SPECIAL EDITION

WITH THE WORLD’S
GREAT TRAVELLERS

EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS
AND OLIVER H. G. LEIGH

Vol. III

CHICAGO

UNION BOOK COMPANY

1901

Copyright 1896 and 1897
by
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Copyright 1901
E. R. DuMONT

THE CATHEDRAL, CITY OF MEXICO

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

VOLUME III

WITH THE WORLD’S
GREAT TRAVELLERS.

THE WORLD’S GREAT CAPITALS OF TO-DAY.

OLIVER H. G. LEIGH.

London.

To the ordinary eye the moon and stars have at least prettiness, perhaps grandeur. To the trained astronomer, and the contemplative poet, the mighty firmament overwhelms the mind with the sense of human inability to grasp the vast. Knowing and loving the features and characteristics of London as a lover those of his mistress, it can be imagined how such a one despairs of doing justice, in a brief space, either to his subject or his own sane enthusiasm. He would fain impart his knowledge, insight, and what glimmerings of romantic fancy may add charm to the prosy exposition, but the showman’s harangue is received as art without heart.

London is a hundred captivating sights and themes for our hundred capacities and moods. You go to it the first time with the child’s enviable eye-delight in novelty, and are lucky if in a week you are not eye-sore, dazed, and jaded with the very monotony of new scenes and blurred impressions. You wisely fly to the lovely country lanes for restful change, and come back with new eyes and a clean slate. Then the mysterious quality which lifts visible London into the London of real romance and realizable antiquity dawns upon the mind. A third exploration reveals its almost omniscient and omnipotent headship as for three centuries the world’s centre for the intellectual and material forces that have so largely built up our civilization. Continued observation brings other and endless aspects of the indescribable city, which is no city, but a Chinese puzzle of separately whirling worlds within each other.

This mystifying prelude may seem rather disheartening to the stranger, primed with rational curiosity to understand, as well as see, this unwieldy London. He will find, however, his curiosity whetted, deepened, elevated, in proportion as he takes with him a moderate grounding in the historical associations of the old city. This easily acquired information will prove to be a key that will unlock hidden places holding bunches of other keys, so that everywhere one may turn, the streets, buildings, and monuments recite their own fascinating stories.

We live in the day of big things, and sneer as we may at the superficiality of estimating quality by size, there is no escape from it when the purpose is only to kindle interest. Analysis can be undertaken afterwards. London “whips creation” in the number of its people, though its greatness is quite independent of this. The circle can be drawn to include four, six, or seven millions and it will still be true that the sustainers of its greatness come within a single million, possibly the half of that. Yet it has a few businesses useful for the novice to know. People have walked and ridden through the double tunnel under the wider part of the Thames since 1843. Its underground railway, costing five million dollars per mile to make, carries one hundred and fifty millions of people a year, and has been running forty years. The public are served by fifteen thousand cabs, which earn twenty-five million dollars a year. There are over one thousand omnibuses, not including tram-cars, on which there are roof seats, and you pay from two to six cents, according to distance. Steamboats afford a fine view of the city, at the same fares.

It has about five hundred theatres and music-halls, giving variety programmes. Many of these hold from three to five thousand and they are always well-filled. The roof of a famous music-hall built in 1870 slides off for a few minutes at a time, for ventilation on summer nights. The Crystal Palace entertains a hundred thousand people without being crowded, in its beautiful glass hall, 1,608 feet long, with two great aisles and transepts, and a charming pleasure park. In the palace are reproductions of ancient architecture, primitive peoples, extinct animals, everything in art and nature that can expand knowledge. The orchestra seats four thousand, the concert-hall four thousand, and the theatre four thousand, all under the same roof, yet their performances are simultaneous. The Palace cost over seven million dollars in 1854, and admission is twenty-five cents. The Albert Memorial Hall holds ten thousand. The Agricultural Hall covers three acres and a half, and holds audiences of twenty-five thousand.

There is not a day in the year without half-a-dozen or more public meetings, convened by religious, scientific, or other societies, a free field for the stranger to see distinguished people, hear average oratory, study character and customs, and lay in stores of useful knowledge with varied entertainment. “Doing the sights” is a matter of course, but they should be selected to suit one’s mood at the time, also the usually unlovely weather, and above all, after some preliminary guide-book reading. The Tower is already familiar in story and picture, yet not every cockney is aware that its walls enclose a virtual town of over three thousand inhabitants. It has a hundred distinct interests for the leisurely-minded, besides that of being a great old fortress. The new Tower bridge equals the underground railway and sub-river tunnels as a triumph of engineering, lifting itself high above the tall ships’ masts when they sail in and out of the port. Near by, the much maligned East End, the Whitechapel district beloved by horror-vending reporters, invites and will repay a visit.

Would you like to realize a dream of some magnificent pageant, in which the great notabilities of all the earth take a share? Take your stand where Rotten Row meets the Drive any morning or afternoon between April and July. Here meet the pink of fashion and the celebrities distinguished for honors won in art, science, diplomacy, statesmanship, and war. The outward and visible magnificence belongs to the horses rather than their riders and drivers, for plainness of attire and decoration is the rule among the great folks. This double daily parade is truly a unique spectacle, viewed by throngs of idlers of all nations, themselves a picturesque feature of the show.

A panorama with another sort of interest should be viewed ponderingly. Let the visitor approach Westminster Abbey from Victoria station along Victoria Street, once a worse than any Whitechapel nest of criminal slum-dwellers. Grouped into a picture unrivalled elsewhere in the world for architectural splendor combined with historic glory, he will see the hoary Abbey, not simply the stone record of a thousand years of human progress; not simply the petrified survival of druidicial worship in the forest groves, with its soaring tree-trunk columns breaking into foliage as their tops meet to screen the sun and echo down again the ascending incense of prayer and song; not simply the stately temple which for ages has been the shrine of England’s great ones, thirteen kings, fourteen queens, and the greater than these—the glorious array of its poets, musicians, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and explorers, who, like Livingstone in his line and Chaucer in his, poured all their wealth of genius and power into the lap of their motherland, to make her happier and stronger. He will see through the mediæval stained windows the deeper meaning of the old church’s story, the reddened sun-rays telling of the bloodshed that watered the growing plant of the nation’s greatness, and the blue beams that figure Britannia’s olden mastery of the seas, and the rainbow hues suggestive of her labors to give hope to the people that long sat in darkness till she brought the light of civilization.

Close to the Abbey’s side stands the venerable St. Margaret’s parish church, where Caxton printed the first book and is buried; where Ambassador James Russell Lowell’s epitaph on Raleigh graces the window that honors the memory of Virginia’s founder, whose headless body reposes in its precincts. Just behind the two churches stands Westminster Hall, as King William Rufus built it in 1099, though its great oak-beam roof was heightened by Richard II. Close behind it rises the majestic file of the Houses of Parliament, the great Victoria tower at one end, at the other the clock tower, with its minute-hand twelve feet long and its chimes that float around for miles. From its foot Westminster Bridge gladly crosses the Thames to the noblest of hospitals, St. Thomas’s, founded in 1213. Its separate blocks corridored together, fitly match the Parliament building on the opposite bank of the river. When you stand on the Abbey sidewalk, near the Beaconsfield statue, you may feel you are standing in the true centre of the earth, for there will pass you in the course of a week in the season the picked leaders of most nations, the representatives of every faith and system of government, the ruling men of Asiatic empires and tribes, and travellers from the world’s end to do homage to the mother of parliaments and the shrine of the immortal dead. And far in the distant haze hovers the dome of St. Paul’s like a balloon ascending through the smoke clouds to the clear blue.

Starting westward from the Abbey, in this sacred bit of the great city, it is possible to walk seven miles on the grass and paths, through St. James’s park, surrounded by Government buildings, stately old mansions, the home of the king when Prince of Wales, St. James’s Palace, and Buckingham Palace. Then along Constitution Hill, across Piccadilly into Hyde Park, along Rotten Row (from Route du Roi) to Kensington Gardens with the house Victoria was born in, and so on, with a few breaks. The group of palatial museums at South Kensington tempt the stranger, whatever his tastes or culture, to spend a year there, and each year so spent will need another to do justice to their marvellous contents.

Turn back now, along Piccadilly, a unique panorama in itself, pass the cluster of great restaurants, theatres, music-halls, and other pleasure places that reach half a mile or so towards the Strand, where the hotels range round Charing Cross. Along this narrow but brilliant highway lie more theatres and a famous church or two, and the cold bath in use since the Romans made it two thousand years ago. Then up Fleet Street, whence the daily papers flutter morning, noon and night, until St. Paul’s crowns the highest bit of the city. Its interior, and the monuments to the nation’s naval and military heroes, will impress the visitor, though hardly so much as the exquisite singing at the short services of morning and afternoon, the strains of vocal and organ music floating and billowing in the great dome and along the lofty aisles.

Between St. Paul’s and old Bishopsgate lies “the city,” that is, the square mile or so given up to business, with no private houses left in it. Still going eastward the route passes through the Billingsgate fishmarket quarter, where its famous language still flourishes. Here stands “the Monument,” a column surmounted with a gilt frame, commemorating the great fire of 1666, which began at this spot. If we take our stand far away on Blackfriars Bridge some thirty-five church steeples may be counted, each with its upper part painted black. The dome of St. Paul’s is one of these. They mark the area of the fire, as each rebuilt church had to bear this memorial. But for this law St. Paul’s would have had a gilded dome. Soon we come to the Tower, and then the long line of docks, covering thousands of acres, and stretching miles down the river. Here the merchant wealth of the country, and of the world, is realizable as nowhere else.

London shows both sides of its shield: incalculable wealth, poverty that defies description. Years of familiarity with its slums, before slumming was invented as a fashionable fad, only deepened the conviction that all the noble efforts to eradicate the worst evils in the situation are utterly hopeless. The breed flourishes faster than the mild measures to improve it can operate.

The homes of aristocracy in Mayfair, the heart of the West End, disappoint those who expect magnificence—long rows of houses in narrow streets, once red brick, now dingy black and musty-looking, the monotony broken here and there by a newer and more pretentious stone mansion. The great Squares are a brighter feature. The same sooty brick houses, large and small, make the quadrangle, each having a key to the gates that enclose the park, in which nursemaids exercise the children and pet dogs, and an occasional game of croquet is ventured by country cousins. The coating of soot on every branch and leaf is fatal to clean hands and summer costumes. The newer streets, and the region around the South Kensington Museums, make a better display of architecture. A little experience will reconcile the stranger to the general dowdiness of house exteriors, when he learns that the English climate has caused the English people to think most of the home within. The contrast on entering these plain structures is startling and gratifying. While this home love and home pride with homely ways are the strongest characteristics of the people, the saying of Charles the Second is still true, that there is no other country in which one can spend so many hours the year round in the open air. They spend as much of their daylight as possible out of doors and their evenings at home have a hearty, informal, delightful charm, wholly in contrast to the stiff and stagy receptions known in other cities.

