SEEING EUROPE WITH FAMOUS AUTHORS

Selected And Edited With Introductions, Etc.

By Francis W. Halsey

Editor of "Great Epochs in American History" Associate Editor of "The Worlds Famous Orations and of The Best of the World's Classics" etc.

In Ten Volumes

Illustrated

Vol. I Great Britain And Ireland

Part One

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

A two-fold purpose has been kept in view during the preparation of these volumes—on the one-hand, to refresh the memories and, if possible, to enlarge the knowledge, of readers who have already visited Europe; on the other, to provide something in the nature of a substitute for those who have not yet done so, and to inspire them with new and stronger ambitions to make the trip.

Readers of the first class will perhaps find matter here which is new to them—at least some of it; and in any case should not regret an opportunity again to see standard descriptions of world-famed scenes and historic monuments. Of the other class, it may be said that, in any profitable trip to Europe, an indispensable thing is to go there possest of a large stock of historical knowledge, not to say with some distinct understanding of the profound significance to our American civilization, past, present, and future, of the things to be seen there. As has so often been said, one finds in Europe what one takes there—that is, we recognize there exactly those things which we have learned to understand at home. Without an equipment of this kind, the trip will mean little more than a sea-voyage, good or bad, a few rides on railroads somewhat different from our own, meals and beds in hotels not quite like ours, and opportunities to shop in places where a few real novelties may be found if one searches for them long enough.

No sooner has an American tourist found himself on board a ship, bound for Europe, than he is conscious of a social system quite unlike the one in which he was born and reared. On French ships he may well think himself already in France. The manners of sailors, no less than those of officers, proclaim it, the furniture proclaims it, and so do woodwork, wall decorations, the dinner gong (which seems to have come out of a chateau in old Touraine), and the free wine at every meal. The same is quite as true of ships bound for English and German ports; on these are splendid order, sober taste, efficiency in servants, and calls for dinner that start reminiscences of hunting horns.

The order and system impress one everywhere on these ships. Things are all in their proper place, employees are at their proper posts, doing their work, or alert to do it when the need comes. Here the utmost quiet prevails. Each part of the great organization is so well adjusted to other parts, that the system operates noiselessly, without confusion, and with never a failure of cooperation at any point. So long as the voyage lasts, impressions of a perfected system drive themselves into one's consciousness.

After one goes ashore, and as long as he remains in Europe, that well ordered state will impress, delight and comfort him. Possibly he will contrast it with his own country's more hurried, less firmly controlled ways, but once he reflects on causes, he will perceive that the ways of Europe are products of a civilization long since settled, and already ancient, while the hurried and more thoughtless methods at home are concomitants of a civilization still too young, too ambitious, and too successful to bear the curbs and restraints which make good manners and good order possible among all classes. It is from fine examples in these social matters, no less than from visits to historic places, that the observing and thoughtful tourist derives benefit from a European tour.

The literature of travel in Europe makes in itself a considerable library. Those who have contributed to it are, in literary quality, of many kinds and various degrees of excellence. It is not now so true as it once was that our best writers write for the benefit of tourists. If they do, it is to compile guide-books and describe automobile trips. In any search for adequate descriptions of scenes and places, we can not long depend on present-day writers, but must hark back to those of the last century. There we shall find Washington Irving's pen busily at work for us, and the pens of others, who make up a noble company. The writings of these are still fresh and they fit our purposes as no others do.

Fortunately for us, the things in Europe that really count for the cultivated traveler do not change with the passing of years or centuries. The experience which Goethe had in visiting the crater of Vesuvius in 1787 is just about such as an American from Kansas City, or Cripple Creek, would have in 1914. In the old Papal Palace of Avignon, Dickens, seventy years ago, saw essentially the same things that a keen-eyed American tourist of today would see. When Irving, more than a century ago, made his famous pilgrimage to Westminster Abbey, he saw about everything that a pilgrim from Oklahoma would see today.

It is believed that these volumes, alike in their form and contents, present a mass of selected literature such as has not been before offered to readers at one time and in one place.

FRANCIS W. HALSEY.



INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. I AND II

Great Britain and Ireland

The tourist who has embarked for the British Isles lands usually at Liverpool, Fishguard, or Plymouth, whence a special steamer-train takes him in a few hours to London. In landing at Plymouth, he has passed, outside the harbor, Eddystone, most famous of lighthouses, and has seen waters in which Drake overthrew the Armada of Philip II.

Once the tourist leaves the ship he is conscious of a new environment. Aboard the tender (if there be one) he will feel this, in the custom house formalities, when riding on the steamer-train, on stepping to the station platform at his destination, when riding in the tidy taxicab, at the door and in the office of his hotel, in his well-ordered bedroom, and at his initial meal. First of all, he will appreciate the tranquility, the unobtrusiveness, the complete efficiency, with which service is rendered him by those employed to render it.

When Lord Nelson, before beginning the battle of Trafalgar, said to his officers and sailors that England expected "every man to do his duty," the remark was merely one of friendly encouragement and sympathy, rather than of stern discipline, because every man on board that fleet of ships already expected to do his duty. Life in England is a school in which doing one's duty becomes a fundamental condition of staying "in the game." Not alone sailors and soldiers know this, and adjust their lives to it, but all classes of public and domestic servants—indeed, all men are subject to it, whether servants or barristers, lawmakers or kings.

Emerging from his hotel for a walk in the street, the tourist, even tho his visit be not the first, will note the ancient look of things. Here are buildings that have survived for two, or even five, hundred years, and yet they are still found fit for the purposes to which they are put. Few buildings are tall, the "skyscraper" being undiscoverable. On great and crowded thoroughfares one may find buildings in plenty that have only two, or at most three, stories, and their windows small, with panes of glass scarcely more than eight by ten. The great wall mass and dome of St. Paul's, the roof and towers of Westminster Abbey, unlike the lone spire of old Trinity in New York, still rise above all the buildings around them as far as the eye can reach, just about as they did in the days of Sir Christopher Wren.

Leaving a great thoroughfare for a side street, a stone's throw may bring one to a friend's office, in one of those little squares so common in the older parts of London. How ancient all things here may seem to him, the very street doorway an antiquity, and so the fireplace within, the hinges and handles of the doors. From some upper rear window he may look out on an extension roof of solid lead, that has survived, sound and good, after the storms of several generations, and beyond may look into an ancient burial ground, or down upon the grass-plots and ample walks around a church (perchance the Temple Church), and again may see below him the tomb of Oliver Goldsmith.

In America we look for antiquities to Boston, with her Long Wharf, or Faneuil Hall; to New York, with her Fraunccs Tavern and Van Cortlandt Manor House; to Jamestown with her lone, crumbling church tower; to the Pacific coast with her Franciscan mission houses; to St. Augustine with her Spanish gates; but all these are young and blushing things compared with the historic places of the British Isles. None of them, save one, is of greater age than a century and a half. Even the exception (St. Augustine) is a child in arms compared with Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, St. Martin's of Canterbury, the ruined abbey of Glastonbury, the remains of churches on the island of Iona, or the oldest ruins found in Ireland.

What to an American is ancient history, to an Englishman is an affair of scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of 1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman—the event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of the British Empire. We fought single-handed with Indians, it is true, and we cooperated with the mother country in wresting the continent from the French, but all this history, in a technical sense, is English history rather than the history of the United States.

Our Revolution occurred in the reign of the Third George; back of it runs a line of other Hanoverian kings, of Stuart kings, of Tudor kings, of Plantagenet kings, of Norman kings, of Saxon kings, of Roman governors, of Briton kings and queens, of Scottish tribal heads and kings, of ancient Irish kings. Long before Caesar landed in Kent, inhabitants of England had erected forts, constructed war chariots, and reared temples of worship, of which a notable example still survives on Salisbury Plain. So had the Picts and Scots of Caledonia reared strongholds and used war chariots, and so had Celts erected temples of worship in Ireland, and Phoenicians had mined tin in Cornwall. When Cavaliers were founding a commonwealth at Jamestown and the Puritans one on Massachusetts Bay, the British Isles were six hundred years away from the Norman conquest, the Reformation of the English church had been effected, Chaucer had written his "Tales," Bacon his "Essays," and Shakespeare all but a few of his "Plays."

Of the many races to whom belong these storied annals—Briton, Pict, Scot, Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norman—we of America, whose ancestral lines run back to those islands, are the far-descended children, heirs actual. Our history, as a civilized people, began not in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, not at Jamestown, not at Plymouth Rock, but there in the northeastern Atlantic, in lands now acknowledging the sway of the Parliament of Westminster, and where, as with us, the speech of all is English. Not alone do we share that speech with them, but that matchless literature, also English, and more than that, racial customs, laws and manners, of which many are as old as the Norman conquest, while others, for aught we know, are survivals from an age when human sacrifices were made around the monoliths of Stonehenge.

It is not in lands such as these that any real American can ever feel himself a stranger. There lies for so many of us the ancestral home—in that "land of just and of old renown," that "royal throne of kings," that "precious stone set in the silver sea," that "dear, dear land, dear for her reputation through the world."

F.W.H.



