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W. D. HOWELLS IN HIS LIBRARY
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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
W . D . H O W E L L S
ILLUSTRATED
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HARPER 6* BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
DP 684-
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Copyright, 1905, 1906, IQH, by HARPER & BROTHERS
CONTENTS
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CHAPTER PAGE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ix
I. METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS 1
II. Civic AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS . 10
III. SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE 22
IV. THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER 35
V. THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS ... 47
VI. IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS 56
VII. THE MEANS OF SOJOURN 62
VIII. CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME . . 70
IX. SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING 76
X. GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER . . 88
XI. TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS . . 106
XII. AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT 125
XIII. A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY 138
XIV. FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT 147
XV. HENLEY DAY 153
XVI. AMERICAN ORIGINS — MOSTLY NORTHERN .... 166
XVII. AMERICAN ORIGINS — MOSTLY SOUTHERN 191
XVIII. ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS 210
XIX. PARTING GUESTS . 220
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
I. THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH 233
II. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER 254
III. A FORTNIGHT IN BATH 271
IV. A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE . . 315
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGB
V. AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL 335
VI. BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON 354
VII. IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON 375
VIII. KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY . 405
IX. OXFORD 425
X. THE CHARM OF CHESTER 451
XI. MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS 469
XII. SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD 489
XIII. NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY 507
ILLUSTRATIONS
W. D. HOWELLS IN HIS LIBRARY (PHOTOGRAVURE) . . . Frontispiece ROTTEN ROW Facing p. 38
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT
THE TOWER OF LONDON
THE GUINEA-PIG MAN
ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY 416
BRITISH CAMP, SHOWING ROMAN INTRENCHMENTS . . 484
THE WASHINGTON HOUSE AT LITTLE BRINGTON ... " 510
172
" 312
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
THE two books united in this volume are in one respect the slight result of an indefinitely larger in- tention. In going to England I had fancied making a study of American origins, visiting the places from which the different immigrations had derived, and learning to know these on their own ground in the earlier reasons as well as the later impulses of self- exile. But I found that the scheme, if faithfully car- ried out, would require much more time and work than I was able or willing to give ; and so the plan remains for some more leisured and more lettered student. I satisfied an easy conscience by suggestively, rather than exhaustively, looking up the sources of American emi- gration in London and in Old Boston, and for the rest I abandoned myself to the pleasure of being in England, which I was willing to share, so far as I could, with any reader willing to loiter and linger with me there.
The sketches began to be written at London in the spring of 1904, as the first of them frankly confesses, in a lodging of Eton Terrace, hard by Pimlico, and continued, at such moments as I could find for them, at divers points in England, throughout the summer and in the winter of 1904-05 in Italy. I remember dis- tinctly working on them in Great Malvern, where we had a fortnight ; and in Aberystwyth, where we had a week; and in Llandudno, where we had two. But the greater part of London Films and some part of Certain
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BIBLIOGKAPHICAL
Delightful .English Towns were my eager occupation in the Villa Laniberti at San Kenio. There I had a whole diriing-table for my desk, and with a little stove at my back I could turn and warm my fingers on its porcelain top when the climate failed to keep its repu- tation for geniality. When the fire in the stove profited by my preoccupation to go out, I could follow it in my own sort, and in a brisk tramp up to the Berigo Road could keep an uninterrupted illusion of my English summer.
The things began to be printed in Harper's Magazine as soon as the first of them was written, and, after a sufficiently unhurried course there, they were repub- lished — London Films in 1905 and Certain Delightful English Towns in 1908 — with the restoration of such passages as in several editorial exigencies had been omitted from them in the periodical. In their present form, therefore, they are much more complete than in their first transitory phase.
Whether this is an advantage or not, it is scarcely for me to say; perhaps the editor was wise in leaving something more to the reader's imagination than the author has since done; but if the reader is anxious to become a partner in the enterprise, to a degree for- bidden by the author's fulness in other matters, he may employ his invention in supplying those American origins which are here so far from satisfactorily ascer- tained. If he should be moved to go to England and himself write a book concerning them, he will meet a want which, whether long felt or not, can be gratified to the undeniable pleasure and profit of other readers. But I cannot advise him to write out his material in San Kemo, if he should have occasion to study his subject historically. There is an English book club in San Eemo with an excellent library, but this does
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
not abound in books of reference; and even for my small necessities as to figures and facts, I do not know what I should have done if it had not been for the sole copy in San Eemo of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which the English gentleman possessing it hospitably put at my service. It was a charming walk to his villa and an equally charming walk back to mine, and I should never be able to say how much of any attraction my book may have is owing to the articles in the En- cyclopaedia which I meditated on my way to and fro, under hedges of rose and geranium and past yellowing and reddening vineyards and orchards of peach and persimmon. If there are any ascertainable touches of poetry in it, I am sure they are attributable to the encyclopaedists rather than to me, and I freely make over to them the honor due. It must have been by a far inspiration from them that four years afterward I had the good-fortune to call Certain Delightful Eng- lish Towns by that name. The name of London Films is the child of my own poorer fancy. Given to the first paper of the series in a moment of reckless, of al- most cynical, indifference, it clung indetachably after- ward to the whole group, which I would so willingly have dignified, when too late, with some more serious title, that they might go more worthily down to ob- livion.
KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.
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METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
WHOEVER carries a mental kodak with him (as I suspect I was in the habit of doing long before I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of the different exposures. This can be determined only by the process of developing, which requires a dark room and other apparatus not always at hand; and so much depends upon the process that it might be well if it could always be left to some one who makes a specialty of it, as in the case of the real amateur photographer. Then one's faulty impressions might be so treated as to yield a pictorial result of interest, or frankly thrown away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye. Otherwise, one must do one's own developing, and trust the result, whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness of the reader, who will surely, if he is the right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows hi a subordi- nation giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my little pictures are superficial, I shall not be able to gainsay him. I can only answer
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that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of those who would prefer some such result as the em- ployment of the Roentgen rays would have given, if applied to certain aspects of the London world.
Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a life-long dweller. To the sojourner scarcely more will vouchsafe itself than to the passing stranger, and it is chiefly to home-keeping folk who have never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in 1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one earliest saw one's London; and the successive pauses in* 1894 and 1897, with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm one in the diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I hope the pages fol- lowing will bear witness.
What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of self-question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning of April, after devious delays in the South and West of England, is destined to have printed upon his mental films a succession of meteoro- logical changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having one's proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own affairs in its
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own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes cen- sorious. If I were to be a little hones ter still, I should confess that I do not know of any place where the month of April can be meaner, more poison, upon occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its moments of relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in a grateful tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the soul to overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England is in- capable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is of public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The English weather is of a more private quality, and ap- portioned to the personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life, and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care, irrespective of the interests of the mass. This may be a little too fanciful, and I do not insist that it is scientific or even sociological. Yet I think the reader who rejects it might do worse than agree with me that the first impression of a foreign country visited or re- visited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the season.
Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day, that there was a lower or a higher
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pressure in a part of Scotland, just as I might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the lakes. "Now/7 I said to myself, "we shall have some- thing like real weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going to be decisively this or that." But I could not see that the weather follow- ing differed from the weather we had been having. It was the same small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm, cold, damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the sun was unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a bitter wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark, the golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches; and round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream. Full of this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.
If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that is why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go in-doors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively realizing that they will be more comfort- able with it than in the atmosphere awaiting them. If their houses could be built reversible, so as to be turned inside out in some weathers, one would be very com- fortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that the English ram did not wet you, and he might have argued that the English cold would not chill you if only you stayed out-of-doors in it.
Why will not travellers be honest with foreign coun- tries? Is it because they think they may some day
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come back? For my part, I am going to be heroic, and say that the in-doors cold in England is constant suffer- ing to the American born. It is not that there is no sizzling or crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing regis- ter; but that the grate in most of the houses that the traveller sees, the public-houses namely, seems to have shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Exeter, for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral, one found a bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm. I might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite the same of the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I pause before arriving at the grate of London, it is be- cause daring must stop somewhere. I think it is probable that the American, if he stayed long enough, would heed the injunction to suffer and be strong from the coldx as the Englishman has so largely done, but I am not sure. At one point of my devious progress to the capital I met an Englishman who had spent ten years in Canada, and who constrained me to a mild deprecation by the wrath with which he denounced the in-doors cold he had found everywhere at home. He said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years behind in such matters; and I could not deny that, even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one. To be warm all round in an English house is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find the top sash has been put down, but this is not merely to let in some of the outside warmth; it is also to make a current of air to the open door. Even if the window has not been put down, it has always so much play in its
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frame, to allow for swelling from the damp, that in any- thing like dry weather the cold whistles round it, and you do not know which way to turn your mediaeval back.
In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there were radiators, but not hot ones, and in a dining-room where they were hot the natives found them oppressive, while the foreigners were warming their fingers on the bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to pretend that the suffering they experience has not ap- parently resulted in the strength they see. Our con- temporary ancestors are a splendid-looking race, in the higher average, and if in the lower average they often look pinched and stunted, why, we are not ourselves giants without exception. The ancestral race does often look stunted and poor; persons of small build and stature abound; and nature is
"So careful of the single type"
of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the matter of complexion, if we count that a proof of health, we are quite out of it in comparison with the English, and beside them must look like a nation of invalids. There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not buy with us. I do not say the color does not look a little overdone in cases, or that the violent explosion of pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of small children, does not make one pause in question whether paste or putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to be too critical. Putty and paste, apart from association, are not pretty tints, and pinks and roses are; and the English children look not only fresher but sturdier and
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healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do not know; but I doubt if the English live longer than we for living less comfortably. The lower classes seem always to have colds; the middle classes, rheumatism; and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears. Rheu- matism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not mind what one said) is universal in England, and all ranks of society have the facilities for it in the in-doors cold in which they otherwise often undeniably flourish. At the end, it is a question of whether you would rather be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the first course and they choose the last.
If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the experience of the careful observer that there is a summit of healthful looks in England, which we do not touch in America, whatever the large table-land or foot-hill average we reach; and in like manner there is an ex- ceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it, rarely enough, in the London streets, which one never encounters with us. I am not envying the one, or at least not regretting the other. Distinction is the one thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too much; only, in America, we pay too much for too many other things to take any great comfort in our want of distinction. I own the truth without grief or shame, while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I enjoy other spectacles for which I cannot help letting the English pay too much. I was not appreciably the poorer myself, perhaps I was actually the richer, in seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the aristocratic region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was
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passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I beheld active, positive, as she passed me by with the tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well- fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various black. She looked not only authoritative; people often do that with us; she looked authorized; she had been empowered by the vested rights and interests to look so her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her, any more than in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, hand- some houses where, in the cellary or sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the rheumatic pangs of which the comparative warmth of the outer air had momentarily relieved her stately bulk.
But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime, they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such soft masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to complain of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can smell it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds in- sist, and in the air is that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the year long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have presently in the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a subtile haze, which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness, and lies upon the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a dream made
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visible. It has the rnagic to transmute you to this sub- stance yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus- top, you are aware of being a part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer's blissful con- sciousness. It is flattering, but you feel like warn- ing him not to go in-doors, or he will lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not be April there till well into June.
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CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS
IT might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that there is no such thing as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twen- tieth look at London I have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as to see what Lon- don is like by making constantly sure what it is not like. A pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same purpose. That is a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty obedient to a just municipal control, of a grandeur studied and authorized in proportion and relation to the design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly realized on lines nobly imagined. But New York and London may always be intelligibly compared because they are both the effect of an indefinite succession of anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and some- times promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one another. Each has been mainly built at the pleasure of the private person, with the community now and then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of house and home to the common advantage. Nothing but our racial illogicality has saved us from the effect of our racial anarchy in the social structure as well as the material structure, but if we could see London and
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New York as lawless in the one way as in the other, we should perhaps see how ugly they collectively are.
The sum of such involuntary reflection with me has been the perception that London was and is and shall be, and New York is and shall be, but has hardly yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally, as she is one-third less numerically, than London. In her future she has no past, but only a present to retrieve; though perhaps a present like hers is enough. She is also one less architecturally than London; she is two- thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if I more closely examine my pocket vision, I am afraid that I must hedge from this modest claim, for we have as yet nothing to compare with at least a half of London magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen or eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her actual age. As we go fast in all things, we may then surpass her; but this is not certain, for in her more deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time the materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the pocket vision, seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and some vast rocketing hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for the con- trast with those miles of imperial and municipal archi- tecture which in London make you forget the leagues of mean little houses, and remember the palaces, the law-courts, the great private mansions, the dignified and shapely flats, the large department stores, the immense hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind.
One reason, I think, why London is so much more striking is in the unbroken line which the irregularly divided streets often present to the passer. Here is a chance for architecture to extend, while with us it has only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block 2 11
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which is the extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied common- place of the commercial structures on either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish- green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses render the rifts between more im- pressively chasmal. The tremendous volume of life that flows through the narrow and winding channels past the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks which the lesser buildings form, is such that the highest tide of Broadway or Fifth Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony- carts, donkey - carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amid the turmoil, with foot- passengers winding in and out, and covering the side- walks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till
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you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public water- proof apron across your knees, and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the universe.
It is an emotion which supports the American visitor even against the immensity he shares, and he is able to reflect that New York would not look so relatively little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a capital on the same lines as London. If New York were, like London, a political as well as a commercial capital, she would have the national edifices of Washington added to the sky-scrapers in which she is now unrivalled, and her competition would be architecturally much more formidable than it is. She would be the legislative centre of the different States of the Union, as London is of the different counties of the United Kingdom; she would have collected in her borders all their capitols and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, would valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one must now recoil on her behalf. She could not, of course, except on such rare days of fog as seem to greet Eng- lishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it shows larger than it is; no mist clothes the sky-scraper in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar into the clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the low buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. Nothing could be done in palliation of the comparative want of antiquity in New York, for the present, at least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment
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of her destiny she will be one day as old as London now is.
If one thinks, however, how old London now is, it is rather crazing; much more crazing than the same sort of thought in the cities of lands more exclusively associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the present; there seems nothing above the past, or only so thin a layer of actuality that you have scarcely the sense of it. In England you remember with an effort Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and the long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English; the living interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense that you cannot penetrate them and consort quietly with the dead alone. Men whose names are in the di- rectory as well as men whose names are in history, keep you company, and push the shades of heroes, mart)Ts, saints, poets, and princes to the wall. They do not shoulder them willingly out of the way, but helplessly; there is no place in the world where the material present is so reverently, so tenderly mindful of the material past. Perhaps, therefore, I felt safe in so largely leaving the English past to the English pres- ent, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger for the old which the new American brings with him to Europe, I now went about enjoying the modern in its manifold aspects and possibly fancying characteristic traits where I did not find them. I did not care how trivial some of these were, but I hesitate to confide to the more serious reader that I was at one moment much interested in what seemed the growing informal- ity of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in the streets and parks, or thought I noted it.
To my vision, or my illusion, they wore every sort of careless cap, slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort
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of tunic, jacket, and cutaway. The top-hat and frock- coat still appear, but their combination is evidently no longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime functions. I do not mean to say that you do not often see that stately garment on persons of author- ity, but only that it is apparently not of the suprem- acy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the eighties and nineties of the last century. Certainly, when it comes to the artist at Truefitt's wearing a frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, when one has said this, one must hedge from a con- jecture so extreme. The king wears a frock-coat, a long, gray one, with a white top -hat and lavender gloves, and those who like to look like a king conform to his taste. No one, upon his life, may yet wear a frock and a derby, but many people now wear top -hats, though black ones, with sack-coats, with any sort of coats; and, above all, the Londoner affects in summer a straw hat either of a flat top and a pasteboard stiffness, or of the operatically picturesque Alpine pattern, or of a slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often the derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of other nations has now become their pleasure, and, with the English genius of doing what they like, it may be that they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The con- ventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but how long this will remain, who can say? The simple- hearted American, arriving with his scrupulous dress suit in London, may yet find himself going out to dinner with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets or tennis flannels. If, however, the men's dress in England is informal,
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impatient, I think one will be well within the lines of safety in saying that above everything the English women's dress expresses sentiment, though I suppose it is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic of our women's dress is expressive of personal chic; in either case the dressmaker, male or female, has im- personally much to do with it. Under correction of those countrywomen of ours who will not allow that the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture to say that their expression of sentiment in dress is charming, but how charming it comparatively is I shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold as to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender fluency of youth than some realizations of the American ideal; and that after the azaleas and rhododendrons in the Park there is nothing in nature more suggestive of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes in which the wearers flow by the flowery expanses in carriage or on foot. The colors worn are often as coura- geous as the vegetable tints; the vaporous air softens and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told would shriek aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the shades worn tend to soft pallors, lavender, and pink, and creamy white. A group of girlish shapes in these colors, seen newly lighted at a doorway from a passing carriage, gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a by- gone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful page, on many a glowing canvas.
Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the word for the present dress of Englishwomen. It forms
16
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
in itself a lovely picture to the eye, and is not merely the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is therefore the more difficult of transference to the imagination of the reader who has not also been a spec- tator, and before such a scene as one may witness in a certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after church in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening, the boldest kodak may well close its single eye in despair. As yet even the mental photograph cannot impart the tints of nature, and the reader who wishes to assist at this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself. At the right moment of the ripening London season the foliage of the trees is densely yet freshly green and flatteringly soft to the eye; the grass below has that closeness of texture which only English grass has the secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododen- drons and azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it are washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from the carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where they are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar, perhaps that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally. They arrive in twos and threes, young girls commonly with their mothers, but sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even when they can- not always express simplicity; and the just observer is obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if
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not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without being unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do not carry themselves well, it takes an American woman to see it. They move naturally and lightly — that is, the young girls do; mothers in England, as elsewhere, are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are as handsome in their well-wearing English way as their daughters.
Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron barriers, and in one of these the arriving groups of au- thorized people found other people of their kind, where the unauthorized people seemed by common consent to leave them. There was especially one enclosure which seemed consecrated to the highest comers; it was not necessary that they should make the others feel they were not wanted there; the others felt it of them- selves, and did not attempt to enter that especial fairy ring, or fairy triangle. Those within looked as much at home as if in their own drawing-rooms, and after the usual greetings of friends sat down in their penny chairs for the talk which the present kodak would not have overheard if it could.
If any one were to ask me how I knew that these beautiful creatures were of supreme social value, I should be obliged to own that it was largely an assump- tion based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch person- ally in the matter they might have been women come to see the women who had not come. Still, if the effects of high breeding are visible, then they were the sort they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old and young, had the aristocratic air which is not aggres- sive, the patrician bearing which is passive and not
18
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
active, and which in the English seems consistent with so much that is human and kindly. There is always the question whether this sort of game is worth the candle; but that is a moral consideration which would take me too far from the little scene I am trying to sug- gest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene was the constant movement of distinguished figures within the sacred close, and up and down the paths past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The distinguished figures were apparently not the least molested by the multiplied and concentrated gazes of the on-lookers, who were, as it were, outside the window, and of the street. What struck one accustomed to the heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where any such scene would be so inexpressibly impossible, was the almost wholly English personnel of the crowd within and without the sacred close. Here and there a Continental presence, French or German or Italian, pronounced its nationality in dress and bearing; one of the many dark subject races of Great Britain was repre- sented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black hair and eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various colonials among the spectators, and in one's nerves one was aware of some other Americans. But these ex- ceptions only accented the absolutely English domi- nance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less evident in the observed than in the observers, where, beyond the barrier, which there was nothing to prevent their passing, they sat in passive rows, in passive pairs, in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the hands folded on the top of the stick express a pause in the emotions and the energies which has its pathos.
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LONDON FILMS
There were women among them, of course, but the women were also of the age when the keener sensibilities are taking a rest; and such aliens of their sex as qualified the purely English nature of the affair lost whatever was aggressive in their difference.
It was necessary to the transaction of the drama that from time to time the agents of the penny-chair company should go about in the close and collect money for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly solved, how the ladies who had come unattended man- aged, with their pocketless dresses, to carry coins un- equalled in bulk since the iron currency of Sparta; or whether they held the pennies frankly in their hands till they paid them away. In England the situation, if it is really the situation, is always accepted with im- plicit confidence, and if it had been the custom to bring pennies in their hands, these ladies would have no more minded doing it than they minded being looked at by people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate superiority.
With us the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could not be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New York; though in Newport, where the aristo- cratic tradition is said to have been successfully trans- planted to our plutocratic soil, something analogous might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that tradi- tion does not come to flower in the open American air; it is potted and grown under glass; and can be carried out-doors only under special conditions. The American must still come to England for the realization of certain social ideals towards which we may be now straining, but
20
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
which do not yet enjoy general acceptance. The reader who knows New York has but to try and fancy its best, or even its better, society dispersing itself on certain grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or after- noon ; or, on some week-day evening, leaving its equipages along the drives and strolling out over the herbage; or receiving in its carriages the greetings of acquaintance who make their way in and out among the whgels. Police and populace would join forces in their several sorts to spoil a spectacle which in Hyde Park appeals, in high degree, to the a?sthetic sense, and which might stimulate the historic imagination to feats of agreeable invention if one had that sort of imagination.
The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society which we have not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its specific events will remain within walls. It could not manifest itself outside without being questioned, chal- lenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear reasons why it is well so.
Ill
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
WE are quite as domestic as the English, but with us the family is of the personal life, while with them it is of the general life, so that when their domes- ticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one feels it strange. One has read of something like this without the sense of it which constantly penetrates one in London. One must come to England in order to realize from countless little occasions, little experiences, how entirely English life, public as well as private, is an affair of family. We know from our reading how a comparatively few families administer, if they do not govern, but we have still to learn how the other families are apparently content to share the form in which au- thority resides, since they cannot share the authority. At the very top — I offer the conjecture towards the solution of that mystery which constantly bewilders the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty — is, of course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the American is that it is revered because it is the royal family. But possibly a truer interpretation of the fact would be that it is dear and sacred to the vaster British public because it is the royal family. A bachelor king could hardly dominate the English imagination like a royal husband and father, even if his being a husband and father were not one of the implications of that tacit
22
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Constitution in whose silence English power resides. With us, family has less and less to do with society, even; but with the English it has more and more to do, since the royal family is practically without political power, and not only may, but almost must, devote itself to society. It goes and comes on visits to other principalities and powers; it opens parliaments; it lays corner-stones and presides at the dedication of edifices of varied purpose ; it receives deputations and listens to addresses; it holds courts and levees; it reviews regi- ments and fleets, and assists at charity entertainments and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays the races; it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalted presences for their prosperity. These events seem public, and if they were imaginable of a democracy like ours they would be so ; but in the close-linked order of English things they are social, they are domestic, they are from one family to every other family directly or indirectly; the king is for these ends not more a royalty than the rest of his family, and for the most part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts are few. Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births, christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in greater or less publicity.
If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willing- ness to generalize from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some phases of func- tions exalted far beyond the range of republican experi- ences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence which we sometimes have cabled to our press at home,
23
LONDON FILMS
by more than usually ardent enterprise, one may have read that the king held a levee at St. James's; and one conceived of it as something dramatic, something his- toric, something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one happened to be walking in Pall Mall on the morning of that levee, one saw merely a sort of irregular coming and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as regarded the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. A thin fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly by- standers lined the curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages, victorias, hansoms, and four- wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and horses. No one concerned seemed to feel anything odd in the effect, though to the unwonted American the sight of a dignitary in full canonicals or regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by ro- mance. At one moment a middle-aged lady in the line of vehicles put her person well out of the window of her four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her driver in something. She may not have been going to the levee, but one felt that if she had been she would still have done unabashed what it abashed the alien to see.
We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English in matters of English state; we, who have no state at all require them to live up to theirs, just as quite plain, elderly observers expect every woman to be young and pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly the secret of enduring so much state as the English have lies in knowing how and when to shirk it, to drop it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon this fact,
24
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
if it is a fact, would find his knuckles warningly rapped when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed empty of etiquette. But the rapping would be very gentle, very kindly, for this is the genius of English rule where it is not concerned with criminal offence. You must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but you are "requested" to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between an oli- garchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more spared in the one and the self-respect in the other, though this is saying it too loosely, and may not be say- ing it truly; it is only a conjecture with which I am par- leying while I am getting round to add that such part of the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was vastly more of it, was much less filling to the imagination than a glimpse which I had of a court one night. I am rather proud of being able to explain that the late queen held court in the early afternoon and the present king holds court at night; but, lest any envious reader suspect me of knowing the fact at first-hand, I hasten to say that the glimpse I had of the function that night only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human through a thin rain, the blood-red figures of the coach- men and footmen gowned from head to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black - gleaming body of the coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so su- preme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab
25
LONDON FILMS
flashed by them, moving in a slow line towards the front of Buckingham Palace.
The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of which would enrich my page beyond the dreams of fiction, and it is said that in the time of the one-o'clock court they used to receive a full share of the attention which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow. They were often halted, as that night I saw them halting, in their progress, and this favored the plebeian witnesses, who ranged along their course and invited themselves and one another to a study of the looks and dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both. The study and the comment must have had their limits; the observed knew how much to bear if the observers did not know how little to forbear; and it is not probable that the London spectators went the lengths which our outsiders go in trying to verify an English duke who is about to marry an American heiress. The Lon- don vulgar, if not better bred than our vulgar, are better fed on the sight of social grandeur, and have not a life- long famine to satisfy, as ours have. Besides, whatever gulf birth and wealth have fixed between the English classes, it is mystically bridged by that sentiment of family which I have imagined the ruling influence in England. In a country where equality has been glori- fied as it has been in ours, the contrast of conditions must breed a bitterness in those of a lower condition which is not in their hearts there; or if it is, the alien does not know it.
What seems certain is the interest with which every outward manifestation of royal and social state is fol- lowed, and the leisure which the poor have for a vicari- ous indulgence in its luxuries and splendors. One would say that there was a large leisure class entirely
26
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
devoted to these pleasures, which cost it nothing, but which may have palled on the taste of those who pay for them. Of course, something like this is the case in every great city; but in London, where society is enlarged to the bounds of the national interests, the demand of such a leisure class might very well be sup- posed to have created the supply. Throughout the London season, and measurably throughout the London year, there is an incessant appeal to the curiosity of the common people which is never made in vain. Some- where a drum is throbbing or a bugle sounding from dawn till dusk; the red coat is always passing singly or in battalions, afoot or on horseback; the tall bear-skin cap weighs upon the grenadier's brow,
"And the hapless soldier's sigh,"
if it does not "run in blood down palace walls, " must often exhale from lips tremulous with hushed profanity. One bright, hot morning of mid-July the suffering from that cruel folly in the men of a regiment marching from their barracks to Buckingham Palace and sweltering under those shaggy cliffs was evident in their distorted eyes, streaming cheeks, and panting mouths. But why do I select the bear-skin cap as peculiarly cruel and foolish, merely because it is archaic? All war and all the images of it are cruel and foolish.
The April morning, however, when I first carried out my sensitized surfaces for the impression which I hoped to receive from a certain historic spectacle was very different. There was even a suggestion of comfort in the archaic bear-skins; they were worn, and they had been worn, every day for nearly two hundred years, as part of the ceremonial of changing the regimental 3 2.7
LONDON FILMS
colors before Buckingham Palace. I will not be asked why this is imperative; it has always been done and probably always will be done, and to most civilian on- lookers will remain as unintelligible in detail as it was to me. When the regiment was drawn up under the palace windows, a part detached itself from the main body and went off to a gate of the palace, and continued mysteriously stationary there. In the mean time the ranks left behind closed or separated amid the shouting of sergeants or corporals, and the men relieved them- selves of the strain from their knapsacks, or satisfied an exacting military ideal, by hopping at will into the air and bouncing their knapsacks, dragging lower down, up to the napes of their necks, where they rested under the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A couple of officers, with swords drawn, walked up and down behind the ranks, but, though they were tall, fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment of their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give the scene any such poignant interest as it had from the men in performing a duty, or indulging a privilege, by hopping into the air and bouncing their knapsacks up to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable delay, but was doubtless requisite for the transaction, the detachment sent for the change of colors returned with the proper standards. The historic rite was then completed, the troops formed in order, and marched back to their barracks to the exultant strains of their band.
The crowd outside the palace yard, which this daily sight attracts, dispersed reluctantly, its particles doubt- less holding themselves ready to reassemble at the slightest notice. It formed a small portion only of the population of London which has volunteer charge of
28
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
the goings and comings at Buckingham Palace. Cer- tain of its members are on guard there from morning till night, and probably no detail of ceremony escapes their vigilance. If asked what they are expecting to see, they are not able to say; they only know that they are there to see what happens. They make the most of any. carriage entering or issuing from the yard; they note the rare civilians who leave or approach the palace door on foot, the half-dozen plain policemen who stand at their appointed places within the barrier which none of the crowd ever dreams of passing must share its in- terest. Neither these policemen nor the sentries who pace their beat before the high iron fence are ap- parently willing to molest the representatives of the public interest. On the April morning in case, during the momentary absence of the policeman who should have restrained the crowd, the sentry found himself embarrassed by a spectator who had intruded on his beat. He faltered, blushing as well as he could through his high English color, and then said, gently, "A little back, please/' and the intruder begged pardon and retired.
In the simple incident there was nothing of the ner- vousness observable in either the official or the offi- cious repositories of the nationality which one sees in Continental countries, and especially in Germany. It was plain that England, though a military power, is not militarized. The English shows of force are civil. Nowhere but in England does the European hand of iron wear the glove of velvet. There is always an English war going on somewhere, but one does not relate to it the kindly-looking young fellows whom one sees suffer- ing under their bear-skin caps in the ranks, or loitering at liberty in the parks, and courting the flattered girls
29
LONDON FILMS
who flutter like moths about the flame of their red jackets, up and down the paths and on the public benches. The soldiers are under the law of military obedience, and are so far in slavery, as all soldiers are, but nothing of their slavery is visible, and they are the idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the pict- uresqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great London spectacle. It is said that they sometimes abuse their apparent supremacy, and that their uniform generally bars them from places of amusement; but one sees nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the public ways, where one sometimes sees them pushing baby-carriages to free the nurse-maids to more unre- stricted flirtation, or straying over the grass and under the trees with maids who are not burdened by any sort of present duty.
After all, as compared with the civilians, they are few even in that game of love which is always playing itself wherever youth meets youth, and which in London is only evident in proportion to the vastness of the city. Their individual life is, like that of the royalty which they decorate, public more than private, and one can scarcely dissociate them, with all their personal humility, from the exalted figures whose eminence they directly or indirectly contribute to throw into relief. I do not mean that they are seen much or little in the king's company. The English king, though he wears many land and sea uniforms, is essentially civilian, and though vast numbers of soldiers exist for his state in London, they do not obviously attend him, except on occasions of the very highest state. I make this observation rather hazardously, for the fact, which I feel bound to share with the reader, is that I never saw in London any of the royalties who so abound there.
30
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I did, indeed, see the king before I left England, but it was in a place far from his capital, and the king was the only one of his large family I saw anywhere. I hope this will not greatly disappoint my readers, especially such as have scruples against royalties; but it is best to be honest. I can be quite as honest in adding that I had always a vague, underlying curiosity concerning royalty, and a hope that it would somehow come my way, but it never did, to my knowledge, and somehow, with the best will towards it, I never went its way. This I now think rather stupid, for every day the morn- ing papers predicted the movements of royalty, which seemed to be in perpetual movement, so that it must have been by chance that I never saw it arriving or departing at the stations where I was often doing the same.
Of course, no private person, not even the greatest nobleman, let alone the passing stranger, can possibly arrive and depart so much as the king and queen, and their many children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces, and cousins of every remove. For the sover- eigns themselves this incessant motion, though mitigated by every device of loyal affection and devotion on the part of their subjects, must be a great hardship, and greater as they get into years. The king's formal office is simply to reign, but one wonders when he finds the time for reigning. He seems to be always setting out for Germany or Denmark or France, when he is not coming from Wales or Scotland or Ireland; and, when quietly at home in England, he -is constantly away on visits to the houses of favored subjects, shooting pheasants or grouse or deer; or he is going from one horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden- party or whatever corresponds in England to a church
31
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sociable. It is impossible to enumerate the pleasures which must poison his life, as if the cares were not enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much liked and is so amiable and active, the perpetual move- ment affects the plebeian foreigner as something terri- ble. Never to be quiet; never to have a stretch of those long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample strange cookeries; to sleep under a different preacher every Sunday, and in a different bed every night; to wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions, three or four times a day; to receive every manner of deputation, and try to show an interest in every manner of object — who would reign on such terms as these, if there were any choice of not reigning?
Evidently such a career cannot be managed without the help, the pretty constant help, of armed men; and the movement of troops in London from one point to another is one of the evidences of state which is so little static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, and makes one wish one were a child that one might fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement of a great mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a flaming squad, or a single vidette spurring on some swift errand, with his pennoned lance erect from his toe and his horse-hair crest streaming behind him. The soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of civil life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spec- tator as they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme attraction in their sort for the newly arrived American is the pair of statuesque warriors who motionlessly sit their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse-Guards, and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist's
32
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shop. When I first arrived in London in the earliest of those sad eighteen-sixties when our English brethren were equipping our Confederate brethren to sweep our commerce from the seas, I think I must have gone to see those images at the Horse-Guards even before I visited the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and they then perfectly filled my vast expectation; they might have been Gog and Magog, for their gigantic stature. In after visits, though I had a sneaking desire to see them again, I somehow could not find their place, being ashamed to ask for it, in my hope of happening on it, and I had formed the notion, which I confidently urged, that they had been taken down, like the Welling- ton statue from the arch. But the other day (or month, rather), when I was looking for Whitehall, suddenly there they were again, sitting their horses in the gate- ways as of yore, and as woodenly as if they had never stirred since 1861. They were unchanged in attitude, but how changed they were in person: so dwarfed, so shrunken, as if the intervening years had sapped the juices of their joints and let their bones fall together, like those of withered old men!
This was, of course, the unjust effect of my original exaggeration of their length and breadth. The troops that I saw marching through the streets where we first lodged were fine, large men. I myself saw no choice in the different bodies, but the little housemaid much preferred the grenadier guards to the Scotch guards; perhaps there was one grenadier guard who lent beauty and grandeur to the rest. I think Scotch caps are much gayer than those busbies which the grenadiers wear, but that, again, is a matter of taste; I certainly did not think the plaid pantaloons with which the Scotch guards hid the knees that ought to have been naked
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were as good as the plain trousers of their rivals. But they were all well enough, and the officers who saun- tered along out of step on the sidewalk, or stoop-shoul- deredly, as the English military fashion now is, followed the troops on horseback, were splendid fellows, who would go to battle as simply as to afternoon tea, and get themselves shot in some imperial cause as imper- sonally as their men.
There were large barracks in our neighborhood where one might have glimpses of the intimate life of the troops, such as shirt-sleeved figures smoking short pipes at the windows, or red coats hanging from the sills, or sometimes a stately bear-skin dangling from a shutter by its throat-latch. We were also near to the Chelsea Hospital, where soldiering had come to its last word in the old pensioners pottering about the garden-paths or sitting in the shade or sun. Wherever a red coat ap- peared it had its honorable obsequy in the popular in- terest, and if I might venture to sum up my impres- sion of what I saw of soldiering in London I should say that it keeps its romance for the spectator far more than soldiering does in the Continental capitals, where it seems a slavery consciously sad and clearly discerned. It may be that a glamour clings to the English soldier be- cause he has voluntarily enslaved himself as a recruit, and has not been torn an unwilling captive from his home and work, like the conscripts of other countries. On the same terms our own military are romantic.
IV
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
I HAD thought — rather cheaply, as I now realize — of offering, as a pendant for the scene of Fashion Meet- ing Itself in the Park on the Sunday noons and after- noons which I have tried to photograph, some picture of open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be found any week-day evening, when the weather is fair, on the grassy stretches which the Park rises into some- what beyond the sacred close of high life. This space is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion as embowering foliage gives. There are no trees on any side for many acres, and the golden-red sunset glow hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of one sultry day which I have in mind. From all the paths leading up out of Piccadilly there was a streaming tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly turfed, and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes which a more impassioned imagination than mine might figure as the dead and wounded in some field of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides having no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a conscience against its unreality. Those people, mostly young people, are either sitting there in gossiping groups,
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or whispering pairs, or singly breathing a mute rapture of release from the day's work. A young fellow lies stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above the newspaper which the lingering light allows him to read; another has an open book under his eyes; but commonly each has the companionship of some fearless girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands beside the sea, but which is here without that extreme effect which the bathing-costume imparts on our beaches. These young people stretched side by side on the grass in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a suggestion of the
" Bella et& dell' oro"
not to be had elsewhere in our iron civilization. One might accuse their taste, but certainly they were more interesting than the rows of young men perched on the top course of the fence, in a wide variety of straw hats, or even than the red-coated soldiers who boldly occupied the penny chairs along the walks and enjoyed each the vigorous rivalry of girls worshipping him on either hand. They boldly occupied the penny chairs, for the danger that they would be made to pay was small. The sole collector, a man well in years and of a benevo- lent reluctance, passed casually among the rows of seats, and took pennies only from those who could most clearly afford it. There was a fence round a pavilion where a band was playing, and within there were spend- thrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the music could be perfectly well heard for nothing out- side. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicy-
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
cling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long after- glow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began to pierce the clear heavens. But there was always enough kindly obscurity to hide emotions that did not mind being seen, and to soften the details which could not be called beautiful. As the dark deepened, the prone shapes scattered by hundreds over the grass looked like peaceful flocks whose repose was not disturbed by the human voices or by the human feet that incessantly went and came on the paths. It was a touch, however illusory, of the rusticity which lingers in so many sorts at the heart of the immense city, and renders it at un- expected moments simple and homelike above all other cities.
The evening when this London pastoral offered itself was the close of a day of almost American heat. The mercury never went above eighty-three degrees, but the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think a good deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye from the lurid horizons paling upward into the dull, unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily overcast or heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came also from the thronged streets, in which the season had scarcely begun to waver, and the pulses of the plethoric town throbbed with a sense of choking fulness. The feverish activity of the cabs contributed to the effect of the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated themselves into every crevice of the frequent "blocks," where the populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their arrest of the artificial movement of air, sweltered in the sun, and the classes in private carriages of every order and degree suffered in a helpless equality with the per- spiring masses.
37
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Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of straw hats; and where one lately saw only the variance from silken cylinders to the different types of derbies and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape of panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence of the low, flat - topped hard - brimmed things that mocked with the rigidity of sheet-iron the conception of straw as a light and yielding material. Men with as yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember when the American picked himself out in the London crowd by his summer hat, but now, in his belated con- formity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt to be one of the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No shape of straw hat is peculiar to any class, but the slouching panama is for pecuniary reasons more the wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in front and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater acceptance with youth; age and middle -age wear its weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora form; and now and then one saw the venerable convention of the cock- aded footman's and coachman's silk hat mocked in straw. No concession more extreme could be made to the heat, and these strange cylinders, together with the linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the excesses in which the English are apt to indulge their common -sense when they decide to give way to it. They have apparently decided to give way to it in the dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park, where individual caprice is the sole law that obtains amid a general anarchy.
The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and sug- gests the daring thought that, if ever their race decides to get on without government of any sort, they will rid
38
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THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
themselves of it with a thoroughness and swiftness past the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have discarded the traditional costumes of Rotten Row. The young girls and young men in flapping panamas, in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave cer- tainly an agreeable liveliness to the spectacle, which their elders emulated by expressions of taste as person- al and unconventional. A lady in the old-fashioned riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating veil recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to lose weight, in a brief emergence from the past to which she belonged. One man similarly hatted, but frock- coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy of note; but no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so much to the sense of liberation from the heat as the others who, when it reached its height, frankly confessed its power by riding in greatly diminished numbers. By twelve o'clock scarcely one left of all those joyous youths, those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy children, matched in size with their ponies, as the elders were in their different mounts, remains to distract the eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs and the promenaders between them.
It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting show of what seemed society at home than the Sunday- afternoon reception in the consecrated closes on the grass. People who knew one another stopped and gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and tried to ignore them. But that could not have been easy. The women whom those handsome, aristocratic men bowed over, or dropped beside into chairs, or saluted as they went by, were very beautiful women,
39
LONDON FILMS
and dressed with that sentiment which has already been celebrated. Their draperies fluttered in the gay breeze which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them with tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the life of a picture to be seen nowhere else. It was not neces- sary to know just who, or just of what quality they were, in order to realize their loveliness.
Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had still something of its early summer freshness; but in its farther stretches it was of our August brown, and in certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The trees themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and the wind blew showers of yellowing leaves from their drooping boughs. Towards the close of the season, on the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of those conse- crated social closes, to which I am always returning with a snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance of the great weary army which would possess the pleas- ure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers had left it. Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there, with their faces in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy heaps and coils where the delicate foot of fashion had pressed the green herbage. As among the spectators I thought I noted an increasing number of my country- men and women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied more and more of them in the hired turnouts which cannot long keep their secret from the critical eye. These were as obvious to conjecture as some other turnouts, which I fancied of a decayed ancestrality : cumbrous landaus and victorias, with rubberless tires, which grumbled and grieved in their course for the passati tempi, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the parvenu carriages, and for all the types of motors which
40
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
more and more invade. the drives of the Park. They had a literary quality, and were out of Thackeray and Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society novelists great enough for them to be out of.
If such novelists had not been wanting I am sure I should not be left with the problem of an extremely pretty and charming woman whose scarf one morning so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside another extremely pretty and charming woman, that he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, ex- quisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of that companion of a lady, stopped in chat by that other lady who was always hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance. The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor was she now made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx- patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid of story could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and scornful in her relation to the encounter from which she remained excluded? The lady who had left her standing rejoined her and they drifted off together into the vast of the unfathomed, but not, I like to believe, the unfathomable.
When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course it did not break. That would have been a violence of
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LONDON FILMS
which English weather would not have been capable. There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a trap were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It softly gave way in a gradual, delicious coolness, which again mellowed at the edges, as it were, and dissolved in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain might finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the "anguish of the solstice," as we had felt it in London, and by the time the first shower insinuated itself we were in the heart of the Malvern Hills.
Of course, this heated term was not as the heated terms of New York are; but it excelled them in length, if not in breadth and thickness. The nights were al- ways cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights do not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would have been unendurable, but in London one woke each morning with renewed hope and renewed strength. Very likely there were parts of London where people despaired and weakened through the night, but in these polite perspectives I am trying to exclude such places; and whenever I say "one" in this relation, I am imagin- ing one of the many Americans who witness the London season perhaps oftener from the outside than the inside, but who still can appreciate and revere its facts.
The season was said to begin very late, and it was said to be a very "bad" season, throughout May, when the charges of those who live by it ordinarily feel an expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become difficult, become impossible; when the rents of apartments double themselves, and apartments are often not to be had at any price; when the face of the cabman clouds if you say you want him by the hour, and clears if you add that you will make it all right with him; when every form of service begins to have the courage of its
42
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
dependence; and the manifold fees which ease the social machine seem to lubricate it so much less than the same fees in April; when the whole vast body of London groans with a sense of repletion such as no American city knows except in the rare congestion pro- duced by a universal exposition or a national conven- tion. Such a congestion is of annual occurrence in London, and is the symptomatic expression of the sea- son; but the symptoms ordinarily recognizable in May were absent until June in the actual year. They were said to have been suppressed by the reluctance of the tardy spring, and again by the king's visit to Ireland. As the king is the fountain of social prosperity it is probable that he had more to do with delaying the sea- son than the weather had; but by what one hears said of him he would not have willingly delayed it. He is not only a well-meaning and well-doing prince, one hears from people of every opinion, but a promoter of peace and international concord (especially with France, where his good offices are believed to have been pe- culiarly effective), and he is, rather more expectedly, a cheerful sovereign, loving the gayety as well as the splendor of state, and fond of seeing the world enjoy itself.
It is no betrayal of the national confidence to repeat what every one says concerning the present outburst of fashion, that it is a glad compliance with the king's liking; the more eager because of its long suppression during the late queen's reign and the more anxious because of a pathetic apprehension inspired by the well- known serious temperament of the heir-apparent to the throne. No doubt the joyful rebound from the depression of the Boer war is also still felt; but for whatever reason London life is gay and glad, it is cer- 4 43
LONDON FILMS
tainly making its hay while the sun shines, and it mixes as many poppies and daisies with the crop as possible against the time when only grass may be acceptable. In other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in the masses as well as the classes is the inspiration of the court, while the free personal preferences expressed are probably the effect of that strong, that headstrong, in- stinct of being like one's self, whether one is like others or not, which has always moulded precedence and tra- dition to individual convenience with the English. One would not have said that a frock-coat of lustrous black alpaca was just the wear for a tall middle-aged gentleman in a silk hat and other scrupulous appoint- ments; but when he appeared in it one hottest Sunday afternoon in that consecrated close of Hyde Park, and was welcomed by the inmost flower-group of the gor- geous parterre, one had to own a force of logic in it. If a frock-coat was the proper thing for the occa- sion in general, then the lightest and coolest fabric was the thing for that occasion in particular. So the wearer had reasoned in sublime self-reliance, and so, probably, the others reasoned in intelligent acqui- escence.
Just what quality he had the courage of one could not have guessed at a distance, 'and he must remain part of the immense question which London continues for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that he looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type of man looked undistinguished, but when the season began to make London over, the pavement of Piccadilly sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking. They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature. They were doubtless the result of a natural selection, to
44
THE DUN YEAR'S BRILLIANT FLOWER
which money for buying perfect conditions had con- tributed as much as the time necessary for growing a type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only now and then hard or cruel; but one need not be espe- cially averse to the English classification of our species to feel that they had cost more than they were worth. The very handsomest man I saw, with the most per- fectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicate- ly aquiline to be particularly patrician), was a groom who sat his horse beside Rotten Row, waiting till his master should come to command the services of both. He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not be said that he had cost the nation too much time and money, it might still be conjectured that he had cost some one too much of something better.
Next after these beautiful people I think that in the multitudinously varied crowd of London I saw no men so splendidly, so brilliantly, so lustrously handsome as three of those imperial British whose lives are safer, but whose social status is scarcely better than that of our negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native dress, and white-turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who suddenly filed out of the crowd, looking more mystery from their liquid eyes than they could well have cor- roborated in word or thought, and bringing to the metropolis of the West the gorgeous and foolish mag- nificence of the sensuous East. What did they make of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or with- out rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferi- ority in the imperial scheme? If looks went for what looks rarely do, except in women, they should have been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under
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British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the crowd.
THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
THE specialization of those fatuous Orientals, tran- sient as it was, was of far greater duration than that of most individual impressions from the London crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a power- ful light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific wavelet; but these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred record with the most instantaneous apparatus. What remains of the vision of that long succession of streets called by successive names from Knightsbridge to Lud- gate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you are scarcely more aware of the single life than of any given ripple in a river. Men, women, children form the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in order to give it the collective immensity which abides in your mind's eye.
To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is archaic. Except for the few slow stages that lumber up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly anything of the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of our continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment and amusement that one finds it still prevailing in London, quite as if it were not as gross an anachronism as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and bewilderingly painted over with the names of its desti- nations, and clad with signs of patent medicines and new plays and breakfast foods in every color but the
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i
colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it rumbles forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a steamer when they put the table-racks on. Seen from the pavement, or from the top of another omnibus, it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the single ex- ample, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tre- mendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with the elephantine gait of things which can no more capsize than they can keep an even pace. Of all the sights of London streets, this procession of the omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common herd of Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft seems to suffer a change into something almost as rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary or less than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby businesses that preoccupy the most of us; they are conquering princes, making a progress in a long triumph, and looking down upon a lower order of human beings from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent dignity that they whom they look down upon are not merely the drivers of trucks and wagons of low degree, but often ladies of title in their family carriages, under the care of the august family coachman and footman, or gentlemen driving in their own traps or carts, or fares in the hansoms that steal their swift course through and by these ranks. The omnibuses are always the most monumental fact of the scene; they dominate it in bulk and height; they form the chief impulse of the tremendous movement, and it is they that choke from time to time the channel of the mighty torrent, and helplessly hold it in the arrest of a block.
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THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
No one can forecast the moment when, or the place where, a block may happen ; but mostly it occurs in mid- afternoon, at the intersection of some street where a line of vehicles is crossing the channel of the torrent. Suddenly all is at a stand-still, and one of those wonder- ful English policemen, who look so slight and young after the vast blue bulks of our Irish force, shows himself in the middle of the channel, and holds back its rapids with the quiet gesture of extended hands. The currents and counter-currents gather and press from the rear and solidify, but in the narrow fissure the policeman stands motionless, with only some such slight stir of his extended hands as a cat imparts to her "conscious tail" when she waits to spring upon her prey.
The mute language of his hands, down to the lightest accent of the fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of those concerned in its interpretation, and is telepathically despatched from the nearest to the farthest driver in the block. While the policeman stands there in the open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not seem as if the particles of the mass could detach themselves for such separate movement as they have at the best. Softly, almost imperceptibly, he drops his arms, and lets fall the viewless barrier which he had raised with them; he remains where he was, but the immense bodies he had stayed liquefy and move in their opposite courses, and for that time the block is over.
If ever London has her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play of fancy in that impetuous form. We have the hansom with us, but it does not perform the essential part in
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New York life that it does in London life. In New York you may take a hansom; in London you must. You serve yourself of it as at home you serve yourself of the electric car; but not by any means at the same rate. Nothing is more deceitful than the cheapness of the hansom, for it is of such an immediate and constant convenience that the unwary stranger's shilling has slipped from him in a sovereign before he knows, with the swift succession of occasions when the hansom seems imperative. A 'bus is inexpensive, but it is stolid and bewildering; a hansom is always cheerfully intelligent. It will set you down at the very place you seek; you need walk neither to it nor from it; a nod, a glance, summons it or dismisses. The 'bus may be kind, but it is not flattering, and the hansom is flattering as well as kind; flattering to one's pride, one's doubt, one's timid hope. It takes all the responsibility for your prompt and un- erring arrival; and you may trust it almost implicitly. At any point in London you can bid it go to any other with a confidence that I rarely found abused. Once, in- deed, my cabman carried me a long way about at mid- night, and when he finally left me at my door, he was disposed to be critical of its remoteness, while he apolo- gized for the delay. I suggested that in a difficulty like his a map of London would be a good thing; but though he was so far in drink as to be able to take the joke in good part, he denied that a map would be of the least use to a cabman. Probably he was right ; my map was not of the least use to me; and those of his craft seemed to feel their way about through the maze of streets and squares and circles by the same instinct that serves a pilot on a river in the dark. Their knowledge is a thing of the nerves, not of the brains, if there is a difference; or if there is none, then it is an affair of the
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THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
subliminal consciousness, it is inspiration, it is genius. It could not well be overpaid, and the cabmen are care- ful that it is not underpaid. I heard, indeed, of two American ladies who succeeded in underpaying their cabman; this was their belief resting upon his solemn declaration; but I myself failed in every attempt of the kind. My cabman always said that it was not enough; and then I compromised by giving him too much. Many stories are told of the abusiveness of the class, but a simple and effective rule is to overpay them at once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one cast a sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his down-stretched palm, and drive off in thankless silence; but any excess of payment was met with eager gratitude. I preferred to buy the cabman's good-will, because I find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the good-will of people whom I do not care the least for, and I did not see why I should make an exception of cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an extor- tionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who drove me to the station, and said: "I'll have to get another sixpence for this, sir." "Well," I returned, with a hardihood which astonished me, "you won't get it of me." But I was then leaving London, and was no longer afraid. Now, such is the perversity of the human spirit, I am sorry he did not get the other sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of jus- tice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose habits of prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even in your own interest to suffer yourself to be plundered a little; it stimulates the imagination of the plunderer to high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which eventu- ate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the party left a shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I
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had, after my custom and principle, overpaid, and who had left us at a restaurant upon our second thought against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put down. We duly despaired, but we went and saw the pictures, and when we came out of the gallery there was our good cabman lying in wait to identify us as the losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is it credible that if he had been paid only his legal fare he would have been at such virtuous pains? It may, indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not worth more than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was actuated by self-interest, but this is a view of our com- mon nature which I will not take.
One hears a good deal of the greater quiet of London after New York. I think that what you notice is a difference in the quality of the noise in London. What is with us mainly a harsh, metallic shriek, a grind of trolley wheels upon trolley tracks, and a wild battering of their polygonized circles upon the rails, is in London the dull, tormented roar of the omnibuses and the in- cessant cloop-cloop of the cab-horses7 hoofs. Between the two sorts of noise there is little choice for one who abhors both. The real difference is that in many neighborhoods you can more or less get away from the specialized noises in London, but you never can do this in New York. You hear people saying that in these refuges the London noise is mellowed to a soft pour of sound, like the steady fall of a cataract, which effectively is silence; but that is not accurate. The noise is broken and crushed in a huge rumble without a specialized sound, except when, after midnight, the headlong clatter of a cab-horse distinguishes itself from the pre- vailing bulk. But the New York noise is never broken and crushed into a rumble; it bristles with specific
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THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
accents, night and day, which agonizingly assort them- selves one from another, and there is no nook or corner where you can be safe from them, as you can measurably be in London.
London is, if anything, rather more infested than New York with motors, as the English more simply and briefly call automobiles. The perspective is seldom free of them, and from .time to time the air is tainted with their breath, which is now one of the most char- acteristic stenches of civilization. They share equally with other vehicles the drives in the parks, though their speed is tempered there to the prevalent pace. They add to the general noise the shuddering bursts of their swift percussions, and make the soul shrink from a fore- cast of what the aeroplane may be when it shall come hurtling overhead with some peculiar screech as yet unimagined. The motor plays an even more promi- nent part in the country than in London, especially in those remnants of time which the English call week- ends, and which stretch from Friday afternoon to the next Monday morning. It is within these limits that people are ordinarily "asked down," and as the host usually lives from five to ten miles from the nearest station, the guest is met there by a motor which hurls him over the intervening ground at the speed of the train he has just left. The motor is still the rich man's pleas- ure, as the week-end is his holiday; and it will be long before the one will be the poor man's use, or the other his leisure. For the present he must content himself, in England, at least, with his own legs, and with the bank-holiday which now comes so often as to be dreaded by his betters when it lets him loose upon their travel and sojourn in excursional multitude. This is not likely ever to come under question of affecting the Lon-
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don season, as one heard the week-end accused of doing. It was theorized that people went out of town so much, in order to be at home in the country for their friends, that with two afternoons and three nights lost to the festivities of London, the season was sensibly if not vitally affected. But that was in the early weeks of it. As it grew and prospered through the latter half of June and the whole of July, the week-end, as an inimical factor, was no longer mentioned. It even began to be recognized as an essential element of the season. Like the king's visits to Denmark, to Ireland, to Germany, it really served to intensify the season.
At this point, I find it no longer possible to continue celebrating that great moment in the social life of a vast empire without accusing myself of triviality and hypoc- risy. I have become aware that I really care nothing about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with most English people who have passed the heyday of their youth, perhaps without having drunk deeply, or at all, of the delirious fountain of fashion, it is much the same. The purpose that the season clearly serves is annually gathering into the capital great numbers of the people best worth meeting from all parts of the world-wide English dominion, with many aliens of distinction, not counting Americans, who are held a kind of middle species by the natives. It is a time of perpetual breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners, receptions, concerts, and for those who can bear it, balls till the day of twenty-four hours' pleasure begins again, with the early rites of Rotten Row. Those who have a superfluity of invitations go on at night from one house to another till they fall lifeless into bed at their own. One may fancy, if one likes, that they show the effects of their pleasure the next day, that many a
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THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
soft cheek pales its English rose under the flapping panama hats among the riders in the Park, and that, lively as they still are, they tend rather to be phantoms of delight. But perhaps this is not so. What is cer- tain is that for those who do not abuse the season it is a time of fine as well as high enjoyment, when the alien, or the middle species, if he is known, or even tolerably imagined, may taste a cup of social kindness, of hos- pitality, deeper if not richer than any in the world. I do not say that one of the middle species will find in it the delicate, the wild, the piquant flavors of certain remem- bered cups of kindness at home; and I should not say this even if it were true; but he will be an ungrateful and ungracious guest if he criticises. He will more wisely and justly accuse himself of having lost his earlier zest, if he does not come away always thinking, "What interesting people I have met!"
VI IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
IN speaking of any specific social experience it is al- ways a question of how far one may pardonably err on the side of indiscretion; and if I remember here a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons — in a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a cathedral crypt — it is with the sufficiently meek hope of keeping well within bounds which only the nerves can ascertain.
The quaintness of the place may have contributed to an uncommon charm in the occasion; but its charm was perhaps a happy accident which would have tried in vain to repeat itself even there. It ended in a visit to the House, where the strangers were admitted on the rigid terms and in the strict limits to which non- members must submit themselves. But one might well undergo much more in order to hear John Burns speak in the place to which he has fought his right under a system of things as averse as can be imagined to a working-man's sharing in the legislation for working- men. The matter in hand that night chanced to be one peculiarly interesting to a believer in the people's doing as many things as possible for themselves, as the body politic, instead of leaving them to a variety of bodies corporate. The steamboat service on the Thames had grown so insufficient and so inconvenient that it was
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IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
now a question of having it performed by the London County Council, which should be authorized to run lines of boats solely in the public interest, and not merely for the pleasure and profit of directors and stockholders. The monstrous proposition did not excite those fears of socialism which anything of the kind would have roused with us; nobody seemed to expect that blowing up the Parliament buildings with dynamite would be the next step towards anarchy. There was a good deal of hear- hearing from Mr. Burns's friends, with some friendly chaffing from his enemies as he went on, steadily and quietly, with his statement of the case; but there was no serious opposition to the measure which was after- wards carried in due course of legislation.
I was left to think two or three things about the matter which, though not strictly photographic, are yet so superficial that they will not be out of place here. Several members spoke besides Mr. Burns, but the labor leader was easily first, not only in the business quality of what he said, but in his business fashion of saying it. As much as any of them, as the oldest-familied and longest-leisured of them, his manners had
"that repose Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere,"
and is supposed to distinguish them from those of the castes of Smith and Brown. But I quickly forgot this in considering how far socialism had got itself realized in London through the activities of the County Council, which are so largely in the direction of municipal control. One hears and reads as little of socialism now in London as in New York, but that is because it has so effectually passed from the debated principle to the admitted prac- tice. It has been embodied in so many admirable
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works that the presumption is rather in favor of it as something truly conservative. It is not, as with us, still under the ban of a prejudice too ignorant to know in how many things it is already effective; but this is, of course, mainly because English administration is so much hones ter than ours. It can be safely taken for granted that a thing ostensibly done for the greatest good of the greatest number is not really done for the profit of a few on the inside. The English can let the County Council put municipal boats on the Thames with the full assurance that the County Council will never be in case to retire on a cumulative income from them.
But apparently the English can do this only by laying the duty and responsibility upon the imperial legislat- ure. It was droll to sit there and hear a body, ulti- mately if not immediately charged with the welfare of a state sentient in every continent and the islands of every sea, debating whether the municipal steamboats would not be too solely for the behoof of the London suburb of West Ham. England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, with any of their tremendous interests, must rest in abeyance while that question concerning West Ham was pending. We, in our way, would have settled it by the vote of a Board of Aldermen, subject to the veto of a mayor; but we might not have settled it so justly as the British Parliament did in concentrating the collec- tive wisdom of a world-empire upon it.
The House of Commons took its tremendous respon- sibility lightly, even gayly. Except for the dramatic division into government and opposition benches, the spectacle was in no wise impressive. There was a restless going and coming of members, as if they could
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not stand being bored by their duties any longer, and then, after a brief absence, found strength for them. Some sat with their hats on, some with their hats off; some with their legs stretched out, some with their legs pulled in. One could easily distinguish the well-known faces of ministers, who paid no more heed, apparently, to what was going on than the least recognizable mem- bers unknown to caricature. The reporters, in their gallery, alone seemed to give any attention to the pro- ceedings, but doubtless the speaker, under his official wig, concerned himself with them. The people ap- parently most interested were, like myself, in the vis- itors' gallery. From time to time one of them asked the nearest usher who it was that was speaking; in his eagerness to see and hear, one of them would rise up and crane forward, and then the nearest usher would make him sit down; but the ushers were generally very lenient, and upon the whole looked quite up to the level of the average visitor in intelligence.
I am speaking of the men visitors; the intellectual light of the women visitors, whatever it was, was much dispersed and intercepted by the screen behind which they were placed. I do not know why the women should be thus obscured, for, if the minds of members were in danger of being distracted by their presence, I should think they would be still more distracted when the ele- ment of mystery was added to it by the grille. Seen across the whole length of the House from the men's gallery the women looked as if tightly pressed against the grille, and had a curiously thin, phantasmal ef- fect, or the effect of frescoed figures done very flat. To the imaginative spectator cheir state might have symbolized the relation of women to Parliamentary politics, of which we read much in English novels, and 5 59
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even English newspapers. Women take much more interest in political affairs in England than with us; that is well known; but it may not be so well known that they are in much greater enjoyment of the fran- chise, if the franchise is indeed a pleasure. I do not know whether they vote for school-committeemen, or whether there are school-committeemen for them to vote for; but they may vote for guardians of the poor, and may themselves be voted for to that office; and they may vote for members of the Urban Councils and the County Councils if they have property to be taxed by those bodies. This is the right for which our Revolu- tion was made, though we continue, with regard to women, the Georgian heresy of taxation without repre- sentation; but it is doubtful to the barbarian whether good can come of women's mixing in parliamentary elections at which they have no vote. Of course, with us a like interference would be taken jocosely, ironically; it would, at the bottom, be a good joke, amusing from the tendency of the feminine temperament to acts of circus in moments of high excitement; but whether the Englishmen regard it so, the English alone know. They are much more serious than we, and perhaps they take it as a fit manifestation of the family principle which is the underlying force of the British Constitution. One heard of ladies who were stumping (or whatever is the English equivalent of stumping) the country on the preferential tariff question and the other questions which divide Conservatives and Liberals; but in spite of these examples of their proficiency the doubt re- mained whether those who have not the suffrage can profitably attempt to influence it. Till women can make up their minds to demand and accept its respon- sibilities, possibly they will do best to let it alone.
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When they want it they will have it; but until they do, it may not be for nothing, or even for the control of the members' wandering fancies, that the House of Com- mons interposes between them and itself the grille through which they show like beauteous wraiths or frescoes in the flat. That screen is emblematic of their real exclusion from the higher government which their social participation in parliamentary elections, and the men's habit of talking politics with them, flatter them into a delusive sense of sharing. A woman may be the queen of England, but she may not be one of its legislators. That must be because women like being queens and do not really care for being legislators.
VII THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
fTIHE secular intensification of the family life makes _L it possible for the English to abandon their secular domesticity, when they will, without apparent detri- ment to the family life. Formerly the English family which came up to London for the season or a part of it went into a house of its own, or, in default of that, went into lodgings, or into a hotel of a kind happily obso- lescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more of the Continental and American features than the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy in appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It has a table-d'hote dinner at separate tables and a fair version of the French cuisine. If it is one of the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dear- est, and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every way than our cheaper. The supply has created a de- mand which apparently did not exist before, and the Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the American with being. In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants
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in great number and variety, he has become a diner and luncher at restaurants. Whether he has been able to exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle species, cannot say, but it is evident that at his hotel or his restaurant he dines or lunches as publicly as ever the American did or does; and he has his friends to din- ner or lunch without pretence to a private dining-room. One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by its facility to those excesses of hospitality which are such a drain on English incomes; but again that is something of which an outsider can hardly venture to have an opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern hotel and restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are push- ing the old-fashioned lodging as well as the old-fashioned hotel out of the general favor, and have already driven them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a level where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species. In the side streets neighboring Piccadilly there are many apartments which are effectively small hotels, where you pay a certain price for your rooms, and a certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave this neighborhood if you want the true lodging where you pay for your apartment, and order the provisions which are cooked for you, and which are apportioned to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is not seri- ously affected by the reality that your provisions are also apportioned to the needs of your landlord's family. Even then, the ideal remains beautiful, and you have an image, somewhat blurred and battered, of home, such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your landlord is the butler who has married the cook, your valeting and cooking approach as nearly perfection as you can hopefully demand.
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It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities of the appointments over which an air of decent reti- cence is cast, and it will have been quite useless to try guarding all the points at which you might be plundered. The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and perhaps in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging you are promptly and respectfully personalized; your tastes are consulted, if not gratified; your minor wants, in which your comfort lies, are interpreted, and possibly there grows up round you the semblance, which is not altogether deceitful, of your own house.
The theory is admirable, but I think the system is in decay, though to say this is something like accus- ing the stability of the Constitution. Possibly if some American ghost were to revisit a well-known London street a hundred years from now, he would find it still with the legend of "Apartments" in every transom; and it must not be supposed that lodgings have by any means fallen wholly to the middle, much less the lower middle, classes. In one place there was a marquis over- head; in another there was a lordship of unascertained degree, who was heard on a court night being got ready by his valet and the landlord's whole force, and then marking his descent to his cab by the clanking of his sword upon the stairs, after which the joint service spent a good part of the night in celebrating the event at a banquet in the basement. At two lodgings in a most unpretentious street, it was the landlords' boast that a royal princess had taken tea with their tenants, who were of the quality to be rightfully taken tea with by a royal princess; and at certain hours of the after- noon during the season it was not uncommon to see noble equipages standing at the doors of certain apart- ments with a full equipment of coachmen and foot-
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men, ana ladies of unmistakable fashion ascending and descending by the carriage - steps like the angels on Jacob's ladder. It could be surmised that they were visiting poor relations, or modest merit of some sort, but it was not necessary to suppose this, and upon the whole I prefer not.