The innate love of country life is shown by rich and poor alike. On the four legal bank holidays, the Monday after Christmas, Easter Monday, Whitsun Monday, and the first Monday in August, all business is suspended throughout the land, in most cases from the Friday evening until Tuesday morning. Then the masses come forth in all their might and finery, they take possession of the street vehicles, the railways and boats. The “upper” and “upper middle” classes religiously stay at home on those days, dreading the uproarious throngs of ’Arries and ’Arriets, who jam themselves ten deep into seats for five and monopolize every place of amusement. Yet it is a cheery sight to see all these hundreds of thousands of London toilers hurrying on wheels of all sorts away to Epping Forest, kept in its virgin state these four hundred years, and to Hampstead Heath, the Crystal Palace, the great parks, and similar handy breathing places, not to mention the favorite resorts within a twenty-mile radius. You will smile at grown folks playing skip the rope the whole day long, and kiss in the ring, and such like primitive games, but it is a wholesome sign when a whole population can find hearty pleasure in romping on the grass, for simple delights gained by healthy open-air exercise yield a more lasting happiness than is to be got by paying money to sit still and see hirelings make antics for you.

These outlying places are the crowning glory of London. Beautiful Windsor, Richmond Park, Kew Gardens, Epping Forest, and the ideally delightful Edens that nestle along the bends of the upper Thames, are all within the twenty-five mile circle, though one can find fifty fairy-grounds within five miles from any city station, where one can sprawl on the velvet grass beneath some spreading oak, and drink in the balmy scent-laden air, out of sight and sound of bricks and mortar. You may, certainly, be disturbed by the carolling of larks, linnets and others of the feathered choir, and perhaps by the waftings of some village church’s silvery peal of bells, celebrating a wedding on the general holiday merrymaking. Even in the very heart of London’s busiest quarters one can instantaneously step from the streets into grassy enclosures with great old trees, as silent and restful as if we were in some monastic cloister a century or two back. Until it has been experienced it is impossible to realize the beauty and mental relief of being able to turn from the rush and roar of the great city into one of these lovely retreats, or into the Cathedral, or Abbey, or nearest old church, where “the dim, religious light” of the stained windows, and the poetry of design and associations, and perhaps the pealing organ, waft the jaded senses into lotos land.

Coming back to details of another kind it is to be remarked that for noise, we can conscientiously claim our own New York as champion unrivalled. This item of metropolitan noise in some wise hits off the characteristics of the nations. New York has its fearsome rattle-clatter, sharp, pungent, nerve-racking, incessant, typical of the ceaseless “hurry-up” of its folk, in talk and motion. All is “rapid-transit” rush, anyhow, anywhere. Paris has its light, flitting, skipping, pittypat noise, as of a million chattering magpies busy shifting quarters. London has altogether another noise—a deep, soft diapason, Niagara-like in its immensity and pitch—a low melodious roar, the noise of “the roaring loom of time”; noises of the past; great booming echoes of dead centuries; the wailings of populations crushed by endless wars, oppressed by dynasties of tyrants, crowned and uncrowned; smitten to death by plagues; swept out of life by Ignorance, Poverty, Evil Fate. Great London has gathered the voices of the peoples in a thousand years of matchless history, and he who listens aright can hear them all as they go up to heaven in the mighty volume of its sun-dimmed incense of smoke.

This London is a miniature world. It is made up of representatives of every nationality; is the hive of every land’s industry; the market-place for every country’s products. It is the mart where traders from all the ends of the earth transact their business; the bank to which every nation and tribe intrust their gains; the parlor, the parleying-place, the parliament of the earth, where rulers and subjects, races and clans, leaders and followers, explorers, travellers, scholars, reformers, do their best talking, most of it in the hearing of all peoples who use the English tongue.

LONDON BRIDGE

London is more than all this. It is the purgatory and the elysium of generations of Britain’s great souls. As the centuries have cast their hallowed tints of sombre gray over her dumbly eloquent stones, they have seen a long procession of sad figures threading the old, quaint, crooked byways and highways, figures of gaunt men and weary women, dropping out from the ranks here and there from sheer want of the wherewithal of life. These have been the forerunners, the seed-sowers, the pioneers of England’s greatness—singers and seers, planners and day-dreamers, toilers with hand and brain, potential Cæsars and Alfreds, Shakespeares and Arkwrights, Wrens, Reynoldses and Wellingtons, without a ray of the ripening sunshine. Old England had its genius-breeders long before the luckier later sons were born. Not a stone of St. Paul’s that glorifies the powers of its designers but is also, when you rightly look, a tombstone to the memory of some unknown toiler whose brain, heart, muscle or blood was spent to make that cathedral sublime; nor can you pick up a page of your Chaucers, Shakespeares, Miltons, Goldsmiths, and Tennysons but, if you scan it closely enough, you will find it stained with the tears of countless strugglers, who wrought themselves sore in the cause of man’s elevation, only to earn a nameless grave for themselves. Pioneers, they sank, but their bones so enriched the soil that the London which was a purgatory to them is an elysium to us to-day, pacing whose witching shades we may see, if we close our eyes on inferior sights, the ghosts of the legion of Greathearts who haunt the old home, whose coldness to them in their own day they have avenged by making it glow with the glory of their names and works.

This is the crowning charm of London the unique—that we tread on ground every inch of which has its thrilling story to tell. There Shakespeare trod. Here Marlowe fell. Here Otway died, starved. Here Carey fainted, foodless. Here Goldsmith trailed footsore, hungry, despairing of fame. Here Johnson and Savage tramped the street all night with three cents between them for coffee at the street stall in the early morning. Here gentle De Quincey slept on the doorsteps. Hear him: “So then, Oxford Street, stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans and drinkest the tears of children, the time was come at last, that I no more should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces; no more should dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger. Thou, Oxford Street, hast echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts!” Aye, and still do thy throbbing streets, O glorious, pitiless London, reverberate with the wails of unsuspected thousands! To-day, this very day, the artist, the poet, the scholar, the inventor, the helpless sons of genius may perish, and most literally do perish, die of the heart-break that is born of hunger, in the wilderness of merry London. Who cannot readily recall a score of these tragedies, within any past score of years, where genius, talent, worth, character, industry, patient effort, failed to win recognition for the ill-fated ones—until the day after their lamentable death?

Glasgow, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester.

London is not the typical English city, though types of almost every city in the eastern hemisphere can be unearthed in its mazes by those who know. The traveller who would get an understanding view of the United Kingdom must visit the great centres of industry in England, the sources of its modern strength, and take a look at the chief cities of Scotland and Ireland. But if he would penetrate deeper into the heart of the nation he will do well to halt by the way and get in touch with the unpretentious towns and lovely country scenes from whose old-fashioned folks most of the makers of the great cities have sprung.

Leaving London for the north a passing thought is due to Birmingham, the most American of English cities in its marvellous activities, metal work of every kind especially, from “ancient” idols for pagan temples in the East to exquisite altar-plate and prayer-book bindings for the institutional foes of idolatry. The local corruption of the name into Brummagem has added a descriptive term to the language, and it also illustrates the interesting fact that these local pronunciations usually preserve historical fact, as the now important city used to be no more than a hamlet adjoining Bromwich, hence Brumwich-ham. It showed the way, in the early seventies, how municipalities of unsalaried and unselfish citizens can acquire their own lighting and waterworks and otherwise carry on the town’s business at an immense saving over the ordinary system. A new city has arisen out of the old one and the running expenses are lower than ever. Sheffield, the centre of the cutlery industry, is well worth studying for a day, for its activity, the surrounding scenery, and the effect of foreign competition upon its staple trade.

Manchester is familiar as the mother of the cotton trade. Its fortune was made by its spinning and weaving enterprises, by its quick utilization of the steam-engine and the inventions of mechanical genius. The first working railway was that which ran between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830. It first gave England the honor of being regarded as the workshop of the world. The wider adaptations of steam power and the establishment of free trade enriched its capitalists and merchants beyond the dreams of their fathers. Many a Lancashire millionaire could not write his name. Within the memory of middle-aged men there have been great enterprises, princely philanthropies, and striking public speeches by self-made magnates who could not compose letters nor speak gracefully without help from others. The city is marked by its pillar of smoke by day and of furnace fire by night. Its wise people carry their umbrellas as constantly as their pocket-books, for “the rain it raineth every day,” at least drizzleth. The population of Manchester and its twin city, Salford, touches three-quarters of a million, sturdy and stern Britons, proudly dubbing themselves “Manchester men,” in distinction from “Liverpool gentlemen.”

Its murky air, ungainly factories and buildings generally, impress the stranger with its intensely practical spirit. The poetry of existence reveals itself in the cosy interiors and the charming outskirt residences. It has romance in its history and associations. Mancastra was a Roman camp in the reign of Titus. Under the Saxons and the later Normans it fashioned itself to the times just as it did to the magic wand of the nineteenth-century genius. It fought for the Parliament against the Royalists. For more than three centuries it led in woollen and, latterly, cotton manufactures. Its district is rich in coal-mines. The Bridgewater Canal dates from 1761, the principal one in the country. A greater, though apparently a less wise, because unprofitable, enterprise, has been the ship-canal. American cotton has always been unshipped at Liverpool, by which its brokers have greatly profited. To save tolls, delays and cost of rail transport, Manchester men made an imitation Suez Canal by deepening and adapting certain waterways, by which ships can pass into the new port of Manchester without troubling Liverpool. It may be hard to realize that Manchester can scarcely hope to become again the world’s cotton factory, seeing that she has not only taught other nations how to do her work, but has long been selling them her machinery and coal for that purpose. A momentous sign of the times is the rapid migration of her capital and brain to Japan and India, where operatives of sufficient skill are content with a mere fraction of the home-workers’ wage, and ocean transport is saved.

The sight-seer will be charmed by the noble city hall with its tall tower, its peal of twenty-one bells, and the public recitals on its great organ. Manchester possesses the oldest free library in the world, Chetham’s, with 40,000 rare old books ranged on the shelves in the old mansion rooms where some of them have reposed for nearly three hundred years. It also has the first of modern free libraries on the grand scale, opened in 1851, a gift from a citizen, greatly enlarged since. Its famous Free Trade Hall has echoed with the eloquence of the world’s famous men and women, in speech and song. Scarcely an American statesman or orator of note, being in England since 1856, but has been cheered by its audiences. The public meetings of all kinds in this hall have been among the most valuable educational influences of the half century. It was said by Lord Salisbury, many years before he became Premier, that “as Manchester thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow,” and it used to be true.

The traveller should try to be in Manchester in Whitsun Week, to see its most striking characteristic. It is the Sunday-school children’s gala time and all business is demoralized in their honor. On the Monday twenty or thirty thousand Church of England scholars march with bands to a service in the Cathedral, the whole town and country around crowding the streets. Tuesday is the only off-day. Every other one is a half-holiday for those who do not take whole ones. Each church gives its scholars picnics in parks or on local farms in the afternoons, and a whole day’s country outing on one day. Friday is the grown folks’ picnic day, and on Saturday the Total Abstainers’ parade. They are called Tee-totallers, because one of the founders, a Lancashire man, happened to stammer in a speech in trying to say total abstinence.