CONTENTS OF VOLUME I

GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND—PART ONE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION AND INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. I AND II—By the Editor

I—LONDON

A GENERAL SKETCH—By Goldwin Smith WESTMINSTER ABBEY—By Washington Irving THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT—By Nathaniel Hawthorne ST. PAUL'S—By Augustus J.C. Hare THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE—By H.A. Taine THE TEMPLE'S GALLERY OF GHOSTS PROM DICKENS—By J.R.G. Hassard THE TEMPLE CHURCH—By Augustus J.C. Hare LAMBETH CHURCH AND PALACE—By Augustus J.C. Hare DICKENS'S LIMEHOUSE HOLE—By J.E.G. Hassard WHITEHALL—By Augustus J. C. Hare THE TOWER—By W. Hepworth Dixon ST. JAMES'S PALACE—By Augustus J. C. Hare LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON—By William Winter

II—CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS

CANTERBURY—By the Editor OLD YORK—By William Winter YORK AND LINCOLN COMPARED—By Edward A. Freeman DURHAM—By Nathaniel Hawthorne ELY—By James M. Hoppin SALISBURY—By Nathaniel Hawthorne EXETER—By Anna Bowman Dodd LICHFIELD—By Nathaniel Hawthorne WINCHESTER—By William Howitt WELLS—By James M, Hoppin BURY ST. EDMUNDS—By H. Claiborne Dixon GLASTONBURY—By H. Claiborne Dixon TINTERN—By H. Claiborne Dixon

III—CASTLES AND STATELY HOMES

LIVING IN GREAT HOUSES—By Richard Grant White WINDSOR—By Harriet Beecher Stowe BLENHEIM—By the Duke of Marlborough WARWICK—By Harriet Beecher Stowe KENILWORTH—By Sir Walter Scott ALNWICK—By William Howitt HAMPTON COURT—By William Howitt CHATSWORTH AND HADDON HALL—By Elihu Burritt EATON HALL—By Nathaniel Hawthorne HOLLAND HOUSE—By William Howitt ARUNDEL—By Anna Bowman Dodd PENSHURST—By William Howitt

IV—ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES

STRATFORD-ON-AVON—By Washington Irving NEWSTEAD ABBEY—By Nathaniel Hawthorne HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH (Byron's Grave)—By William Winter DR. JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE—By Nathaniel Hawthorne

(English Literary Shrines continued in Vol. II)



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME I

FRONTISPIECE TRAFALGAR SQUARE, LONDON

PRECEDING PAGE I WESTMINSTER ABBEY RIVER FRONT OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL INTERIOR OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL CHAPEL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, WESTMINSTER ABBEY THE TOWER OF LONDON CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL TINTERN ABBEY DRYEURGH ABBEY WINDSOR CASTLE

FOLLOWING PAGE 95 THE ALBERT MEMORIAL CHAPEL, WINDSOR THE THRONE ROOM, WINDSOR CASTLE POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY THE GREAT HALL AT PENSHURST THE ENTRANCE HALL OF BLENHEIM PALACE GUY'S TOWER AND THE CLOCK TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE WARWICK CASTLE THE BEAUCHAMP CHAPEL, WARWICK THE RUINS OF KENILWORTH CASTLE CHATSWORTH ALNWICK CASTLE HOLLAND HOUSE EATON HALL



I

LONDON

A GENERAL SKETCH [Footnote: From articles written for the Toronto "Week." Afterward (1888) issued by The Macmillan Company in the volume entitled "The Trip to England."]

BY GOLDWIN SMITH

The huge city perhaps never imprest the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of the Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained.

It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of these ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is fine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to be forgotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon may have vied with London in circumference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open spaces; the modern Babylon is a dense mass of humanity....

The Empire and the commercial relations of England draw representatives of trading committees or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the faces and costumes of the Hindu, the Parsee, the Lascar and the ubiquitous Chinaman mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what the great Palace of Tyre must have been to the ancient world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London.

Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest products are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindu, Japanese, Chinese industry is as much at your service here, if you have the all-compelling talisman in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Benares, Yokohama, or Peking. That London is the great distributing center of the world is shown by the fleets of the carrying trade of which the countless masts rise along her wharves and in her docks. She is also the bank of the world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of commerce and the precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam.

The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat. How can the five millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruits which can hardly be left beyond a day? Here again we see reason for excepting to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, and concluding that tho there may be fraud and scamping in the industrial world, genuine production, faithful service, disciplined energy, and skill in organization, can not wholly have departed from the earth. London is not only well fed, but well supplied with water and well drained. Vast and densely peopled as it is, it is a healthy city. Yet the limit of practical extension seems to be nearly reached. It becomes a question how the increasing multitude shall be supplied not only with food and water, but with air.

The East of London, which is the old city, is, as all know, the business quarter. Let the worshiper of Mammon when he sets foot in Lombard Street adore his divinity, of all whose temples this is the richest and the most famous. Note the throng incessantly threading those narrow and tortuous streets. Nowhere are the faces so eager or the steps so hurried, except perhaps in the business quarter of New York. Commerce has still its center here; but the old social and civic life of the city has fled. What once were the dwellings of the merchants of London are now vast collections of offices. The merchants dwell in the mansions of the West End, their clerks in villas and boxes without number, to which when their offices close they are taken by the suburban railways. On Sunday a more than Sabbath stillness reigns in those streets, while in the churches, the monuments of Wren's architectural genius which in Wren's day were so crowded, the clergyman sleepily performs the service to a congregation which you may count upon your fingers.

It is worth while to visit the city on a Sunday. Here and there, in a back street, may still be seen what was once the mansion of a merchant prince, ample and stately, with the rooms which in former days displayed the pride of commercial wealth and resounded with the festivities of the olden time; now the sound of the pen alone is heard. These and other relics of former days are fast disappearing before the march of improvement, which is driving straight new streets through the antique labyrinth. Some of the old thoroughfares as well as the old names remain. There is Cheapside, along which, through the changeful ages, so varied a procession of history has swept. There is Fleet Street, close to which, in Bolt Court, Johnson lived, and which he preferred, or affected to prefer, to the finest scenes of nature. Temple Bar, once grimly garnished with the heads of traitors, has been numbered with the things of the past, after furnishing Mr. Bright, by the manner in which the omnibuses were jammed in it, with a vivid simile for a legislative deadlock....

Society has migrated to the Westward, leaving far behind the ancient abodes of aristocracy, the Strand, where once stood a long line of patrician dwellings, Great Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house may still be seen; Lincoln's Inn Fields, where, in the time of George II, the Duke of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions, too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, such as Norfolk House, Spencer House and Lansdowne House, stayed the westward course of aristocracy at St. James's Square and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair; but the general tide of fashion has swept far beyond.

In that vast realm of wealth and leisure, the West End of London, the eye is not satisfied with seeing, neither the ear with hearing. There is not, nor has there ever been, anything like it in the world. Notes of admiration might be accumulated to any extent without aiding the impression. In every direction the visitor may walk till he is weary through streets and squares of houses, all evidently the abodes of wealth, some of them veritable palaces. The parks are thronged, the streets are blocked with handsome equipages, filled with the rich and gay. Shops blaze with costly wares, and abound with everything that can minister to luxury.

On a fine bright day of May or early June, and days of May or early June are often as bright in London as anywhere, the Park is probably the greatest display of wealth and of the pride of wealth in the world. The contrast with the slums of the East End, no doubt, is striking, and we can not wonder if the soul of the East End is sometimes filled with bitterness at the sight. A social Jeremiah might be moved to holy wrath by the glittering scene. The seer, however, might be reminded that not all the owners of those carriages are the children of idleness, living by the sweat of another man's brow; many of them are professional men or chiefs of industry, working as hard with their brains as any mechanic works with his hands, and indispensable ministers of the highest civilization. The number and splendor of the equipages are thought to have been somewhat diminished of late by the reduction of rents.

The architecture of the West End of London is for the most part drearily monotonous; its forms have too plainly been determined by the builder, not by the artist, tho since the restoration of art, varieties of style have been introduced, and individual beauty has been more cultivated. It is the boundless expanse of opulence, street after street, square after square, that most impresses the beholder, and makes him wonder from what miraculous horn of plenty such a tide of riches can have been poured.

A beautiful city London can not be called. In beauty it is no match for Paris. The smoke, which not only blackens but corrodes, is fatal to the architecture as well as to the atmosphere. Moreover, the fine buildings, which if brought together would form a magnificent assemblage, are scattered over the immense city, and some of them are ruined by their surroundings. There is a fine group at Westminster, and the view from the steps under the Duke of York's column across St. James's Park is beautiful. But even at Westminster meanness jostles splendor, and the picture is marred by Mr. Hankey's huge tower of Babel rising near. London has had no edile like Haussmann.

The Embankment on the one side of the Thames is noble in itself, but you look across from it at the hideous and dirty wharves of Southwark. Nothing is more charming than a fine water street; and this water street might be very fine were it not marred by the projection of a huge railway shed. The new Courts of Law, a magnificent, tho it is said inconvenient, pile, instead of being placed on the Embankment or in some large open space, are choked up and lost in rookeries. London, we must repeat, has had no edile. Perhaps the finest view is that from a steamboat on the river, embracing the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the Temple, with St. Paul's rising above the whole.



WESTMINSTER ABBEY [Footnote: From "The Sketch Book." Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.]

BY WASHINGTON IRVING

On one of those sober and rather melancholy days in the latter part of Autumn, when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together and throw a gloom over the decline of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about Westminster Abbey. I spent some time in Poet's Corner, which occupies an end of one of the transepts or cross aisles of the abbey. The monuments are generally simple; for the lives of literary men afford no striking themes for the sculptor. Shakespeare and Addison have statues erected to their memories; but the greater part have busts, medallions, and sometimes mere inscriptions. Notwithstanding the simplicity of these memorials, I have always observed that the visitors to the abbey remained longest about them. A kinder and fonder feeling takes the place of that cold curiosity or vague admiration with which they gaze on the splendid monuments of the great and heroic. They linger about these as about the tombs of friends and companions; for indeed there is something of companionship between the author and the reader. Other men are known to posterity only through the medium of history, which is continually growing faint and obscure; but the intercourse between the author and his fellow men is ever new, active and immediate.