The search for lodgings, which began before the sea- son was conscious of itself, was its own reward in the pleasures it yielded to the student of human nature and the lover of mild adventure. The belief in lodgings was a survival from an age of faith, when in the early eighteen-eighties they seemed the most commodious and desirable refuge to the outwandering American family which then first proved them. The fragmentary outwanderers who now visited London, after an absence of twenty-two years, did not take into account the fact that their apartment of long ago was the fine event of the search, prolonged for weeks, by two friends, singu- larly intelligent and deeply versed in London; they took it as a type, and expected to drive directly to its fel- low. They drove indirectly to unnumbered lodgings unlike it and unworthy of its memory, and it was not until after three days that they were able to fix upon a lodging that appeared the least remote from their ideal. Then, in a street not too far from Mayfair, and of the quality of a self-respectful dependant of Belgravia, they set up their breathless Lares and panting Penates, and settled down with a sense of comfort that grew upon them day by day. The place undeniably had its charm, if not its merit. The drawing-room chairs were in a proper pattern of brocade, and, though abraded at their edges and corners, were of a tasteful frame; the arm- chairs, covered like the sofa in a cheerful cretonne, lent the parting guest the help of an outward incline; the
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sofa, heaped with cushions, could not conceal a broken spring, though it braved it out with the consciousness of having been sat upon by a royal princess who had once taken tea in that lodging. But the other appoint- ments, including a pretty writing-desk and a multitude of china plates almost hiding the wall-paper, were un- fractured, and the little dining-room was very cosey. After breakfast it had the habit of turning itself into a study, where one of the outwanderers used to set himself down and ask himself with pen and ink what he honest- ly thought and felt about this England which he had always been more or less bothering about. The inquiry took time which he might better have spent in day- dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven, with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it. He might have more profitably wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow- brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle dis- tance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy back- yards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing under them. Inquiries into English civilization can always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man, and I put them down roughly in behalf of a futile phi- losopher who ought to have studied them in their inex- haustible detail.
He could not be reproached with insensibility to his domestic circumstance, from the combination of cook and butler which took him into its ideal keeping to the unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron who
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had the dining-room floor, and was represented through his open door by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly valeted clothes. The valeting in that house was unex- ceptionable, and the service at table was of a dress- coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever eaten there. The service throughout was of a gravity never relaxed, except in the intimate moments of bringing the bath in the morning, when the news of the day before and the coming events of the present day were suggestively yet respectfully discussed.
The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of their most fortunate inspirations in sight-seeing to the suggestions of the landlord, whose apartments I would in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There was, indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made by some envious trunk; but there was nothing of the frowziness, the shabbiness of many of those houses in the streets neighboring Mayfair where many Americans are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house on the borders of Belgravia.
The Americans I am imagining had first carried on their search in those genteel regions, which could hardly have looked their best in the last moments of prepara- tion before the season began. The house-cleaning which went on in all of them was no more hurried than the ad- vance of the slow English spring outside, where the buds appeared after weeks of hesitation, and the leaves un- folded themselves at long leisure, and the blossoms de- liberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better stay in than come out. Day after day found the lodg- ing-houses with their carpets up, and their furniture inverted, and their hallways and stairways reeking of slop-pails or smelling of paint-pots, and without any visible promise of readiness for lodgers. They were
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pretty nearly all of one type. A young German or Swiss — there for the language — came to the door in the coat he had not always got quite into, and then sum- moned from the depths below a landlord or landlady to be precise about times and terms, to show the rooms, and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest dim and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the thresh- old and worn to the quick by the cleansing of number- less feet; and an indescribable frowziness prevailed which imparted itself to the condition of widowhood dug up by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes there responded to his summons a clerical, an almost episcopal presence, which was clearly that of a former butler, unctuous in manner and person from long serv- ing. Or sometimes there would be something much more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of holding in the background unsurmised charges for electric lights, for candles, for washing, for baths, for boots, and for what-know-I, after the most explicit declaration that the first demand included everything. Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that when the season began, or after the first of May the rent would be doubled.
The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted cham- bers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of
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pseudo-aesthetic rugs. The drawing-room expected to be the dining-room also, and faintly breathed the stale- ness of the meals served in it. If the front windows often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows had no air but that of the sunless spaces which successive architectural exigencies had crowded with projecting cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement sky- lights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages and the stairs were never visible except after dark ; even then the foot rather than the eye found the way. Yet, once settled in such a place, it developed possibilities of comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest hope- fulness could not have forecast. The meals came up and could be eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English hotels have good and nearly all English lodgings bad, could be exchanged for tea; the service was always well- intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid twice as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so ill-used as you might have been.
It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs, is unsteady on its feet from the competition of the great numbers of those large, new, reasonably cheap, and admirably managed hotels. Yet the lodging-houses remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions, throughout the land, and if the English are giving them up they are renouncing them with national delibera- tion. The most mysterious fact concerning them is that they are, with all their multitude, so difficult to get, and are so very bad when you have got them. Having said this, I remember with fond regret particular advantages in every lodging of my acquaintance.
VIII CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
THE painting -up which the apartments, as they always call themselves, undergo inside and out, in preparation for the season, is a rite to which all London bows during April as far as it can afford it. The lodg- ing-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh green its front door and window - frames, or perhaps reddening its area railing; but private houses pretend- ing to be smart clothe themselves from eave to base- ment in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints sus- ceptible of the soonest harm from the natural and artificial climates of London. While the paint is fresh, or "wet," the word by which you are warned from its contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives the gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the boxes of brilliant flowers at every window-sill, promises a gayety which the season realizes in rather unusual measure. It is said that the flowers at the windows must be renewed every month, against the blight of the London smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot be renewed so often, it is of perhaps a little more durable beauty. For a month of preparation, while the house- fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the
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grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of another London season.
If the American's business or pleasure takes him out of town on the edge of the season and brings him back well over its border, he will have an agreeable effect from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs he left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion will have got in its work, and the streets, the pavements, the parks will have responded with a splendor, a gayety earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the passing feet will be oftener those going to luncheon and afternoon tea, and not so solely those hurrying to or lagging from the toils of the day. Even the morning trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to arrive with multitudes fresher and brighter than those which arrived before the season began. I do not know whether it was in tribute to the joyful time that a house- maid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and whitening up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore a long, black train and a bolero hat and jacket, and I do not say that this is the usual dress of the London house- maid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all the London steps wear in the morning. One might as well pretend that the may is consciously white and red on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom al- most as long as its namesake month endures. But that is no great wonder: when a tree has worked as hard as a
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tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is natu- rally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on for weeks.
The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their silken fulness; the trees stood densely, softly, darkly rounded in the dim air, and they did not begin to shed their foliage till almost two months later. But I think I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the London trees as one evening in the grounds of a country club not so far out of London as not to have London trees in its grounds. They were mostly oaks, beeches, and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide, slow water, which could not be called a stream, and they hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists. The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I de- clared which the birds were singing their vespers in. There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I think must have been singing in the heart of the mist, and which probably mistook it for a tree of like sub- stance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; and really the place was enchanting, with its close- cropped, daisy - starred lawns, and the gay figures of polo-players coming home from a distant field in the pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June.
The birds are heard everywhere in London through that glowing month, and their singing would drown the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab- horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens of the houses back together and form innumerable shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the American city-dweller, who never sees anything but clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but
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they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.
The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really warm days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be making some very gravelly garden-beds along the wall when the hen proclaimed her achievement, and he called his children and their mother to rejoice with him. His oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his lodgers came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am sure the royal princess would have done if she had been taking tea there that afternoon.
He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, and though his aspirates were dislocated, his heart, however he miscalled it, was in the right place. We had many improving conversations, by which I profited more than he; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of every class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively upon the rights of his station. In England you feel that you cannot trespass upon the social demesne of the lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the premises. The social inferiors have a convention of profound respect for the social superiors, but it some- times seemed provisional only, a mask which they ex- pected one day to drop; yet this may have been one of those errors which foreigners easily make. What is
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certain is that the superior had better keep to his place, as the inferior keeps to his. Across the barrier the classes can and do exchange much more kindness than we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this is not a good time to say that the English manner to dependants is beyond criticism. The consideration for them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things if they please, and they are invariably and distinctly thanked for the smallest service. There are no doubt exceptions to the kindness which one sees, but I did not see the exceptions. The social machinery has so little play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the grind of class upon class might be intolerable. With us in America there is no love lost between rich and poor; unless the poor are directly and obviously depen- dent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with one another, as they never seem in England. Very possibly that perfect English manner from superiors is also a convention, like the respect of the inferiors, but it is a becoming one.
This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to say my landlord, who told me that when he first took that house a flock of starlings used to visit him in the spring. He did not tell me that his little house stood in the region of Nell G Wynne's mulberry-gardens; his knowledge was of observation, not of reading; and he was a gossip only about impersonal things. Concerning his lodgers he was as a grave for silence, and I fancy this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak once of a young German lodger whom he had kept from going to a garden-party in full evening-dress, but the incident was of a remoteness which excused its mention. What had impressed him in it was the for-
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eigner's almost tearful gratitude when he came home and acknowledged that he had found everybody in the sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him to wear.
While the may was still hesitating on the hawthorns whether to come out, there were plum and peach trees in the gardens which emulated the earlier daring of the almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the greengages that come there after they have ceased to come from France are as good as our own when the curculio does not get them; but the efflorescence of the peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they never fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances are against them. Perhaps the fruits of the fields and orchards, if not of the streets, would do better in Eng- land if the nights were warmer. The days are often quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so de- cidedly that even in that heated fortnight in July a blanket or two were never too much. In the spring a day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of the afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid. 6
IX
SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
I HAD a very good will towards all the historic temples in London, and I hope that this, with the fact that I had seen them before, will pass for my ex- cuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed had some self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul's, of which I said to myself I ought to see it again; there might be an emotion in it. I passed and repassed it, till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of other tardy visitors who had come at the closing hour. After this unavailing visit, the necessity of going again established itself in me, and I went repeatedly, choosing, indeed, rainy days when I could not well go elsewhere, and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy of its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.
Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that St. Paul's always seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter's in its structure and decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me
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with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much mind the heavy presence of the Fames or Britannias of the earlier nineteenth century celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement hi the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when the national type was least able to inspire grief with an artistic expression. The statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than the Fames or the Britannias.
The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul's so much as at that list of London bishops, which, if you are so lucky as to come on it by chance where it is inscribed beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense of the long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops of the Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly Latin names; bishops of the Saxon and Danish times remembered in rough Northern syllables; bishops of the Norman time, with appellations that again flow upon the tongue; bishops of the English time, with designations as familiar as those in the directory: what a record! It moves you more than any of those uni- formed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, and it speaks more eloquently of the infrangible con- tinuity, the unbroken greatness of England.
My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other English cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to think, that England was overgothicized, and that I should be glad of something classicistic or at least relieved. But I found that I was mistaken. That architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the English faith, which continues the ancient tradition in terms not ceremonially very distinct from those of Rome; and coming freshly from the minister in York
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to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences which were all in favor of the elder fane. The minster now asserted its superior majesty, and its mere magni- tude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its clustered columns, the vastness of its wide and lofty windows, as they held their own in my memory, dwarfed St. Paul's as much physically as spiritually.
A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul's, like St. Peter's, testifies of the genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built after the plans of the most skilful architects of their time and race, and both are monu- ments to civilizations which had outlived mystery.
I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey than to St. Paul's, but I had from the first so profoundly and thoroughly naturalized myself to the place that it was like going back to a home of my youth. It was, indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; and if I might advise any reader who still has his first visit to Westminster Abbey before him, I would counsel him not to go there much past his twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and
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how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets' Corner and read the words, " Oh, rare Ben Jonson!" The good Ben was never so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous emotion the tears came.
I am not sensible of having been grouped with others in charge of a verger, but a verger there must have been, and at my next visit there must equally have been one; he only entered, rigid, authoritative, unsparing, into my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that he was going with a flock of other docile tourists. I suppose it would be possible to see Westminster Abbey without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second visits, but that my memory rejected him as unfit for association with fames and names made so much of in death that it seemed better than life in all dignified particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my chances of getting along for a few centuries on earth.
I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next- to-last visit I found him very intelligently accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty which used to be 'carried in the funeral processions of the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till he had dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some
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upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly life- like in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubt- less there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Eliza- beth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that dwelt in William's. Possibly I read their natures into them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish that art had so preserved all the great embodiments of history.
I hope it was some better motive than the sight- seer's that at least partly caused me to make myself part of the congregation listening to a sermon in the Abbey on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the stir of the place's literary associations began with the sight of Longfellow's bust, which looks so much like him, in the grand simplicity of his looks, as he was when he lived ; and then presently the effigies of all the " dear sons of memory " began to reveal themselves, medallion and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory and inscription. We went and sat, for the choral ser- vice, under the bust of Macaulay, and, looking down, we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his grave. It might have been the wounded sense of reverence, it might have been the dread of a longer sermon than we had time for, but we left before the sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt little public garden which lies by the Thames in the shadow of the Parliament Houses; and who has said the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand years old, but some day they will be, and then those who cavilled at them when they were only fifty will be
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HOUSES OF1 PARLIAMENT
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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
sorry. For my part I think them as Gothically noble and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic, too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew from the ground there far into the gray sky to which their architecture is native. It was a pale, resigned afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted heat in it, which a recent rain had slightly abated, and we were glad of a memoriferous property which it seemed to exhale. Suddenly in the midst of that most alien environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom we had last parted twenty years before in the woods beside Lake George, and whose apparition at once implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so sensa- tional is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if it is so, why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and we were in the shadow of the Parliament Houses again, and no longer in that of the forest which did not know it was Gothic.
We were going to hang upon the parapet of West- minster Bridge for the view it offers of the Houses, to which the spacious river makes itself a foreground such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in this cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the pleasure of realizing the statue of Cromwell which has somehow found place where it belongs in those stately precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend of Parliaments than Charles whom he slew, but he was such a massive piece of English history that the void his effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons must have ached for it before.
When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The
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roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and the children strayed along the streets without playing, or lagged homeward behind their parents. There were no vehicles except those of pleasure or convenience; the omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar; our cab- horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the noisiest thing we heard. The trees in the squares and places hung dull and tired in the coolish, dusty atmos- phere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties of experience which, after all, one does not impart.
Those who like, as I do, the innocence which compan- ions the sophistication of London will frequent Kensing- ton Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has set the seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then seems peculiarly the playground of little children in the care of their nurses, if they are well-to-do people's children, and in one another's care if they are poor people's. All over England the tenderness of the little children for the less is delightful. I remember to have seen scarcely any squabbling, and I saw abundance of caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies of almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if it were a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This goes on in spite of a reciprocal untidiness which is in- describable; for the English poor children have the very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch have dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering of filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think, perhaps, they wash up a little when they come to play
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in Kensington Gardens, to sail their ships on its placid waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter the palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as they do in troops, they are commonly in charge of their teachers; and their raptures of loyalty in the] presence of those reminders that queens, too, must have once been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are doubtless as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and political associations. Since William III. built the palace and laid out the gardens that he might dwell within easy reach of his capital, but beyond its smoke and din, the place has not lost the character which his homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially sweet and commendable because of its relation to the good Victoria's childhood. One does not forget " great Anna's " drinking tea there in the Orangery so nobly de- signed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is dearest because Victoria spent so many of her early days in it, and received there the awful summons lit- erally to rise from her dreams and come and be queen of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke of poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet provided even for the election of young girls to the presidency; and though we may prefer our prosaical republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of such an incident in the mother monarchy.
The Temple was another of the places that I did not think I should visit again, because I had so pleasant and perfect a memory of it, which I feared to impair. More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in the chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and then gone out and wandered about in the wet, for it was raining very diligently. I cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was
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down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them then, but from the pensive asso- ciations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler after our drive from the Thames Embankment and be- gan to walk up towards the Temple Church. I will not ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will mere- ly have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies of the crusaders lying cross-legged in the pavement of the circle to which one enters. According to the strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our party, these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture since she saw them first. It was not merely that they had uncrossed their legs and crossed them another way, or some such small matter; but that now they lay side by side, whereas formerly they had better accommo- dated themselves to the architectural design, and lain in a ring with their long-pointed toes pointing inward to the centre. Why they should have changed, we could not understand; the verger said they had not; but he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly in a limp sort on keeping the door locked so that people could not get away without his help, and must either fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple Church, indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cun- ningham says that the two edifices most worth visiting are the church and the Middle Temple Hall, which I now preferred luxuriously to leave in my remembrances
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of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party, straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the empty courts, and envying, not very actively, the lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking old brick dwell- ings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this day, but I am told they are practically of both sexes, and that when married they are allowed to domesticate themselves in these buildings in apartments sublet to them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law, but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are subject only to a semicentennial ejection, so that I do not know where a young literary couple could more charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the Temple paths and on the Temple lawns. At one house, a girl was vaguely arriving with a band-box and parcels, and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint, remote date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash of our period came to us through the Strand gate soft- ened to a mellow roar. The noise was not great enough, we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman in court dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the top of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith's grave, and leaning forward with one hand extended as if, in the spirit of the present entente cordiale, he was calling our attention to the fact that the garlands and streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the walls about him were in the mother-clime of a real Amer- ican redness.
It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble
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remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must count that last day of our September in London as spent in such sort as to be of unsurpassed if not un- rivalled impression, because of the visit which we then so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we had almost not paid it at all.
The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and naval museum; with the swords and saddles and uni- forms and other equipments of divers English heroes in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the two most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I was not so vain of my reading about battles as not to be glad of seeing how the men-of-war deployed at Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops were engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of the cannons' mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when Blucher modestly appeared at one corner of the plan in time to save the day. "But we should 'ave 'ad it, without 'im?'; a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously inquired of the custodian. "Oh, we should 'ave 'ad the victory, anyway," the custodian reassured him, and they looked together at some trophies of the Boer war with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I do not know whether they shared my psychological inter- est in that apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which, in this place, as in several others in England, invests the spiritual squalor of war-memories with the glamour of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities. Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers
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in their ideals shed such a light upon the sad business of their lives as almost to ennoble it. One feels that with a little more qualification on the creative side they could have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps, but, say, historical novelists.
There is some question among other authorities which window of the Banquetting House the doomed king passed through upon the scaffold to the block; but the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a choice of windows, and as to a space broken through the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so well satisfied with his window as to shrink involunta- rily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal substance showed through the shadowy illusion of pass- ing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the street, the king's voice rising above the noises in ten- der caution to a heedless witness, " Have a care of the axe; have a care," and then gravely to the headsman: "When I stretch out my hands so, then — " The drums were ordered beaten, so that we could not hear more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs and 'busses to the horse - guards sitting shrunken on their steeds, and passed between them into the park be- yond where the beds of flowers spread their soft au- tumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day.
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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
I LIKED walking through St. James's and through Green Park, especially in the late afternoon when the tired poor began to droop upon the benches, and, long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face down- ward, among its odorous roots. There was often the music of military bands to which wide-spreading audi- ences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St. James's there were seats along the borders of the ponds where, while the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good deal of energetic courting went on. Besides, both. were in the immediate neighborhood of certain barracks where there was always a chance of military, and were hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected to find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class, is apt to be better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class, and the women especially make a bolder attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and
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if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to breathlessness ; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emu- lated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting and flirting at the same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the young fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of the swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled them in their aberrations from formality.
There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the people to sit under, but there was almost a superabun- dance of flowers in glaring beds, and there were pieces of water, where the amateur boatmen could have the admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely encircling the ponds. To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do. We ourselves ordered tea, knowing the quality and quantity of the public English ice, which is so very minute that you think it will not be enough, but which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want. The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and a crowd of envious small boys thronged the railing that parted us from the general public, till the spectacle of their hungry interest became intolerable. We con- sulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our question as to the moral and social effect of sixpence worth of buns on those boys; he decided that it would at least not form an example ruinous to the peace of his tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag
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that seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even half a bushel of buns will not go round the boys in Bat- tersea Park, and we had to choose as honest a looking boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and hope, as he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with the whole troop at his heels, that he would be faithful to the trust.
So very mild are the excitements, so slight the inci- dents, so safe and tame the adventures of modern travel! I am almost ashamed when I think what a swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real imagination would have been having in London wtren so little was happening to me. There was, indeed, one night after dinner when for a salient moment I had hopes of something different. The maid had whistled for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door where we stood waiting, when out of the shadows across the way two figures sprang, boarded the cab, and bade the cabman drive them away under our very eyes. Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o'clock, prom- ised a series of stirring experiences; and an American lady, long resident in England, encouragingly said, on hearing of the outrage, "Ah, that's London!" as if I might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the sort; but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the security and gentleness with which life is operated in the capital of the world is one of the things that make you forget its immensity. Your personal comfort and safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mis- take yourself for one of very few people instead of so many.
London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and
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deliberation, and if it hurried or worried, it would be like the precession of the equinoxes getting a move on, and would shake the earth. The street events are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely spent in the streets, I saw the body of only one acci- dent worse than a cab-horse falling; but that was early in my stay when I expected to see many more. We were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and were walking by the hospital of the same name just as a cab drove up to its gate bearing the body of the accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face hung upon his breast and whose limp arm another young man of the same station in life held round his own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside him. A crowd was already following, and it gathered so quickly at the high iron fence that the most censorious witness could hardly see with what clumsiness the wounded man was half -dragged, half -lifted from the cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the ground till he could be duly carried into the hospital. It may have been a casualty of the many incident to alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single combat, which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediaeval atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic dignity which would have come in the way of a more heroical imagination.
It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however characteristic of the observer, that I made haste to forget it as I entered the church-yard under the Nor- man arch which has been for some years gradually rinding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole church, indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it was one of the first effects I saw) of that rescue of the past from the present which is perpetually going on all
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over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and the crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an iron- worker's shop; and modern life still pressed close upon it in the houses looking on the graves of the grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and doing other household work, the place was like something out of Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he turned monk) who founded the Cister- cian monastery there in the twelfth century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to ex- amine the church. He would have had the advantage, which he could not have enjoyed in his life- time, of his own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and he might have been interested to note, as we did, that the painter Ho- garth had been baptized in his church six hundred years after his own time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent Norman architecture might have been less; it is possible he would have preferred the Gothic which was coming in when he went out.
The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, dim, twilighted as with the closes of the days of a thou- sand years; and in the pale ray an artist sat sketching a stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a loss in not having looked to see how he was making out, but the image of the pew-opener remains compensatively with me. She was the first of her sort to confront me in England with the question whether her very intelligent comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. She was a little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca dress, and a world-old black bonnet, who spared us no
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detail of the church, and took us last into the crypt, not long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now used as a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish, which is still full of the poor. The chapel was equipped with a large bier and tall candles, frankly ready for any of the dead who might drop in. The old countries do not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger countries do.
We came out into the imperfect circle before the gate- way of the church, and realized that it was Smithfield, where all those martyrs had perished by fire that the faith of the world might live free. There can be no place where the past is more august, more pathetic, more appealing, and none I suppose, where the activ- ities of the present, in view of it, are more offensive. It is all undermined with the railways that bring the day's meat-provision to London for distribution through- out the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm with butchers' wagons laden with every kind and color of carnage, prevalently the pallor of calves' heads, which seem so to abound in England that it is wonderful any calves have them on still. The wholesale market covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at some central point, you find yourself amid endless perspectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole car- casses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings, and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, so that you come away wishing to live a vegetarian ever after.
The emotions are not at one's bidding, and if one calls upon them, they are very apt not to come. I promised myself some very signal ones, of a certain type, from going to the Sunday market of the Jews in what was once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning
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up and clearing out of the slums, has got itself called by some much finer and worthier name. But, really, I had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on our own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I had been led to expect it would. The blazing forenoon of my visit was more than half gone, and yet there was no clothes' auction, which was said to be the great thing to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be every- thing else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry finery, children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one an- other indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most monumental features of the scene were the gor- geous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals along the street, and arranged with seats, like swings, for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know their tonnage; apparently they have a passion for know- ing it.
The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that he questioned the policemen for some very squalid or depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse
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but to take me on top of a tram-car and show me how very thoroughly it had been reformed and cleaned up. In a ride the whole length of Whitechapel Road to where the once iniquitous region ceased from troubling and rose in a most respectable resurrection as Stepney, with old- fashioned houses which looked happy, harmless homes, I could only be bidden imagine avenues of iniquity branching off on either hand. But I actually saw noth- ing slumlike; indeed, with a current of cool east wind in our faces, which the motion of the tram reinforced, the ride was an experience delightful to every sense. It was significant also of the endlessness of London that as far as the tram-car took us we seemed as far as ever from the bounds of the city ; whatever point we reached there was still as much or more London beyond.
Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than it used to be in the days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it. At any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less un- blushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless days of 1882-3. In those days I remem- ber being taken by a friend, much concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful purlieu where I saw and heard and smelled things quite as bad as any that I did long afterwards in the over- tenanted regions of New York. My memory is still haunted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who fled blinking from one hole- in the wall to another, with little or nothing on, and of other creatures much in liquor and loudly scolding and quarrelling, with squalid bits of childhood scattered about underfoot, and vague shapes of sickness and mutilation, and all the time a buying and selling of loathsome second - hand rags. In the midst of it there stood, like figures of a monu-
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ment erected to the local genius of misery and dis- order, two burly figures of half-drunken men, threaten- ing each other with loud curses and shaken fists under the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the throat-latch of his helmet. When the men should strike, I was aware that it would be his instant duty, as the gual-dian of the public peace, to seize them both and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ounce of cure.
I would very willingly have seen something of this kind again, but, as I say, I happened not to see it. I think that I did not see or hear even so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more gin-palaces, flaring through their hell- litten windows into the. night; but this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and coming out of such places in draggle-tailed processions in those wicked days; but now I only once saw women drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night, when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the thirst of the morrow, for all through the Sunday idle- ness it cannot be slaked enough. It was a hot night, and the bar-room door stood open, and within, fronted by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men- kind, those poor silly things stood drooping against the wall with their beer -pots dangling limply from their hands, and their mouths fallen open as if to catch the
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morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the tongues of their admired male companions. They did not look very bad; bad people never do look as bad as they are, and perhaps they are sometimes not so bad as they look. Perhaps these were kind, but not very wise, mothers of families, who were merely relieving in that moment of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's work. I may have passed and repassed in the street some of the families that they were the mothers of; it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose oppres- siveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to share with the reader, and the street children seemed to have been roused to uncommon vigilance by it. They played about far into the night, unrebuked -by their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little girls were always lugging, shared their untimely wake- fulness if not their activity. There was seldom any crying among them then, though by day the voice of grief and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. If their mothers did not call them in-doors, their fathers were still less exacting. After the marketing, which took place in the neighboring avenue, where there began to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, father and mother alike seemed to have renounced their domestic cares and to have liberated their offspring to the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.
As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see much of it, and I heard less, though that might have been because I did not look or listen in the right places. With that, as with everything else in London, I took my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports of a lady in Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of mutual friends from assaulting another lady. She, however, though she excelled in violence, did not equal
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in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, long hour threatened an invisible bicyclist under our windows in that humbler quarter already described as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had apparently been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, in a moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned that he had not sounded the warning bell. In making this confession he had evidently apologized with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error of his con- fession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again pardon with warning was given. Even a glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman's voice rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he seemed to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before by the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up at the prospect of his escape. I do not know how the affair ended; perhaps it never ended; but exhausted nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured person was, if not drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when the sensibilities are keenest and self-respect is most alert. An American could not, at least, have been so tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an Englishman could.
It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative drunkenness of the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the hope and example of the human race in so many things, that much if not most of our American drunkenness is alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely native. If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early
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years of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous, were added to the sum of our home-born intoxication, there could be no doubt which was the greater. As it is, I am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more drunken men in London than in New York; and when I think of the Family Entrance, indicated at the side-door of every one of our thousands of saloons, I am not sure I can plume myself on the superior sobriety of our drink- ing men's wives. As for poverty — if I am still partially on that subject — as for open misery, the misery that indecently obtrudes itself upon prosperity and begs of it, I am bound to say that I have met more of it in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in London. Such misery may be more rigidly policed in the English capital, more kept out of sight, more quelled from asking mercy, but I am sure that in Fifth Avenue, and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between that avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more deserving or undeserving poverty has made itself seen and heard to my personal knowledge than in Piccadilly, or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane, or the squares and places which are the London analogues of our best residential quarters.
Of course, the statistics will probably be against me — I have often felt an enmity in statistics — and I offer my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be sure of one's own experience (even if one can be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September, I used to stroll much among the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more
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interesting than they probably were, either asleep or awake, and if I could really have got inside their minds I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I had penetrated the consciousness of as many people of fashion in the height of the season. But what I wish to say is that, whether sleeping or waking, they never, any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise inti- mated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered it myself, it was another thing, and it was not refused to the extent of a shilling by the good fellow whose conver- sation I bought one afternoon when I found him, sitting up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle and thread. I asked him of the times and their badness, and I hope I left him with the conviction that I believed him an artisan out of work, taking his misfortune brave- ly. He was certainly cheerful, and we had some agree- able moments, which I would not prolong, because I did not like waking the others, or such of them as might be sleeping.
I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery to be cheerful seemed to be rather trivial, and I was bet- ter pleased with the impassioned bearing of a pair who passed me another day as I sat on one of the benches beside the path where the trees were dropping their listless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the
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high effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, and looked more miser- able, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed in a ghastly pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his luck. He owned that he was, and in guarantee of his good faith took the shilling I offered him. If his need had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sov- ereign; but one must not fly in the face of the Providence which is probably not ill-advised in choosing certain of us to be reduced to absolute destitution. The man smiled a sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his teeth in a sort of pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife, gloomily unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk back to my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had not embodied, society to her.
I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest that came to my knowledge in London; but I do not insist that it was genuine, and if any more scientific student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my trag- edy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize the sentimental American stranger, and do him out of one of his ill-got shillings, I will not gainsay him. I merely maintain, as I have always done, that the condi- tions are alike in the Old World and the New, and that the only difference is in the circumstances, which may be better now in New York, and now in London, while the conditions are always bad everywhere for the poor. That is a point on which I shall not yield to any more scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time my light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to another pair on the grass of the slope not far off in front of me.
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Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair of quite well-dressed young people had thrown them- selves, side by side, on the September grass as if it had been the sand at any American seashore, or the embrowned herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps the shelving ground was dryer than the moist levels where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but I do not think it would have mattered to that tender pair if it had been very damp; so warmly were they lapped in love's dream, they could not have taken cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their open-air love-making to that in public places at home, and contrast it with the decorum of Latin countries where nothing of the kind is known. If anything, English lovers of this type are franker than with us, doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the Eng- lish nature; and they seem to be of a better class. One day when I was sitting in a penny chair in Green Park, the agent of the company came and collected the rent of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely chosen an inconspicuous situation where I should not be found, and it was long past the end of the season, when no company should have had the heart to collect rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmur- ing, and as the young man who sold me a ticket good for the whole day at a penny, was obviously not pressed with business, I tried to recoup myself by a little conversation.
"I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I don't see many of your chairs occupied."
"Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a few taken at night, sir — over there in the hollow." I looked a leading question, and he went on : " Young peo- ple come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet place and out of the way."
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"Oh, yes. Where they're not molested by the un- employed?" I cast a generalizing glance over the dead and wounded of the battle of life strewn about the grass of an adjacent space.
"Well, that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do nothing but sleep all day, and then after dark they get up and begin to prowl. They spy, some of 'em, on the young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and black- mail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work if they could get it."
I perceived that my friend was a capitalist, and I sus- pected him of being one of the directors of the penny- chair company. But perhaps he thought me a capi- talist, too, and fancied that I would like to have him decry the unemployed. Still he may have been right about the blackmailing ; one must live, and the innocent courage of open-air courtship in London offers occasions of wilful misconstruction. In a great city, the sense of being probably unnoted and unknown among its myriads must eventuate in much indifference to one's surroundings. How should a young couple on an omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the seat opposite could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which they renewed their love after some previous falling out?
"But I was hurt, Will, dear."
"Oh, I'm so sorry, dear."
"I know, Will, dear."
"But it's all right now, dear?"
"Oh yes, Will, dear."
Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it down; it ought to be sacred; and nothing but my zeal in these social studies could make me profane it. Who would not have been the careless brute this young man
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must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweet- ness of such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on misbehavior. He was a nice-looking young fellow, but she was nicer, and in her tender eyes there seemed more wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to temper justice with mercy. .
Sometimes women do not know when to temper mercy with justice. I fancied this the error of the fond nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her peram- bulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the side- walk in order to keep up with the tall grenadier who marched with his head in the air, and let her make this show of being in his company, but not once looking at her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls are always with the military, so that it is said to be comparatively easy to keep servants in the neighborhood of the barracks, or even in those streets that the troops habitually pass through, and may be conveniently gloated upon from attic-windows^ or basement areas. Probably much of the natural supremacy of the male of our species has been lost in all ranks of society through the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men in civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace on their coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely they could still knock women about as they used, and be all the more admired. It is a point worth consider- ing in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.
A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory with those I eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus- top, was a silent pair I noted one day in St. Paul's. They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had apparently lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where every monument is more forbidding than another, and had sunk down on a seat by themselves, and were try-
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ing to get back a little courage by furtively holding each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of a human interest larger than any London characteristic. So, in a little different sort, was the rapture of a couple behind a tree on whom a friend of mine came suddenly in St. James's Park at the very moment when the eager he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a 'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had taken next him. The witness was going up to a dentist in that region, and professed that in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the furies of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after all.
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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
E)NDON is so manifold (as I have all along been saying) that it would be advisable, if one could, to see it in a sort of severalty, and take it in the successive strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it could best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans; then one could give himself to its political or civic in- terest, another to its religious memories and associa- tions, another to its literary and artistic records; no one American, however cultivated, could do justice to all these claims, even with life and health of an expectation beyond that of the most uncultivated American. Be- sides this suggestion I should like to offer a warning, and this is, that no matter with what devoted passion the American lover of London approaches her he must not hope for an exclusive possession of her heart. If she is insurpassably the most interesting, the most fascinat- ing of all the cities that ever were, let him be sure that he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it, but he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival before him in devotion to any aspect of her divinity. It is not for nothing that poets, novelists, historians, antiquarians have been born in England for so many ages; and not a palm's breadth of her sky, not a foot of her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wall- spaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described
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in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the American, come he never so numerously, will find out- numbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their island I had occasion to observe how fond the English were of English travel and English objects of interest, and wherever I went in London there were Englishmen elbowing me from the front rank, not rudely, not un- kindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been used as a foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at shrines of the beautiful or memorable. I do not know how it is now, but in those days there was nothing in the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza, or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for Rome, there was no such thing as doing as the Romans do in such places, because there were apparently no Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about Lon- don far greater than you can ever inspire them with for New York.
Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which they must have been visiting all their lives, there were, at least, a thousand Englishmen for every cultivated American we could make sure of when we went there; and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to the general public, this overwhelming majority of natives must have come on orders from Fellows of the Society such as we had supposed would admit us much more selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded, and if it had been, still it would have been delightful on a summer afternoon, of that hovering softness, half- cloud, half-sun, which the London sky has the patent
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of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with their may, were like cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it then was and would be at sunset; and there was a den- sity of grass underfoot and foliage overhead in which one's own childhood found itself again, so that one felt as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years old. But I cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the same degree, and so had better not insist upon the animals; the herds of elephants, the troops of lions and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the mass-meetings of anthopoid apes. Above and beyond these in their strangeness were the figures of humanity representative of the globe-girdling British empire, in their drawers and turbans and their swarthy skins, who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me, in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien shapes in Central Park, but there they are somehow at once less surprising and less significant than these Asian and African forms; they will presently be Amer- icans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperial- ings were already British and eternally un-English. They frequented the tea - tables spread in pleasant shades and shelters, and ate buns and bread-and-butter, like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English loveliness with an effect of mystery irreconcilable for- ever with the matter-of-fact mind behind their bland masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos, Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them so that we were faint for the tea from which they kept us at the crowded tables in the gardens or on the ve- randas of the tea-houses. But we were not so insatiable of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British
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whom one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special advantage. Our Sunday was in the season, and the sea- son had conjecturably qualified it, so that one could sometimes feel oneself in company better than one's own. The children were well-dressed and admirably well-be- haved; they justly outnumbered their elders, and it was obviously their day. But it was also the day of their elders, who had made excuse of the children's pleasure in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were not so much their elders, and the young aunts and uncles, who were naturally cousins, lost themselves at times a little way from the children and maids, in the quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the tranquil waters with one another. They were then more interesting than the strangest Malays and Hindoos, and I wonder what these made of them, as they con- templated their segregation with the other thronging spectators.
We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo; we were there quite voluntarily; but among the places which we promised ourselves not to visit again were the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery; and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith with ourselves in regard to the last. We went to it again not once, but several times, and always with an increasing sense of its transcendent representativity. It is not merely that for all the schools of painting it is almost as good as going to the continental countries where they flourished, and is much easier. It is not only that for English history, as it lives in the portrait- ure of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courte- sans and heroes and statesmen, it is the past made per- sonal to the beholder and forever related to himself, as if he had seen those people in the flesh. It is,
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above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms crowded with the pictures and statues and busts of the Englishmen who have made England England in every field of achievement that is oppressively, almost crush- ingly wonderful. Before that swarming population of poets, novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of painters, sculptors, architects; of astronomers, mathe- maticians, geologists, physicians; of philosophers, theolo- gians, divines; of statesmen, politicians, inventors, act- ors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but must dwindle in number till our past seems as thinly peopled as our continent. It is in these rooms that the grandeur of England, historically, resides. You may, if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, and at some point find her less great than the greatest of her overgrown or overgrowing daughters, but from the presence of that tremendous collectivity, that pop- ulous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in the welcome obscurity to which you plunge among the millions of her capital, that in all-round greatness we have hardly even the imagination of her transcendence. Well towards fifty years had passed between my first and last visits to London, but I think I had kept for it throughout that long interval much more of the earlier sentiment than for any other city that I have known. I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that this sentiment was continuous through the smell of the coal -smoke, or that the smoke formed a solution in which all associations were held, and from which they were, from time to time, precipitated in specific mem- ories. The peculiar odor had at once made me at home in London, for it had probably so saturated my first
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consciousness in the little black, smoky town on the Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a most intimate element when I now inhaled it. But apart from this personal magic, the London smoke has always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is mostly the smoke which gives "atmosphere," softens outlines, tenderly blurs forms, makes near and far the same, and intenerisce il cuore, for any him whose infant sense it bathed. No doubt it thickens the constant damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog; but it is over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objection- able, it is wholly deplorable, indeed, when it descends in those sooty particles, the blacks; but in all my London sojourns I have had but one experience of the blacks, and I will not condemn the smoke because of them. It gives a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sun- rises and the early winter sunsets, the beauty of which dwells still in my mind from my first London sojourn. In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the noons to the softest effulgence ; in the summer it was a veil in the air which kept the flame of the heated term from doing its worst. It hung, diaphonous, in the dusty perspec- tives, but it gathered and thickened about the squares and places, and subdued all edges, so that nothing cut or hurt the vision.
I was glad of that, because I found one of my greatest pleasures in looking at the massed tree-forms in those gardened - groves, which I never penetrated. The greater parks are open to the public, but the squares are enclosed by tall iron fences, and locked against the general with keys of which the particular, have the keep- ing in the houses about them. It gave one a fine shiver of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look through their barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while
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their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over the trim walks. Sometimes it was even young ladies who sat reading, or, at the worst, governesses. But commonly the squares were empty, though the grass so invited the foot, and the benches in the border of the shade, or round the great beds of bloom, extended their arms and spread their welcoming laps for any of the par- ticular who would lounge in them.
I remember only one of these neighborhood gardens which was open to the public, and that was in the poor neighborhood which we lodged on the edge of, equally with the edge of Belgravia. It was opened, by the great nobleman who owned nearly the whole of that part of London, on all but certain days of the week, with restrictions lettered on a board nearly as big as the garden itself; but I never saw it much frequented, per- haps because I usually happened upon it when it was locked against its beneficiaries. Upon the whole, these London squares, though they flattered the eye, did not console the spirit so much as the far uglier places in New York, or the pretty places in Paris, which are free to all. It can be said for the English way that when such places are free to all they are not so free to some, and that is true. In this world you have to exclude either the many or the few, and in England it is rather the many who are excluded. Being one of those shut out, I did not like the English way so well as ours, but if I had had keys to those locks, I should not now dare ask myself which principle I should have preferred. It would have been something like choosing between popu- lar government and family government after having been created one of the governing families.
Life, I felt, would be sensibly dignified if one could spend some months of every year of it in a mansion
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looking down into the leafy tops of those squares. One's mansion might not always have the company of the most historical or patrician mansions; sometimes these are to be found in very unexpected and even in- conspicuous places; but commonly the associated dwell- ings would be ample, if not noble. They would rarely be elbowed by those structures, not yet quite so frequent in London as in New York, which lift themselves in an outer grandeur unsupported by the successive levels of the social pretence within. I should say that with the English, more than with us, the perpendicular is still socially superior to the horizontal domestication. Yet the London flats are of more comfortable and taste- ful arrangement than ours. They are better lighted always, never having (as far as I know) dark rooms blindly staring into airless pits; and if they are not so well heated, that is because the English do not wish, or at least expect, to be heated at all. The elevator is not so universal as with us, but the stairways are easier and statelier. The public presence of the edifice is statelier, too; but if you come to state, the grandest of these buildings must deny its denizens the splendor of flunkeys standing before its door, on a day or night of social function, as one sees them standing by the steps or portals of some mansion that houses a single family. To which of the flat-dwellers would they be supposed to belong, if they grouped themselves at the common entrance? For anything specific in their attendance they might almost as well be at the next street-corner. Time and again, in these pages, I have paid my duty, which has been my grateful pleasure, to the birds which haunt the squares, and sing there. You are not obliged to have a householder's key in order to hear them; and when the hawthorns and the horse-chestnuts blossomed
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you required a proprietorial right as little. Somehow, my eye and ear always disappointed themselves in the absence of rooks from such places. My senses ought to have been better instructed than to expect rooks in London, but they had been so educated to the sight and sound of rooks everywhere else in England that they mechanically demanded them in town. I do not even know what birds they were that sang in the spaces; but I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply edging their song next the street; and where the squares were reduced to crescents, or narrow parallelograms, or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect that this edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so densely interwoven in the squares.
I have spoken hitherto of that passion for dress to which all the womanhood of England has so bewitch- ingly abandoned itself /and which seemed to have reached an undue excess in the housemaid in a bolero hat and a trained skirt, putting that white on the front steps which is so universal in England that if the sun missed it after rising he might instantly go down again in the supposition that it was still night. It must always be a woman who whitens the steps; if a man-servant were to do it any such dreadful thing might happen as would follow his blacking the boots, which is so entirely a female function. Under the circumstances one hears much of the general decay of excellence in woman-servants in London. They are far less amiable, patient, respectful, and faithful than when their mistresses were young. This may be from the fact that so many more employ- ments besides domestic service seem to be open to girls. Apparently very young girls are preferred in the innu- merable postal-stations, if one may judge from the chil- dren of tender years who sell you stamps, and take your
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telegrams and register your letters. I used at first to tremble for a defective experience, if not a defective in- telligence in them, but I did not find them inadequate to their duties through either. Still their employment was so phenomenal that I could not help remarking upon it. None of my English friends seemed to have noticed it, till at last one, who had noticed it, said he believed it was because the government found them cheap, and was in that way helping repay itself for the enormous expenses of the Boer War.
In the London shops I did not think women were so generally employed as in our own, or those of the Con- tinent. But this may have been a conclusion from careless observation. In the book-stores to which I most resorted, and which I did not think so good as ours, I remember to have seen but one saleswoman. Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large stores where women's goods, personal and household, are sold, and which I again did not think comparable to ours. Seldom in any small shop, or even book-stall or newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge. But at the street - markets, especially those for the poorer customers, market-women were the rule. I should say, in fine, that woman was a far more domes- tic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the beast of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German cities great or small; but I am not going to sentimental- ize her lot in England. Probably it is only compara- tively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and lowest its hardship is attested by the stunted stature, and 'the stunted figure of the ordinary English lower- class woman. Even among the elect of the afternoon parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great an average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show
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with us, where they form the patriciate which our plu- tocracy has already flowered into. But there was a far greater average of tall young men than with us; which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a masculine distinction.
As for those great department stores with which the question of women relates itself inevitably, I have cur- sorily assumed our priority in them, and the more I think of them, the more I am inclined to believe myself right. But that is a matter in which women only may be decisive; the nice psychology involved cannot be convincingly studied by the other sex. I will venture, again, however, so far into this strange realm as to say that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so good in London as in New York, though when one re- members the two Bond Streets, and Oxford, and lower Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of claiming superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty- third streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts of Third and Sixth avenues to which ladies' shopping has spread. After all, perhaps there is but one London, in this as in some other things.
Among the other things are hardly the restaurants which abound with us, good, bad, and indifferent. In the affair of public feeding, of the costliest, as well as the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot menus, safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in the world, not to say the universe. It is not only that we make the openest show of this feeding, and parade it at windows, whereas the English retire it to curtained depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it ubiq- uitously, perpetually. In both London and New York it is exotic for the most part, or, at least, on the higher levels, and the administration is in the hands of those
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foreigners who take our money for learning English of us. But there is no such range of Italian and French and German restaurants in London as in New York, and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when lunch -time came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and our wicked hope was in a little Italian trattoria which opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial effect as an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blos- soms. There was a strictly English company within, and the lunch was to the English taste, but the touch was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the Tiber or on the Riva degli Schiavoni.
At the great restaurants, where one may see fashion lunching, the kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration with Sherry's or Delmonico's, but the entourage was less oppressively glaring, and the service had more moments of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a prin- cipal part of the drama. That is often the case with us in the simpler sort of eating-houses, where it is the neat hand of Phyllis that serves rather than that of the white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of either color or any nationality. My profoundest and distmctest impression of Phyllidian service is from a delightful lunch which I had one golden noonday in that famous and beautiful house, Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, which remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in which Sir John Crosby proudly built it from his grocer's and woolman's gains in 1466. It had afterwards added to it the glory of lodging Richard III., who, both as
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protector and as sovereign-prince made appointments there, in Shakespeare's tragedy of him, for the Lady Anne, for Catesby, and for the "First Murderer," whom he praises for his thoughtfulness in coming for the "warrant," that he might be admitted to their victim.
"Well thought upon; I have it here about me. When you have done, repair to Crosby place."
Probably the First Murderer lunched there, four hundred years ago, "when he had done as I did now"; but, in the mean time, Henry VIII. had given Crosby Place to a rich Italian merchant, one Anthony Bonvice; later, ambassadors had been received in it; the first Earl of Northampton had enlarged it, and dwelt in it as lord mayor; in 1638 the East India Company had owned it, and later yet, in 1673, it was used for a Pres- byterian meeting-house; but in 1836 it was restored to its ancient form and function. I do not know how long it has been an eating-house, but I hope it may long remain so, for the sensation and refreshment of Amer- icans who love a simple and good refection in a mediaeval setting, at a cost so moderate that they must ever after- wards blush for it. You penetrate to its innermost perpendicularity through a passage that encloses a "quick-lunch" counter, and climb from a most noble banquet-hall crammed with hundreds of mercantile gentlemen "feeding like one" at innumerable little tables, to a gallery where the musicians must have sat of old. There it was that Phyllis found and neat- handedly served my friend and me, gently experiencing a certain difficulty in our combined addition, but mas- tering the arithmetical problem presently, and taking our tip with an air of surprise which it never created in
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any of the English-learning Swiss, French, or Italian Strephons who elsewhere ministered to us.
The waitresses at Crosby Place were of a girlish dig- nity which never expected and was never visibly offered the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banal- ities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel ; and I thought it to the honor of the lunchers that they seemed all to know it. The gentle influence of her presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood where, another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was misled by the mediaeval aspect of the entrance, and where I found waitresses again instead of waiters. But nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting the manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those repeated A. B. C. cold-lunch places of the Aerated Bread Company, where a chill has apparently been imparted to their bearing by the temperature of the food they serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be rather that a New England severity in them is the effect of the impersonal relation of served and server which no gratuity humanizes.
It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds him- self asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the pro-
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gramme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, six- pence for their programmes and feel no asperity at being so plundered. The true explanation may be found, after all, in the discovery, akin to the government's, that their service is cheaper than men ushers' would be. Children of as tender years as those who manage the postal-stations, go round with tea and coffee between the acts, as with us the myriad-buttoned ice-water boy passes; but whereas this boy returns always with a tray of empty glasses, I never saw a human being drink either the tea or coffee offered by those female infants in any London theatre.
Let it be not supposed, however, that I went much to London theatres. I went perhaps half a dozen times in as many weeks. Once settled in my chair, I might well have fancied myself at home in a New York theatre, except that the playing seemed rather better, and the English intonation not quite so scrupulously English as that which our actors have produced after a con- scientious study of the original. I heard that the Eng- lish actors had studied the American accent for a play imported from us; but I did not see this play, and I am now very sorry. The American accent, at least, must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from the reproductions of our parlance which I heard in private life by people who had sojourned, or merely travelled, among us. These were so unfailingly delight- ful, that one could not have wished them more like.
The arriving and departing of theatre-goers by night adds sensibly to the brilliancy of the complexion of London. The flare of electricity in the region of the theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart
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of September, and recalled the gayety of the season for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even in the height of the season it was one of the things that distinguished itself among the various immense impres- sions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to characterize them, transitory; they were effects of ad- ventitious circumstances; they were not structural in their origin. The most memorable aspect of the Strand or Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately architecture, but its moments of fog or mist, when its meanest architecture would show stately. The city won its moving grandeur from the throng of people astir on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and Parliament did not seem in them- selves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Traf- algar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the Place de la Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with its suggestions of old steel-engravings of Athens. Of course St. Paul's has a prodigious opportunity, as the multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its fagade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for bit, there is not quite any bit in London like that edi- fice of smutted Greek on which the newly arrived American looks from his breakfast-table in his Liverpool hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far from thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to the London architecture. Pure white marble is all very
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well, and the faint rose that the stone takes from a thousand years of Italian sunsets is not bad; but the black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul's lends wall and dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the elec- tric glare of tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches the columns which rise, more or less casually as it seems, from the London streets and squares, and one almost hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the fronts of the aristocratic mansions. It is like having an old picture restored; perhaps it has to be done, but it is a pity.
The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of large houses of the proudest nobility in the world, are by no means overwhelming. They hold their primacy among the other pieces of domestic architecture, as their owners hold their primacy in society, very quietly, if very stolidly, and one would have, I fancy, to come much harder against them than one would be allowed to do, in order to feel their quality intimately. There they are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high social preparation during the season in flinging out curtained galleries or pavilions towards the street, if it stood back; if it stood flush upon the sidewalk a group of fifteen or twenty flunkeys, and the continual arrest of carriages would attest its inward state; but the genius of the race
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is to keep its own to itself, even its own splendors and grandeurs, except on public occasions when it shines forth in incomparable magnificence.
If London, then, is not habitually grandiose, or mon- umental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery, curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers every- where mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of birds heard through the staccato of cabs, and the muffled bellow of omnibuses. You may not like London, but you cannot help loving it. The monuments, if I may keep coming back to them, are plain things, often, with no attempt upon the beholder's emotions. In the proc- ess of time, I suspect that the Albert Memorial will not be the most despised among them, for it expresses, even if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does not stand mum, like the different shy, bashful columns stuck here and there, and not able to say what they would be at. .
If one comes to the statues there are, of course, none so good as the Farragut in Madison Square, or the Logan on the Lake front at Chicago, and, on the whole, I remem- ber those at Washington as better. There are not so many English kings standing or riding about as one would expect; the English kings have, indeed, not been much to brag of in bronze or marble, though in that I do not say they are worse than other kings. I think, but I am not sure, that there are rather more public men of inferior grade than kings, though this may be that they were more impressive. Most noticeable was the statue of Disraeli, which, on Primrose Day, I saw much garlanded and banked up with the favorite flower
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of that peculiarly rustic and English statesman. He had the air of looking at the simple blossoms and for- bearing an ironical smile; or was this merely the fancy of the spectator? Among the royal statues is that of the Charles whom they put to death, and who was so unequal in character though not in spirit to his dread fate. It was stolen away, and somewhere long hid by his friends or foes; but it is now to be seen in the collec- tion of Trafalgar Square, so surely the least imposing of equestrian figures that it is a pity it should ever have been found. For a strikingly handsome man, all his statues attest how little he lent himself to sculpture. Not far away is another equestrian statue, which never failed to give me a start, when I suddenly came upon it in a cab. It looked for an instant quite like many statues of George Washington, as it swept the air with its doffed hat, but a second glance always showed it the effigy of George the Third, bowing to posterity with a gracious eighteenth-century majesty. If it were possible, one would like to think that the resemblance mentioned had grown upon it, and that in the case of Americans it was the poor king's ultimate concession to the good -feeling which seems to be reuniting the people he divided.
XII
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
amiable afternoon of late April which we chose for going to Hampton Court, made our return to the place, after an interval of twenty odd years, a sort of triumphal progress by embowering the course of our train with plum and pear and cherry trees in a white mist of bloom. Long before we reached the country these lovely apparitions abounded in the back-yards of the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely flowers; when we got to open expanses where nature could find room to spread in lawns that green English turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies and sunny with dandelions. The poets used to call that sort of thing enamelling, and it was not distasteful, in our ap- proach to such a kindly, artificial old place as Hampton Court, to suppose that we were passing through enam- elled meads. Under the circumstances we might have expected our train to purl, in default of a stream to perform the part, and I can truly say of it that it arrived with us in a mood so pastoral that I still cannot under- stand why we did not ask for a fly at the station in a couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our taking it for the little distance to the palace, which it would have been so much pleasanter to walk.
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Yet, I do not know but we were instinctively wise in coming to the entrance of the fine old paved court- yard with a certain suddenness: if we had left it much more time the grass between the bricks might have over- grown them, and given an air of ruin to precincts that for centuries have been held from decay, in the keeping of life at once simple and elegant. Though Hampton Court has never been the residence of the English kings since the second George gave the third George an en- during disgust for it by boxing the ears of the boy, there, in a fit of grandfatherly impatience, it has been and is the home of many English gentlefolk, rarely privileged, in a land of rare privileges, to live in apart- ments granted them by royal favor. In former times the privilege was now and then abused by tenants who sublet their rooms in lodgings; but the abuse has long been broken up, and there cannot be, in the whole earth, a more dignified dwelling for the dowager of a distinguished or merely favored family than such as the royal pleasure freely grants at Hampton Court. Doubt- less the crumpled rose-leaf is there, as it is everywhere, but unless it is there to lend a faint old-fashioned odor as of pot-pourri to life in those apartments, I do not be- lieve that it abounds in any of them.
The things I had chiefly in mind from my former visit were the beauties of the Stuarts' time, and of Sir Peter Lely's pencil, in the galleries of the palace, and the secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar place in a corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid my devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly declare that I did not find it looking a day older since I had seen it last in 1882. It could hardly have said as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two hundred years old to begin with, and consoled myself
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as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the unaging antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this moment be glad to share the youthful spirit of the sunken garden which I passed on my way to the famous vine, and in which, with certain shapes of sculpture and blossom, I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor- vita3 in the taste of a world more childlike than ours, and at the same time so much older. The Dutch taste of it all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from the Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by the good William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly good in comparison with all their predecessors from Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in that long arbor of clipped wych-elms, near the sunken garden, called Mary's Bower, which, on our April after- noon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs to break into leaf.
We did not penetrate its perspective, for it seems one of the few things at Hampton Court barred to the public. Everywhere else the place is free to the visit- or, who may walk as he pleases on its garden - paths, or over its close-woven turf, or sit out of the sun under its dense black yews, or stroll beneath the oaks by the banks of the Long Canal. If the canal is Dutch, the burly trees which lounge about at their pleasure in the park, impart the true English sentiment to the scene; but, for my part, I did not care to go far from the bor- ders of the beds of hyacinths and tulips and daffodils. The grass sighed with secret tears under the foot, and it was better to let the fancy, which would not feel the
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need of goloshes, rove disembodied to the bosky depths into which the oaks thickened afar, dim amid the vapor- laden air. From the garden-plots one could look, dry- shod, down upon the Thames, along which the pretty town of Hampton stretches, and in whose lively current great numbers of house-boats tug at their moorings. The Thames beside the palace is not only swift but wide, and from the little flowery height on which we sur- veyed these very modernest of pleasure-craft they had a remove at which they were lost in an agreeable mystery. Even one which we were told belonged to a rich Amer- ican could not alienate itself from the past when there were no United States, and very few united colonies. The poorest American, if he could not have a lodgement in the palace (and I do not see how the royal bounty could extend to one of our disinherited condition), or one of the pleasant Hampton houses overlooking the river, might be glad to pass the long, mild English summer, made fast to the willowy bank of the Thames, without mosquitoes or malaria to molest him or make him afraid in his dreamful sojourn.
By all the laws of picturesque dealing with other times the people whose portraits we had seen in the galleries ought to have been in the garden or about the lawns in hospitable response to the interest of their trans- Atlantic visitors; but in mere common honesty, I must own they were not. They may have become tired of leaving their frames at the summons of the imagina- tions which have so often sought to steal their color for a dull page, and to give the charm of their tragedy or comedy to a passage which otherwise would not move. I do not blame them, and I advise the reader not to expect a greater complaisance of them than we experi- enced. But in all that densely -storied England, where
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every scene has memories accumulated one upon an- other till the sense aches under them, I think there is none that surpasses, if any vies with this.
What makes the charm of Hampton Court is that from first to last it lies in an air clearer of fable or tradition than that which involves most other seats of power. For we do like to know what we are dealing with, in the past as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves real, we love reality in other people, whether they still live or whether they died long ago. If they were people of eminence, we gratify in supreme degree the inextin- guishable passion for good society innate in every one by consorting with royalties and titles whom we may here know as we know our contemporary equals, through facts and traits even better ascertained. At Hamp- ton Court we are really at home with the great parvenu who began the palace in such magnificence that none of the successive princes have excelled it in design, and who when his fear of the jealous tyrant compelled him to offer it to his king, could make such a gift as no sub- ject ever before laid at the feet of a sovereign. The grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry VIII., in the sufferance and the performance of that extortion are as sensible in the local air as if they were qualities of some event in our own day, and the details of the tyrant's life in the palace remain matters of as clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the recent taking off of the Servian king and queen. The annals are so explicit that no veil of uncertainty hangs between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard, as in some hideous kinetoscope, escaping from her prison- chamber and running through the gallery to implore the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if a
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phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched woman's screams when she is pursued and seized and carried back, while the king continues devoutly in the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward VI. relates itself as distinctly to the palace where he was born; and one is all but personally witness there to the strange episode of Elizabeth's semi -imprisonment while Bloody Mary, now sister and now sovereign, balanced her fate as from hand to hand, and hesi- tated whether to make her heiress to a throne or to a crown of martyrdom. She chose wisely in the end, for Elizabeth was fitter for mortal than immortal glory; and for the earthly fame of Mary Queen of Scots Eliza- beth in her turn did not choose unwisely, however un- wittingly, when amid her coquetting and counselling with her statesmen and lovers at Hampton Court she drew the toils closer and closer about her victim. But here I ought to own that all this is a reflected light from after - reading, and not from my previous knowl- edge of the local history. In making my confession, however, I am not sure that the sort of general ig- norance I brought to it was not a favorable medium through which to view Hampton Court. If you come prepared with the facts, you are hampered by them and hindered in the enjoyment of the moment's chances. You are obliged to verify them, from point to point, but if you learn them afterwards you can arrange them in your memories of the scene, where you have wandered vaguely about in a liberal and expansive sense of un- limited historical possibilities. I am able now to realize, without having missed one charm of our spring after- noon in those entrancing bounds, that the son of Mary Stuart was as fond of Hampton Court, when he came there king, as Elizabeth herself.
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It was there that James I. confronted and confuted the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their com- plaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow- beating so hammered their hard metal that he tem- pered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his son; it was there that Charles began the famous quarrel with his queen which ended in his deporting Henrietta Maria's French adherents, or, as he wrote Buckingham, "dryving them away, lyke so many wylde beastes . . . and soe the Devill goe with them"; it was there that more importantly, when an honorable captive of Parlia- ment, he played fast and loose, after the fashion he was born to, with Cromwell and the other generals who would have favored his escape, and even his restora- tion to the throne, if they could have found any truth in him to rest a treaty on. It was at Hampton that Cromwell, when the palace became his home, first put on something of royal state, always with lapses through his bonhomie into good-fellowship with his officers, and never with any help from his simple-hearted wife; that the death of his daughter, amid these fitful glories, broke his heart, and he drooped and sickened to his own end, which a change to the different air of Whitehall did not delay; that after the little time of Richard Crom well's protectorate, Hampton Court had another royal lord in the second Charles, who repeated history in a quarrel with his queen, for none of the good reasons which the first Charles had in the like contention. The father's tergiversations with Cromwell may be supposed to have given a glamour of kingcraft to his sojourn later, but the bad part which the son took against his wife was without one dignifying circumstance. One reads with indigna- tion still hot how he brought the plain little Portuguese woman there for their honeymoon, and brightened it
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for her by thrusting upon her the intimacy of his mis- tress Lady Castlemaine ; how he was firm for once in his yielding life, when he compelled Clarendon to the base office of coaxing and frightening the queen who had trusted the old man as a father; how, like the godless blackguard he was, the " merry monarch/7 swore " before Almighty God," in his letter to the chancellor, that he was "resolved to go through with this matter" of forcing his paramour upon his wife, with the added threat, " and whomsoever I find my Lady Castlemaine's enemy" in it, "I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live." It is less wonderful that the un- happy creature whose spirit he broke should have been crushed, than that the English people, to whom the king's bad life was an open book, should have suffered him. But perhaps, even this was less wonderful than their patience with the harsh virtue of the Puritans. It is not well to be good, or make others be good at the cost of every ease and grace of life, and though it seems strange and sad to us republicans that the mighty English commonwealth should have been supplanted by such a monarchy as that restored in Charles, it may not be so strange as it was sad. The life which attests itself in the beauties of Lely and of Kneller on the walls of Hampton Court, when it began to have its free course was doubtless none the purer for having been frozen at its source. The world is a long time being saved from itself, and it has had to go back for many fresh starts. If the beautiful women whose wickedness is recorded by the court painters in a convention of wanton looks, rather than by a severally faithful portraiture, can be regarded simply as a part of the inevitable reaction from a period when men had allowed women to be better, we shall not have so much difficulty in showing
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them mercy. If only after a lapse of twenty years they would not look so much like old acquaintances who had kept their youth too well, one need certainly not be shy of them. Even if all the beauties were as bad as they were painted, there are many other women not ostensibly bad whose pictures fill Hampton Court; but, knowing what galleries are, how mortally fatiguing to every fibre, I should not think of making the reader follow me through the long rooms of the palace, and I will now own that I even spared myself many details in this second visit of mine.
Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never ceases to be most intimately interesting down to the day of that third George who had his ears boxed there. The second James had almost as little to do with it as our last king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else that he had no time for the place where other sovereigns before and after him took their pleasure. But William and Mary seemed to give it most of their leisure; to the great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if it were a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Ken- sington. His queen planted it and kept it to his fancy while he was away fighting the Stuarts in Ireland; and when she was dead, he continued to pull down and build up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the sort of ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the unsparing present always touches the past. He sick- ened towards his end there, and one day his horse stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in the park where the kings from Henry VIII. down had chased the deer), fell with him and hurt him past sur- gery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly after- wards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed
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so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat. They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne's time, when under a dull sovereign the civility of England brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite artificial flower which it ever bore; for it was at Hamp- ton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in the matchless numbers of The Rape of the Lock.
Such pleasure - parties as that in which the lovely Arabella Fermor lost her curl under the scissors of Lord Petre, must have had the best of the gayety, in the time of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself, writing of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life as one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was fairest and brightest and wittiest, if not wisest in Eng- land graced it, and the names of Bellenden and Lepell and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that must have been so heavy even at Hampton Court in these reigns. After all, it is the common people who get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house for which they have paid comes back to them, as palaces are not unapt finally to do; and it is not unimaginable that collectively they bring as much brilliancy and beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers did in their mutually hampered pleasures.
Though the Georges began to divide the palace up into the apartments for the kind of permanent guests of the state who now inhabit them, it was not until well into the time of the late queen that the galleries and gardens were thrown open, without price or re- striction, to the public. Whose ver the instinct or in- spiration was, the graciousness of it may probably be
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attributed to the mother-hearted sovereign whose good- ness gave English monarchy a new lease of life in the affections of her subjects, and raised loyalty to a part of their religion. I suppose that actual rags and dirt would not be admitted to Hampton Court, but I doubt if any misery short of them would be excluded. Our fellow-visitors were of all types, chiefly of the humbler English, and there were not many obvious aliens among them. With that passion and pride in their own which sends them holidaying over the island to every point of historic or legendary interest, and every scene famous for its beauty, they strayed about the grounds and gar- den-paths of Hampton Court and through the halls of state, and revered the couches and thrones of the dead kings and queens in their bed-chambers and council- chambers, and perused the pictures on the walls, and the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest they did not seem persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their en- joyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it, and possibly it was even greater without that. They could not have got so much hurt from the baleful beau- ties of Charles's court without their history as with it, and where they might not have been protected by their ignorance, they were saved by their preoccupation with one another, for they mostly hunted the objects of in- terest in courting couples.
We were going, after we had shared their sight-seeing, to enjoy the special privilege of visiting one of the pri- vate apartments into which the palace has been so comfortably divided up. But here, I am sorry to say, I must close the door in the reader's face, and leave him to cool his heels (I regret the offensiveness of the ex- pression, but I cannot help it) on the threshold of the apartment, at the top of the historic staircase which
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he will have climbed with us, until we come out again. I do not mind telling him that nothing could be more charmingly homelike, and less like the proud discomfort of a palace, than the series of rooms we saw. For a moment, also, I will allow him to come round into the little picturesque court, gay with the window-gardens of its quaint casements, where we can look down upon him from the leads of our apartment. He ought to feel like a figure in an uncommonly pretty water- color, for he certainly looks like one, under the clustering gables and the jutting lattices. But if he prefers com- ing to life as a sight-seer he may join us at the door of Cardinal Wolsey's great kitchen, now forming part of our hostess's domain. The vast hearth is there yet, with its crane and spit, and if the cardinal could come back he might have a dinner cooked at it for Edward VII. with very little more trouble than for Henry VIII. three or four hundred years ago. "But wnat in the world," the reader may ask me, putting his hand on an old sedan-chair, which is somewhere in the same base- ment, if not in the kitchen itself, "is this?" I answer him, quite easily: "Oh, that is the Push," and explain that though now mounted on wheels instead of poles, the sedan-chair is still in actual use, and any lady- dweller in the apartments has the right of going to a dinner, or for what I know a "rout" in it, wherever it can be propelled within the precints of the palace.