The Cathedral is not a great edifice, but has many remarkable fifteenth-century carvings and side chapels. It is affectionately known, in the local vernacular, as “t’owd church,” the old church. On Easter Mondays the villagers and working folk used to crowd in to be married, as many as two hundred couples being despatched at a blow, the same service answering for all simultaneously. The city may be proud of its Victoria University, the development of Owen’s College, founded in 1847. Of its many famous characters, the names of De Quincey and Harrison Ainsworth are perhaps the best known in literature.

Liverpool is thirty-six miles from Manchester and three from the sea. Its first charter was granted in 1229 and it sent two members to Parliament in 1296, yet its population until the seventeenth century was only about one thousand. It has the distinction of having made the first dock, penning up with flood-gates sufficient water to keep ships afloat between the fall and rise of tides. This was built in 1709. It is unkind, though true, to record that Liverpool’s first fortune was made in the slave-trade. Its ships went to the west coast of Africa and took in cargoes of natives whom they then transported to the West Indies as slaves, being paid for by cargoes of sugar and rum, brought home to Liverpool. This traffic began about 1720. It was suppressed by Parliament in 1807, the number of ships then engaged in it being 185, carrying over forty thousand slaves annually. A good deal of privateering was carried on during the eighteenth-century wars, an echo of which survived until the American Civil War of 1861-65.

Liverpool has many unique features of interest. It has not many manufactures, and only four or five ship-building establishments, for reasons which will appear in the pages on Glasgow. Its commercial growth has been extraordinary. In 1800 the population was under 78,000; in 1900 it was about 750,000. In the first-named year the tonnage of its ships was 450,000, and is now nearly 10,000,000. Its commerce is chiefly with America. A magnificent sight is its endless array of docks, stretching along both shores of the Mersey in a line, measured continuously, of over thirty miles. Many a stately procession of great ships glides up the spacious river, laden with precious cargoes not to be estimated by statistics. Over fifty thousand Americans, it is said, visit England each summer, entering by this majestic water-gate. Who shall tell the influence of this mingling of kindred peoples, the moral and national worth of all they bring and all they take?

It is a new city, as towns go in the old country, with few visible marks of its history. The public buildings are not specially imposing, but St. George’s Hall stands on a commanding site and in exterior and interior holds its own with the best civic temples, in spaciousness and grace. The great public library near by does honor to the city and to its donor. The art gallery is remarkable for its construction, as for its exhibits. It has a circular floor of one hundred feet in diameter without columns or any intermediate support, and beneath it is an amphitheatre, used for lectures, with its benches hewn out of the solid rock.

To ferry across the river to Birkenhead and Bootle, and down to New Brighton and other popular resorts, is an excellent way to appreciate the greatness of this famous port. As a city it has little charm, except in its surroundings.

All the excitements of the transatlantic voyage may be had in miniature (except the mal de mer) in crossing the lively channel to Dublin. The metropolis of Ireland must not be judged by commercial and cosmopolitan standards.

A city of many contrasts, stirring associations and poetical interest, two patriotisms, two grand divisions of its community, are discernible in the air. On the one hand is the Castle, lacking the castle feature and charm, with a pervading sense of royalism minus the outward symbols of state which give it popularity and influence. On the other is the vibrant nationalism which, in many tones and by a hundred tokens, expresses its hostility to the emblems of what it regards as alien dominance. Pathetic in its way is the decay of once fashionable, not to say aristocratic, districts, that have lapsed into commonplace, and many fine streets hobnob with veritable slums. This gradual decline of much residential property impoverished old families and added to the sum of general discontent. Dublin has never taken kindly to the idea of becoming a commercial city, such as Liverpool. The intellectual head of the island, it prides itself on the genius of its professional people. Irish eloquence shines as brightly as ever in its pulpits, in the law courts, and, indeed, wherever public speech is heard. The Four Courts enshrine the fame of many a gifted patriot orator and wit. Trinity College, founded by Queen Elizabeth, has made its mark not simply in the island and kingdom but all over the world. The same is true of its colleges in general.

The city lions are these buildings, the Castle, Phœnix Park, St. Patrick’s Cathedral and sundry monuments. One world-important industry has done wonders for the city. The Guiness product rebuilt the Cathedral out of its decaying remains. A local distillery has contributed nobly to the city’s reputation for progress. Singular it certainly is that the most appreciated malt liquor of the kind known as stout, should be produced in three cities, Dublin, London, and Philadelphia, each of which can boast the filthiest river in its country, the Liffey, the Thames, and the Schuylkill.

Dublin earth quickly turns to black bog under the frequent rains. Yet neither its mud nor its political differences can damp the cheery spirits of its natives. This is one great delight of a journey to the island. Usually we see what we set out to see anywhere. No matter whether our quest is for city shows or the lovely rural scenery, or the sports on the Curragh, or the woes of the impoverished masses, we cannot pass a single hour without marvelling at the native good-humor and good wit of even the most distressful-conditioned people. Where less gifted sufferers grow melancholy-visaged, the Irish greet misfortune with a continual smile, in which fact lies a world of hope, and not a little envy.

Up in Belfast the austere-faced Ulstermen have made a commercial centre of the first rank. Ship-building and the flax industry, with others, flourish, and the city might be a civic paradise if faction warfare could be cooled down.

Passing now to Glasgow we find ourselves in a city of comparative palaces. Its buildings are of sandstone, its streets handsome, its municipal government so admirable as to have become the model for American cities. The canny Scot may be trusted to make the citizen’s penny bring a full pennyworth. The city authorities own their plants for providing the people with light, and for bringing the pure waters of Loch Katrine into every home. They went a step farther and bought the public tramways and cars, giving the people cheaper travel than had ever been known.

Glasgow stole the greater part of Liverpool’s ship-building business and Belfast a goodly share. Miles and miles of the banks of the Clyde are decorated with skeletons of new vessels waiting to be clothed in steel or wood garb. Every variety of craft is to be seen, from the battle-ship to the racing yacht. But Glasgow turns its hands to everything makable and salable. Its three-quarters of a million inhabitants work at innumerable trades. Their success shows in the substantial build of their city, which has more than a liberal allowance of splendid structures. Modern and up-to-date, its whirl of daily life recalls New York in certain aspects. This modernness in architectural effect is the more striking when we stand in the High Street and reflect that the grand national hero, William Wallace, fought a battle with the English on this spot in 1300. The city’s patron saint, Kentigern, gave it its name in the sixth or seventh century, glasgu, the dear family, after a band of his disciples settled there. Its cathedral, old St. Mungo’s, takes its name also from Kentigern’s munghu, or most loved friend. Its charter, authorizing the holding of a free market, was granted in 1175. Commercial development dates from 1707, when the union with England was settled. Glasgow University traces its beginnings to 1450. In making a new dock recently the diggers brought to light a boat, formed out of the trunk of a tree, a relic of primeval seamanship. The scenery of the Clyde, and for miles beyond its banks, has been the theme of many a poetical description by American travellers. The reader of Scott needs no reminder of its richness in historic story. But is not all Scotland a picture-poem of stirring romance?

“Auld” Edinburgh is written of elsewhere in this volume by its brilliant son. American newspapers that lop off the final letter, also objected to in Pittsburgh, are evidently unaware that it is pronounced Edinborough (burrow). The unrivalled queen of British cities, the uncommercial capital of Scotland, its ancient capital and its present glory, is worth the pilgrimage, even from old Athens and Rome. The towering castle was begun twelve centuries ago. St. Giles’s church dates from 1110. It was a walled town in 1450. Progressive in the sleepy old days, it set up its first printing-press, one of the world’s first presses, in 1507, and has been literary ever since. The early rulers brought musicians and scholars from abroad to delight their courts, and many jealousies they caused.

KENILWORTH AND WARWICK CASTLES.

ELIHU BURRITT.

[Elihu Burritt, the “Learned Blacksmith,” wrote two works of mingled description and economic observation in the British island, these being “A Walk from John O’Groat’s to Land’s End” and “Walks in the Black Country and its Green Border-Land.” It is from the “green border-land” section of the latter that we take the following description of two of England’s most famous ancient castles.]

Between Coventry and Warwick, in a green, quiet rural district, stands Kenilworth, and Kenilworth is a castle which absorbs into itself all of space, population, and history that belongs to the name. Not only novel-readers, but practical history-readers at a distance, never think of anything but the castle when the name is mentioned or suggested.

Still, there is a goodly, tidy, and comfortable village near the ruins worth visiting, without the lion which attracts so many thousands a year to pay their homage and their admiration—to the genius of Sir Walter Scott. All the ordinary trades of a practical business community are carried on in this village; and a tall, taper chimney of a tannery, as high as any church steeple, smokes its pipe in the face of all the romantic antiquities of the place. Still, the people would probably confess that the principal source of their income is derived from their vested interest in Sir Walter Scott’s “Kenilworth,” not in the real castle walls. Take away that famous novel, and, with all the authenticated history that remains attached to them, not one in five of the visitors they now attract would walk around them with admiration. In fact, they are more a monument to the genius of the great novelist than to the memory of Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester. If any community ever owed a statue to the honor of a benefactor for money value received, the Kenilworths owe one to the celebrated Scotch writer. One might reasonably estimate that his book has been worth ten thousand pounds a year to them for the last quarter of a century or more.

There are observatories, barometer and anemometer stations around the coasts of England, where rain-falls and wind-blows, tide-risings and star-showers are registered. There are other observation-stations where the self-registering offices of human fames and reputations are kept, and where these are measured spontaneously. Go to Stratford and look at the inner walls of Shakespeare’s house and the record kept there, and count the names from the four quarters of the globe written there in homage of the great bard; go to Abbotsford, and consult the day-book of that great memory; go to Olney, and see what manner and multitude of names cover and re-cover the little garden summer-house in which Cowper wrote, and you will have this self-registration of human genius and its appreciation. So at Kenilworth, the visitors’ day-book at the hotel will show how many come from both hemispheres and all their continents to see the scene of Sir Walter Scott’s romance.

I was favored with a bright day on the sunny edge of autumn for my visit, when the very sky imparts a radiance to the ivied ruins of old castles and abbeys. Kenilworth shows its successive ages and uses in the various departments of its structure. From the ground it occupied, one would hardly conceive it to be a fighting castle. But when you come to look at the massive Cæsar’s Tower, you will be impressed with its impregnability in the bow-and-arrow period of English warfare. Its lofty walls hold their frontage and perpendicular lines as true and even as if they were a last-year’s structure. It is seemingly composed of several towers connected by walls sixteen feet thick, perforated by window-holes which look like so many archways. It is built or faced with hewn red sandstone, and is a perfect specimen of mason-work. The Insurgent Barons stood a siege of six months against Henry III. behind these strong walls, and in the reign of Edward I. Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, presided over a grand tournament beneath them.