From Poet's Corner I continued my stroll toward that part of the abbey which contains the sepulchers of the kings. I wandered among what once were chapels, but which are now occupied by the tombs and monuments of the great. At every turn I met with some illustrious name; or the cognizance of some powerful house renowned in history. As the eye darts into these dusky chambers of death, it catches glimpses of quaint effigies; some kneeling in niches, as if in devotion; others stretched upon the tombs, with hands piously prest together; warriors in armor, as if reposing after battle; prelates with croziers and miters; and nobles in robes and coronets, lying, as it were, in state. In glancing over this scene, so strangely populous, yet where every form is so still and silent, it seems almost as if we were treading a mansion of that fabled city where everything had been suddenly transmuted into stone.

In the opposite transept to Poet's Corner stands a monument which is among the most renowned achievements of modern art, but which to me appears horrible rather than sublime. It is the tomb of Mrs. Nightingale, by Roubillac. The bottom of the monument is represented as throwing open its marble doors, and a sheeted skeleton is starting forth. The shroud is falling from its fleshless frame as he launches his dart at his victim. She is sinking into her affrighted husband's arms, who strives, with vain and frantic effort, to avert the blow. The whole is executed with terrible truth and spirit; we almost fancy we hear the gibbering yell of triumph bursting from the distended jaws of the specter. But why should we thus seek to clothe death with unnecessary terrors, and to spread horrors round the tombs of those we love? The grave should be surrounded by everything that might inspire tenderness and veneration for the dead; or that might win the living to virtue. It is the place, not of disgust and dismay, but of sorrow and meditation.

I continued in this way to move from tomb to tomb, and from chapel to chapel. The day was gradually wearing away; the distant tread of loiterers about the abbey grew less and less frequent; the sweet-tongued bell was summoning to evening prayers; and I saw at a distance the choristers, in their white surplices, crossing the aisle and entering the choir. I stood before the entrance to Henry the Seventh's chapel. A flight of steps lead up to it, through a deep and gloomy but magnificent arch. Great gates of brass, richly and delicately wrought, turn heavily upon their hinges, as if proudly reluctant to admit the feet of common mortals into this most gorgeous of sepulchers.

On entering, the eye is astonished by the pomp of architecture and the elaborate beauty of sculptured detail. The very walls are wrought into universal ornament, incrusted with tracery and scooped into niches, crowded with statues of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labor of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density, suspended aloft, as if by magic, and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb.

Along the sides of the chapel are the lofty stalls of the Knights of the Bath, richly carved of oak, tho with the grotesque decorations of Gothic architecture. On the pinnacles of the stalls are affixt the helmets and crests of the knights, with their scarfs and swords; and above them are suspended their banners, emblazoned with armorial bearings, and contrasting the splendor of gold and purple and crimson with the cold gray fretwork of the roof. In the midst of this grand mausoleum stands the sepulcher of its founder—his effigy, with that of his queen, extended on a sumptuous tomb, and the whole surrounded by a superbly wrought brazen railing....

When I read the names inscribed on the banners, they were those of men scattered far and wide about the world, some tossing upon distant seas; some under arms in distant lands; some mingling in the busy intrigues of courts and cabinets; all seeking to deserve one more distinction in this mansion of shadowy honors; the melancholy reward of a monument.

Two small aisles on each side of this chapel present a touching instance of the equality of the grave; which brings down the oppressor to a level with the opprest, and mingles the dust of the bitterest enemies together. In one is the sepulcher of the haughty Elizabeth; in the other is that of her victim, the lovely and unfortunate Mary. Not an hour in the day but some ejaculation of pity is uttered over the fate of the latter, mingled with indignation at her oppressor. The walls of Elizabeth's sepulcher continually echo with sighs of sympathy heaved at the grave of her rival.

A peculiar melancholy reigns over the aisle where Mary lies buried. The light struggles dimly through windows darkened by dust. The greater part of the place is in deep shadow, and the walls are stained and tinted by time and weather. A marble figure of Mary is stretched upon the tomb, round which is an iron railing, much corroded, bearing her national emblem—the thistle. I was weary with wandering, and sat down to rest myself at the monument, revolving in my mind the chequered and disastrous story of poor Mary....

Suddenly the notes of the deep-laboring organ burst upon the ear, falling with doubled and redoubled intensity, and rolling, as it were, huge billows of sound. How well do their volume and grandeur accord with this mighty building! With what pomp do they swell through its vast vaults, and breathe their awful harmony through these caves of death, and make the silent sepulcher vocal! And now they rise in triumph and acclamation, heaving higher and higher their accordant notes, and piling sound on sound. And now they pause, and the soft voices of the choir break out into sweet gushes of melody; they soar aloft, and warble along the roof, and seem to play about these lofty vaults like the pure airs of heaven. Again the pealing organ heaves its thrilling thunders, compressing air into music, and rolling it forth upon the soul. What long-drawn cadences! What solemn, sweeping concords! It grows more and more dense and powerful—it fills the vast pile, and seems to jar the very walls—the ear is stunned—the senses are overwhelmed. And now it is winding up in full jubilee—it is rising from the earth to heaven—the very soul seems rapt away and floated upward on this swelling tide of harmony!...

I rose and prepared to leave the abbey. As I descended the flight of steps which lead into the body of the building, my eye was caught by the shrine of Edward the Confessor, and I ascended the small staircase that conducts to it, to take from thence a general survey of this wilderness of tombs. The shrine is elevated upon a kind of platform, and close around it are the sepulchers of various kings and queens. From this eminence the eye looks down between pillars and funeral trophies to the chapels and chambers below, crowded with tombs; where warriors, prelates, courtiers and statesmen lie moldering in their "beds of darkness." Close by me stood the great chair of coronation, rudely carved of oak, in the barbarous taste of a remote and Gothic age. The scene seemed almost as if contrived, with theatrical artifice, to produce an effect upon the beholder. Here was a type of the beginning and the end of human pomp and power; here it was literally but a step from the throne to the sepulcher. Would not one think that these incongruous mementos had been gathered together as a lesson to living greatness, to show it, even in the moment of its proudest exaltation, the neglect and dishonor to which it must soon arrive; how soon that crown which encircles its brow must pass away, and it must lie down in the dust and disgraces of the tomb, and be trampled upon by the feet of the meanest of the multitude?...

The last beams of day were now faintly streaming through the painted windows in the high vaults above me; the lower parts of the abbey were already wrapt in the obscurity of twilight. The chapels and aisles grew darker and darker. The effigies of the kings faded into shadows; the marble figures of the monuments assumed strange shapes in the uncertain light; the evening breeze crept through the aisles like the cold breath of the grave; and even the distant footfall of a verger, traversing the Poet's Corner, had something strange and dreary in its sound. I slowly retraced my morning's walk, and as I passed out at the portal of the cloisters the door, closing with a jarring noise behind me, filled the whole building with echoes.

I endeavored to form some arrangement in my mind of the objects I had been contemplating, but found they were already fallen into indistinctness and confusion. Names, inscriptions, trophies, had all become confounded in my recollection, tho I had scarcely taken my foot from off the threshold. What, thought I, is this vast assemblage of sepulchers but a treasury of humiliation; a huge pile of reiterated homilies on the emptiness of renown and the certainty of oblivion! It is, indeed, the empire of death; his great shadowy palace, where he sits in state, mocking at the relics of human glory, and spreading dust and forgetfulness on the monuments of princes. How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present, to think of the characters and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside to be speedily forgotten. The idol of to-day pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of to-morrow.

"Our fathers," says Sir Thomas Browne, "find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors." History fades into fable; fact becomes clouded with doubt and controversy; the inscription molders from the tablet; the statue falls from the pedestal. Columns, arches, pyramids, what are they but heaps of sand; and their epitaphs, but characters written in the dust? What is the security of a tomb, or the perpetuity of an embalmment? The remains of Alexander the Great have been scattered to the wind, and his empty sarcophagus is now the mere curiosity of a museum. "The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth; Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." [Footnote: Sir Thomas Browne.]

What, then, is to insure this pile which now towers above me from sharing the fate of mightier mausoleums? The time must come when its gilded vaults, which now spring so loftily, shall lie in rubbish beneath the feet; when, instead of the sound of melody and praise, the wind shall whistle through the broken arches, and the owl hoot from the shattered tower—when the garish sunbeam shall break into these gloomy mansions of death, and the ivy twine round the fallen column; and the foxglove hang its blossoms about the nameless urn, as if in mockery of the dead. Thus the man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.



THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT [Footnote: From "English Note Books." By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers of Hawthorne's works, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1870-1898.]

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

A little before twelve, we took a cab, and went to the two Houses of Parliament—the most immense building, methinks, that ever was built; and not yet finished, tho it has now been occupied for years. Its exterior lies hugely along the ground, and its great unfinished tower is still climbing toward the sky; but the result (unless it be the river-front, which I have not yet seen) seems not very impressive. The interior is much more successful. Nothing can be more magnificent and gravely gorgeous than the Chamber of Peers—a large oblong hall, paneled with oak, elaborately carved, to the height of perhaps twenty feet. Then the balustrade of the gallery runs around the hall, and above the gallery are six arched windows on each side, richly painted with historic subjects. The roof is ornamented and gilded, and everywhere throughout there is embellishment of color and carving on the broadest scale, and, at the same time, most minute and elaborate; statues of full size in niches aloft; small heads of kings, no bigger than a doll; and the oak is carved in all parts of the paneling as faithfully as they used to do it in Henry VII.'s time—as faithfully and with as good workmanship, but with nothing like the variety and invention which I saw in the dining-room of Smithell's Hall. There the artist wrought with his heart and head; but much of this work, I suppose, was done by machinery.