I suppose it is not taken out into the town, and I do not know that the ladies of the apartments ever visit there. In spite of this misgiving, Hampton remains one of the innumerable places in England where I should like to live always. Its streets follow the Thames, or come and go from the shores so pleasantly, that there is a sense of the river in it everywhere; and though I
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suppose people do not now resort to the place so much by water as they used, one is quite free to do so if one likes. We had not thought, however, to hire a water- man with his barge in coming, and so we poorly went back by the train. I say poorly in a comparative sense only, for there are many worse things in the world than running up to London in the cool, the very cool, of an April evening from Hampton Court. At such an hour you see the glad young suburban husbands, who have got home for the day, digging in the gardens at the backs of the pretty houses which your train passes, and the glad young wives, keeping round after them, and seeing they do not make play of their work. A neat maid in a cap pushes a garden-roller over the path, or a peram- bulator with a never-failing baby in it. The glimpse of domestic bliss is charming ; and then it is such a com- fort to get back to London, which seems to have been waiting, like a great plain, kind metropolis-mother, to welcome you home again, and ask what you would rather have for dinner.
XIII A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
THE invention of Week-Ends is a feat of the English social genius dating since long after my stay of twenty-odd years ago. Like so many other English mysteries it is very simple, and consists of dedicating the waste space of time between Friday afternoon and Monday forenoon to visits out of town. It is the time when, if you have friends within reasonable, or even unreasonable reach of London, you are asked down. Science has ascertained that in this interval of fifty or sixty hours no one can do anything, and that the time had better be frankly given up to pleasure.
Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no such intervals between sights, or perhaps between en- gagements, and we found a whole week-end beyond our grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend it here or there in the country. That was why we were going down to the place of a friend one Sunday morning instead of a Friday evening and coming back the same day instead of the next. But we were glad of our piece of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grate- ful for the Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the most perfect of its kind. There used to be such Sun- days in America when people were young, and I suppose there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if you are no longer so very young you will be more apt
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to find them in England, where Sunday has been study- ing, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in just what proportion to blend the blue and white in its wel- kin, and to unite warmth and coolness in its air.
I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church that morning, but our third-class compartment was filled with people going into the country for the day; fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for an endless time in the fields and woods, which are often free in that much-owned England, while the may was yet freshly red and white on the hawthorns in the first week in June. Among our fellow - passengers that morning a young mother, not much older than her five children, sat with her youngest in her arms, while the other four perched at the edge of the seat, two on each side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare of red cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had to help. One's heart must go with these holiday-makers as they began to leave the train after the last suburban stations, where they could feel themselves fairly in the country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such motherly looking country, and yet young with spring- time, and of a breath that came balmily in at the open car- windows; and the trees stood about in the meadows near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing it was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being much use for fuel or lumber they could stand for ages and ages, and shelter the sheep and cattle without danger of the axe.
At our own station we found our host's motor waiting for us, and after waiting for some one else, who did not come by the next train, it whisked us much sooner than we could have wished over the nine miles of smooth road
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stretching to his house. The English are always telling you, if you are an American, how the Americans think nothing of distances, and they apparently derive their belief from the fact that it is a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we do not step casually aboard a train for either of those places, or, indeed, without much moral and material preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware attaches to you from our supposed contempt of space, you could make out a very pretty case against them, in convicting them of an even greater indifference to dis- tances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and accepting invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a run from London down to Ultima Thule for a week is thought nothing of, or much less of than a journey from New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more in the English social scheme than the other is in ours; and perhaps the distance at which a gentleman will live from his railroad-station in the country is still more impressive. The American commuter who drives night and morning two or three miles after leaving and before getting his train, thinks he is having quite drive enough ; if he drives six miles the late and early guest feels him- self badly used; but apparently such distances are not minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come to devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled away by a public fly, they seem not to have been re- garded as evils.
For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. Every foot, every inch of the way was delightful, and we only wished that our motor could have conceived of our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom
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had made it indifferent. There were some villages in the course of that swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church- going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol of our race's rustic Sunday leisure every- where; and the main difference that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of hedges.
If one part of England can be said to be more charm- ing than another, and I suppose that there are odds in its loveliness, I think there can be no doubt but we were that day in one of the most beautiful regions within an hour's reach of London. We were pretty constantly mounting in our motor-flight from the station; the up- lands opened round us, and began to roll far away tow- ards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency of English downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and this we had from the windows and gardened levels of our friends' house even more than from the highroad, which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way of its own. Mountains would have been out of key with the landscape; downs were just right.
I do not know why the house was the more agreeable for being new, and for being the effect of our friends' immediate and not their ancestral fancy, quite as it would have been with most of our friends' country-
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houses at home. We certainly had not come to England for newness of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the shrubberies being new; and my content was absolute when I heard from our friends that they had at one time thought of building their house of wood : the fact seemed to restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built continent which I had do willingly forsaken only a few weeks before.
But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than that it shall render us some fleeting image of the nearest and dearest things of home? What I had reasonably or logically come to England for was nature tamed to the hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of some- thing wild, something savage - looking, gaunt, huge, rugged, I rejoiced with an insensate pleasure in its like- ness to the roughest aspect of America that association could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some others, and I will own that when our friends took us the walk over the downs which they had promised us, nothing could have gladdened me so much as to enter a secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart- track growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out over its snows and mosses.
The masses of the red may and the white may which stood here and there in the border of the yews, might have been the blossom of the wilding apple-trees which often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent
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hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree - shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dore, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame to bear what witness we can to the fact.
The yew-tree's shade in Gray's Elegy had not pre- pared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld. The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less protected than now, or when its wood was more employed in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London used to come out to the forest by night and lop away great limbs of the yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of timber-merchants. From time to time my host put his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry decay without that endeavor some other trees make to cover the stump with a new growth. The down, he told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his horse or his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not know whose forest rights, if any one's, were especially violated in these cruel midnight outrages on the yews; but some one must have had the interest to stop it.
I would not try to say how far the common extended,
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or how far its privileges; but the land about is mostly held in great estates, like most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in the game-keeper whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheas- ants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I would not for the sake of the books where I have known so many of his sort have him the least different from what he was.
The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liber- ties. By the tune we got back to lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous house in the neigh- borhood, the temperature was all right again; it was more than all right in the cold current of air which the motor created. In the course of that post - luncheon talk our host brought out a small porcelain bust of Wash- ington, in very Continental blue, which he said was one of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the time of our Revolution to express the feeling of our Eng- lish sympathizers in the struggle which gave English liberty a new lease. One reads of this sympathy, how wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not real- ized it. The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at our ignorance with his accustomed blandness, and I hope
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he will never regret being given to one of us as a testi- mony of the amity which had largely endured for our nation from and through the most difficult times. The gift lent our day a unique grace, and I could only hope that it might be without a surprise too painful that our English Washington would look upon the American Republic of his creation when we got home with him; I doubted if he would find it altogether his ideal.
The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down to the house where we were going, I do not know how many miles, for our 'afternoon tea. The house was famous for being the most perfect Tudor house in ex- istence, but I am not going to transfer the burden of my slight knowledge of its past to the mind of the reader. I will only say that it came into the hands of the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of its owners' heads, a means of acquisition not so dis- tasteful to him as to them, and after its restitution to the much decapitated family it continued in their possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, rising upon a gentle level of fields and meadows, with nothing dramatically picturesque in the view from its straight-browed windows. The present owner, who showed me through its rooms and gardens, hurriedly in consideration of our early train, has the generous pas- sion cf leaving the old place as nearly as he can in the keeping of its past; and my satisfaction in this was much heightened by what he was simultaneously saying about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not pub- lishing serial fiction: in his own newspaper, he said, he had a story running all the time.
The old and the new kiss each other constantly in
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England, and I perceived that this vividly modern possessor of the most perfect Tudor house existing was, with the intense actuality of his interests and ambitions, as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. When we came out of the house and walked toward the group we had left under a spreading oak (or it might have been an elm; the two are much of the same habit in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have fancied one's self in any most picturesque period of the past, if it had not been for the informality of the men's dress. Women are always of the past in the beauty of their attire, and those whom* the low sun, striking across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their pretty gowns of our day, could easily have stepped out of an old picture, or continued in it as they sat in their wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.
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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
N incident of the great midsummer heat, was an excursion down the Thames which took us far from the society atmosphere so relaxing to the moral fibre of the mere witness of the London season. The change was not to the cooler air which had been imagined, but it immersed us for the space of the boat's voyage to and from Greenwich among those social inferiors who are probably the moral betters of their superiors, but whose company does not always seem the spiritual baptism it doubtless is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly of the classes which are lower as well as middle, and the sole worldly advantage they had of us was that they were going where they wished, and we were going where we must. We had started for Richmond, but as there proved to be no boat for Richmond, we decided to take the boat which was for Greenwich, and consoled our- selves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor of many parliamentary and literary feasts which that fish has furnished. A whitebait dinner, what would not one suffer of human contiguity for it, even though it could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early hour?
It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the Greenwich boat puffed up to her landing at Westminster Bridge, and the lower middle classes streamed aboard.
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She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat, and she was of a failing line which the London County Council is about to replace by a line of municipal boats, without apparently alarming, in the English, the sen- sibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there is any talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the tide towards Greenwich. ,
Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark and the grandeur of the Westminster shore, which is probably the noblest water-front in the world. Near and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial masses of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we passed, varied their grouping with one another, and with the leafy domes and spires which everywhere enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great succession ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it does to the mind's eye, but to the body's eye, the Tower is rather histrionic than historic. It is like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage; and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the pur- chase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a sky-scraper.
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So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it is so true as it is that after passing the Tower the one shore of the Thames begins to lose its dignity and beauty, and to be of like effect with the other, which is the Southwark side, and like all the American river-sides that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little to console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the for- est of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.
Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bath- ing from the slimy shoals, running down to the water on planks laid over them, and splashing joyously into the filthy solution with the inextinguishable gladness of their years. They looked like boys out of the pur- lieus of Dickens's poverty-world, and all London water- side apparitions are more or less from his pages. The elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated hotel to which we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as much of his invention as if he had created him from the dust of the place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul into him. He had a queer pseudo-respectful shuffle and a sidelong approach, with a dawning baldness at the back of his head, which seemed of one quality with these characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with the greasiness of long serving. Asked for whitebait, he destroyed the illusion in which we had come at a blow. He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if
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we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any call for it now, and they did not keep it. Then he smiled down upon us out of an apparently humorous face in which there was no real fun, and added that we could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon mayonnaise was therefore what we had, and except that it was not whitebait, it was not very disappointing; we had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, we were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a fly which we wished to take for a drive, in the absence of whitebait. But a fly required, in Greenwich, an interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, though we were assured it would be fairly conducted, we decided to forego, and contented ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmos- phere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson's, for no very definite rea- son, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate fore- ground— it was as much earth as water that lapped the shore — of a small boy wading out to a small boat and providing himself a sorrowful evening at home with his mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves and trousers in the solution. Some young men in rowing costume were vigorously pulling in a heavy rowboat by way of filling in their outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaint- ance we had made in coming, was hurrying to get out of the river into the freshness of the sea, and this was all of Greenwich as a watering - place which we cared to see.
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But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of balls and parties, which, though not imaginably of the first social quality, must have given his middle-aging hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in summer. He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the gallery of the old naval college on the way back to our boat, and saw us to the door, and fairly out into the blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat, and we utilized every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, running from tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every available portico and colonnade. But once inside the great hall where England honors her naval heroes and their battles, it was deliciously cool. It could not have been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid air, for they all represented the heat of battle, with fire and smoke, and the work of coming to close quarters, with
"hot gun-lip kissing gun."
The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals and other sea-dogs of England whose portraits relieved the intolerable spread of the battle scenes; and it was best of all in the many pictures and effigies and relics of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of his great time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; everywhere his face showed the impassioned dreamer, the poet; and once more gave the lie to the silly notion that there is a type of this or that kind of great men. When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we perceived that the whole place we were in was a temple to Nelson, and that whatever minor marine deities had their shrines there, it was in strict subordination to him. England had done what she could for them, who had done so much for her; but they seem consecrated in
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rather an out-of-the-way place, now that there is no longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their worship; and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before choosing just their apotheosis.
By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the first-class shelter of the awning at her stern. Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solu- tion; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide among the lower middle classes. They were mostly good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment harsher than pity even when they were not good. Still it was not just the sort of day when one could have wished them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. Perhaps they were only incidentally given it,' but it must have been from a specific generosity that several children in arms were fed by their indulgent mothers with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had prob- ably had no whitebait.
XV HENLEY DAY
OUR invitation to the regatta at Henley, included luncheon in the tent of an Oxford college, and a view of the races from the college barge, which, with the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed down the Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry between the crews of the two great English universities. There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of house- boats stretching up and down the grassy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were to take. As their contest was the least important fact of the occa- sion for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a clear notion which came off winner in any of the events, I will try not to trouble the reader with my impressions of them, except as they lent a vivid action and formed a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles under the sun. I have hitherto contended that class- day at Harvard was the fairest flower of civilization, but, having seen the regatta at Henley, I am no longer so sure of it.
Henley is no great way from London, and the quick pulse of its excitement could be sensibly felt at the station, where we took train for it. Our train was one of many special trains leaving at quarter-hourly inter-
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vals, and there was already an anxious crowd hurrying to it, with tickets entitling them to go by that train and no other. It was by no means the youthful crowd it would have been at home, and not even the over- whelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now politely prevails with us in almost her European num- bers, was here in no greater evident force; but gray- haired fathers and uncles and elderly friends much more abounded; and they looked as if they were not altogether bent upon a vicarious day's pleasure. The male of the English race is of much more striking pres- ence than the American; he keeps more of the native priority of his sex in his costume, so that in this crowd, I should say, the outward shows were rather on his part than that of his demurely cloaked females, though the hats into which these flowered at top gave some hint of the summer loveliness of dress to be later revealed. They were, much more largely than most railway-sta- tion crowds, of the rank which goes first class, and in these special Henley trains it was well to have booked so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive uncrumpled, for the second-class and third-class carriages were packed with people.
There seemed so many of our fellow-passengers, that reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside the station which were to take us to the scene of the races. Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these vehicles, or for the more public brakes and char-a-bancs and omnibuses plying to the same destination; and so far from falling victims to covert extortion in the matter of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded with the price of the drive. This was about double the
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ordinary price, and so soon does human nature adjust itself to conditions that I promptly complained to an English friend for having had to pay four shillings for a drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home. In my resentment I tried to part foes with my driver, who mildly urged that he had but a few days in the year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded so ill that when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day, I amicably took him again for the return to the station.
Of the coming and going through the town of Henley I keep the sort of impression which small English towns give the passing stranger, of a sufficiently busy commer- cial life, doing business in excellent shops of the modern pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a familiar picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned annual or stage - setting or illustrated Christmas - story they are out of. I never could pass through such a town without longing to stop in it and know all about it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated my longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could have had each other to ourselves in the interest of an intimate acquaintance. It looked most worthy to be known, and I have no doubt that it is full of history and tradition of the sort which small towns have been growing for centuries throughout England.
But we had only that one day there, and in our haste to give it to the regatta we could only make sure of driving over a beautiful picture-postal bridge on our way to the meadows by whose brink our college barge was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain. It was really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar with boat-racing in the Thames where the Thames is still the Isis at Oxford, and was as wholly without the motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many
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other barges and house-boats set broadside to the shore for a mile up and down as closely as they could be lined, it was of a comfortable cabin below and of a pleasant gallery above, with an awning to keep off the sun or rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather to send. But that day the weather had no whims; it was its pleasure to be neither wet nor hot, but of a de- licious average warmth, informed with a cool freshness which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact, youth came back in all the holiday sights and scents to the elderly witness who ought to have known better than to be glad of such things as the white tents in the green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the sun- light by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages thronging up and down the road, or standing detached from the horses in the wayside shadow, where the trodden grass, not less nor more than the wandering cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus- days and Fourths of July. But such things lift the heart in spite of philosophy and experience, and bid it rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene every- where elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncra- sies of time and place. Certain of these might well touch the American half-brother with a sense of differ- ence, but there was none that perhaps more suggested it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board that these or those grounds in the meadows were this or that lady's, who might be supposed waiting in pro- prietory state for her guests within the pavilion of her roped-off enclosure. Together with this assertion of private right, and the warning it implied, was the ex- pression of yet elder privilege in the presence of the immemorial wanderers who had their shabby camps by the open wayside and offered the passer fortune at
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so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford to buy a prophecy of prosperity from them; I do not know why they proposed to sell with these favorable destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make.
These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can nat- uralize, are a fact of every English holiday without which it would not be so native, as the English them- selves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and in- tensely insular through the prevalence of more and more Americans among them. Most of our fellow- guests on that Oxford barge were our fellow-country- men, and I think now that without their difference there would have been wanting an ultimately pene- trating sense of the entirely English keeping of the affair. The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I hope, a novel zest to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed to grow and open flower-like from the water, until it was a blossom which covered the surface with its petals.
The course for the races was marked off midway from either shore by long timbers fastened end to end and forming a complete barrier to the intrusion of any of the mere pleasure-craft. Our own shore was sacred to barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I re- member rightly, was devoted to the noisy and muscular expansion of undergraduate emotion, but, it seems to me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own side. Still the impression of something rather more official in the arrangements of that shore persists with me.
There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing began, but as this throughout was the least interest of the affair for any one but the undergraduates, and the
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nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I will keep my promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced some minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather un- impressive hand-bell. Then a pistol-shot was fired; and then, after the start far up the course, the shells came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked from their waists up as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculptu- resque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to eager life. I think that American moment was more thrilling than any given moment at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a col- lege barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored spectator, I am not going to own that it equals as a view-point the observation-train, with its successive banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast of the racing crews beside the stately course of the Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I think it best to withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should decide in favor of Henley.
There was already a multitude of small boats within the barriers keeping the race-course open, and now and then one of these crossed from shore to shore. They were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply rounded craft, new to my American observance, and called cockles, very precisely adapted to contain one girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed on the young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or that should overset the ticklishly balanced shell. She
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might assist her eyes in trimming the boat with a red or yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleido- scope's vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park had taken water, and though in such a scene as that which spread its soft allure before us, it was not quite imaginable that all the loveliness one saw was of the quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near Stan- hope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the beauty was not as well - born as it was well - dressed. Those house-boats up and down the shore must mainly have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and of those who had come from the four quarters to Henley for the day, not every one could have been an actress with her friends, though each contributed to the effect of a spectacle not yet approached in any pantomime. There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and forth among the house-boat people ; and I was told that it was even more than correct for a young man to ask a house-boat girl to go out with him in one of the small boats on the water, but how much this contributed to keep the scene elect I do not know.
If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This
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ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one's feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's college barge. Out of that "giddy pleasure of the eyes" business lifted a practical front from time to time, and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For, it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and this gave the affair its pathos. Not that negro min- strelsy as the English have interpreted the sole Amer- ican contribution to histrionic art, is in itself pathetic, except as it is so lamentably far from the original; but that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is sorrowful; and there were many different artists there who were working hard. Sometimes it was the man who sang and the woman who played; but it was always the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to have the greater enterprise and perseverance. Of course in the case of the blackened minstrels, some man ap- pealed to the love of humor rather than the love of beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case of an old-time plantation darkey who sang the familiar melodies with the slurring vowels and wandering as- pirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A com- pany of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager be- cause they were, as our English friends believed, under- graduates on a lark.
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They were no better-natured than the rest of the constantly increasing multitude. The boats thickened upon the water as if they had risen softly from the bot- tom to which any panic might have sent them; but the people in them took every chance with the amiability which seems to be finally the thing that holds England together. The English have got a bad name abroad which certainly they do not deserve at home; but per- haps they do not think foreigners worthy the considera- tion they show one another on any occasion that masses them. One lady, from her vantage in the stern of her boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a tremen- dous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked round and smiled, as if it had been a caress, which it probably was, in disguise. But they were all kind and patient with one another whether in the same boat or not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a boat should be managed; they bumped and punched one another wildly; but the occupants of the boat assailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a smiling acceptance of its apology, and passed on the incident to another boat before or beside them. From the whole multitude there came not one loud or angry note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the universal good-humor. The women were there to show themselves in and at their prettiest, and to see one another as they lounged on the cushions or lay in the bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their hats and parasols; the men were there to make the women have a good time. Neither the one nor the other seemed in the least concerned in the races, which duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal
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came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure- craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, soft- ly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that you could have walked from the barrier to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would have overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged their freight to helpless death. But the spectacle smiled securely to the sun, which smiled back upon it from a cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than English ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our lunch- eon in the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the grassy shore.
To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long tables, and served one another from the dishes put before us. There was not the ambitious variety of salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have seen at Harvard Class-Day spreads, but there were the things that stay one more wholesomely and substan- tially, and one was not obliged to eat standing and hold one's plate. Everything in England that can be is adjusted to the private and personal scale; everything with us is generalized and fitted to the convenience of the greatest number. Later, we all sat down together at afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits.
I believe some races were rowed while we were eating and drinking, but we did not mind. We were not there for the races, but for the people who were there for the races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time, the multitude of them seemed to have increased, and where I had fancied that not one boat more could have been pressed in, half a dozen had found room. The
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feat must have been accomplished by main strength and awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place indeed for skill to evince itself; but people pushed about in the most incredible way when they tried to move, though mostly they did not try; they let their boats lie still, and sway with the common movement when the water rose and sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them. There were more and more people of the sort that there can never be enough of, such as young girls beautifully dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer hats. It was the fairy multitude of Harvard Class-Day in English terms, and though Henley never came at any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expres- sion which Class-Day used to reach when all its youthful loveliness banked itself on the pine-plank gradines en- closing the Class-Day elm, and waited the struggle for its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in the presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves from a society ultimately, if not immediately, vaster. It was rather dreadful perhaps to reflect that if all that brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had been en- gulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly replaced by as much more, not once but a score of times.
I will not pretend that this thought finally drove me from the scene, for I am of a very hardy make when it comes to the most frightful sort of suppositions. But the afternoon was wearing away, and we must go some- time. It seemed better also to leave the gayety at its height: the river covered with soft colors, and the barges and house-boats by the brink, with their com- panies responsive in harmonies of muslin and gauze and lace to those afloat; the crowds on the opposite
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shore in constant movement, and in vivid agitation when the bell and the pistol announced a racing event. We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass, weaving the web of fate and selling brooms and brushes in the intervals of their mystical employ, or cosily gos- siping together; and then we took for the station the harmless fly which we had forever renounced as preda- tory in the morning.
It was not yet the rush-hour for the run back to Lon- don, and we easily got an empty compartment, in which we were presently joined by a group of extremely hand- some people, all of a southern type, but differing in age and sex. There were a mother and a daughter, and a father evidently soon to become a father-in-law, and the young man who was to make him so. The women were alike in their white gowns, and alike in their dark beauty, but the charms of the mother had expanded in a bulk incredible of the slender daughter. She and her father were rather silent, and the talk was mainly be- tween the mother and the future of the girl. They first counted up the day's expenses, and the cost of each dish they had had at luncheon. " Then there was the cham- pagne," the lady insisted. "It isn't so much when you count that out; and you know we chose to have it." They all discussed the sum, and agreed that if they had not wanted the champagne their holiday would not have cost inordinately. "And now," the mother continued to the young man, " you must order that box for the opera as soon as ever you reach the hotel. Order it by telephone. Give the girl your boutonniere; that will jolly her. Get a four-guinea box opposite the royal box."
As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class
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seat, her little feet could not reach the floor, and the effort with which she bent forward was heroic. The very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was almost eclipsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gen- tleman in the opposite corner spoke a word now and then, but for the most part silently smelled of tobacco. The talk which the mother and future son-in-law had to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do not know why they should have wished to crush us with their opulence since they would not have chosen to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly hand- some people, in the dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which I am afraid our own race can never achieve. Yet with all this evident opulence, with their resolute spirits, with their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon which they could have made less expensive if they had not chosen to gratify themselves in it, with their pros- pect of a four-guinea box, opposite the box of royalty, at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they were a radiantly enviable party returning from a brilliant day at Henley*
XVI
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
THE return in mid-September to the London which we left at the end of July, implicates a dramatic effect more striking than any possible in the mere tour- ist's experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magni- tude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life; the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds all its six millions except a few hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a cer- tain part of London has in September, for the brilliant and perpetual movement of those hundred thousands was what gave it repletion.
The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Picca- dilly and the streets of shops is all away at country- houses or at the sea-side or in the mountains of the island or the continent. The comely young giants who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the paths of the Park are off killing grouse ; scarcely a livery shows itself; even the omnibus -tops are depopulated; long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks; the stately pro- cession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts at
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nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the tormented regiments of soldiers are at peace in their barracks; a strange quiet has fallen on that better quarter of the town which is really, or unreally, the town. With this there is an increase of the homelike feeling which is always present, with at least the happy alien, in London; and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and cen- tralized in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the theatres. There, indeed, the season seems to have returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses and the stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of its summer joy.
One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the church parade wore in life through those halcyon days when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but upon the whole it failed. It may have been an im- pulse from this vision that carried me as far as Hyde Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick or the dead, in the chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning up the edges of the road. In the consecrated closes, where the vanished children of smartness used to stand or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walk- ing, the inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered, with their legs in the air, on the wet grass, and the drip- ping leaves smote damply together overhead. Another close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had showered over-night, and the ground must still have been wet where a score of the bodies of the unemployed, or at least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun. They were having their holiday, but they did not make me
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feel as if I were still enjoying my outing so much as some other things: for instance, the colored minstrelsy, which I had heard so often at the sea-side in August, and which reported itself one night in the Mayfair street which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and touched our hearts with the concord of our native airs and banjos. We were sure they were American darkies, from their voices and accents, but perhaps they were not as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who came down the place at high noon with her large baby in her arms, swaying it from side to side as she sang a plaintive ballad to the skies, and scanned the windows for some relenting to her want.
The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the season had used so hard, were many of them putting themselves in repair against the next time of festivity, and testifying to the absence of their world. One day I found the solitude rather more than I could bear with- out appeal to that vastly more multitudinous world of the six millions who never leave London except on busi- ness. I said in my heart that this was the hour to go and look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in wait for me in St. Paul's, and I had no sooner mounted an omnibus-top for the journey through Piccadilly, the Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found the other omni- bus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had formed the almost universal head-covering of the 'bus- top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us when September begins. They had never so much rea- son to be here as with us, and they might have had al- most as much reason for lingering as they had for com- ing. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as
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well as among the omnibus-toppers, and the pedestrians abashed me by their undiminished myriads. As they streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent of eager life, and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my theory of a decimated London. It was not the tenth man who was gone, nor the hundredth, if even it was the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis mocked with its millions the notion of nobody left in town be- cause a few pleasurers had gone to the moors or the mountains or the shores.
Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle of September, the trivial kodak could not bear to dwell on the mortuary aspects which the fashionable quarters of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek those springs or sources of the American nation which may be traced all over England, and which rather abound in London, trusting chances for the involuntary glimpses which are so much better than any others, when you can get them. In different terms, and leaving apart the strained figure which I cannot ask the reader to help me carry farther, I went one breezy, cool, sunny, and rainy morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps, and philosophize my reflections in the researches before us. Our rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows Barking, conveniently founded just opposite the Mark Lane District Railway Station, some seven or eight hun- dred years before I arrived there, and successively de- stroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair that I could safely lean against it while waiting for my friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood. The street before it might have been a second-rate New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, ex-
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cept for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public- housee. There was a continual coming and going of trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all heedless, if not unconscious, of the Tower of London close at hand, whose dead were so often brought from the scaffold to be buried in that church.
Our own mission was to revere its interior because William Penn was baptized in it, but when we had got inside we found it so full of scaffolding and the litter of masonry, and the cool fresh smell of mortar from the res- torations going on that we had no room for the emotions we had come prepared with. With the compassion of a kindly man in a plasterer's spattered suit of white, we did what we could, but it was very little. I at least was not yet armed with the facts that, among others, the head- less form of Archbishop Laud had been carried from the block on Tower Hill and laid in All Hallows; and if I had known it, I must have felt that though Laud could be related to our beginnings through his persecution of the Puritans, whom he harried into exile, his interment in All Hallows was only of remote American interest. Besides, we had set out with the intention of keeping to the origins of colonies which had not been so much studied as those of New England, and we had first chosen Penn as sufficiently removed from the forbidden ground. But we had no sooner left the church where he was baptized, to follow him in the much later interest of his imprisonment in the Tower, than we found our- selves in New England territory again. For there, round the first corner, under the foliage of the trees and shrubs that I had been ignorantly watching from the church, as they stiffly stirred in the September wind,
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was that Calvary of so many martyr - souls, Tower Hill.
It is no longer, if it ever was, a hill, or even a per- ceptible rise of ground, but a pleasant gardened and planted space, not distinguishable from a hundred others in London, with public offices related to the navy closing it mostly in, but not without unofficial public and private houses on some sides. It was per- haps because of its convenience for his professional affairs that Admiral Penn had fixed such land-going residence as an admiral may have in All Hallows Bark- ing parish, where his great son was born. "Your late honored father/' his friend Gibson wrote the founder of Pennsylvania, "dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall." But the memories of honored father and more honored son must yield in that air to such tragic fames as those of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these and the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir Harry Vane, once governor of Massachusetts, who died here among those whom the perjured second Charles played false when he came back to the throne of the perjured first Charles. In fact you can get away from New England no more in London than in America; and if in the Tower itself the long captivity of Sir Walter Raleigh somewhat dressed the balance, we were close upon other associations which outweighed the discovery of the middle south and of tobacco, a thousandfold.
Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the common level than it once was, as often happens with rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinc- tion of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away,
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Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approach- ed, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and their friends, by Charles L, when they were embarking for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt. This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving. It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land they were to ennoble with the first great republican ex- periment of our race, though the Commonwealth failed to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps because of a want of imagination in both people and protector, who could not conceive of a state without an hereditary ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father, till another son of another father came back to urge his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the
172
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citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time and place; but we ourselves who grew up where there had never been kings to craze the popular fancy, could not conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years and more, and even then some of us thought of having one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom- house— if he was. There is a very personable edifice now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I did first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did last. We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled away to cool themselves in different parts of the Amer- ican wilderness. It was much later that the place became famous for the declaration of the three tailors of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have begun, a public appeal with the words : " We, the people of England," and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street is more suggestive of them than of those who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and common- place thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street,
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and who so largely form the ancestry of the American people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there is the beauty of that good-will to men, which I should be glad to think characteristic of our nation, in one of the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted Amer- ican bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better homes than the London poor could otherwise have known.
Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of free- dom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, under which we walked the length of the long, dull, noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church (an uninteresting Wrennish structure) of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that sweet Pris- cilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth colony came from. When we had paid this tribute we pushed on for the sake of the Puritan ministers who, fail- ing to repent in the Clink prison, after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the bound- lessness of our continent. My friend strongly be- lieved that some part of the Clink was still to be de- tected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave's or St. Tooley's, and wandered on through their shades, among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain
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floury laborers who had cleared a space among the wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and, above all, the Globe.
Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not in mind. Eng- land has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place
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and extending his vast shadow over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now another em- barrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St. Saviour's Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that parish, was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southward in fruits and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour's. Out- side it has been pitilessly restored in a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural beauty lingers, es- pecially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard's sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Ed- mund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare's younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the "moral Gower" who so in- sufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the
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theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the Corner the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St. Saviour's, for we were almost a year too early for the painted window which now commem- orates him.
One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed through, and I dare say they were not the best, the broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground and fall from the clouds. But many people live there, and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it was one o'clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting by the early closing which shuts the stores of London so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our way through them to the parapet for a final look at that stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a kingdom.1
1 While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific erudition of my friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my state-
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We were going from St. Saviour's in Southwark where Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton's effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our his- tory through his daughter's elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wanton- ness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in London. One curved herself round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young sycamores flicker over her velvet flank ; the third arched a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accom- panying us into the church. There was not much for us to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire, and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much because he had directed the publication of the first complete version of the English Bible, as because he had borne the name of a chief character in The Blithedale Romance. I am afraid that if the cat could have sup- posed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I should not have known how to justify myself by ex-
ments. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they prove mistaken.
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plaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illus- triously connected with America through that coinci- dence than many more historical scenes.
The early closing had already prevailed so largely in the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree's at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for getting into any church, but we looked about us too carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law of Virginia. That was what we said to console our- selves afterwards; but now, since we were, however un- wittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that his part in them was alleged against him, and did some- thing to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is said to have helped in designing the church, and that the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arun- del could have found his bones to put it over, are suffi- ciently irrelevant details.
The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after pay- ing this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the former edifice on its site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better when, by an accident happier than that
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which befell us at St. Catherine Cree's, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New- Yorker's interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship's company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help the Dutch found the Tammany regime, which still flourishes at the Hudson's mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the mis- giving which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set him right. " Oh, 'e did mike it 'ere, sir. They've been and searched the records," she said, so that the reader now has it on the best authority.
I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assur- ance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or clos- ing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their foot- ways and wheelways, so that we got from point to point- in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the blocks of the
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wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story. London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any better informed wanderer less dense would have found im- passable with memories.
As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate Street to the sequestered place before the church of the Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dis- solved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to the "Germans" as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beginnings of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it. Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch, renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways, notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters and parcels would be received there for them; this some- how intimated that the refugees could not have found it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half round the world. Cunningham says that "the church contains some very good decorated windows, and will repay examination," but, like the early - closing shops all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday
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afternoon, and we had to come away contenting our- selves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impar- tially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker travellers, but they can readily find the church in the rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts there, and judge for themselves.
Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bow- bells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the sev- eral prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it with- out making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to jail in spite of the jury's verdict of acquittal; such things could then be easily done. In self -justification they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that made a very perfect case for their worships, as the reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth in Maria Webb's story of The Penns and the Penningtons. As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh con- verted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote to him in Newgate: "Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests to the end of the world. . . . Live in love. Shun all manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He will bless you."
Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned is left; a spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monu- ment to him who was brave in such a different way from his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly
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greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, courtly son would achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was cast there the second time in three months, that he wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, and three minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a letter to Parliament explaining the principles of Quaker- ism, and he protested to the sheriff of London against the cruelties practised by the jailors of Newgate on prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich and well-born preferred to suffer with these humble victims; and probably his oppressors were as glad to be rid of him in the end as he of them.
One may follow Penn (though we did not always fol- low him to all, that Saturday afternoon), to many other places in London: to the Tower, where he was impris- oned on the droll charge of "blasphemy," within stone's throw of All Hallow's Barking, where he was christened; to Grace Church Street, where he was arrested for preach- ing; to Lincoln's Inn, where he had chambers in his worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the "rules" of the prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt awhile almost in hiding from the creditors who were pressing him, probably for the public debt of Pennsyl- vania.
We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited the church of St. Sepulchre hard by, and vainly at- tempted to enter, because Roger Williams was christ- ened there, and so connected it with the coming of tol- eration into the world, as well as with the history of the minute province of Rhode Island, which his spirit so boundlessly enlarged. We failed equally of any satis- factory effect from Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred
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and five years before, and because my friend could not quite make out which neighboring street it was where the mother of the Wesleys was born. But we did what we could with the shield of the United States Consulate- General in the Place, and in an adjoining court we had occasion for seriousness in the capers of a tipsy French- man, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no true photographer.
After all, we did not find just the street, much less the house, in which Susannah Annesley had lived before she was Mrs. Wesley, and long before her sons had imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had borne its message to General Oglethorpe's new colony of Georgia. She lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury Square, that place sacred to so many varying mem- ories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased it, because they would not have the service from the book of Common Prayer read over them. There her dust mingles with that of John Bunyan, of Daniel de Foe, of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard, and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others. The English crowd one another no less under than above the ground, and their island is as historically as actually over-populated. As I have expressed before, you can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a certain association without being importuned by a score of others as interesting or more so. I have, for instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor of Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who
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was silenced for his Puritanism in his church of St. Giles Cripplegate, because I should have to confess that when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley, and John Wesley, and the Georgian Methodists to the far mightier fame of Milton, who lies interred there, with his father before him, with John Fox, author of The Book of Martyrs, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who sailed the western seas when they were yet mysteries, with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of Shakespeare's Sir Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a youth of twenty-one, to Elizabeth Bowchier. Again, I have had to ask myself, what is the use of painfully following up the slender threads afterwards woven into the web of American nationality, when at any moment the clews may drop from your heedless hands in your wonder at some which are the woof of the history of the world? I have to own even here that the more storied dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay among them Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of In- crease and Cotton.
That is a place which one must wish to visit not once, but often, and I hope that if I send any reader of mine to it he will fare better than we did, and not find it shut to the public on a Sunday morning when it ought to have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of England are quite past the comprehension of even such semi-aliens as the Americans, and must baffle entire foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen the Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane, which are licit, if not legal, and that Sunday morning before we found Bunhill Fields fast closed, we had found a market for poor Christians wide open in Whitecross Street near by. It was one of several markets of the
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kind which begin early Saturday evening, and are suffered by a much-winking police to carry on their traffic through the night and till noon the next day. Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes from a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public morals in London begin to urge the hucksters and their customers to have done with their bargaining, and get about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither per- suasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the police sometimes call in the firemen and rake the market- place with volleys from the engine-hose. This is doubt- less effective, but at the hour when we passed through as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could bear, it was still far from the time for such an extreme measure, and the market was flourishing as if it were there to stay indefinitely.
Everything immediately imaginable for the outside or inside of man seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes, hats and caps, glassware, iron-ware; fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English hazel- nuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to ripen on the way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally smelling to heaven; but, above all, flesh meats of every beast of the field and every bird of the barn-yard, with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and hides and claws and feathers and other less namable refuse. There was a notable absence among the huck- sters of that coster class which I used to see in London twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there
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were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow - brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts were, and if no word came from their lips with its true quality, but with that curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke a sound business dialect.
When we traversed the dense body of the market and entered Roscoe Street from Whitecross, we were sur- prisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet befitting the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave of George Fox, because of his relation to our colonial history in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and we thought it well to look into the Friends' Meeting-house on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we might have brought with us from Whitecross Street. A mute sexton welcomed us at the door, and held back for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular interior, where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk as Fox might have preached to in just such a place. The only difference was that they now wore artless versions of the world's present fashions in dress, and not the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only the antiquated simplicity of the time when Quakerism began ; and the people we now saw were more fitly dressed than if they had worn it. We sat with them a quarter of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders on the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, apparently more deeply lost in it than the rest. Then 13 18?
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we had freedom (to use their gentle Quaker parlance) to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.
Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill Fields, but he owns there is no memorial of him there; and there is a stone to mark his grave in the grassy space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street. If that is really his last resting-place, he lies under the shadow of certain lofty warehouse walls, and in the shelter of some trees which on that sunny First Day morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by which the English foliage confesses the fall before it drops sere and colorless to the ground. Some leaves had already fallen about the simple monumental stone, and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still.
I will own here that I had more heart in the researches which concerned the ancestral Friends of all mankind, including so much American citizenship, than in follow- ing up some other origins of ours. The reader will per- haps have noticed long before that our origins were nearly all religious, and that though some of the Amer- ican plantations were at first the effect of commercial enterprise, they were afterwards by far the greater part undertaken by people who desired for themselves, if not for others, freedom for the forms of worship for- bidden them at home. Our colonial beginnings were illustrated by sacrifices and martyrdoms even among the lowliest, and their leaders passed in sad vicissitude from pulpit to prison, back and forth, until exile became their refuge from oppression. No nation could have a nobler source than ours had in such heroic fidelity to ideals; but it cannot be forgotten that the religious freedom, which they all sought, some of them were not willing to impart when they had found it; and it is known how, in New England especially, they practised
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the lessons of persecution they had learned in Old Eng- land. Two provinces stood conspicuously for toleration, Rhode Island, for which Roger Williams imagined it the first time in history, and Pennsylvania, where, for the first time, William Penn embodied in the polity of a state the gospel of peace and good-will to men. Neither of these colonies has become the most exemplary of our commonwealths; both are perhaps, for some reasons, the least so in their sections; but, above all the rest, their earlier memories appeal to the believer in the universal right to religious liberty and in the ideal of peaceful democracy which the Quakers alone have realized. The Quakers are no longer sensibly a moral force; but the creed of honest work for daily bread, and of the equalization of every man with another which they lived, can never perish. Their testimony against bloodshed was practical, as such a testimony can still be, when men will ; their principle of equality, as well as their practise of it was their legacy to our people, and it remains now all that differences us from other na- tions. It was not Thomas Jefferson who first imagined the first of the self-evident truths of the Declaration, but George Fox.
We went, inappropriately enough, from where George Fox lay in his grave, level with the common earth, to where, in Finsbury Pavement, the castellated armory of the Honourable Artillery Company of London recalls the origin of the like formidable body in Boston. These gallant men were archers before they were gunners, being established in that quality first when the fear of Spanish invasion was rife in 1585. They did yeoman service against their own king in the Civil War, but later fell into despite and were mocked by poets no more warlike than themselves. Fletcher's "Knight of the
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Burning Pestle'7 was of their company, and Cowper's " John Gilpin " was " a train-band captain." Now, how- ever, they are so far restored to their earlier standing that when they are called out to celebrate, say, the Fourth of July, or on any of the high military occasions demanding the presence of royalty, the King appears in their uniform.
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OUTSIDE the high gate of Bunhill Fields, we could do no more than read the great names lettered on the gate-posts, and peer through the iron barriers at the thickly clustered headstones within. But over against the cemetery we had access to the chapel where John Wesley preached for thirty years, and behind which he is buried. He laid the corner-stone in 1777 amid such a multitude of spectators that he could scarcely get through to the foundation, Cunningham says. Before the chapel is an excellent statue of the great preacher, and the glance at the interior which we suf- fered ourselves showed a large congregation listening to the doctrine which he preached there so long, and which he carried beyond seas himself to the colonies and founded among us the great spiritual common- wealth which is still more populous than any of those dividing our country.
The scene of his labors here was related for me by an obscure association to such a doctrinally different place as Finsbury Chapel, hard by, where my old friend, Dr. Moncure D. Conway, preached for twenty years. Whatever manner of metaphysician he has ended, he began Methodist, and as a Virginian he had a right to a share of my interest in that home of Wesley ism, for it was in Virginia, so much vaster then than now, that
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Wesleyism spread widest and deepest. If any part of Wesley's mission tended to modify or abolish slavery, then a devotion to freedom so constant and generous as Conway's should link their names by an irrefragable, however subtle, filament of common piety. I wished to look into Finsbury Chapel for my old friend's sake, but it seemed to me that we had intruded on worship- pers enough that morning, and I satisfied my longing by a glimpse of the interior through the pane of glass let into the inner door. It was past the time for sing- ing the poem of Tennyson which "Tom Brown" Hughes used to say they always gave out instead of a hymn in Finsbury Chapel; and some one else was preaching in Conway's pulpit, or at his desk. I do not know what weird influence of sermonizing seen but not heard took the sense of reality from the experience, but I came away feeling as if I had looked upon something visionary.
It was no bad preparation for coming presently to the church of All Hallows in the Wall, where a bit of the old Roman masonry shows in the foundations of the later defences, of which indeed, no much greater length remains. The church, which is so uninterestingly ugly as not to compete with the relic of Roman wall, stands at the base of a little triangle planted with young elms that made a green quiet, and murmured to the silence with their stiffening leaves. It was an effect possible only to that wonderful London which towers so massive- ly into the present that you are dumb before the evi- dences of its vast antiquity. There must have been a time when there was no London, but you cannot think it any more than you can think the time when there shall be none. I make so sure of these reflections that I hope there was no mistake about those modest breadths
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of Roman masonry; its rubble laid in concrete, was strong enough to support the weightiest reflection.
I am the more anxious about this because my friend, the genealogist, here differed with the great Cunning- ham, and was leading me by that morsel of Roman London to St. Peter's Lane, where he said Fox died, and not to White Hart Court, where my other authority declares that he made an end two days after preaching in the Friends' Meeting-house there. The ignorant dis- ciple of both may have his choice ; perhaps in the proc- ess of time the two places may have become one and the same. At any rate we were able that morning to repair our error concerning St. Catherine Cree's, which we had unwittingly seen before, and now consciously saw, for Sir Nicholas Throgmor ton's sake. It had the look of very high church in the service which was cele- brating, and I am afraid my mind was taken less by the monument of Sir Nicholas than by the black-robed figure of the young man who knelt with bowed head at the back of the church and rapt me with the memory of the many sacerdotal shapes which I used to see do- ing the like in Latin sanctuaries. It is one of the few advantages of living long that all experiences become more or less contemporaneous, and that at certain moments you cannot be distinctly aware just when and where you are.
There was little of this mystical question when our mission took us to Whitechapel, for there was nothing there to suggest former times or other places. I did, indeed, recall the thick - breathed sweltering Sunday morning when I had visited the region in July; but it is all now so absolutely and sordidly modern that one has no difficulty in believing that it was altogether dif- ferent when so many Southern and especially Virginian
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emigrations began there. How many settlers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also were recruited from it, I know not; but the reader may have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at first- hand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names of the first quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in the colonizing times, was a region of high respectability, and not for generations afterwards the perlieu it became, and has now again somewhat ceased to be.
The first exiles from it were not self-banished for conscience' sake, like those at a later date when the Puritans went both to Massachusetts where they re- volted further, and to Virginia where they ultimately conformed. The earlier out-goers, though they might be come-outers, were part of the commercial enterprise which began to plant colonies north and south. The Plymouth Company which had the right to the country as far northward as Nova Scotia and westward as far as the Pacific, and the London Company which had as great scope westward and southward as far as Cape Fear, had the region between them in common, and they both drew upon Whitechapel, and upon Stepney be- yond, where I had already fancied the present White- chapel resuming somewhat of its ancient respectability. It is then a "spacious fair street," as one of Cunning- ham's early authorities describes it, and it is still " some- what long," so long indeed that our tram was a half- hour in carrying us through it into Stepney. About the time of the emigrations De Foe saw it, or says he saw it (you never can be sure with De Foe) thronged "with the richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the town, . . . with their families and servants/' escaping into the country from the plague.
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The "offscourings" of London, which the companies carried rather more to the southward than the north- ward with us, were hardly scoured off in Whitechapel, which was a decent enough ancestral source for any American strain. As for Stepney, then as now the great centre of the London shipping, she has never shared the ill-repute of Whitechapel, at least in name. Cunningham declares the region once "well-inhabited/' and the sailors still believe that all children born at sea belong to Stepney Parish. By an easy extension of this superstition she is supposed to have had a motherly interest in all children born beyond seas, including, of course, the American colonies, and she is of a presence that her foster-folk's descendants need not be ashamed of. Our tram took us now and then by an old mansion of almost manor-house dignity, set in pleasant gardens; and it followed the shore of the Thames in sight of the masts of ships whose multitude brought me to disgrace for having, on my way to Greenwich, thought poorly of London as a port, and which, because of her riparian situation, made Stepney the scene of the great strike of the London dockers, when they won their fight under the lead of John Burns.
Our lovely weather cooled slightly as the afternoon wore away, but it was bright and mild again when we came another day towards Stepney as far as the old church of St. Dunstan. It is an edifice of good perpen- dicular Gothic, with traces of early English and even of later Norman, standing serene in a place of quiet graves amid the surrounding turmoil of life. The church- yard was full of rustling shrubs and bright with beds of autumnal flowers, from which the old square tower rose in the mellow air. Divers of our early emigrants were baptized in St. Dunstan's, namely, the wife of
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Governor Bradford of Plymouth, with many of our ship- men, notably that Master Willoughby, who established the ship -yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts. I like better to associate with it our beginnings, because here I first saw those decorations for the Thanksgiving festival which the English have lately borrowed from us, and which I found again and again at various points in my September wanderings. The pillars were wreathed with the flowers and leaves of the fall; the altar was decked with apples and grapes, and the pews trimmed with yellow heads of ripe wheat. The English Thanks- giving comes earlier than ours, but it remembers its American source in its name, and the autumn comes so much sooner than with us that although the " parting summer lingering blooms delayed" in St. Dunstan's church-yard, the fallen leaves danced and whirled about our feet in the paths.
There is witness of the often return of the exiles to their old home in the quaint epitaph which a writer in The Spectator (it might have been Addison himself) read from one of the flat tombstones:
"Here Thomas Taffin lyes interred, ah why? Born in New England, did in London die."
"I do not wonder at this," Dr. Johnson said of the epitaph to Boswell. "It would have been strange if born in London he had died in New England."
The good doctor did indeed despise the American colonies with a contempt which we can almost reverence; but the thing which he found so strange happened to many Londoners before his time. One of the least worthy and less known of these was that George Down- ing, who came back from Boston, where he was grad- uated at Harvard, and took the title of baronet from
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Charles II., in return, apparently, for giving his name to that famous Downing Street, ever since synonymous with English administration. If he has no other claim to our interest, that is perhaps enough; and the Amer- ican who is too often abashed by the humility of our London origins may well feel a rise of worldly pride in the London celebrity of this quondam fellow-citizen. His personality is indeed lost in it, but his achievement in laying out a street, and getting it called after him, was prophetic of so much economic enterprise of ours that it may be fairly claimed as a national honor.
Of those who preferred not to risk the fate Dr. John- son held in scorn, multitudes perished at Whitechapel of the plague which it was one of the poor compensa- tions of life in NewJEngland to escape. They would all have been dead by now, whether they went or whether they stayed, though it was hard not to attribute their present decease solely to their staying, as we turned over the leaves of the old register in St. Mary Matfelon's, Whitechapel. The church has been more than once rebuilt out of recollection of its original self, and there were workman still doing something to the interior; but the sexton led us into the vestry, and while the sunlight played through the waving trees without and softly illumined the record, we turned page after page, where the names were entered in a fair clear hand, with the given cause of death shortened to the letters, pL, after each. They were such names as abounded in the colo- nies, and those who had borne them must have been of the kindred of the emigrants. But my patriotic inter- est in them was lost in a sense of the strong nerve of the clerk who had written their names and that "pi." with such an unshaken hand. One of the earlier dead, in the church -yard without, was a certain ragman,
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Richard Brandon, of whom the register says: "This R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of Charles the First."
From the parish of St. Botolph by Aldgate, on the road from Houndsditch to Whitechapel, came many of those who settled in Salem and the neighboring towns of Massachusetts. It is now very low church, as it probably was in their day, with a plain interior, and with the crimson foliage of the Virginia-creeper staining the light like painted glass at one of its windows. The bare triangular space in front of the church was once a pit where the dead of the plague were thrown, and in the sacristy is a thing of yet grislier interest. My friend made favor with some outlying authority, and an old, dim, silent servitor of some sort came back with him and took from a sort of cupboard, where it was kept in a glass box, the embalmed head of the Duke of Suf- folk, which he lost for his part in the short-lived usurpa- tion of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. Little was left to suggest the mighty noble in the mummy-face, but the tragedy of his death was all there. It seemed as if the thoughts of the hideous last moment might still be haunting the withered brain, and the agony of which none of the dead have yet been able to impart a sense to the living, was present in it. As he who was showing us the head, turned it obligingly round in view of the ex- pected shilling, and tilted it forward that we might see the mark of the axe in the severed neck, one seemed to see also the things which those sunken eyes had looked on last : the swarming visages of the crowd, the inner fringe of halberdiers, the black - visored figure waiting beside the block. As the doomed man dragged himself to the scaffold, how pale that face in the glass box must have been, for any courage that kept him above his fate. It
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was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that such a devilish thing as the death - punishment should still be, and that governments should keep on surpass- ing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruel- est murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever vis- ited that church in remembrance of the fact that his people came from the same parish; if he saw the mortal relic which held me in such fascination that I could scarcely leave the place even when the glass box had been locked back in its cupboard, and if the spirits of the dead sometimes haunt their dust, there must have been a reciprocal intelligence between the dead and the living that left no emotion of the supreme hour unim- parted.
We visited St. Sepulchre's where the truly sainted Roger Williams was baptized, and found entrance one day after two failures to penetrate to its very unattrac- tive interior. We were lighted by stained - glass win- dows of geometrical pattern and a sort of calico or ging- ham effect in their coloring, to the tablet to Captain John Smith, whose life Pocahontas, in Virginia, with other ladies in divers parts of the world, saved, that we might have one of the most delightful, if not one of the most credible, of autobiographies. He was of prime colonial interest, of course, and we were not taken from the thought of him by any charm of the place; but when we had identified his time-dimmed tablet there was no more to do at St. Sepulchre's. The church is at the western end of Old Bailey, and in the dreadful old times when every Friday brought its batch of doomed men forth from the cells, it was the duty of the bell- man of St. Sepulchre's to pass under the prison walls the night before and ring his bell, and chant the dismal lines :
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"All you that in the condemned hold do lie, Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die; Watch all, and pray, the hour is drawing near, That you before the Almighty must appear; Examine well yourselves, in time repent, That you may not to eternal flames be sent, And when St. Sepulchre's bell to-morrow tolls, The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
Past twelve o'clock."
When we consider what piety was in the past, we need not be so horrified by justice. Sentiment sometimes came in to heighten the effect of both, and it used to present each criminal in passing St. Sepulchre's on the way to Tyburn with a nosegay, and a little farther on with a glass of beer. The gardened strip of what once must have been a graveyard beside the church could hardly have afforded flowers enough for the pious rite. It was frequented, the day of our visit, by some old men of a very vacant-looking leisure, who sat on the benches in the path; and the smallest girl in proportion to the baby she carried that I ever saw in that England where small girls seem always to carry such very large babies, tilted back and forth with it in her slender arms, and tried to make-believe it was going to sleep.
The reader who prefers to develop these films for himself must not fail to bring out the surroundings of the places visited, if he would have the right effect. Otherwise he might suppose the several sanctuaries which we visited standing in a dignified space and hal- lowed quiet, whereas, all but a few were pushed close upon crowded streets, with the busy and noisy indiffer- ence of modern life passing before them and round them. St. Giles-in-the-Fields, which we visited after leaving St. Sepulchre, was the church in which Calvert, the founder
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of Maryland, was baptized, of course before he turned Catholic, since it could not very well have been after- wards. At the moment, however, I did not think of this. I had enough to do with the fact that Chapman, the translator of Homer, was buried in that church, and Andrew Marvell, the poet, and that very wicked Coun- tess of Shrewsbury, the terrible she who held the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he was killing her husband in a duel. I should, no doubt, have seen this mem- orable interior if it had still existed, but it was the in- terior of a church which was taken down more than a hundred years before the present church was built.
We visited the church on the way to Lincoln's Inn Fields, turning out of Holborn round the corner of the house, now a bookseller's shop, where Garrick died. I mention this merely as an instance of how the famous dead started out of the over-populated London past and tried at every step to keep me from my proper search for our meaner American origins. I was going to look at certain mansions, in which the Lords Balti- more used to live, and the patriotic Marylander, if he have faith enough, may identify them by their arches of gray stone at the first corner on his right in coming into the place from Holborn. But if he have not faith enough for this, then he may respond with a throb of sympathy to the more universal appeal of the undoubted fact that Lord Russell was beheaded in the centre of the square, which now waves so pleasantly with its elms and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king, wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that, and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy "as inde- cent," Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson had prayed with him, " laid his head on the block at a
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spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was cut off at two strokes."
Cunningham is certainly very temperate in calling Lincoln's Inn Fields "a noble square." I should my- self call it one of the noblest and most beautiful in London, and if the Calverts did not dwell in one of the stately mansions of Arch Row, which is " all that Inigo Jones lived to build" after his design for the whole square, then they might very well have been proud to do so. They are not among the great whom Cunning- ham names as having dwelt there, and I do not know what foundation the tradition of their residence rests upon. What seems more certain is that one of the Cal- verts, the first or the second Lord Baltimore, was buried in that church of St. Dunstan's in the West, or St. Dun- stan's Fleet Street, which was replaced by the actual edifice in 1833.
The reader, now being got so near, may as well go on with me to Charing Cross, where in the present scene of cabs, both hansoms and four - wheelers, perpetually coming and going at the portals of the great station and hotel, and beside the torrent of omnibuses in the Strand, the Reverend Hugh Peters suffered death through the often broken faith of Charles II. In one of the most de- lightful of his essays, Lowell humorously portrays the character of the man who met this tragic fate : a restless and somewhat fatuous Puritan divine, who, having once got safely away from persecution to Boston, came back to London in the Civil War, and took part in the trial of Charles I. If not one of the regicides, he was very near one, and he shared the doom from which the treacherous pardon of Charles II. was never intended to save them. I suppose his fatuity was not incom- patible with tragedy, though somehow we think that
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absurd people are not the stuff of serious experi- ence.
Leigh Hunt, in that most delightful of all books about London, The Town, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street, Strand, was once the dwelling of Benjamin Franklin, and he adds, with the manliness which is always such a curious element of his unmanliness: "What a change along the shore of the Thames in a few years (for two centuries are less than a few in the lapse of time) from the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a tradesman, to that of a yeoman's son, and a printer, who was one of the founders of a great state !"
Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street, Strand, a state which led in the attempted dismember- ment of that great state, and nearly wrought its ruin, had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was there John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina, which still, I believe, remains its organic law. One has one's choice among the entirely commonplace yellow brick buildings, which give the street the aspect of an old-fashioned place in Boston. The street was seriously quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot- passengers sauntering through it, and certain clerklike youth entering and issuing from the doors of the build- dings which had the air of being law-offices.
We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the cork- screw stairs leading to it, did we find their tombs and tablets? I am not sure, but I am sure we found the tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a History of the 14 203
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Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who while in Parliament strongly favored "distressing the Amer- icans," as the king wished, and made a speech in sup- port of the government measure for closing the port of Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge for that, but I could not give myself to his monument with such cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and volatile old letter-writer James Howell, which also I found in that triforium, half -hidden behind a small organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in the dim- ness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this, after looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus College in Oxford, where he studied the humanities which enabled him to be so many things to so many masters, that I took all his chiselled praises for granted.
I made what amends I could for my slight of the Mortons in the Temple Church, by crossing presently to Clifford's Inn, Strand, where the very founder of Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself was sometime student of the law and a dweller in these precincts. It is now the hall of the Art Workers' Guild, and anywhere but in London would be incredibly quiet and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern neigh- borhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and roistering antipuritan, who set up his May -pole at Wollaston, and danced about it with his debauched aboriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles Standish marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such ungodly doings at the muzzles of his matchlocks.
It must have been another day that we went to view the church of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, because some of the patrician families emigrating to Massachusetts were from that parish, which was the home of many patrician families of the Commonwealth. In St. An-
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drew's Holborn, the Vanes, father and son, worshipped, together with the kindred of many that had gone to dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior, after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our visit was smelling of varnish; most London churches smell of mortar, when in course of their pretty constant reparation, and this was at least a change. St. Stephen's Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as the spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport, who was the founder of New Haven, but it will attract the unlocalized lover of liberty because it was also the parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for trouble. It had a certain sentiment of low-churchness, being very plain without and within not unlike an Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England town. One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean court, out of a business neighborhood, jostled by com- mercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats who were ex- pressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy with the past if not with the present of St. Andrew's.
St. Martins-in-the-Fields, where General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, was baptized, was, in his time, one of the proudest parishes of the city, and the actual church is thought to be the masterpiece of the architect Gibbs, who produced in the portico what Cunningham calls "one of the finest pieces of architecture in Lon- don. " Many famous people were buried in the earlier edifice, including Nell Gwynne, Lord Mohun, who fell in a duel with the Duke of Hamilton, as the readers of Henry Esmond well know, and Farquhar the dramatist. Lord Bacon was baptized there; and the interior of the church is very noble and worthy of him and of the parish history. Whether General Oglethorpe drew
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upon his native parish in promoting the settlement of Georgia, I am not so sure as I am of some other things, as, for instance, that he asked the king for a grant of land, "in trust for the poor," and that his plan was to people his colony largely from the captives in the debt- ors' prisons. I love his memory for that, and I would gladly have visited the debtors' prisons which his hu- manity vacated if I could have found them, or if they had still existed.
The reader who has had the patience to accompany me on these somewhat futile errands must have been aware of making them largely on the lordly omnibus- tops which I always found so much to my proud taste. Often, however, we whisked together from point to point in hansoms; often we made our way on foot, with those quick transitions from the present to the past, from the rush and roar of business thoroughfares to the deep tranquillity of religious interiors, or the noise- bound quiet of ancient church-yards, where the autumn flowers blazed under the withering autumn leaves, and the peaceful occupants of the public benches were scarcely more agitated by our coming than the tenants of the graves beside them.
The weather was for the most part divinely beautiful, so tenderly and evenly cool and warm, with a sort of lingering fondness in the sunshine, as if it were prescient of the fogs so soon to blot it. The first of these came on the last day of our research, when suddenly we dropped from the clouded surfaces of the earth to depths where the tube-line trains carry their passengers from one brilliantly lighted station to another. We took three of the different lines, experimentally, rather than neces- sarily, in going from St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street, hard by the Bank of England, to the far neigh-
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borhood of Stoke Newington; and at each descent by the company's lift, we left the dark above ground, and found the light fifty feet below. While this sort of transit is novel, it is delightful ; the air is good, or seems so, and there is a faint earthy smell, somewhat like that of stale incense in Italian churches, which I found agreeable from association at least; besides, I liked to think of passing so far beneath all the superincumbent death and all the superambulant life of the immense immemorial town.
We found St. Mary Woolnoth closed, being too early for the Sunday service, and had to content ourselves with the extremely ugly outside of the church which is reputed the masterpiece of Wren's pupil Hawksmoor; while we took for granted the tablet or monument of Sir William Phipps, the governor of Massachusetts, who went back to be buried there after the failure of his premature expedition against Quebec. My friend had provided me something as remote from Massachusetts as South Carolina in colonial interest, and we were presently speeding to New River, which Sir Hugh Myd- dleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke Newington to all the streets of London, and so originated her modern water-supply. This knight, or baronet, he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist, to be of the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of the first South Carolinians then and since. It is at least certain that he was a Welshman, and that the gift of his engineering genius to London was so ungratefully received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his enter- prise. The king claimed a half-interest in the profits, but the losses remained undivided to Myddleton. The fact, such as it is, proves perhaps the weakest link in a chain of patriotic associations which, I am afraid the reader
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must agree with me, has no great strength anywhere. The New River itself, when you come to it, is a plain straightforward, canal -like water -course through a grassy and shady level, but it is interesting for the gar- den of Charles Lamb's first house backing upon it, and for the incident of some of his friends walking into it one night when they left him after an evening that might have been rather unusually "smoky and drinky." Apart from this I cared for it less than for the neighbor- hoods through which I got to it, and which were looking their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and richest among the low trees of Highbury Fields, where, when we ascended to them from our tubular station, the lawns were of an electric green in their vividness. In fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the pre- vailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon rows of humble brick dwellings in the streets we passed through were flattered into cottage homes where one would have liked to live in one's quieter moods, and some rather stately eighteenth - century mansions in Stoke Newington housed one's pride the more fittingly, because of the mystery which the fog added to their antiquity. It hung tenderly and reverently about that old, old parish church of Stoke Newington where, it is story or fable, they that bore the body of the dead King Harold from the field of Hastings made one of their stations on the way to Waltham Abbey ; and it was much in the maundering mind of the kindly spectator who could not leave off pitying us because we could not get into the church, the sexton having just before gone down the street to the baker's. It followed us more and more vaguely into the business quarter where we
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took our omnibus, and where we noted that business Lon- don, like business New York, was always of the same complexion and temperament in its shops and saloons, from centre to circumference. Amid the commonplace- ness of Islington where we changed omnibuses, the fog abandoned us in despair, and rising aloof, dissolved into the bitterness of a small cold rain.
XVIII ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
THE fog, through that golden month of September (September is so silvern in America), was more or less a fact of the daily weather. The morning began in a mellow mistiness, which the sun burned through by noon; or if sometimes there was positive rain, it would clear for a warm sunset, which had moments of a very pretty pensiveness in the hollows of Green Park, or by the lakes of St. James's. There were always the bright beds of autumn flowers, and in Hyde Park some- thing of the season's flush came back in the driving. The town began to be visibly fuller, and I was aware of many Americans, in carriages and on foot, whom I fancied alighting after a continental summer, and poising for another flight to their respective steamers. The sentiment of London was quite different at the end of September from the sentiment of London at the be- ginning, and one could imagine the sort of secondary season which it revisits in the winter. There was in- deed no hint of the great primary season in the sacred paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where the inverted penny chairs lay with their foreheads in the earth; and the shrivelled leaves, loosened from their boughs in the windless air, dropped listlessly round them. At night our little Mayfair Street was the haunt of
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much voluntary minstrelsy. Bands of cockney darkeys came down it, tuning their voices to our native rag- time. Or a balladist, man or woman, took the centre, and sang towards our compassionate windows. Or a musical husband and wife placed their portable melodeon on the opposite sidewalk, and trained their vocal and in- strumental attack upon the same weak defences.
It was all in keeping with the simple kindliness of the great town whose homelikeness arises from its immense habitability. This always strikes the New-Yorker, whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful New- Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the ampler metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted spaces where man may peacefully dwell, or quietly lodge over-night, in his own city. In assimilating each of the smaller towns or villages, which it has made itself up of, London has left them so much of their original character that though merged, they are not lost; and in cases where they have been so long merged as to have experienced a severance of consciousness, or where they are only nominally different sections of the vast whole, they have each its own temperament. It would be quite impossible for one finding one's self in Blooms- bury to suppose one's self in Belgravia, or in any of the Kensingtons to fancy one's self in Mayfair. Chelsea is as temperamentally different from Pimlico as the City from Southwark, and Islington, again, though it speaks the same language as Whitechapel, might well be of another tongue, so differently does it think and feel. The names, and a hundred others, call to the stranger from the sides and fronts and backs of omnibuses, until he has a weird sense that they personally knew him long before he knew them. But when once domesti- cated in any quarter he is so quickly at home in it that
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it will be the centre of London for him, coming to and going from it in a local acceptance which he cannot help feeling a reciprocal kindliness. He might do this as a mere hotel-dweller, but if he has given hostages to fortune by going into lodgings, and forming even in- direct relations with the tradesmen round the corners, the little stationers and newsmen, the nearest book- seller, the intelligent female infants in the post-office (which is always within a minute's walk), and perhaps conversed with the neighboring policeman, or has taken cabs so often from the neighboring rank as to be recog- nizable to the cabmen, then he is more quickly and thoroughly naturalized in the chosen region. He will be unworthy of many little friendlinesses from his fellow-citizens if he does not like them, and he will miss, in refusing the image of home which is offered him, one of the rarest consolations of exile.