In a later century the castle passed into the hands of John o’ Gaunt, who added the noble structure called the Lancaster Buildings, or banqueting-hall. This must have been one of the finest specimens of architecture of his time in England, and, in ruins, presents the graceful proportions and embellishments of its structure. Under the régime of that celebrated nobleman the castle began to put on a civilian dress over its coat of mail, and to echo with the music and mirth of dancing and feasting, instead of the clangor of arms.

But Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, completed the transformation into a residential palace. He not only added the wing called the Leicester Buildings, but he renovated and embellished all the old portions of the huge pile. He erected an ante-castle, or a great gate house, which is a noble structure in itself. Never did a subject build, and rebuild, and embellish on such a scale as he did to receive his sovereign.

Three times Elizabeth was his guest. Her last visit was in July, 1575, and lasted seventeen days. Of the festivities and princely entertainments he prepared for her on this occasion Sir Walter Scott has written with all that natural enthusiasm and predilection with which, perhaps, above all other English novelists, he dilated upon such a subject. His graphic descriptions of these scenes are so familiar to the million that I will not venture to go behind his brilliant fictions in search of actual historical facts of duller interest. The day of such favorites has gone by, like the beauty and glory of this once gorgeous fabric. The sun of Christian morality and civilization has risen to a purer flood of light, and such broad-faced gallantries would now be looked out of countenance in high places....

The facing of the massive and lofty Cæsar’s Tower must be nearly three centuries old, and it is wonderfully perfect. The perpendicular lines from base to battlement are as straight as if the walls were run in a mould; the eye cannot detect a deflection of a hair’s breadth, nor has time been able to eat into the smooth and even surface. I noticed, however, that “the brave old ivy green,” which braids such bandages for the wounds made by time and human violence in abbeys and castles, had wound around the front of this huge tower such a thick spread that it had deadened the skin of the wall and was eating into the solid body of it like a caustic blister. There were men at work on tall ladders, removing this thick green bandage and letting the sun in upon the stone, which had not seen its light for years.

The Gate House is in excellent preservation, and is occupied by a tenant of the Earl of Clarendon. The towers are supported by old pear-trees that clasp their long arms around the stone-work and hug it so tightly that you may see their impress in the wall. It is a pleasant sight, which a poet might make something of, to see them hanging their clusters of luscious fruit up and down, as if, like the idea expressed in Solomon’s Song, they were staying the venerable building with apples and cheering delicacies. Indeed, for its historical associations, as well as for the architectural character disclosed in its picturesque ruins, Kenilworth, perhaps, stands at the very head of all old English castles as an object of popular interest. If a self-registering apparatus could be put in operation at the gate opening to it, which would number and record the human feet, just as some instruments register the rain-drops that fall, doubtless no other castle in England would show such a census of visitors as this.

Warwick Castle! England and all who speak its language owe the successive inheritors of this great living pile of buildings more than they have ever acknowledged; for it is really the only baronial castle that has survived the destruction or decay of all the other monuments of the feudal ages of the same order. We should not know what they were in their day and generation were it not for this. It helps our fancy to fill up the vast breaks in the walls of Kenilworth, Dudley, and Chepstow; to reconstruct their banqueting-halls, their drawing-rooms, galleries, crypts, and kitchens, and to reproduce them entire in their first and fullest grandeur. By the light of Warwick we can not only rebuild and roof the broken walls of these old castles, but bring into the vista of the imagination their interior embellishments, their carved cornices and wainscoting, their luxurious furniture, tapestry, paintings, and other works of art. Thus, Warwick represents to us in its living being and form of to-day the hundreds of castles that were planted over the island in the first century after the Conquest. Schamyl in his native costume and dignity could not represent better at St. Petersburg the leaders of the Circassian race and country than does this grand home and fortress of the Warwicks the embattled citadels of the old English knights.

Warwick Castle, the fortress of one of the stoutest and grimmest of the old English fighting knights, did not put on the armor of nature to help out its own. It did not take advantage of perpendicular rocks or river-sides like Stirling, Edinburgh, or Chepstow. At first thought one might fancy the founders of it selected the location more for fishing than fighting. And now, in these quiet sunny days of peace, with its venerable mane of cedar-trees, it looks like a grand old lion lying down with its paw tenderly over a tired lamb. Or, it basks its broad side on the bank of the Avon, which photographs its walls and towers and turrets every bright day in the centuries. The castle is all intact and entire, with no part clean gone or going to ruin. Inside and out, from end to end, it is the harmonious growth of many ages, and registers them in distinctive illustrations. It shows what can be done by a dozen generations of wealthy men, inheriting an estate that doubles in income every half-century. Here each branch of the wide-spreading family tree has hung in festooned clusters the foliage of its life, genius, and taste. Each has contributed its contingent to the magnificent whole to be handed down to a posterity which should cherish and adorn the heirloom of illustrious ancestors, and send it down the line of the future with added wealth and beauty.

With such an anchorage to moor a family name and estate to, there is no wonder that both should attach their being, life, and treasures to it with a proud ambition of perpetuity. The name holds on as everlastingly as the estate. For the poorest man on earth must have some distant relation, and the richest man’s son would take the name of the twentieth cousin to inherit the title and castle of Warwick. However thin and attenuated may be the line of blood relationship between these families, the favored heir to this baronial rank and wealth gathers within his coronet all the memories and distinctions and even relationships of his predecessors all the way back to the Conquest. He is the heir of all of them; Saxon, Dane, and Norman converge into his status and blend in his being....

The great body of the castle itself, viewed detached from its grand surrounding walls and towers, presents no very salient features. It is a long range of buildings, with a straight front on the river. It never had the imposing or varied frontage of Dudley Castle in its day, or the palace halls that flanked the great tower of Kenilworth. But in its large straight suite of lofty apartments you have a museum of objects illustrating the tastes, habits, fashions, luxuries, and arts of all the ages and generations which those massive walls have seen. Passing from end to end, you may gauge English history for seven centuries with an observing glance through these objects. Here the white-winged dove of Peace has made her nest in the rusty and battered helmet of grim-visaged war.

On entering the Great Hall one is deeply impressed with its capacious faculty of hospitable entertainment. Truly, if tables were ever spread from end to end, a regiment of guests must have sat down to the banquet. It is sixty-two feet in length by forty in breadth, and the roofage of it is lofty and done in elaborate Gothic, rich in carving and other ornament. Here are the coronets and shields of all the earls back to Henry de Newburgh, who seem to look down upon the company below through their cognizances, as if represented in and countenancing all the generous hospitalities their living heir is disposed to give. The walls are wainscoted with the brave old English oak, far advanced in its seeming transformation into ebony. All you ever read in romance or veritable history about walls hung with armor of crusaders and other knightly raiders, interspersed with spoils of the chase, is here realized in full; and you see that even Sir Walter Scott has not exaggerated the fact in this respect. Conspicuous on the genealogical tree of these weapons and outfittings for war is the helmet usually worn, says the loyal guide-book, by the usurper Cromwell. Here, too, is the doublet in which Lord Brooke was killed at Lichfield, in 1643.

Three great Gothic windows are set out in deep recesses, as if to embrace and welcome the first and last light of the day, and to soften and diffuse it, a tinted smile, over the spacious apartment and its embellishments. But if the outside world smiles inward through these great windows so graciously, their outward vision opens upon a scene of exquisite beauty, which few can be found to equal. Here a vista deploys before the view full of all the attractions that nature and art can give to a landscape. What a pier-glass is to the richest drawing-room, the gentle and classic Avon is to this variegated scenery, as a portion of it, and as a reflecting medium of all its other features. It meanders through the landscape as a limpid hem to lawn, field, grove, garden, and forest, now flashing a silver radiance, now one of gold, upon the robe it adorns, just as the sun’s rays vary in their fall and flood. Right before the face and eyes of the castle, the river forms a great brooch of emerald, or a little green island, which may be taken for its coat of arms, or cognizance, much older and nobler than any hung up in the Great Hall. Then the soft and level river, looking half asleep, or checking its flow in the presence of these human antiquities, just below them arises and stands on its feet, showing a stature one hundred feet high in a cascade that sings a kind of lullaby to the by-gone ages whose spirits haunt the castle.

It was in these grounds that, in 1846, I saw for the first time a real cedar of Lebanon, and I never shall forget the impression it made upon me. Here they stood, grand and venerable, with their long low arms extended as if pronouncing “a benediction after prayer” upon the green lawn that mirrored their august entourage. Here they stood, singing the same old song they sang to David on Mount Lebanon. It was a mere fancy; but I listened to the soughing murmur with the thought that they were reciting to each other some of his best psalms of praise and thanksgiving.

From the Great Hall you have a vista of state rooms on one side, and private or family rooms on the other, extending in a straight line for three hundred and thirty-three feet. All these apartments, large and small, are adorned and enriched with specimens of high art and high labor, collected by all the families that have owned and occupied the estate. In some respects each room, if not the museum, is the mirror, of its age. Armor and articles of luxurious or antique furniture divide with pictures of the same dates the admiration of the visitor. Here is the celebrated painting of Charles I. by Vandyke, for which Sir Joshua Reynolds offered to pay five hundred guineas in his time. How much it would bring under the hammer to-day those who know the existing furore for the old masters may easily estimate. And all the old masters are here, represented each in several of the pictures that made their fame. In fact, a national gallery of paintings, of creditable number and variety, might be filled from the treasures of art exhibited in these splendid apartments. Here figure Rubens, Rembrandt, Vandyke, Salvator Rosa, Guido, Murillo, David, and other great artists of different ages, schools, and countries.

Then, as the framework of all these pictures, you see the artistry of the chisel, or carved work in wood and stone of contemporary schools in that department. Then the garnered treasures collected by these various branches of the family, purchased in different centuries and countries, are arranged in happy taste and harmony with the pictorial adornments. Wardrobes, cabinets, tables, and all the articles of luxurious furniture found in palaces, English or Continental, modern or ancient, are here in all their variety and curious workmanship.

The “Kenilworth Buffet,” a work which attracted so much admiration in the Great Exhibition of 1851, is a masterpiece of design and execution. It is Kenilworth and its romantic history, with the principal acts and actors of its Elizabethan drama, carved in oak from a tree that stood a green, tall sentinel of nature at the time to witness the festive scenes. Even Elizabeth’s meeting with Amy Robsart, and her interview with Leicester after the exposure of his faithlessness, are done to the life by the carver’s chisel.