It is a most noble and splendid apartment, and, tho so fine, there is not a touch of finery; it glistens and glows with even a somber magnificence, owing to the deep, rich hues and the dim light, bedimmed with rich colors by coming through the painted windows. In arched recesses, that serve as frames, at each end of the hall, there are three pictures by modern artists from English history; and tho it was not possible to see them well as pictures, they adorned and enriched the walls marvelously as architectural embellishments. The Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a decorously exact position. The woolsack is between these two divisions of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor—a great square seat, covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly for the Chancellor to lean against. In front of the woolsack there is another still larger ottoman, on which he might lie at full length—for what purpose intended, I know not. I should take the woolsack to be not a very comfortable seat, tho I suppose it was originally designed to be the most comfortable one that could be contrived.

The throne is the first object you see on entering the hall, being close to the door; a chair of antique form, with a high, peaked back, and a square canopy above, the whole richly carved and quite covered with burnished gilding, besides being adorned with rows of rock crystals—which seemed to me of rather questionable taste....

We next, after long contemplating this rich hall, proceeded through passages and corridores to a great central room, very beautiful, which seems to be used for purposes of refreshment, and for electric telegraphs; tho I should not suppose this could be its primitive and ultimate design. Thence we went into the House of Commons, which is larger than the Chamber of Peers, and much less richly ornamented, tho it would have appeared splendid had it come first in order. The Speaker's chair, if I remember rightly, is loftier and statelier than the throne itself. Both in this hall and in that of the Lords we were at first surprized by the narrow limits within which the great ideas of the Lords and Commons of England are physically realized; they would seem to require a vaster space. When we hear of members rising on opposite sides of the House, we think of them but as dimly discernible to their opponents, and uplifting their voices, so as to be heard afar; whereas they sit closely enough to feel each other's spheres, to note all expression of face, and to give the debate the character of a conversation. In this view a debate seems a much more earnest and real thing than as we read it in a newspaper. Think of the debaters meeting each other's eyes, their faces flushing, their looks interpreting their words, their speech growing into eloquence, without losing the genuineness of talk! Yet, in fact, the Chamber of Peers is ninety feet long and half as broad and high, and the Chamber of Commons is still larger.



ST. PAUL'S [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

It will be admitted that, tho in general effect there is nothing in the same style of architecture which exceeds the exterior of St. Paul's, it has not a single detail deserving of attention, except the Phenix over the south portico, which was executed by Cibber, and commemorates the curious fact narrated in the "Parentalia," that the very first stone which Sir Christopher Wren directed a mason to bring from the rubbish of the old church to serve as a mark for the center of the dome in his plans was inscribed with the single word Resurgam—I shall rise again. The other ornaments and statues are chiefly by Bird, a most inferior sculptor. Those who find greater faults must, however, remember that St. Paul's, as it now stands, is not according to the first design of Wren, the rejection of which cost him bitter tears. Even in his after work he met with so many rubs and ruffles, and was so insufficiently paid, that the Duchess of Marlborough, said, in allusion to his scaffold labors, "He is dragged up and down in a basket two or three times in a week for an insignificant L200 a year."...

The interior of St. Paul's is not without a grandeur of its own, but in detail it is bare, cold, and uninteresting, tho Wren intended to have lined the dome with mosaics, and to have placed a grand baldacchino in the choir. Tho a comparison with St. Peter's inevitably forces itself upon those who are familiar with the great Roman basilica, there can scarcely be a greater contrast than between the two buildings. There, all is blazing with precious marbles; here, there is no color except from the poor glass of the eastern windows, or where a tattered banner waves above a hero's monument. In the blue depths of the misty dome the London fog loves to linger, and hides the remains of some feeble frescoes by Thornhill, Hogarth's father-in-law. In St. Paul's, as in St. Peter's, the statues on the monuments destroy the natural proportion of the arches by their monstrous size, but they have seldom any beauty or grace to excuse them. The week-day services are thinly attended, and, from the nave, it seems as if the knot of worshipers near the choir were lost in the immensity, and the peals of the organ and the voices of the choristers were vibrating through an arcaded solitude....

The most interesting portion of the church is the Crypt, where, at the eastern extremity, are gathered nearly all the remains of the tombs which were saved from the old St. Paul's. Here repose the head and half the body of Sir Nicholas Bacon (1579), Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in the reign of Elizabeth, and father of Francis, Lord Bacon. Other fragments represent William Cokain, 1626; William Hewit, 1597; and John Wolley and his wife, 1595. There are tablets to "Sir Simon Baskerville the rich," physician to James I. and Charles I., 1641; and to Brian, Bishop of Chester, 1661. The tomb of John Martin, bookseller, and his wife, 1680, was probably the first monument erected in the crypt of new St. Paul's....

In the Crypt, not far from the old St. Paul's tombs, the revered Dean Milman, the great historian of the church (best known, perhaps, by his "History of the Jews," his "History of Latin Christianity," and his contributions to "Heber's Hymns"), is now buried under a simple tomb ornamented with a raised cross. In a recess on the south is the slab of Sir Christopher Wren, and near him, in other chapels, Robert Mylne, the architect of old Blackfriars Bridge, and John Rennie, the architect of Waterloo Bridge. Beneath the pavement lies Sir Joshua Reynolds (1742), who had an almost royal funeral in St. Paul's, dukes and marquises contending for the honor of being his pallbearers. Around him are buried his disciples and followers—Lawrence (1830), Barry (1806), Opie (1807), West (1820), Fuseli (1825); but the most remarkable grave is that of William Maillord Turner, whose dying request was that he might be buried as near as possible to Sir Joshua.

Where the heavy pillars and arches gather thick beneath the dome, in spite of his memorable words at the battle of the Nile—"Victory or Westminster Abbey"—is the grave of Lord Nelson. Followed to the grave by the seven sons of his sovereign, he was buried here in 1806, when Dean Milman, who was present, "heard, or seemed to hear, the low wail of the sailors who encircled the remains of their admiral." They tore to pieces the largest of the flags of the "Victory," which waved above his grave; the rest were buried with his coffin.

The sarcophagus of Nelson was designed and executed for Cardinal Wolsey by the famous Torregiano, and was intended to contain the body of Henry VIII. in the tomb-house at Windsor. It encloses the coffin made from the mast of the ship "L'Orient," which was presented to Nelson after the battle of the Nile by Ben Hallowell, captain of the "Swiftsure," that, when he was tired of life, he might "be buried in one of his own trophies." On either side of Nelson repose the minor heroes of Trafalgar, Collingwood (1810) and Lord Northesk; Picton also lies near him, but outside the surrounding arches.

A second huge sarcophagus of porphyry resting on lions is the tomb where Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, was laid in 1852, in the presence of 15,000 spectators, Dean Milman, who had been present at Nelson's funeral, then reading the services. Beyond the tomb of Nelson, in a ghastly ghost-befitting chamber hung with the velvet which surrounded his lying in state at Chelsea, and on which, by the flickering torchlight, we see emblazoned the many Orders presented to him by foreign sovereigns, is the funeral car of Wellington, modeled and constructed in six weeks, at an expense of L13,000, from guns taken in his campaigns.

In the southwest pier of the dome a staircase ascends by 616 steps to the highest point of the cathedral. No feeble person should attempt the fatigue, and, except to architects, the undertaking is scarcely worth while. An easy ascent leads to the immense passages of the triforium, in which, opening from the gallery above the south aisle, is the Library, founded by Bishop Compton, who crowned William and Mary, Archbishop Seeker refusing to do so. It contains the bishop's portrait and some carving by Gibbons.

At the corner of the gallery, on the left, a very narrow stair leads to the Clock, of enormous size, with a pendulum 16 feet long, constructed by Langley Bradley in 1708. Ever since, the oaken seats behind it have been occupied by a changing crowd, waiting with anxious curiosity to see the hammer strike its bell, and tremulously hoping to tremble at the vibration.

Returning, another long ascent leads to the Whispering Gallery, below the windows of the cupola, where visitors are requested to sit down upon a matted seat that they may be shown how a low whisper uttered against the wall can be distinctly heard from the other side of the dome. Hence we reach the Stone Gallery, outside the base of the dome, whence we may ascend to the Golden Gallery at its summit. This last ascent is interesting, as being between the outer and inner domes, and showing how completely different in construction one is from the other. The view from the gallery is vast, but generally, beyond a certain distance, it is shrouded in smoke. Sometimes, one stands aloft in a clear atmosphere, while beneath the fog rolls like a sea, through which the steeples and towers are just visible "like the masts of stranded vessels." Hence one may study the anatomy of the fifty-four towers which Wren was obliged to build after the Fire in a space of time which would only have properly sufficed for the construction of four. The same characteristics, more and more painfully diluted, but always slightly varied, occur in each. Bow Church, St. Magnus, St. Bride, and St. Vedast are the best.

The Great Bell of St. Paul's (of 1716), which hangs in the south tower, bears the inscription, "Richard Phelps made me, 1716." It only tolls on the deaths and funerals of the royal family, of Bishops of London, Deans of St. Paul's, and Lord Mayors who die in their mayoralty.



THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE [Footnote: From "Notes on England." By arrangement with the publishers, Henry Holt & Co.]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

I have letters of introduction and a ticket of admission to the British Museum. About the Grecian marbles, the original Italian drawings, about the National Gallery, the Hampton Court galleries, the pictures at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, and the private collections, I shall say nothing. Still, what marvels and what historical tokens are all these things, five or six specimens of high civilization manifested in a perfect art, all differing greatly from that which I now examine, and so well adapted for bringing into relief the good and the evil. To do that would fill a volume by itself.

The Museum library contains six hundred thousand volumes; the reading-room is vast, circular in form, and covered with a cupola, so that no one is far from the central office, and no one has the light in his eyes. All the lower stage of shelves is filled with works of reference—dictionaries, collections of biographies, classics of all sorts—which can be consulted on the spot, and are excellently arranged. Moreover, a small plan placed on each table indicates where they are placed and the order in which they stand.