At a distance from London (say as small a distance, in time if not space, as Bath), you will hear it said that everybody is well in London, but in London you will find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish. All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are re- laxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange then that London should be likewise subdivided. May- fair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terri- bly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, Chelsea again is bracing, and as for South Kensington it stands to reason that it is bracing because it is very high, almost as high as Mayfair. If you pass from your Pimlico borderland of Belgravia to either of those regions you are certainly not sensible of any sharp ascent, but there is no telling what a gradual rise of eight or ten feet may make in the quality of the air. To the stranger all London seems
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a vast level, with perhaps here and there the sort of ground-swell you may note from your car-window in the passage of a Western plain. Ludgate Hill is truly a rise of ground, but Tower Hill is only such a bad eminence as may gloomily lift itself in history irrespec- tive of the actual topography. Such an elevation as our own Murray Hill would be a noticeable height in London, and there are no such noble inequalities as in our up - town streets along the Hudson. All great modern cities love the plain surfaces, and London is not different from Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Milan in this; New York is much more mountainous, and Boston is a Sierra Nevada in comparison.
Yet, I suppose there must be something in the super- stition that one part of London is more bracing or more relaxing than another, and that there is really, however insensibly, a difference of levels. That difference of temperaments which I have mentioned, seems mostly intimated in the size and age of the houses. They are larger and older in Bloomsbury, where they express a citizen substance and comfort; they are statelier about the parks and squares of Belgravia, which is compara- tively a new settlement; but there are more little houses among the grandeurs of Mayfair which is of the same social quality, though many of its streets crossing from Piccadilly have quite gone to shops and family hotels and lodgings. It is more irregular and ancient than Belgravia, and its grandeurs have a more casual air. The historic mansions crowded by the clubs towards Hyde Park Corner, and grouped about the open space into which Piccadilly falters there, or following the park in the flat curve of Park Lane, have not the effect of withdrawal and exclusion of the Belgravian mansions;
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beyond which again there is a world of small dwellings of fainter and fainter self-assertion till they fade into the hopeless plebeian unconsciousness of Pimlico, whose endless streets are without beauty or dignity. Yet beyond this lost realm Chelsea redeems itself in a grace of domestic architecture and an atmosphere of aesthetic associations which make it a favorite abode of the tastes as well as the means. Kensington, where you arrive after what seems hopeless straggling through the roaring thoroughfare prolonging the Fleet-and-Strand- derived Piccadilly, is of almost equal artistic and literary appeal, but is older and perhaps less actual in its claims upon the cultivated sympathies. In either of these regions the polite American of definite resources might, if banished from the republic, dwell in great material and spiritual comfort; but if he chose Chelsea for his exile, I do not know that I should blame his preference. There he would have the neighborhood of many charm- ing people whom to know for neighbors would add a certain grace to existence, although he might not other- wise know them. Besides he would have, beyond the Thames, the wooded stretch of Battersea Park, if his dwelling, as it very well might, looked out upon the river and across it; and in the distance he would have the roofs and chimneys of that far Southwark, which no one seems anxious to have nearer than, say, the seventeenth century, and yet which being a part of London must be full of perfectly delightful people.
Even if you make-believe that Southwark bears some such relation to London as Jersey City bears to New York (but the image is very imperfect) still New York, you are aware, can never domesticate the Hudson as London has domesticated the Thames. Our river is too vast, too grand, if you will, ever to be redeemed
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from its primitive wildness, much less made an intimate part of the city's life. It may be laced with ferries and bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave with its swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and bridged hereafter, again and again, but its mere size will keep it savage, just as a giant, though ever so ami- able and good-natured, could not imaginably be civilized as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among rivers the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average, and is therefore perfectly proportioned to the little continent of which it is the Amazon or the Mississippi. If it were larger it would make England ridiculous, as Denmark, for instance, is made ridiculous by the sounds and estuaries that sunder it. But the Thames is of just the right size to be held in London's arms, and if it is not for her the graceful plaything that the Seine is for Paris, it is more suited to the practical nature of London. There are, so far as I noted, no whispering poplars planted by the brink of the Thames, but I feel sure that if there were, and there were citizens fishing their years away in their shade, they would sometimes catch a fish, which the life-long anglers in the Seine never do. That forms a great difference, expressive of a lasting difference of character in the two capitals. Along the Thames the trees are planted on the successive Embankments, in a beautiful leafy parkway following its course, broken here and there by public edifices, like the Parliament buildings, but forming a screen most- ly uninterrupted, behind which a parade of grandiose hotels does not altogether hide itself from the river. Then the national quality of the English stream is ex- pressed in the succession of bridges which span it. These are uglier than any that cross the Seine; each one, in fact, is uglier than the other, till you come to the
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Tower Bridge, which is the ugliest of all. They have a strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to the stranger who lounges on their parapets and looks down upon the grimy little steamers scuttling under them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an ad- mirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and resting their blunt snouts on the mud-banks in a slum- berous content.
It is seldom that the prospect reveals a vessel of more dignified proportions or presence, though in my drives along one of the Embankments I came upon a steamer of the modest size which we used to think large when we crossed the Atlantic in it, but which might be swung among the small boats from the davits of a latter-day liner. This vessel always had an admiring crowd about it, and I suppose it had some peculiar interest for the public which did not translate itself to me. As far as the more visible commerce of the more sight-seen parts of the Thames is concerned, it is as unimpressive as may be. It has nothing of the dramatic presence of the shipping in the Hudson or the East River, with its light opera touches in the gayly painted Sound and North River steamboats. You must go as far at least as Stepney on the Thames before you begin to realize that London is the largest port, as well as the largest city, in the world.
There are certain characteristics, qualities, of London which I am aware of not calling aright, but which I will call sentiments for want of some better word. One of them was the feel of the night-air, especially late in the season, when there was a waste and weariness in it
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as if the vast human endeavor for pleasure and success had exhaled its despair upon it. Whatever there was of disappointment in one's past, of apprehension in one's future, came to the surface of the spirit, and asserted its unity with the collective melancholy. It was not ex- actly a WeJtschmerz ; that is as out-dated as the roman- tic movement; but it was a sort of scientific relinquish- ment, which was by no means scornful of others, or too appreciative of one's own unrecognized worth. Through the senses it related itself to the noises of the quiescing city, to the smell of its tormented dust, to the whiff of a casual cigar, or the odor of the herbage and foliage in the park or square that one was passing; one may not be more definite about what was perhaps nothing at all. But I fancy that relinquishment of any sort would be easier in London than in cities of simpler interest or smaller population. For my own part I was content to deny many knowledges that I would have liked to be- lieve myself possessed of, and to go about clothed in my ignorance as in a garment, or defended by it as by armor. There was a sort of luxury in passing through streets memorable for a thousand things and as dense with associations as Long Island with mosquitoes when the winds are low, and in reflecting that I need not be ashamed for neglecting in part what no man could know in whole. I really suppose that upon any other terms the life of the cultivated American would be hardly safe from his own violence in London. If one did not shut one's self out from the complex appeal to one's higher self one could hardly go to one's tailor or one's hatter or one's shoemaker, on those missions which, it is a national superstition with us, may be much more inexpensively fulfilled there than at home. The best way is to begin by giving up everything, by frankly
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saying to yourself that you will not be bothered, that man's days of travel are full of trouble, and that you are going to get what little joy you can out of them as you go along. Then, perhaps, on some errand of quite ignoble purport, you will be seized with the knowledge that on the very spot where you stand one of the most significant things in history happened. It will be quite enough for you, as you inhale a breath of the London mixture of smoke, dust, and fog, that it is something like the air which Shakespeare and Milton breathed when they were meditating the works which have given so many international after-dinner orators the assurance of a bond of amity in our common language. Once, in driving through one of the dullest streets imaginable, I chanced to look out of the side-window of my hansom, and saw on a flying house- wall a tablet reading: "Here lived John Dry den," and though Dry den is a poet to move one to tenderness as little as may be, the tears came into my eyes.
It is but one of a thousand names, great in some sort or other, which make sojourn in London impossible, if one takes them to heart as an obligation to consciousness of her constant and instant claim. They show you Johnson's house in Bolt Court, but it only avails to vex you with the thought of the many and many houses of better and greater men which they will never show you. As for the scenes of events in fiction you have a plain duty to shun them, for in a city where the great facts of the past are written so deep upon the walls and pavement, one over another, it is folly which can be forgiven only to the vacancy of youth to go looking for the place where some imaginary thing happened. Yet this claim of folly has been recognized, and if you wish to indulge it, you can do so at little trouble. Where
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the real localities are not available they have fictitious ones, and they show you an Old Curiosity Shop, for instance, which serves every purpose of having been the home of Little Nell. There are at least three Cock Taverns, and several Mitres, all genuine; and so on. Forty odd years ago I myself, on first arriving in London, lodged at the Golden Cross, because it was there that David Copperfield stopped; and I was insensately pleased the other day that there was still a hotel of that name at the old stand. Whether it was the old inn, I did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I doubt if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee- room"; more probably you have & table d'hdte meal served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead ; and for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I heard telling an English- man, there, in those disheartening days, of our civic corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that he himself had bought votes, as many as he wanted, in the city of Providence; and though I could deny the general prevalence of such venality at least in my own stainless state of Ohio, I did not think to suggest that in such a case the corruption was in the buyer rather than the seller of the votes, and that if he had now come to live, as he implied, in a purer country, he had not taken the right way to be worthy of it. But at twenty-four you cannot think of everything at once, and a recreant American is so uncommon that you need hardly, at any age, provide for him. 15
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HOWEVER the Golden Cross Inn may have inwardly or outwardly changed, the Golden Cross Hotel keeps its old place hard by the Charing Cross station, which is now so different from the station of the earlier day. I do not think it is one of the most sympathetic of the London stations. I myself prefer rather the sentiment of the good old Euston station, which con- tinues for you the feeling of arrival in England, and keeps you in the glow of landing that you have, or had in the days when you always landed in Liverpool, and the constant Cunarders and Inmans ignored the upstart pre- tensions of Southampton and Plymouth to be ports of entry from the United States. But among the stations of minor autobiographical interest, Charing Cross is un- doubtedly the first, and you may have your tenderness for it as the place where you took the train for the night- boat at Folkestone in first crossing to the continent. How strange it all was, and yet how not unfriendly; for there is always a great deal of human nature in England. She is very motherly, even with us children who ran away from home, and only come back now and then to make sure that we are glad of having done so. In the lamp-broken obscurity of the second-class carriage I am aware still of a youthful exile being asked his destina- tion, and then his derivation, by a gentle old lady in the
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seat opposite (she might have been Mother England in person), who, hearing that he was from America where the civil war was then very unpromising, could only say, comfortingly: "And very glad to be out of it, / dare say!" He must protest, but if he failed to con- vince, how could he explain that part of his high mission to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had eventually to do no sweeping of that sort at all; for no privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he de- voted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the chief of those ports.
It was the first of many departures from London, where you are always more or less arriving or departing as long as you remain in England. It is indeed an axiom with the natives that if you want to go from any one point to any other in the island it is easier to come to London and start afresh for it, than to reach the point across country. The trains to and from the capital are swifter and more frequent, and you are not likely to lose your way in the mazes of Bradshaw if you consult the indefinitely simplified ABC tables which instruct you how to launch yourself direct from London upon any objective, or to recoil from it. My impression is that you habitually drive to a London station as nearly in time to take your train as may be, and that there is very little use for waiting-rooms. This may be why the waiting-room seems so small and unattractive a part of the general equipment. It never bears any such pro- portion to the rest as the waiting-rooms in the great Boston stations, or even that of the Grand Central in New York, and is by no chance so really fine as that of
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the Atchison and Topeka at Omaha, or that of the Lake Shore at Pittsburg. Neither the management nor the climate is so unkind as to keep intending passengers from the platforms, where they stand talking, or walk up and down, or lean from their carriage-doors and take leave of attendant friends with repeated pathos. With us it is either too cold or too hot to do that, and at all the great stations we are now fenced off from the tracks, as on the Continent, and unless we can make favor with the gateman, must despatch our farewells before our parting dear ones press forward to have their tickets punched. But at no London station, and far less at any provincial station in England, are you sub- jected to these formalities; and the English seem to linger out their farewells almost abusively, especially if they are young and have much of life before them.
Charing Cross has the distinction, sole among her sister stations, of a royal entrance. There is no doubt a reason for this; but as royalty is always coming and going in every direction, it is not easy to know why the other stations do not provide themselves with like facilities. One cannot imagine just how the king and queen get in and out of the common gateway, but it has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross, no matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither has any other station a modern copy of a Queen Eleanor's Cross, but this is doubtless because no other station was the last of those points where her coffin was set down on its way from Lincoln to its final resting- place in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret their lack after you have seen such an original cross as that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was faithful and earnest, it was not somehow the art of
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1291. One feels no greater hardness in the Parliamen- tary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern work, and refuses to be softened by any effect of the mellowing London air. It looks out over the scurry of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the rain- fall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as anything in the Strand. It is only an instance of the constant futility of the restoration which, in a world so violent or merely wearing as ours, must still go on, and give us dead corpses of the past instead of living images. Fortunately it cannot take from Charing Cross its pre- eminence among the London railway stations, which is chiefly due to its place in the busy heart of the town, and to that certain openness of aspect, which some- times, as with the space at Hyde Park Corner, does the effect of sunniness in London. It may be nearer or farther, as related to one's own abode, but it has not the positive remoteness from the great centres, by force of which, for instance, Waterloo seems in a peripheral whirl of non-arrival, and Vauxhall lost somewhere in a rude borderland, and King's Cross bewildered in a roar of tormented streets beyond darkest Bloomsbury. Even Paddington, which is of a politer situation, and is the gate of the beautiful West-of-England country, has not the allure of Charing Cross; even Euston which so sweetly prolongs the old-fashioned Liverpool voyage from New York, and keeps one to the last moment in a sense of home, really stays one from London by its kind reluctance. It is at Charing Cross alone that you are immediately and unmistakably in the London of your dreams.
I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or de- parted from all the great stations, but I will not make
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so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid that I was, more strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of so marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures in it, and gave me an illusion of Italy, though I was explicitly there because of an American origin in the baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do not remember the name of that little church, but it stood among autumn flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny morning, where the reader will easily find it. Of Vic- toria station I am many times certain, for it was from there that we at last left London, and there at the time of an earlier sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which stamped our sense of the world's metropolis with a completeness which it had hitherto disappointingly wanted.
It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover, but not uncommonly dull for an evening of the English November, and we did not notice that we had emerged from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the corridors of the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a confident spirit of our party declared to be smoke, in expression of the alarming conviction that the house was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed troubled by the smoke, however, and with a prompt recurrence to the reading which makes the American an intimate of the English circumstance though he has never per- sonally known it, we realized that what seemed smoke must be a very marked phase of London fog. It did not perceptibly thicken in-doors that night, but the next day no day dawned, or, for that matter, the day after the next. All the same the town was invisibly astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments between total and partial blindness. The usual motives and incentives were at work in the business of men,
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more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking. From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel the city's efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, with an invisible stir in all directions, as of groping. Of course, life had to go on, upon sucn terms as it could, and if you descended from your window that showed nothing, and went into the street, and joined the groping, you could make out something of its objects. With a cabman who knew his way, as a pilot knows his way on a river in a black night, you could depart and even arrive. In the course of your journey you would find the thoroughfare thick with hesitating or arrested traffic. At one place you would be aware of a dull, red light, brightening into a veiled glare, and you would have come upon a group of horses, detached from several omnibuses, and standing head to head till they might hopefully be put to and driven on again. The same light, with the torches carried by boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly creeping forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of flame made by the cab-lamps were craning their necks forward, or twitching them from side to side. Through the press foot-passengers found their way across the street, and imaginably in the dark that swallowed up the sidewalks, they were going and coming on errands that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they could know which way they were going, or how they could expect to reach any given point.
Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest, and there it was a greenish-yellow, like water when you open your eyes and look at it far below the surface. Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in a square, or with a park on one side, the vapor thick- ened into blackness and seemed to swell, a turbid tide,
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overhead and underfoot. It hurt your straining eyes, and got into your throat, and burned it like a sullen steam. If your cab stopped, miraculously enough, at the address given, you got out incredulous and fearful of abandonment. When you emerged again, and found your cab waiting, you mutely mounted to your place and resumed your strange quality of something in a dream.
So, all that day the pall hung upon the town, and all the next. The third day the travellers were to sail from Liverpool, and there was some imperative last- shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous cab, and started for Bond Street. In a few moments the cab was in the thick of the fog and its consequences, a tangle of stationary vehicles with horses detached, or marking time, without advancing either way. A trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof, and a trembling voice asked the cabman: "Do you think you can go on?" "I think so, sir." The horse's head had already vanished; now his haunches faded away. Towards the dashboard the shafts of another cab came yawing, and again the eager voice quavered: "Do you think you can get back?" " Oh yes, sir," the answer came more cheerfully, and the shopping was done a week later in Twenty-third Street.
There is an insensate wish in the human witness to have Nature, when she begins misbehaving, do her worst. One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we had experienced. But you see the blizzard once in a generation or a century, while if you are good, or good
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enough to live in London, you may see a charac- teristic fog almost any year. It is another case in which the metropolis of the New World must yield to the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do not say the fog in which we left New York, on March 3, 1904, was as perfect as our great London fog, But the New York fog was only blindingly white and the London fog blindingly black, and that is a main difference.
The tender and hesitating mist with which each day of our final September in London began, must not be confused in the reader's mind with a true London fog. The mist grew a little heavier, day by day, perhaps; but only once the sun failed to burn through it before noon, and that was one of the first days of October, as if in September it had not yet lost the last of its summer force. Even then, though it rained all the forenoon, and well into the afternoon, the weather cleared for a mild, warm sunset, and we could take the last of our pleasant walks from Half-Moon Street into St. James's Park.
When the last day of our London sojourn came, it was fitly tearful, and we had our misgivings of the Channel crossing. The crossing of the day before had been so bad that Pretty Polly, who had won the, St. Leger, held all England in approving suspense, while her owners decided that she should not venture to the defeat that awaited her in France, till the sea was smoother. But in the morning the papers prophesied fair weather, and it was promised that Pretty Polly should cross. Her courage confirmed our own, and we took our initial departure in the London fashion which is so different from the New York fashion. Not with the struggle, personally and telephonically, in an
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exchange of bitter sarcasms prolonged with the haughty agents of the express monopoly, did we get our bag- gage expensively before us to the station and follow in a costly coupe, but with all our trunks piled upon two reasonable four-wheelers, we set out contemporane- ously with them. In New York we paid six dollars for our entire transportation to the steamer; in London we paid six shillings to reach the Victoria station with our belongings. The right fare would have been five; the imagination of our cabman rose to three and six each, and feebly fluttered there, but sank to three, and did not rise again. At our admirable lodging the land- lady, the butler and the chambermaid had descended with us to the outer door in a smiling convention of regret, the kindly Swiss boots allowed the street porter to help him up with our trunks, and we drove away in the tradition of personal acceptability which bathes the stranger in a gentle self-satisfaction, and which prolonged itself through all the formalities of registering our baggage for the continent at the station, of bribing the guard in the hope of an entire first-class compart- ment to ourselves and then sharing it with four others similarly promised its sole use, and of telegraphing to secure seats in the rapide from Calais to Paris.
Then we were off in a fine chill, small English rain through a landscape in which all the forms showed like figures in blotting-paper, as Taine has said, once for all. After we had run out of the wet ranks of yellowish- black city houses, and passed the sullen suburbs,
"All in a death-dumb autumn-dripping gloom/'
we found ourselves in a world which was the dim ghost of the English country we had so loved in the summer. On some of the trees and hedgerows the leaves hung
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dull yellow or dull red, but on most they were a blacken- ing green. The raw green of the cold flat meadows, the purplish green of the interminable ranks of cabbages, and the harsh green of the turnip-fields, blurred with the reeking yellow of mustard bloom, together with the gleaming brown of ploughed fields, formed a prospect from which the eye turned with the heart, in a rapturous vision of the South towards which we were now swiftly pulsing.
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
NO American, complexly speaking, finds himself in England for the first time, unless he is one of those many Americans who are not of English extraction. It is probable, rather, that on his arrival, if he has not yet visited the country, he has that sense of having been there before which a simpler psychology than ours used to make much of without making anything of. His English ancestors who really were once there stir within him, and his American forefathers, who were nourished on the history and literature of England, and were therefore intellectually English, join forces in creating an English consciousness in him. Together, they make it very difficult for him to continue a new-comer, and it may be that only on the fourth or fifth coming shall the illusion wear away and he find himself a stranger in a strange land. But by that time custom may have done its misleading work, and he may be as much as ever the prey of his first impressions. I am sure that some such result in me will evince itself to the reader in what I shall have to say of my brief stay with the
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English foster-mother of our American Plymouth; and I hope he will not think it altogether to be regretted.
My first impressions of England, after a fourth or fifth visit, began even before I landed in Plymouth, for I decided that there was something very national in the behavior of a young Englishman who, as we neared his native shores, varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour, in his doubt whether a cap or a derby hat was the right wear for a passenger about landing. He seem- ed also perplexed whether he should or should not speak to some of his fellow-passengers in the safety of parting, but having ventured, seemed to like it. On the tender which took us from the steamer to the dock I fancied another type in the Englishman whom I asked which was the best hotel in Plymouth. At first he would not commit himself; then his humanity began to work in him, and he expressed a preference, and abruptly left me. He returned directly to give the reasons for his preference, and to excuse them, and again he left me. A second time he came back, with his conscience fully roused, and conjured me not to think of going else- where.
I thought that charming, and I afterwards found the hotel excellent, as I found nearly all the hotels in Eng- land. I found everything delightful on the way to it, inclusive of the cabman's overcharge, which brought the extortion to a full third of the just fare of a New York cabman. I do not include the weather, which was hesitating a bitter little rain, but I do include the behavior of the customs officer, who would do not more than touch, with averted eyes, the contents of the single piece of baggage which he had me open. When it came to paying the two hand -cart men three shillings for
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bringing up the trunks, which it would have cost me three dollars to transport from the steamer to a hotel at home, I did not see why I should not save money for the rest of my life by becoming naturalized in England, and making it my home, unless it was because it takes so long to become naturalized there that I might not live to economize much.
It was with a pleasure much more distinct than any subliminal intimation that I saw again the office-ladies in our hotel. Personally, they were young strangers, but officially they were old friends, and quite as I had seen them first forty years ago, or last a brief seven; only once they wore bangs or fringes over their bright, unintelligent eyes, and now they wore Mamie loops. But they were, as always, very neatly and prettily dress- ed, and they had the well - remembered difficulty of functionally differencing themselves to the traveller's needs, so that which he should ask for a room, and which for letters, and which for a candle, and which for his bill, remains a doubt to the end. From time to time with an exchange of puzzled glances, they united in beg- ging him to ask the head porter, please, for whatever it was he wanted to know. They seemed of equal au- thority, but suddenly and quite casually the real su- perior appeared among them. She was the manageress, and I never saw a manager at an English hotel except once, and that was in Wales. But the English theory of hotel-keeping seems to be house-keeping enlarged; a manageress is therefore more logical than a manager, and practically the excellence of English hotels attests that a manager could not be more efficient.
One of the young office-ladies, you never can know which it will be, gives you a little disk of pasteboard with the number and sometimes the price of your room
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on it, but the key is an after-thought of your own. You apply for it on going down to dinner, but in nearly all provincial hotels it is safe to leave your door unlocked. At any rate I did so with impunity. This was all new to me, but a greater novelty which greeted us was the table d'hote, which has nearly everywhere in England replaced the old-time dinner off the joint. You may still have that if you will, but not quite on the old im- perative terms. The joint is now the roast from the table d'hote, and you can take it with soup and vege- tables and a sweet. But if you have become wonted to the superabundance of a German steamer you will not find all the courses too many for you, and you will find them very good. At least you will at first : what is it that does not pall at last? Let it be magnanimously owned at the outset then, while one has the heart, that the cooking of any English hotel is better than that of any American hotel of the same grade. At Plymouth, that first night, everything in meats and sweets, though sim- ple, was excellent ; in vegetables there were green things with no hint of the can in them, but fresh from the southerner parts of neighboring France. As yet the protean forms of the cabbage family were not so in- sistent as afterwards.
Though we dined in an air so cold that we vainly tried to warm our fingers on the bottoms of our plates, we saw, between intervening heads and shoulders, a fire burning blithely in a grate at the farther side of the room. It was cold there in the dining-room, but after we got into the reading-room, we thought of it as having been warm, and we hurried out for a walk under the English moon which we found diffusing a mildness over the promenade on the Hoe, in which the statue of Sir Francis Drake fairly basked on its pedestal. The old
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sea-dog had the air of having lifted himself from the game of bowls in which the approach of the Spanish Armada had surprised him, and he must have already arrived at that philosophy which we reached so much later. In England it is chiefly inclement in-doors, but even out-doors it is well to temper the air with as vigor- ous exercise as time and occasion will allow you to take. Another monument, less personally a record of the Armada, balanced that of Drake at the farther end of the Hoe, and on top of this we saw Britannia leading out her lion for a walk : lions become so dyspeptic if kept housed, and not allowed to stretch their legs in the open air. We had no lion to lead out; and there was no chance for us at bowls on the Hoe that night, but we walked swiftly to and fro on the promenade and began at once to choose among the mansions looking seawards over it such as we meant to buy and live in always. They were all very handsome, in a reserved, quiet sort; but we had no hesitation in fixing on one with a balcony glassed in, so that we could see the sea and shore in all weathers; and I hope we shall not incommode the actual occupants.
The truth is we were flown with the beauty of the scene, which we afterwards found as great by day as by night. The promenade, which may have other rea- sons for calling itself as it does besides being shaped like the blade of a hoe, is a promontory pushed well out into the sound, with many islands and peninsulas clustered before it, or jutting towards it and forming a safe road- stead for shipping of all types. Plymouth is not a chief naval station of Great Britain without the presence of war-ships in its harbor; and among the peaceful craft at anchor with their riding-lights showing in the deeps of the sea and air one could distinguish the huge kraken
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shapes of modern cruisers and destroyers, and what not. But like the embattled figures of the marine and land- going soldiery, flirting on the benches of the promenade with females as fearless as themselves, or jauntily stroll- ing up and down under the moon, the ships tended to an effect of subjective peacefulness, as if invented mere- ly for the pleasure of the appreciative stranger. We were, at any rate, very glad of them, and appreciated the municipal efforts in our behalf as gratefully as the imperial fortifications of the harbor. It must be con- fessed at once, if I am ever to claim any American su- periority in these "trivial, fond records," which I shall never be able to help making comparative, that in what is done by the public for the public, we are hardly in the same running with England. It is only when we reflect upon our greater municipal virtue, and consider how the economies of our civic servants in the matter of beauty enable them to spend the more in good works, that we can lift up our heads and look down on what England has everywhere wrought for the people in such unspiritual things as parks and gardens, and terraces and promenades and statues. I could have wished that first evening, before I committed myself to any wrong impression or association, that I had known something more, or even anything at all, of the history of Plymouth. But I did not even know that from the Hoe, and pos- sibly the very spot where I stood, the brave Trojan Cirenseus hurled the giant Goemagot into the sea. I was quite as far from remembering any facts of the British civilization which has always flourished so splen- didly in the fancy of the native bards, and which has mingled its relics with those of the Roman, not only in the neighborhood of Plymouth, but all over England. As for the facts that Plymouth had been harried through-
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out the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the incur- sions of the French; that it was the foremost English port in the time of Elizabeth; that Drake sailed from it in 1585 to bring back the remnant of Raleigh's colony from Virginia; that one hundred and twenty-seven Eng- lish ships waited in its waters to meet the Spanish Armada; that it stood alone in the West of England for the Parliament in the Civil War; that Charles II. had signified his displeasure with it for this by building to overawe it the entirely useless fortress in the harbor; and that it was the first town to declare for William of Orange when he landed to urge the flight of the last Stuart: I do not suppose there is any half-educated school-boy but has the facts more about him than I had that first night in Plymouth when I might have found them so serviceable. I could only have matched him in my certainty that this was the Plymouth from which the Mayflower sailed to find, or to found, another Plymouth in the New World; but he could easily have alleged more proofs of our common conviction than I. At sunset, which they have in Plymouth appropriate- ly late for the spring season and the high latitude, there had been a splotch of red about six feet square in the watery west, promising the fine weather which the morning brought. It also brought more red coats and swagger-sticks in company with the large hats and glaring costumes which had not had so good a chance the night before, whether we saw them in our walk on the Hoe, or met them in the ramble through the town into which we prolonged it. Through the still Sunday morning air there came a drumming and bugling of religious note from the neighboring fortifications, and while we listened, a general officer, or perhaps only a colonel, very tight in the gold and scarlet of his uniform,
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passed across the Hoe, like a pillar of flame, on his way to church. But I do not know that he was a finer bit of color, after all, than the jet-black cat with a vivid red ribbon at her neck, which had chosen to crouch on the ivied stone-wall across the way from our hotel, in just the spot where the sun fell earliest and would lie longest. There was more ivy than sun in Plymouth, that is the truth, and this cat probably knew what she was about. There was ivy, ivy everywhere, and there were sub- tropical growths of laurel and oleander and the like, which made a pleasant confusion of earlier Italy and later Bermuda in the brain, and yet were so character- istic of that constantly self-contradictory England.
Many things of it that I had known in flying and poising visits during fifty years of the past began to steal back into my consciousness. The nine-o'clock breakfast, of sole and eggs and bacon, and heavy bread and washy coffee, was of the same moral texture as the sabbatical silence in the pale sunny air, which now I remembered so well, with some weird question whether I was not all the while in Quebec, instead of Plymouth, and the strong conviction at the same time that this was the absurdest of obsessions. The Hoe was not Durham Terrace, but it looked down on a sort of Lower Town from a height almost as great, and the spread of the harbor, with a little help, recalled the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. But the rows of small houses that sent up the smoke of their chimney- pots were of yellow brick, not of wood or gray stone, and their red roofs were tiled in dull weather-worn tints, and not brilliantly tinned.
Why, I wonder, do we feel such a pleasure in finding different things alike? It is rather stupid, but we are always trying to do it and fatiguing ourselves with the
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sterile effect. At Plymouth there was so much to re- mind me of so much else that it was a relief to be pretty promptly confronted on the Hoe with something so positive, so absolute as a Bath chair, which at the worst could only remind me of something in literature. A stubby old man was tugging it over the ground slowly, as if through a chapter of Dickens; and a wrathful-look- ing invalid lady sat within, just as if she had got into it from a book. There was little to recall anything else in the men strolling about in caps and knickerbockers, with short pipes in their mouths, or, equally with short pipes, wheeling back and forth on bicycles. There were a few people in top-hats, who had unmistakably the air of having got them out for Sunday; though why every one did not wear them every day in the week was the question when we presently saw a shop-window full of them at three and sixpence apiece.
This was when we had gone down into the town from the Hoe, and found its quiet streets of an exquisite Sunday neatness. They were quite empty, except for very washed-up-looking worshippers going to church, among whom a file of extremely little boys and girls, kept in line and kept moving by a black-gowned church- sister, gave us, with their tender pink cheeks and their tender blue eyes, our first delight in the wonderful West- of-England complexion. The trams do not begin run- ning hi any provincial town till afternoon on Sundays, and the loud-rattling milk-carts, bearing bright brass- topped cans as big as the ponies that drew them, seemed the only vehicles abroad. The only shops open were those for the sale of butter and eggs and fruit and flowers; but these necessaries and luxuries abounded in many windows and doorways, especially the flowers, which had already begun to arrive everywhere by tons
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from the Channel Islands, though it was then so early in March'. It is not the least of the advantages which England enjoys that she has her Florida at her door; she has but to put out her hand and it is heaped with flowers and fruits from the Scilly Isles, while the spring is coming slowly up our way af home by fast-freight, through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia.
So many things were strange to me that I might have thought I had never been in Plymouth before, and so many things familiar that I might have fancied I had always been there. The long unimpressive stretches of little shops might have been in any second-class Ameri- can city, which would likewise have shown the same exceptional number of large department stores. What it could not have shown were the well-kept streets, the reverently guarded heritage from the past in here and there a bit of antique architecture amid the prosperous newness; the presence of lingering state in the mansions peering over their high garden wall, or standing with- drawn from the thoroughfares in the quiet of wooded crescents or circles.
I doubt if any American city, great or small, has the same number of birds, dear to poetry, singing in early March, as Plymouth has. That morning as we walked in the town, and that afternoon as we rode on our tram- top into the country, they started from a thousand lovely lines of verse, finches and real larks, and real robins, and many a golden-billed blackbird, and piped us on our way. Overhead, in the veiled sun, circled and swam the ever-cawing rooks, as they jarred in the anxieties of the nesting then urgent with them. They were no better than our birds; I will never own such a recreant thing. If I do not quite prefer a crow to a rook, I am free to say that one oriole or redbird or
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hermit-thrush is worth all the English birds that ever sang. Only, the English birds sing with greater author- ity, and find an echo in the mysterious depths of our ancestral past where they and we were compatriots.
Viewed from the far vantage of some rising ground the three towns of Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devon- port, which have grown together to form one Plymouth, stretch away from the sea in huge long ridges thickly serried with the gables, and bristling with the chimney- pots of their lines of houses. They probably look dense- lier built than they are through the exaggerative dim- ness of the air which lends bulk to the features of every distant prospect in England; but for my pleasure I would not have had the houses set any closer than they were on the winding, sloping line of the tram we had taken after luncheon. It was bearing us with a leisurely gait, inconceivable of an American trolley, but quite swiftly enough, towards any point in the country it chose; and after it had carried us through rows and rows of small, low, gray stone cottages, each with its pretty bit of garden at its feet, it bore us on where their strict contiguity ceased in detached villas, and let us have time to look into the depths of their encompassing evergreenery, their ivy, their laurel, their hedges of holly, all shining with a pleasant lustre. So we came out into the familiar provisionality of half-built house- lots, and at last into the open country quite beyond the town, with green market-gardens, and brown ploughed fields, patching the sides of the gentle knolls, laced with white winding roads, that lost their heads in the haze of the horizon, and with woodlands calling themselves "Private," and hiding the way to stately mansions with- drawn from the commonness of our course.
When the tram stopped we got down, with the other
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civilian persons of our tram-top company, and with the soldiers and the girls who formed their escort, and hur- ried beyond hearing of the loud-cackling, hard-mouthed, red-cheeked, black-eyed young woman, whom one sees everywhere in some form, and in whose English version I saw so many an American original that I was humbled with the doubt whether she might not have come out on the Mayflower. There were many other people more inoffensive coming and going, or stretching themselves on the damp new grass in a defiance of the national rheumatism which does not save them from it. At that time, though, I did not know but it might, and I enjoyed the picturesqueness of their temerity with an untroubled mind. I noted merely the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the commoner sort, and I thought the men better and the women worse dressed than Americans of the same order. Then, after I had realized the preva- lence of much the same farming tradition as our own, in the spreading fields, and holloed my fancy up and away over the narrow lines climbing between them to the sky, there was nothing left to do but to go to town by a different tram-line from that which brought us. The man I asked for help in this bold enterprise had a face above the ordinary in a sort of quickness, and he seemed to find something unusual in my speech. He answered civilly and fully, as all the English do when you ask them a civil question, without the friendly irony with which Americans often like to visit the inquiring stranger. Then he stopped short, checking the little boy he was leading by the hand, and said, abruptly, "You're not English!"
"No," I said, "we're Americans," and I added, "From New York."
"Ah, from New York!" he said, with a visible rush of
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interest in the fact that it never afterwards brought to another English face, so far as I could see. " From New York! Americans !" and he stood clutching the hand of the little boy, while I felt myself in the presence of a tacit drama, which I have not yet been able to render explicit. Sometimes I have thought it not well to try. It might have been the memory of sad experiences which had left a rancor for our country in his heart, and held him in doubt whether he might not fitly wreak it upon the first chance American he met. Again I fancied it might have been the stirring of some long-deferred hope, some defeated ambition, or the rapture of some ideal of us which had never had the opportunity to disappoint itself. I only know that he looked like a man above his class: an unhappy man anywhere, and probably in England most unhappy. I stupidly hurried on, and after some movement to follow me he let me leave him behind. Whoever he was or whatever his emotion, I hope he was worthy of the sympathy which here offers itself too late. If I could I would perhaps go back to him, and tell him that if he sailed for New York he might never find the America of his vision, but only a hard workaday world like the one he was leaving, where he might be differently circumstanced, but not differently conditioned. I dare say he would not believe me; I am not sure that I should believe myself, though I might well be speaking the truth.
The next day being Monday, it was quite fit that we should go to work with the rest of the world in Plymouth, and we set diligently about the business of looking up such traces of the Pilgrim Fathers as still exist in the town which was so kind to them in their great need of kindness. I will not pretend that the pathetic story recurred to me in full circumstance during our search for
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the exact place from which the Mayflower last sailed, when after she had come with her sister ship, the Speed- well, from Holland to Southampton, and then started on the voyage to America, she had been forced by the unseaworthiness of the Speedwell to put back as far as Plymouth. Mr. W. E. Griffin, in his very agreeable and careful little book, The Pilgrims in their Three Howes, is able only to define the period of their stay there as "some time," but he tells us that the disappointed voy- agers "were treated very kindly by the people of the Free Church, forming what is now the Grange Street Chapel, the Mayflower meanwhile lying off the Barbi- can. " The weather was good while the two ships stay- ed, but when they sailed again the Speedwell returned to London with some twenty of the homesick or heart-sick, while all her other people stowed themselves with their belongings in the little Mayflower as best they could, and she once more put out to sea: a prison where the brutal shipmen were their jailers; a lazar where the seeds of death were planted in many that were soon to fill the graves secreted under the snow of the savage shore they were seeking.
I believe it was the visiting association of American librarians who caused, a few years ago, a flag-stone in the pavement of the quay where the Mayflower lay to be inscribed with her name and the date 1620, as well as a more explicit tablet to be let into the adjacent parapet. Perhaps our driver could have found these records for us, or we could have found them for our- selves, but I am all the same grateful for the good offices of several unoccupied spectators, especially a friendly matron who had disposed of her morning's stock of fish, and had now the leisure for indulging an interest in our search. She constituted herself the tutelary spirit
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of the neighborhood, which smelt of immemorial catches of fish, both from the adjacent market and from the lumpish, quaintly rigged craft crowding one another in the docks and composing in an insurpassable picturesque- ness; and she directed us wherever we wanted to go.
The barbican of the citadel from which the Mayflower sailed, before there was either citadel or barbican, is no great remove from the Hoe, which may justly enough boast itself "the finest promenade in England/' but it is quite in another world : a seventeenth-century world of narrow streets crooking up hill and down, and overhung by the little bulging houses which the pilgrims must have seen as they came and went on their affairs with the ship, scarcely bigger than the fishing -boats now nosing at the quay where she then lay. Whatever it was in the Mayflower's time, it is not a proud neighbor- hood in ours, nor has it any reason to be proud; for it is apparently what is indefinitely called a purlieu. At one point where I climbed a steep thoroughfare to look at what no doubt unwarrantably professed to be a rem- nant of "Cromwell's castle," I met an elderly man, who was apparently looking up truant school-children, and who said, quite without prompting, "This used to be 'ell upon earth," with something in his tone implying that it might still be a little like it. We could not get into the ruin, the solitary who tenanted its one habitable room being away on a visit, as a neighbor put her head out of a window opposite to tell us.
Probably the traveller who wishes for a just impres- sion of the Plymouth of 1620 will get it more reliably somewhat away from the immediate scene of the May- flower's departure. There are old houses abundantly overhanging their first stories, after the seventeenth- century fashion, in the pleasanter streets which keep
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aloof from the water. If he is more bent upon a sense of modern Plymouth he will do best to visit her group of public edifices, the Guild Hall, the Law Courts, the Library, and see all that I did not see of the vast ship- ping which constitutes her one of the greatest English ports, and the government works which magnify her importance among the naval stations of the world.
It is always best to leave something for a later comer, and I may seem almost to have left too much by any one whom I shall have inspired to linger in Plymouth long enough after landing to get his sea-legs off. But really I was continually finding the most charming things. The very business aspects of Plymouth had their charm. I saw a great prosperity around me, but there was no sense of the hustle which is supposed alone to create prosperity with us. I dare say that below the unruffled surface of life there is sordid turmoil enough, but I did not perceive it, and I prefer still to think of Plymouth as the first of the many places in England where the home-wearied American might spend his last days in the repose of a peaceful exile, with all the com- forts, which only much money can buy with us, cheaply about him. He could live like a gentleman in Plymouth for about half what the same state would cost him in his own air, unless he went as far inland as the inex- pensive Middle West, and then it would be dearer in as large a town. He could keep his republican self-respect in his agreeable banishment by remembering how Plym- outh had held for the Commonwealth in Cromwell's time, and the very name of the place would bring him near to the heroic Plymouth on the other shore of the Atlantic. I speak from experience, for even in my two days' stay with the mother Plymouth I had now and then a vision of the daughter Plymouth, on the elm-shaded slopes of
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her landlocked bay, filially the subordinate in numbers and riches with which she began her alien life. Still of wood, as the English Plymouth is still of stone, and newer by a thousand years, she has an antiquity of her own precious to Americans, and a gentle picturesqueness which I found endearing when I first saw her in the later eighteen-sixties, and which I now recalled as worthy of her lineage. Perhaps it was because I had always thought the younger Plymouth would be a kind dwelling- place that I fancied a potential hospitality in the elder. At any rate I thought it well, while I was on the ground, to choose a good many eligible residences, not only among the proud mansions overlooking the Hoe, but in some of the streets whose gentility had decayed, but which were still keeping up appearances in their fine roomy old houses, or again in the newer and simpler surburban avenues, where I thought I could be content in one of the pretty stone cottages costing me forty pounds a year, with my holly hedge before me belting in a little garden of all but perennial bloom.
We had chanced upon weather that we might easily have mistaken for climate. There was the lustre of soft sunshine in it, and there was the song of birds in the wooded and gardened pleasaunces which opened in several directions about the Hoe, and seemed to follow the vagarious lines of ancient fortifications. Whether weather or climate, it could not have been more suit- able for the excursion we planned our last afternoon across that stretch of water which separates Plymouth from the seat of the lords who have their title from the great estate. The mansion is not one of the noble houses which are open to the public in England, and even to get into the grounds you must have leave from the manor - house. This will not quite answer
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the raw American's expectation of a manor-house; it looks more like a kind of office in a Plymouth street; but if you get from it as guide a veteran of the navy with an agreeable cast in his eye, and an effect of in- voluntary humor in his rusty voice, you have not really so much to complain of. In our own case the veteran's intelligence seemed limited to delivering us over at gates to gardeners and the like, who gave us back to his keep- ing after the just recognition of their vested interests, and then left him to walk us unsparingly over the whole place, which had grown as large at least as some of our smaller States, say Connecticut or New Jersey, by the time we had compassed it. We imagined afterwards that he might have led us a long way about, not from stupidity, but from a sardonic amusement in our pro- tests; and we were sure he knew that the bird he called a nightingale was no nightingale. It was as if he had said to himself, on our asking if there were none there, " Well, if they want a nightingale, let ;em have it," and had chosen the first songster we heard. There were already songsters enough in the trees about to choose any sort from, for we were now in Cornwall, and the spring is very early in Cornwall. There were primroses growing at the roots of the trees in the park; in the garden closes were bamboos and palms, and rhododendrons in bloom, with cork-trees and ilexes, springing from the soaked earth which the sun damply shining from the spongy heavens could never have dried. The confusion of the tropical and temperate zones hi this air, which was that of neither or both, was somewhat heightened by the first we saw of those cedars of Lebanon which so abound in England that you can hardly imagine any left on Leba- non. It was a dark, spreading tree, with a biblical seriousness and an oriental poetry of aspect, under
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whose low shelving branches one might think to find the scripturalized childhood of our race. The gardens, whether English or French or Italian, appealed to a more sophisticated consciousness; but it had all a dim, blurred fascination which words refuse to impart, and the rooks, wheeling in their aerial orbits overhead, seemed to deepen the spell with the monotony of their mystical incantations. There were woodland spaces which had the democratic friendliness of American woods, as if not knowing themselves part of a noble- man's estate, and which gave the foot a home welcome with the bedding of their fallen leaves. But the rabbits which had everywhere broken the close mossy turf with their burrowing and thrown out the red soil over the grass, must have been consciously a part of the English order. As for the deer, lying in herds, or posing statu- esquely against the sky on some stretch of summit, they were as absolutely a part of it as if they had been in the peerage. A flag floated over the Elizabethan mansion of gray stone (rained a fine greenish in the long succes- sion of springs and falls), to intimate that the family was at home, and invite the public to respect its privacy by keeping away from the grounds next about it; and in the impersonal touch of exclusion which could be so impersonally accepted, the sense of certain English things was perfected. You read of them all your life, till you imagine them things of actual experience, but when you come face to face with them you perceive that till then they have been as unreal as anything else in the romances where you frequented them, and that you have not known thier true quality and significance. In fiction they stood for a state as gracious as it was splen- did, and welcomed the reader to an equal share in it; but in fact they imply the robust survival, in commer-
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cial and industrial times, of a feudal condition so wholly obsolete in its alien admirer's experience that none of the imitations of it which he has seen at home suggest it more than by a picturesqueness almost as provisional as that of the theatre.
What the alien has to confess in its presence is that it is an essential part of a system which seems to work, and in the simpler terms, to work admirably; so that if he has a heart to which the ideal of human equality is dear, it must shrink with certain withering doubts as he looks on the lovely landscapes everywhere in which those who till the fields and keep the woods have no ownership, in severalty or in common. He must re- member how persistently and recurrently this has been the history of mankind, how, while democracies and republics have come and gone, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, have remained, or have returned after they had passed. If he is a pilgrim reverting from the new world to which the outgoing pilgrims sailed, there to open from the primeval woods a new heaven and a new earth, his dismay will not justly be for the persistence of the old forms which they left behind, but for the question whether these forms have not somehow fixed themselves as firmly and lastingly in his native as in his ancestral country. I do not say that any such anxieties spoiled the pleasure of my afternoon. I was perhaps expecting to see much more perfect instances of the kind, and I was probably postponing the psycho- logical effect to these. It is a fault of travel that you are always looking forward to something more typical, and you neglect immediate examples because they offer themselves at the outset, or you reject them as only approximately representative to find that they are never afterwards surpassed. That was the case with our hotel,
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which was quite perfect in its way : a way rather new to England, I believe, and quite new to my knowledge of England.
It is a sort of hotel where you can live for as short or as long a time as you will at an inclusive rate for the day or week, and always in greater comfort for less money than you can at home, except in the mere mat- ter of warmth. Warm you cannot be in-doors, and why should not you go out-doors for warmth, when the sub- tropical growths in the well-kept garden, which never fails to enclose that kind of hotel, are flourishing in a temperature distinctly above freezing? They always had the long windows, that opened into the garden, ajar when we came into the reading-room after dinner, and the modest little fire in the grate veiled itself under a covering of cinders or coal-siftings, so that it was not certain that the first-comer who got the chair next to it was luckiest. Yet around this cold hearth the social ice was easily broken, and there bubbled up a better sort of friendly talk than always follows our diffidence in public places at home. Without knowing it, or being able to realize it at that moment, we were confronted with a social condition which is becoming more and more gen- eral in England, where in winter even more than in summer people have the habit of leaving town for a longer or a shorter time, which they spend in a hotel like ours at Plymouth. There they meet in apparent fearlessness of the consequences of being more or less agreeable to one another, and then part as informally as they meet. But as yet we did not know that there was that sort of hotel or that we were in it, and we lost the earliest occasion of realizing a typical phase of recent English civilization.
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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
THE weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in many trains, still em- bodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves, as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as some American trains would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet, with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which?) in bloom along the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether it was in mere surfeit, or in an in- vincible distaste for turnips, or an instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure
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as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.
As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through care- fully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by associa- tion from the earliest moment of your intellectual non- age. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cow- slips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedge- rows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drift- ing low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then suddenly skirts some nobleman's park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and
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twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in Eng- land.
The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter's claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find "a typical English city . . . alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin. . . . None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past." Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter's.
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Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do as much in the like case ; when it comes to certain details I doubt if even New York would be equal to it.
I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases, and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the better-informed reader will recall with- out an effort that the place was never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest. The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality. Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travellers as do not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York dis- puted its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the tune of Henry VIII. 's high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and Cornish men fought for the
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ancient faith within its walls against his forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I al- ways think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles's hapless daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts back after Crom- well's death.
The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral's sake we fell a willing prey to the fanciful statement. There is of course no hotel in the cathedral close, but the Butt of Malmsey is so close to the cathedral that it may have unintentionally con- fused the words. At any rate, it stood facing the side of the beautiful pile and getting its noble Norman towers against a sky, which we would not have had other than a broken gray, above the tops of trees where one nesting rook the less would have been an incalculable loss. One of the rooms which the managers could give us looked on this lovely sight, and if the other looked into a dim court, why, all the rooms in a cathedral close, or close to a cathedral, cannot command views of it.
We had of course seen the cathedral almost before we saw the city in our approach, but now we felt that the time spent before studying it would be time lost and we made haste to the great west front. To the first glance it is all a soft gray blur of age-worn carving, in which no point or angle seems to have failed of the touch which has blent all the archaic sanctities and royalties of the glorious screen in a dim sumptuous harmony of figures and faces. Whatever I had sceptically read,
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and yet more impatiently heard, of the beauty of Eng- lish cathedrals was attested and approved far beyond cavil, and after that first glance I asked nothing but submissively to see more and more of their gracious splendor. No wise reader will expect me to say what were the sculptured facts before me or to make the hope- less endeavor to impart a sense of the whole structure in descriptions or admeasurements. Let him take any picture of it, and then imagine something of that form vastly old and dark, richly wrought over in the stone to the last effects of tender delicacy by the miracles of Gothic art. So let him suppose the edifice set among leafless elms, in which the tattered rooks'-nests swing blackening, on a spread of close greensward, under a low welkin, where thin clouds break and close in a pallid blue, and he will have as much of Exeter Cathedral as he can hope to have without going there to see for himself; it can never otherwise be brought to him in words of mine.
Neither, without standing in that presence or another of its kind, can he realize what the ages of faith were. Till then the phrase will remain a bit of decorative rhetoric, but then he will live a meaning out of it which will die only with him. He will feel, as well as know, how men built such temples in an absolute trust and hope now extinct, but without which they could never have been built, and how they continued to grow, like living things, from the hearts rather than the hands of strongly believing men. So that of Exeter grew, while all through the tenth and eleventh centuries the monks of its immemorial beginning were flying from the heathen invasions, but still returning, till the Normans gave their monastery fixity in the twelfth century, and the long English succession of bishops maintained the cathedral
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in ever-increasing majesty till the rude touch of the Tudor stayed the work that had prospered under the Norman and Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings. If the age of faith shall extend itself to his perception, as he listens to the afternoon service in the taper-starred twilight, far back into the times before Christ, he may hear in the chanting and intoning the voice of the first articulate religions of the world. The sound of that imploring and beseeching, that wailing and sighing, which drifts out to him through the screen of the choir will come heavy with the pathos of the human abasing itself before the divine in whatever form men may have imagined God, and seeking the pity and the mercy of which Christianity was not the first to feel the need. Then, if he has a sense of the unbroken continuity of ceremonial, the essential unity of form, from Pagan to Roman and from Roman to Anglican, perhaps he will have more patience than he otherwise might with the fierce zeal of the fanatics who would at last away with all ceremonial and all form, and would stand in their naked souls before the eternal justice and make their appeal direct, and if need be, through their noses, to Him. who desireth not the death of a sinner.
Unless the visitor to Exeter Cathedral can come into something of this patience, he will hardly tolerate the thought of the Common weal th's-men who deemed that they were doing God's will when they built a brick wall through it, and listened on one side to an Independent chaplain, and on the other to a Presbyterian minister. It is said that they "had great quiet and comfort" in their worship on each side of their wall, which was of course taken down directly after the Restoration. For this no one can reasonably grieve; and one may of course rejoice that Cromwell's troopers did not stable
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their horses in Exeter Cathedral. They forbore to do so in few other old churches in England, but we did not know how to value fully its exemption from this prof- anation in our first cathedral. We took the fact with an ignorant thanklessness from our guide-book, and we acquiesced, with some surprise, in the lack of any such official as a verger to instruct us in the unharmed monu- ments. The printed instructions which we received from the placard overhanging a box at the gate to the choir did not go beyond the elementary precept that we were each to put sixpence in it; after that we were left free to look about for ourselves, and we made the round of the tombs and altars unattended.
The disappointment which awaits one in English churches, if one's earlier experience of churches has been in Latin countries, is of course from the want of pictures. Color there is and enough in the stained windows which Cromwell's men sometimes spared, but the stained win- dows in Exeter are said to be indifferent good. In com- pensation for this, there are traces of the frescoing which once covered the walls, and which Cromwell's men neglected to whitewash. They also heedlessly left un- spoiled that wonderful Minstrel's Gallery stretching across the front of the choir, with its fourteen tuneful angels playing forever on as many sculptured instru- ments of stone. For the rest the monuments are of the funereal cast to which the devout fancy is pretty much confined in all sacred edifices. There is abundance of bishops lying on their tombs, with their features worn away in the exposure from which those of many crusaders have been kept by their stone visors. But what was most expressive of the past, which both bishops and crusaders reported so imperfectly, was the later portrait statuary, oftenest of Elizabethan ladies and their lords,
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painted in the colors of life and fashion, with their ruffs and farthingales worn as they were when they put them off, to rest in the tombs on which their effigies lie. It is not easy to render the sense of a certain consciousness which seemed to deepen in these, as the twilight of the closing day deepened round them in the windows and arches. If they were waiting to hold converse after the night had fallen, one would hardly have cared to stay for a share in their sixteenth-century gossip, and I could understand the feeling of the two dear old ladies who made anxiously up to us at one point of our common progress, and asked us if we thought there was any danger of being locked in. I did my poor best to re- assure them, and they took heart, and were delightfully grateful. When we had presently missed them we found them waiting at the door, to thank us again, as if we had saved them from a dreadful fate, and to shake hands and say good-bye.
If it were for them alone, I should feel sensibly richer for my afternoon in our first cathedral. But I think my satisfaction was heightened just before we left, by meet- ing a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal which he was trundling through "the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault" to the great iron stoves placed on either side of the nave to warm the cathedral, and contribute in their humble way to that perfect balance of parts which is the most admired effect of its architectural symmetry. As he stopped before each stove and noisily stoked it from a clangorous shovel, the simple sincerity of this bit of necessary house-keeping in the ancient fane seemed to strike a note characteristic of the English civilization, and to suggest the plain outrightness by which it has been able to save itself sound through every age and fortune. The English have reared a civic edifice more
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majestic than any the world has yet seen, but in the temple of their liberty and their loyalty a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal has always been frankly invited to appear when needed. It is this mingling of the poet- ical ideal and the practical real which has preserved them at every emergency, and but for the man's timely ministrations church and state would alike have fared ill in the past. He has kept both habitable, and to any one who visits cathedrals with a luminous mind the man with the wheelbarrow of coal will remain as distinctly a part of the impression as the processioning and reces- sioning celebrants coming and going in their white surplices, with their red and black bands; or even the singing of the angel-voiced choir-boys, who as they hurry away at the end of the service do not all look as seraphic as they have sounded. There is often indeed something in the passing regard of choir-boys less sug- gestive of the final state of young-eyed cherubim than of evil provisionally repressed.
I do not say that I thought all this before leaving the cathedral in Exeter, or till long afterwards. I was at the time rather bent upon seeing more of the town, in which I felt a quality different from that of Plymouth though it pleased me no better. The manageress of the Butt of Malmsey had boasted already of the numbers of nobility and gentry living in the neighborhood of the little city, where, she promised, we should see ten private carriages for every one in Plymouth. I did not keep count, but I dare say she was right. What was more to my crude pleasure was the sight of the many Tudor, and earlier than Tudor, houses in the High Street and the other streets of Exeter, with their second stories over- hanging their first, to that effect of baffle in the leaded casements of their gables which we fancy in the eyes of
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stout gentlemen who try to catch sight of their feet over the intervening bulge of their waistcoats. They are in- comparably picturesque, those Tudor houses, and as I had afterwards occasion to note from some of their interiors, they mark a beginning of domestic comfort, which, if not modern on the American terms, is quite so on the English.
To the last, I had always to make my criticisms of the provision for the inner house in England, but my con- viction that the English had little to learn of us in pro- viding for the inner man began quite as early as in my first walks about Exeter, where the most perverse Amer- ican could not have helped noting the abundance and variety of the fruits and vegetables at the green-grocers'. Southern Europe had supplied these better than Florida and California supply them with us at the same season in towns the size of Exeter, or indeed in any less luxuri- ous than our great seaboard cities. Counting in the apples and oranges from South Africa and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, we are far out of it as to cheapness and quality. Then, no place in England is so remote from one sea or another as not always to have the best and freshest fish, which as the dealers arrange them with an artistic eye for form and color, make, it must be owned, a more appetizing show than the throng- ing shapes of carnage which start from the butchers' doors and windows, and bleed upon the sidewalk, and gather microbes from every passing gust. There is something peculiarly loathsome in these displays of fresh meat carcases all over England, which does not affect the spectator from the corded and mounded ham and bacon in the grocers' shops, though when one thinks of the myriads of eggs needed to accompany these at the forty million robust English breakfasts every morn-
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ing, it is with doubt and despair for the hens. They seem equal to the demand upon them, however, like every one and everything else English, and they always lay eggs enough, as if every hen knew that England expected her to do her duty.
We sauntered through Exeter without a plan, and took it as it came in a joy which I wish I could believe was reciprocal, and which was at no moment higher than when we found at the corner of the most impressive old place in Exeter the office of a certain New York insurance company. As smiling fate would have it, this was the very company in which I was myself in- sured, and I paused before it with effusion, and shook hands with the actuary in the spirit. In the flesh, if he was an Englishman, he might not have known what to do with my emotion, but with Englishmen in the spirit the wandering American always finds himself cor- dially at home. One must not say that the longer they have been in the spirit the better; some of them who are actually still in the flesh are also in the spirit; but a certain historical remove is apt to relieve friends of that sort of stiffness which keeps them at arm's-length when they meet as contemporaries. At the other end of Bedford Circus, where I had my glad moment with the insurance actuary, I found myself in the presence of that daughter of Charles I., the Princess Henrietta, who was born there near three hundred years ago, and whose life I had lately followed with pathos for her young exile from England, through her girlhood in France, and through her unhappy marriage with the King's brother Monsieur, to the afternoon of her last day when she lay so long dying in the presence of the court, as some thought, of poison. I could not feel myself an intrusive witness at that strange scene, which
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now represented itself in Bedford Circus, with the court- iers coming and going, and the doctors joining their medical endeavors with the spiritual ministrations of the prelates, and the poor princess herself taking part in the speculations and discussions, and presently in the midst of all incontinently making her end.
I suppose it would not be good taste to boast of the intimacy I enjoyed with the clergy in the neighborhood of the cathedral, by favor of their translation into a region much remoter than the past. Without having the shadow of acquaintance with them and without removing them for an instant from their pleasant houses and gardens in the close at Exeter, I put them back a generation, and met them with familiar ease in the friendly circumstance of Trollope's many stories of cathedral towns. I am not sure they would have liked that if they had known it, and certainly I should not have done it if they had known it; but as it was I could do it without offence. When we could rend ourselves from the delightful company of those deans, and canons, and minor canons, and prebendaries, with whom we really did not pass a word, we went a long idle walk to an old-fashioned part of the town overlooking the Exe from the crest of a hill, where certain large out-dated mansions formed themselves in a crescent. We instantly bought property there in preference to any more modern neighborhood, and there our subliminal selves remain, and stroll out into the pretty park and sit on the benches, and superintend the lading and unlading of the small craft from foreign ports in the old ship-canal below: the oldest ship-canal in the world, indeed, whose begin- nings Shakespeare was born too late to see. We do not find the shipping is any the less picturesque for being much entangled in the net-work of railroad lines (for
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Exeter is a large junction), or feel the sticks and spars more discordant with the smoke and steam of the loco- motives through which they pierce, than with the fine tracery of the trees farther away.
I was never an enemy of the confusion of the old and new in Europe when Italy was all Europe for me, and now in England it was distinctly a pleasure. It is some- thing we must accept, whether we like it or not, and we had better like it. The pride of the old custodian of the Exeter Guildhall in the coil of hot-water pipes heat- ing the ancient edifice was quite as acceptable as his pride in the thirteenth-century carvings of the oaken door and the oak-panelled walls, the portraits of the Princess Henrietta and General Monk, and the swords bestowed upon the faithful city by Edward IV. and Henry VII. I warmed my chilly hands at the familiar radiator while I thawed my fancy out to play about the medieval facts, and even fly to that uttermost antiquity when the Roman Prsetorium stood where the Guildhall stands now. Still, I was not so warm all over but that I was glad to shun the in-doors inclemency to which we must have returned in the hotel, and to prolong our stay in the milder air outside by going a drive beyond the city into the charming country. I do not say that the country was more charming than about Plymouth, but it had its pleasant difference, which was hardly a difference in the subtropical types of trees and shrubs. There were the same evergreens hedging and shading, too deeply shading, the stone cottages of the suburbs as we had seen nearer the sea; but when we were well out of the town, we had climbed to high, rolling fields, which looked warm even when the sun did not shine upon them; there were brown bare woods cresting the hills, and the hedge-rows ran bare and brown between
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the ploughed fields and the verdure of the pastures and the wheat. Behind and below us lay the town, cluster- ing about the cathedral which dwarfed its varying tops to the illusion of one level.
We had driven out by a handsome avenue called, for reasons I did not penetrate, Pennsylvania Road. Stately houses lined the way, and the wealth and consequence of the town had imaginably transferred themselves to Pennsylvania Road from the fine old crescent where we had perhaps rashly invested; though I shall never regret it. But we came back another way, winding round by the first English lane I had ever driven through. It was all, and more, than I could have asked of it in that quality, for it was so narrow between the tall hedges, which shut everything else from sight, that if we had met another vehicle, I do not know what would have happened. There was a breathless moment when I thought we were going to meet a market-cart, but luckily it turned into an open gateway before the actual encounter. There must be tacit provision for such a chance in the British Constitution, but it is not for a semi-alien like an American to say what it is.
We were apparently the first of our nation to reach Exeter that spring, for as we came in to lunch we heard an elderly cleric, who had the air of lunching every day at the Butt of Malmsey, say to his waiter, "The Amer- icans are coming early this year." We had reasons of our own for thinking we had come too early; probably in midsummer the old-established cold of the venerable hostelry is quite tolerable. If I had been absolutely new to the past, I could not have complained, even in March, of its reeling floors and staggering stairways and dim passages; these were as they should be, and I am not saying anything against the table. That again was
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better than it would have been at a hotel in an Amer- ican town of the size of Exeter, and it had a personal application at breakfast and luncheon that pleased and comforted; the table d'hote dinner was, as in other English inns, far preferable to the indiscriminate and wasteful superabundance for which we pay too much at our own. It is of the grates in the Butt of Malmsey that I complain, and I do not know that I should have cause to complain of these if I had not rashly ordered fire in mine. To give the grate time to become glowing, as grates always should be in old inns, I passed an hour or two in the reading-room talking with an elderly Irish gentleman who had come to that part of England with his wife to buy a place and settle down for the remnant of his days, after having spent the greater part of his life in South Africa. He could not praise South Africa enough. Everything flourished there and every one prospered; his family had grown up and he had left seven children settled there ; it was the most wonderful country under the sun; but the two years he had now passed in England were worth the whole thirty-five years that he had passed hi South Africa. I agreed with him in extolling the English country and climate, while I accepted all that he said of South Africa as true, and then I went up to my room.
With the aid of the two candles which I lighted I dis- covered the grate in the wall near the head of the bed, and on examining it closely I perceived that there was a fire in it. The grate would have held quite a double- handful of coal if carefully put on; the fire which seemed to be flickering so feebly had yet had the energy to draw all the warmth of the chamber up the chimney, and I stood shivering in the temperature of a subterranean dungeon. The place instantly gave evidence of being
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haunted, and the testimony of my nerves on this point was corroborated by the spectral play of the firelight on the ceiling, when I blew out my candles. In the middle of the night I woke to the sense of something creeping with a rustling noise over the floor. I rejected the hypothesis of my bed-curtain falling into place, though I remembered putting it back that I might have light to read myself drowsy. I knew at once that it was a ghost walking the night there, and walking hard. Sud- denly it ceased, and I knew why: it had been frozen out.
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fTlHE American who goes to England as part of the in- J_ vasion which we have lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phoenicians, and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there from the begin- ning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the Romans always cropping up and displac- ing the others. He likes well enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy, in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Brit- ain forms too great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him little hope of doing anything very sur- prising in a stay of four months. He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable medievalism before push- ing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of Lon- don, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their ves-
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tiges are less intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his resentment.
The very beginnings of Bath were Roman, for I sup- pose Prince Bladud is not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as the prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who went forth from his father's house a leper, and who observed the swine under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneuin or Pompeii, you can still have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the stone platforms, steps, and
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seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for convey- ing it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material, attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before him.
If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morn- ing we arrived, he might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like get- ting into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by your hand - baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class whom Lord Chester- field nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of their service. I have seen people give them twopence, for some slight office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something; but I never saw an English porter's face clouded by the angry resentment which instantly dark- ens the French porter's brow if he thinks himself under- paid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from the hope of
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gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first- class for short hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh, you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.
We had come third-class from Plymouth to Exeter in a superstition preached us before leaving home, that everybody now went third-class in England, that to go first-class was sinfully extravagant, and that to go sec- ond-class was to chance travelling with valets and lady's- maids. But in coming on from Exeter we thought we would risk this contamination, and, not realizing that the first-class rate was no greater than ours with the cost of a Pullman ticket added, I boldly "booked" second-class. But so far from finding ourselves in a compartment with valets and lady's-maids, in whose company I hope we should have avouched our quality by promptly perishing, we were quite alone, except for the presence of a lady who sat by the window knitting, knitting, knitting. She did not look up, but from time to time she looked out, till our interchanges of joy in the landscape seemed to win upon her, and then she looked round. Her glance at the member of our party whose sex seemed to warrant her in the overture was apparently reassuring. She asked if we would like the window closed, and we pretended that we would not, but she closed it, and then she arranged her needles in her knitting, and folded her knitting up, and put it firmly away in her bag, and began to talk. Evidently she liked talking, but evidently she liked listening, too, and she let us do our share of both in confirming the tacit treaty of amity between our nations. She spoke
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of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English, and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world, and we tried hard for some mutual ac- quaintance. Our failure did not matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from the window of her parting train.