Two objects connected with Warwick Castle every one, young or old, who visits it, will remember perhaps most distinctively. They are the “Guy’s porridge-pot” and the great marble Vase. Both are of prodigious capacity, the very Gog and Magog of all hollow-ware. The Irishman who called the donkey the father of all rabbits would call this large porridge-pot the father of all kettles. Its history cannot be got out of it by the grave and solemn thumpings that the old woman gives its massive sides. So it is ascribed to the great Guy’s time and to his personal use. As ornithologists deduce the size and habits of some prehistoric bird by a single foot-track in petrified clay, so the size, strength, and other capacities of that legendary giant are deduced from the size of this remarkable pot. The analogy might seem reasonable to many simple-minded people. Surely no man could be less than eight feet and a half high who needed such a kettle for cooking for himself and family, even if his children were nearly as large as himself. And this is the size accorded to that prehistoric hero. He was one of those amphibious beings who, like King Arthur, have lived in the misty border-land of history, half substance and half shadow, but projecting a full human outline upon the spectrum of by-gone centuries.

The history of the Great Vase is more ancient and uncertain still. It is of white marble, executed in the purest Grecian order of conception and art. It is truly a mighty goblet, with two handles of intertwisted vine-branches and wreathed and crowned with the tendrils, leaves, and clusters of the vineyard. It was fished up from the bottom of a lake near Tivoli by the British ambassador then at Naples, from whom it passed into the hands of the father of the present earl, who conveyed it to England and placed it in its present position.

The high and solid walls that enclose the castle and their great towers impress you with the realities of the ages they represent. Erected before gunpowder had been brought into the field of battle, they still look as if the builders anticipated its introduction and power, and they would stand a heavy battering now, old as they are, by common cannon. In a word, Warwick Castle is a structure which must grow more and more interesting from decade to decade. It is the only feudal palace left intact in England. It was ranked among the very best of them when they were all alive and strong over the land. It is associated with a name that stands among the first in the Norman aristocracy. Its location in itself is deeply interesting. Shakespeare breathed an inspiration upon the little Avon that laves its foundations, and gave to its name an immortality more vital and beautiful than the Tiber’s. All these aspects and associations are becoming more and more widely appreciated; and the footfall of visitors from distant countries crossing the threshold will grow more and more frequent as the readers of English history and romance increase in both hemispheres.

WINDSOR FOREST AND CASTLE.

ANONYMOUS.

[It is to the author of “English Forests and Forest-Trees,” who fails to give his name on the title-page of a work whose authorship is amply worthy of acknowledgment, that we owe our present selection. Among the various historic forests of England, that of Windsor ranks high, and the adjoining castle was the seat of many interesting episodes of English history. The selection we give is mainly confined to the scenery and traditions of the forest.]

Windsor forest and castle are dear to all Englishmen. Few palaces have grouped around them so many associations, both legendary, historical, and poetical, from the time of Arthur and the knights of his Round Table to those of the royal house of Hanover. The castle has been the abode of royalty from the time of the Saxon kings. It was while King John lived at Windsor that the barons obtained from him the Magna Charta. Cromwell has held his courts within its walls, and Charles I. lies buried in its chapel. A Scottish king has been a captive here, and here have been celebrated some of the most splendid pageants and courtly ceremonies recorded in history. The forest, though it can scarcely be said now to exist, has also some “legends of woe and dread,” and other associations.

The forest was once of enormous extent, comprehending a circumference of one hundred and twenty miles.... In the lapse of time, however, it dwindled away; for we find that in the reign of James I. its circumference was estimated by Norden at only seventy-seven miles and a half, exclusive of the liberties extending into Bucks. At this period there were fifteen walks within it, each under the charge of a head keeper, and the whole contained upward of three thousand head of deer. This extent was somewhat diminished in later years; for in a subsequent map, by Roque, the circuit is given as fifty-six miles.

In the year 1813 an act of Parliament was passed for its enclosure. The portion which had been previously enclosed, known as Windsor Great Park, was of small extent compared with the whole range of the forest. The area of the park was less than four thousand acres, of which two thousand were under cultivation; while the open unenclosed forest amounted to twenty-four thousand acres. Scarce a vestige of the forest is now left, except what has been apportioned to the crown, adjoining the Great Park.

The view from Windsor Castle is one of the finest in England. A vast panorama extending as far as the eye can reach. All flat,—the faint blue horizontal line, scarcely discernible from the clouds, so distant is it, as straight as the boundary of a calm sea,—and yet how infinitely varied! What would such an expanse of land be in any other country? A mere drugget compared to this Field of Cloth of Gold. A lovely river, to which the hackneyed illustration of molten gold might well be applied from the silent roll of its glittering waters, as if impeded by their own rich weight; now flashing like a strip of the sun’s self through broad meadows whose green is scarcely less dazzling, now lost in shady nooks of wonderful and refreshing coolness. Trees of every sort and growth, singly, in clumps, in rows, everywhere. Little bright-looking villages, with their white spires or gray towers, dotted all over the scene. Everything is in perfect harmony. The gentle murmur of human life, reaching us from the distance, is no more injurious to the effect than the rustling of trees or the chirping of the birds....

Our first homage is to Nature. The influence of the beautiful is predominant over all others. We think only of the scene before us, and must thoroughly enjoy it for its own sake before we can bestow a thought on a single association connected with it. We forget all about the walls we are standing on. We do not even reflect that the golden river is our old friend the Thames. It never strikes us that that expanse of green out there to the right, so thickly planted with massive elms and chestnuts, is a very celebrated place called the Home Park of Windsor, or indeed that it is called anything else—or anything at all. We are (metaphorically speaking) rolling in that grass with a republican contempt for its patrician connections, and picking out the best of those trees with an ungrateful heedlessness of what royal hand may have planted them there for our gratification.

[The author proceeds to describe some notable places surrounding. To the left, across the river, is Eton College; immediately facing is the town of Slough, where the Herschells made their residence; to the right is Stoke Poges, the scene of Gray’s “Elegy”; to the extreme right is Runnymede, where King John signed Magna Charta; and nearer at hand is the village of Datchet, the scene of Falstaff’s ducking, in the “Merry Wives of Windsor.”]

And now, reader, it is high time we turned our attention to the forest side of the question.

By the forest we must be distinctly understood to mean, not merely the dense collection of wood to which the term is usually applied, but that aspect of nature generally wherein the wild and unchecked growth of forest-trees forms the principal feature. The so-called Windsor Forest has almost entirely disappeared, a few insignificant plantations alone retaining the title. The Great Park, however,—indeed, the whole country south of the castle for several miles,—presents every variety of the class of scenery which it is our business to treat.

Our way into the Great Park lies along the celebrated avenue known as the Long Walk. This is no less than three miles in length, extending in a perfectly straight line from the castle, in a direction almost due south, to Snow Hill, a natural elevation surmounted by an equestrian statue of George III.

We have two good miles before us ere we can meet with an outlet that will enable us to ramble among the trees to our hearts’ content. The Long Walk, however, is a very fine sight, in spite of its dire straightness. A splendid road, three miles long, bordered by double rows of giant elms, is not without interest. The regularity is not unpleasing, because not overstrained. The trees, once pressed into the service of order, have been allowed to grow their own way, instead of being clipped and cropped as they would be under similar circumstances in some countries,—France, to wit. Here we have Nature with her hair combed merely; there we should find her with her head shaved. The monotony of the perspective is nicely broken by the undulations of the ground. It is pleasant to turn occasionally into the aisle-like sidewalks, and look up at the cool green roof of trellis-work formed by the interlacing trees. Besides, the castle, as we look back at it receding from us, begins to recover something of its original character: Edward III. and William of Wykeham are resuming the ascendancy. The gradually deepening stillness, too, is exactly what we could wish. The rooks, hovering over us eternally, afford very agreeable companionship; and we consider their quiet, though apparently cynical, observations very much to the purpose indeed.

Ere we proceed far on our way, an object of once agreeable, now melancholy, interest attracts our attention. This is the famous Herne’s Oak, which stands in the enclosure known as the Little Park, to our left. It is contended by some authorities that the veritable Herne’s Oak was cut down by some orders of George III., delivered in a mistake as to its identity. Others, with a natural reluctance to believe so sagacious a monarch capable of such a blunder, maintain that the rumor originated in the fact of his majesty causing some similar trees in the vicinity to be cleared away, that the oak itself might occupy a more prominent position.

The agreeable interest attached to this famous tree is well known. It is supposed (though there has been much controversy as to its authenticity) to be the identical tree immortalized by the mention of Shakespeare as the scene of Herne the Hunter’s unamiable exploits:

“There is an old tale goes, that Herne the Hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragged horns;
And then he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle;
And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.”

The interest we have alluded to of a melancholy description is of a more recent date, and is derived from the tantalizing fact that Herne’s Oak is no longer visible to the public, the portion of the park in which it stands having been recently enclosed as an addition to the private grounds of the Duchess of Kent’s residence at Frogmore.

We tried hard once to tempt an inflexible gate-keeper to let us in,—just to have a look at it. It was of no use. We assured him we should do no harm, and (as the most delicate means of suggesting a recompense) offered to pay the expenses of any trustworthy person he might choose to send to look after us. He was adamant,—no strangers were allowed in. We appealed to his feelings,—like Rolla and the sentinel,—asked him (in terms we considered adapted to his mental cultivation) how he would like to be a poet wrecked in sight of inspiration. His expressed opinion was that we were making fun of him.

He was not, however, a bad fellow; his sternness was a matter of duty, not constitution. He was touched by our disappointment, and sought to console us by the assurance that we had lost nothing; “that there was nothing to be seen in the tree; that it was about the ugliest he ever see in the whole park; and as for Herne the Hunter, it was nothing but a pack of old woman’s rubbage.”

However, neither our niggardly exclusion from the sight of the old tree, nor the materialist consolations of our friend the gate-keeper, can efface the impression on our mind of the grim forest-fiend haunting the old park like a family spectre.

There is no satisfactory legend of Herne the Hunter. Vague tradition states that he was a keeper in the forest in Elizabeth’s reign, who, having committed some crime which occasioned his dismissal, hung himself on the tree. This is a view of the case we cannot think of taking. The idea of a discharged flunkey committing suicide on a mere sentimental consideration of wages and perquisites is a sorry foundation for the magnificent “demon business” indicated by Shakespeare. Our notion is of something far more weird and fiendish,—a story of fearful crimes and unhallowed compacts; something in the nightmare German ballad style....

It is a long lane that has no turning; we mean the Long Walk is. Passing through a handsome pair of lodge-gates, we emerge fairly into the Great Park.

Now we are in the Forest.

When we inform our reader that our first impulse is to run as fast as our legs can carry us, he will doubtless require an explanation.

Assuming that it is a fine day we have chosen for our ramble, in the first place we are surrounded by a bright and rarefied atmosphere, whose inhalation, to quote a lamented writer, is a process something between breathing and drinking. The scene has changed, as if by magic. The barrier we have just passed would seem to be a fairy circle, shutting out all matters pertaining to human life. Castles and towns are things we must have dreamt of somewhere long ago. We are in a vast solitude of grassy mounds and giant trees, in all their native luxuriance, spreading as far as the eye can reach. The stillness would be appalling but for the clamor of a million birds. We have heard of a native of Piccadilly, who, spending a night in the country for the only time in his life, declared that he had been unable to sleep, the confounded birds made such a noise. If we had a grudge against that native (and doubtless if we knew him we should not be long in forming one, as we certainly should not like him), and had it in our power to punish him in our own way, we should condemn him to sling a hammock on one of the trees in Windsor Great Park, and roost there for a week; for the birds in Windsor Great Park are the noisiest in the world.