Each seat is isolated; there is nothing in front but the woodwork of the desk, so that no one is annoyed by the presence of his neighbor. The seats and the tables are covered with leather, and are very clean; there are two pens to each desk, the one being steel, the other a quill pen; there is also a small stand at the side, upon which a second volume, or the volume from which the extracts are being copied may be placed. To procure a book, the title is written on a form, which is handed to the central office. The attendant brings the book to you himself, and does so without delay. I have made trial of this, even in the case of works seldom asked for. The holder of the book is responsible till he has received back the form filled up when he applied for it. For ladies a place is reserved, which is a delicate piece of attention.

What a contrast if we compare this with our great library at the Louvre, with its long room, with half of the readers dazzled by the light in their eyes, the readers being packed together at a common table, the titles of the books being called out in loud tones, the long time spent in waiting at the central office. The French Library has been reformed according to the English model, yet without being rendered as convenient. Nevertheless, ours is the more liberally conducted; its doors are opened to all comers. Here one must be a "respecable" person; no one is admitted unless vouched for by two householders. This is said to be enough; as it is, those gain admission who are worse than shabby—men in working clothes, and some without shoes—they have been introduced by clergymen. The grant for buying new books is seven or eight times larger than ours. When shall we learn to spend our money in a sensible way?

In other matters they are not so successful, such as the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, for instance, which formed the building for the Great Exhibition, and which is now a sort of museum of curiosities. It is gigantic, like London itself, and like so many things in London, but how can I portray the gigantic? All the ordinary sensations produced by size are intensified several times here. It is two miles in circumference and has three stories of prodigious height; it would easily hold five or six buildings like our Palace of Industry, and it is of glass; it consists, first, of an immense rectangular structure rising toward the center in a semicircle like a hothouse, and flanked by two Chinese towers; then, on either side, long buildings descend at right angles, enclosing the garden with its fountains, statues, summer houses, strips of turf, groups of large trees, exotic plants, and beds of flowers. The acres of glass sparkle in the sunlight; at the horizon an undulating line of green eminences is bathed in the luminous vapor which softens all colors and spreads an expression of tender beauty over an entire landscape.

Always the same English method of decoration—on the one side a park and natural embellishments, which it must be granted, are beautiful and adapted to the climate; on the other, the building, which is a monstrous jumble, wanting in style, and bearing witness not to taste, but to English power. The interior consists of a museum of antiquities, composed of plaster facsimiles of all the Grecian and Roman statues scattered over Europe; of a museum of the Middle Ages; of a Revival museum; of an Egyptian museum; of a Nineveh museum; of an Indian museum; of a reproduction of a Pompeiian house; of a reproduction of the Alhambra. The ornaments of the Alhambra have been molded, and these molds are preserved in an adjoining room as proofs of authenticity. In order to omit nothing, copies have been made of the most notable Italian paintings, and these are daubs worthy of a country fair.

There is a huge tropical hothouse, wherein are fountains, swimming turtles, large aquatic plants in flower, the Sphinx and Egyptian statues sixty feet high, specimens of colossal or rare trees, among others the bark of a Sequoia California 450 feet in height and measuring 116 feet in circumference. The bark is arranged and fastened to an inner framework in such a manner as to give an idea of the tree itself. There is a circular concert room, with tiers of benches as in a Colosseum. Lastly, in the gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters, megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others. In these gardens Blondin does his tricks at the height of a hundred feet.

I pass over half the things; but does not this conglomeration of odds and ends carry back one's thoughts to the Rome of Caesar and the Antonines? At that period also pleasure-palaces were erected for the sovereign people; circuses, theaters, baths wherein were collected statues, paintings, animals, musicians, acrobats, all the treasures and all the oddities of the world; pantheons of opulence and curiosity; genuine bazaars where the liking for what was novel, heterogeneous, and fantastic ousted the feeling of appreciation for simple beauty.

In truth, Rome enriched herself with these things by conquest, England by industry. Thus it is that at Rome the paintings, the statues, were stolen originals, and the monsters, whether rhinoceroses or lions, were perfectly alive and tore human beings to pieces; whereas here the statues are made of plaster and the monsters of goldbeater's skin. The spectacle is one of second class, but of the same kind. A Greek would not have regarded it with satisfaction; he would have considered it appropriate to powerful barbarians, who, trying to become refined, had utterly failed.



THE TEMPLE'S GALLERY OF GHOSTS FROM DICKENS [Footnote: From "A Pickwickian Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Hassard's Pilgrimage to the Temple and its neighborhood will be recognized as characters In the novels of Charles Dickens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1881.]

BY JOHN R.G. HASSARD

The Temple is crowded with the ghosts of fiction. Here were the neglected chambers, lumbered with heaps and parcels of books, where Tom Pinch was set to work by Mr. Fips, and where old Martin Chuzzlewit revealed himself in due time and knocked Mr. Pecksniff into a corner. Here Mr. Mortimer Lightwood's dismal office-boy leaned out of a dismal window overlooking the dismal churchyard; and here Mortimer and Eugene were visited by Mr. Boffin offering a large reward for the conviction of the murderer of John Harmon; by that honest water-side character, Rogue Riderhood, anxious to earn "a pot o' money" in the sweat of his brow by swearing away the life of Gaffer Hexam; by Bradley Headstone and Charley Hexam; by "Mr. Dolls," negotiating for "three-penn'orths of rum."

It was in Garden Court of The Temple, in the house nearest the river, that Pip, holding his lamp over the stairs one stormy night, saw the returned convict climbing up to his rooms to disclose the mystery of his Great Expectations. Close by the gateway from The Temple into Fleet Street, and adjoining the site of Temple Bar, is Child's ancient banking house, the original of Tellson's Bank in a "Tale of Two Cities." The demolition of Temple Bar made necessary some alterations in the bank, too; and when I was last there the front of the old building which so long defied time and change was boarded up.

Chancery Lane, opposite The Temple, running from Fleet Street to Holborn—a distance only a little greater than that between the Fifth and Sixth Avenues in New York—is the principal pathway through the "perplexed and troublous valley of the shadow of the law." At either end of it there are fresh green spots; but the lane itself is wholly given up to legal dust and darkness. Facing it, on the farther side of Holborn, in a position corresponding with that of The Temple at the Fleet Street extremity, is Gray's Inn, especially attractive to me on account of the long grassy enclosure within its innermost court, so smooth and bright and well-kept that I always stopt to gaze longingly at it through the railed barrier which shuts strangers out—as if here were a tennis lawn reserved for the exclusive vise of frisky barristers.

At No. 2 Holborn Court, in Gray's Inn, David Copperfield, on his return from abroad near the end of the story, found the rooms of that rising young lawyer, Mr. Thomas Traddles. There was a great scuttling and scampering when David knocked at the door; for Traddles was at that moment playing puss-in-the-corner with Sophy and "the girls." Thavies' Inn, on the other side of Holborn, a little farther east, is no longer enclosed; it is only a little fragment of shabby street which starts, with mouth wide open, to run out of Holborn Circus, and stops short, after a few reds, without having got anywhere. The faded houses look as if they belonged to East Broadway; and in one of them lived Mrs. Jellyby....

The buildings within the large enclosure of Lincoln's Inn are a strange mixture of aged dulness and new splendor; but the old houses and the old court-rooms seem to be without exception dark, stuffy, and inconvenient. Here were the chambers of Kenge and Carboy, and the dirty and disorderly offices of Sergeant Snubbin, counsel for the defendant in the suit of Bardell against Pickwick. Here the Lord Chancellor sat, in the heart of the fog, to hear the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.

At the back of the Inn, in the shabby-genteel square called Lincoln's Inn Fields, Mr. Tulkinghorn was murdered in his rusty apartment. The story of "Bleak House" revolves about Lincoln's Inn. The whole neighborhood has an air of mystery and a scent like a stationer's shop. Always I found Mr. Guppy there, with a necktie much too smart for the rest of his clothes, and a bundle of documents tied with red tape. Jobling and young Smallweed sometimes stopt to talk with him. The doors of the crowded court-rooms opened now and then, and gentlemen in gowns and horsehair wigs came out to speak with clients who waited under the arches....

The climax of "Bleak House" is the pursuit of Lady Dedlock, and the finding of the fugitive, cold and dead, with one arm around a rail of the dark little graveyard where they buried the law-copyist, "Nemo," and where poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at night and swept the stones as his last tribute to the friend who "was very good" to him. There are three striking descriptions of this place in the novel. "A hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene—a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Kafir would shudder at. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life; here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in corruption to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together."

The exact situation of the graveyard is not defined in the novel; but it was evidently near Lincoln's Inn, and Mr. Winter told us, in one of his delightful London letters, that it was also near Drury Lane. So strangely hidden away is it among close and dirty houses that it was only after three long searches through all the courts thereabouts that I found the "reeking little tunnel," and twice I passed the entrance without observing it. Opening out of Drury Lane, at the back and side of the theater, is a network of narrow, flagged passages built up with tall houses. There are rag and waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or three dreadful little greengrocers' stalls, a pawnbroker's, a surprizing number of cobblers, and in the core of the place, where the alley widens into the semblance of a dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes, pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play-books. Between Marquis Court on the one hand, Russell Court on the other, and a miserable alley called Cross Court which connects them, is what appears at first sight to be a solid block of tenements. The graveyard is in the very heart of this populous block. The door of one of the houses stood open, and through a barred staircase window at the back of the entry I caught a glimpse of a patch of grass—a sight so strange in this part of London that I went around to the other side of the block to examine further.