It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be like that! I do not say that they act- ually were, and I do not say they were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that charm- ing incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read after- wards that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone, the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was in Pulteney Street, where the Aliens of "Northanger Abbey" had their apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest corner
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of which the dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen her- self had lived for two years in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the neighborhood.
Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach, itself from the rank of these handsome dwell- ings; and everything in our happy circumstance be- gan at once to breathe that air of gentle association which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early consultation with pos- sibly the most lenient of the medical authorities of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath, his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in the mean time he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at Carls- bad that everything which was not allowed was for- bidden! But he found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud's day few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running, or limping, with his fellow-invalids.
He had apparently not even brought an American
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accent with his malady, and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in British company, and that when his party went to their rooms they talked violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.
He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the pleasant people at that hotel, who seem- ed to regard their being thrown together as a circum- stance that justified their speaking to one another much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table cov- ered with the day's papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept at
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a distance in which they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly and in- telligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather, there was plenty of weather to talk about.
There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first be- gan to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly noth- ing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers', and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most 'passionately cabbage.
Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by an
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attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the "sweets" included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dol- lar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing ef- fect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer's comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was com- pleted by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was a
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formidable matter to get the head porter, in full uni- form, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.
When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary associa- tion; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beauti- ful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were soft- ly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one's self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no other- wise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a
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fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament. When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of pros- pects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one's self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high -set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system — I do not say universe — The King's Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adorn- ment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King's Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star is
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one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the un- stinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.
In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods' has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James's Square or Queen's Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one's self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfort- ably back to dinner at one's hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where
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the great Earl of Chatham had lived : he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil would never had laid down his arms — never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major Andre had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not sur- prised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major Andre. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.
Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter profes- sional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurk- ing suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to
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make oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buy- ing property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of unsurpassed love- liness.
But you cannot anywhere get away from the beauti- ful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and slop- ing streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediaeval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all assthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that per- pendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicate- ly feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to the
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bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive- tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, " Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church." Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope's failure to bless his divorces, the monas- tery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.
The failure of Oliver Cromwell's troopers to stable their horses in it is one of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be con- fronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously de- spoiled by Henry VIII. 's Thomas Cromwell. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller, which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guide- book, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.
"Sole issue of a matchless paire, Both of their state and virtues heyre;
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In graces great, in stature small, As full of spirit as voyd of gall; Cheerfully grave, bounteously close, Holy without vain-glorious showes; Happy, and yet from envy free, Learn'd without pride, witty, yet wise, Reader, this riddle read with mee, Here the good Lady Waller lies."
There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash — namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King's com- mand; and "How strange," the preacher reflected, "that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords." But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close- knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much less
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spiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man's body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to dis- obey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyality. But I could not offer this no- tion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with en- tire acceptance.
From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelm- ingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one
"Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,"
I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for a
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thousand years to come. Briton and Phoenician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American conscious- ness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, pass- ing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wil- fulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally ac- cepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americans
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achieve when they mean to be very good society in pub- lic places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were suf- ficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.
History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaugh- tered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth cantury, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and en- closed. Even then they were not so covered and en-
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closed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.
If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the Bath Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title of Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amus- ing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte's. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that "none but Abigails appeared in white aprons," as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not for-
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gotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding- hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a chal- lenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government* of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who at all periods have
*BATH.
Rules laid down by Richard Nash, Esq., M.C., put up by Authority in the Pump Room and observed at Bath Assemblies during his reign.
I.
"That a visit of ceremony at coming to Bath, and another going away, is all that is expected or desired by Ladies of Quality and Fashion— except Impertiuents.
II.
" That Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmens coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Inconveniences to Themselves and Others.
III.
"That Gentlemen of Fashion never appearing in a Morning before the Ladies in Gowns and Caps shew Breeding and Respect.
IV.
"That no Person take it ill that any one goes to another's Play or breakfast and not to theirs;— except Captious by Nature.
V.
"That no Gentleman give his Tickets for the Balls to any but Gentlewomen ;— N. B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.
VI.
"That Gentlemen crowding before the Ladies at the Ball, shew ill Manners; and that none do so for the Future; — except such as respect nobody but themselves.
VII.
"That no Gentleman or Lady take it ill that another Dances before them;— except such as have no Pretence to dance at all.
VIII.
"That the Elder Ladies and Children be contented with a Second Bench at the Ball, as being past, or not come to Perfection.
IX.
"That the younger Ladies take notice how many Eyes observe them;— This don't extend to the Have-at-all's.
X. "That all whisperers of Lies and Scandal be taken for their Authors.
XI.
" That all Repeaters, of such Lies and Scandal be shun'd by all Company; — except such as have been guilty of the same Crime.
"3T. B. — Several Men of no Character, Old Women and Young Ones of Questioned Reputation, are great Authors of Lies in this place, being of the sect of LEVELLERS."
Date 1707. 291
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invaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so largely into control of the Saeseneg, while seeming to merge and lose themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the rebellious material to a form of pro- priety if not of beauty. When he passed to his ac- count, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans of two rival candidates for the mastership met hi force, a free fight followed the attempt of a clergyman's wife to take precedence of a peer's daughter; "the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming, tore each other's gar- ments and headgear; the floor was strewn with frag- ments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each other." Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and read the Riot Act three times.
Of course matters could not go on so. Both the con- testants for the Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich), was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the Abbey. This to be sure
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was after his death, but the place was always of such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, "who had highly dis- tinguished himself in the British army during the American war," by no means disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane Austen's most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, his courage was apparently not equal to up- holding his general authority with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King "humbly requested," though in the matter of wearing hats "at the cotillions or concerts or dress balls," our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit to warn any lady who should "through inattention or any other motive infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly."
From Nash's time onward several Masters of Cere- monies were scandalized by people's giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics, and one of them took public notice of the evil. " Servants, hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to keep away, and to spare them- selves the mortification of being desired to withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they con- tinue to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their entrance."
Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies, society in Bath was not only very
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fast, which society never minds being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it was at the same time always very gay. When at last the re- spective nights of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained, the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms; it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms ; on Thursday with a Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Sat- urday with Public Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking, alter- nately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the fun was over by eleven o'clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modern party is beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls. Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.
It will be seen that with that "large acquaintance" which Mrs. Allen so handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very good
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time at Bath for a very little money, and every one ap- parently who had the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens, where all sorts of peo- ple went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and- six. Jane Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens, the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to because they were so con- venient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless grace which leaves nothing to be asked.
The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fish- ing, riding, and beer. " Her favorite haunt," says Mr. Tyte, "was a summer-house by the riverside in Har- rison's Walk, where she often was seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied under her chin." But she also liked to wear when on horseback "a hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat," which must have set off her red face and portly bulk to peculiar ad-
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vantage. Her particular friend was a milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include any comer from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for, as the sup- posed writer in the New Bath Guide records. But the custom has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need fear being honored and plundered through it.
It would be idle to catalogue the princes and prin- cesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all con- cerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or per- haps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical ob- servance, in a place they and she so much frequented.
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I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Cath- erine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. "Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down."
I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine's for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one's back without infringing anybody's privileges or pref- erences. Under the Pump Room were the old Ro- man Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide who
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started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.
I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw noth- ing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spec- tator in the days of the New Bath Guide, when —
" 'Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex All wading with gentlemen up to their necks."
The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are re- duced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic inci- dent, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was every- thing that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.
I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavish
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fidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird -song and bee -murmur, with the color of bloom in one's eyes and the oder of flowers in one's nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought prop- erty right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I re- peat that I hear.! people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so neces- sary in England, and must take humbler dwellings in- stead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher's meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwhole- some-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath wators were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of that
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bilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.
But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self -respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the con- sensus of feminine feeling has had force with the im- perial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.
The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt say- ing than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of fashion and infirmity,
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and pain, without evolving in the finest sort ( remacy of woman, who is first in either. The * tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which a soft afterglow over the literary decline of -is of the same effect in the gentle city where spectacle of life became penetrated with the f so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of lor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness • atelligence have remained to this time, when rt,le of life has so dwindled that the observed the observers, it would not be wonderful, ial part of what has been anywhere seems nt the scene, and to become the immortal ,,•* place. In a more literal sense Bath is ' ;he past, for it is the favorite resort of interesting ghosts, whose characters are ted and whose stories are recounted to ^ve so much merit, by people who have res almost from childhood. Some of *t of preferably appearing to strangers; "ew the line at Americans, he almond-trees were in bloom or o Bath, but I am sure they con- cur stay, and I found them stead- elsewhere for a month afterwards. y they should not, for they have way of ripening their nuts, and i,nd unfinal as the vines and fig- ^hich also blossom as cheerfully •carry it through the seasons in I never thought the almond in '& the peach, whose pale elder ence of the peach, I was always or over a garden wall. Where
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the walls were low enough to lean upon, as the^ times were round the vegetable gardens, it was p to pause and contemplate the infinite variety bage held in a green arrest by the mild winter destined to an ultimation beyond the powers almond, the grape and the fig. There seemed good many of these gardened spaces in the well as in the outskirts where more new hoi going up, in something of the long leisure of th tion. The famous Bath building-stone is much employed elsewhere that there may n' of it for home use, and that may account growth of the place; but if I lived there wish it to grow, and if I were King of Bat cession from Beau Nash, I would not suff- stone to be set upon the other within it place is large enough as it is, and I shoulc it restored to its former greatness. Th only too little decay in it, but there gratifying instance in the stately rr of our street, — falling or fallen to r style rapidly antedating the rough baths, in the effect of a sorrowf which I could not have rescued fr< out serious loss. The hollow wind and toppled chimneys, the weat pillars painted green with moul half betrayed, by the neglected wilding thicket had sprung up o by wanton paths in spite of w: ing by severely worded sign-be was, or why it was abandoned '. not know that I wished to lear it was and for what it was. I
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Sydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.
We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our souls with so sor- rowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and good, and as* if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to glance in over the threshold that Jane Austen's feet had lightly pressed, but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments, but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note with a longing, lingering look, that the house was very simple and plain, like the other houses near.
The literary tradition of the neighborhood is sup- ported in one of these by the presence of a famous nau- tical novelist, who has often shipwrecked and marooned me to my great satisfaction, on reefs and desolate isl- ands, or water-logged me in lonely seas. He lived even nearer the corner of Pulteney Street where we were in our hotel, and where we much imagined taking one of the many lodgings to let there, but never did. We looked into some, and found them probably not very different from what they were when the Aliens went
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into theirs with Catherine Morland. We decided that this was just across the way from our hotel, and that Mrs. Allen saw us from her window whenever we went or came. We were sure also that we met Lady Russell and Anne Elliot driving out of Persuasion through Pulteney Street, when Anne noticed Captain Went- worth coming towards them, and supposed from Lady Russell's stare, that she was equally moved by the vision, but found she was "looking after some window curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland were telling" her of as "being the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath."
Our hotel fronted not only on Pulteney Street, but also on Laura Place, a most genteel locality indeed where we knew as soon as Sir Walter Elliot that his cousin "Lady Dalrymple had taken a house for three months and would be living in style." I do not think we ever made out the house, and we were more engaged in observing the behavior of the wicked John Thorpe driving poor Catherine Morland through Laura Place after he had deceived her into thinking Henry Tilney, whom she had promised to walk with, had gone out of town, and whom she now saw passing with his sister. On a happier day, as the reader will remember, Catherine really went her walk with the Tilneys, and in sympathy and emulation we too climbed the steep slopes of " Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath." You now cross the railroad to reach it, and pass through neighbor- hoods that were probably pleasanter a hundred years ago; but the view of the town in the bottom of its bowl must be as fine as ever, though we found no hanging coppice from which to command it. Still, as our wont
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was, we bought several pieces of property that pleased us, and I still have a few suburban houses in that quar- ter which I could offer the reader at a sacrifice. The truth is that in spite of having the Tilneys and Cather- ine for company we did not like the Beechen Cliff as well as its rival acclivity, Sion Hill, which forms the opposite rim of Bath, and is not so arduous of approach. A lady who lived not quite at the top, but above the Bath chair line, declared it the third-best air in Eng- land, without indicating the first or second. The air was at least more active than we were in our climb, but with a driver who got down and helped his horses walk up with us, we could enjoy there one of the love- liest prospects in the world. The fineness of the air was attested probably by the growth of ivy, which was the richest I saw in England, where the ivy grows so richly in every place. It not only climbed all the trees on that down, and clothed their wintry nakedness with a foliage perpetually green, but it flung its shining mantles over the walls that shut in the mansions on the varying slopes, and densely aproned the laps of the little hollows in the lawns and woods. It had the air of feeling its life in every leaf, and of lustily reaching out for other conquests, like the true weed it is in Old England, and not the precious exotic which people make it believe it is in New England. I do not know that I ever lost the surprise of it in its real character; I only know that this surprise was greatest for me on those happy heights.
The modern hand-book which was guiding our steps about Bath advised us that if we would frequent Milsom Street about four o'clock we should find the tide of fashion flowing through it; but the torrent must have
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been very rapid indeed, for we always missed it, and were obliged to fill the rather empty channel with the gayety of the past. There are delightful shops every- where in Bath, and so many places to buy old family silver that it seems as if all the old families must have poured all their old silver into them, till you visit other parts of England, and find the same superabundance of second-hand plate everywhere. But it is in Milsom Street that most of the fine shops are, and I do not deny that you will see some drops of the tide of fashion clus- tered about their windows. Other drops have perco- lated to the tea-rooms, where at five o'clock there is a scene of dissipation around the innocent cups. But there was no reason why we should practise the generous self-deceit of our hand-book regarding the actual Milsom Street, when we had its former brilliancy to draw upon. Even in the time of Jane Austen's people it was no longer "residential," though it was not so wholly gone to shops as now. The most eligible lodgings were in it, and here General Tilney sojourned till he insisted on carrying Catherine off to Northanger Abbey with his children. "His lodgings were taken the very day after he left them, Catherine," said Mrs. Allen, afterwards. "But no wonder; Milsom Street, you know." Still, the finest shops prevailed there, then, and when Isa- bella Thorpe wished to punish the two young men who had been so impertinently admiring her, by fol- lowing them, she persuaded Catherine that she was tak- ing her to a shop-window in Milsom Street to see " the prettiest hat you can imagine . . . very like yours, with coquelicot ribbons instead of green." In Milsom Street, sweet Anne Elliot first meets Captain Wentworth after he comes to Bath, and he is much confused. But it is no wonder that so many things happen in or through
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Milsom Street in Bath fiction, for it leads directly, or as directly as a street in Bath can, from the New Assembly to the Old Assembly which were called, puzzingly enough for the after-comer, the Upper Rooms and the Lower Rooms, as if they were on different floors of the same building, instead of separated a quarter of a mile by a rise of ground. The street therefore led.," also to the Pump Room and to the divers parades and walks and gardens, and was of prime topographical importance, as well as literary interest.
We could not visit the Lower Rooms because they were burned down a great while ago, but for the sake of certain famous heroines, and many more dear girls unknown to fame, we went to the Upper Rooms, and found them most characteristically getting ready for the Easter Ball which the County Club was to give, and which promised to relume for one night at least the vanished splendors of Bath. The Ballroom was really noble, and there were sympathetic tea-rooms and cloak- rooms, and the celebrated octagonal room in the centre, where workmen were hustling the pretty and gallant ghosts of former dances with their sawing and hammer- ing, and painting and puttying, and measuring the walls for decorations. I do not know that I should have minded all that, though I hate to have the present dis- turbing the past so much as it must in England; but something very tragical happened to me at the Upper Rooms which branded that visit in my mind. A young fellow civilly detached himself from the other artisans and showed us through the place, and though we could have easily found the way ourselves, it seemed fit to return his civility in silver. Sixpence would have been almost too much, but in my pocket there was a sole coin that enlarged itself to my dismay to the meas-
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ure of a full moon. I appealed to my companion, but when did ever a woman have money unless she had just got it from a husband or father? The thought struck me that for once I might behave as shabbily as I should always like to do; but I had not the courage. Slowly, with inward sighs, I drew forth my hand and bestowed upon that most superfluous youth, for five minutes' disservice, a whole undivided half-crown, re- ceived his brief "Thankyesir," rendered as if he took half-crowns every day for that sort of thing, and tottered forth so bewildered that I quite forgot the emotion proper to the place where Catherine Morland went to her first ball, and Anne Elliot first met Captain Wentworth after coming to Bath. It was there that Catherine had to sit the whole evening through without dancing or speak- ing with a soul, and was only saved by overhearing two gentlemen speak of her as "a pretty girl. Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before, her humble vanity was contented; she . . . went to her chair in good humor with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention."
I should have liked immensely to look on at the County Ball which was to assemble all the quality of the neighborhood on something like the old terms, and I heard with joy the story of ten gay youths who re- turned from one of the last balls in Bath chairs, drawn through the gray dawn in Milsom Street by as many mettlesome chairmen. Only when one has studied the Bath chair on its own ground, and seen the sort of gloomy veteran who pulls it, commonly with a yet gloomier old lady darkling under its low buggy-top, can one realize the wild fun of such an adventure. It might not always be safe, for the chairman sometimes
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balks, and in case of sharp acclivities altogether refuses to go on, as I have already told.
In paying our duty to the literary memories of the town we did not fail to visit the church of St. Swithin, in the shadow of which Fanny Burney lies buried with the gentle exile who made her Madame d'Arblay, and a very happy wife, after the glory of Evelina and Cecilia began to be lost a little in the less merited success of Camilla and The Wanderer. The gate was locked and we were obliged to come away without getting into the church -yard, but we saw "about where" one of the great mothers of English fiction lay; and the pew- opener, found for us with some difficulty and delay by an interested neighbor, let us into the church, and there we revered the tablets of the kindly pair. They were on the wall of the gallery, and I thought they might have been nearer together, but hers was very fitly inscribed; and one could stand before it, and in- dulge a pensive mood in thought of the brilliant girl's first novel, which set the London world wild and kept Dr. Johnson up all night, mixed with fit reflections on her father's ambition in urging her into the service of the "sweet Queen1' Charlotte, where she was sum- moned with a bell like a waiting-maid, and the fire of her young genius was quenched.
If one would have a merrier memory of literary Bath, let him go visit the house, if he can find it, of the Rever- end Dr. Wilson, in Alfred Street, where the famous Mrs. Macaulay, the first English historian of her name, pre- sided as a species of tenth muse, and received the homage of whatever was academic in the rheumatic culture of Bath. She was apparently the idol of the heart as well as the head (it was thought to have been partially turned) of the good man whose permanent
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guest she was. He put up a marble statue to her as History in his London parish church, and had a vault made near it to receive her remains when she should have done with them. But before this happened, His- tory fell in love with Romance in the person of a young man many years her junior, and on their marriage the reverend doctor irately removed her statue from the chancel of St. Stephen's, and sold her vault for the use of some less lively body. Her new husband was the brother of a Dr. Graham who had formerly travelled with Lord Nelson's beautiful Lady Hamilton and ex- hibited her "reclining on a celestial bed" as the Goddess of Health and Beauty. On the night of Mrs. Macaulay's birthday the physician presented her with an address in which he claimed, by virtue of his mud baths, "the supreme blessedness of removing under God, the com- plicated and obstinate maladies your fair and very delicate frame was afflicted with." The company danced, played, and talked, and went out to a supper of " sylla- bubs, jellies, creams, ices, wine-cakes, and a variety of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples." The literary celebrities who visited Bath, or sojourned, or lived there were not to be outnumbered except in London alone, if in fact the political capital exceeded in them. Mr. Tyte mentions among others De Foe, who stopped at Bath in collecting materials for his Tour of Great Britain ; and who met Alexander Selkirk there, and probably imagined Robinson Crusoe from him on the spot. Richard Steele came and wrote about Bath in the Spectator. Gay, Pope and Congreve, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe came and went; and Sheridan dwelt there in his father's house, and met the beautiful Miss Linley, woed, won, went off to Paris with her and wedded her, and returned
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to fight two duels in defence of her honor. Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell resorted to the waters; Lord Chesterfield wrote some of his letters from a place where worldly politeness might be so well studied; Walpole some of his where gossip so abounded. De Quincey was a school-boy in Bath; Sou they spent his childhood there, and Coleridge preached there, as he did in many other Unitarian pulpits in England; Cowper wrote his " Verses on finding the Heel of a Shoe at Bath" after coming to see his cousin, Lady Hesketh, there; Burke met his wife there, and so did Beckford, who wrote Vathek, meet his. Christopher Anstey, the author of that humorous, that scandalous, that amus- ing satire, the New Bath Guide, lived most of his life in the city he delighted to laugh at.
The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most attracts, after the names of Jane Aus- ten and Fanny Burney, is the name of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young, and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wrote The Pickwick Papers he was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous drollery was not just the quali- fication for dealing with the pathetic absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick's money; and he had already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the description of Mr. Pickwick's introduction to the Master of the Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq. The exag-
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gerated caricature preserves some traits of the M.C.'s, his illustrious predecessors; and perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens's could best render the personal effect of a beau of the period. He "was a charming young man of not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short, broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand . . . and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiffest; his wig of the glossiest, black- est and curliest. . . . His features were contracted into a perpetual smile. 'Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to Ba-ath. . . . Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick? . . . Never in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-mark- able!' "
This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened, and one sighs amid the horse-play for '"'the touch of a vanished hand," like Jane Austen's, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just op- posite the Pump Room, but it was while living in " the upper portion of the Royal Crescent/' that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler, whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return from a ball. The elderly reader will prob- ably remember better than the younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the mockeries of a party coming into the
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THE GUINEA-PIG MAN
CERT A
gerati his ill
handling could best render the
effect of He "was a
young m. than fifty, dressed in a
bright-bl ! nt buttons, black trousers,
and C of highly polished boots,
A go* *•• : from his neck by a short,
! snuff-box was lightly clasped
in hi> la pliant ebony cane
of the very
whit; wig of the glossiest, black*
I into
nth. . . .
-3HT XT
. . Never in a wag. Not
not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-mark- able!' "
This might have happened, bu< seem as
if it had happened, and o torse-play
for " the touch of -I," like Jane Austen's,
to give delii to the picture. The
Pickwick Club first put up at the lort, just op-
posite the Pump Room, but i- living in "the
of the Roy. that Mr. Winkle
-vvith Mrs. Dowler, whose ..T promising to sit up for • elderly reader will prob- r than the younger how Mr. Winkle in his bed-gown and slippers to let hen had the door blown to behind him, lo plunge into her sedan-chair to hide (lie mockeries of a party coming •
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Crescent; how he fled to escape her infuriated husband, and in Bristol found Mr. Dowler, who had also fled from Bath to escape Mr. Winkle and the consequences of his own violent threats. It was at the house of the Master of Ceremonies in Queen's Square that "a select company of Bath footmen" entertained Sam Weller at a "friendly swarry consisting of a boiled leg of mutton and the usual trimmings," but I am unable to give the number where Sam's note of invitation instructed him to ring at the "airy bell."
In fact, on going back to the Bath episode of the Pickwick Papers, one finds so much make-believe re- quired of him that the remembrance of one's earlier delight in it is a burden and a hindrance rather than a help. You could get on better with it if you were reading it for the first time, and even then it would not seem very like what one probably saw. You would be sensible of the elemental facts, but in the picture they are all jarred out of semblance to life. The effect is quite that of a Cruikshank illustration, abounding in impossible grotesqueness, yet related here and there to reality by an action, an expression, a figure. It is screaming farce, or it is shrieking melodrama; the mirror is held up to nature, but nature makes a face hi it. Nevertheless, on an earlier visit to England, I had once seen a water-side character getting into a Thames steam- boat who seemed to me exactly like a character of Dickens; and in Bath I used often to meet a little, queer block of a man, whose nationality I could not make out, but every inch of whose five feet was full of the suggestion of Dickens. His face, topped by a frowzy cap, was twisted in a sort of fixed grin, and his eyes looked different ways, perhaps to prevent any attempt of mine to escape him. He carried at his side a small
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wicker-box which he kept his hand on; and as he drew near and halted, I heard a series of plaintive squeaks coming from it. "Make you perform the guinea-pig?" he always asked, and before I could answer, he dragged a remonstrating guinea-pig from its warm shelter, and stretched it on the cage, holding it down with both hands. "Johnny die queek!" he commanded, and lifted his hands for the instant in which Johnny was motionlessly gathering his forces for resuscitation. Then he called exultantly, "Bobby's coming!" and before the police were upon him, Johnny was hustled back into his cosy box, woefully murmuring of his hard- ship to its comfort; and the queer little man smiled his triumph in every direction. The sight of this brief drama always cost me a penny; perhaps I could have had it for less; but I did not think a penny was too much.
IV
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
rflHERE were so many pleasing places within easy JL reach of Bath that it was hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to break the charm, to Bradford-on- Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathe- dral, and felt that the chapel had a prior claim. Pos- sibly, spoiled as we were by the accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there is really a good deal of.
The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the fellow-sub-
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jects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle's battle with the Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very small and very .rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by the lapse of centuries. Without, the grass grew close to its foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after entering, one must wait a moment before attempt- ing to move about in the cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English con- tinuity on which political and religious changes vainly
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break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years before : the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations dwell- ing in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, many-gabled, leaden-sashed, dia- mond-paned picturesqueness that I have never seen sur- passed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, and was damp with the immemorial dampness that in- undated us from the open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must be the lot of youth in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among the joints of age in the very beds and chim- ney-corners! Better, it sometimes seemed, the plainest prose ever devised by a Yankee carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such dwellings.
But there were actually some wooden houses in Brad- ford, or partially wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times, when, as I have noted, the English seemed to build with an instinct for comfort earlier unknown and later lost; otherwise Bradford was of stone, stony. It
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Studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising manufacturer in- vited to the place centuries before, and whose skill es- tablished its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there were moments when it might have looked Italian.
Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guard- house which had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweet- sis
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
ness in a minister of the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke ?
The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that char- acter, but when he put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman's boots in honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us out on the other side.
His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered houses which were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their horror in delicate French and become abattoirs; but as that street in Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we could have wished (or the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within, but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort of others. The house was that Kingston House, world- famous for having been reproduced in papier-mache at
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the last Universal Exposition in Paris, which a wealthy cloth - manufacturer had had built for himself about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was touched with Italian feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England), faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur of a mill some- where beyond the Avon.
There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy farmer, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee- deep in the manure, with the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get milk from in America, but if we could have that
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old cow-barn, without the cows, at home, I think we might gainfully exchange our neatest and whoiesomest dairy for it. The rich superabundance of the past in England is what always strikes one, and the piety with which the past is preserved and restored promises more and more of antiquity. I am sure the Barton Barn at Bradford is only waiting for some public-spirited mag- nate who will yet drive the untidy kine from its shelter, clean up, and sod and plant its yard, and with the help of some reverent architect renew it in the image of its prime, and stock it as a museum with the various kinds of tithes which in the ages of faith the neighboring churls used to pay into it for the comfort of the clergy here, and the good of their own souls hereafter.
When we got well away from the tithe-barn we felt the need of tea, and we walked back from the station where our large boy, or little man, had put us down, to the shop of a green-grocer, which is probably the most twentieth-century building in Bradford. It is altogether of wood, and behind the shop, where the vegetables vaunted themselves in all the variety of cabbage, there is a clean little room, with the walls and roof sheathed in matched and painted pine. In this cheerful place, two rustics, a man and a boy, were drinking tea at the only table, but at our coming they politely choked down all the tea that was in their cups, and in spite of our entreaties hurried out with their cheeks bulged by what was left of their bread and butter. It was too bad, we mur- mured, but our hostess maintained that her late guests had really done, and she welcomed us with a hospitality rendered precious by her dusting off the chairs for us with her apron: I do not know that I had ever had that done for me before, and it seemed very romantic, and very English. The tea and butter were English too, and
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excellent, as they almost unfailingly are in England, no matter how poor the place where they are supplied, and the bread was no worse than usual. In a morsel of gar- den under the window some gillyflowers were in bloom, and when we expressed our surprise, the kind wom- an went out and gathered some for us: they bloomed there pretty well all the winter, she said; but let not this give the fond reader too glowing an idea of the winter's warmth in the West of England. It only proves how sturdy the English flowers are, and how much raw cold they can stand without turning a petal. Before our train went, we had time to go a longish walk, which we took through some pleasant, rather new, streets of small houses, each with its gardened front -yard hedged about it with holly or laurel, and looking a good, dull, peaceful home. It may really have been neither, and life may have been as wild, and bad, and fascinating in those streets as in the streets' of any American town of the same population as Bradford. There was everything in the charming old place to make life easy; good shops of all kinds, abundant provisions, stores, and not too many licensed victuallers, mostly women, privileged to sell wine and spirits. Yet, as the twilight began to fall, Bradford seemed very lonely, and we thought with terror, what if we should miss our train back to Bath! We got to the station, however, in time to cower half an hour over a grate in which the Company had munificently had a fire early in the day; and to correct by closer observation of an elderly pair an error which had flattered our national pride at the time of our arrival. In hurrying away to get the only fly at the station the lady had then fallen down and the gentleman had kept on, leaving her to pick herself up as she could, while he secured the fly. Perhaps he had
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not noticed her falling, but we chose to think the inci- dent very characteristically middle - class English; for all we knew it might be a betrayal of the way all the English treated their wives. Now the same couple ar- rived to take the train with us for Bath, and we heard them censuring its retard in accents unmistakably Amer- ican! We fell from our superiority to our English half- brothers instantly; and I think the little experience was useful in confirming me in the resolution throughout my English travels to practise that slowness in sentencing and executing offenders against one's native ideals and standards which has always been the conspicuous orna- ment of English travellers among ourselves.
The day that we drove out from Bath to a certain charming old house which I wish I could impart my sense of, but which I will at once own the object of a fond despair, was apparently warm and bright, but was really dim and cold. That is, the warmth and bright- ness were superficial, while the cold and dimness were structural. The fields on either side of the road were mostly level, though here and there they dipped or rose, delicately green in their diaphanous garment of winter wheat, or more substantially clad in the grass which the winter's cold had not been great enough to embrown. Here and there were spaces of woodland, withdrawn rather afar from our course, except where the trees of an avenue led up from the highway to some unseen mansion. To complete the impression you must always, under the tender blue sky, thickly archipelagoed with whity- brown clouds, have rooks sailing and dreamily scolding, except where they wake into a loud clamor among the leafless tops surrounding some infrequent roof. There are flights of starlings suddenly winging from the pastures, where the cows with their untidily
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caked and clotted hides are grazing, and the sheep are idling over the chopped turnips, and the young lambs are shivering with plaintive cries. Amid their lamen- tations the singing of birds makes itself heard; the singing of larks, or the singing of robins, Heaven knows which, but always angelically sweet. The bare hedges cross and recross the fields, and follow the hard, smooth road in lines unbroken save near some village of gray walls and red roofs, topped by an ancient church. In the background, over a stretch of embankment or along the side of a low hill, sweeps a swift train of little Eng- lish cars, with a soft whirring sound, as unlike the giant roar of one of our expresses as it is unlike the harsh clatter of a French rapide. The white plumes of steam stretch after it in vain; break, and float thinner and thinner over the track behind.
There were, except in the villages, very few houses; and we met even fewer vehicles. There was one family carriage, with the family in it, and a sort of tranter's wagon somewhere out of Hardy's enchanted pages, with a friendly company of neighbors going to Bath inside it. At one exciting moment there was a lady in a Bath chair driving a donkey violently along the side of the road. A man slashing and wattling the lines of hedge, or trimming the turf beside the foot-path, left his place in literature, and came to life as the hedger and ditcher we had always read of. Beneath the hedges here and there very "rathe primroses" peered out intrepidly, like venturesome live things poising between further advance and retreat. The road was admirable, but it seemed strange that so few people used it. The order in which it was kept was certainly worthy of constant travel, and we noted that from point to point there was a walled space beside it for the storage of road-mending material.
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At home we should dump the broken stone in the gutter near the place that needed mending, or on the face of the highway, but in England, where everything is so static, and the unhurried dynamic activities are from everlasting to everlasting, a place is specially provided for broken stone, and the broken stone is kept there.
The drive from Bath to our destination was twelve miles, and the friend who was to be our host for the day had come as far on his wheel to ask us. It was the first of many surprises in the continued use of the bicycle which were destined to confound strangers from a land whose entire population seemed to go bicycle- mad a few years ago, and where now they are so wholly recovered that the wheel is almost as obsolete as the russet shoe. As both the wheel and the russet shoe are excellent things in their way, though no American could now wear the one or use the other without something like social suicide, the English continue to employ them with great comfort and entire self-respect. They fail so wholly to understand why either should have gone out with us that one becomes rather ashamed to explain that it was for the same reason that they came in, merely because everybody had them.
Our friend had given us explicit directions for our journey, and it was well that he did so, for we had two turnings to take on that lonely road, and there were few passers whom we could ask our way. We really made the driver ask it, and he did not like to do it, for he felt, as we did, that he ought to know it. I am afraid he was not a very active intelligence, and I doubt if he had ever before been required to say what so many birds and flowers were. I think he named most of them at random, and when it came at last to a very common white flower, he boldly said that he
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had forgotten what it was. As we drew near the end of our journey he grew more anxiously complicated in such knowledge of our destination as he acquired. But he triumphed finally in the successive parleys held to determine the site of a house which had been in its place seven or eight hundred years, and might, in that time have ceased to be a matter of doubt even among the farther neighbors. It was with pride on his part and pleasure on ours that suddenly and most unex- pectedly, when within a few yards of it, he divined the true way, and drove into the court-yard of what had at times been the dower-house, where we were to find our host and guide to the greater mansion.
As this house is a type of many old dower-houses I will be so intimate as to say that you enter it from the level of the ground outside, such a thing as under-pin- ning to lift the floor from the earth and to make an air- space below being still vaguely known in England, and in former times apparently unheard of. But when once within you are aware of a charm which keeps such houses inviolate in the form of the past; and this one was warmed for us by a hospitality which refined itself down to the detail of a black cat basking before the grate: a black cat that promptly demanded milk after our luncheon, but politely waited to be asked to the saucer when it was brought. From the long room which looked so much a study that I will not call it differently, the windows opened on the shrubberies and lawns and gardens that surround such houses in fiction, and keep them so visionary to the comer who has known them nowhere else that it would be easy to transgress the bounds a guest must set himself, and speak as freely of the people he met there as if they were persons in a pleasant book. Two of them, kindred of the manor-
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house and of the great house near, had come from three or four miles away on their wheels. Our host himself, the youngest son of the great house, was a painter, by passion as well as by profession, and a reviewer of books on art, such as plentifully bestrewed his table and for- bade us to think of the place in the ordinary terms as a drawing-room. It seemed to me characteristic of the convenient insular distances that here, far in the West, almost on the Welsh border, he should be doing this work for a great London periodical, in as direct touch with the metropolis as if he dwelt hard by the Park, and could walk in fifteen minutes to any latest exhibition of pictures.
When he took us after luncheon almost as long a walk to his studio, I fancied that I was feeling England under my feet as I had not before. We passed through a gray hamlet of ten or a dozen stone cottages, where, behind or above their dooryard hedges, they had gradually in the long ages clustered near the great house, and a little cottage girl, who was like a verse of Wordsworth, met us, and bidding us good-day, surprised us by dropping a courtesy. It surprised even our friends, who spoke of it as if it were almost the last courtesy dropped in Eng- land, and made me wish I could pick it up, and put it in my note-book, to grace some such poor page as this: so pretty was it, so shy, so dear, with such a dip of the suddenly weakening little knees.
We were then on our way to see first the small gray church which had been in its place among the ancient graves from some such hoary eld as English churches dream of in like places all over the land, and make our very faith seem so recent a thing. It was in a manner the family chapel, but it was also the spiritual home of the lowlier lives of village and farm, and was shared
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with them in the reciprocal kindness common in that English world of enduring ties. There for ages the par- ish folk had all been christened, and all married, and all buried, and there in due time they had been or would be forgotten. The edifice was kept in fit repair by the joint piety of rich and poor, with the lion's share of the expense rightfully falling to the rich, as in such cases it always does in England; and within and without the church the affection of the central family had made itself felt and seen, since the Christian symbols were first rudely graven in the stone of the square church-tower. The name of the family always dwelling in that stately old house whither we were next going had not always been the same, but its nature and its spirit had been the same. An enlightened race would naturally favor the humane* side in all times, and the family were Parlia- mentarian at the time England shook off the Stuart tyranny, and revolutionist when she finally ridded her- self of her faithless Jameses and Charleses. In the archives of the house there are records of the hopes vainly cherished by a son of it who was then in New York, that our own revolt against the Georgian oppres- sion might be composed to some peaceful solution of the quarrel. It was not his fault that this hope was from the first moment too late, but it must be one of his virtues in American eyes that he saw from the begin- ning the hopelessness of any accommodation without a full concession of the principles for which the colonies contended. In the negotiation of the treaty at Versailles in 1783 he loyally did his utmost for his country against ours at every point of issue, and especially where the exiled American royalists were concerned. Our own commissioners feared while they respected him, and John Adams wrote of him in his diary, "He pushes and
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presses every point as far as it can possibly go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit."
This was the first baronet of his line, but the real dignity and honor of the house has been that of a race of scholars and thinkers. Their public spirit has been of the rarer sort which would find itself most at home in the literary association of the place, and it has come to literary expression in a book of singular charm. In the gentle wisdom of sympathies which can be universal without transcending English conditions, the Talk at a Country House, as the book modestly calls itself, strays to topics of poetry, and politics, and eco- nomics, and religion, yet keeps its allegiance to the old house we were about to see as a central motif. It was our first English country house, but I do not think that its claim on our interest was exaggerated by its novelty, and I would willingly chance finding its charm as potent again, if I might take my way to it as before. We came from the old church now by the high-road, now through fringes of woodland, and now over shoulders of past- urage, where the lesser celandine delicately bloomed, and the primrose started from the grass, till at last we emerged from under the sheltering boughs of the tall elms that screened the house from our approach. There was a brook that fell noisily over our way, and that we crossed on a rustic bridge, and there must have been a drive to the house, but I suppose we did not follow it. Our day of March had grown gray as it had grown old, and we had not the light of a day in June, such as favored an imaginary visitor in Talk at a Country House, but we saw the place quite so much as he did that his words will be better than any of my own in picturing it.
"The air was resonant with rooks as they filled the sky with the circles in which they wheeled to and fro,
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disappearing in the distance to appear again, and so gradually reach their roosting trees. ... I might call them a coruscation of rooks. ... On my left I saw . . . the old battlemented wall, and a succession of gables on either side . . . and one marked by a cross which I knew must be the chapel. . . . The old, battlemented wall had a flora of its own: ferns, crimson valerian, snap-dragons, and brier-roses . . . and an ash and a yew growing on the battlements where they had been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I passed through an archway of the road, the whole house came in view. It was not a castle nor a palace, but it might be called a real though small record of what men had been doing there from the time of the Doomsday Book to our
own."
As we grew more acquainted with it, we realized that at the front it was a building low for its length, rising gray on terraces that dropped from its level in green, green turf. Some of the long windows opened down to the grass, with which the ground floor was even. Above rose the Elizabethan, earlier Tudor, and Plantag- enet of the main building, the wings, and the tower of the keep. The rear of the house was enclosed by a wall of Edward II. 7s time, and beyond this was a wood of ekns, tufted with the nests of that eternal chorus of coruscating rooks. At first we noticed their multitudi- nous voices, but in a little while they lost all severalty of sound, like waves breaking on the shore, and I fancied one being so lulled by them that one would miss them when out of hearing, and the sense would ache for them in the less soothing silence.
The family was away from home, and there were no reserves in the house, left in the charge of the gardener, as there must have been if it were occupied. But I do
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not hope to reproduce my impressions of it. I can only say that a sense of intellectual refinement and of liberal thought was what qualified for me such state as charac- terized the place. The whole structure within as well as without was a record of successive temperaments as well as successive times. Each occupant had built up or pulled down after his fancy, but the changes had left a certain physiognomy unchanged, as the mixture of different strains in the blood still leaves a family look pure. The house, for all its stateliness, was not too proud for domesticity; its grandeur was never so vast that the home circle would be lost in it. The portraits on the walls were sometimes those of people enlarged to history in their lives, but these seemed to keep with the rest their allegiance to a common life. The great Bess of Hardwicke, the "building Bess," whose architectural impulses effected themselves in so many parts of Eng- land, had married into the line and then married out of it (to become, as Countess of Shrewsbury, one of the last jailers of Mary Queen of Scots), and she had left her touch as well as her face on its walls, but she is not a more strenuous memory in it than a certain unstoried dowager. She, when her son died, took half the house and left half to her daughter-in-law, whom she built off from herself by a partition carried straight through the mansion to the garden wall, with a separate gate for each.
In her portrait she looks all this and more; and a whole pathetic romance lives in the looks of that lady of the first Charles's time who wears a ring pendent from her neck, and a true-lovers' knot embroidered on the bodice over her heart, and who died unwedded. There were other legends enough; and where the pict- ures asserted nothing but lineage they were still very
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interesting. They were of people who had a life in common with the house, wives and mothers and daugh- ters, sons and husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an Eng- lish house must feel. It would be easy to overestimate the feeling, but in view of it I began to understand the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it inalienably their common home, though only the first-born son may dwell in it. If there were no law to transmit it to the eldest brother they might well in their passion for it be a law unto themselves at any sacrifice and put it in his hands to have and hold for them all.
In my own country I had known too much graceless private ownership to care to offer the consecrated tenure of such an ancestral home the violence of unfriendly opinions of primogeniture. But if I had been minded to do so, I am not sure that this house and all its dead and living would not have heard me at least tolerantly. In England, with the rigid social and civic conformity, there has always been ample play for personal character; perhaps without this the inflexible conditions would be insufferable, and all sorts of explosions would occur. With full liberty to indulge his whim a man does not so much mind being on this level or that, or on which side of the social barrier he finds himself. But it is not his whim only that he may freely indulge: he may have
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his way in saying the thing he thinks, and the more frankly he says it the better he is liked, even when the thing is disliked. These are the conditions, implicit in everything, by which the status, elsewhere apparently so shaky, holds itself so firmly on its legs. They recon- cile to its contradictions those who suffer as well as those who enjoy, and dimly, dumbly, the dweller in the cot- tage is aware that his rheumatism is of one uric acid with the gout of the dweller in the great house. Every such mansion is the centre of the evenly distributed civilization which he shares, and makes each part of England as tame, and keeps it as wild, as any other. He knows that hut and hall must stand or fall together, for the present, at least; and where is it that there is any longer a future?
It seems strange to us New-Worldlings, after all the affirmation of history and fiction, to find certain facts of feudalism (mostly the kindlier facts) forming part of the status in England as they form no part of it with us. It was only upon reflection that I perceived how feudal this great house was in its relation to the lesser homes about it through many tacit ties of responsibility and allegiance. From eldest son to eldest son it had been in the family always, but it had descended with obligations which no eldest son could safely deny any more than he could refuse the privileges it conferred. To what gentlest effect the sense of both would come, the reader can best learn from the book which I have already named. This, when I had read it, had the curious retroactive power of establishing the author in a hospitable perpetuity in the place bereft of him, so that it now seems as if he had been chief of those who took leave of us that pale late afternoon of March, and warned us of the chill mists which shrouded us back
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to Bath. As we drove along between the meadows where the light was failing and the lambs plaintively called through the gloaming, we said how delightful it had all been, how perfectly, how satisfyingly, English. We tried again to realize the sentiment which, as well as the law, keeps such places in England in the ordered descent, and renders it part of the family faith and honor that the ancestral house should always be the home of its head. I think we failed because we con- ceived of the fact too objectively, and imagined con- scious a thing that tradition has made part of the Eng- lish nature, so that the younger brother acquiesces as subjectively in the elder brother's primacy as the elder brother himself, for the family's sake. We fancied that in their order one class yielded to another without grudg- ing and without grasping, and that this, which fills England with picturesqueness and drama, was the secret of England. In the end we were not so sure. We were not sure even of our day's experience; it was like some- thing we had read rather than lived; and in this final unreality, I prefer to shirk the assertion of a different ideal, which all the same I devoutly hold.
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EVEN the local guide-book, which is necessarily optimistic, owns that the railroad service between Bath and Wells leaves something to be desired. The distance is twenty miles, and you can make it by the Great Western in something over two hours, but if you are pressed for time, the Somerset and Dorset line will carry you in two. As we were nationally in a hurry, though personally we had time to spare, we went and came by this line, mostly in a sort of vague rain, which favored the blossoming of the primroses along the rail- road bank. Not that any part of the way needed rain; great stretches of the country lay soaking in the rain- fall of the year before, which had not had sun enough to diminish its depth or breadth. In fact, on the eve of the sunniest and loveliest summer which perhaps Eng- land ever saw, the whole West looked in March as if wringing it out and hanging it up to dry in a steam- laundry could alone get the wet out of it. The water lay in wide expanses in the meadows, the plethoric streams swam chokeful; in the ditches men were at work with short scythes cutting the rank weeds out to give the flood a little course, but where it was to run was a question which did not answer itself.
We were in a third-class compartment, and we had the advantage of the simple life getting in and out of a
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train that seemed to stop oftener than it started. Our ever-changing fellow-passengers were mostly mothers of large little families : babies in arms, and babies slightly bigger, sisters and brothers pendent at arm's -length from the mother-hands, all with flaring blue eyes and flaming red cheeks, and flaxen hair and mild, sweet faces. Everybody was good, and helped these helpless families to mount and dismount; the kindly porters came and went with their impracticable bundles, and the passengers handed the brothers and sisters after the baby-burdened mother, or took them from her so that she might stumble into the carriage without falling upon her detached offspring. They were beautifully polite in word and deed, so that it was a consolation to hear and see them.
Shortly after our journey began, our train was appar- ently run down by an old man and his granddaughter who got in blown and panting from their chase of half a mile before overtaking us. They were of the thin blond type of some English country folks, with a milder color in their cheeks than usual, and between his age and her youth they had about a third of the natural allowance of teeth. Agriculture is apparently nowhere favorable to the preservation of teeth; the rustic theory is that when a tooth offends one should pluck it out; but in England they never expect to replace it, while with us they pluck out all the others and replace them with new ones from the dentist's, so that when you see good teeth in a country mouth you know where they come from. Their want of teeth did not prevent the old man and the little girl from beginning to eat as soon as they could get their breath. They were going on a visit to her aunt, it seemed, and she was provisioned against the chances of famine in the hour's journey by
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a plentiful supply of oranges and apples and cakes in a net bag. "Us 'ad a 'ard chase, didn't us?" the old man asked her, with a sociable glance round the place. The little girl nodded with her mouth full, while her fingers explored the bag for more cakes to fill it when it should be empty, and the old man leaned tenderly towards her and suggested, "Couldn't your little 'and find something for me, too?" She drew forth an orange and a cake and gave them to him. Then they munched on, he garrulously, she silently; with what teeth they had between them they must have managed to masticate their food, and there is every probability that they reached their journey's end without famishing.
We had only two changes to make in our twenty miles, and as we were on the swift train that made the distance in two hours, we did not mind some delay at each change. It was just lunch-time when we reached Wells, and had ourselves driven in the hotel omnibus, a tremendously rackety vehicle, to The Swan. This bird's plumage was much disarranged by some sort of Easter preparations, and there were workmen taking down and hanging up decorations. But there was quiet in the coffee-room, where over a cold, cold, luncheon we shivered in sympathy with the icy gloom of the base- ment entrance of the inn, where an office-lady darkled behind her office-window, apparently in winter-long ques- tion whether she would be warmer with it shut or open. It was an inn of the old type, now happily obsolescent, which if it cannot smell directly of a stable-yard, does what it can by smelling of the stable-boy in its doorway. We had not, however, come to Wells for the Swan, but for the cathedral, and as we could look out at its loveli- ness from the window where we ate lunch, we had really nothing to complain of. We had indeed something
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specially to be glad of, for we could there get our first glimpse of the cathedral through the Dean's Eye, or if this is not quite honest, from over the Dean's Eyebrow, so to call the top of the fifteenth-century gate, which commands the finest approach to the cathedral. When you have passed through the Dean's Eye it may not be quite as if you had passed through the Needle's Eye; but if I had been an American millionaire who had my doubts of the way I was going I might have fancied my- self achieving a feat even more difficult than the camel's, and to be entering the Kingdom as I crossed the lawn inside the gate, and moved in my rapture towards the divine edifice. All the English cathedrals are beautiful, but among those which are most beautiful the Wells cathedral is next to the cathedral of Ely, in my memory. I am not speaking of stateliness or grandeur, but of that more refined and exquisite something which makes a supreme appeal in, say, the Church of St. Mark's at Venice. I came away from the Wells cathedral saying to myself that there was a loveliness in it for which there was no word but feminine; and if this conveys any notion to the reader's mind, I shall be glad to leave him for the rest to any pictures of it he can find.
Of course we followed the verger through it in the usual way, but I could not make any one follow me with as much profit. It had its quaint details, and its grotesque details, from the bursting fun of the ages of faith, as well as its expressions of simple reverence, all blending to the sort of tender beauty I have tried to intimate, and it had its great wonder of an in- verted arch, through which one looked at its glories as with one's head held upside down. I do not know but the 1325 clock of Peter Lightfoot, monk of Glas- tonbury, is as great a wonder as the inverted arch.
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We were so fortunate as to be present when it struck the hour, and so we saw the four knights on horseback go riding round, and the seated man kick two small bells with his heels, as he has been doing every fifteen minutes for nigh six hundred years. For the ordinary lay-mind on its travels, I suppose, this active personage is one of the great attractions of the cathedral next after the toothache-man in one of the capitals who pulls his mouth open to show his aching tooth. He has been much photographed, of course, but he is to be seen in situ just above that bishop's tomb which is sovereign, through the bishop's merits, for the toothache. The verger, who told us this, left us to suppose that the tomb had been too difficult of application to the tooth of the sufferer above, and that this was why he was still appealing to the public sympathy.
We offered him a mute condolence after we had sated ourselves with the beauty of the most beautiful chap- ter-house in the world, ascending and descending by the wide, foot-worn, curving sweep of the unique stair- way, and then walking through into the Vicar's Close, and the two rows of Singers' Houses, like cottages in a particularly successful stage perspective. As we passed one of these histrionic habitations, each with its lifelike dooryard and its practicable gate, three of the clerical students, who have an immemorial right to lodge with the singers, came out gayly challenging one another which way they should walk, and deciding on Tor Hill, wherever that was, and then starting off at a good round pace in the rain. The doubting day had sorrowed and soured to that effect, and when the verger had led us through the cloister aisle into the gardens of the bishop's palace the grounds were so much like waters that there seemed no reason why the ducks should not
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have been sailing on the lawn as well as the moat. This, with the embattled wall, is said, and probably fabled, to have formed the defence of his house for a certain bishop whose life was threatened by the monks of Bath, who if they had waited five hundred years in the idea of suddenly descending upon him by our swift train, would have found him prepared to give them a warm reception. But the day of our visit there were no belligerent monks; the place was almost peacefully picturesque, with no protection needed but an umbrella against the rain heavily dripping from the ivy of the ruined cloister arches, and goloshes against the water of the sopping earth.
It was the idea of one of us who had found an ancient almshouse very amusingly characteristic on a former English journey, that we could not do better, after the cathedral, than go to one of the several time-honored charitable foundations in Wells. We had our choice of several, including one for six poor men, and one for twelve poor men and two poor women. But we must have selected the largest, where both poor men and poor women dwell. Such people do not end their days in the snugness of such places with anything of the dis- grace which attaches to paupers with us. Their lot is rather a coveted honor, and on their level is felt to add dignity to the decline of life. Each old woman has her kitchen, and each old man his kitchen garden (always edged with simple flowers); and they have a stated income, generally six or seven shillings a week, with which they provision themselves as they please.
We did not find the matron of the place we chose without some difficulty, or some apologetic delay for her want of preparation. But she was really well enough, when she came, though it was charing -day, and the
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whole house was even better prepared, which was the essential thing. I cannot say that the inmates seemed especially glad to see their poor American relations, but there was no active opposition to our visit, and we did our best to win the favor of three old men shown as specimens in the large common room where they were smoking by the chimney, and, if I am any judge of human nature, criticising the management down to the motives of the original benefactor in the fourteenth century. We had some brief but not unfriendly parley, and after offering a modest contribution towards the general tobacco-fund, we said good-bye to these merito- rious old men, who made a show of standing up, but did not really do so, I think. The matron would have left the door open, but I bethought me to ask if they would not rather have it shut, and they said with one voice that they would. I closed it with the conviction that they would instantly begin talking about us, and not to our advantage, but I could not blame them. Age is censorious, poverty is apt to be envious, infirmity is not amiable and we were not praiseworthy. Upon the whole I hope they gave it us good and strong; for I am afraid that the next pensioner whom we visited thought better of us than we deserved. I got the notion that she was in some sort a show pensioner, and that therefore we had not taken her unawares. Her room was both par- lor and kitchen, and was decorated no less with her cooking apparatus than the china openly set about the wall on shelves. She was full of smiles and little polite bobs, and most willing to have her room admired, even to the bed that crowded her table towards her grate, and left a very snug fit for her easy-chair. One could see that the matron prized her, and expected us to do so, and we did so, especially when she showed us a
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flower in a pot which her son had given her. Perhaps we exaggerated the comforts of her room in congratu- lating her upon it, but this was an error in the right direction, and we did what we could to repair it by the offer of a shilling. If it is permitted to the spirits of benefactors in heaven to take pleasure in their good deeds on earth, it must have been a source of satisfac- tion for five hundred years (as they count time here) to the founder of this charity when he thought of how many humble fellow-creatures he had helped, and was helping. Perhaps they do not care, up there; but the chance is worth the attention of people looking about for a permanent investment. I think every one ought to earn a living, and when past it ought to be pensioned by the state, and let live in comfort after his own fancy; but failing this ideal, I wish the rich with us would multiply foundations after the good old English fashion, in which the pensioners, though they dwelt much in common, could keep a semblance of family life and personal independence.
Of course Wells, as its name says, was once a watering- place, though never of so much resort as Bath; but now its healing springs bubble or ooze forth in forgottenness, with not a leper or even a rheumatic to avail of them. It was very, very anciently a mining-town, and long afterwards a shoe-town, with an interval of being a place of weavers, but it was never an industrial centre. It has never even been very historical, though Henry VII. stopped there in his campaign against the Pretender Perkin Warbeck, and after centuries the followers of another pretender — the luckless, worthless, but other- wise harmless bastard of Charles II., the Duke of Mon- mouth, who was making war against his uncle, James II. — occupied the city and stripped the lead from the
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cathedral roof for bullets; they otherwise dishonored its edifice, Cromwell's soldiers having failed to do so. By the beginning of this century the population of the town had dwindled to less than five thousand. But these, in their flat streets of snug little houses, we thought well supplied with good shops, and the other comforts of life, and we found them of an indefatigable civility in telling and showing us our way about. We had still some time to spare when finally their kindness got us to the station of the Somerset and Dorset line, where, as a friendly old man whom we found there before us justly re- marked, "Us must wait for the train; it won't wait for we."
There was another old man there, in a sort of farmer's gayety of costume, with leathern gaiters reaching well to his knees, and a jaunty, low-crowned hat, who promptly made our acquaintance and told us that he was eighty years old, and that he had lately led the singing of a Methodist revival-meeting. "And every one said my voice was as strong in the last note as the first." He then sang us a verse from a hymn in justifi- cation of the universal opinion, and in spite of his func- tional piety was of an organic levity which, with his withered bloom and his lively movement on his feet, recalled the type of sage eternized by Mr. Hardy in Granfer Cantle. Upon the whole we were glad to be rid of him when he quitted the train on which we started together, and left us to the sadder society of a much younger man. He too was a countryman, and he pres- ently surprised me by owning that he had once been a fellow-countryman. He had indeed lived two years in a part of Northern Ohio where I once lived, and the world shrank in compass through our meeting in the Somerset and Dorset line. "And didn't you like it?"
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"Oh, yes; / liked it. After I came back I was the homesickest man! But my wife couldn't get her health there." Privately, I thought I would have preferred Glastonbury, where this kindly man got out, to Orwell, Ashtabula County, Ohio; but we all have our tastes, and I made him a due show of sympathy in his regret for my native land.
When our two hours of travel were rather more than up, we found ourselves again in Bath after a day which I felt to have been full of exciting adventure. But I ask almost as little of Me as of literature in the way of incident, and perhaps the reader will not think my visit to Wells especially stirring. In that case I will throw in the fact of a calf tied at one of the stations where we changed, and lamentably bellowing in the midst of its fellow-passengers, but standing upon its rights quite as if it had booked first-class. When I add that there was a sign up at this station requiring all persons to cross the track by the bridge, and that without exception we contumaciously trooped over the line at grade, I think the cup of the wildest lover of romance must run over.
Of our subsequent afternoon in Bristol, what remains after this lapse of time except a pleasing impression? We chose a wet day because there were no dry days to choose from. But a wet day of the English spring is commonly better than it promises, and this one made several unexpected efforts to be fine, and repeatedly succeeded. Bristol is no nearer Bath than Wells is, but there are no changes, and we arrived in half an hour and drove at once through the rather uninteresting streets to the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe. There we found the verger (or perhaps one should say the sexton) as ready to receive us, having just finished mopping the floor, as if he had been expecting us from
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the foundation of the church in the thirteenth century. One has not often such a welcome, even from a verger, and I make this occasion to say that few things add more to the comfort of sight-seeing travel than an ap- preciative verger. He imparts a quality of his church or cathedral to the sight-seer, who feels himself Early English or at least Perpendicular Gothic under his flat- tering ministrations, and he supplements the dry facts of the guide-book with those agreeable touches of fable which really give life to history.
St. Mary Redcliffe is so rich in charming associations, however, as scarcely to need the play of the sacristan's imagination for the adornment of her past. She is easily, as Queen Elizabeth so often-quotedly said, "the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish church in England," and is more beautiful and interesting than the cathedral of her city, if not more graceful in form and lovely in detail than any other church in Europe, One scarcely knows which of her claims on the reader's interest to mention first, but perhaps if the reader has a feeling heart for genius and sorrow he will care most for St. Mary Redcliffe because Chatterton lies buried in her shadow. Or, if he is not buried there, but at St. Andrews, Holborn, in London, as Peter Cunningham claims, there is at least his monument at St. Mary's Redcliffe to give validity to the verger's favorite story. The bishop for- bade the poor suicide to be buried in the church-yard, and he was interred in a space just outside; but later the vestry bought this lot and enclosed it with the rest, and so beat the bishop on his own consecrated ground. I could not give a just sense of how much the verger triumphed in this legend, but apparently he could not have been prouder of it if he had invented it. He point- ed out, at no great remove, a house in or near which
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Chatterton was born; and he must have taken it for granted that we knew the boy had pretended to find the MS. of his poems in an old chest in the muniment- room, over the beautiful porch of the church, for he did not mention it. He was probably so absorbed in the interest which Chatterton conferred upon St. Mary Red- cliffe that he did not think to remind us that both Coleridge and Southey were married in the church. Southey was born in Bristol, and they both formed part of a little transitory provincial literary centre, which flourished there before the rise of the Lake School under the fostering faith of Joseph Cottle, the publisher, himself an epic poet of no mean area.
But St. Mary Redcliffe has peculiar claims upon the reverence of Americans from its monument of Admiral Penn, father of him who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The formidable old sailor's gauntlets, cuirass, and helmet hang upon the wall above the monu- ment, and near by is the rib of a whale which John Cabot is said to have slain in Labrador. Less endearing asso- ciations for us, and less honorable to the city are those of the slave-trade which Bristol long carried on to her great gam and shame. Slavery was common there, not only in the Saxon and Norman days, but practically far down the centuries into the eighteenth. In the earlier times youths and maidens were roped together and offered for sale in the market; people sold their own children abroad; and in the later times, Bristol prospered so greatly in the exportation of young men and women to the colonies, that when this slavery was finally put an end to, it was found just to compensate her merchants and ship-owners in the sum of nearly a million dollars for their loss in the redemptioners whom they used to carry out and sell for their passage-money.
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In the strange contemporaneity of the worst and the best things Bristol grew in grace; beautiful churches rose, and then her people fought the fight out of Roman- ism into Protestantism; in the civil war she held for the Parliament against the King, and was taken by Rupert and retaken by Cromwell. A hundred years after, the great religious awakening to be known as Methodism, began in and about Bristol. Whitefield preached to the miners at Kingswood, and then Wesley, whose help he had invoked, came arid preached to all classes, in the town and out, moving them so power- fully to seek salvation, that many who heard him fell down in swounds and fits, and " roared for the disquiet- ness of their hearts," while tens of thousands were less dramatically saved from their sins. Yet another hun- dred years and the spirit miraculously responded to the constant prayer of George Miiller for means to found the Orphanages, which witness the wonder at this day to any tourist willing to visit them. Without one spe- cific or personal appeal, alms to the amount of three million dollars flowed in upon him, and helped him do his noble work.
Riches abounded more and more in Bristol, but the city continued almost to the nineteenth century in a mediaeval inconvenience, discomfort, and squalor. A horse and cart could not pass through her tortuous streets, and trucks drawn by dogs transported her merchandise; down to 1820 heavy wagons were not permitted for fear of damaging the arches of the sewers, and sledges were used. All the same, there was from the beginning a vehement and powerful spirit of enterprise, and Bristol is connected with our own history not only by the voyages of the Cabots to our savage northern shores in the fifteenth century, but by the venture of
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the Great Western, which, in 1838, made the first steam passage of the Atlantic Ocean. In honor of the rela- tions established by her mariners between the old world and the new, I over-ruled our driver's genteel reluctance from the seafaring quarter of the town, and had him take us to as much of the port of Bristol as possible. I am not sure that I found the points from which either the Matthew sailed for America in 1497, or the Great Western in 1838, but I am sure that nothing more pict- uresque could have rewarded my vague search. Among the craft skirting the long quays there was every type of vessel except the Atlantic liner which had originated there; but the steamers, which looked coast-wise and river-going, contributed their full share to the busy effect. This for the moment was intensified by the interest which a vast crowd of people were taking in the raising of a sunken barge. Their multitude helped to embarrass our progress through the heaps of merchan- dise, and piles of fish, and coils of chain and cordage, and trucks backing and filling; but I would not have had them away, and I only wish I knew, as they must later have known, whether that barge was got up in good shape.
On one shore were ranks of warehouses, and on the other, the wild variety of taverns and haunts of crude pleasure, embracing many places for the enjoyment of strong waters, such as everywhere in the world attract the foot wandering ashore at the end of a sea-leg. Their like may have allured that Anglicized Venetian, John Cabot, when he returned from finding Newfoundland, and left his ship to enjoy the ten pounds which Henry VII. had handsomely sent him for that purpose, as an acknowledgment of his gift of a continent. It is not to be supposed that there were then so many and so
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large shops as now intersperse the pleasure-resorts in the port of Bristol; I question whether Cabot, if he had strained his eyes over-seas by looking out for new hemi- spheres, could have found there a whole building lettered over with the signs of an optician, and I do not yet see just why such a semi-scientist should so abound there now. But I shall always be sorry I did not go to him to replace the eye-glasses I had broken, instead of poorly driving to the shop of an optician in one of the best city streets. It was a very handsome street full of shops, such as gave a due notion of the sufficiency of Bristol to all demands of wealth and ease, and I got an excellent pair of glasses; but if I had bought my glasses in the port, I might perhaps have seen the whole strenuous past of the famous place through them, and even "stared at the Pacific" with the earliest of her circumnavigating sons. However, we cannot do everything, and we did not even see that day the cathedral which St. Mary Redcliffe so much surpasses, for anything we know to the contrary. We could and did see the beautiful Nor- man gateway of the Abbey, which it is no treason to our favorite church to allow she has none to equal, and passing under its sumptuously carven arches into the cathedral we arrived at the side of the regretful verger. He bade us note that the afternoon service was going on, and how the Elder Lady Chapel with its grotesque sculptures in the mediaeval taste, which used to have fun in the decoration of sacred places with all sorts of mocking fancies, was impossible to us at the moment.
But the Bristol cathedral is not one of the famous English cathedrals, and our regret was tempered by this fact, though the verger's was not. I tried to appease him with a promise to come again, which I should like nothing better than to keep, and then we
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drove off. We were visiting almost without a plan this storied and noble city, which so much merited to be carefully and intelligently seen, and it was by mere grace of chance that we now happened upon one of the most interesting houses in it. In the graveyard of St. Peter's Church the hapless poet Richard Savage was buried at the cost of the jailer of the debtor's prison where he died, and we must have passed the tablet to his memory in finding our unheeding way to St. Peter's Hospital behind the church. This is one of the most splendid survivals of the statelier moods of the past in that England which is full of its records. A noted al- chemist built it, whether for his dwelling or whether for the mystic uses of his art, in the thir teen-hundreds, but it is gabled and timbered now in the fashion of the sixteenth century, and serves as the official home of the Bristol Board of Guardians. Once it belonged to a company of merchant adventurers, and their ships used to float up to its postern -gate, and show their spars through the leaden sash of its windows, still kept in their primal picturesqueness. The whole place within is a wonder of carven mantels and friezes and ceilings; and so sound that it might well hold its own for yet five hundred years longer.
It was the first of those mediaeval houses which gave us a sense of English comfort hardly yet surpassed in modern English interiors; and here first we noted the devotion of the English themselves to the monuments of their past. The Americans who visit objects of interest on the continent are apt to find themselves equalling in number, if not outnumbering their fellow- Anglo-Saxons of English birth; but in England they are a most insignificant minority. The English are not merely globe-trotters, they are most incessant travellers
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in their own island. They are always going and coming in it, and as often for pleasure as business, apparently. At any rate the American who proposes coming into a private heritage of the past when he visits his ances- tral country finds himself constantly intruded upon by the modern natives, who seem to think they have as good right to it as he. This is very trying when he does not think them half so interesting as himself, or half so intelligently appreciative. He may be the most dissi- dent of dissenters, the most outrageously evangelical of low-churchmen, but when he is pushed by a clerical- looking family of English country folk, father, mother, sister-in-law, and elderly and younger daughters, almost out of hearing of the vergeress's traditions of St. Peter's Hospital, he cannot help feeling himself debarred of most of the rights established by our Revolution. It is perhaps a confusion of emotions; but it will be a generous confusion if he observes, amidst his resentment, the listless inattention of the young girl, dragged at the heels of her family, and imaginably asking herself if this is their notion of the promised holiday, the splendid gayety of the long-looked-for visit to Bristol!