These are the combined causes of an effect similar to that of laughing-gas, or something to drink, leading to gymnastic results such as we have indicated....

The rabbits of Windsor Park, by the way, are endowed with matchless impudence. They treat you with a familiarity which borders too close on contempt to be gratifying. They will scarcely get out of your way. They sit comfortably before their holes, lazily watching you go past with as much indifference as a country gentleman seated at his own door would the passing of a travelling tinker. The same may be said of the game generally with which the park abounds. The flocks of deer will go on browsing comfortably till you almost tread on their little black noses. Then there will be a short listless consultation as to whether you are a person to be tolerated or not. The leader will probably give a verdict in the negative, and they turn slowly round, all showing their powder-puffs of tails at once in the most insulting manner, and strut a few yards off, when they recommence their endless meal, merely regarding you as something of a bore and a nuisance, but in no serious light whatever.

Once we started a pheasant; he would not even pay us the compliment of flying. We ran at him violently; he ran a few yards off, and commenced pecking at something. We threw a stone at him; he ducked his head a little,—no more. We waved our hands and cried “Shoo!” in the most approved manner, demonstrations to which he would not condescend to pay the slightest attention. We ran towards him again; he ran away from us a short distance, and then before our very eyes roosted on an old rail with unmistakable intentions of going to sleep. This was insufferable. We could almost have knocked him down with our walking stick, and were sufficiently exasperated to think of trying, when the appearance of a game-keeper on the horizon suddenly made us look in an opposite direction, and commence a careful search for botanical specimens.

This tameness, which is shocking to us, is very different from the trusting innocence of Alexander Selkirk’s happy family, who were

“So unaccustomed to man.”

It is the insolent security of a privileged class. They know you are not allowed to shoot them, and the airs they give themselves are intolerable....

Descending a cool valley densely wooded with magnificent Scotch firs, we come to a bridge crossing a placid-looking lake of considerable dimensions. The stranger generally thinks this is Virginia Water; he is a little disappointed,—thinks it hardly merits the reputation it has earned for beauty,—but, on the whole, is not dissatisfied. He thinks it is probably a little better farther on, on one side or the other; he wonders which he ought to try; he is, however, loath to explore either till he has ascertained whether there is really anything to be seen or not (for your speculative sight-seer is a cautious fellow, and has a great objection to being taken in). Seeing a lodge-gate a little ahead, he proceeds there to ask whether there is any more of Virginia Water than what he has just left; not but what that was very delightful,—he merely wishes to know. The lodge-keeper laughs sardonically, and, good-naturedly blessing the stranger’s eyes, tells him that is none of Virginia Water; then, with a look of contemptuous pity, seizes him by the arm, leads him impatiently to a little gate opening on to a thick wood, thrusts him in, and, bidding him follow his nose, returns to the lodge, satisfied at having nothing more to do with a person of that scale of intelligence.

Our plan is to follow the lodge-keeper’s precept and the stranger’s example. We pass through the little gate, and after a few seconds’ walk through the wood, come unexpectedly on a very novel and delightful scene, of which we cannot speak in higher terms than to say that it fully merits the florid eulogium of the original edition of the Royal Windsor Guide, already quoted.

We are standing on the brink of an immense lake, whose extent alone is sufficient to do away with all ideas of its artificial origin. This is completely enclosed by densely wooded acclivities, rising almost from the water’s edge, one above the other, in agreeable perspective, so as to exclude the slightest glimpse of the world beyond. On one side of the lake a broad pathway of dark-green grass, yielding like a rich Turkey carpet to the tread, extends from one end of the lake to the other. Immediately on the left, the shelving woods begin to rise. There is not a sound to be heard except a gentle murmur of the trees, that never ceases.

The scene is not very romantic; but there is no earthly reason why it should be; it is very peaceful and very charming, suggesting all sorts of pleasant quiet-life recreations. The lake would not have suited Wordsworth, but it would have been the very thing for Izaak Walton. You could not get much poetry out of the woods, but you could get capital picnics in them; and there be those who despise poetry, but where is the ascetic who would turn up his nose at a picnic?

As we proceed, the view of the lake gets more extensive. The cool breeze from it, and the soft springy turf scarcely six inches above the level of the water, make the walk very agreeable. One feature is particularly worth mentioning; some of the largest and most beautiful specimens of that most dainty of English trees, the silvery birch, are to be seen gracefully dipping their light branches into the lake. At length the pathway takes a turn up into the wood, from which we soon emerge into an open space, where we come across an object that really startles us,—a classic temple in ruins!

These ruins are of course not genuine. At a second glance we recognize the masquerading tendencies of George IV., as developed by Sir Jeffrey Wyattville. There is, however, no objection to the exercise of such a whim in what was never intended to serve any other purpose than that of a gentleman’s pleasure-ground. Moreover, the ruin has some claims to be considered as a work of art of no mean merit. The design is admirable, and the semblance of decay is wonderfully imitated. The broken columns seem to have lain there for ages. Huge trees obtrude themselves between the shattered fragments as if they had grown there since the building had fallen to ruin. Some portions are completely hidden by masses of ivy and lichen, apparently the growth of centuries. Altogether the thing is admirably “got up,” and makes us think what a stage-manager Sir Jeffrey Wyattville would have made for arranging a Christmas spectacle.

We should remark that the materials, consisting of columns of red and gray granite and porphyry, and several marble statues, are of veritable antiquity. The greater portion were transferred from the outer court of the British Museum, the remainder being from the Elgin collection. The reason of the building being called the Temple of Augustus was probably because Sir Jeffrey thought that name would do for it quite as well as any other, in which case we quite agree with him....

The Great Park is rich in varied woodland scenery. There are not only fine thriving oaks, throwing out their gigantic arms, but sturdy pollards without end, which seem to have set time and season and decay at defiance. They are gnarled and knotted, twisted and distorted, yet at the same time sound and vigorous at heart. The beeches, too, may be seen of all ages and sizes, picturesque and beautiful in their decay, but while in full vigor, and dotted with their sparkling leaves, they are the richest ornament of the wood.... The size of some of the trees is enormous; one beech-tree, near Sawyer’s Lodge, measuring, at six feet from the ground, thirty-six feet round. It is now protected from injury, and nature seems to be doing her best towards repairing the damage which its exposure to the attacks of man and beast has produced. It must once have been almost hollow, but the vacuum has been nearly filled up. One might almost fancy that liquid wood, which had afterwards hardened, had been poured into the tree. There is no bark on this extraneous substance; but the surface is smooth, hard, and without any appearance of decay.

THE ASPECT OF LONDON.

HIPPOLYTE TAINE.

[Taine’s “English Literature” has in itself added a new work to the world’s best literature of far more value than many of those with which it deals. In his “Notes on England” he gives us thoughtful impressions of the country itself, from which we select his pen-picture of the great city on the Thames. The picture is not an inspiring one. He could not avoid comparing in his mind this fog-haunted capital with the brighter aspect of his native Paris.]

Sunday in London in the rain; the shops are shut, the streets are almost deserted; the aspect is that of an immense and a well-ordered cemetery. The few passers-by under their umbrellas in the desert of squares and streets have the look of uneasy spirits who have risen from their graves; it is appalling.

I had no conception of such a spectacle, which is said to be frequent in London. The rain is small, compact, pitiless; looking at it, one can see no reason why it should not continue to the end of all things. One’s feet churn water; there is water everywhere,—filthy water impregnated with an odor of soot. A yellow, dense fog fills the air, sweeps down to the ground; at thirty paces a house, a steamboat appear as spots upon blotting-paper. After an hour’s walk in the Strand especially, and in the rest of the city, one has the spleen; one meditates suicide. The lofty lines of fronts are of sombre brick, the exudations being incrusted with fog and soot. Monotony and silence; yet inscriptions on metal or marble speak and tell of the absent master, as in a large manufactory of bone-black closed on account of a death.

A frightful thing is the huge palace in the Strand which is called Somerset House. Massive and heavy piece of architecture, of which the hollows are inked, the porticoes blackened with soot, where, in the cavity of the empty court, is a sham fountain without water, pools of water on the pavement, long rows of closed windows,—what can they possibly do in these catacombs?

It seems as if the livid and sooty fog had even befouled the verdure of the parks. But what most offends the eye are the colonnades, peristyles, Grecian ornaments, mouldings, and wreaths of the houses all bathed in soot. Poor antique architecture, what is it doing in such a climate? The flutings and columns in front of the British Museum are begrimed as if liquid mud had been poured over them. St. Paul’s—a kind of Pantheon—has two ranges of columns: the lower range is entirely black; the upper range, recently scraped, is still white, but the white is offensive: coal-smoke has already plastered it with its leprosy.

These spots are melancholy, being the decay of the stone. And these nude statues in memory of Greece! Wellington as a fighting hero, naked under the dripping trees of the park! That hideous Nelson, stuck on his column with a coil of rope in the form of a pig-tail, like a rat impaled on the top of a pole! Every form, every classical idea, is contrary to nature here. A swamp like this is a place of exile for the ark of antiquity. When the Romans disembarked here they must have thought themselves in Homer’s hell, in the land of the Cimmerians. The vast space which, in the south, stretches between the earth and the sky, cannot be discovered by the eye; there is no air; there is nothing but liquid fog; in this pale smoke objects are but fading phantoms. Nature has the look of a bad drawing in charcoal, which some one has rubbed with his sleeve.

I have just spent half an hour on Waterloo Bridge. The Houses of Parliament, blurred and indistinct, appear in the distance but a wretched pile of scaffolding; nothing is discernible, and, more particularly, nothing is living, except a few steamboats skimming along the river, black, smoky, unwearied insects. A Greek watching their passengers embarking and disembarking would have thought of the Styx. He would have found that to exist here was not to live; in fact, life here is different from what it is in his country; the ideal has altered with the climate. The mind quits the without to retire within itself, and there creates a world. Here one must have a comfortable and well-ordered home, clubs, societies, plenty of business, many religious and moral preoccupations; above all, instead of abandoning one’s self to the influence of exterior impressions, it is necessary to extrude all the sad promptings of unfriendly Nature, and fill up the great void wherein melancholy and tedium would take up their abode.

[After this gloomy image of a rainy London, and a description of the Sunday church services, the writer proceeds in a more complimentary vein.]

The population numbers three millions and a quarter; that makes twelve cities like Marseilles, ten cities like Lyons, two cities like Paris, put together; but words upon paper are no substitutes for the sensation of the eyes. It is necessary to take a cab several days in succession, and proceed straight on towards the south, the north, the east, and the west, during a whole morning, as far as the uncertain limits where houses grow scanty and the country begins.