There I found the "reeking little tunnel." It is merely a stone-paved passage about four feet wide through the ground floor of a tenement. House doors open into it. A lamp hangs over the entrance. A rusty iron gate closes it at the farther end. Here is the "pestiferous and obscene churchyard," completely hemmed in by the habitations of the living. Few of the graves are marked, and most of the tombstones remaining are set up on end against the walls of the houses. Perhaps a church stood there once, but there is none now. The burials are no longer permitted in this hideous spot, the people of the block, when they shut their doors at night, shut the dead in with them. The dishonoring of the old graves goes on briskly. Inside the gate lay various rubbish—a woman's boot, a broken coal scuttle, the foot of a tin candlestick, fragments of paper, sticks, bones, straw—unmentionable abominations; and over the dismal scene a reeking, smoke-laden fog spread darkness and moisture.



THE TEMPLE CHURCH [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

By Inner Temple Lane we reach the only existing relic of the residence of the Knights Templars in these courts, their magnificent Temple Church (St Mary's), which fortunately just escaped the Great Fire in which most of the Inner Temple perished. The church was restored in 1839-42 at an expense of L70,000, but it has been ill-done, and with great disregard of the historic memorials it contained.

It is entered by a grand Norman arch under the western porch, which will remind those who have traveled in France of the glorious door of Loches. This opens upon the Round Church of 1185 (fifty-eight feet in diameter), built in recollection of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the only four remaining round churches in England; the others being at Cambridge, Northampton, and Maplestead in Essex. Hence, between graceful groups of Purbeck marble columns, we look into the later church of 1240; these two churches, built only at a distance of fifty-five years from each other, forming one of the most interesting examples we possess of the transition from Norman to Early English architecture. The Round Church is surrounded by an arcade of narrow Early English arches, separated by a series of heads, which are chiefly restorations. On the pavement lie two groups of restored effigies of "associates" of the Temple (not Knights Templars), carved in freestone, being probably the "eight images of armed knights" mentioned by Stow in 1598....

Against the wall, behind the Marshalls, is the effigy of Robert Ros, Governor of Carlisle in the reign of John. He was one of the great Magna Charta barons, and married the daughter of a king of Scotland, but he was not a Templar, for he wears flowing hair, which is forbidden by the rites of the Order; at the close of his life, however, he took the Templars' habit as an associate, and was buried here in 1227. On the opposite side is a Purbeck marble sarcophagus, said to be that of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her effigy is at Fontevrault, where the monastic annals prove that she took the veil after the murder of Prince Arthur. Henry II. left five hundred marks by his will for his burial in the Temple Church, but was also buried at Fontevrault. Gough considers that the tomb here may be that of William Plantagenet, fifth son of Henry III., who died in infancy, and (according to Weaver) was buried in the Temple in 1256.

A staircase in the walls leads to the triforium of the Round Church, which is now filled with the tombs, foolishly removed from the chancel beneath. Worthy of especial notice is the colored kneeling effigy of Martin, Recorder of London, and Reader of the Middle Temple, 1615. Near this is the effigy—also colored and under a canopy—of Edmund Plowden, the famous jurist, of whom Lord Ellenborough said that "better authority could not be cited"; and referring to whom Fuller quaintly remarks: "How excellent a medley is made, when honesty and ability meet in a man of his profession!" There is also a monument to James Howell (1594-1666), whose entertaining letters, chiefly written from the Fleet, give many curious particulars relating to the reigns of James I. and Charles I.... The church (eight-two feet long, fifty-eight wide, thirty-seven high), begun in 1185 and finished in 1240, is one of our most beautiful existing specimens of Early English Pointed architecture: "the roof springing, as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain, out of the clustered pillars that support its pinioned arches; and these pillars, immense as they are, polished like so many gems." [Footnote: Hawthorne.] In the ornaments of the ceiling the banner of the Templars is frequently repeated—black and white, "because," says Fawyne, "the Templars showed themselves wholly white and fair toward the Christians, but black and terrible to them that were miscreants." The letters "Beausean" are for "Beauseant," their war cry.

In a dark hole to the left of the altar is the white marble monument of John Selden, 1654, called by Milton "the chief of learned men reputed in this land." The endless stream of volumes which he poured forth were filled with research and discrimination. Of these, his work "On the Law of Nature and of Nations" is described by Hallam as among the greatest achievements in erudition that any English writer has performed, but he is perhaps best known by his "Table Talk," of which Coleridge says, "There is more weighty bullion sense in this book than I ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer."...

On the right of the choir, near a handsome marble piscina, is the effigy of a bishop, usually shown as that of Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, by whom the church was consecrated, but he left England in a fury, after Henry II. refused to perform his vow of joining the Crusades in person, to atone for the murder of Becket. The figure more probably represents Silverston de Eversdon, Bishop of Carlisle, 1255. In the vestry are monuments to Lords Eldon and Stowell, and that of Lord Thurlow (1806) by Rossi.

The organ, by Father Smydt or Smith, is famous from the long competition it underwent with one by Harris. Both were temporarily erected in the church. Blow and Purcell were employed to perform on that of Smith; Battista Draghi, organist to Queen Catherine, on that of Harris. Immense audiences came to listen, but tho the contest lasted a year they could arrive at no decision. Finally, it was left to Judge Jefferies of the Inner Temple, who was a great musician, and who chose that of Smith.



LAMBETH—CHURCH AND PALACE [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

The Church of St. Mary, Lambeth, was formerly one of the most interesting churches in London, being, next to Canterbury Cathedral, the great burial place of its archbishops, but falling under the ruthless hand of "restorers" it was rebuilt (except its tower of 1377) in 1851-52 by Hardwick, and its interest has been totally destroyed, its monuments huddled away anywhere, for the most part close under the roof, where their inscriptions are of course wholly illegible!...

Almost the only interesting feature retained in this cruelly abused building is the figure of a pedler with his pack and dog (on the third window of the north aisle) who left "Pedlar's Acre" to the parish, on condition of his figure being always preserved on one of the church windows. The figure was existing here as early as 1608.

In the churchyard, at the east end of the church, is an altar tomb, with the angles sculptured like trees, spreading over a strange confusion of obelisks, pyramids, crocodiles, shells, etc., and, at one end, a hydra. It is the monument of John Tradescant (1638) and his son, two of the earliest British naturalists. The elder was so enthusiastic a botanist that he joined an expedition against Algerine corsairs on purpose to get a new apricot from the African coast, which was thenceforth known as "the Algier Apricot." His quaint medley of curiosities, known in his own time as "Tradeskin's Ark," was afterward incorporated with the Ashmolean Museum....

"Lambeth, envy of each band and gown," has been for more than 700 years the residence of the Archbishops of Canterbury, tho the site of the present palace was only obtained by Archbishop Baldwin in 1197, when he exchanged some lands in Kent for it with Glanville, Bishop of Rochester, to whose see it had been granted by the Countess Goda, sister of the Confessor. The former proprietorship of the Bishops of Rochester is still commemorated in Rochester Row, Lambeth, on the site of a house which was retained when the exchange was made, for their use when they came to attend Parliament. The Palace is full of beauty in itself and intensely interesting from its associations. It is approached by a noble Gateway of red brick with stone dressings, built by Cardinal Moreton in 1490. It is here that the poor of Lambeth have received "the Archbishops' Dole" for hundreds of years. In ancient times a farthing loaf was given twice a week to 4,000 people.

Adjoining the Porter's Lodge is a room evidently once used as a prison. On passing the gate we are in the outer court, at the end of which rises the picturesque Lollards' Tower, built by Archbishop Chicheley, 1434-45; on the right is the Hall. A second gateway leads to the inner court, containing the modern (Tudor) palace, built by Archbishop Howley (1828-48), who spent the whole of his private fortune upon it rather than let Blore the architect be ruined by exceeding his contract to the amount of L30,000. On the left, between the buttresses of the hall, are the descendants of some famous fig trees planted by Cardinal Pole.

The Hall was built by Archbishop Juxon in the reign of Charles II., on the site of the hall built by Archbishop Boniface (1244), which was pulled down by Scot and Hardyng, the regicides, who purchased the palace when it was sold under the Commonwealth. Juxon's arms and the date 1663 are over the door leading to the palace. The stained window opposite contains the arms of many of the archbishops, and a portrait of Archbishop Chicheley. Archbishop Bancroft, whose arms appear at the east end, turned the hall into a Library, and the collection of books which it contains has been enlarged by his successors, especially by Archbishop Seeker, whose arms appear at the west end, and who bequeathed his library to Lambeth. Upon the death of Laud, the books were saved from dispersion through being claimed by the University of Cambridge, under the will of Bancroft, which provided that they should go to the University if alienated from the see; they were restored by Cambridge to Archbishop Sheldon. The library contains a number of valuable MSS., the greatest treasure being a copy of Lord Rivers's translation of the "Diets and Sayings of the Philosophers," with an illumination of the Earl presenting Caxton on his knees to Edward IV. Beside the King stand Elizabeth Woodville and her eldest son, and this, the only known portrait of Edward V., is engraved by Vertue in his Kings of England.

A glass case contains: The Four Gospels in Irish, a volume which belonged to King Athelstan, and was given by him to the city of Canterbury; a copy of the Koran written by Sultan Allaruddeen Siljuky in the fifteenth century, taken in the Library of Tippoo Saib at Seringapatam; the Lumley Chronicle of St. Alban's Abbey; Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-Book, with illuminations from Holbein's Dance of Death destroyed in Old St. Paul's; an illuminated copy of the Apocalypse, of the thirteenth century; the Mazarine Testament, fifteenth century; and the rosary of Cardinal Pole.