Before my own visit to that city my mind was much on a young Welsh girl whose feet used to be light in its streets, more than a hundred years ago, and who used in her garb of Quaker grandmother to speak of her childhood days there. She had come an orphan from Glamorganshire, to the care of an aunt and uncle at Bristol, and there she grew up, and one day she met a young Welshman from Breconshire who had come on some affair of his father's woollen-mills to the busy town. She was walking in the fields, and when they passed, and she looked back at him, she found he was looking back at her; and perhaps if it were not for this
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surprising coincidence, some other hand than mine might now be writing this page. In her Bristol days she did not wear the white kerchief crossed at her neck above the gown of Quaker drab, nor the cap hiding the gray hair, but some youthful form of the demure dress in which one could better fancy her tripping across the field and looking back, in the path where she still pauses, in a dear and gentle transmutation of girl- hood and grandmotherhood.
It might have been over the very field where she walked that we drove out to the suburb of Clifton, where Bristol mostly lives. It is the more beautiful Allegheny City of a less unbeautiful Pittsburg, but otherwise it bears the same relation to Bristol as the first of these American towns bears to the last. Nobody dwells in Bristol who can dwell in Clifton, and Clifton has not only the charm of pleasant houses and gardens, with public parks and promenades, and schools and colleges, and museums and galleries, as well as almost a superabun- dance of attractive hotels, but it is in the midst of nat- ure as grand as that of the Niagara River below the falls. The Avon's currents and tides flow between cliffs, spanned by Brunei's exquisite and awful suspension- bridge, that rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side, and on the other, built over to its stupendous verge with shapes of the stately and dignified architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes English towns. The American invader draws a panting breath of astonish- ment in the presence of scenery which eclipses his native landscape in savage grandeur as much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders, on his way through that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come to England with the notion that she was soft and tame in her most spectacular moods. He does not call upon the
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hills to hide his shame, lest the cliffs that beetle dizzy- ingly above him should only too complaisantly comply. But he promises himself, if he gets back to Bath alive, to use the first available moment for taking a reef in his national vanity where it has flapped widest. Of course it will not do in Bath to wound the local suscepti- bilities by dwelling upon the surviving attractions of Clifton as a watering-place, but he may safely and mod- estly compare them with those of Saratoga.
VI
BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON
WE left Bath on the afternoon of a day which re- mained behind us in doubt whether it was sunny or rainy; but probably the night solved its doubt in favor of rain. It was the next to the last day of March, and thoughtful friends had warned us to be very care- ful not to travel during the impending Bank holidays, which would be worse than usual (all Bank holidays being bad for polite travellers), because they would also be Easter holidays. We were very willing to heed this counsel, but for one reason or another we were travelling pretty well all through those Easter Bank holidays, and except for a little difficulty in finding places in the train up from Southampton to London, we travelled without the slightest molestation from the holiday-makers. The truth is that the leisure classes in England are so coddled by the constitution and the by-laws that they love to lament over the slightest menace of discomfort or displeasure, and they go about with bated breath warning one another of troubles that never come.
Special trains are run on all lines at Bank holiday times, and very particularly special trains were ad- vertised for those Easter Bank holidays in the station at Bath, but as we were taking a train for Southampton on the Saturday before the dread Monday which was to
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begin them, we seemed to have it pretty much to our- selves. The Midland road does not run second-class cars, and so you must go first or third, and we being as yet too proud to go third, sought a first-class non- smoking compartment. The most eligible car we could find was distinctly lettered "Smoking," but the porter said he could paste that out, and by this simple device he changed it to non-smoking, and we took possession.
We were soon running through that English country which is always pretty, and seems prettiest wherever you happen to be, and though we did not and never can forget Bath, we could not help tricking our beams a little, in response to the fields smiling through the sunny rain, or the rainy sun. It was mostly meadow- land, with the brown leafless hedges dividing pasture from pasture, but by-and-by there began to be ploughed fields, with more signs of habitation. Yet it was as lonely as it was lovely, like all the English country, to which the cheerfulness of our smaller holdings is want- ing. What made it homelike, in spite of the solitude, was the occurrence in greater and greater number of wooden buildings. We conjectured stone villages some- where out of sight, huddled about their hoary churches, but largely the gray masonry of the West of England had yielded to the gray weather-boarding of the more southeasterly region, where at first only the barns and out - buildings were of wood; but soon the dwellings themselves were frame-built.
Was it at otherwise immemorable Shapton we got tea, running into the cleanly, friendly station from the slopes of the shallow valleys? It must have been, for after that the sky cleared, and nature in a cooler air was gayer, as only tea can make nature. They trundled a little cart up to the side of the train, and gave us our
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cups and sandwiches, bidding us leave the cups in the train, as they do all over England, to be collected at some or any other station. After that we were in plain sight of the towers and spires of Salisbury, the nearest we ever came, in spite of much expectation and reso- lution, to the famous cathedral; arid then we were in the dear, open country again, with white birches, like those of New England, growing on the railroad banks; and presently again we were in sight of houses building, and houses of pink brick already built, and then, almost without realizing it, we were in the suburbs of South- ampton, and driving in a four-wheeler up through the almost American ugliness of the main business street, and out into a residence quarter to the residential hotel commended to us.
It was really very much a private house, for it was mainly formed of a stately old mansion, which with many modern additions, actual and prospective, had been turned to the uses of genteel boarding. But it had a mixed character, and was at moments everything you could ask a hotel to be; if it failed of wine or spirits, which could not be sold on the premises, these could be brought in from some neighboring bar. The tran- sients, as our summer hotels call them, were few, and nearly all the inmates except ourselves were permanent boarders, in the scriptural and New England proportion of seven women to one man. It was a heterogeneous company of insular and colonial English, but always English, whether from the immediate neighborhood, or Canada, or South Africa, or Australia. At separate small tables in an older dining-room, cooled by the ancestral grate, or in a newer one, warmed by steam- radiators just put in, we were served abundant break- fasts of bacon and eggs and tea and toast, and table
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d'hote luncheons and dinners, with afternoon tea and after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room. For all this, with rooms and lights and service, we paid ten shillings a day, and I dare say the permanents paid less. Bed- room fires were of course extra, but as they gave out no perceptible heat, they ought not to be counted, though they had a certain illuminating force, say a five candle-power, and rendered the breath distinctly visible. We had come down to Southampton in a supersti- tion that, being to the southward, it would be milder than Bath, where the spring was from time to time so inclement, but finding it rather colder and bleaker, we experimented a little farther to the southward, a day or two after our arrival, and went to the Isle of Wight. The sail across the Solent, or whatever water it was we crossed, was beautiful, but it was not balmy, and when we reached Cowes, after that dinner aboard which you always get so much better in England than in like con- ditions with us, we found it looking not so tropical as we could have liked, but doubtless as tropical as it really was. The pretty town curved round its famous yacht harborage in ranks of summer hotel-like houses, with green lattices and a convention of out-door life in their architecture, such as befitted a mild climate; but we were keeping on to the station where you take train for Ventnor, on the southern shore of the island which has to support the reputation of being the English Riviera. We did not know then how bad the Italian Riviera could be, and doubtless we blamed the English one more than we ought. We ought, indeed, to have been warmed for it by the sort of horseback exercise we had on the roughest stretch of railway I can remember, in cars whose springs had been broken in earlier service on some mainland line of the monopoly now employing
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them on the Isle of Wight, and defying the public to do anything about it, as successfully as any railroad of our own republic. We had a hope and an intention of seeing flowers, which we fulfilled as we could with the unprofitable gayety of the blossomed furze by the way- sides; and more and more we fancied a forwardness in the spring which was doubtless mainly of our invention. From our steamer we had a glimpse of Osborne Castle, the favorite seat of the good queen who is gone, and we wafted our thoughts afar to Carisbrooke, where the hap- less Charles I. was for a time captive, playing fast and loose, in feeble bad faith, with the victorious Parlia- ment, when it would have been willing to treat with him. But you cannot go everywhere in England, es- pecially in one day, though home-keeping Americans think it is so small, and we had to leave Newport and its Carisbrooke castle aside in our going and coming be- tween Ryde and Ventnor.
It was well into the afternoon when we reached Vent- nor, and took a fly for the time left us, which was large- ly tea-time, by the reckoning of the girl in the nice pas- try-shop where we stopped for refreshment. She said that the season in Ventnor was July and August, but the bathing was good into October, and we could be- lieve the pleasant Irishman in our return train who told us that it was terribly hot in the summer at Ventnor. The lovely little town, which is like an Eng- lish water-color, for the rich, soft blur of its grays, and blues and greens, has a sea at its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a milky horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats, drowning in it, like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to have the liveliness of watering-place
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shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and laurel; some of the better-looking houses were thatched, per- haps to satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant. The intelligent hunchback who drove our fly, and instructed us in things of local in- terest far beyond our capacity, named prices at these houses which might, if I repeated them, tempt an in- vasion from our own resorts, if people did not mind suf- fering in July and August for the sake of the fine weather in November. Doubtless there are some who would not mind being shut southward by the steep and lofty downs which prevent the movement of air as much in summer as in winter at Ventnor. The acclivities are covered with a short, wiry grass, and on the day of our visit the boys of Ventnor were coasting down them on a kind of toboggans. Besides this peculiar advantage, Ventnor has the attraction, common to so many Eng- lish towns and villages, of a Norman church, and of those seats and parks of the nobility and gentry which one cannot long miss in whatever direction one goes, in a land where the nobility and gentry are so much cherished.
The day had been hesitating between rain and sun as usual, but it had decided for rain when we left Vent- nor, where we had already found it very cold in-doors, over the tea and bread and butter, which they gave us so good. By the time we had got back to Ryde, the frigidity of the railway waiting-room, all the colder for the fire that had died earlier in the day, was such that it seemed better to go out and walk up and down the platform, in the drive of the rain, as hard and fast as one could, than to stay within. In these conditions the
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boat appeared to be longer in coming than it really was, and when it came it was almost too well laden with the Bank-holiday folk whom we had been instructed to dread. At Cowes, more young men and young girls of a like sort came on board, but beyond favoring us with their loud confidences they did us no harm, and it was quite practicable to get supper. They were of the chorus-girl level of life, apparently, and there was much that suggested the stage in their looks and be- havior, but they could not all have been of the theatre, and they were better company than the two German governesses who had travelled towards Ventnor with us, and filled the compartment with the harsh clashing of their native consonants. The worst that you could say of the trippers was that they were always leaving the saloon door open, and letting in the damp wind, which had now become very bitter, but English people of every degree are always leaving the door open, and these poor trippers were only like the rest of their nation in that. One young lady lay with her feet conspicu- ously up on the lounge which she occupied to the ex- clusion of four or five other persons, but by -and -by she took her feet down, and the most critical traveller could not have affirmed that it was characteristic of Easter Bank -holiday ladies to stretch themselves out with their feet permanently up on the cushions. When we landed at Southampton, and drove away in a cab, we had an experience which was then novel, but ceased to be less and less so. It seemed that the pier was a private enterprise, and you must pay toll for its use, or else not arrive or depart on that boat.
So many of our fellow-countrymen come ashore from their Atlantic liners at Southampton, and rush up to London in two hours by their steamer trains, without
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any other sense of the place than as a port of entry, that I feel as if I were making an undue claim upon their credulity in proposing it as a city having a varied literary and historical interest. Yet Southampton is a city of no mean memories, with a history going back into the dark of the first invasions, and culminating early in the fable of King Canute's failure to browbeat the Atlantic. The men who won Cressy, Poictiers and Agincourt set sail from it, and fifty ships and more made ready there for the Armada. In turn it was much harried by the French, but the Dutch, whom Alva drove into exile, settled in the town and helped prosper it with their industries, till the Great Plague brought it such adversity that the grass, which has served the turn of so much desolation, grew in its streets. With the continuous wars of England and France it rose again, and now it is what every American traveller fails to see as he hurries through it. I have not thought it needful to mention that in the ages when giants abounded in Britain, Southampton had one of the worst of that caitiff race, who was baptized against his will, but afterwards eloping with his liege lady, was finally slain.
The place was so attractive socially, a hundred-odd years ago, that Jane Austen's family, when they came away from Bath, could think of no pleasanter sojourn. She wrote some of her most delightful letters from Southampton, and of course we went and looked up the neighborhood where she had lived. No trace of that precious occupancy is now left beside the stretch of the ancient city wall from which the Austens' gar- den overlooked a beautiful expanse of the Solent, but we made out the place, and for the rest we gave our- selves to the pleasure of following the course of the old
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city wall, which, with its ivied arches, its towers and battlements all agreeably mouldering and ruinous, is better, as far as it goes, than the walls of either Chester or York, conscious of their entirety, and of their claim upon the interest of travel. Southampton is so very modern in the prosperity which has made it the rival of Liverpool as the chief port of entry from our country, that we ought rather to have devoted ourselves to its docks than its walls, and we did honestly try for them. But there is always something very disappointing about docks, and though I went more than once for a due im- pression of them at Southampton, I constantly failed of it. I tried coming upon them casually at first; at last I drove expressly to them, and when I dismounted from my cab, and cast about me for the sensation they should have imparted, and demanded of my cabman, " Where are the docks?" and he said, "Here they are, sir," I could not make them out, and was forced to conclude that they had been taken in for the time.
I had no such difficulty with the prison into which Dr. Isaac Watts's father was put for some of those opin- ions which in former times were always costing people their personal liberty. In my mind's eye I could almost see his poor wife bringing their babe and suckling the infant hymnologist under the father's prison window; and I was in such rich doubt of Dr. Watts's birthplace in French Street, that with two houses to choose from, I ended by uncovering to both. I think it was not too much honor to that kind, brave soul, who got no little poetry into his piety, and was neither very severe about theology on earth, nor exigent of psalm-singing in heaven, where he imagined a pleasing conformity in the condi- tions to the tastes and habits of the several saints in this life. If the reader thinks that I overdid my reverence
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in the case of this poet, let him set against it my total failure to visit either the birthplace or the baptismal church of another Southampton poet, that Charles Dibdin, namely, whose songs were much on British tongues when Britain was making herself mistress of the seas, and which possibly breathe still from the lips of
"The sweet little cherub who sits up aloft, Keeping watch o'er the life of poor Jack."
Early in my English travels I found it well to leave something to the curiosity of after-seekers, and there is so much to see in every English city, town, village, country neighborhood, road, and lane that I could al- ways leave unseen far more than I saw. I suppose it was largely accidental that I gave so much of my time to the traces of the Watts family, but perhaps it was also because both the prison and the house (in which, whichever it was, the mother kept a boarding-house while she nurtured her nine children, and the good doc- tor began his Greek and Latin at five years of age), were in the region of the old church of St. Michael's which will form another compensation at Southampton for the American who misses the docks. Its architect- ure was amongst my earliest Norman, and was of the earliest Norman of any, for the church was built in 1100 by monks who came over from Normandy. It was duly burned by the French two centuries later in one of their pretty constant incursions; they burned only the nave of the church, but they left the baptismal font rather badly cracked, and with only the staple of the lock which used to fasten the lid to keep the water from being stolen. I do not know why the baptismal water should have been stolen, but perhaps in those ages of faith
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it was a specific against some popular malady, leprosy or the black death, or the like. The sacristan who showed me the font, showed me also the tomb of a bad baronet of the past, a very great miscreant, whose name he could not remember, but who had done some- thing awful to his wives; and no doubt he could easily have told me why people stole the water. He was him- self an excellent family man, or at least highly domesti- cated, if one might judge from his manner with his own wife, who came in demanding a certain key of him. Husband-like, he denied having it; then he remembered, and said, "Oh, I left it in the pocket of my black coat." He was not at all vexed at being interrupted in telling me about the bad baronet, whose tomb, he made me observe, had not a leaf or blossom on it, though it was Easter Sunday, and the old church, which was beauti- fully rough and simple within, was decked with flowers for the festival.
Outside, the prevalence of Easter was so great that we had failed of a street cab, and had been obliged to send to the mews (so much better than a livery-stable, though probably not provided now with falcons) for a fly, and we felt by no means sure that we should be ad- mitted to the beautiful old Tudor house, facing the church of St. Michael's, which goes by the name of King Henry VIII. 's Palace. They are much stricter in Eng- land concerning the holy days of the church than the non-conforming American imagines. On Good Friday there were neither cabs nor trams at Southampton in the morning, and only Sunday trains were run on the Great Southwestern to London; though on the other hand the shops were open, and mechanics were work- ing; perhaps they closed and stopped in the afternoon. But we summoned an unchurchly courage for the Tudor
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house, and when we rang at the postern-gate — it ought to have been a postern-gate, and at any rate I will call it so — it was opened to us by a very sprightly little old lady, with one tooth standing boldy up in the centre of her lower jaw, unafraid amid the surrounding desolation. She smiled at us so kindly that we apologized for our coming, and said that we did not suppose we could see the palace, and then she looked grave, and answered, "Yes, but you'll have to pay a fee, sir," I undertook that the fee should be paid, and then she smiled again, and led the way from her nook in it, through one of the most livable houses I was in anywhere in England. By this time the reader will have noted that I was con- stantly coming in England on houses I would have greedily liked to keep other people from living in; here was a house I would have liked to live in myself; and it was not spoiled for me by being called a palace. This palace of Henry VIII., which is rather simple for a palace, but may very well have been the sojourn of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth in their visits to Southampton, was divided above and below into large rooms, wainscotted in oak, of a noble shapeliness, and from cellar to attic was full of good air, without the draughts which the earlier and later English have found advantageous in perpetuating the racial catarrh and rheumatism. The apartments were of varying dig- nity from the ground floor up, and the basement was so wholesome that before the time of the present owner, who had restored it to its former state, a fam- ily with eleven children lived there in the greatest health as long as they were allowed to stay. Even in the attic, the rooms, though rough, were pleasant, and there were so many that one of them had got lost and could never be found, though the window
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of it still shows plainly from the outside. This and much more the friendly dame recounted to us in our passage through a mansion, which we found so attractive that we of course tacitly proposed to buy it and live in it always. Then she led us out into her kitchen-garden, running to the top of the ancient city wall, and undermined, as she told us, by submarine passages.
But we could only find a flight of stone steps descend- ing to the street level below, where, if the reader is of a mind to follow, he will find the wall falling wholly away at times, and at times merging itself in the mod- ern or moderner buildings, and then reappearing in arches, topped with quaint roofs and chimneys, and here and there turned to practical uses in little work- shops, much as old walls are in the dear Italian towns which we Americans know rather better than the Eng- lish, though the English ruins are befriended by a softer summer, prolonging itself with its mosses and its ivy never sere deep into winters almost as mild as Italy's. In an avenue reluctantly leaving the ancient wall and winding deviously into the High Street, are the traces, in humbler masonry, of the jambs and spandrels of far older arches in the fagade of an edifice presently a cow stable, but famed to have been the palace of that King Canute who was mortified to find his power inferior to the sea's, and sharply rebuked his courtiers when they had induced him to set his chair in reach of the tides which would not ebb at his bidding. The tides have now permanently ebbed from the scene of the king's discomfiture, and as this royal Dane was otherwise so able and shrewd a prince as to have made himself mas- ter of England if not of her seas, we may believe as little as we like of the story. For my part, I choose to be-
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lieve it every word, as I always have believed it, and I think it should still be a lesson to royalty, which is alto- gether too credulous of its relative importance to the rest of the universe.
In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its archway the High Street hard by where Porter's Lane creeps into it from Canute's cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to take a seat even farther back than Canute's, under an overruling providence. In this effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a Roman warrior, but perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed more aptly symbolizes the extremely friable nature of human empire. One never can look at any present- ment of the poor, good, mistaken man without the soft- ness of regret for his long sufferings, or without gratitude for what he involuntarily did for us as a people in forcing us to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet with our national prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find him taken seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between us and the re- moter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an unbroken allegiance. When I looked on the mediaeval work of the Bargate, I easily felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had to draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than either of the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in war than George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against as the allies of the French.
We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey, which is such a little way off from
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Southampton across the river Itchen, that I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all fellow-countrymen ar- riving on whatever line, to keep half a day from London, and give it to that most beautiful and pathetic place. It was our first ruin in England, but though we saw ruins afterwards of great merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and none remains so sweet and pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern city you reach this dim, mediaeval shadow by way of what they poetical- ly call at Southampton the Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it, we fancied some form of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of ferry-boat com- mon in earlier times on American rivers East and West, forced by the tide on supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our landing on the farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly refused to abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the bor- ders of the Itchen in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been so bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that yielded perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute, that not the sunniest day known to the English climate could have added sensibly to it. I do not believe that we could have been happier in it even if we had known all the little why and how together with the great when of its suppression by Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the conjecture of the moment by anything especially dra- matic from history. Netley Abbey, like the rest of the religious houses which Henry hammered down, was suppressed in the general hope of pillage, defeated by the fact that its income was rather less than a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which even in the money of the
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time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian monks in their life as their in- come, except perhaps their virtues, which he would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told us, they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were given them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor cheese, but only a spare porridge — twice a day, and in Lent once. They never spoke except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and on a journey they could only ask questions, which they must ask if possible by signs. They that transgressed the rules were whipped, or stretched upon the stone floor during mass. For their greater humilia- tion the heads of the order were entirely shaven, which if the wind blew from the sea in their day, as piercingly as it blew in ours, was not so comfortable as it was pict- uresque for the monks going about bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their hospitality was great and con- stant, and then: guest-hall was so often full that Horace Walpole, in his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could speak with insinuation of their "purpled abbots," as if these perhaps led a life of luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey is so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the best thing that could be said of it: "How shall I describe Netley to you? I can only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs, pendent in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns of windows topped round and round with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up among the walls, and only want to be increased by cypresses. A hill rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood. The fort in which we would build a tower for
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habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the world. "
What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little parley at the porter's lodge where they charge admittance and sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English black- birds fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of vegetation, but men have aided 'from time to time in the destruction, though not with-
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out the censure of their fellow -men. It is told, in- deed, that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other build- ing, that he began to dream of his own death by a key- stone falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Every- thing in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keep- ing with it: a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleas- ant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The machine- threshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country people on our way, look- ing rather sallow and lean, but our driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.
When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mount- ing a tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick houses, each with its
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little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hart- ford. The tram's course was largely through um- brageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holiday- makers strolled up and down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in ever- increasing multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modern advance of South- ampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neigh- borhood of fine old houses, standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease aiid splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-growri walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a Betting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.
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We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest after- noon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plym- outh; the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on first-class tickets tha.t at any other time would have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were the more content, because, present- ly, we were running through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any Ameri- can railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mas- tered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the per- versity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cot- tages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded
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depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of -England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.
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HOW long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folke- stone on the southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place, I am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Csesar's camp, and though Csesar is now said not to have known of camp- ing there, other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down from the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day's marauding along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of the Channel; but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season which for five or six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone beaches thronged with visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves formed no part of the season, having come for the air in the later spring, when the air is said to be tonic enough without the water. It is my belief that at no time of the year can you come amiss to Folke- stone; but still it is better to own at the outset that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April. We thought we were doing a very original if not a
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very distinguished thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then driving with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of lodg- ings. But the very first people whom we told said they had done the same, and I dare say it is the com- mon experience at Folkestone, where, even out of season, the houses whose addresses you have seem to be full-up, as the lodging-house phrase is, and where although every other house in the place has the sign of "Apartments" in the transoms, or the drawing-room windows, or both, you have the greatest difficulty in fixing yourself. When one address after another failed us, the driver of our fly began to take pity on us: too great pity for our faith, for we began to suspect him of carrying us to apartments in which he was interested; but we were never able to prove it, and by severely opposing him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally go where he wanted. Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us. If one landlord had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully re- ferred us to another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were the best, we did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we tried yet one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he commended us to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in every way, and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the facts justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied reluctance in our driver, and found the land- lord serenely expectant on the pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses, and in an- other minute we found ourselves in the spacious sitting- room which had become ours, overlooking the brick- walled gardens of the adjoining houses in the shelter,
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which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim, young trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some out-door sport in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove, we felt that we could not have made a mistake; when a black cat pro- vided itself for one of the garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced. Fortune had approved our resolution not to go, except in the greatest extremity, to any sort of boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, pri- vate, residential, tempera nt or inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side caravansary which is common to the whole world, but to cling to an ideal of lodgings such as we had cherished ever since our former sojourn in Eng- land, and such as you can realize nowhere else in the world.
Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these tall, slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the front of our house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are called), you could not see the coast of France from it, as you could from the house- fronts of the Leas in certain states of the atmosphere. But that sight always means rain, and in Folkestone there is rain enough without seeing the coast of France; and so it was not altogether a disadvantage to be one corner back from the Leas on a street enfilading them from the north. After the tea and bread and butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had been boil- ing for us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would never go away from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such a thing, with that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward into the town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it,
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and westward to the sunset, and dropping by a swift declivity softened in its abruptness by flowery and leafy shrubs? If this were not enough inducement to an eternal stay, there was the provisionally peaceful Chan- nel wrinkled in a friendly smile at the depth below us, and shaded from delicate green to delicate purple away from the long, brown beach on which it amused itself by gently breaking in a snowy surf. In the middle dis- tance was every manner of smaller or larger sail, and in the offing little stubbed steamers smoking along, and here and there an ocean-liner making from an American for a German port; or if it was not an ocean-liner, we will call it so. Certainly there could be no question of the business and pleasure shipping drawn up on the beach, on the best terms with the ranks of bathing-machines patiently waiting the August bathers with the same serene faith in them as the half-fledged trees showed, that end-of-April evening, in the coming of the summer which seemed so doubtful to the human spectator. For the prevailing blandness of the atmosphere had keen little points and edges of cold in it; and vagarious gusts caught and tossed the smoke from the chimney-pots of the pretty town along the sea -level below the Leas, giving away here to the wooded walks, and gaining there upon them. Inspired by the presence of a steel pier half as long as that of Atlantic City, with the same sort of pavjlion for entertainments at the end, we tried to fancy that the spring was farther advanced with us at home, but we could only make sure that it would be summer sooner and fiercer. In the mean time, as it was too late for the military band which plays every fine afternoon in a stand on the Leas, the birds were singing in the gardens that border it, very sweetly and richly, and not obliging you at any point to get up and
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take your hat off by striking into "God Save the King." I am not sure what kind of birds they were; but I called them to myself robins of our sort, for upon the whole they sounded like them. Some golden-billed black- birds I made certain of, and very likely there were larks and finches among them, and nightingales, for what I knew. They all shouted for joy of the pleasant even- ing, and of the garden trees in which they hid, and which were oftener pleasant, no doubt, than the even- ing. The gardens where the trees stood spread between handsome mansard-roofed houses of gray stucco, of the same type as those which front flush upon the Leas, and which prevail in all the newer parts of Folkestone; their style dates them of the sixties and seventies of the last century, since when not many houses seem to have been built in Folkestone.
Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that they have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to grow morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which some- how persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugli- ness for a contrast as well as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing could be more unlike the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike their picturesque declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels and toy cottages of the New Jersey summer- resort are built; nothing more unlike the mild, many- steamered, many-schooncred expanse of the Channel, than the immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the ocean. Yet, I say, there is a soli-
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clarity of gay intent and of like devotion to brief alien pleasures in which I find the two places inseparable in my mind.
If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fight- ing their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far in under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I could only transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas, and the joyous darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board Walk, and turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took it in their shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet, wrapped in carpet, with a rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should like, if this could be done, to ask the first, "Isn't this something like Folkestone?" and the last, "Isn't this like Atlantic City?"
Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal steel piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home everywhere, for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the same tides, and only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover breathed the odor that blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach, or the Long Sands at York, Maine.
We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers from the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage had left of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found shelter in their special train for London. It used to be one of the chief amusements of the visitors at Folkestone to witness such dishevelled debarkations at their own
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piers, and we had promised ourselves the daily excite- ment of the spectacle; but the arrival of the boats had been changed so as to coincide with our lunch hour, and we pretended that it would have been indelicate to indulge ourselves with it when really it was merely inconvenient.
There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the pavilion on the pier, and yet milder attrac- tions in the hall of the Leas Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk some ten or twelve feet below the surrounding level. The tea was yet milder than the other attractions: than the fair vocalist; than the prestidigitator who made a dozen different kinds of hats out of a square piece of cloth, and personated their historical wearers in them; than the cinematograph; than the lady orchestra which so often played pieces "By Desire" that the programme was almost com- posed of them. A diversion in the direction of ice- cream was not lavishly fortunate: the ice-cream was a sort of sweetened and extract-flavored snow which was hardly colder than the air outside.
At Folkestone we were early warned against the air of the sea-level, which we would find extremely relax- ing, whereas that of the Leas, fifty feet above was ex- tremely bracing. We were not able always to note the difference, but at times we found the air even on the Leas extremely relaxing when the wind was in a certain quarter. Once, in a long, warm rain, I found myself so relaxed in the street back of the Leas, that but for the seasonable support of a garden wall against which I rested, I do not know how I should have found strength to get home. You constantly hear, in England, of the relaxing and bracing effects of places that are so little separated by distance, that you wonder at the variance.
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of their hygienic qualities. But once master the notion and you will be able to detect differences so subtle and so constant that from bench to bench on the Leas at Folkestone you will be sensible of being extremely re- laxed and extremely braced, though the benches are not twenty rods apart. The great thing is to forget these differences, and to remember only that the birds are singing, and the sun shining equally for all the benches.
The sun is, of course, the soft English sun, which seems nowise akin to our flaming American star, but is quite probably the centre of the same solar system. The birds are in the wilding shrubs and trees which clothe the front of the cliffs, and in the gardened spaces on the relaxing levels, spreading below to the sands of the sea; and they are in the gardens of the placid, hand- some houses which stand detached behind their hedges of thorn or laurel. This is their habit through the whole town, which is superficially vast, and everywhere agreeably and often prettily built. It is overbuilt, in fact, and well towards a thousand houses lie empty, and most of those which are occupied are devoted to lodgings and boarding-houses, while hotels, large and little, abound. There are no manufactures, and ex- cept in the season and the preparatory season, there is no work. Folkestone has become very fashionable, but it is no longer the resort of the conservative or the aristocratic, or even the aesthetic. These turn to other air and other conditions, where they may step out-of- doors, or wander informally about the fields or over the sands. A great number of smaller places, more lately opened, along the everywhere beautiful English shore, supply simplicity at a far lower rate than you can buy formality in Folkestone.
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But the birds say nothing of all this, especially in the first days of your arrival, when it is only a question whether you shall buy the most beautiful house on the Leas, or whether you shall buy the whole town. After- wards, your heart is gone to Folkestone, and you do not mind whether you have made a good investment or not. By this time though the Earl of Radnor still owns the earth, you own the sky and sea, for which you pay him no ground rent. Of your sky perhaps the less said the better, but of your sea you could not brag too loudly. Sometimes the sun looks askance at it from the curtains of cloud which he likes to keep drawn, especially when it is out of season, and sometimes the rainy Hyades vex its dimness, but at all times its tender and lovely color- ing seems its own, and not a hue lent it from the smiling or frowning welkin. I am speaking of its amiable moods, it has a muddiness all its own, also, when the Hyades have kept at it too long. But on a seasonably pleasant day, such as rather prevails at Folkestone, in or out of sea- son, I do not know a much more agreeable thing than to sit on a bench under the edge of the Leas, and tacitly direct the movements of the fishermen whose sails light up the water wherever it is not darkened by the smokes of those steamers I have spoken of. About noon they begin to make inshore, towards the piers which form the harbor, and then if you will leave your bench, and walk down the long, sloping road from the Leas into the quaint, old seafaring quarter of the town, you can see the fishermen auctioning off their several catches.
Their craft, as they round the end of the breakwater, and come dropping into the wharves, are not as grace- ful as they looked at sea. In fact, the American eye, trained to the trimmer lines of one shipping in every kind, sees them lumpish and loggish, with bows that can
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scarcely know themselves from sterns, and with stumpy masts and shapeless sails. But the fishermen them- selves are very fine : fair and dark men, but mostly fair, of stalwart build, with sou'westers sloping over power- ful shoulders, and the red of their English complexions showing through their professional tan. With the toe of his huge thigh-boot one of them tenderly touches the edge of the wharf, as the boatload of fish swerves up to it, and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty a squirming and flapping heap on the stones. The heaps are gathered into baskets, and car- ried to the simple sheds of the market, where the be- heading and disembowelling of fish is forever going on, and there being dumped down on the stones again, they are cried off by one of the crew that caught them. I say cried because I suppose that is the technical phrase, but it is too violent. The voice of the auctioneer is slow and low, and his manner diffident and embarrassed; he practises none of the arts of his secondary trade; he does nothing, by joke or brag, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative frenzy; after a pause, which seems no silenter than the rest of the transaction, he ceases to repeat the bids, and his fish, in the measure of a bushel or sq, have gone for a matter of three shill- ings. A few tourists, mostly women, of course, form the uninterested audience. A few push-cart dealers were there with their vehicles the day of my visit. Some boys were trying to get into mischief and to compromise some innocent, confiding dogs as their ac- complices. One vast fish -woman, in a man's hat, with enormous hips and huge flanks, moved ponder- ously about, making jokes at the affair, and shaking with bulky laughter. The affair was so far from having the interest prom-
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ised, that I turned from it towards the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses, and wondered in which of them it would have been that forty-three years before a very home-sick, very young American, going out to be a consul in Italy, stopped one particu- larly black midnight and had a rasher of bacon. It seemed to me that I was personally interested in this incident, as if I had been personally a party to it, and it was recalled for my amusement, how a little old man, in a water-side fur cap of the Dickens type, came to the front-door of that humble house, and, by the dim light of the candle he bore, recognized the two companions of the young American, who had made friends with them on the journey from London, where they dwelt, and where they had left all their aspirates except a few which they misplaced. I think they must have been commercial travellers going to Paris upon some business occasion, and used to the transit of the Channel, which was much more dependent then than it is now, in its beginnings and endings, on the state of the tide, so that it was no surprise either for them or for that old man to meet at midnight on his threshold in a negotiation for supper. He set about getting it with what always calls itself, in no very intimate relation to the fact, cheerful alacrity, and at a rather smoky fire in the parlor grate he set the tea-kettle singing, and burned the toast, and broiled the bacon, which he then put sizzling before his guests, famished, but gay and glad of heart. Even the heavy heart of the very homesick, very young American was lifted by the simple cheer; and it seemed to him that while there might have been and doubtless would be better bacon, there actually was none half so good in the world. He had no distinct recollection of the Channel crossing afterwards, and so it must have
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been good, and he could recall little of the journey to Paris or the sojourn there. Being as proud as he was poor, he travelled second-class incognito, but some sense of an official quality must have transpired from his mysterious reticence, for at Paris when they were taking different trains from the same station, one of those good fellows came to his car-window to shake hands. It was in that dark hour of the civil war when the feeling between England and America was not the affection of these halcyon days, but the good fellow put it in the form of a kindly gibe. "I say," he mocked, holding the American's hand, "don't make it too 'ot to 'old us, down there?" Then he waved his hand and disappeared, smiling out of that darkness of time and space which has swallowed up so many smiling faces.
That darkness had swallowed up the humble Folke- stone house, so that it could not be specifically found, but there were plenty of other quaint, antiquated houses, of which one had one's choice, clinging to the edge of the sea, and the foot of the steep which swells away towards Dover into misty heights of very agree- able grandeur. In the narrow street that climbs into the upper and newer town, there are curiosity shops of a fatal fascination for such as love old silver, which is indeed so abundant in the old curiosity shops of Eng- land everywhere as to leave the impression that all the silver presently in use is fire -new. There are other fascinating shops of a more practical sort in that street, which has a cart-track so narrow that scarce the bold- est Bath chair could venture it. When it opens at top into the new wide streets you find yourself in the midst of a shopping region of which Folkestone is justly proud, and which is said to suggest to " the finer female sense,"
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both London and Paris. Perhaps it only suggests a difference from both; but at any rate it is very bright and pleasant, especially when it is not raining; and there are not only French and English modistes but Italian confectioners; one sees many Italian names, and their owners seem rather fond of Folkestone, of which they may mistake the air for that of the Riviera. I wish they would not guard so carefully from the peo- ple at the Leas Pavilion the secret of the meridional ice-cream.
•This street of shops (which abounds in circulating libraries) soon ceases in a street of the self-respectful houses of the local type, and from the midst of these rises the bulk of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, to which I addicted myself with my love of the drama without even the small reciprocity which I experience from it at home. In the season, the Pleasure Gardens ad- jacent are given up to many sorts of gayety, but dur- ing our stay there was no merriment madder than the hilarity of a croquet tournament ; this, I will own, I had not the heart to go and pay sixpence to see.
But at no season does Folkestone cease to be charm- ing, if not in itself, then out of itself. A line of omni- busses as well as a line of public automobiles runs to the delightful old village of Hythe, which is mainly a sin- gle street of low houses, with larger ones, old mansions and new villas on the modest heights back of its sea- level, where the sea is first of all skirted by a horse- car track. The cars of this pass the ruins of certain old martello towers between the sea and the long canal dug at the beginning of the last century as part of the defences against the Napoleonic invasion, apparently in the hope that such of the French as escaped the
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dangers of the Channel would fall into the canal and be drowned. But the chief object of interest at Hythe, beside the human interest, is the ancient church. It is of the usual mixture of Norman and Gothic char- acteristic of old English churches, but it has the pecul- iar merit of a collection of six hundred skulls, which with some cords of the relative bones wellnigh fill the whole crypt. These sad evidences of our common mortality are not a3sthetically ordered, as in the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, but are simply corded up and ranged on shelves. The surliest of vergers vent- ures no fable such as you would be very willing to pay for, and you are left to account for them as you can, by battle, by plague, by the slow accumulation of the dead in unremembered graves long robbed of their tenants. It is hard for you, in the presence of their peculiar detachment, to relate these smiling ground- plans of faces —
" Neither painted, glazed nor framed," —
to anything at any time like the life you know in your- self, or to suppose that there once passed in these hol- low shells, even such poor thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.
It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you come out gladly into the watery sun- shine, and stray among the tombs, where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try, rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at home which should do us equal credit. Other
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things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent, and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were the grass- grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present ivy, ever absent with us; arid over the Gothic portal of the church was a grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a spar- row flew from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower, and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones. The bells of St. Leonard's at Hythe are famous for their tenderness, their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every after- noon for the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.
The church -yard was half surrounded by humble houses of many dates, and we came down by one of these streets to the main thoroughfare of Hythe at the moment two little girls were wildly daring fate at the hands of the local halfwit, who was tottering after them, with his rickety arms and legs flung abroad as he ran, in his laughter at their mocking. It was a scene proper to village life anywhere, but what made us localize it in the American villages we knew was coming suddenly
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on the low wooden cottage which stood flush upon the sidewalk, exactly in the way of wooden houses of exact- ly the same pattern, familiar to our summer sojourn in many New England towns. It might have stood, just as it was, except for its mouldering and mossgrown tile-roof, on any back street of Marblehead, or New- buryport, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire; yet it seemed there in Hythe by equal authority with any of the new or old brick cottages. There are in fact many wooden houses, both old and new, in Hythe and Sand- gate, and other sea-shore and inland towns of the Folke- stone region; the old ones follow the older American fashion in their size and shape, and the newer ones the less old; for there are summer cottages of wood in the style that has ultimately prevailed with us. Many by the sea emulate the aesthetic forms of these, but in brick, and only look like our summer cottages at a distance. The real wooden houses when not very ancient, are like those we used to build when we were emerging from the Swiss chalet and Gothic villa period, and the jig-saw still lent its graceful touch in the decoration of gable and veranda; and they are always painted white.
In all cases they either look American or make our houses of the like pattern look English in the retro- spect. On the line of the South Eastern Railway in Kent are many wooden stations of exactly the sort I remember on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts. They could have been transposed without disturbing their consciousness; but what of the porter at one of the Kentish stations whom I heard calling the trains with the same nasal accent that I used to hear announc- ing my arrival at n'Atholl, and n'Orange, Massachu- setts? Was he a belated Yankee ancestor, or was the brakeman of those prehistoric days simply his far pro-
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genitor? Is there then nothing American, nothing English, and are we really all one?
In the window of the little pastry shop at Hythe where we got some excellent tea, there were certain objects on a lavish platter whose identity we scarcely ventured to establish, but "What are these?" we finally asked.
"Doughnuts" the reply came, and we could not gasp out the question:
"But where are the baked beans, the fish-balls?"
We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, "We are no more American than you are, with your English language, which you go round with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. We and you are of the same immemorial Anglo-Saxon tradition; we are at home on either shore of the sea; and we shall attest the unity of the race's civilization in all the ages to come."
This would have been a good deal for the baked beans and the fish-balls to say, but it would not have been too much. In that very village of Hythe, where we lunched the Sunday after in a sea-side cottage of such an endearingly American interior that we could not help risking praise of it for that reason, there was a dish which I thought I knew as I voraciously ate of it. I asked its honored name, and I was told, " Salt haddock and potatoes," but all the same I knew that it was in- choate fish-balls, and I believe they had left the baked beans in the kitchen as more than my daunted in- telligence could assimilate at one meal. The baked beans! What know I? The succotash, the chowder, the clam - fritters, the hoe-cake, the flapjacks, the corned -beef hash, the stewed oyster, with whatever else the ancient Briton ate —
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and felt his digestion affected by a weird prescience of his transatlantic posterity.
They do not serve hot tamales on the Leas of Folke- stone yet, and perhaps they never will, now that our national fickleness has relegated to a hopeless back- numbership the hot-tamale-man, in his suit of shining white with his oven of shining brass, and impoverished our streets of their joint picturesqueness. It is possible that in the season they serve other sorts of public food on the Leas, but I doubt it, for the note of Folkestone is distinctly formality. I do not say the highest fashion, for I have been told that this is " the tender grace of a day that is dead" for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in America, seeks the simplest ex- pression in certain moments; it likes to go to little sea- shore places where it can be informal, when it likes, in dress and amusement, where it can get close to its neg- lected mother nature, and lie in her lap and smoke its cigarette in her indulgent face. So at least I have heard; I vouch for nothing. Sometimes I have seen the Leas fairly well dotted with promenaders towards evening; sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On bad days — and my experience is that out of eighteen days at Folkestone fourteen are too bad for the band to play in the Pavilion, there is a modest string-band in the Shelter. This is a sort of cavern hollowed under the edge of the Leas, where there are chairs within, and without under the veranda eaves, at tuppence each, and where the visitors all sit reading novels, and trying to shut the music from their con- sciousness. I think it is because they dread so much
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coming to "God Save the King/' when they will have to get up and stand uncovered. It is not because they hate to uncover to the King, but because they know that then they will have to go away, and there is noth- ing else for them to do.
Once they could go twice a day to see the Channel boats come in, and the passengers sodden from sea- sickness, limply lagging ashore. But now they are de- prived of this sight by the ill-behavior of the railroad in timing the boats so that they arrive in the middle of lunch and after dark. It is held to have been distinctly a blow to the prosperity of Folkestone, where people now have more leisure than they know what to do with, even when they spend all the time in the dressing and un- dressing which the height of the season exacts of them. Of course, there is always the bathing, when the water is warm enough. The bathing-machine is not so at- tractive to the spectator as our bath-house, with the bather tripping or limping down to the sea across the yellow sands; but it serves equally to pass the time and occupy the mind, and for the American onlooker it would have the charm of novelty, when the clumsy structure was driven into the water.
I have said yellow sands in obedience to Shakespeare, but I note again that the beach at Folkestone is reddish- brown. Its sands are coarse, and do not pack smoothly like those of our beaches; at Dover, where they were used in the mortar for building the castle, the warder had to blame them as the cause of the damp com- ing through the walls and obliging the authorities to paint the old armor to keep it from rusting. But I fancy the sea-sand does not enter into the composition of the stucco on the Folkestone houses, one of which we found so pleasantly habitable. Most of the houses
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on and near the Leas are larger than the wont of Ameri- can houses, and the arrangement much more agreeable and sensible than that of our average houses; the hall- way opens from a handsome vestibule, and the stairs ascend from the rear of the hall, and turn squarely, as they mount half-way up. But let not the intending exile suppose that their rents are low; with the rates and taxes, which the tenant always pays in England, the rents are fully up to those in towns of correspond- ing size with us. Provisions are even higher than in our subordinate cities, especially to the westward, and I doubt if people live as cheaply in Folkestone as, say, in Springfield, Massachusetts, or certainly Buffalo.
For the same money, though, they can live more handsomely, for domestic service in England is cheap and abundant and well-ordered. Yet on the other hand, they cannot live so comfortably, nor, so whole- somely. There are no furnaces in these very person- able houses; steam-heat is undreamed of, and the grates which are in every room and are not of ignoble size, scarce suffice to keep the mercury above the early sixties of the thermometer's degrees. If you would have warm hands and feet you must go out-of-doors and walk them warm. It is not a bad plan, and if you can happen on a little sunshine out-of-doors, it is far better than to sit cowering over the grate, which has enough to do in keeping itself warm.
One could easily exaggerate the sense of sunshine at Folkestone, and yet I do not feel that I have got quite enough of it into my picture. It was not much ob- scured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that came and went — came more than they went. One night there was absolute fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in the electric
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lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning long the sky was blue, blue, as I had fancied it could be blue only in America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along under the Leas, towards Sandgate, as far as to the Elizabethan castle on the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it was not yet Whitmonday, until which feast of the church it would not be opened. It is only after much trouble with the almanac that the essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church feasts which are con- fidently given in public announcements in England, as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we should not be there after Whitmonday, and we made what we could of the outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us. Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled along that pleasant-way, with the sea on one side and the sea-side cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England coast they would have frozen up and blown away; but here they stood safe among their laurels, with their little vegetable gardens beside them; and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, prob- ably never left off singing the year round except in some extraordinary stress of weather, or when occupied in
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plucking up the sprouting peas by the roots and eat- ing the seed-peas. To prevent their ravage, and to re- strict them to their business of singing, the rows of young peas were netted with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the mosqui- toes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.
I only know that the sun shone impartially on birds and peas, and upon us as well, so that an overcoat be- came oppressive, and the climb back to the Leas by the steep hill-side paths impossible. If it had not been for the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers read- ing one another's thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was we climbed down after climbing half-way up, and retraced our steps tow- ards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone. Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at Shorn- cliff, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had by me some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and white of print, I might give some notion in color of the way the red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and how the strong pur- ples and greens and yellows and blues of the listeners' dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them; American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear, colors in their soft atmos- phere that would shriek aloud in our clear, pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and each soldier had paired off and strolled away with the maid who had
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been simple-heartedly waiting for him, it was as gi- gantic tulips and hollyhocks walking.
The camp at Shorncliff is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe of all arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with streets and lanes of its own; and there many of the officers have their quarters as well as the men. Once these officers' families lived in Folkestone, and something of its decay is laid to their removal, which was caused by its increasing expensive- ness. Probably none of them dwell in the tents, which our drive brought us in sight of beyond the barrack- town, pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying like heaps of snow on the verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a cloud of immemorial associations, rose gray in the background of the picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field a sheep-pasture stretched, full of the bloodless innocence of the young lambs, which after imaginably bounding as to the tabor's sound from the martial bands, were stretched beside their dams in motionless exhaustion from their play.
It was all very strange, that sunshiny Sunday morn- ing, for the soldiers who lounged near the gate of their camp looked not less kind than the types of harmless- ness beyond the hedge, and the emblems of their in- herited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous grotesqueness of their trade of murder than these poor souls themselves. It is all a weary and disheartening puzzle, which the world seems as far as ever from guessing out. It may be that the best way is to give it up, but one thinks of it helplessly in the beauty of this gentle, smiling England, whose history has been written in blood from the earliest records of the heathen time to the latest Christian yesterday, when
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her battle-fields have merely been transferred beyond seas, but are still English battle-fields.
What strikes the American constantly in England is the homogeneousness of the people. We at home have the foreigner so much with us that we miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks in the mall in Central Park I am likely to hear any other tongue oftener than English, to hear Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, or Norwegian, or French, or Italian, or Spanish; but when I take my walks on the Leas at Folkestone, scarcely more than an hour from the poly- glot continent of Europe, I hear almost nothing but English. Twice, indeed, I heard a few French people speaking together; once I heard a German Jew telling a story of a dog, which he found so funny that he al- most burst with laughter; and once again, in the lower town, there came to me from the open door of an eating- house the sound of Italian. But everywhere else was English, and the signs of Id on parle Fran^ais were almost as infrequent in the shops. As we very well know, if we know English history even so little as I do, it used to be very different. Many of these tongues in their earlier modifications used to be heard in and about Folkestone, if not simultaneously, then succes- sively. The Normans came speaking their French of Stratford-atte-Bow, the Saxons their Low German, the Danes their Scandinavian, and the Italians their ver- nacular Lathi, the supposed sister-tongue and not mother-tongue of their common parlance. It was not the Latin which Caesar wrote, but it was the Lathi which Caesar heard in his camp on the downs back of Folke- stone, if that was really his camp and not some later Roman general's. The words, if not the accents of these foreigners are still heard in the British speech
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there; the only words which are almost silent in it are those of the first British, who have given their name to the empire of the English; and that seems very strange, and perhaps a little sad. But it cannot be helped; we ourselves have kept very few Algonquin vocables; we ourselves speak the language of the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman in the mixture imported from England in the seventeenth century, and adapted to our needs by the newspapers in the twentieth. We may get back to a likeness of the Latin to which the hills behind Folkestone echoed two thousand years ago, if the Italians keep coming in at the present rate, but it is not probable; and I thought it advisable, for the sake of a realizing sense of Italian authority in our civili- zation to pay a visit to Caesar's camp one afternoon of the few when the sun shone. This took us up a road so long and steep that it seemed only a due humanity to get out and join our fly driver (again that apparent slang!) in sparing his panting and perspiring horse; but the walk gave us a better chance of enjoying the en- trancing perspectives opening seaward from every break in the downs. Valleys green with soft grass and gray with pasturing sheep dipped in soft slopes to the Folke- stone levels; and against the horizon shimmered the Channel, flecked with sail of every type, and stained with the smoke of steamers, including the Folkestone boat full of passengers not, let us hope, so sea-sick as usual.
Part of our errand was to see the Holy Well at which the Canterbury Pilgrims used to turn aside and drink, and to feel that we were going a little way with them. But we were so lost in pity for our horse and joy in the landscape, that we forgot to demand these objects and their associations from our driver till we had remounted
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to our places, and turned aside on the way to Caesar's camp. Then he could only point with his whip to a hollow we had passed unconscious, and say the Holy Well was there.
"But where, where," we cried, "is the pilgrim road to Canterbury?"
Then he faced about and pointed in another direction to a long, white highway curving out of sight, and there it was, just as Chaucer saw it full of pilgrims seven hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw it six hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always pre- ferred Stothard's notion of these pious folk to Blake's; but that is a matter of taste. Both versions of them were like, and they both now did their best to repeople the empty white highway for us. I do not say they altogether failed; these things are mostly subjective, and it is hard to tell, especially if you want -others to believe your report. We were only subordinately con- cerned with the Canterbury pilgrims; we were mainly in a high Roman mood, and Caesar's camp was our goal.
The antiquity of England is always stunning, and it is with the breath pretty well knocked out of your body that you constantly come upon evidences of the Roman occupation, especially in the old, old churches which abound far beyond the fondest fancy of the home-keeping American mind. You can only stand be- fore these walls built of Roman brick, on these bricked- up Roman arches, and gasp out below the verger's hearing, " Four hundred years ! They held Britain four hundred years! Four times as long as we have lived since we broke with her!" But observe, gentle and trusting reader, that these Roman remains are of the latest years of their domination, and very long after
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they had converted and enslaved the stubbornest of the Britons, while at Caesar's camp, if it was his, we stood before the ghosts of the earliest invaders, of those legionaries who were there before Christ was in the world, and who have left no trace of their presence except this fortress-grave.
Very like a grave it was, with huge, long barrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had stretched him- self out on one of them, and as we approached from below was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies, which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter there, and which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover, till I found them out by their having no odor.
The effect was what forts and fields of fight always come to if you give them time enough; though few of the most famous can offer the traveller such a view of Folkestone and the sea as Cesar's camp. We drove round into the town by a different road from that we came out by, and on the way I noted a small brick- making industry in the suburb, which could perhaps
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account both for the prosperity of Folkestone and for the overbuilding. Sadly we saw the great numbers of houses that were to be let or sold, everywhere, and we arrived at our lodgings and the conclusion together that four-fifths of the houses which were not to be let whole, were to be let piecemeal in apartments. The sign of these is up on every hand, and the well-wisher of the sympathetic town must fall back for comfort as to its future on the prevalence of what has been waiting to call itself the instructural industry. Schools for youth of both sexes abound, and we everywhere saw at the proper hours discreetly guarded processions of fresh-looking young English-looking girls, carrying their complexions out into the health-giving air of the seas. As long as we could see them in their wholesome, pink- cheeked, blue-eyed innocence, we could hardly miss the fashion whose absence was a condition of one's being in Folkestone out of season.
Another compensation for being there untimely, as regarded fashion, was a glimpse of the English political life which I had one night in a "Liberal Demonstration" at the Town Hall. This I found as intellectually brac- ing as my two nights at the theatre were mentally re- laxing. It was all the difference between the beach and the Leas, and nothing but a severe sense of my non-citizenship saved me from partaking the enthu- siasm which I perceived all round me. I perceived also the good, honest odor of salt fish, such as was proper to the seafaring constituency whom one of the gentle- men on the platform was willing to represent in Parlia- ment as the Liberal candidate. He was ranked in by rows of his friends of both sexes, and on the floor where I sat, as well as in the galleries there were great num- bers of women, whom one seldom sees in political meet-
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ings at home, and great numbers of young men whom one sees almost as seldom. One lady on the platform, in evening dress, I fancied the wife of the young gentle- man in evening dress who was standing (in England candidates do not run) for a neighboring parliamentary constituency, and who presently made an excellent and telling speech. At times the speakers all aimed some remark, usually semijocose, at the women, and there was evidence of the domestication, the homely intelligence of all ranks and sexes, in English politics, which is wholly absent from ours. The points made against the Tories were their selfish government of the nation in the interest of themselves and their families; the crushing debts and taxes heaped upon the English people by the mismanagement of the Boer war; the in- justice of the proposed school law towards Dissenters; the absurdity and wickedness of the preferential tariff. It was all very personal to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, but impersonally personal and self-respectful. As I came in the Folkestone candidate was speaking very clearly and cogently, but not very vividly, and the real spirit of the demonstration was not roused till a Liberal member of Parliament followed him in a jovial, witty, and forcible talk rather than a speech. He won the heart of the people, and especially the women, who laughed with him, and helped cheer him; there was some give and take between him and the audience, from which he was bantered as well as ap- plauded; but all was well within the bounds of good-hu- mor and good-manners. He genially roughed the work- ing-men, whom he rallied on not getting everything they wanted, now when they had the vote and could vote %what they chose. It was like the talk of a man to his family or his familiar friends, and gave the sense of the
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closely graduated intimacy of politics possible in a homogeneous community.
He was followed by that gentleman in evening dress, who spoke as forcibly, and addressed himself to the working-man, too, whom he invited to realize their power, and to "take their share in the kingship.'7 The terms of his appeal made me tremble a little, but they were probably quite figurative, and embodied no dan- ger to the monarchy. Still from a man in evening dress, and especially a white waistcoat, they were in- teresting; and I came away equally divided between my surprise at them, and my American misgiving for the fact that neither the gentleman proposing to repre- sent a Folkestone constituency nor any of his friends was a resident of Folkestone. Such a thing, I reflected, was wholly alien to our law and custom, and could not happen except where some gentleman wished very much to be a Senator from a State of which he was not a citizen, and felt obliged to buy up its legislature.
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DOVER is a place which looks its history as little as any famous town I know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as common- place as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting there; but at last, after passing red-coat- ed soldiers stalking upward, and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers, hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through it by a warder of a jo- cosity which I have not known elsewhere in England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls; for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the unfathomable cas- tle well; for the disparity between our multitude and
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the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us. At different points he would begin, "I always say, 'ere/' and then pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a cru- sader effigy's tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of calling it " 'is toothpick."
All Would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked, and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has displaced. I knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a dulness, or a heart- lessness, I do not know which, such as I have never seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy sixpence into his palm with the bated explanation, "That's for the jokes," and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the apprecia- tion and not for the sixpence.
We went once to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe, which was once the home of smug- gling, and where there is still a little ale-house that po- etically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its sign of "Smuggler's Retreat." It is said that there was formerly smuggling pretty much along the whole
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coast, and there is a heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth -fires of many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn, would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the police-station, in the long, ram- bling street, had apparently once been an assembly- room, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top of one's charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.
I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements. Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps, than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in Folke- stone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association with Chaucer's Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas a Becket's murder. Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more surprise. The manual
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which one buys in all places is for the retrospective en- joyment and identification of their objects of interest, and my "Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book of the City," could do no more than agreeably supplement, long afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.
The day which chose us for our run up from Folke- stone was a heavenly fourth of May, when the flowers had pretty well all come up to reassure the birds of spring. There were not only cowslips and primroses in their convertible yellow, but violets visible if not recog- nizable along the railway sides, and the cherry-trees which so abound in Kent were putting on their clouds of bridal white and standing in festive array between the expanses of the hop-fields, in a sort of shining ex- pectation. At first you think there cannot be more of anything than of the cherry-trees in Kent, which last so long in their beauteous bloom, that for week after week you will find them full-flower, with scarcely a fallen petal. But by-and-by you perceive that there are more hop-vines than even cherry-trees in Kent; and that trained first to climb their slender poles, and then to feel their way along the wires crossing every- where from the tops of these till the whole landscape is netted in, they are there in an insurpassable pleni- tude. As yet, on our fourth of May, however, the hops, in mere hint of their ultimate prevalence, were just out of the ground, and beginning to curl about their poles, while the cherry-trees were there as if drifted by a bliz- zard of bloom. Here and there a pear-tree trained against a sunny wall attempted a rivalry self-doomed to failure; but the yellow furze gilded the embankments and the backward-flying plain with its honied flowers, already neighbored by purple expanses of wild hyacinth.
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What, in the heart of all this blossoming, was the great cathedral itself, when we came in sight of it, but a vast efflorescence of the age of faith, mystically beauti- ful in form, and gray as some pale exhalation from the mould of the ever-cloistered, the deeply reforested past?
Canterbury Cathedral, however, though it is so dis- tinctive, and is the chief of the sacred edifices which have in all Christian times incomparably enriched the place, might be lost from it and be less missed than from any other town of cathedral dignity. Without it Canterbury would still be worthy of all wonder, but with it, what shall one say? There is St. Martin's, there is St. Mildred's, there is St. Alphege's, there is the Monastery of St. Augustine, there is St. Stephen's, there is St. John's Hospital, and I know not what other pious edifices to remember the Roman and Saxon and Norman and English men, who, if they did not build better than they knew, built beautifuler than we can. But of course the cathedral towers above them all in the sky and thought, and I hope no reader of mine will make our mistake of immuring himself in a general omnibus for the rather long drive to the sacred fane from the station. A fly fully open to the sun, and creeping as slowly as a fly can when hired by the hour, is the true means of arrival in the sacred vicinity. In this you may absorb every particular of the picturesque course over the winding road, across the bridge under which the Stour rushes (one marvels whither, in such haste), overhung with the wheels of busy mills and the balconies of idle dwellings, in air reeking of tanneries, and so into the city by streets narrowing and widening at their own caprice, with little regard to the conven- ience of the shops. These seem rather to thicken about
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the precincts of the cathedral, where among those just without is a tiny restaurant which thinks itself almost a part of the church, and where some very gentlewo- manly young women will serve you an excellent warm lunch in a room of such mediaeval proportion and deco- ration that you can hardly refuse to believe yourself a pilgrim out of Chaucer. If the main dish of the lunch is lamb from the flocks which you saw trying to whiten the meadows all the way from Folkestone, and destined to greater success as the season advances, the poetic propriety of the feast will be the more perfect. After you have refreshed yourself you may sally t)ut into the Mercery Lane whither the pilgrims used to resort for their occasions of shopping, and where the ruder sort kept up "the noise of their singing, with the sound of their piping, and the jingling of their Canterbury bells," which they made in all the towns they passed through on their devout errand. They were in Canter- bury, according to good William Thorpe, who paid for his opinions by suffering a charge of heresy in 1405, "more for the health of their bodies than their souls. . . . And if these men and women be a month in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after great j anglers, tale-tellers, and liars. They have with them both men and women that sing well wanton songs." But what of that, the archbishop before whom Thorpe was tried effectively demanded. "When one of them that goeth barefoot striketh his foot against a stone . . . and maketh him to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow be- ginneth then a song . . . for to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow. For with such solace the travel and weariness of pilgrims is lightly and merrily brought forth." Nevertheless, in spite of this archiepiscopal reason-
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ing, the pilgrims seem to be largely a godless crew whom, if my reader has come in their company to Canterbury, he will do better to avoid while there, and betake himself at once to the cathedral when he has had his luncheon. It is easily of such interest, histor- ical and architectural, that he may spend in it not only all that is left him of his fourth of May, but many and many days of other months before he has exhausted it. The interest will rather exhaust him if he forms one of that troop of twentieth-century pilgrims who are led sheeplike through the edifice under the rod of the verger. We fell to a somewhat severe verger, though the whole verger tribe is severe, for that matter, and were snubbed if we ventured out of the strict order of our instruction at the shrine where Thomas a Becket, become a saint by his passive participation in the act, was murdered. One lady who trespassed upon the bounds pointed out as worn in the stone by the knees of more pious pilgrims, in former ages, was bidden per- emptorily "Step back," and complied in a confusion that took the mind from the arrogant churchman slain by the knights acting upon their king's passionate suspiration, "Is there no one to deliver me from this turbulent priest?"
Perhaps it was not the verger alone that at Canter- bury caused the vital spirits to sink so low. There was also the sense of hopelessness with which one recalled a few shadowy details of the mighty story of the church, including, as it does, almost everything of civility and art in the successive centuries which have passed, eight of them, since it began to be the prodigious pile it is. St. Thomas, who, since he was so promptly canonized, must be allowed a saint in everything but meekness, is the prime presence that haunts the thought of the
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visitor, and yet it is no bad second if the French Protestant refugees, whom Elizabeth allowed to hold their services in the crypt, and who lived where they worshipped in their exile, possess it next; the Black Prince's armor and effigy are not in it, with these. The crypt is no longer their dwelling-place, but their rites (I suppose Calvinistic) are still solemnized there; and who knows but if the savage Puritans, who imagined they were abolishing episcopacy when they were de- stroying beauty, had been a little less barbarous they might not now enter third among the associations of the cathedral? We cannot doubt the sincerity of their self-righteousness, and there is a fine thrill in the story of how they demolished "the great idolatrous window standing on the left hand as you go up into the choir," if you take it in the language of the minister Richard Culmer, luridly known to neighboring men as "Blue Dick." He himself bore a leading part in the vandal- ism, being moved by especial zeal to the work, not only because " in that window were seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary, in seven large glorious appearances," but because " their prime cathedral saint, Archbishop Becket, was most rarely pictured in that window, in full propor- tion, with cope, rochet, crozier, and his pontificalibus. ... A minister," the godly Blue Dick tells us, modestly forbearing to name himself, "was on top of the city ladder, near sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand, rattling down proud Becket's glassy bones, when others present would not venture so high."
Of course, of course, it is all abominable enough, but it is not contemptible. The Puritans were not doing this sort of thing for fun, though undoubtedly they got fun out of it. They believed truly they were serving God in the work, arid they cannot be left out of any
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count that sums up the facts making the English churches so potent upon the imagination. These churches were of a powerfuler hold upon my age than those that charmed my youth in Italy, because they bore witness not only to the great political changes in the life about them, but also to the succession of re- ligious events. The order of an unbroken Catholicism is not of so rich a picturesqueness or so vital an im- portance as the break from the Roman Church, and then the break from the English Church, the first prot- estantism obeying the king's will and the second the people's conscience. Each was effected with ruinous violence, but ruin for ruin, that wrought by Henry VIII. is of twice the quantity and quality of that wrought by the zealots of the Commonwealth. When they tell you in these beautiful old places that Crom- well did so and so to devastate or desecrate them, you naturally, if you are a true American, and inherit in spirit the Commonwealth, take shame to yourself for brave Oliver; but you need not be in such haste. There was a Thomas Cromwell, who failed to " put away am- bition," when bidden by the dying Wolsey, and who served his king better than his God; and it was this Cromwell far more than Oliver Cromwell who spoiled the religious houses and the churches. A hundred years before the righteous Blue Dick "rattled down proud Becket's glassy bones/7 there were royal com- missioners who rattled out the same martyr's real bones, and profaned his tomb in such wise that one cannot now satisfy the piety which drew the pilgrims in such multitude to his knee-worn shrine. It is to be said for the first Cromwell and his instruments, who were not too good to stable their horses in a church here and there, like the Puritan troopers who hardly bet-
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tered their instruction, that they would forbear their conscientious violence if the churchmen would pay enough, whereas no bribe could stay the hands of such followers of the second Cromwell as Blue Dick when once they lifted their hands against "cathedral saints."
We revered whatever was venerable in the cathedral, and then came rather wearily out and sat down to rest on a friendly bench commanding a view of as much of the edifice as the eye can take in at a glance. That was much more than the pen could tell in a chapter, and I will only generalize the effect as such rich repose for soul and body as I should not know where else to find again. We sat there in a moment of positive sun- shine, which poured itself from certain blue spaces in a firmament of soft white clouds. The towers and pin- nacles of the mighty bulk, which was yet too beautiful to seem big, soared among the tender forms, the Eng- lish sky is so low and the church was so high; and in and out of the coigns and crevices of its Norman, and early English, and Gothic, the rooks doing duty as pigeons, disappeared and appeared again. Naturally, there were workmen doing something to the roofs and towers, but as if their scaffolding was also Norman, and Gothic, and early English, it did not hurt the harmony of the architecture. When we could endure no more of the loveliness, we rose, and went about peering among the noble ruins of the cathedral cloisters, the work of the first Cromwell who tried to fear God in honoring the king, not the second Cromwell, who tried to honor God without fearing the king.