Enormous, enormous,—this the word which always recurs. Moreover, all is rich and well ordered; consequently they must think us neglected and poor. Paris is mediocre compared with these squares, these crescents, these circles and rows of monumental buildings of massive stone, with porticoes, with sculptured fronts, these spacious streets. There are sixty of them as vast as the Rue de la Paix. Assuredly Napoleon III. demolished and rebuilt Paris only because he had lived in London. In the Strand, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in the neighborhood of London Bridge, in twenty places, there is a bustling crowd, a surging traffic, an amount of obstruction which our busiest and most frequented boulevard cannot parallel. Everything is on a large scale here: the clubs are palaces; the hotels are monuments; the river is an arm of the sea; the cabs go twice as fast; the boatmen and the omnibus conductors condense a sentence into a word; words and gestures are economized; actions and time are turned to the utmost possible account; the human being produces and expends twice as much as among us.

BANK OF ENGLAND

From London Bridge to Hampton Court are eight miles,—that is, nearly three leagues of buildings. After the streets and quarters erected together, as one piece, by wholesale, like a hive after a model, come the countless pleasure retreats, cottages surrounded with verdure and trees in all styles,—Gothic, Grecian, Byzantine, Italian, of the Middle Age, or the Revival, with every mixture and every shade of style,—generally in lines, or clusters of five, ten, twenty of the same sort, apparently the handiwork of the same builder, like so many specimens of the same vase or the same bronze. They deal in houses as we deal in Parisian articles. What a multitude of well-to-do, comfortable, and rich existences! One divines accumulated gains, a wealthy and spending middle class quite different from ours, so pinched, so straitened. The most humble, in brown brick, are pretty by dint of tidiness; the windows sparkle like mirrors; there is nearly always a green and flowery patch; the front is covered with ivy, honeysuckle, and nasturtiums.

The entire circumference of Hyde Park is covered with houses of this sort, but finer, and those in the midst of London retain a country look. Each stands detached in its square of turf and shrubs, has two stories in the most perfect order and condition, a portico, a bell for the tradespeople, a bell for the visitors, a basement for the kitchen and the servants, with a flight of steps for the service; very few mouldings and ornaments; no outside sun-shutters; large, clear windows which let in plenty of light; flowers on the sills and at the portico; stables in a mews apart, in order that their odors and sight might be kept at a distance; all the external surface covered with white, shining, and varnished stucco; not a speck of mud or dust; the trees, the turf, the flowers, the servants, prepared as if for an exhibition of prize products.

How well one can picture the inhabitant after seeing his shell! In the first place, it is the Teuton who loves nature, and who needs a reminder of the country; next, it is the Englishman who wishes to be by himself on his staircase as in his room, who could not endure the promiscuous existence of our huge Parisian cages, and who, even in London, plans his house as a small castle, independent and enclosed. Besides, he is simple, and does not desire external display; on the other hand, he is exacting in the matter of condition and comfort, and separates his life from that of his inferiors. The number of such houses at the Westend is astonishing. The rent is nearly five hundred pounds; from five to seven servants are kept; the master expends from twelve to twenty-four hundred pounds a year. There are ten of these fortunes and these lives in England to every one in France.

The impression is the same when visiting the parks; the taste, the area are quite different from what is the case among us. St. James’s Park is a genuine piece of country, and of English country; huge old trees, real meadows, a large pond peopled with ducks and water-fowl; cows and sheep, in an enclosed space, fed on the grass, which is always fresh. There are even sheep in the narrow green border that surrounds Westminster Abbey; these people love the country in their hearts. It is sufficient to read their literature from Chaucer to Shakespeare, from Thomson to Wordsworth and Shelley, to find proofs of this. What a contrast to the Tuileries, the Champs-Elysées, the Luxembourg! As a rule, the French garden, that of Louis XIV., is a room or gallery in the open air, wherein to walk and converse in company; in the English garden, such as they have invented and propagated, one is better alone; the eyes and the mind converse with natural things. We have arranged a park on this model in the Bois de Boulogne; but we have committed the blunder of placing therein a group of rocks and waterfalls; the artifice is discovered at a glance, and offends; English eyes would have felt it.

[A description of Regent’s Park follows, with some words on the English love of out-door exercise. Piccadilly and Hyde Park are next mentioned.]

Hyde Park is the largest of them all, with its small rivulet, its wide greensward, its sheep, its shady walks, resembling a pleasure park suddenly transported to the centre of a capital. About two o’clock the principal alley is a riding-ground; there are ten times more gentlemen and twenty times more ladies on horseback than in the Bois de Boulogne on its most frequented days; little girls and boys of eight ride on ponies by the side of their father; I have seen ample and worthy matrons trolling along. This is one of the luxuries. Add to it that of having servants. For instance, a family of three persons which I visited keeps seven servants and three horses. The mother and daughter gallop in the park daily; they often pay visits on horseback; they economize in other things,—in theatre-going, for example; they go but seldom to the theatre, and when they do it is to a box which has been presented to them. This vigorous exercise appears indispensable for health; young girls and ladies come here even when it rains....

From five to seven o’clock is the review of ladies’ dresses. Beauty and ornamentation abound, but taste is wanting. The colors are outrageously crude and the forms ungraceful; crinolines too distended and badly distended, in geometrical cones or bunched, green flounces, embroideries, flowered dresses, quantities of floating gauze, packets of falling or frizzed hair; crowning this display tiny embroidered and imperceptible bonnets. The bonnets are too much adorned; the hair, too shiny, presses closely on the temples; the small mantle or casaque falls formless to the lower part of the back, the petticoat expands prodigiously, and all the scaffolding badly joined, badly arranged, variegated and labored, cries and protests with all its gaudy and overdone colors. In the sunshine, especially, at Hampton Court the day before yesterday, among the shopkeepers’ wives, the absurdity was at its height; there were many violet dresses, one being of a wild violet clasped round the waist with a golden band, which would have made a painter cry out. I said to a lady, “The toilette is more showy among you than in France.” “But my dresses come from Paris!” I carefully refrained from replying, “But you selected them.”

Excepting only the highest class, they apparel themselves as fancy dictates. One imagines healthy bodies, well-built, beautiful at times; but they must be imagined. The physiognomy is often pure, but also often sheepish. Many are simple babies, new waxen dolls, with glass eyes, which appear entirely empty of ideas. Other faces have become ruddy, and turned to raw beefsteak. There is a fund of folly or of brutality in this inert flesh,—too white, or too red. Some are ugly and grotesque in the extreme; with heron’s feet, stork’s necks, always having the large front of white teeth, the projecting jaws of carnivora. As compensation, others are beautiful in the extreme. They have angelic faces; their eyes, of pale periwinkle, are softly deep; their complexion is that of a flower, or an infant; their smile is divine. One of these days, about ten o’clock in the morning, near Hyde Park Corner, I was rooted to the spot motionless with admiration at the sight of two young ladies; the one was sixteen, the other eighteen years old. They were in rustling dresses of white tulle amid a cloud of muslin; tall, slender, agile, their shape as perfect as their face, of incomparable freshness, resembling those marvellous flowers seen in select exhibitions, the whiteness of the lily or orchis; in addition to all that, gayety, innocence, a superabundance of unalloyed sap and infantine expression, of laughter, and the mien of birds; the earth did not support them.

Many of the horsewomen are charming, so simple and so serious, without a trace of coquetry; they come here not to be seen, but to take the air; their manner is frank without pretension; their shake of the hand quite loyal, almost masculine; no frippery in their attire; the small black vest, tightened at the waist, moulds a fine shape and healthy form; to my mind, the first duty of a young lady is to be in good health. They manage their horses with complete ease and assurance.

Sometimes the father or brother stops and talks business or politics with a friend; the ladies listen and thus habituate themselves to serious topics. These fathers and brothers, too, are a pleasant sight; expressive and resolute faces, which bear, or have borne, the burden of life; less exhausted than among us, less ready to smile and to execute the tricks of politeness, but calmer and more staid, and who often excite in the onlooker a vague impression of respect, of esteem at least, and often of trust. Perhaps this is because I am instructed as to their condition; yet it seems to me that mistake is difficult; whether nobles, members of Parliament, landed proprietors, their manners and their physiognomies are those of men accustomed to authority, and who have wielded it.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

[We do not class Hawthorne in usual lists of travellers, yet in his “Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches,” he gives us some thoughtful and interesting discussions of English scenes and institutions which are well worth reproducing. We accordingly select his description of London’s great centre of pilgrimage to the devout antiquarian.]

On a Sunday afternoon, I passed through a side-entrance in the time-blackened wall of a place of worship, and found myself among a congregation assembled in one of the transepts and the immediately contiguous portion of the nave. It was a vast old edifice, spacious enough, within the extent covered by its pillared roof and overspread by its stone pavement, to accommodate the whole of church-going London, and with a far wider and loftier concave than any human power of lungs could fill with audible prayer. Oaken benches were arranged in the transept, on one of which I seated myself, and joined, as well as I knew how, in the sacred business that was going forward. But when it came to the sermon, the voice of the preacher was puny, and so were his thoughts, and both seemed impertinent at such a time and place, where he and all of us were bodily included within a sublime act of religion, which could be seen above and around us and felt beneath our feet.

The structure itself was the worship of the devout men of long ago, miraculously preserved in stone without losing an atom of its fragrance and fervor; it was a kind of anthem-strain that they had sung and poured out of the organ in centuries gone by; and being so grand and sweet, the Divine benevolence had willed it to be prolonged for the behoof of auditors unborn. I therefore came to the conclusion that, in my individual case, it would be better and more reverent to let my eyes wander about the edifice than to fasten them and my thoughts on the evidently uninspired mortal who was venturing—and felt it no venture at all—to speak here above his breath.

The interior of Westminster Abbey (for the reader recognized it, no doubt, the moment we entered) is built of rich brown stone; and the whole of it—the lofty roof, the tall, clustered pillars, and the pointed arches—appears to be in consummate repair. At all points where decay has laid its finger the structure is clamped with iron, or otherwise carefully protected; and being thus watched over,—whether as a place of ancient sanctity, a noble specimen of Gothic art, or an object of national interest and pride,—it may reasonably be expected to survive for as many ages as have passed over it already. It was sweet to feel its venerable quietude, its long-enduring peace, and yet to observe how kindly and even cheerfully it received the sunshine of to-day, which fell from the great windows into the fretted aisles and arches that laid aside somewhat of their aged gloom to welcome it. Sunshine always seems friendly to old abbeys, churches, and castles, kissing them, as it were, with a more affectionate, though still reverential, familiarity than it accords to edifices of later date. A square of golden light lay on the sombre pavement of the nave, afar off, falling through the grand western entrance, the folding leaves of which were wide open, and afforded glimpses of people passing to and fro in the outer world, while we sat dimly enveloped in the solemnity of antique devotion.