A staircase lined with portraits of the Walpole family, leads from the Library to the Guard Room, now the Dining-Hall. It is surrounded by an interesting series of portraits of the archbishops from the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Through the paneled room, called Cranmer's Parlor, we enter the Chapel, which stands upon a Crypt supposed to belong to the manor-house built by Archbishop Herbert Fitzwalter, about 1190. Its pillars have been buried nearly up to their capitals, to prevent the rising of the river tides within its wall. The chapel itself, tho greatly modernized, is older than any other part of the palace, having been built by Archbishop Boniface, 1244-70. Its lancet windows were found by Laud—"shameful to look at, all diversely patched like a poor beggar's coat," and he filled them with stained glass, which he proved that he collected from ancient existing fragments, tho his insertion of "Popish images and pictures made by their like in a mass book" was one of the articles in the impeachment against him. The glass collected by Laud was entirely smashed by the Puritans: the present windows were put in by Archbishop Howley. In this chapel most of the archbishops have been consecrated since the time of Boniface....

Here Archbishop Parker erected his tomb in his lifetime "by the spot where he used to pray," and here he was buried, but his tomb was broken up, with every insult that could be shown, by Scot, one of the Puritan possessors of Lambeth, while the other, Hardyng, not to be outdone, exhumed the Archbishop's body, sold its leaden coffin, and buried it in a dunghill. His remains were found by Sir William Dugdale at the Restoration, and honorably reinterred in front of the altar, with the epitaph, "Corpus Matthaei Archiepiscopi tandem hic quiescit." His tomb, in the ante-chapel, was re-erected by Archbishop Sancroft, but the brass inscription which encircled it is gone.

The screen, erected by Laud, was suffered to survive the Commonwealth. At the west end of the chapel, high on the wall, projects a Gothic confessional, erected by Archbishop Chicheley. It was formerly approached by seven steps. The beautiful western door of the chapel opens into the curious Post Room, which takes its name from the central wooden pillar, supposed to have been used as a whipping-post for the Lollards. The ornamented flat ceiling which we see here is extremely rare. The door at the northeast corner, by which the Lollards were brought in, was walled up, about 1874.

Hence we ascend the Lollard's [Footnote: The name Lollard was used as a term of reproach for the followers of Wyclif. Formerly derived from Peter Lollard, a Waldensian pastor of the thirteenth century, more recently from the Middle Dutch "lollen," to hum.] Tower, built by Chicheley—the lower story of which is now given up by the Archbishop for the use of Bishops who have no fixt residence in London. The winding staircase, of rude slabs of unplaned oak, on which the bark in many cases remains, is of Chicheley's time. In a room at the top is a trap-door, through which as the tide rose prisoners, secretly condemned, could be let down unseen into the river. Hard by is the famous Lollard's Prison (13 feet long, 12 broad, 8 high), boarded all over walls, ceiling, and floor. The rough-hewn boards bear many fragments of inscriptions which show that others besides Lollards were immured here. Some of them, especially his motto "Nosce te ipsum," are attributed to Cranmer. The most legible inscription is "IHS cyppe me out of all al compane. Amen." Other boards bear the notches cut by prisoners to mark the lapse of time. The eight rings remain to which the prisoners were secured: one feels that his companions must have envied the one by the window. Above some of the rings the boards are burned with the hot-iron used in torture. The door has a wooden lock, and is fastened by the wooden pegs which preceded the use of nails; it is a relic of Archbishop Sudbury's palace facing the river, which was pulled down by Chicheley. From the roof of the chapel there is a noble view up the river, with the quaint tourelle of the Lollard's Tower in the foreground.

The gardens of Lambeth are vast and delightful. Their terrace is called "Clarendon's Walk" from a conference which there took place between Laud and the Earl of Clarendon. The "summer-house of exquisite workmanship," built by Cranmer, has disappeared. A picturesque view may be obtained of Cranmer's Tower, with the Chapel and the Lollard's Tower behind it.



DICKENS'S LIMEHOUSE HOLE [Footnote A: From "A Pickwickian Pilgrimage." The persons mentioned in Mr. Hassard's account of Limehouse Hole will be recognized as characters in the novels of Charles Dickens. By arrangement with, and by permission of, the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1881.]

BY JOHN R.G. HASSARD

I took a steamboat one day at Westminster Bridge, and after a voyage of 40 minutes or so landed near Limehouse Hole, and followed the river streets both east and west. It was easy enough to trace the course of Mortimer Lightwood and Eugene Wrayburn, as they walked under the guidance of Riderhood through the stormy night from their rooms in The Temple, four miles away, past the Tower and the London Docks, and down by the slippery water's edge to Limehouse Hole, when they went to cause Gaffer Hexam's arrest, and found him drowned, tied to his own boat. The strictly commercial aspect of the Docks—the London Docks above and the West India Docks below—shades off by slight degrees into the black misery of the hole. The warehouses are succeeded by boat-builders' sheds; by private wharves, where ships, all hidden, as to their hulls, behind walls and close fences, thrust unexpected bowsprits over the narrow roadway; by lime-yards; by the shops of marine store-dealers and purveyors to all the wants and follies of seamen; and then by a variety of strange establishments which it would be hard to classify.

Close by a yard piled up with crates and barrels of second-hand bottles, was a large brick warehouse devoted to the purchase and sale of broken glass. A wagon loaded with that commodity stood before the door, and men with scoop-shovels were transferring the glass into barrels. An enclosure of one or two acres, in an out-of-the-way street, might have been the original of the dust-yard that contained Boffin's Bower, except that Boffin's Bower was several miles distant, on the northern outskirt of London. A string of carts, full of miscellaneous street and house rubbish, all called here by the general name of "dust," were waiting their turn to discharge. There was a mountain of this refuse at the end of the yard; and a party of laborers, more or less impeded by two very active black hogs, were sifting and sorting it. Other mounds, formed from the sittings of the first, were visible at the sides. There were huge accumulations of broken crockery and of scraps of tin and other metal, and of bones. There was a quantity of stable-manure and old straw, and a heap, as large as a two-story cottage, of old hoops stript from casks and packing-cases. I never understood, until I looked into this yard, how there could have been so much value in the dust-mounds at Boffin's Bower.

Gradually the streets became narrower, wetter, dirtier, and poorer. Hideous little alleys led down to the water's edge where the high tide splashed over the stone steps. I turned into several of them, and I always found two or three muddy men lounging at the bottom; often a foul and furtive boat crept across the field of view. The character of the shops became more and more difficult to define. Here a window displayed a heap of sailor's thimbles and pack-thread; there another set forth an array of trumpery glass vases or a basket of stale fruit, pretexts, perhaps, for the disguise of a "leaving shop," or unlicensed pawnbroker's establishment, out of which I expected to see Miss Pleasant Riderhood come forth, twisting up her back hair as she came. At a place where the houses ceased, and an open space left free a prospect of the black and bad-smelling river, there was an old factory, disused and ruined, like the ancient mill in which Gaffer Hexam made his home, and Lizzie told the fortunes of her brother in the hollow by the fire.

I turned down a muddy alley, where 12 or 15 placards headed "Body Found," were pasted against the wall. They were printed forms, filled in with a pen. Mr. Forster tells us in his life of Dickens that it was the sight of bills of this sort which gave the first suggestion of "Our Mutual Friend." At the end of the alley was a neat brick police-station; stairs led to the water, and several trim boats were moored there. Within the station I could see an officer quietly busy at his desk, as if he had been sitting there ever since Dickens described "the Night Inspector, with a pen and ink ruler, posting up his books in a whitewashed office as studiously as if he were in a monastery on the top of a mountain, and no howling fury of a drunken woman were banging herself against a cell-door in the back yard at his elbow." A handsome young fellow in uniform, who looked like a cross between a sailor and a constable, came out and asked very civilly if he could be of use to me. "Do you know," said I, "where the station was that Dickens describes in 'Our Mutual Friend'?"

"Oh, yes, sir! this is the very spot. It was the old building that stood just here: this is a new one, but it has been put up in the same place."

"Mr. Dickens often went out with your men in the boat, didn't he?"

"Yes, sir, many a night in the old times."

"Do you know the tavern which is described in the same book by the name of The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters?"

"No, sir, I don't know it; at least not by that name. It may have been pulled down, for a lot of warehouses have been built along here, and the place is very much changed; or it may be one of those below."

Of course, I chose to think that it must be "one of those below." I kept on a little farther, by the crooked river lanes, where public houses were as plentiful as if the entire population suffered from a raging and inextinguishable thirst for beer. The sign-boards displayed a preference for the plural which seems not to have escaped the observation of the novelist. If I did not see The Six Porters, I came across The Three Mariners, The Three Cups, The Three Suns, The Three Tuns, The Three Foxes, and the Two Brewers; and in the last I hope that I found the original of the tavern so often mentioned in the story.

I had first noticed it from the steamboat—"a narrow, lop-sided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden veranda impending over the water,"—a tavern of dropsical appearance, which had not a straight floor in its whole constitution, and hardly a straight line. I got at the entrance on the land side after a search among puzzling alleys, and there I found still stronger reminders of "Our Mutual Friend." Stuck against the wall was an array of old and new hand-bills, headed, "Drowned," and offering rewards for the recovery of bodies. The value set upon dead persons in Limehouse Hole is not excessive: the customary recompense for finding them seems to be ten shillings, and in only one instance did the price reach the dazzling amount of one pound.