These are somehow more appealing than the ruins of St. Augustine's monastery, which is still a school for missionaries in its habitable parts. He began to build it while King Ethelbert yet mourned, in his conversion,
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for his Christian Queen Bertha, but it was a thousand years growing to the grandeur which Henry VIII. spared and appropriated, and in which it remained to be the sojourn of all the sovereigns visiting Canterbury from his time till that of Charles II. It is not clear how it fell into its present dignified dilapidation, through the hands to which it was granted from age to age; but it could not be a more sightly or reverently kept monument. The missionary school is like some vigorous growth clothing with new sap the flank of a mouldering trunk long since dead. It is interesting, it is most estimable; it tenderly preserves and uses such portions of the ancient monastery as it may; but the spirit turns willingly from it, and goes and hangs over some shoulder of orchard wall, and gloats upon the pictu- resqueness of broken, sky-spanning arches, ivied from their pillar bases to the tops of their mutilated spandrels. It was here, I think, that we first saw that curious flintwork which so abounds in the parts of Kent: the cloven pebbles of black-rimmed white set in walls of such pitiless obduracy that the sense bruises itself against them, and comes away bleeding. The monks who wove these curtains of checkered masonry, what an adamantine patience they must have had! But the labor was the least part of their bleak life, which was well put an end to, soon after it was corrupted into something tolerable by the vices attributed to them. Vicious they could not have been in the measure that the not over-virtuous destroyers of their monasteries pretended, and I think that amid the ruins of their nouses one may always rather fitly offer their memory the oblation of a pitying tear. I am not sure whether it was before or after we had visited the still older scene of St. Augustine's missionary effort at the church
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of St. Martin, that I paid some such tribute to his suc- cessors at the monastery; but the main thing is to have visited St. Martin's at any time. It is so old as to have forgotten not only its founders, who are dimly conject- ured to have been some Christian soldiers of the Roman garrison in about the year 187, but also the name of its first tutelary saint, for St. Martin was not yet bora when St. Martin's was built. He died about 395, and his fame crossed over from France with the good Bertha, when she came to wed the heathen King Ethelbert, of whose heathenism, with St. Augustine's help, she made such short and thorough work that after her death he became a Christian himself, and after his own death a saint. She dedicated the little Roman church to St. Martin, and she lies buried in a recess of the wall beside the chancel. The verger who showed us her stone coffin in its nook said, with a seeking glance from the corner of his eye: "This is where she is supposed to be buried. They say she is buried in two other places, but I think, as there is nothing to prove it, they might as well let her rest here."
He was probably right, and he was of a subacid saturnine humor which suited so well with the fabulous atmosphere of the place, or else with our momentary mood, that we voted him upon the whole the most sympathetic sexton we had yet known. He made, doubtless not for the first time, demurely merry with the brass of a gentleman interred beneath the chancel, who, being the father of three sons and ten daughters, was recorded to have had "many joys and some cares," and with the monumental stone of a patriarch who had died at a hundred and of whom he conjectured grimly that if he had not so many joys as his neighbor, he had fewer cares, since he had never married. If these jokes
416
ST. MART; VCH. CANTERBURY
CERTAIN IL ENGLISH TCW
of St. Martin, paid some such tribute to hi,
cessors at the monastery; but the main thing is to have visited St. M.- any time. It is so old as to have
forgotten founders, who are dimly conject-
ured to h- ie Christian soldiers of the Roman
garrison i year 187, but also the name of its
first tutelar)' saint, for St. Martin was not yet born when was built. He died about 395, and
his fa; ver from France with the good Bertha,
when > wed the heathen King Ethelbert, of
's help, she made
t and thorough work that after her death he
te a Christian himself, and after his own death a
the little Roman church to St.
Mart' •' ' - ^^Jtfe*fed-i^^rl5ce!§en*f^i* w*ll beside
<Tger who showed us her stone coffin in its nook said, with a seeking glance from the corner of his eye: "This is where si; *J to
be buried. They say she is buried in iaoes,
but I think, as there is nothii; as well let her rest here."
He was probably right, and he was of a subacid
saturnine humor v with the fabulous
atmosphere of tb with our momentary
mood, that \ him upon the whole the most
sympathetic had yet known. He made,
doubtless not for the first time, demurely merry with
tleman interred beneath the chancel,
f;her of three sons and ten daughters,
to have had "many joys and some cares,"
monumental stone of a patriarch who had
died idred and of whom he conjectured grimly
that if he had not so many joys as his neighbor, he had
fewer cares, since he had never married. If these jokes
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KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
were the standard drolleries purveyed to all travellers, we yet imputed from them a more habitual humor to the English race than Americans are willing to give it credit for. I still fancy something national in his com- ment on the seven doors, now all but one walled up in the side of the church: Roman and Saxon and Nor- man doors, which formed a pretty fair allowance of exit from a place not much more than thirty feet long, even if one of the Saxon doors was appropriated to the Evil One for his sole use in retreating when hard pressed by the sermon within. I believe, or I wish to believe, that our verger's caustic wit spared that sad memorial of past suffering and sorrow which one comes upon again and again in the old English churches, and which was called the Lepers' Squint in days when the word had no savor of mocking, and meant merely the chance of the outcasts to see the worship which their affliction would not suffer them to share.
It would be a pity to seem in any sort wanting in a sense of the solemnity of that pathetic temple, so old, so little, so significant of the history of the faith and race. The tasteful piety which is so universal in Eng- land, and is of such constant effect of godliness in an age not otherwise much vowed to it, keeps the revered place within and without in perfect repair; and I hope it is not too fantastic to suppose it in tacit sympathy with any stranger who lingers in the church-yard, and stays and stays for the beautiful prospect of Canterbury from its height. We drove from it through some streets of old houses stooped and shrunken with age, to that doting monument of the past which calls itself the Dane John, having forgotten just what its right name is. The immemorial mound, fifty feet high, which now forms the main feature of a pretty public garden, is
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fabled to be the monstrous barrow of those slain in a battle between the Danes and Saxons, but it need not be just that to "tease us out of thought" of our times; for wars are still as rife as in its own century, and dead men's bones can still be heaped skyward on the bloody fields. Some sixty or seventy years ago a public- spirited citizen of Canterbury planned and planted the pleasaunce one may now enjoy there, if one will leave one's carriage at the gate and stroll through it. Half of our little party preferred resting in the fly, seeing which a public-spirited citizeness came and protested against the self-denial with much entreaty. This un- known lady, hospitable and kindly soul, we afterwards fancied tardily fulfilling a duty to the giver of the garden which other ladies earlier spurned, if we may trust a local writer to whose monograph I owe more than I should like to own. "The gentry — for here in Canterbury, as elsewhere, we have our jarring spheres — consider the place unfashionable, and frequent it very little, because it is much frequented by the tradespeople, the industrious classes, and the soldiery; who, one and all, behave with exemplary propriety."
Another day of May, not quite so elect as our Can- terbury fourth, we went to the village of Eelham, nearer Folkestone, and there found ourselves in a most alluring little square with an inn at one corner and divers shops, and certain casual, wide-windowed, brick cottages enclosing it, and a windmill topping the low height above it. Windmills are so characteristic of Eelham Valley that we might not forbear visiting this, and I found the miller of as friendly and conversible a leisure as I could ask. Perhaps it was because he had a brother in Manitoba that we felt our worlds akin; perhaps because the varied experience of my own youth
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had confessedly included a year of milling. He said that he ground all kinds of grain, except wheat, for which the stones were too coarse, and he took toll of every third bushel, which did not seem too little. I should have liked to spend the day in his company, where I perceived I might be acceptably and comfort- ably silent when I would.
There must have been a church at Eelham, but there was a more noted church at Lyminge, two miles away, whither we decided to walk. The main object of inter- est at Eelham was an old Tudor manor-house, which we had not quite the courage, or perhaps the desire, to ask to see except from the outside. The perspective from the sidewalk through the open doorway included a lady on a step-ladder papering the entry wall, and presently another lady, her elder, going in-doors from the garden, who was not averse to saying that there was plenty of room in the house, but it was much out of repair. We inferred that we were not conversing with the manorial family; when we asked how far it was to Lyminge, this old lady made it a half-mile more than the miller; and probably the disrepair of the mansion was partly subjective.
The road to Lyminge was longer than it was broad, though its measure was in keeping with an island where the roads cannot be of our continental width. It opened to a sky smaller than ours, but from which there fell a pleasant sunshine with bird-singing in it; and there was room enough on the borders of the lane for more wild flowers than often grow by our waysides. When the envious hedges suffered us a glimpse of them we saw gentle fields on either hand, and men at work in their furrows. From time to time we met bicyclers of both sexes, and from time to time people in dog-
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carts. Once we met a man with a farm-cart, who seemed willing, though dull, when we asked our way. "Turn to left just inside the windmill," he directed us; and by keeping outside of the mill, on a height beyond, we got to Lyminge.
I am sorry to report of the pastry-shop there that we had with our tea the only rancid butter offered us in England, and that in a country where the bread is always heavy and damp, it was here a little heavier and damper than elsewhere. But we were at Lyminge not for the pastry-shop, but the church, and that did not disappoint us, even to the foundation of the Roman edifice which is kept partly exposed beside it. The actual church is very Norman, and it is of that chilly charm which all Norman churches are of when the English spring afternoon begins to wane. From the tower down through the dim air dangled long bell-ropes bound with red stuff where the ringers seized them, and we heard, or seem now to have heard., that there had lately been a bell-ringing contest among them which must have stirred Lyminge to its centre. The day of our visit was market-day, and there had been cattle sales which left traces of unwonted excitement in the quiet streets, and almost thronged the bleak little sta- tion with the frequenters of the fair. One of these was of a type which I imagine is alien to the elder country life. The young man who embodied it was so full of himself, and of his day's affairs, for which he was appro- priately costumed in high boots and riding-breeches, that he overflowed in confidences to the American stranger. He told what cattle he had bought and what sold, and he estimated his gains at a figure which I hope was not too handsome. In return he invited the experience of the stranger whom he brevetted a
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cattle-dealer of perhaps a more old-fashioned kind, but whose errand at Lyminge on market-day was doubtless the same as his own. It was mortifying not to be able to comply, but my thoughts were still busy with the somewhat ghostly personage whom we had found de- ciphering an inscription on a stone in the church-yard, and whose weirdness was heightened by an impediment in his speech. He was very kind in helping us out in our mild curiosity, and I hope he has felt that brace in the change of air to Lyminge from Folkestone which he offered as a reason for his being where we met him. But he liked Lyminge, he said, and if one does not care much for the movements of great cities there may be worse places than the church-yard of Lyminge, where we left him in the waning light, gently pushing, not scraping, the moss from
— the lay Graved on a stone beneath the aged thorn.
If the reader thinks we were too easily satisfied with the events of our excursion, he can hardly deny that the children and their mothers or aunts or governesses getting into the trains at the little country stations, with their hands full of wild flowers, and eyes bluer than their violets, were more than we had a right to. When at one of these stations a young man, with county- family writ large upon his face and person and raiment, escaped from a lady who talked him into the train, and then almost talked him out of it before it could start, we felt blessed beyond our desert. We dramatized, out of our superabundant English fiction, the familiar situation of the pushing and the pushed which is always repeating itself; and in the lady's fawning persistence, and his solid, stolid resistance we had a moment of the
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sort of social comedy which should provoke tears rather than smiles. But the pushed always yield to the pusher in the end. This adamantine aristocrat, if such he was, was utimately to be as putty between the fingers of the parvenue, if such she was, and since she was middle- aged enough to be the mother of a marriageable daugh- ter we foresaw her ultimately giving him her child with tears of triumph.
Travel is obliged to make up these little romances, or else it is apt to feel that it has had no genteel expe- riences, since it necessarily moves on the surfaces and edges of life. I was glad of any chance of the sort, and even of the humbler sort of thing which offered itself more explicitly, such as the acquaintance of a milkman and a retired exciseman, with whom I found myself walking outside of the pretty town of Rye on a May morning of sunny rain. At the entrance of a hop-field, where there was a foot-path inviting our steps across lots, the milkman eliminated himself with his cans and left us with the fact that hop-raising was not everything to the farmer that could be wished, and that if, after all his expenses, he could clear up a pound an acre at the end of the season, he was lucky. Up to that moment our discourse had been commonplace and busi- ness-like, but now it became sociological, it became met- aphysical, it became spiritual, as befitted the conversa- tion of a Scotchman and an American. The Englishman had been civil and been kind; he was intelligent enough in the range of his experiences; but he was not so vividly all there as the Scotch body, who eagerly in- quired of the state of Presbyterianism among us. He did not push the question as to my own religious persuasion, but I met nowhere any Briton so generally interested in us. In the feeling promoted by this interest of his,
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we united in a good opinion of his actual sovereign, whom it was fit, as a pensioner who had been "for-r-ty years in his Majesty's sar-r-vice," he should praise as "a good-natured gentleman." As for the late queen he had no terms to measure his affection and reverence for her. I do not know now by what circuit we had reached these topics from the Scriptural subjects with which we started, or how it was he came to express the strong sense he had of the Saviour's civility to the woman of Samaria, as something that should be "a lesson to our gentry" in kindly behavior to the poor.
Wherever he now is, I hope my friendly Scot is well, and I am sure he is happy. Our weather included, from the time we met till we parted after crossing the wide salt-marsh stretching between Rye and the sea, every vicissitude of sun and rain, with once a little hail; but I remember only an unclouded sky, which I think was his personal firmament. I left him at the little house of the daughter whom he said he was visit- ing, outside the only town-gate that remains to Rye from its mediaeval fortifications. There is a small pa- rade, or promenade, at a certain point near by, fenced with peaceful guns, from which one may overlook all that wide level stretching to the sea — with a long gash of ship-channel and boats tilted by the ebb on its muddy shores — and carrying the eye to the houses and vessels of the port. Rye itself was once much more impressively the port, but the sea left it, long and long ago, standing like the bold headland it was, and still must look like when ths fog washes in about its feet. It is an endear- ing little town, one of hundreds (I had almost said thou- sands) in England, with every comfort in the compass of its cosey streets; with a church, old, old, but not too dotingly Norman, and a lane opening from it to the door
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of a certain house where one might almost live on the entrancing perspective of its tower and its graveyard trees. A damp blind beggar on a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass of rheu- matic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely old tewns. It keeps its history to itself, and I would no more invite the reader to intrude upon its past than I would ask him to join me in invading the private affairs of any English gentleman. A few people who know its charm come down from London for the summer months; but there is a reasonable hope that it will never be newer or other than it is. I myself would not have it changed in the least particular. I should like to go there May after May as long as the world stands, and hang upon the parapet of the small parade and look dreamfully seaward over the prairie-like level, and presently find myself joined by a weak-eyed, weak-voiced elder who draws my attention to the blossoming hawthorns beside us. One is white and one is pink, and between them is a third of pinkish-white. He wishes to know if it is so because the bees have inoculated it, and being of the mild make he is, he rather asks than asserts, "They do inockerlate 'em, sir?"
IX
OXFORD
THE friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began to ex- press it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflores- cence of the past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station where each of our passen- gers was welcomed by at least three sons or brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else's boxes in the confiding distributions from the luggage-vans. As our passengers were mostly mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in the
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worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers, but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of the meetings at the sta- tion, if I did not say that the meeters were quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued together from the place these contributed their advantageous disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and against walls, before their advancing flood.
Our own friend who, lief and clear as any son or brother or nephew or cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to greet us at the sta- tion, had in a wonderfully little while divined our bag- gage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we perceived was no petrificatiori, but a living growth from the soul of the undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there. We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortar- boards, and gowns clipped of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets with- out this abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in the ordi- nary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened
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suspicion in the authorities. We were, in fact, driving through a largeish town, peopled beyond its comfortable wont, and noisy with the rush of feet and wheels far frequenter and swifter than those which set its char- acteristic pace.
Our friend knew we were not, poor things, there for a tumult which we could have easily had in New York, or even in London, and he made haste to withdraw us from it up into a higher place at the top of the Radcliffe Library, where we could look down on all Oxford, with the tumult subsiding into repose under the foliage and amid the flowers of the college gardens. It is the well- known view which every one is advised by the guide- books to seize the first thing, and he could not have done better for us, even from his great love and lore of the place, than to point severally out each renowned roof and spire and. tower which blent again for my rapture in a rich harmony with nothing jarring from the whole into any separately accentuated fact. I pre- tended otherwise, and I hope I satisfactorily seemed to know those tops and deeps one from another, when I ignorantly exclaimed, "Oh, Magdalen, of course! Christ Church! And is that Balliol? And Oriel, of course; and Merton, and Jesus, and Wadham — really Wadham? And New College, of course! And is that Brasenose?"
I honestly affected to remember them from a first visit twenty years before, when in a cold September rain I wandered about among them with a soul dry- shod and warmed by an inner effulgence of joy in being there on any sort of terms. But I remembered nothing except the glory which nothing but the superior radi- ance of being there again in May could eclipse. What I remember now of this second sight of them will not let itself be put in words; it is the bird which sings in
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the bush, and alertly refuses to double its value by coming into the hand. I could not now take the most trusting reader up into that high place, and hope to abuse his innocence by any feigned knowledge of those clustering colleges. All is a blur of leafy luxuriance, probably the foliage of the garden trees which embower the colleges, but not so absolutely such that it does not seem the bourgeoning and branching edifices themselves, a sumptuous Gothic suggestion, in stem and spray, of the stone-wrought beauty of the halls and chapels where nature might well have studied her effects of Perpen- dicular or Early English, or that spiritual Flamboyant in which she excels art. There remains from it chiefly a sense of flowery color which I suppose is from the nearer-to insistence of trees everywhere in bloom.
It was as if Oxford were decorated for the Eights by these sympathetic hawthorns and. chestnuts and fond lilacs, and the whole variety of kind, sweet shrubs which had hung out their blossoms to gladden the pretty eyes and noses of the undergraduates' visitors. We could not drive anywhere without coming upon some proof of the floral ardor; but perhaps I am embowering Oxford more than I ought with borrowed wreaths and garlands from the drive to the Norman church of Iffley where our friend took us, ostensibly because it could just be got in before lunch, but really because we needed some relief from the facts of Oxford which, stamped thickly, one upon another, made us inexhaustible palimpsests of precious impressions. I am sure that if another could get at my memory, and wash one record clear of an- other, there would reveal itself such a perfect history of what I saw and did as would constitute every be- holder a partner of my experiences. But this I cannot manage for myself, and must be as content as I can
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with revealing mere fragmentary glimpses of the fact, broken lines, shattered images, blurred colors. For instance, all I can get at, of that visit to the Norman church at Iffley, is the May morning air, with its sun and sweet, from which we passed to the gloom, richly chill, of the interior, and then from that again, into the sun and sweet, to have a swift look at the fagade, with the dog-toothing of its arches, which I then for the first time received distinctly into my consciousness. A part of the precious concept, forever inseparable, is my rec- ollection of the church warden's printed prayer that I would not lean against the chain-fencing before the fagade, and of my grief that I could not comply without failing of the view of it which I was there for: without leaning against that chain one cannot look up at the dog-toothing, and receive it into one's consciousness.
As often I have thought of asking my reader to re- visit Oxford with me, I have fancied vividly possessing them of this or that distinctive fact, without regard to the sequences, but I find myself, poor slave of all that I have seen and known! following myself, step by step through the uneventful events in the order of their occurrence; and if my reader will not keep me com- pany, after luncheon, in my stroll across fields and through garden ways beyond my friend's house to that affluent of the Isis whose real name is the Cherwell, and which calls itself the Char, I know not how he is to get to the point where the Isis becomes the Thames, and where we are to see the first of the Eights, and two of the Bumps together. For except by this stroll we cannot reach the pretty water, so full, so slow, so bright, so dark, where we are to take boat, and get down to the destined point on its smooth breast, with a thousand other boats of every device, but mainly, but overwhelm-
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ingly, punts. The craft were all pushed or pulled by their owners or their owners' guests, who were as serene- ly and sweetly patient with the problem of getting to the Eights or the Bumps in time, as if the affair were subjective, and might be delayed by an effort of the will in the various cases.
As with other public things in England, this had such a quality of privacy that we seemed the only per- sons really concerned, and other people in other boats were as much figures painted in the landscape as the buttercups in the meadowy levels that stretched on either hand at our point of departure, and presently, changed into knots of boskage, overhanging the dreamy lymph. But I shall not get into my picture the sense of the lush grasses, with those little yellow lamps, or those Perpendicular boles, with their Early English arches, or their Flamboyant leafage, any more than I shall get in the sense of the shore gleamily wetting its root-wrought earthen brinks, or bringing the weedy herbage down to drink of the little river. River it was, though so little, and as much in scale with the little continent it helps to water, as any Ohio or Mississippi of ours is with our measureless peninsula. There is also something in that English air, which, in spite of the centuries of taming to man's hand leaves Nature her moods, her whims, of showing divinely and inalienably primitive, so that I had bewildering moments, on that sung and storied water, of floating on some wildwood stream of my Western boyhood. It has, so it appeared, its moments of savage treachery, and one still eddy where it lay smoothly smiling was identified as the point where two undergraduates had not very long ago been drowned. Sometimes the early or the later rains swell it to a flood, and spread it over those low pastures, in
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an image of the vaster deluges which sweep our immense stretches of river valley.
There was a kind of warm chill in the afternoon air, which bore all odors of wood and meadow, and trans- mitted the English voices with a tender distinctness. From point to point there were reaches of the water where we had quite a boat's-length of it to ourselves, and again there were sharp turns where it narrowed to an impossible strait and the congested craft must have got by one another through the air. The people in the punts, and canoes, and boats, were proceeding at their leisure, or lying wilfully or forgetfully moored by the flat shores or under the mimic bluffs. They struck into one another where they found room enough to with- draw for the purpose, and they were constantly grinding gunwale against gunwale, with gentle murmurs of dep- recation and soft -voiced forgivenesses which had al- most the quality of thanks. Then, before we knew it we were gliding under Magdalen bridge past bolder shores, and so, into wider and opener waters where, with as little knowledge of ours the Char had become, or was by way of becoming the Thames which is the Isis. I believe it is still the Char where the bumps take place in the commodious expanses between the college barges tethered to the grassy shores. These barges were only a little more conspicuously aflame and aflutter with bright hats and parasols and volatile skirts than the shores; and they were all one fluent delight of color. On the shore opposite the barge where we were guests, there ran, soon after we had taken our first cups of tea, a cry of undergraduates, heralding the first of the two shells which came rowing past us. Then, almost ere I was aware oL it the bow of a shell which was behind touched the stern of the shell which was before, and
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the first blimp had been achieved. The thing had been so lightly and quickly done that the mere fact of the bump had not fully passed from the eye to the mind, when a glory wholly unexpected by me involved us: the shell which had made the bump belonged to our college, or at least the college to which our barge be- longed. Shining in the reflected light, we rowed back up the Char to the point of our departure, and in the long, leisurely twilight found our first day in Oxford drawing on to night in the fragrant meadow.
Was it this night or the next that I dined in hall? There were several dinners in hall, and I may best be indefinite as to time as well as place. All civilized din- ners are much alike everywhere, from soup to coffee, and it is only in certain academic formalities that a dinner in hall at Oxford differs from another banquet. One of these which one may mention as most captivat- ing to the fancy fond of finding poetry in antique usage was the passing from meat in the large hall, portraited round the carven and panelled walls with the effigies of the college celebrities and dignities, into a smaller and cosier room, where the spirit of the gadding vine began its rambles up and down the glossy mahogany; and then into a third place where the fragrant cups and tubes fumed in the wedded odors of coffee and tobacco. If I remember, we went from the first to the last succes- sively under the open heaven; but perhaps you do not always so, though you always make the transit, and could not imaginably smoke where you ate or drank.
Once, when the last convivial delight was exhausted, and there was a loath parting at the door in the grassy quadrangle under the mild heaven, where not even a star intruded, I had a realizing sense of what Oxford could mean to some youth who comes to it in eager in-
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experience from such a strange, far land as ours, and first fully imagines it. Or perhaps it was rather in one of the lambent mornings when I strayed through the gar- dened closes too harshly called quadrangles that I had the company of this supposititious student, and wreaked myself in his sense of measureless opportunity. Not opportunity alone, but opportunity graced with all the charrn of tradition, and weighted with rich scholarly convention, the outgrowth of the patient centuries blos- soming at last in a flower from whose luminous chalice he should drink the hoarded wisdom of the past. I said to myself that if I were such a youth my heart would go near to break with the happiness of finding myself in that environment and privileged to all its possibilities, with nothing but myself to hinder me from their utmost effect. Perhaps I made my imag- inary youth too imaginative, when I was dowering him with my senile regrets in the form of joyful expecta- tions. It is said the form in which the spirit of the university dwells is so overmastering for some that they are fain to escape from it, to renounce their fellow- ships, and go out from those hallowed shades into the glare of the profane world gladly to battle "in the midst of men and day."
Even of the American youth who resort to it, not all add shining names to the effulgent records of the place. They are indeed not needed, though they may be pa- triotically missed from the roll in which the native memories shine in every sort of splendor. It fatigues you at last to read the inscriptions which meet the eye wherever it turns. The thousand years of English glory stretch across the English sky from 900 to 1900 in a luminous tract where the stars are sown in multitudes outnumbering those of all the other heavens; and in
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Oxford above other places one needs a telescope to distinguish them. The logic of any commemoration of the mighty dead is that they will animate the living to noble endeavor for like remembrance. But where the mighty dead are in such multitude perhaps it is not so. Perhaps in the presence of their records the desire of distinction fails, and it is the will to do great things for the things' sake rather than the doer's which remains. The hypothesis might account for the prevailing imper- sonality of Oxford, the incandescent mass from which nevertheless from time to time a name detaches itself and flames a separate star in the zenith.
What strikes one with the sharpest surprise is not the memories of distant times, however mighty, but those of yesterday, of this forenoon, in which the tradi- tion of their glory is continued. The aged statesman whose funeral eulogy has hardly ceased to echo in the newspapers, the young hero who fell in the battle of the latest conquest, died equally for the honor of Eng- land, and both are mourned in bronze which has not yet lost its golden lustre beside the inscriptions forget- ting themselves in the time-worn lettering of the tablets on the walls, or the brasses in the floors. Thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa, they strew the solemn place, but in the religious calm of those chapels and halls there is no rude blast to scatter them, or to disturb the quiet in which for a few hundred or a few thousand years they may keep themselves from the universal oblivion.
When one strays through those aisles and under those arches, one fancies them almost as conscious of their sacred eld as one is one's self. Then suddenly one comes out into the vivid green light of a grassy quadrangle, or the flowery effulgence of a garden, where the banks of blossomed bushes are pushed back of the beds of glow-
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ing annuals by the velvety sward unrolled over spaces no more denied to your foot than the trim walks that wander beyond their barrier, under the ivied walls, and to and from the foot-worn thresholds. To the eye it is all very soft and warm, and the breadths of enclosing masonry, the arched or pillared gables, the towers start- ing on their skyward climb, seem to bathe themselves in sun or cool themselves in shade alike mellow and mild. There are other senses that more truly take account of the thermometer and report it in very glow- ing moments as not registering much above the middle fifties. But you answer in excuse of it that it is so sincere, just as you ascribe to its scrupulous truthful- ness the failure of the English temperament ever to register anything like summer heat. We boil in the torridity of an adoptive climate, but our ancestral suns were no hotter than those of the English are now; and where we have kept their effect in some such cold storage as that, say, of Boston, we probably impart no greater heat to the stranger. The spiritual temperature of Oxford, indeed, is much that of Old Cambridge, that Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, when it was far older, forty years ago, than it is now. Very likely, the atmos- pheres of all capitals of learning are of the same degree of warmth; and of a responsive salubrity, in the ab- sence of malarial microbes. At any rate I was at once naturalized to Oxford through my former citizenship in Old Cambridge, and in a pleasing confusion found myself in both places at once with an interval of forty years foreshortened in a joint past and present. ^
The note of impersonality is struck in both places, but not so prevalently in Old Cambridge as in Oxford, where the genius of the place at some moment of divine inspiration,
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" Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight."
As in the political frame of things the powerful English individualities pronounce themselves strongliest by their abnegation to a patriotic ideal, so in this finer and higher England, this England of the mind, what chiefly impresses the stranger is that mighty accord, that im- personal potency, which is the sum of the powerful wills, intellects, spirits severally lost in its collectivity. The master of this college, the president of that, the dean of the other, they all unite in effacing themselves, and letting the university, which is their composite per- sonality, stand for them. As far as possible they refuse to stand for it, and the humor of the pose is carried to the very whim in the custom which bars the Chancellor of the University from ever returning to Oxford after that first visit which he makes upon his appointment. My imagination does not rise to a height like his, but of all accessible dignities there seems to me none so amiable as the headship of one of those famous colleges. I will not, since I need not, choose among them, and very likely if one had one's choice, one might find a crumpled rose-leaf in the cushioned seat. Yet one could well bear the pain for the sake of the pleasure and the pride of feeling one's self an agency of that ancient and venerable impersonality and of denying one's self the active appearance. Scholarship, when it does not degenerate into authorship is the most nega- tive of human things. It silently feeds itself full of learning, which is as free again to the famine of future scholarship; and in a world where pretty nearly all the soft warm things of privilege are so cruelly wrong, I can think of none so nearly innocent as those which
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lap the love of learning round in such an immortal home of study as Oxford. It is there so fitly housed, so properly served, so respectfully fed, so decorously clad, so beautifully environed, that it might almost dream itself a type of what should always and every- where be an emanation of the literature to which it shall return after its earthly avatar, and rest, a blessed ghost, between the leaves of some fortunate book on an unvisited shelf of a vast silentious and oblivious library.
There is memory enough of lunches and dinners and teas, in halls and on lawns and in gardens, but as the reader was not asked, so cannot he in self-respect and propriety go. But there was one of the out-door affairs of which I may give him at least a picture-postal-card glimpse. No one's abnegated personality will be in- fringed, not even the university need shrink from the intrusion if the garden of no college is named. The reader is to stand well out of the way at a Gothic window looking on the green where the guests come and go under an afternoon heaven which constantly threatens to shower, and never showers; where the sun indeed appears just often enough to agree with the garden trees that it will add indescribably to the effect if their length- ening shadows can be cast over the sward with those of the Gothic tops around. A little breeze crisps the air, and the birds sing among the gossiping leaves of the hawthorns and of the laburnums. One great chest- nut stands elect, apart, dense with spiky blossoms from the level of its lowest spreading boughs to the topmost peak of its massive cone. Everywhere is the gracious architecture in which the mouldering Oxford stone, whether it is old or new, puts on the common antiquity.
I will not say that all the colleges seem crumbling to
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ruin, but the scaly and scabrous complexion of the sur- faces is the impression remaining from the totality. The decay into which the stone almost instantly falls is sometimes rather dreadful to the casual glance in the plinths of those philosophers and sages about the Sheldonian Theatre, where the heads seem to be drop- ping away in a mortal decay. I believe they are re- newed from time to time when they become too dread- ful, but always in the same stone; and I do not know that I would have it otherwise in the statues or struct- ures of Oxford. Where newness in any part would seem upstart and vulgar, every part looks old, whether it is of the last year or the first year. The smoke has blackened it, the damp has painted it a dim green; the latent disintegration of the stone has made its way to the surface, which hangs in warped scales or drops in finer particles. One would not have a different material used for building; brick or marble would affront the sensibilities, and deny the wisdom of that whole Eng- lish system, in which reform finds itself authorized in usage, and innovation hesitates till it can put on the likeness of precedent.
It is interesting in Oxford to see how the town and the university grow in and out of each other. Like other towns of the Anglo-Saxon civilization it is occa- sional, accidental, anarchical, the crass effect of small personal ambitions and requisitions. In the course of so many centuries its commonness could not always fail of a picturesque quaintness, and perhaps it only seems without beauty or dignity because the generous collec- tive spirit working itself out in the visible body of the university has created more of both than any other group of edifices in the world embodies. Those shape- less, shambling, casual streets, with their scattered
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dwellings and their clustering shops, find by necessity a common centre, without irnpressiveness or distinction. But in their progress or arrival, weakly widening here, or helplessly narrowing there, they often pass under the very walls of the venerable and beautiful edifices which constitute at once the real Oxford and the ideal Oxford, alike removed from the material Oxford of the town. Sometimes it is a wall that flanks a stretch of the com- monplace thoroughfares; sometimes a gate or a portal under a tower giving into the college quadrangle from which you pass by inner ways beneath inner walls to an inmost garden, where the creepers cling to the win- dows and the porches, or a space of ivied masonry suns itself above the odorous bushes and the daisied sward. It would be hard to choose among these homes of ancient lore; but happily one is not obliged to choose. They are all there for the looking, and one owns them, an inalienable possession for life. One would not will them away, if one could; they must remain forever to enrich the pious beholder with the vision which no words can impart.
The heart of the pilgrim softens in the retrospect even towards that municipal Oxford which forms the setting of their beauty, as a mass of common rock may shape- lessly enclose a cluster of precious stones, crystals which something next to conscious life has deposited through the course of the slow ages in the rude matrix. He re- lents in remembering pleasant suburbs, through which the unhurried trams will bear him past tasteful houses, set in embowered spaces of greensward, and on past pretty parks into the level country where there are villas among grounds that will presently broaden into the acreage of ancestral-seats, halls, manors, and, for all I know, castles. Even the immediate town has moods
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of lurking in lanes apart from the busier streets, and offering the consolation of low, stone dwellings faced by college walls, and dedicated to the uses of furnished lodgings. If it should be your fortune to find your sojourn in one of these, you may look down from your front window perhaps into the groves that shade Addi- son's Walk; or you may step from your back door into a grassy nook where a tower or bastion of the old city wall will be hiding itself in a mesh of ivy. The lane before may be dusty with traffic and the garden behind may be damp with the rains that have never had inter- vals long enough to dry out of it; but the rooms with their rocking floors will be neatly kept, and if they hap- pen to be the rooms of a reading or sporting under- graduate, sublet in some academic interval, you will find the tokens of his tastes and passions crowding the mantels and the walls. He has confided them with the careless faith of youth, to your chance reverence; he has not even withheld the photographs which attest his preference in actresses, or express a finer fealty in the faces self-evidently of mother or sister or even cousin, or some one farther and nearer yet.
It is everywhere much alike, that spirit of studious youth, at least in our common race, and I do not believe that if I had met a like number of Harvard men, going and coming in the mortar-boards and cropped gowns, in those quadrangles or gardens, I should have known them from the Oxford men I actually saw. They might have looked sharper, tenser, less fresh and less fair, not so often blue of eye and blond of hair, more mixed and differenced; but they would have had the same effect of being chosen for their golden opportunity by fortune, and the same gay ignorance of being favored above other youth. If one came to closer quarters and had
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to ask some chance question, the slovenlier speech of the Harvard men would have betrayed them in their answer, for even our oldest university has not yet taken thought of how her children shall distinguish themselves from our snuffling mass by the beauty of utterance which above any other beauty discriminates between us and the English. It is said that the youth of the parent stock are younger than our youth; but I know nothing as to this; and I could not say that their manners were better, except as the manners of the English are in being simpler. They are not better in being suppler: I should say that as life passed with him the American limbered and the Englishman stiffened, and that the first gained and the last lost in the power to imagine another which they both perhaps equally possessed in their shy nonage, and which chiefly, if not solely, enables men to be comfortable to their fellows. But here, as everywhere, I wish to be understood as making an inference vastly disproportioned to the facts observed. The stranger in any country must reflect that its people seem much less interested in themselves and their belongings than he is, and from the far greater abun- dance of their knowledge have far less to say of them. This may very well happen to a traveller from an old land among us; his zest for our novelty may fatigue us; just as possibly our zest for his antiquity may put us at odds with him. The spirit seeks in either case a common ground of actuality, achronic, ubiquitious, where it may play with its fellow soul among the human interests which are eternally and everywhere the same. What these are I should be far from trying to say, but I think I may venture to recur to my memories of the mute music of Harvard for the dominant of the unheard melodies at Oxford. The genius of the older
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university seemed much the same as that of the younger under the stress of ceremonial, and to have the quality of that stern acquiescence in the inevitable on the occa- sions of Commemoration Day that I remembered from Commencement Days in the past. The submission did not break into the furtively imparted jest which relieves the American temperament under fire, but the feeling of obedience to usage, the law-abiding instinct of the race, was the same in both. From both a gala pride was equally remote; the confident expectation of living through it, and not even a martyr exultance in the ordeal, was doubtless what sustained the participants. We have simplified form, but the English have simplied the mood of observing form, and in the end it comes to the same thing in them and in us. But there the parallel ceases. There is a riches of incident in the observance of Commemoration Day at Oxford, for which the sum of all like events in our academic world is but an accumulated poverty. We could not if we would emulate the continuous splendors of the time, for we lack not only the tradition but the environment in which to honor the tradition. If it were possible so to abolish space that Harvard and Yale and Princeton, say, and Columbia could locally unite, and be severally the colleges of one university, and assemble their best in architecture for its embodiment, something might be imaginable of their collectivity like what involuntarily, inevitably happens at Oxford on Commemoration Day. Then the dinners in hall on the eve and in the evening, the lunches in the college gardens immediately follow- ing the academical events of the Sheldonian Theatre, the architectural beauty and grandeur forming the avenue for the progress of the Chancellor and all his train of diverse doctors, actual and potential, might be
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courageously emulated, but never could be equalled or approached. Our emulation would want the color of the line which at Oxford comes out of the past in the bravery of the scarlets and crimsons and violets and purples which men used to wear, and before which the iridescent fashions of the feminine spectators paled their ineffectual hues. Again, the characteristic sur- render of personality contributed to the effect. In that procession whatever were the individual advan- tages or disadvantages of looks or statures, all were clothed on with the glory of the ancient university which honored them; it was the university which pas- sively or actively was embodied in them; and their very distinction would in a little while be merged in her secular splendor.
Of course we have only to live on a few centuries more and our universities can eclipse this splendor, though we shall still have the English start of a thou- sand years to overcome in this as in some other things. We cannot doubt of the result, but in the mean time we must recognize the actual fact, arid I will own that I do not see how we could ever offer a coup d'oeil which should surpass that of the supreme moments in the Sheldonian Theatre when the Chancellor stood up hi his high place, in his deeply gold-embroidered gown of black, and accepted each of the candidates for the university's degrees, and then, after a welcoming clasp of the hand, waved him to the benches which mystically represented her hospitality. The circle of the interior lent itself with unimagined effect to the spectacle, and swam with faces, with figures innumerable, representing a world of birth, of wealth, of deed, populous beyond reckoning from our simple republican experience. The thronged interior stirred like some vast organism with
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the rustle of stuffs, the agitation of fans, the invisible movement of feet; but the master -note of it was the young life which is always the breath of the university. How much or little the undergraduates were there it would not do for a chance alien spectator to say. That they were there to do what they would with the occa- sion in the tradition of an irresponsible license might be affirmed, but it must be equally owned that they generously forebore to abuse their privilege. They cheered the Candidates, some more, some less, but there was, to my knowledge, none of the guying of which one hears much, beyond a lonely pun upon a name that offered itself with irresistible temptation. The pun itself burst like an involuntary sigh from the heart of youth, and the laugh that followed it was of like quality with it.
Then, the degrees being conferred, each with dis- tinctive praise and formal acceptance in a latinity un- touched by modern conjecture of Roman speech, there ensued a Latin oration, and then English essays and speeches from the graduates — thriftily represented, that the time should not be wasted, by extracts — and then a prize poem which did not perhaps distinguish itself so much in generals as in particulars from other prize poems of the past. If it had been as wholly as it was partially good — and there were passages that caught and kept the notice — it would have been a breach of custom out of tune and temper, as much as if the occa- sional latinity had been of the new Roman accent in- stead of that old English enunciation as it was of right, there where Latin had never quite ceased to be a spoken language. All was of usage: the actors and the spec- tators of the scene were bearing the parts which like actors and like spectators had ancestrally borne so often
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that they might have seemed to themselves the same from the first century, the first generation, without sense of actuality. This sense might imaginably have been left, in any sort of poignancy, to the accidental alien, who in proportion as he was penetrated with it would feel it a contravention of the spirit, the taste, of the event.
I try for something that is not easily said, and being said at all, seems over-said; and I shrink from the weightest impression of Oxford which one could receive, and recall those light touches of her magic, which as I feel them again make me almost wish that there had been no Eights, no Commemoration Day in my expe- rience. Of course I shall fail to make the reader sensi- ble of the preciousness of a walk from the Char through a sort of market flower-garden, where when I asked my way to a friend's house a kindly consensus of gardeners helped me miss the short cut; but I hope he will not be quite without the pleasure I knew in another row on that stream. Remembering my prime joys in its navigation, I gratefully accepted an invitation to a second voyage which was delayed till we could be sure it was not going to rain. Then we started for the boat where it lay not far off under a clump of trees, and where we were delayed in their seasonable shelter by a thunder-gust; but the clouds broke away and the sun shone, so that when our boat was bailed dry, we could embark in a light shower, and keep on our way unmolested by the fine drizzle that was really repre- senting fine weather. If I had been native to the impulsive climate I should not have noticed these swift vicissitudes, and as it was I noticed them only to enjoy them on the still, bank-full water, where I floated with a delight not really qualified by the question whether
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the pond-lilies which padded it in places were of the fragrant family of our own pond-lilies. I was pursued by a kindred curiosity in regard to many other leaves and blossoms till one Sunday morning, when, as I found myself interrogating a shrub by the sunny walk of a college garden, it came to me that my curiosity was out of taste. The bush was not there specifically, but as an herbaceous expression of the University, and I had no more right to pass certain bounds with it in my curiosity than I would have had to push any scholar of the place to an assertion of personality where he would have preferred to remain collective.
What riches of personality lay behind the collectivity I ought not, if I knew, to say. Again I take refuge, from the reader's quest, which I cannot help feeling in the indefinite attempt to suggest it, by saying that the collective tone is that of Old Cambridge, or more strictly, of Harvard. I remember that once a friend, coining in high June straight to Old Cambridge after a brief ocean interval from Oxford, noted the resemblance. As we walked under a Gothic archway of our elms, past the door-yards full of syringas and azaleas, with
"Old Harvard's scholar-factories red/'
showing on the other hand in the college enclosures, he said it was all very like Oxford. He must have felt the moral likeness, the spiritual likeness, as I did in Oxford, for physical or meteorological likeness there is none ab- solutely. Ijb is something in the ambient ether, in the temperament, in the unity of high interests, in the mystical effluence from minds moving with a certain dirigibility in the upper regions, but controlled by in- visible ties, in each case, to a common centre. It is the
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prevalence of scholarship, which characterizes the re- spective municipalities and which holds the civic bodies in a not ungraceful, not ungrateful subordination.
Something of the hereditary grudge between town and gown descended to Harvard from the English centres of learning; but the prompt assertion of town government as the sole police force forbade with us the question of jurisdictions which it is said still confuses the parties with a feeling of enmity at Oxford. The war of fists following the war of swords and daggers, which in the earliest times left the dead of both sides in the streets after some mortal clash, and kept each college a stronghold, even after that war had no longer a stated or formal expression, is forever past, but still the town and the gown in their mutual dependence hold themselves aloof in mutual antipathy. So I was told, but probably on both sides the heritage of dislike re- sides only in the youthfuler breasts, and is of the quality of those ideals which perpetuate hazing in our colleges, or which among boys pass forms of mischief and phases of superstition along on a certain level of age. All cus- toms and usages are presently uninteresting, as one ob- serves them from the outside, and can be precious on the inside only as they are endeared by association. What is truly charming is some expression of the characteristic spirit such as in Oxford forbids one of the colleges to part in fee with a piece of ground on which a certain coveted tree stands, but which allows it to lease that beautiful feature of the landscape to a neighboring college. A thing like that is really charming, and has forever the freshness of a whimsical impulse, where whimsical impulses of many sorts must have abounded without making any such memorable sign.
In the reticence of the place all sorts of silent char-
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acter will have been accumulating through the centuries until now the sum of it must be prodigious. But that is a kind of thing which if one has any direct knowledge of it one feels to be a kind of confidence, and which one lets one's conjecture play about, in the absence of knowledge, very guardedly. For my part I prefer to leave quite to the reader's imagination the charming traits of the acquaintance I would fain have made my friends. Sometimes they were of difficult conversation, but not more so than certain Old Cambridge men, whom I remembered from my youth; the studious life is nowhere favorable to the cultivation of the smaller talk; but now that so many of the Fellows are married the silence is less unbroken, and the teas, if not the dinners, recur in a music which is not the less agreeable for the prevalence of the soprano or the contralto note. It seemed to me that there were a good many teas, out-doors when it shone and in-doors when it rained, but there were never enough, and now I feel there were all too few. They had the entourage which the like social dramas cannot have for yet some centuries in our centres of learning; between the tinkle of the silver and the light clash of the china one caught the muted voices of the past speaking from the storied architecture, or the immemorial trees, or even the secular sward underfoot. But one must not suppose that the lawns which are velvet to one's tread are quite voluntarily velvet. I was once sighing enviously to a momentary host and saying of his turf that nothing but the inces- sant play of the garden-hose could keep the grass in such vernal green with us, when he promptly answered that the garden-hose had also its useful part in the miracle of his own lawn. I dared not ask if the lawn- mower likewise lent its magic; that would have been
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going too far. Or at least I thought so; and in the midst of the surrounding reticences I always felt it was better not to push the bounds of knowledge.
There is so much passive erudition, hived from the flowers of a thousand summers in such a place of learn- ing, that I felt the chances were that if the stranger came there conscious of some of his own little treasure of honey, he would find it a few thin drops beside the rich stores of any first apiarist to whom he opened it. In that long, long quiet, that illimitable opportunity, that generously defended leisure, the scholarship is not only deep, but it is so wide that it may well include the special learning of the comer, and he may hear that this or that different don who is known for a master in a certain kind has made it his recreation to surpass in provinces where the comer's field shrinks to parochial measure. How many things they keep to themselves at Oxford, it must remain part of one's general ignorance not to know, and it is more comfortable not to inquire. But out of the sense of their guarded, their hidden, lore may spring the habit of referring everything to the university, which represents them as far as they can manage not to represent it. They may have imagi- nably outlived our raw passion of doing, and have be- come serenely content with being. This is a way of sajdng an illanguagible thing, and, of course, oversay- ing it.
The finer impressions of such a place — there is no other such in the world unless it is Cambridge, England, or Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, — escape the will to impart them. The coarser ones are what I have been giving the reader, and trying to pass off upon him in their fragility for something subtile. If one could have stayed the witchery of an instant of twilight in a college
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quadrangle, or of morning sunshine in a college garden, or of a glimpse of the High Street with the academic walls and towers and spires richly foreshortened in its perspective, or of the beauty of some meadow widening to the level Isis, or the tender solemnity of a long- drawn aisle of trees leading to the stream under the pale English noon, and could now transfer the spell to an- other, something worth while might be done. But short of this endeavor is vain. There was a walk, which I should like to distinguish from others, all de- lightful, where we passed in a grassy field over an old battle-ground of the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, and saw traces of the old lager-beads, the earthworks in which the hostile camps pushed closer and closer to each other, and left the word "loggerheads" to their language. But I do not now find this very typical, and I am rather glad that the details of my sojourn are so inextricably interwoven that I need not try to unravel the threads which glow so rich a pattern in my memory.
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
BECAUSE Chester is the handiest piece of English antiquity for new Americans to try their infant teeth on, I had fancied myself avoiding it as unworthy my greater maturity. I had not now landed in Liver- pool, and as often as I had hitherto landed there, I had promptly, proudly disobeyed the charge of more imper- fectly travelled friends to be sure and break the run to London at Chester, for there was nothing like it in all England. Having indulged my haughty spirit for near- ly half a century, one of the sudden caprices which un- dermine the firmest resolutions determined me to pass at Chester the day which must intervene before the steamer I was going to meet at Liverpool was due. Naturally I did everything I could to difference myself from the swarm of my crude countrymen whom I found there, and I was rewarded at the delightful restaurant in the Rows, where I asked for tea in my most carefully guard- ed chest-notes, with a pot of the odious oolong which observation has taught the English is most acceptable to the palate of our average compatriots, when they cannot get green tea or Japan tea. Perhaps it was my mortifying failure in this matter which fixed me in my wish never to be taken for an Englishman, except by other Americans whom it was easy to deceive. The Americans abounded in Chester, not only on the
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present occasion but in my three successive chance visits to the place; and if they were by an immense majority nearly all of the same sex, they were none the worse for that. By pretty twos, by pretty threes, by yet larger lovely groups, and, in serious, middle-aged instances, singly, they wandered in and out of the plain old cathe- dral ; they strayed through the Rows or arcades by which Chester distinguishes herself from other cities in having two-storied sidewalks; they clustered in the shops where the prices were adjusted to their ignorance of English values and they could pay as much for a pair of gloves as in New York or Chicago; they crowded the narrow promenade which tops the city wall; they haunted the historic houses, where they strayed whispering about with their Baedekers shut on their thumbs, attentive to the instruction of the custodians: they rode on the tops of the municipal tram-cars with apparently no apprehension from their violation of the sacred Ameri- can principle of corporational enterprise in transporta- tion; they followed on foot the wanderings of the desul- tory streets; at the corners and before the quainter facades the sun caught the slant of their lifted eye- glasses and flashed them into an involuntary conspicuity. In all his round I doubt if his ray could have visited countenances of a more diffused intelligence, expressive of a more generous and truly poetic interest in those new things of the old English world on which they were now feeding full the longing, and realizing rapturously the dreaming, of the years and years of vague hopes. I could read from my own past the pathos of some lives, restricted and remote, to which the present opportunity was like a glad delirium, a glory of unimagined chance, in which they trod the stones of Old Chester as if they were the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. These
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arid such as these have forever the better of those born to the manner; as for those assuming to be naturalized to the manner, they are not worthy to be confounded with such envoys from the present to the past. It is only the newest Americans who ever really see England, and they are apt to see it in the measure of that sim- plicity for which sincerity is by no means a satisfactory substitute.
It could well be in a passion of humility that a sophis- ticated traveller might wish to hide himself from them in the depths of that Roman bath which apparently so few visitors to Chester see. We found it with some difficulty, by the direction of a kindly shop-woman who, though she had lived all her life opposite, could only go so far as to say she believed it was under a certain small newspaper and periodical store across the way. Asking the young man we found there, he owned the fact, and leaving a yet younger man in charge, he lighted a sturnp of candle, and led to a sort of cavern back of his shop, where the classic relic, rude but unmistakable, was. Rough, low pillars supported the roof and the modern buildings overhead, and the bath, clumsily shaped of stone, attested the civilization once dominant in Ches- ter. Our guide had his fact or his fable concerning the spring which supplied the bath; but whether it is in summer or in winter that this spring almost wholly dis- appears, I am ashamed not to remember.
The Rome that was built upon Britain underlies so much of England that if one begins to long for its ex- cavation one must be willing to involve so much me- diaeval and modern superstructure in a common ruin that one's wisdom must be doubted. So far as the Roman remains showed themselves to a pretty ignorant observer they did not seem worth digging out in their
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entirety; here and there an example seems to serve; they are the unpolished monuments of life in a remote and partially settled province, not to be > compared, except at Bath and York, with those of Pompeii or Herculaneum. To be sure, if one knew they underlay New York, one would gladly level all the sky-scrapers in the town, that they might be given to the light. But in Chester it is another matter. There is already an interesting if not satisfactory collection of antiquities in Chester; and if it came to question of demolishing the delightful old wall, or the Rows, with God's Providence House, and Bishop Lloyd's House, or even the cathedral, though it is, to my knowledge, the least sympathetic of English cathedrals, one would wish to think twice. At the wall, especially, one would like to hesitate, walking perhaps all the way round the city on it, and pausing at discreet intervals to repose and ponder. It does not convince everywhere of an equal antiquity; there are parts that are evidently restorations and parts that are reproductions, and the gates frankly own themselves modern. But there are towers that moulder and bast- ions that have plainly borne the brunt of time. In the circuit of the wall you may look down on the roofs of old Chester within, and that much larger and busier new Chester without, which stretches with its shops and mills and suburban cottages and villas into the pretty country, as far as you like. But our affair was never with that Chester; except where the country began under the walls, and widened away beyond the river Dee, with bridges and tramways presently lost to the eye in the shadow of pleasant groves, we cared for nothing beyond the walls. There were places where these dropped sheer to the waters of the Dee, which obliged us at one point of its flow with a vivid rapid, or
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(I will not be sure) the swift slope of a dam, where a man stood midway casting his line into the ripple. He could by some stretch of the imagination have been a Jolly Miller who lived on the river Dee, though I remem- ber no mills in sight; and by an equal stroke of fancy, he could have been casting his line for the salmon with which the sands of Dee are also associated in song. I do not insist that the reader shall hazard either con- jecture with me; but what I say is that all England is so closely netted over and embroidered with literary reminiscence, with race - memories, from the earliest hours of personal consciousness, that wherever the American goes his mind catches in some rhyme, some phrase, some story of fact or fable that makes the place more home to him than the house where he was born. That is the sweetness, the kindness of travel in England, and that is the enchanting strangeness. To other lands we relate ourselves by an effort, but there the charm lies waiting for us, to seize us and hold us fast with ties running to the inmost and furthermost of our earthly being.
At one point in our first ramble on the wall at Chester we came to a house built close upon it, of such quaint- ness and demureness that it needed no second glance, in the long June twilight, to convince us that one of Thomas Hardy's heroines lived there; or if it did, no possible doubt of the fact could be left when we en- countered at the descent to the next city gate the smartest of red-coated sergeants mounting the wall to go and pay court to her. Afterwards we found many nouses level with the top of the wall, with little gardened door-yards or leafy spaces beside them. I do not say they all had Hardy heroines in them; there were not sergeants enough for that; but the dwellings were all
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of an insurpassable quaintness and demurencss, or only less quaint and less demure than the first. One of the most winning traits of the past wherever you find it is its apparent willingness to be friends with the present, to make room for it when it can, and to respond as far as possible to its commonplace and even sordid occa- sions. Like old walls that I had known in Italy, the old wall at Chester lent itself not only to the domestic but the commercial demands of to-day, and if the shops which it allowed to front upon its promenade were pref- erably those of dealers in bric-a-brac and second-hand books, still the principle is the same. In one of these shops was an old (it looked old) sundial which tempted and tempted the poor American, who knew very well he could not get it home without intolerable incon- venience and expense; and who tore himself from it at last with the hope of returning another day and carrying it all the way to New York, if need be, in his arms. As is the custom of sundials it professed to number only the sunny hours; but he had (or is this his subsequent invention?) the belief that somewhere on its round was indelibly if invisibly marked that gloomy moment of the September afternoon when King Charles looked from the Phcenix Tower hard by the shop where the dial lurked, and saw his army routed by the Parliamenta- rians on Rowton Moor. To be sure the moment was bright for the Parliamentarians; there is the consolation in every defeat that it is the victory of at least one side, and in this instance it was the right side which won.
You are advised that if you would see Chester Cathe- dral aright you had best look at it across the grassy space which lies between it and the wall near Phoenix Tower. It is indeed finest there, for it is a fane that asks distance, and if you go visit it by the pale twilight
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at nine o'clock of the long June day, the brown stone it is built of will remind you less than it might at noon- day of the brown-stone fronts of the old New York streets. But who am I that I should criticise even the material body of any English cathedral ? If we had this one of Chester in the finest American city, in Boston itself, we should throng to it with our guide-books if not our prayer-books, and would not allow that any ecclesiastical structure in the country compared with it. All that I say to my compatriots of either sex, who come to its Perpendicular Gothic fresh from the Oblique Doric of their Cunarders or White Stars at Liverpool, is: "Wait! Do not lavish your precipitate raptures all upon this good but plain edifice. Keep some of them rather for the gentler and lovelier dreams of architecture at Wells, at Ely, at Exeter, and supremely the minster at York, to which you should not come impoverished of the emotions you have been storing up from the begin- ning of your aesthetic consciousness. Yet, stay! For- bear to turn slightingly from your first cathedral be- cause some one tells you it is not the best. It will have more to say to that precious newness of yours (you can- not yet realize how precious your newness is) than fairer temples shall to your more shop-worn sensibility." It is always well in travel to cherish the first moments of it, for these are richer in potentialities of joy than any that can follow; and it is doubtless in the wise order of Providence that such a city as Chester should lie so near the great port of entry for three hundred thousand Americans that they may have something worthy of their emotions while they have still their sea-legs on, and may reel under the stroke without causing suspicion.
I have said how constantly one met them, how in- evitably; and if they were wondering, willingly or un-
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willingly, what Chester could be bought for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but the walls and gates must be included.
Why should such a thing be impossible? Such a thing on a smaller scale, different in quantity but not in quality, had been dreamt of by a boldly imaginative Chicagoan, if we could believe the good woman in charge of the Derby House, up the little court out of Nicholas Street, where all that is left of the old town mansion of the noble Stanleys remains. This magnanimous dreamer had the vision of the Stanleys' town-house transplanted to the shores of Lake Michigan, and erected as a prime feature of the great Columbian Fair. He offered to buy it in fulfilment of his vision, so ran the tale, of whoever then could sell it; but when the head of the family to which it once belonged heard of the offer, he bought it himself in a quiver of indignation conceivably lasting yet, and dedicated it to the public curiosity forever, on the spot where its timbered and carven gables have looked into a dingy little court ever since the earliest days of Tudor architecture. If we could trust the witness of the cards which strewed the good woman's table, it was American curiosity which mainly wreaked itself on the beautiful but rather uninhabitable old house our Chicagoan failed to buy. By hungry hun- dreds they throng to the place, and begin to satisfy
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their life-long famine for historic scenes in the mansion where Charles the First sojourned while in Chester, and whence the head of the house was taken out to die by the axe for his part in the royalist rising of 1657. So, in my rashness, I should have believed, but for the correction of Mr. Havell Crickmore, who says, in his pleasantly written and pleasantly pictured book about "Old Chester," that the Earl was "beheaded during the great Rebellion," which would shorten his life by some ten years, and make his death date 1647, not 1657. It does not greatly matter now; he would still be dead, at either date, and at either a touch of heroic humor would survive him in the story Mr. Crickmore repeats. Colonel Duckenfield of the Cromwellian forces asked him if he had no friend who would do the last office for him. "Do you mean, to cut my head off? Nay, if those men who would have my head off cannot find one to cut it off, let it stand where it is."
I have always liked to believe everything I read in guide-books, or hear from sacristans or custodians. In Chester you can believe not only the blunt Baedeker, with its stern adherence to fact, but anything that any- body tells you; and in my turn I ask the unquestioning faith of the reader when I assure him that he will find nothing so mediaeval-looking out of Nuremberg as. that street — I think it is called Eastgate Street — with its Rows, or two-story sidewalks, and its timber-gabled shops with their double chance of putting up the rates on the fresh American. Let him pay the price, and gladly, for there is no perspective worthier his money. I am not in the pay of a certain pastry-cook of the Rows, who makes the wedding-cakes for all the royal marriage feasts; but I say he will serve you a toasted tea-cake with the afternoon oolong he will try to put
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off on an American, such as you cannot buy elsewhere in England; only, you must be sure to eat the bottom half of the tea-cake, because most of the rich, sweet Cheshire butter will have melted tenderly into that. Go then, if you will, to the cathedral which I have been vainly seeking to decry, and study its histories, begin- ning with the remnants of the original Norman church of the Conqueror's lieutenant and nephew Hugh Lupus, and ending with a distinctly modern restoration of the mediaeval carvings in the eastern transept, wherein Dis- raeli and Gladstone are made grotesquely to figure, the one in building up the Indian Empire and the other in dis- establishing the Irish Church. Somewhere in the histor- ical middle distance are certain faded flags taken from the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, which we should always have won if our powder had not given out, and let the enemy capture these banners. The beauty of the Chapter House will subdue you, if you rebel against the sight of them, and I can certify to the solemnity of the Cloister, which I visited with due im- pression; but with what success a young girl was sketching a perspactive of the cathedral I did not look over her shoulder to see.
How perverse is memory! I cannot recall distinctly the prospect across the Dee from the Watergate to which the Dee use to float its ships and from which it now shrinks far beyond the green flats. But I remember that in returning through a humble street from the Watergate, the children on the door-steps were eating the largest and thickest slices of bread and butter I saw in all England, where the children in humble streets are always eating large, thick slices of bread and butter. For the pleasure of riding on the municipal trams, and of realizing how much softer and slower they run than
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our monopolistic trolleys, we made, whenever we had nothing else to do, an excursion "across the sands of Dee" by the bridge which spans its valley, with always fragments of Kingsley's tender old song singing them- selves in the brain, and with the visionary Mary going to call the cattle home, and the cruel, crawling foam from which never home came she.
Oh, is it fish, or weed, or floating hair,
in the tide that no longer laps the green floor that once was sand ? Ask the young girls of fifty years ago, who could make people cry with the words! It was enough for me that I was actually in the scene of the tragedy, and more than all the British, Roman, Saxon, or Norse- man antiquity of Chester. At the suburban extremity of the tram-line, or somewhere a little short of it, we were offered by sign-board a bargain in house-lots so phrased that it added thirty generations to the age of a region already old enough in all conscience. We wrere not invited to buy the land brutally in fee-simple, out- right; but it was intimated that the noble or gentle family to which it belonged would part with it tempo- rarily on a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years. I hope we fully felt the delicacy, the pathos in that reservation of the thousandth year, which was the more appealing because it was tacit.
These lots were no part of the vast estate of the great noble whose seat lies farther yet out of Chester in much the same direction. It was one of the many aristocratic houses which I meant to visit in England, but as I really visited no other, I am glad that I gave way in the matter of a shilling to the driver of the fly who held that the drive to the place was worth that much more
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than I did. I tried hard for the odd shilling, as an affair of conscience and of public spirit; but the morning was of a cool-edged warmth, and of a sky that neither rained nor shone, and the driver of the fly was an elderly man who looked as if he would not lie about the regular price, though I pretended so strenuously it should be six and not seven shillings for the drive, and I yielded. After all (I excused my weakness to myself), it would have been seven dollars at home; and presently we were in the leafy damp, the leafy dark of the parkway within the gates of the great nobleman's estate beyond the Dee. Eight thousand acres large it stretches all about, and is visibly bounded only by the beautiful Welsh hills to the westward, and four miles we drove through the woodsy quiet of the park, which was so much like the woodsy quiet of forest-ways not so accessible at home. Birds were singing in the trees, and on the hawthorns a little may hung yet, though it was well into June. Rabbits — or if they were hares I mean no offence to the hares — limped leisurely away from the road-side. Coops of young pheasants, carefully bring- ing up to be shot in the season for the pleasure of noble or even royal guns, were scattered about in the borders of the shade ; arid grown cock and hen pheasants showed their elect forms through the undergrowth in the con- scious pride of a species dedicated to such splendid self- sacrifice. In the open spaces the brown deer by scores lay lazily feeding, their antlers shining, or their ears pricking through the thin tall stems of the grass. Other- where in paddock or pasture, were two-year-olds or three-year-olds, of the blooded hunters or racers to whose breeding that great nobleman is said to be mostly affectioned, though for all I personally know he may be more impassioned of the fine arts, or have his whole
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heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do per- sonally know is that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless fly, arid es- caped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own responsive nerves vibrating.
From time to time notices to the public "earnestly requested" the visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England, and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit them- selves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circum- stance proper to a great English nobleman's place, no one can say; and if I mention that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful houses ap- propriated to the immediate dependants of this noble- man, it is less with the purpose of instructing some fut- ure oil-king or beef-baron in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.
As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace, it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it with vague preconcep- tions of another sort of majesty. I myself was disap- pointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect to be Norman, " or at least Early Eng- lish/' but which one finds a low two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground, with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance disguised as a small classic temple. But the
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castle is in the definite taste of a self -justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated Georgian — the Fourth Georgian — surviving into our own century not so very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satis- faction in the silvery sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror ap- pointed to hold Chester for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.
I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the formalities of cropt lawns and dipt trees, and I would fain have the reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its be- longings, so that in passing a certain bust with the famil- iar broken nose of the master he respectfully murmured,
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"Sir Michael Hangelo."
"Who?" the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of the precious fact; and the good soul repeated,
" Sir Michael Hangelo, sir."
Of course it was Sir Michelangelo, Bart. ; nothing so low as the effigy of a knight could be admitted to that august gallery.
Am I being a little too scornful in all this? I hope not, though I own that in the mansions of the great it is difficult not to try despising them. The easy theory about a man whom you find magnificently housed in the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it. In your generous indig- nation you wish to have him out, and his pleasure- grounds divided up into small farms. But this is a kind of equity which may be as justly applied to any one who owns more of the earth than he knows how to use. Who are they that fence large parts of Long Island, and much of the Hudson River scenery, which they have studded with villas never open to the public like that great house near Chester? I know a man who has two acres and a half on the Maine shore of the Piscataqua, and tills not a tenth of it; but I should be sorry to have him expropriated from the rest. We all, who have the least bit more than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another matter. They are the immense majority and they may vote anything they choose, even a cruel injustice.
The American, newly arrived in Chester after his new
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arrival in Liverpool, will be confronted with a strong- hold of the past which he will not be able to overthrow perhaps during his whole stay in England, though he should spend the summer. Immemorial custom is in- trenched there not only in the picturesqueness, the beauty, the charm, but the silent inexpugnable posses- sion which time from the beginning has been fortifying. The outside has been made as goodly as possible, but within is the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and toil. Yet let him not rashly fling himself against its impregnable defences. It is not primarily his affair. Let him go quietly about with his Baedeker, and see and enjoy all he can of that ancient novelty, so dear to us new folk, and then when he is worn out with his pleasure, and sits down to his toasted tea-cake in that restaurant of the Rows where they will serve him a cup of our national oolong, let him ask himself how far the beloved land he has left has been true to its proclamations in favor of a fresh and finally just Theilung der Erde.
Having answered this question to his satisfaction, let him by no means hurry away from Chester that night or the next morning in the vain belief that greater historic riches await him in cities, farther away from his port of entry, in the heart of the land. Scarcely any shall surpass it, for if not a Roman capital like York or London, it was long a Roman camp, and a temple of Apollo replaced a Druid temple on the site of the present cathedral. The Britons were never pushed farther off than the violet hills where they still dwell, strong in their unintelligible tongue, with a taste for music and mysticism which seems never to have failed them. From those adjacent heights they harried in frequent foray their Roman and Saxon and Norman invaders,
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and only left off attacking Chester when the Early Eng- lish had become the Later.
