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LONDON FILMS
AND
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL
ENGLISH TOWNS
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W. D. HOWELLS IN HIS LIBRARY
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LONDON FILMS
AND
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
LONDON FILMS
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
IX
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.
LONDON FILMS
AND
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL
ENGLISH TOWNS
LONDON FILMS
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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LONDON FILMS
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
2
METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
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
3
LONDON FILMS
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
4
METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
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
5
LONDON FILMS
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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METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS
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.
n
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
10
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
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
LONDON FILMS
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
12
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
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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LONDON FILMS
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
14
CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS
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,
15
LONDON FILMS
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
17
LONDON FILMS
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.
19
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
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
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
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
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
LONDON FILMS
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
SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE
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
33
LONDON FILMS
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,
35
LONDON FILMS
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
LONDON FILMS
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
of (.-
things
ption
i with as
mber
mdon
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with y<v
weave ;=
and
straw.
.
h the
i the
indulge their
; way to it.
-ray to it in
aths of the Park,
sole law that obtains
is exhilarar
, if ever their
rmient of any
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
41
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
45
LONDON FILMS
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
47
LONDON FILMS
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.
48
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
49
LONDON FILMS
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
50
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
51
LONDON FILMS
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
52
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-
53
LONDON FILMS
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
54
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
56
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
57
LONDON FILMS
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
58
IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
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
LONDON FILMS
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.
60
IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS
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
62
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
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.
63
LONDON FILMS
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-
64
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
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
65
LONDON FILMS
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
66
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
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
67
LONDON FILMS
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
68
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
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
70
TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
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
71
LONDON FILMS
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
72
TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
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
•73
LONDON FILMS
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-
74
TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
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
76
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
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
77
LONDON FILMS
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
78
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
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
79
LONDON FILMS
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
80
HOUSES OF1 PARLIAMENT
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80
• . • .'. i
and
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
81
LONDON FILMS
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
82
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
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
83
LONDON FILMS
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
84
VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
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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VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
"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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LONDON FILMS
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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GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER
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.
XI
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
106
TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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
8 107
LONDON FILMS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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
no
TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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
114
TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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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TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS
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
126
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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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AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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
136
AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT
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
138
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
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
10 139
LONDON FILMS
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
140
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
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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LONDON FILMS
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
142
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
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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LONDON FILMS
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
144
A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY
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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LONDON FILMS
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.
xrv
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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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
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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LONDON FILMS
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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FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
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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HENLEY DAY
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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HENLEY DAY
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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HENLEY DAY
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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HENLEY DAY
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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HENLEY DAY
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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LONDON FILMS
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS—MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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,
12 171
LONDON FILMS
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
rHilllooj
ed, with i
which always n it. The look ' -'ower
towards it is 1 than the
river- n is the hist;
laines there as at the
nibus to cross it,
r the brid<j
<>s which look
There, in the
of the
? happened.
I •
I)egin to doubt:
»ably memorable expanse of muddy water
the morning I saw it, with barges resting
nt slime of tl
iition, if i:
and with
ut of the
;-s of destiny
the land
olican ex-
i wealth failed
because of a
id protector, who
ithout an hereditary
Cromwell must follow his father,
another father came back to urge
i primacy that no one h
lirect and still renewed f the
172
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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
174
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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
176
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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
180
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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LONDON FILMS
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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?
LONDON FILMS
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY NORTHERN
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.
XVII
AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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
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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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AMERICAN ORIGINS—MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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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LONDON FILMS
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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AMERICAN ORIGINS— MOSTLY SOUTHERN
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
" 210
ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
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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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS
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
XIX
PARTING GUESTS
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
220
PARTING GUESTS
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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LONDON FILMS
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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PARTING GUESTS
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,
224
PARTING GUESTS
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,
225
LONDON FILMS
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
226
PARTING GUESTS
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
227
LONDON FILMS
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
228
PARTING GUESTS
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
233
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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
16 235
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
236
THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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
237
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
240
THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH .TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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-
17 251
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH
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.
II
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
254
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
287
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
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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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
296
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
298
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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
20 299
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
300
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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
•jm
301
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
302
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
304
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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
305
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
306
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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-
307
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
308
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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
309
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
310
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
312
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
•
A FORTNIGHT IN BATH
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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-
21 315
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
316
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
319
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
320
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
322
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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.
324
A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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
22 331
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
V
AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL
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
335
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
336
AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL
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
339
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
340
AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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
341
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
"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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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AFTERNOONS AT WELLS AND BRISTOL
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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BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
vn
IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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"When wild in the woods the noble savage ran,"
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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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IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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-
402
IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON
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.
vrn
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING
CANTERBURY
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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KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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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KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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
412
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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-
413
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
414
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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
415
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
416
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
417
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
418
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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-
419
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
420
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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
421
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
422
KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS
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
423
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
425
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
426
OXFORD
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
28 427
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
446
OXFORD
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
448
OXFORD
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
452
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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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THE CHARM OF CHESTER
(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
456
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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
458
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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
460
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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
402
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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
4G3
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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,
464
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
"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
465
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
466
THE CHARM OF CHESTER
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
467
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
469
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
470
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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,
471
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLLStf TOWNS
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
472
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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
473
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
474
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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
31 475
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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-
47G
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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
477
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
478
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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
479
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
480
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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.
481
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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-
482
MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS
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
483
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
485
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
486
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
487
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
489
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
490
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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,
32 491
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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.
492
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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
493
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
494
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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
495
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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 "
497
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
498
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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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CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
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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
501
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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-
502
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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-
503
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
504
SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER
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
505
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
33 507
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
508
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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,
509
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
I had gri
•<h hi poor common ;
•f not so mixed with
that through parliamentary
l >ut to by poor uncom ;.
igious, which the
; Lie note of North
uted
.is Bradlaugh
:own of Eng-
as
N<
Was
w»
thority. But the Wellingtons of Northampton were
any part of the revolt agaii:
The Lawrence Washington who
Northampton profited by
the monasteries to \ if of Sul.
his dc
until I
more
of t-li
the Spen-
Brington,
n house, was gr>
ui or gift of the Spencers;
act gi now. The Washingtons,
T cousins, were rather
y suffer adversit
, and they did not appai
roe[)crity which the Restoration brou^
as could extort recognition fror
.
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
'511
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
512
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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
513
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
514
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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
515
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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
516
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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
517
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
518
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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-
519
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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,
520
NORTHAMPTON AND WASHINGTON
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-
521
CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS
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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