By the side of the house is an approach to the river: most of the buildings near are old and irregular, and at low tide a great deal of the shore must be exposed. Going upon the slippery stones, beside which lay a few idle and rickety boats, I found the expected range of windows with "red curtains matching the noses of the regular customers." I looked in at the door. A long passage opened a vista of pleasant bar-parlor, or whatever it may have been, on the river-side; and, perhaps, I should have seen Miss Abbey Potterson if I had gone to the end. Several water-side characters were drinking beer at the lead-covered counter, waited upon by a sharp young woman, who seems to have replaced Bob Gliddery. Instead of the little room called "Cozy," where the Police Inspector drank burned sherry with Lightwood and Wrayburn, there was an apartment labelled "The Club." A party of "regular customers," all evidently connected with water (or mud), sat around a table: beyond question they were Tootle, and Mullins, and Bob Glamour, and Captain Joey; and at ten o'clock Miss Abbey would issue from the bar-parlor, and send them home. If The Jolly Fellowship Porters is still extant, this must be it.



WHITEHALL [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

The present Banqueting-House of Whitehall was begun by Inigo Jones, and completed in 1622, forming only the central portion of one wing in his immense design for a new palace, which, if completed, would have been the finest in the world. The masonry is by a master-mason, Nicholas Stone, several of whose works we have seen in other parts of London. "Little did James think that he was raising a pile from which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold." The plan of Inigo Jones would have covered 24 acres, and one may best judge of its intended size by comparison with other buildings. Hampton Court covers 8 acres; St. James's Palace, 4 acres; Buckingham Palace, 2-1/2 acres. It would have been as large as Versailles, and larger than the Louvre. Inigo Jones received only 8s. 4d. a day while he was employed at Whitehall, and L46 per annum for house-rent. The huge palace always remained unfinished.

Whitehall attained its greatest splendor in the reign of Charles I. The mask of Comus was one of the plays acted here before the king; but Charles was so afraid of the pictures in the Banqueting-House being injured by the number of wax lights which were used, that he built for the purpose a boarded room called the "King's Masking-House," afterward destroyed by the Parliament. The gallery toward Privy Garden was used for the king's collection of pictures, afterward either sold or burned. The Banqueting-House was the scene of hospitalities almost boundless.

The different accounts of Charles I.'s execution introduce us to several names of the rooms in the old palace. We are able to follow him through the whole of the last scenes of the 30th of January, 1648. When he arrived, having walked from St. James's, "the King went up the stairs leading to the Long Gallery" of Henry VIII, and so to the west side of the palace. In the "Horn Chamber" he was given up to the officers who held the warrant for his execution. Then he passed on to the "Cabinet Chamber," looking upon Privy Garden. Here, the scaffold not being ready, he prayed and conversed with Bishop Juxon, ate some bread, and drank some claret. Several of the Puritan clergy knocked at the door and offered to pray with him, but he said that they had prayed against him too often for him to wish to pray with them in his last moments. Meanwhile, in a small distant room, Cromwell was signing the order to the executioner, and workmen were employed in breaking a passage through the west wall of the Banqueting House, that the warrant for the execution might be carried out which ordained it to be held "in the open street before Whitehall."....

Almost from the time of Charles's execution Cromwell occupied rooms in the Cockpit, where the Treasury is now, but soon after he was installed "Lord Protector of the Commonwealth" (December 16, 1653), he took up his abode in the royal apartments, with his "Lady Protectress" and his family. Cromwell's puritanical tastes did not make him averse to the luxury he found there, and, when Evelyn visited Whitehall after a long interval in 1656, he found it "very glorious and well furnished." But the Protectress could not give up her habits of nimble housewifery, and "employed a surveyor to make her some little labyrinths and trap-stairs, by which she might, at all times, unseen, pass to and fro, and come unawares upon her servants, and keep them vigilant in their places and honest in the discharge thereof." With Cromwell in Whitehall lived Milton, as his Latin Secretary. Here the Protector's daughters, Mrs. Rich and Mrs. Claypole, were married, and here Oliver Cromwell died (September 3, 1658) while a great storm was raging which tore up the finest elms in the Park, and hurled them to the ground, beneath the northern windows of the palace.

In the words of Hume, Cromwell upon his deathbed "assumed more the character of a mediator, interceding for his people, than that of a criminal, whose atrocious violation of social duty had, from every tribunal, human and divine, merited the severest vengeance." Having inquired of Godwin, the divine who attended him, whether a person who had once been in a state of grace could afterward be damned, and being assured it was impossible, he said, "Then I am safe, for I am sure that I was once in a state of grace." Richard Cromwell continued to reside in Whitehall till his resignation of the Protectorate.

On his birthday, the 29th of May, 1660, Charles II returned to Whitehall. The vast labyrinthine chambers of the palace were soon filled to overflowing by his crowded court. The queen's rooms were facing the river to the east of the Water Gate. Prince Rupert had rooms in the Stone Gallery, which ran along the south side of Privy Gardens, beyond the main buildings of the palace, and beneath him were the apartments of the king's mistresses, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, afterward Duchess of Cleveland, and Louise de Querouaille, Duchess of Portsmouth. The rooms of the latter, who first came to England with Henrietta, Duchess of Orleans, to entice Charles II into an alliance with Louis XIV., and whose "childish, simple, baby-face" is described by Evelyn, were three times rebuilt to please her, having "ten times the richness and glory" of the queen's. Nell Gwynne did not live in the palace, tho she was one of Queen Catherine's Maids of Honor!

Charles died in Whitehall on February 6, 1684. With his successor the character of the palace changed. James II, who continued to make it his principal residence, established a Roman Catholic chapel there.

It was from Whitehall that Queen Mary Beatrice made her escape on the night of December 9, 1688. The adventure was confided to the Count de Lauzun and his friend M. de St. Victor, a gentleman of Avignon. The queen on that terrible evening entreated vainly to be allowed to remain and share the perils of her husband; he assured her that it was absolutely necessary that she should precede him, and that he would follow her in twenty-four hours. The king and queen went to bed as usual to avoid suspicion, but rose soon after, when the queen put on a disguise provided by St. Victor. The royal pair then descended to the rooms of Madame de Labadie, where they found Lauzun, with the infant Prince James and his two nurses. The king, turning-to Lauzun, said, "I confide my queen and my son to your care: all must be hazarded to convey them with the utmost speed to France." Lauzun then gave his hand to the queen to lead her away, and, followed by the two nurses with the child, they crossed the Great Gallery, and descended by a back staircase and a postern gate to Privy Gardens. At the garden gate a coach was waiting, the queen entered with Lauzun, the nurses, and her child, who slept the whole time, St. Victor mounted by the coachman, and they drove to the "Horse Ferry" at Westminster, where a boat was waiting in which they crossed to Lambeth.

On the 11th the Dutch troops had entered London, and James, having commanded the gallant Lord Craven, who was prepared to defend the palace to the utmost, to draw off the guard which he commanded, escaped himself in a boat from the water-entrance of the palace at three o'clock in the morning. At Feversham his flight was arrested, and he returned amid bonfires, bell-ringing, and every symptom of joy from the fickle populace. Once more he slept in Whitehall, but in the middle of the night was aroused by order of his son-in-law, and hurried forcibly down the river to Rochester, whence, on December 23, he escaped to France. On the 25th of November the Princess Anne had declared against her unfortunate father, by absconding at night by a back staircase from her lodgings in the Cockpit, as the northwestern angle of the palace was called, which looked on St. James's Park. Compton, Bishop of London, was waiting for her with a hackney coach, and she fled to his house in Aldersgate Street. Mary II arrived in the middle of February, and "came into Whitehall, jolly as to a wedding, seeming quite transported with joy."

But the glories of Whitehall were now over. William III., occupied with his buildings at Hampton Court and Kensington, never cared to live there, and Mary doubtless stayed there as little as possible, feeling opprest by the recollections of her youth spent there with an indulgent father whom she had cruelly wronged, and a stepmother whom she had once loved with sisterly as well as filial affection, and from whom she had parted with passionate grief on her marriage, only nine years before. The Stone Gallery and the late apartments of the royal mistresses in Whitehall were burned down in 1691, and the whole edifice was almost totally destroyed by fire through the negligence of a Dutch maidservant in 1697.

The principal remaining fragment of the palace is the Banqueting-House of Inigo Jones, from which Charles I. passed to execution. Built in the dawn of the style of Wren, it is one of the most grandiose examples of that style, and is perfect alike in symmetry and proportion. That it has no entrance apparent at first sight is due to the fact that it was only intended as a portion of a larger building. In the same way we must remember that the appearance of two stories externally, while the whole is one room, is due to the Banqueting-House being only one of four intended blocks, of which one was to be a chapel surrounded by galleries, and the other two divided into two tiers of apartments. The Banqueting-House was turned into a ehapel by George I., but has never been consecrated, and the aspect of a hall is retained by the ugly false red curtains which surround the interior of the building. It is called the Chapel Royal of Whitehall, is served by the chaplains of the sovereign, and is one of the dreariest places of worship in London. The ceiling is still decorated with canvas pictures by Rubens (1635) representing the apotheosis of James I. The painter received L3,000 for these works. The walls were to have been painted by Vandyke with the History of the Order of the Garter. "What," says Walpole, "had the Banqueting-House been if completed?" Over the entrance is a bronze bust of James I. attributed to Le Soeur.



THE TOWER [Footnote: From "Her Majesty's Tower."]

BY W. HEPWORTH DIXON

Half-a-mile below London Bridge, on ground which was once a bluff, commanding the Thames from St. Saviour's Creek to St. Olave's Wharf, stands the Tower; a mass of ramparts, walls, and gates, the most ancient and most poetic pile in Europe.... The Tower has an attraction for us akin to that of the house in which we were born, the school in which we were trained. Go where we may, that grim old edifice on the Pool goes with us; a part of all we know, and of all we are. Put seas between us and the Thames, this Tower will cling to us, like a thing of life. It colors Shakespeare's page. It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon's story. Many of our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans's "Poesies," Raleigh's "Historie of the World," Eliot's "Monarchy of Man," and Penn's "No Cross, No Crown."