Chester was not only one of the stubbornest of the Eng- lish cities in its resistance of William the Conqueror, but it held out still longer against Oliver the Conqueror in the war of the King and the Parliament. What part, if any, it had in the Wars of the Roses, I excuse myself for not knowing. The strong Henry Fourth led the weak Richard Second a captive through it, and there is record that the weaker Henry Sixth tried in vain to recruit his forces in it for his futile struggle with fate. The lucky Henry Seventh who had newly married royalty, and was no more king by right than the pre- tender who afterwards threatened his throne, sent a Stanley to the block for having spoken tolerantly of Perkyn Warbeck. But if there was any party in Ches- ter for that pretender, there was none for the Stuart calling himself Charles III., for when he sent from Scot- land an entreaty to the citizens for help, they took it as a warning to fortify their town against him. After that they had peace, and now the place is the great market for Cheshire cheese which is made in the fertile country round about, and vies with the New Jersey imitation in the favor of our own country.
The American who means to stop in Chester for the day, which may so profitably and pleasantly extend itself to a week, cannot do better than instruct himself more particularly in the history which I still find my- self so ignorant, for all my show of learning. I would have him distrust this at every point, and correct it from better authorities. Especially I would have him mistrust a story told in Chester of the American who discovered a national origin in the guide-book's mention of one of the Mercian kings who extended his rule so far
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from the midland counties. The traveller read the word American, and pronounced it as the English believe we all do. "My dear," he said to his wii'e, "this town was settled by the 'Murricaiis."
XI
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
FROM the 10th to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fort- night, with a peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was why we left Lon- don, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.
Our run was through a country which frankly con- fessed a long drouth, such as parches the fields at home in exceptional summers. Rain had not fallen during the heat from which we were escaping, and the grain had been cut and stacked in unwonted safety from mould. There is vastly more wheat grown in England than the simple American, who expects to find it a large market-garden, imagines, and the yield was now so heavy that the stacked sheaves served to cover hatf the space from which they had been reaped. The meadow-lands were burned by the sun almost as yel- low as the stubble; the dry grass along the railroad banks had caught fire from the sparks of the locomo- tive, and the flames had run through the hedges, into the pasturage and stubble, and at one place they had kindled the stacks of wheat, which farm-hands were pulling apart and beating out. The air was full of the pleasant smell of their burning, and except that the larks
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were spiring up into the dull-blue sky, and singing in the torrid air, it was all very like home.
I ventured to say as much to the young man whom I found sleeping in the full blaze of the sun in his corner of our carriage, and to whom I apologized for the liberty I had taken in drawing his curtain so as to shade his comely fresh face. He pardoned me so gratefully that I felt warranted in thinking he might possibly care to know of the resemblance I had noted. He said, "Ah!" in the most amiable manner imaginable, "which part of America?" But just as I was going to tell him,' the train drew into the station at Oxford, and he escaped out of the carriage.
Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the land compara- tively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat, heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we approach- ed Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, "universal politeness," related mainly to the railway company's servants, but there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten.
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I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station, through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to supper.
Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and we were destined later to a pleas- anter impression of Worcester than that from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern hotel, odorous only of a surround- ing garden into which a soft rain was already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which em- bloom most English towns.
I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad, for instance,
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where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady- butler, and carved the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New England, as matron of a boys; reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large imperial allow- ance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.
We were ourselves driving away in search of lodgings, which, whether you like them or not after you find them, it is always so interesting to look up in England. It was our fate commonly to visit places in their season when lodgings were scarce and dear; and it was one of the surprises that Great Malvern had in store for us that it was in the very height of its season. We should never have thought it, but for the assurance of the lodging-house landladies, who united in saying so, and in asking twice their fee as an earnest of good faith. The charming streets, which were not only laterally but vertically irregular, and curved and rose and fell in every direction, were so far from thronged that we were often the only people in them besides the unoccupied drivers of other flies than ours, and the boys who had pony chairs for hire, and demanded heigh t-of-the-season prices for them. Perhaps the fellow-visitors whom we missed from the street were thronging in -doors: the hotels were full up; the boarding-houses could offer only a choice of inferior rooms; the lodgings had nearly all been taken at the rates which astonished if they did not
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dismay us. But we found the pleasantest apartment left at last, and were immediately as much domesticated in it as if we had lived there ever since it was built. In front it faced, across the street, a wooded and gardened steep; in the rear, from the window of our stately sitting- room, we looked out over a vast plain, of tilth and grass and groves, cheered everywhere with farm villages or farm cottages, and the grander edifices of the local no- bility and gentry, and the spires of churches. Farther off where the Cotswold Hills began to be blue, glim- mered Cheltenham, where we could, with a glass strong enough, have seen the retired military and civil em- ployes of the India service who largely inhabit the place, basking in a summer heat of familiar tropical fervor, and a cheapness suited to their pensions. In the same quarter there was also sometimes visible a blur of dim towers and roofs which the guide-book knew as Tewkes- bury; in the opposite direction, Worcester with its ca- thedral more boldly defined itself. The landscape seemed so altogether, so surpassingly English, that one day when I had nothing better to do — as was mostly the case with me in Malvern — I set down its amiable features, which I wrish I could assemble here in a portrait. First, there were orchard and garden trees of our own house (one of a dozen houses on the same curving terrace), with apples, pears, and plums belted in by the larches and firs that deepened towards the foot of the hill. Pretty, well-kept dwellings of more or less state, showed their chimneys and slated or tiled roofs everywhere through the trees and shrubs at the beginning of what looked the level from our elevation. From these the plain stretched on, with hotels and churches salient from rows of red brick and gray stone cottages. Fields, now greening under the rains, but still keeping the warmer
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colors which the long drouth had given them, were parted into every angular form by rigid hedge -rows. They were fields of oats and grass, and sometimes wheat; but there were no recognizable orchards; and the trees that dotted the fields, singly and in clumps, massed them- selves in forest effects in the increasing distance. They covered quite a third of the plain, which stretched twenty miles away on every hand, and were an accent of dark, harsh green amid the yellower tone of the meadows. The Cotswolds rising to the height of the Malvern Hills against the dull horizon (often rainy, now, but dull always), ended the immense level, where, coming or going, the little English railway trains, under their long white plumes of smoke, glided in every direction; and somewhere through the scene the unseen Severn ran.
Not to affront the reader's intelligence, but to note my own ignorance, until an unusually excellent local guide-book partially dispersed it, will I remind him that all this region was once a royal chase. Half a dozen forests, of which Malvern Forest was chief, spread "a boundless contiguity of shade" over the hills and plains in which the cruel kings, from Canute down to Charles I., hunted the deer consecrated to their bows and spears, and took the lives or put out the eyes of any other man that slew them without leave. But in virtue of the un- written law by which the people's own reverts to them through the very pride of their expropriators, the dwell- ers in and about Malvern Chase had insensibly grown to have such rights and privileges in the wilderness that when Charles proposed to sell the woods they made a tumultuous protest; they rose in riot against the king's will, and he had to give them two-thirds of the Chase for commons, before he could turn the remaining third into the money he needed so much.
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In the very earliest times Malvern seems to have been a British stronghold against the Romans, and perhaps, again, the Saxons; but otherwise its peaceful history is resumed in that of its beautiful Priory church, an edifice which is fabled to have begun its religious life as a Druid temple. On one of the three Beacons, as the chief of the Malvern Hills are called, after the three counties of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford in which they rise,
"Twelve fair counties saw the blaze"
which signaled the approach of the Spanish Armada. But the local history is not of that dense succession of events, against whose serried points the visitor so often dashes himself in vain elsewhere in England. He can let his fancy roam up and down the vague past, with nothing, except the possible surrender of Caractacus to the Romans, very definitely important to hinder it, from the dawn of time to the year 1842, when the Priessnitz system of water-cure chose Malvern the capi- tal of English hydropathy. The Wells of Malvern had always been famous for their healing properties, and now modern faith added itself to ancient superstition, and from the centre of belief thus established, a hydro- pathic religion spread throughout England. Its monu- ments still confront one everywhere in the minor hotels or major boarding-houses which briefly call themselves Hydros, but probably do not attempt working the old miracles. There is still a commodious shrine for the performance of these in the heart of Malvern; but the place was plainly no longer the Mecca of the pilgrims of thirty or fifty years ago. The air of its hills in- deed invites the ailing, who so abound in England, but the waters have found the level which even medicinal
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waters seek, and flow away in the obscurity attending the decline of so many once thronged and honored Spas.
I do not know that I particularly like ruinous ruins, but a decay that is still in tolerable repair is greatly to my mind. The better the repair, the greater my pleas- ure in it, and when we were once posited in our lodgings, I began to take comfort in the perfect neatness, the un- failing taste, the pious care with which the spirit of that dead Malvern guarded its sepulchre. There was all the apparatus of a social gayety beneficial to invalids, but not, so far as I could note, an invalid to profit by it, if it had been running. In a certain public garden, indeed, in the centre of the town, there was a sound of revelry emitted by a hidden band, in the afternoon and evening, but I had never the heart to penetrate its secret; within, the garden might not have looked so gay as it sounded. There were excellent large and little shops, including a book and periodical store, where you could get almost anything you wanted, or did not want, at watering-place prices. There was an Assembly building, always locked fast, and a very good public library where I resorted for books of reference, and for a word of intellectual con- verse with the kind assistant librarian who formed my social circle in Malvern. From somewhere in the dim valley at night there came bursts of fragmentary min- strelsy, which we were told by the maid was the profes- sional rejoicing of Pierrots, a gleeful tribe summer England has borrowed from the French tradition almost as lavishly as the crude creations of our own burnt-cork opera. Wherever you go, among her thronged and thronging watering-places, these strongly contrasted fig- ures meet and cheer you; even in Malvern there were strains of rag-time, mingling with the music of the Pier-
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rots, which gave assurance of these duskier presences somewhere in the dark.
One afternoon we went to a politer entertainment in a lower room of the Assembly building, given by a com- pany which had so vividly plastered the dead walls (if this is specific) of Malvern with the announcements of their coming, that we hastened to be among the earliest at the box-office lest we should not get seats. To make sure of seeing and hearing we took two-shilling seats, which were at the front, and it was well we did so, for before the curtain rose, a multitude of fourteen people thronged to the one -shilling benches behind us. This number I knew from deliberate count, for the curtain, as if in a sad prescience of adversity, was long in rising. I do not think that company of artists would have been very cheerful under the best conditions; as it was they afforded us the very sorrowfulest amusement I have ever enjoyed. In that pathetic retrospect it seems to me that one man and woman of them sang at different times comic duets with tears in their voices. There were also from time to time joyless glees, and there was an interlude of dancing, so very, very blameless that it was all but actively virtuous in its modesty. A sense of something perpetually provincial, something irretrievably amateur- ish in the performers, penetrated the American specta- tors; and it is from a heart still full of pity that I recall how plain they were, poor girls, how floor - walkerish they were, poor fellows. They were as one family in their mutual disability and forbearance; if perhaps they each knew how badly the others were doing, they did nothing to show it; and in their joint weakness they were unable to spare us a single act of their programme. I have seldom left a hall of mirth in so haggard a frame, but perhaps if I had been more
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inured to Malvern I could have borne my pleasure better.
If this was not, strictly speaking, a concert, that was certainly a concert which I attended one evening at a Baptist chapel, where a company of Welsh miners sang like a company of Welsh angels. I was in hopes they would have sung in Welsh, which, as is well known, was the language of Paradise, but they sang in English as good as English ever can be in comparison; and instead of Bardic measures, it was all terribly classic, or when not classic, religious. As I say, though, the voices were divine, and I asked myself if such heavenly sounds could issue, at this remove, from the bowels of the Welsh mountains, what must be the cherubinic choiring from their tops! It was a very simple-hearted affair, that concert, and well encouraged by a large and cordial audience, thanks mostly, perhaps, to the vigilance of the lady pickets stationed down the lane leading to the chapel, and quite into the street, with tickets for sale, who let no hesitating passers escape. I myself pleaded a sovereign in defence, but one of the fair pickets changed it with instant rapture, and I was left without excuse for the indecision in which I had gone out to see whether I would really go to the concert.
For the matter of that we were without excuse for staying on in Malvern, save that it was so very, very pleasant though so very, very dull. It was there, I think, that I formed the Spanish melon habit, which I indulged thereafter throughout that summer, till the fogs of London reformed me at end of September, when no more melons came from Spain. The average of Spanish melons in England is so much better than that of our cantaloupes at home that I advise all lovers of the generous fruit to miss no chance of buying them,
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The fruiterer who sold me my first in Malvern, said that in the palmy days of the place many Americans used to come, and he mentioned a New York millionaire of his acquaintance so confidently that I almost thought he was mine, and felt much more at home than before. I had more talk with this kind fruiterer than with any one else in Malvern, though I will not depreciate an interview with a jobbing mechanic from far Norfolk,, who spent an afternoon washing our windows, and was conversible when once you started his torpid flow. He did not grasp extra-Norfolk ideas readily, and he alto- gether lacked the brilliant fancy of the gay, rusty, frowsy ragged tramp who came one afternoon with a bunch of cat-tail rushes for sale, and who had vividly conceived of himself as a steel-polisher out of work. He might not have been mistaken; but if he was it could not spoil my pleasure in him, or in the weather which had now begun to be very beautiful, with blue skies almost cloudless, and quite agreeably hot. It being the 12th of August, a bank holiday fell on that day, and the town filled up with trippers (mysteriously much objected to in England), who seemed mostly lovers, and who arm in arm passed through our street. One indeed there was who passed without companion- ship, playing the accordeon, his eyes fixed in a rapture with his own music.
On several other days the town seemed the less rea- soned resort of crowds of harmless young people, who perhaps thought they were seeing the world there, since it was the height of the Malvern season. They were at one time more definitely attracted by the Flower Show at the neighboring seat of a great nobleman, which was opened by his lady with due ceremonies, and which en- joyed a greater popular favor. I myself followed with
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the trippers there, partly because I had long read of that kind of English thing without seeing it, and be- cause in the spacious leisure of Malvern it was difficult to invent occupations that would fill the time between luncheon and dinner, even with an hour out for an after- noon nap.
It was just a pleasant drive to the nobleman's place, and my progress was attended by a sentiment of circus- day in the goers and comers on foot and in fly, and the loungers strewn on the grass of the road-sides and the open lots. At the gate of the nobleman's grounds, we paid a modest entrance, and there were still modester fees for several of the exhibits. One of these was a tent where under a strong magnifying-glass a community of ants were offering their peculiar domestic and social economy to the study of the curious. But, if I rightly remember, the pavilion which sheltered the flower-show was free to all who could walk through its sultry air without stifling; it was really not so much a show of flowers as of fruits and vegetables, which indeed bore the heat better. Another free performance was the rivalry, apparently of amateurs, in simple feats of car- pentry and joiner -work as applied to fence -building; but this was of a didactic effect from which it was a relief to turn to the idle and useless adventures of the people who lost themselves in a maze, or labyrinthine hedge and shared the innocent hilarity of the spectators watching their bewilderment from a high ground hard by. All the time there was a band playing, which when it played a certain familiar rag- time measure was loudly applauded and forced to play it again and again. It was a proud moment for the exile from a country whose black step-children had contributed these novel motives to the world's music, in the intervals of being lynched.
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The scene was all very familiar and very strange, with qualities of a subdued county fair at home, but more ordered and directed than such things are with us. As I say, I had long known its like in literature, and I was now glad to find it so realistic. My pleasure in it over- flowed when the nobleman who had lent his premises for the show, came walking out among the people, bare- headed, in a suit of summer gray, with his lady beside him, and paused to speak, amid the general emotion, with a neat old woman of humble class, whose hand his lady had shaken. That, I said to myself, was quite as it should be in its allegiance to immemorial tradition and its fidelity to fiction; it could have formed the initial moment of a hundred thousand English novels. If it could not have formed a like moment in American romance, it is because our millionaires, in their shyness of subpoenas or of interviews, do not yet open their private grounds for flower-shows. It needs many centu- ries to mellow the conditions for the effect I had wit- nessed, and we must not be impatient.
The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very mediaeval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any comer in his misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun, with groups of people seriously, if some- what awe-strickenly, enjoying themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude towards their superiors which must long delay a real classifica- tion of society with us.
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When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I came to pay .the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then added, "And two shillings for me," I did not like it as well as my theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much, and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible law.
It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them. There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday after- noon, for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery door-yards and making believe to read.
The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it ran by a vast en-
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closure, which looked like a neglected nursery, losing itself in a forest beyond. But we had really chanced i pon one of the most characteristic features of English civilization. This neglected nursery was in fact a plan- tation of all woodland growths, for a game-preserve where later the gentleman who owned it would have the pleasure of killing the wild things resorting to it. We came to it fresh from our satisfaction with another characteristic feature: a village of low houses fronting on a green common, where geese and sheep were graz- ing, and poultry were set about in coops in the grass. Children were playing over it; men were smoking at the doors, and women doubtless were working within. The evening fire sent up its fumes from the chimneys, and a savory smell of cooking was in the air. It all looked very sociable, and if a little squalid, not the less friendly for that reason. It is from our literary associations with such scenes that we derive our heart- aches when we first leave our humble homes in America, where we have really no such villages, but only solitary farms, or bustling communities on the way to be busi- ness centres. A village like that could easily become a " Deserted Village," and an image of it, reflected in Gold- smith's dear and lovely poem, recurred to me from my far youth,
"On Erie's banks, where tigers steal along, And the dread Indian chants his warlike song, "
and mixed with the reality as I drove through it.
The three great summits which are chief of the Mal- vern Hills are the Beacons of Worcestershire, Gloucester- shire, and Herefordshire; and nearest the town they are everywhere traversed by the paths which the founders of the water-cure taught to stray over their undulations
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in the fashion of the German spas, and on which the patients walked themselves into a wholesome glow after their douches, sprays, and drenches. They are very noble tops indeed, from which one may everywhere command a lordly prospect, but the most interesting, and the loftiest, is the Worcestershire Beacon, a brow of which the Britons fortified against the Romans. You can drive the greater part of the way to their earthwork, and if you make the climb to it you will not envy either enemy its possession. The views from it are enchanting, and the fortifications, with companies of sheep grazing sidelong on their glacis and escarpments, can still be easily traced by the eye of military science; but perhaps their chief attraction to the civilian is that they seem impregnable to the swarming flies which infest the road almost throughout its rise, and at the point where you leave your carriage are a quite indescribable pest. One could imagine the Romans hurrying up the steep to be rid of them, and beating the Britons out of their strong- hold in order to secure themselves from the insect enemy on the breezy height. They must have bitten the bare legs of the legionaries fearfully and really rendered retreat impossible, while the Britons had no choice but to submit; for if it was at this point that the brave Caractacus surrendered with his following, rather than be forced down among those flies, he yielded to a mili- tary necessity, and I should be the last to blame him for it. I wondered how my driver was getting on among them, till I found that he had taken refuge in the oppor- tune inn from which he issued, wiping his mouth, on my descent from the embattled height; but the inn could not have been there in the Roman times.
The best of the excursion was coming home by the Wyche, a tremendous cut through beetling walls of
484
BRITISH CAMP. SHOWING ROMAN INTRENCHMENTS
FUL
may every t in ten- on, a br<
ie Romans. You
•art of the way to their earthwork,
to it you will not envy either
\vs from it are enchanting,
p grazing
ii be
haps
-liout its rise, and at the point \\ rriage are a quit could imagine the Rornau rid of them, and beating the 1 hold in order to secun on the breezy height, legs of the le^r it impo.^
irrendered with reed down amon
illy ren-
hoice but t that the brave A ing, rather than s», he yielded to a mill- ^ last to blame him ,vras getting on among i refuge in the oppor- wiping his mouth, on my attled height; but the inn could • the Roman times, ursion was coming horn- rough beetling v
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
rock, which are truly, in the old eighteenth-century lit- erary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone. It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to the Grand Canon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London. This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be happy, if you have an umbrella.
I could not praise too much the meteorological delight- fulness of that fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves, except for the incursion- ary trippers, who were, after all, so transient. What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted their doors
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she could approach their spotless thresholds without wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.
If ever the tide of sickness sets back there — and some- how I wish it might — the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass the pict- uresqueness of those up and down hill streets of Mal- vern, or the easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water growths which I did interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked friendly if not famil- iar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a cultivated sufferer from our Priory Church- less land will have an endless charm.
At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in Malvern, and spend- ing hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting graves without, and the vaguely remembering monu- ments within. But not among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the visitor that of
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MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution of the monasteries. The good " Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight," lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters, with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father's head. Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman's figure, on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with "Even so, come, Lord Jesus." This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of Birming- ham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenth- century tiles which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly carven stalls with the gro- tesques of their underseats, and doubtless to do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without pay- ing for it, and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still so fair and neat, and why
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if her Hydropathy should fail at last to attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the home of Langland, the author of "Piers Ploughman's Vision," he could visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any friend of the poor.
XII
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD
WE made Worcester what amends we could for re- fusing to stop the night in her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvii dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of "wottle-and-dab," the dab being probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows — namely, that to have a
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small teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking bowl of clay, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with mathe- matical precision. With difficulty I then followed our intelligent guide through every part of the wonderful establishment: from the places where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economi- cal thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works, where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual perfectioning of the prod- uct through more than a hundred and fifty years, and where copies of its chefs-d'ceuwe are assembled hi dazzling variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.
It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was fortunate for us that
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the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power, of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence, was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each other, with the eager grudge of travel- lers; and I suppose we would rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who wrote Charles I.'s Eikon Basilike, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubillac, or effigies of King John and Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by the angler him- self, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. "The organ is decorated in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty -two stops," yet we thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral. I remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what remains to me of the exquisite "Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S. aisle of the nave"? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see the marriage contract of William Shake- speare and Anne Hathaway, in the diocesan registrar's office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting the cathedral, and is now repre- sented by a remnant of his cuticle in the chapter-house. My prevalent impression of the Worcester Cathedral is not so much one of beauty as one of interest, full,
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various, and important interest. Of course in our one poor afternoon we could not give the wonderful place more than an hour. We had for one thing to go and do some shopping, and the shops in Worcester are very fairly good. Then we tried for tea, but there seemed to be men drinking beer in the place; and though the pro- prietor hospitably drove them out, in honor of the lady of our party, yet we thought we would not have tea there, or indeed anywhere. We went rather for a rainy moment to a pretty public garden beside the Severn, where from a waterproof spread upon a stone seat we watched the flow of the river. It seemed a very damp river, but it must be remembered the weather was wet. For the rest, Worcester proved a city of trams, passing through rather narrow streets of tall modern houses, intersected by lanes of lesser and older houses, much more attractive. It was also a centre of torrential downpours, with refuges in doorways where one of us could wait while the other umbrellaed a wild way about in search of a personable public-house, and an eventual chop. Found, the public-house turned out brand-new, like a hotel in an American railroad centre, where in an upper chamber, dryer and warmer than the English wont, travelling-men sat eating, and the strangers were asked by a kind, plain girl if they would have tea with their chop. Did English people, then, of the lower middle non-conformist class, have tea with their meat? It seemed probable, and in compliance we reverted to the American custom of fifty years ago. If the truth must be told it was not very good, personal tea, but was of the quick-lunch general brew which one drinks scalding hot from steaming nickel-plated cylinders in our country -stations, with the conductor calling "All aboard!" at the door.
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It is a shame to be noting these silly exceptions to the grand and beautiful life which must abound in Worcester, if one only had the key to it. There looked charming houses here and there in the quiet streets and places, but the present must keep itself locked against the average touristry to which the past is open. After- wards we visited the famous city again and again in history, where the reader will find our welcome awaiting him, from Peter de Montford, who pillaged the town in 1263, and Owen Glendower in 1401; from Henry VII. who beheaded there after the battle of Bosworth Field many citizens holding for hunchback Richard; from Queen Elizabeth who came in 1574 and was received at the White Ladies; from Prince Rupert who captured it and Essex who recaptured and plundered it and spoiled the cathedral; and from the two wicked Kings Charles, father and son, who each deserved to lose the battle each lost at Worcester. If the reader comes and goes by Sidbury Gate, he may easily make his entrance and exit by that approach, where the first Charles's friends upset the wagon-load of hay which kept his pursuers from overtaking and taking him in his flight from the battle-field above the city. The storied, or the fabled, hay is always there, if you do not know the place.
The August day we left Malvern, and stayed for a drive through Hereford on our way to Shrewsbury, was bright and hot, and Hereford was responsively sultry and dusty. Except for its beautiful cathedral, Hereford is not ap- parently interesting, though it may really be interest- ing. It certainly is historically interesting; and if one likes to find one's self in a place which was considerable in 584, and sent a bishop to the synod of St. Augustine seventeen years later, there is Hereford for the choosing. Otherwise it looks a dull, slovenly large market-town
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which has not been swept since the last market-day. It has, indeed, the merit of a fine old Tudor house between three intersecting streets and now devoted to a banking business, and I will not pretend that I did not enjoy, quite as much as I enjoyed the cathedral, the old alms- house which we visited somewhere on the length of a mighty long street. A longer, dustier, flatter and hotter street I have not known outside of Ferrara, where all the streets are like that. It must have been in default of other attractions that we were so strenuous about seeing the Coningsby Hospital for old soldiers and servants, but at any rate I am now glad we went. For one thing we should not have known what else to do till our train left for Shrewsbury, and for another it was really very nice to learn what old soldiership or old butlership could come to late in life in that England of snug retreats for so many sorts of superannuation. The kindly inmate who showed me about the place was hurrying himself into a red coat when we stopped at the outer door, and as he proved an old servant and not an old soldier, I thought he might have worn some- thing of a cooler color, say Kendall-green, on such a day. But there was no other fault in him, and if I had been the nobleman who appointed him to that disoccu- pation after a life-long menial employment, I might well have thought twice before choosing some other domestic of my train. He led me about the thirsty garden, where the vegetables panted among their droughty flower- borders, and had me view not only the Norman arch- way of the old commandery of the Knights Templars, now spanning a space of pot herbs, but the ruins of the Black Friars' priory drooping in the heat. Something incongruous in it all tormented the spirit, but how to have it otherwise probably the spirit could not have
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said. It was better in the cloistered approaches to the pensioners' quarters, cool and dim under the low ceiling, and I shall always be sorry that I pretended a hurry, and did not view the rooms of my guide. I thought I could do that, any time, in the insensate superstition of the postponing traveller, and now, how far I am from Hereford, recording these vain regrets in the top of a towering New York hotel, overlooking the Hudson!
Or is it rather the Wye? The Wye runs, or slowly, slowly creeps through Hereford, under a most beautiful bridge, which I do not know but you cross in going to the station. I had, or I ought to have had, long thoughts in that dreamy old town, where I would now so willingly pass all the rest of my worst enemy's life; for it was the market-town of my ancestors, and thither, I dare say, my Welsh-flannel manufacturing great-grandfather sent his goods, as to a bustling metropolis where they would bring the largest price. But at this distance of time, who knows? I hope at least they went by the river Wye in barges laden at his little Breconshire town, and floated either up or down the stream; I do not know which way the Wye runs from The Hay, and in this sort of purely literary reverie it does not matter. What really matters is to get these Welsh flannels into the hands of some mercer in Hereford, and then leave them and go again to the cathedral, which is so beauti- ful, and so full of bishops, now no longer living. Your foot knocks against their monuments at every step; but the great glory of the cathedral is in its mighty tower, massing itself to heaven from the midst, and looking best, I fancy, from the outside of the church. Only, there, when you have left your fly in the shade of the great chestnuts (I hope they are chestnuts), you will have to run across the blazing pavement if you wish to
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reach the cathedral alive in that fierce Hereford sun. Before I leave it for another flight to our fly, I wish to bear testimony to the exceptional intelligence of the verger showing us about, in whom I vainly sought a likeness to the verger who twenty years earlier had guided my steps among the tombs of those multitudi- nous bishops. At that time I had lately read in an Ecclesiastical Directory of the United Kingdom that a newer canon of the cathedral was of my own name; and I asked the verger if he could show me his seat in the choir. He did so at once, and incidentally noted, "Many's the 'alf-crown I've 'ad from 'im, sir," when, such is the honor one bears one's name, I too gave him a half-crown at parting. Had I perhaps been meaning to give him sixpence?
We were sheltered from the sun at last when we started for Shrewsbury, in a train which began almost at once to run between wooded hills under a sky that constantly cleared, constantly clouded, through a coun- try that had been expelled from Eden along with Adam and Eve. It was still very hot, on the outskirts of the afternoon, when we rearched Shrewsbury, and drove to the Raven, which we called a bird of prey because it wanted certain shillings for two large, cool rooms, though we should be glad now to pay twice their sum. How haught the spirit grows when once it has tasted the comparative cheapness of English inns! We alleged Chester, we alleged Plymouth, we alleged Liverpool, in expostulation, but the Raven would only offer us two smaller and warmer rooms for fewer shillings, and so we drove to another hotel. We got two fair chambers there with loaded casements, for much less money, and we looked from our pretty windows down upon the green at the foot of St. Mary's Church, and as far up its
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heaven-climbing tower as we could crane our necks to see. I can give no idea of our content in that proximity; it was as if we had the lovely and venerable edifice all to ourselves, and as we listened to the music in which it struck the hour and the next quarter of it, our hearts sang in unison with a holy and tasteful joy.
But it seemed as if, though a sultry afternoon at Hereford,
"The day increased from heat to heat,"
in its decline at Shrewsbury. We made a long evening of it before we tried to sleep, and then our joy in the chimed quarters of St. Mary's clock was still tasteful, but not so holy as it had been at first. The bells had miraculously transferred themselves to the interior of our rooms, which were transformed into deeply murmur- ing belfries; and we discovered that there were not four but twenty-four quarters in every hour. These were computed by one stroke for the first quarter, two for the next, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on until about a thousand strokes told the final quarter in the twenty-four. In the mean time the heat broke in a passion of rain. A thunder-storm came on, and having the whole night before it, and being quite at leisure, it bellowed and flashed till daylight, when it retired from the scene and left it as hot as ever, and a great deal closer.
If the entire truth must be told, in that old bor- der-town which, after an inarticulate Roman an- tiquity, had held back the Welsh from England for nearly a thousand years, and finally witnessed the tri- umph of the Red Rose over the White in the fight where Hotspur Harry fell, we had been allured by the deli- cious incongruity of seeing " The Belle of New York "
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in the most alien of all possible environments. We had never seen the piece in its native city; money could not there have overcome our instinct of its abominable vulgarity, but here in a strange land (if our English friends will let us call it so for the sake of the an- tithesis) we made it an act of patriotism to go. We bought two proud front seats, and found our way to them before a risen curtain, to realize too late that until its fall there was no retreat for us. The theatre at Shrewsbury is not large, under the best of circum- stances, and that night it was smaller than ever. Such was the favor of "The Belle of New York " with that gen- erous population, that every seat in the orchestra was taken, and the walls of the edifice pressed suffocatingly inwards. On the stage the heat was so concentrated that in the glare of the foot-lights the faces of the per- formers steamed with perspiration through the grease- paint of their faces, as they swayed and sang, and leaped and bounded in obedience to the dramatist and composer, and delivered our New York slang in a cockney convention of our local accent which seemed entirely to satisfy the preconceptions of Shrewsbury. Altogether, the piece enjoyed an acceptance with the audience which, in the welding heat, was so little less than stifling that the adventurous strangers, at the close of an act that lasted as long as a Greek trilogy, escaped into the street with what was left of their lives. I know that it is making an exorbitant demand upon the cre- dulity of the reader to relate that upon their return to Shrewsbury a week later these strangers again went to see an American play in the same theatre, which seemed to have been greatly enlarged in the interval, and so deliciously lowered in temperature that in their balcony seats they all but shivered through a melodrama of
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New York life professing to have been written by Joseph Jefferson. There was an escape of the hero from prison in one scene, and in another a still narrower escape from drowning in the East River at the hands of perhaps the worst reprobate who ever came to a bad end on the stage; and there was a set (I think it is called) of the Brooklyn Bridge, which though atten- uated and almost spectralized, recalled the reality as measurably as the English Bobby in blue recalled the massive Irish-American guardians of our public security. The "Shadows of a Great City" did not convince us of our dear and now-lamented Jefferson's authorship; but it was not so unbearable as "The Belle of New York," for meteorological reasons, if not for others, and upon the whole it interested, it flattered the mind to the fond conjecture that here in this ancient, this beautiful town, the American drama, if finally neglected in its own land, might be welcomed to a prosperous and honored exile.
St. Mary's Church was so near at hand that it could hardly fail of repeated visits, and it merited a veneration which might have been more instructed but could not have been more sincere than ours. In every author who treats of it the riches of its stained glass is cele- brated, and I will not dwell upon its beauties or even its quaint simplicities. The church is as old as Nor- man architecture can make it, and it invites with a hundred interesting facts, so that I hardly know how to justify the specific attraction which one piece of modern sculpture there had from me above all other things. The tomb of General Curston by Westonscott has not even the claim of being within the church, where so many memorable and immemorable dead are re- membered. It is in the square basement of the tower,
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and the soldier's figure is on your right as you enter. He was perhaps not much known to history, being only an adjutant - general, who fell in battle with the Sikhs at Runneggar in 1848, but no one who looks upon his countenance in the living stone can forget it. His left hand rests at his side; his right lies on his heart holding his sword; his soldier's cloak opens, showing his medals. In the realistically treated face, with its long drooping mustache and whiskers, is a look of dreamy melan- choly which, whatever the other qualities of the work, is a masterpiece of expression. Of a period when the commonplace asserted itself with a positive force almost universal in the arts, this simple monument is of classic beauty.
As quaint as any of the earliest inscriptions on the monuments of the church is the tablet in the outer wall of the tower to the bold eighteenth -century aeronaut who came to his death in an endeavored flight from its top to the farther bank of the Severn. It appears that in this as in some other matters —
"Not only we, the latest seed of time, That in the flying of a wheel cry down The past—"
have excelled or even failed. Nor is it probable that the bold youth who perished in 1759 was the first to try imperfect wings in the region where none have yet triumphed; and the faith of his epitapher is not less touching than that of the many who survive to our own day in the belief of antemortem aerostation.
"Let this small monument record the name Of Cadmus, and to future time proclaim How by an attempt to fly from this high spire Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire 500
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His fatal end. 'Twas not for want of skill, Or courage to perform the task, he fell. No, no, a faulty cord being drawn too tight, Hurried his soul on high to take her flight."
The imagination which does not rest its hopes on faulty cords, but follows carefully, on the sure and firm-set earth, in the steps of fact and then flies forward in most inspired conjecture, has its abiding in the memory of the great Darwin, son of Shrewsbury town, and scholar of her famous school. If we cannot count him
"The first of these who know"
among such savans and philosophers as Jenner, Paley, Kennedy, and Butler, his name will carry to further times than any other the glory of that " faire free schoole," founded by Edward VI., of which even in the seventeenth century it could be written, "Itt hath fowr maisters, and their are sometimes six hundred schollers, and a hansome library thirunto belonging." The stainless Sir Philip Sidney, and the blood-stained Judge Jeffreys were both of its alumni, but it is the statue of Darwin to which the devotees of evolution will bend their steps in Shrewsbury. It was my fortune to find myself by chance in the house where he lived with his first teacher, the Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury, and to stand in the room where he began, very obliquely and remotely, the studies which changed the thoughts of the world. But the old man he became sits in bronze at a far remove from this in front of the museum of Roman antiquities.
As a museum it is not so amusing as you might ex- pect of a collection containing the remains of Latin civilization from the Roman city of Uriconium, long
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hidden from fame under the name of Wroxeter, which lies, as my laconic Baedeker tells, "about 5 m. to the S. E." of Shrewsbury. But probably it is your want of archaeology which disables your interest in the province of these remains, while you readily grapple with the fact that the museum itself is part of the old Edward VI. foundation, and that Darwin, whose mild, wise face welcomes you up the way to the building, often went it "unwillingly to school'' in that very place.
Another dear son of memory who may be associated with Shrewsbury was the poet Coleridge, vaguely and vagariously great, who in his literary nonage preached in the Unitarian chapel of the town. This chapel ("now used," my guide says, "by a Theistic congregation/') was afterwards partially destroyed by a mob which had the divinity of Christ so much at heart that it could not suffer a Socinian place of worship; but it was restored by the King's command at the public cost, as we ought to remember of that poor George III. whose name we cannot otherwise revere. It was restored in the good architectural taste of the time, and as you stand within it you might readily fancy yourself in some elderly fane of our own once Unitarian Boston.
Darwin's mother was of that cult, which has enjoyed rather a lion's share of the social discountenance falling to all dissent in England, but the tale of his fellow- scholars in aftertimes and aforetimes at the school of Edward Vlth, shines with so many Established bishops and divines, as to relieve Shrewsbury from any blight falling upon it for that cause. With these, and such statesmen as Halifax, such dramatists as Wycherley, such poets as Ambrose Phillips, such savans as Dr. Jonathan Scott, the orientalist, Dr. Edward Waring, the mathematician, Rev. C. H. Hartsborne, the anti-
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quarian, the venerable foundation is surely safe in the regard of the most liturgical.
But Shrewsbury swarms with all sorts of high asso- ciations. Here David, the last of the old British Princes of Wales, was put to death by order of the English King, and here in the last battle between the Roses, the Welsh hope was finally broken in the defeat of the White Rose. Here Falstaff fought with Harry Hot- spur "a long hour by the Shrewsbury clock" — probably the very clock in St. Mary's tower which kept me awake much longer; and here was born the second son of Henry IV., one of the princes whom their wicked uncle Richard slew in the Tower. Here, in one of his flights before his subjects, Charles I. stayed with the brief splendor of his court about him, and minted the plate of the loyal Shropshire gentry, till treachery overtook him (in the local guide-book), and the town fell to the Parliament; and here James II. paused a day when time was getting to be more than money to him. Twice the good Queen Victoria visited the town, and once, long before, the Prince of Darkness himself came, in storm and night, and spoiled the clock of St. Alkmund, leaving a scratch from his claw on the fourth bell. The precise occasion of his visit is not recorded, nor is it told just why the effigy of Richard of York, the father of Edward IV., should be standing, "clad in complete steel," in front of the beautiful old Market Hall, and stooped in an attitude of such apparent discomfortable- ness that he is known to some of a light-minded genera- tion as the "Stomach-ache Man."
The city is the home of those Shrewsbury cakes, famed in The Ingoldsby Legends, and once offered to distinguished visitors, who thought them "delicious," but if they were then no better than now, we can im-
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agine how poor the living of the proudest was in olden times. Rather than the bakery which professes to be the original Tallin's, or even the Norman castle from which Henry IV. went out to beat Henry Percy and his Yorkish followers, the gentle reader will wish to see the quaint streets and places in which the timbered houses called Tudor abound beyond the like anywhere else in England. There are whole lengths and breadths of these, some stately and tall, and some so humble and low that you can put your hand on their eaves as you pass, but all so charming and so picturesque that you could wish every house in the town to be like them. Failing this, you must console yourself as best you can by visiting the most beautiful old Abbey Church in the world: how old it is I will not say, and how beautiful I cannot, but it fills the heart with reverence and delight. I will not pretend that the inside is as lovely as the outside: that could not be, and any one outlive the joy of it; but it is within and without adorable. You do not require a late afternoon light on the rich facade, but if you have it you are all the happier in its century- mellowed masonry and the old -lace softness of the Gothic window which opens over half its space. From the church you will fancy, inadequately enough, what the whole abbey must have been before it fell into ruin under the hand of Reform. But a relic of the monastic life remains which will repay the enthusiast for going across the way and putting his nose and eyes between the palings of the railroad freight-yard in which it stands, and lingering long upon the sight of it among the grime and dust of the place. It is the pulpit of the refectory where some young brother used to stand to read to the other monks, while they sat at meat, and listened to his prayer and praise, if anything,
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and not to one another's talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company, pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods -vans, and from time to time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence of the reader's words; and -all is very weird and sad.
What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view "the quaint Dun Cow Inn," heaven knows; but that was what we did, and now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations for the better- informed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there, and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal — in the essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of " the gentleman in the parlor" waiting for his supper. We must have it that he paid the poet's bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching relentlessly overhead.
There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrews- bury: the English Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who wish to drink so deep of the Severn's beauty (in which the softly wooded shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress' eyes), that they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain
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glad captives to the witchery of her wandering up- and-down-hill streets, her Tudor houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in in- surpassable events and men. I say insur passable to round my period; but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in these things.
XIII NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY
/"^REAT BRINGTON is the name of the village \JT neighborhood clustering about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bring tons from Lon- don you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel can offer. To drive the six miles from Northamp- ton to the Bringtons is another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in its veil, for your railroad run through a level pastoral scene where stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to pierce you with a thousand
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appeals and reproaches. The many much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing could otherwise deliver you.
If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. North- ampton did not fail to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken and once burnt by the Danish in- vaders. It suffered under the Normans, but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror's reign, and began a new life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A pictu- resque incident of its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal will, was Thomas a Becket's defiance of Henry II., when the King tried to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the words, " Son and Earl, hear me first ! I forbid you to judge me! I decline your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope." Then he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King's knights, at the altar in the cathedral. Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the
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prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doc- trines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city's walls; ten thousand of Henry's "tall Englishmen" were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison "plaid for about two hours" on "the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them" when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the. battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.
If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King's side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia,, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief who soon after could "say this of Naseby, — that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men ... I could not, riding alone about my business,
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but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it." Yet the faith in poor common men, once kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell's, outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put to by poor uncommon men.
Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were no part of, was the note of Northamp- ton from the first, and to the last it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of Eng- land, and apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance to the pretensions of au- thority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII. 's suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor, where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658, when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the Spen- cers at Brington.
It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists, but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to such of their side as could extort recognition from the
510
THE WASHINGTON HOUSE AT LITTLE BRlNGTON
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.
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washing- tons paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite gratu- itously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made fortunes, were knight- ed, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who suffered more than the common misfort- unes of the Washingtons at Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was afterwards cleared, but he had thence- forth only a small living to the end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the Spencers. The Lawrence Washington who was Mayor of North- ampton and the grantee of Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then, as it con- tinued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediaeval town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton
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to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American- looking town we now find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly commonplace. One might fancy one's self, coming towards the Church of All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, " is wholly modern." But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and a New England town might find a very satisfying antiq- uity in an edifice which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a full- bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amus- ing, and the spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably supposed to share the specta- tor's enjoyment. Behind one end of the portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the church, were once the rooms in which many non-con- formists of Northampton were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.
The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living, and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before the fire,
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when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the memory of a man who was born in the century when Lawrence was twice chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the cen- tury when George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that " he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last." I leave more mystical inquirers to trace a rela- tionship between the actual civilizations of Northamp- ton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the Geisha Cafe. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment at the door of the genial resort.
It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the American patriot who is also a per- son of taste, as one must try to be in going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward, whether from St. Peter's, unsur- passed for the effect of its rich Norman; or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades in memory of the Holy Sepul- chre. There are other old churches, but perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One, which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is that
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the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their children's children.
It is curious how everything becomes matter of aesthetic interest, if you give it time. We stood looking at the Queen's Cross, near Northampton, which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Ameri- cans begun by a common impulse to say verses from Macaulay's stalwart ballad of the battle. Our English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans to "bear up another minute" for the coming of "brave Oliver," and in the supposed narrator's abhorrence of " the man of blood," whom brave Oliver presently put to rout.
But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.
If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.
He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that the rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend the gene- alogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that divine September
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afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields, instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park. There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque ; but at dif- fering distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undu- lation of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen lightly flying from the visitors' approach through the glades of the park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I hope that in their absence the reader will make no
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objection to the black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It will be remem- bered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000. Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks: a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold- eyed irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wick- edness the sympathy which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning, or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it adds a piquant charm to its ap- pearance, and I do not know why we have not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.
When presently we drove past Althorp house, stand- ing at a dignified remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its aspects the mo- dernity which has always been characteristic of the family. It is of that agreeable period when the Eng- lish architects were beginning to study for country houses the .form of domestic classic which the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a noble mansion. The lady of
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the house more than two centuries back had been the Saccharissa of Suckling's verse, and her charm remained to my vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp : priceless then, but sold in our times to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband's memory. Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy's kins- man, Lawrence Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully re- moved for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archaeological novel- ist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Cornet Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and Mistress Lucy Washington, and his
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reverence Mr. Washington, looking down at the incident from a window of the library, and if he is the romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the king- ly power in America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps un- reasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the Reverend Law- rence may have been puzzled to choose among his great- great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or identify him in his historical character.
It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours, and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet, one must try hard in one's memory or imagination to match it with a scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other English scenes like the home of Washington's ancestors, and it is English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing hedges, the farmsteads snug- gling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the headland, is a foreground,
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with the human interest without which no picture lives.
I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference, whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our Northampton cler- ical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat au- sterely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. " Did you mean to bring that animal with you?" he asked, and they pretended that the dog was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an under- standing between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector's reproof with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention. They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily wandering from Early English architect-
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ure to Later English character, and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it is "notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire," and it is the fitting last home of Washington's ancestors.
I bring myself with some difficulty to own that the specific knowledge I have on this point, and several others in this vague narration, I owe to an agreeable sketch of "The Homes of the Washingtons" by Mr. John Leyland. But if I did not own it, some one would find me out, and it is best to confess my obligation together with my gratitude. I wish I had had the sketch with me at the time of my visit to Great Bring- ton church, but I had not, and I lingered about in the church-yard, after we came out and the rector must leave us, under the spell of a quiet and in the keeping of associations unalloyed by information. For this reason I am unable to attribute its true significance to the old cross which stands apart from the church, and guides and guards the way to the place of graves beside it. I must own that at first glance it has somewhat the effect of an old-fashioned sign-post at an inn yard, and per- haps that were no bad symbol of the welcome the peace- ful place holds for the life-weary wayfarers who lie down to their rest in it. Great Brington remains to me an impression of cottage streets, — doubtless provided with some shops. But when we had taken leave of the rector, and looked our last at the elegy-breathing church-yard, with its turf heaving in many a mouldering heap as if in decasyllabic quatrains, we drove away to see the Wash- ington house in Little Brington.
When you come to it, or do not come to it, you find Little Brington nothing but a dwindling Great Brington,
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or a wider and more shopless dispersion of its cottages on one long street, which is really the highroad back to Northampton. Some bad little boys hung on to the rear of our carriage, and other little boys, quite as bad, I dare say, ran beside us, and invited our driver to " Cut be'oind, cut be'oind!" probably in the very accents, mellow and rounded, of our ancestral Washingtons. They all dropped away before we stopped at the gate of the very simple house where these Washingtons dwelt. It is a thatched stone house, of a Tudor touch in archi- tecture, with rooms on each side of the front door and a tablet over that, lettered with the text, "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord." Perhaps in other times it was of the dignity of a manor-house, but now it was inhabited by decent farmfolk, and very neatly kept. The farmwife who let us go up-stairs and down and all through it was a friendly soul, but apparently puzzled by our interest in it, and*I fancied not many pilgrims worshipped at that shrine. It was rather ruder and humbler within than without; the flooring was rough, and the white- washed walls of the little chambers were roughly plas- tered; neither these nor the living-rooms below had the beauty or interest of many colonial houses in New Eng- land. There was a little vegetable-gardened space be- hind the house, and a low stable, or some sort of shed, and on the comb of the roof an English true robin red- breast perched, darkly outlined against the clear Sep- tember sky, and swelled his little red throat, and sang and sang. It was very pretty, and he sang much better than the big awkward thrush which we call a robin at home.
Our lovely day which had begun so dim, was waning in a sweet translucency, and we drove back to Northamp-
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ton over gentle uplands through afternoon influences of a rich peacefulness. The road-side hedgerows now kept us from seeing much beyond them, but they were red, like those we passed in coming, with haws and wild rose- pips, which we again took for a flush of American autumn in their leaves; but the trees were really of a sober yellow, with here and there, on a house wall, a flame of Japanese ivy or Virginia creeper. The way was dotted with shoe-hands, men and girls, going home early from the unprosperous shops which our driver said were run- ning only half-time. But even on half-pay they earned so much more than they could on the land that the farmers, desperate for help, could pay only a nominal rent. Much of the land was sign-boarded for sale, and this and the unusual number of wooden cottages gave us a very home feeling. In our illusion, we easily took for crows the rooks sailing over the fields.
INDEX
ABBEY CHURCH, 504, 505. Abbey of Bath, 287, 292. Abbey, the, Bristol, 349. Adams, John, 328. Addison, Joseph, 196. Aerated Bread Company, 119. Aldhelm, Saint, 316. All Hallow's Barking, 183. All Hallows in the Wall, 192. Althorp Park, 515, 517. Amelia, Princess, 290, 295, 296. Andre, John, 283. Anne, Queen, 134, 512. Annesley, Reverend Samuel, 184,
185.
Annesley, Susannah, 184, 185. Anstey, Christopher, 311. Arblay, Madame d', 309. Arundel, Earl of, 179. Augustine Friars, 181. Austen, Jane, 276, 283, 293, 295,
296, 303, 306, 311, 312, 361. Avon, the, 280, 284, 295, 320, 352.
BACON, Lord, 205. Bagatelle, the, Bath, 295. Bailes, John, 513. Balfour, Arthur James, 403. Baltimore, Lord, 202. Bank of England, 206. Banquetting House, 86, 87. Barton barn, the, Bradford, 320. Bath, 271-316, 322-325, 334,
335, 340, 342, 344, 353-355,
357, 361, 373, 386. Battersea Park, 88, 89, 90, 214. Becket, Thomas a, 407, 411-413,
508.
Beckford, William, 311. Bedford Circus, Exeter, 265, 266. Beechen Cliff, Bath, 304.
Belgravia, 211, 212, 213. Bellenden, 134. Bess of Hardwicke, 331. Bladud, Prince, 289. Blake, William, 184, 400. Blithedale Romance, The, 178. Bloomsbury, 213. Boleyn, Anne, 129, 365. Bonvice, Anthony, 118. Book of Martyrs, The, 185. Booth, Junius Brutus, 224. Borough Market, 176. Bos well, James, 311. Bowchier, Elizabeth, 185. Bradford, Governor, 196. Bradford-on-Avon, 315, 317-322. Brandon, Richard, 198. Bristol, 275, 344, 353. Bristol Cathedral, 349. Britannia, statue of, 237. Buckingham, Duke of, 201. Buckingham Palace, 26, 27, 28,
88.
Bunhill Fields, 185, 188, 191. Bunyan, John, 184. Burke, Edmund, 283, 311. Burney, Frances, 283, 309, 311. Burns, John, 56, 57, 195. Butt of Malmsey, 257, 258, 263,
268, 269.
CABOT, JOHN, 346, 348, 349. Caesar's camp, Folkestone, 375,
398-401.
Cambridge, Duke of, 286. Canterbury, 399, 400, 407-418. Canterbury Cathedral, 409. Canterbury, pilgrim road to, 400. Carisbrooke, 358. Castlemaine, Lady, 132. Castle of Chester, 463.
523
IKDEX
Charles I., 131, 171, 172, 198,
202, 205, 258, 265, 331, 358,
406, 459, 474, 491, 503, 511. Charles II., 131, 171, 197, 201,
202, 239, 342, 406, 415, 511,
512.
Charles III., 467. Chamberlain, Joseph, 403. Chapman, George, 201. Charing Cross Station, 202, 220,
222, 223.
Char, the, Oxford, 429-432, 445. Chatham, Earl of, 283. Chatterton, Thomas, 346. Chaucer, Geoffrey, 176, 400, 407,
410.
Chelsea, 211,212, 214. Chelsea Hospital, 34. Cheltenham, 473. Chester, 271, 272, 362, 451-468. Chester Cathedral, 456. Chesterfield, 134. Chesterfield, Earl of, 273, 311. Church of All Saints, 512. Chute, Mr., 369. Clifford's Inn, 204. Clifton, 352, 353. Clink prison, 174. Clive, Robert, 283. Coleridge, Samuel, 502. Congreve, William, 310. Coningsby Hospital, 495. Conqueror, William the, 467. Conway, Dr. Moncure, 191, 192. Copperfieid, David, 219. Cornuvii, 489. Cornwall, 250. Cotswold Hills, 473, 474. Cottle, Joseph, 346. Country Club, Bath, 307. County Council, London, 57, 58,
60.
Covent Garden Market, 176. Coverdale, Miles, 178. Cowes, 357, 360.
Cowper, William, 190, 283, 311. Crickmore, Havell, 459. Cromwell, Oliver, 172, 173, 177,
185, 285, 343, 347, 413, 414,
509, 510.
Cromwell, Richard, 131. Cromwell, Thomas, 285, 413, 414.
Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, 117,
118, 119.
Crosby, Sir John, 117. Cruikshank, George, 313. Culmer, Richard, 412-414. Cunningham, Peter, 177, 180,
181, 188, 191, 193, 194, 202, 205. Curston, General, 499.
DARWIN, CHARLES ROBERT, 501,
502.
Davenport, Reverend Mr., 205. Dean's Eye, Wells, 338. Dee, the, 454, 455, 460, 461. De Foe, Daniel, 310. De Quincey, Thomas, 311. Devonport, 243. Dibdin, Charles, 363. Dickens, Charles, 149, 241, 311-
313, 385. Digby, Mrs., 491. Disraeli, statue of, 123, 460. Dore, Gustave, 143. Dover, 380, 386, 393, 405, 406. Downing, George, 196. Drake, Francis, statue of, 236,
237, 239.
Dryden, John, 218. Duckenfield, Colonel, 459. Dun Cow Inn, 505. Dyer, Edward, 176.
EAST INDIA COMPANY, 118.
Edward II., 330.
Edward III., 367.
Edward IV., 267, 503.
Edward VI., 130, 181, 501, 502.
Edward VII., 136.
Edinburgh, 274.
Eelham, 418, 419.
Elizabeth, Queen, 130, 365, 412,
493.
Ely, cathedral of, 338. Emanuel College, 176. English Bridge, 505. Exe, the, 266.
Exeter, 254-270, 272-274, 279. Exeter Cathedral, 258-261.
FARQUHAR, GEORGE, 205. Fermor, Arabella, 134. Finsbury Chapel, 191, 192.
524
INDEX
Fletcher, John, 176. Foe, Daniel de, 184, 194. Folkestone, 375-405, 407, 408,
410, 418, 421.
Fox, George, 187, 188, 189, 193. Fox, John, 185. Franklin, Benjamin, 203. Free Church, Plymouth, 246. Friends' Meeting House, 187, 193. Frobisher, Sir Martin, 185.
GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS, 283.
Garrick, David, 201.
Gauden, Bishop, 491.
Gay, John, 134, 310.
Geisha Cafe", 513.
George I., 134.
George II., 126, 134, 295.
George III., 124, 126, 133, 367,
502.
Gibbon, Edward, 203. Giovanni of Padua, 320. Gladstone, William Ewart, 460. Glastonbury, 344. Glendower, Owen, 493. Globe Theatre, 175. Gloucestershire, 483. God's Providence House. 454. Golden Cross Hotel, 220. Golden Cross Inn, 219, 220. Goldsmith, Oliver, 283, 311, 483. Gower, John, 176. Grange Street Chapel, 246. Great Brington, 507, 519, 520. Great Case of Liberty of Conscience,
The, 183.
Greenaway, Kate, 317. Green Park, 88, 99, 102, 167, 210. Greenwich, 147, 148, 149, 150,
152, 195.
Grenadier guards, 33. Grey, Lady Jane, 198. Griffin, W. E., 246. Grosvenor Gardens, Bath, 295. Guildhall, Exeter, 267. Gwynne, Nell, 205.
HALIFAX, 502. Hamilton, Duke of, 205. Hamilton, Emma Lyon, 310. Hampden, John, 172. Hampton Court, 125-137.
Hardyish, Thomas, 143. Hardy, Thomas, 324, 343, 373,
455.
Harold, King, 208. Hartsborne, Rev. C..H., 502. Harvard, John, 176, 177, 178. Harvey, 134. Hathaway, Anne, 491. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 199. Hereford, 493-496. Henley, 153-165. Henrietta, Princess, 258, 265, 267. Henry II., 491, 508. Henry IV., 467, 503, 504. Henry VI., 467. Henry VII., 267, 342, 348, 467,
493 Henry VIII., 118, 127, 129, 133,
136, 145, 181, 257, 285, 364,
365, 368, 413, 415, 487, 519. Henry Esmond, 205. Herefordshire, 483. History of the Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire, 204. Hoe, the, Plymouth, 236-241,
247, 249.
Hollins, Robert, 487. Holy Well, the, Folkestone, 399,
400
Hope Theatre, 175. Horse-Guards, 33. House of Commons, 56, 58, 59. Howard, Catherine, 129. Howell, James, 204. Hudson, Henry, 180, 181. Hunt, Leigh, 203. Hyde Park, 17, 18, 21, 35, 36, 38,
41, 44, 55, 82, 89, 102, 159, 166,
167, 210, 213.
Hyde Park Corner, 213, 223. Hythe, 387-391, 406, 407.
IFFLEY, 428, 429.
Ingoldsby Legends, The, 503.
Isis, the, 429, 431.
Isle of Dogs, 150.
Isle of Wight, 357, 358.
Islington, 209, 211.
JAMES I., 131.
James II., 133, 201, 342, 503.
Jefferson, Joseph, 499.
525
INDEX
Jefferson, Thomas, 189.
Jeffreys, Judge, 501.
Jesus College, 204.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 196, 197,
309, 311. Jones, Inigo, 179, 202.
KENSINGTON, 211, 212, 214.
Kensington Gardens, 82, 83, 133.
Kent, 375, 389, 390, 405-424.
King, J., 293.
King, Oliver, 285.
King's Circus, the, Bath, 281,
282, 283.
Kingston House, Bradford, 319. Kingswood, 347. Kneller, 132.
LABOUCHERE, Mr., 510. Lamb, Charles, 179, 208. Landor, Walter Savage, 283. Lansdowne Crescent, Bath, 284. Laud, Archbishop, 170, 179. Laura Place, Bath, 280, 304. Leas Pavilion, Folkestone, 381,
387, 392. Leas, the, Folkestone, 377-383,
392, 394-396, 398. Leicester, Earl of, 508. Lely, Sir Peter, 126, 132. Lepell, 134. Leyland, John, 520. Lightfoot, Peter, clock, Wells, 338. Lincoln's Inn Fields, 201, 202. Linley, Eliza Ann, 310. Little Brington, 507, 510, 511,
520. Little Church Round the Corner,
177. Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate,
183.
Liverpool, 271, 362, 372. Lloyd's, Bishop, House, 454. Locke, John, 203. London Bridge, 172, 173, 177,
178.
Lowell, James Russell, 202. Lower Rooms, Bath, 307. Lucy, Margaret, 185. Ludgate Hill, 213. Lupus, Hugh, 460. Lyminge, 417-421.
MACAULAY, CATHARINE SAW- BRIDGE, 309, 310.
Malvern, 469-488.
Malvern Chase, 474.
Malvern Forest, 474.
Malvern Hills, 42, 474, 475, 483.
Malvern, Wells of, 475.
Marvell, Andrew, 201.
Mary Queen of Scots, 331.
Massinger, Philip, 176.
Mather, Nathaniel, 185.
Mayfair, 97, 99, 122, 168, 210, 211, 212, 213.
Mayflower, 239, 244, 246, 247.
Milsom Street, Bath, 305-308.
Milton, John, 185, 218.
Mohun, Lord, 205.
Monk, George, 258, 267.
Monmouth, Duke of, 342.
Montagu, 134.
Montague, Mary Wortley, 310.
Montford, Peter de, 493.
More, Sir Thomas, 171.
Morton> Thomas, 204.
Miiller, George, 347.
Mullins, Priscilla, 174.
Myddleton, Sir Hugh, 207.
NAPOLEON I., 151.
Nash, Richard, 286, 290-293, 302.
National Gallery, 109.
Naval College, 151.
Nelson, Horatio, 150, 151, 283,
310.
Netley Abbey, 367-371. New Assembly Rooms, Bath,
294, 307.
Newport, 20, 358. Northampton, 507-522. Northampton, Earl of, 118.
OFFA, King, 284.
Oglethorpe, General, 184, 205.
Old Assembly Rooms, Bath, 294,
307.
Orphanages, The, 347. Osborne Castle, Isle of Wight, 358. Osric, King, 284. Oxford, 425-450.
PALL MALL, 24, 166. Paris Garden, 175.
526
INDEX
Park Lane, 122, 213. Parliament Houses, 80, 81. Penn, Admiral, 171. Penn, William, 170, 182, 183, 189;
monument, 346. Penns and the Penningtons, The,
182.
Percy, Henry, 504. Peters, Reverend Hugh, 202. Petre, Lord, 134. Petticoat Lane, 93, 185. Phillips, Ambrose, 502. Phipps, Sir William, 207. Phoenix Tower, 456. Piccadilly, 35, 38, 44, 63, 99, 122,
166, 167, 213. Pickwick Club, 311, 312. "Piers Ploughman's Vision," 488. Pimlico, 212.
Pleasure Gardens Theatre, Folke- stone, 387. Plymouth, 233-254, 272, 274,
277, 279, 373. Pope, Alexander, 134, 310. Priory Church, 475, 486, 487,
488. Pump Room, Bath, 272, 276, 291,
292, 295-297, 307, 311, 312.
QUEENSBURY, Duchess of, 290.
RADCLIFFE, ANN WARD, 310. Radnor, Earl of, 383. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 171, 178. Rape of the Lock, The, 134. Richard II., 467. Richard III., 117, 367. Rose Theatre, 175. Rotten Row, 39, 45, 54. Rougemont, castle of, 257. Royal Crescent, Bath, 284, 312,
313
Rupert, Prince, 347, 493. Russell, Lord, 201. Ryde, 358, 359. Rye, 422-424. Rylands, Mrs., 517.
ST. ALKMUND, 503. St. Andrew's Holborn, 205. St. Augustine, monastery of, Can- terbury, 409, 414.
St. Bartholomew, church of, 91 , 92. St. Botolph, parish of, 198, 204. St. Catherine Cree, 178, 179, 180,
193. St. Dunstan, church of, 195, 196,
202.
St. Ethelburga, church of, 180. St. Giles Cripplegate, church of,
185. St. Giles-in-the-Fields, church of,
200. St. James's Park, 24, 88, 105,
210, 227. St. Leonard's Church, Hythe,
388, 389.
St. Magnus, church of, 178, 179, St. Martin's Church, Canterbury,
409, 416. St. Martins-in-the-Fields, church
of, 205. St. Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel,
197. St. Mary Redcliffe, church of,
Bristol, 344-346, 349. St. Mary's Church, 496, 497, 499,
503
St. Mary Woolnoth, 206, 207. St. Michael's Church, South- ampton, 363, 364. St. Olave, church of, 174. St. Pancras, 224. St. Paul's Cathedral, 76, 77, 78,
104, 121, 122, 168. St. Peter's Church, Bristol, 350. St. Peter's Hospital, Bristol, 350,
351.
St. Peter's Lane, 193. St. Saviour's Church, 176, 177,
178. St. Sepulchre, church of, 183,
199, 200.
St. Stephen's Coleman-Street , 205. St. Swithin, church of, Bath, 309. Salisbury, 356. Sandgate, 390, 395, 396. Savage, Richard, 350. Scotch guards, 33. Scott, Dr. Jonathan, 502. Scott, Walter, 283. Shakespeare, Edmund, 176. Shakespeare, William, 175, 176,
218, 272, 393, 491.
527
INDEX
Shapton, 355.
Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, 438, 442, 443.
Shelter, the, Folkestone, 392.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley But- ler, 283, 310.
Shorncliff, 396, 397.
Shrewsbury, 496-506.
Shrewsbury, Countess of, 201.
Sidbury Gate, 493.
Sidney, Sir Philip, 501.
Sion Hill, Bath, 305.
Selkirk, Alexander, 310.
Smith, Captain John, 199.
Smithfield, 93.
Smollett, Tobias George, 283.
Sneyd, Honora, 283.
Solent, the, 357, 361.
Somerset and Dorset line, 335, 343.
Southampton, 354-373.
Southey, Robert, 283, 311, 346.
South Kensington Museum, 109.
Southward, 148, 149, 176, 177, 178.
Spectator, The, 196.
Speedwell, 246.
Spencer, Earl, 507.
Spencer, Herbert, 176.
Standish, Miles, 204.
Stanhope Gate, 159.
Steele, Richard, 310.
Stepney, 194, 195.
Stoke Newington, 207, 208.
Stonehouse, 243.
Stothard, Thomas, 184, 400.
Stuart, Mary, 130, 133.
Suffolk, Duke of, 198.
Swan Theatre, 175.
Swan, The, Wells, 337.
Sydney Gardens, Bath, 295, 303.
TEMPLE CHURCH, 84, 203, 204. Tewkesbury, 473. Thames Embankment, 84. Thames, steamboat service, 56,
Thames, the, 214, 215, 216, 429,
431.
Thorpe, William, 410. Throgmorton, Sir Nicholas, 178,
193.
Tooley Street, 173, 174.
Tower Bridge, 172, 173, 216;
Hill, 170, 171, 172, 213. Tower of London, 170, 183. Town, The, 203. Trafalgar Square, 121, 124. Tudor houses, the, 263, 264. Tyte, William, 290, 295, 310.
UPPER ROOMS, Bath, 307, 311.
VANE, HARRY, 171. Ventnor, 357-360. Victoria Park, Bath, 284. Victoria, Queen, 83, 503. Villa Gardens, Bath, 295.
WALLER, Lady, monument to,
285.
Waller, William, 285. Walpole, Horace, 134, 311, 369. Waltham Abbey, 208. Walton, Isaac, 491. Warbeck, Perkin, 342, 467. Waring, Dr. Edward, 502. Washington, George, 507, 513,
518. Washington, Lawrence, 507, 510,
511, 512, 517, 518, 519. Washington, Lucy, 511, 517. Watts, Isaac, 184, 362. Webb, Maria, 182. Wells, 315, 335-353. Wells Cathedral, 337. Welsh Bridge, 505. Wesley, John, 185, 191, 347. Wessex, King of, 315, 316. Westminster Abbey, 33, 76, 78,
79, 80.
Westminster Bridge, 81, 147. Whitechapel, 94, 95, 194, 195,
197, 211.
Whitefield, George, 347. Whitehall, 85, 86. White Hart Court, 193. White Hart, the, Bath, 312. William of Orange, 239. Williams, Roger, 183, 189, 199. William III., 83. Withington, Lothrop, 177. Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, 129,
134, 136, 413.
528
INDEX
Worcester, 489-493. Worcester Cathedral, 490, 491. Worcestershire Beacons, 483, 484. Wordsworth, William, 283, 327. Wycherley, William, 502. Wye, the, 495.
YORK, 362.
York, Richard of, 503.
Yorkshire, 318.
ZOOLOGICAL GARDENS, 107, 109.
THE END
DA Howells, William Dean 684 London films
1911
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