In the south transept, separated from us by the full breadth of the minster, there were painted glass windows, of which the uppermost appeared to be a great orb of many-colored radiance, being, indeed, a cluster of saints and angels whose glorified bodies formed the rays of an aureole emanating from a cross in the midst. These windows are modern, but combine softness with wonderful brilliancy of effect. Through the pillars and arches I saw that the walls in that distant region of the edifice were almost wholly incrusted with marble now grown yellow with time; no blank, unlettered slabs, but memorials of such men as these respective generations deemed wisest and bravest. Some of them were commemorated merely by inscriptions on mural tablets; others by sculptured bas-reliefs; others (once famous, but now forgotten, generals or admirals, these) by ponderous tombs that aspired towards the roof of the aisle, or partly curtained the immense arch of a window.

These mountains of marble were peopled with the sisterhood of Allegory, winged trumpeters, and classic figures in full-bottomed wigs; but it was strange to observe how the old Abbey melted all such absurdities into the breadth of its own grandeur, even magnifying itself by what would elsewhere have been ridiculous. Methinks it is the test of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridiculous without deigning to hide it; and these grotesque monuments of the last century answer to a similar purpose with the grinning faces which the old architects scattered among their most solemn conceptions....

It is a characteristic of this grand edifice that it permits you to smile as freely under the roof of its central nave as if you stood beneath the yet grander canopy of heaven. Break into laughter, if you feel inclined, provided the vergers do not hear it echoing among the arches. In an ordinary church you would keep your countenance for fear of disturbing the sanctities or proprieties of the place; but you need leave no honest and decorous portion of your human nature outside of these benign and hospitable walls. Their mild awfulness will take care of itself. Thus it does no harm to the general impression, when you come to be sensible that many of the monuments are ridiculous, and commemorate a mob of people who are mostly forgotten in their graves, and few of whom ever deserved any better boon from posterity. You acknowledge the force of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s objection to being buried in Westminster Abbey, because “they do bury fools there!”

Nevertheless, these grotesque carvings of marble, that break out in dingy-white blotches on the old freestone of the interior walls, have come there by as natural a process as might cause mosses and ivy to cluster about the external edifice; for they are the historical and biographical record of each successive age, written with its own hand, and all the truer for the inevitable mistakes, and none the less solemn for the occasional absurdity. Though you entered the Abbey expecting to see the tombs only of the illustrious, you are content at last to read many names, both in literature and history, that have now lost the reverence of mankind, if indeed they ever really possessed it. Let these men rest in peace. Even if you miss a name or two that you hoped to find there, they may well be spared. It matters little a few more or less, or whether Westminster Abbey contains or lacks any one man’s grave, so long as the centuries, each with the crowd of personages that it deemed memorable, have chosen it as their place of honored sepulture, and laid themselves down under its pavement. The inscriptions and devices on the walls are rich with evidences of the fluctuating tastes, fashions, manners, opinions, prejudices, follies, wisdoms of the past; and thus they combine into a more truthful memorial of their dead times than any individual epitaph-maker ever meant to write.

When the services were over, many of the audience seemed inclined to linger in the nave or wander away among the mysterious aisles; for there is nothing in this world so fascinating as a Gothic minster, which always invites deeper and deeper into its heart both by vast revelations and shadowy concealments. Through the open-work screen that divides the nave from the chancel and choir we could discern the gleam of a marvellous window, but were debarred from entrance into that more sacred precinct of the Abbey by the vergers. These vigilant officials (doing their duty all the more strenuously because no fees could be exacted from Sunday visitors) flourished their staves and drove us towards the grand entrance like a flock of sheep. Lingering through one of the aisles, I happened to look down, and found my foot upon a stone inscribed with this familiar exclamation, “O rare Ben Jonson!” and remembered the story of stout old Ben’s burial in that spot, standing upright,—not, I presume, on account of any unseemly reluctance on his part to lie down in the dust, like other men, but because standing-room was all that could reasonably be demanded for a poet among the slumberous notabilities of his age. It made me weary to think of it!—such a prodigious length of time to keep one’s feet! Apart from the honor of the thing, it would certainly have been better for Ben to stretch himself at ease in some country church-yard. To this day, however, I fancy that there is a contemptuous alloy mixed up with the admiration which the higher classes of English society profess for their literary men.

Another day—in truth, many other days—I sought out Poets’ Corner, and found a sign-board and pointed finger, directing the visitor to it, on the corner house of a little lane leading towards the rear of the Abbey. The entrance is at the southeastern end of the south transept, and it is used, on ordinary occasions, as the only free mode of access to the building. It is no spacious arch, but a small, lowly door, passing through which, and pushing aside an inner screen that partly keeps out an exceedingly chill wind, you find yourself in a dim nook of the Abbey, with the busts of poets gazing at you from the otherwise bare stone-work of the walls. Great poets, too; for Ben Jonson is right behind the door, and Spenser’s tablet is next, and Butler’s on the same side of the transept, and Milton’s (whose bust you know at once by its resemblance to one of his portraits, though older, more wrinkled, and sadder than that) is close by, and a profile-medallion of Gray beneath it. A window high aloft sheds down a dusky daylight on these and many other sculptured marbles, now as yellow as old parchment, that cover the three walls of the nook up to an elevation of about twenty feet above the pavement.

It seemed to me that I had always been familiar with the spot. Enjoying a humble intimacy—and how much of my life had else been a dreary solitude!—with many of its inhabitants, I could not feel myself a stranger there. It was delightful to be among them. There was a genial awe, mingled with a sense of kind and friendly presences about me; and I was glad, moreover, at finding so many of them there together, in fit companionship, mutually recognized and duly honored, all reconciled now, whatever distant generations, whatever personal hostility or other miserable impediment, had divided them far asunder while they lived.

I have never felt a similar interest in any other tombstones, nor have I ever been deeply moved by the imaginary presence of other famous dead people. A poet’s ghost is the only one that survives for his fellow-mortals after his bones are in the dust,—and he not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere of life. What other fame is worth aspiring for? Or, let me speak it more boldly, what other long-enduring fame can exist? We neither remember nor care anything for the past, except as the poet has made it intelligibly noble and sublime to our comprehension. The shades of the mighty have no substance; they flit ineffectually about the darkened stage where they performed their momentary parts, save when the poet has thrown his own creative soul into them, and imparted a more vivid life than ever they were able to manifest to mankind while they dwelt in the body. And therefore—though he cunningly disguises himself in their armor, their robes of state, or kingly purple—it is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe all that they now are or have,—a name!

WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND VICTORIA TOWER

In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have been betrayed into a flight above or beyond the customary level that best agrees with me; but it represents fairly enough the emotions with which I passed from Poets’ Corner into the chapels, which contain the sepulchres of kings and great people. They are magnificent even now, and must have been inconceivably so when the marble slabs and pillars wore their new polish, and the statues retained the brilliant colors with which they were originally painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tarnished with antique dust. Yet this recondite portion of the Abbey presents few memorials of personages whom we care to remember. The shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain interest, because it was so long held in religious reverence, and because the very dust that settled upon it was formerly worth gold. The helmet and war-saddle of Henry V., worn at Agincourt, and now suspended above his tomb, are memorable objects, but more for Shakespeare’s sake than the victor’s own. Rank has been the general passport to admission here. Noble and regal dust is as cheap as dirt under the pavement.

I am glad to recollect, indeed (and it is too characteristic of the right English spirit not to be mentioned), one or two gigantic statues of great mechanicians, who contributed largely to the material welfare of England, sitting familiarly in their marble chairs among forgotten kings and queens. Otherwise the quaintness of the earlier monuments, and the antique beauty of some of them, are what chiefly gives them value. Nevertheless, Addison is buried among the men of rank; not on the plea of his literary fame, however, but because he was connected with nobility by marriage, and had been a secretary of state. His gravestone is inscribed with a resounding verse from Tickell’s lines to his memory, the only lines by which Tickell himself is now remembered, and which (as I discovered a little while ago) he mainly filched from an obscure versifier of somewhat earlier date.

Returning to Poets’ Corner, I looked again at the walls, and wondered how the requisite hospitality can be shown to poets of our own and the succeeding ages. There is hardly a foot of space left, although room has lately been found for a bust of Southey and a full-length statue of Campbell. At best, only a little portion of the Abbey is dedicated to poets, literary men, musical composers, and others of the gentle artist breed, and even into that small nook of sanctity men of other pursuits have thought it decent to intrude themselves. Methinks the tuneful throng, being at home here, should recollect how they were treated in their lifetime, and turn the cold shoulder, looking askance at nobles and official personages, however worthy of honorable interment elsewhere. Yet it shows aptly and truly enough what portion of the world’s regard and honor has heretofore been awarded to literary eminence in comparison with other modes of greatness,—this dimly-lighted corner (nor even that quietly to themselves in the vast minster), the walls of which are sheathed and hidden under marble that has been wasted upon the illustrious obscure.

THE GARDENS AT KEW.

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.

[Kew Gardens stand pre-eminent among conservatories, and a description of the treasures of botany there gathered cannot fail to prove of interest to our readers. Julian Hawthorne, son of the celebrated novelist, and himself a writer of rich imaginative power, thus describes these famous gardens con amore.]

On the banks of the Thames, about a dozen miles from London in a southerly direction, lies the ancient town of Twickenham. In the seventeenth century, Alexander Pope had a villa there; somewhat later, Horace Walpole built his rococo castle at Strawberry Hill, a mile beyond the village; and close by, to the north, is Whitton, where Sir John Suckling lived. Within an easy hour’s walk stands Hampton Court, built by Cardinal Wolsey of haughty and unhappy memory, and approached through the magnificent avenue of Bushey Park. Nearly as far in the opposite direction is Richmond, with its venerable bridge and famous hill, the latter commanding a view of rural English landscape which, as Thackeray says, looks as if it had its hair curled, like the waiters at the inn on its summit. A mile down the river from Richmond, and six miles from London, extend the renowned botanical gardens of Kew.

It will be seen, therefore, that Twickenham was not a bad place for a suburban residence: the roads were excellent, the scenery and associations delightful, and, by taking the train, one could be at Waterloo railway-station, in the heart of London, in half an hour. I lived there several years, and know something about it.

The most agreeable expedition of all, taking one month with another, was to Kew Gardens. In winter, it was a luxury to sit in the hot-houses; in summer it was lovely throughout. You could travel thither by train; but the best way was to go on foot. Passing through Twickenham town, and through the church-yard, with its gravestones centuries old, you came out upon the river banks. Here a broad, well-kept path followed the enchanting windings of the stream, and skirted the lawns of pretty villas on the left. On the right, soon appeared the green heights of the Hill, with clumps of mighty oaks, and the gleaming ramparts and windows of the hostelry over all. At its foot, on the river, were boat-houses and “hards,” with slender rowing-craft drawn up, or lying afloat, or pushing off into the current with their freight of white-jerseyed oarsmen. And now came into view the quaint, hog-backed bridge, with its high stone parapet, and the eddies swirling against its piers; and Richmond itself, red with brick, white with stucco, green with trees; irregular and diversified in outline; resting snug against the base of the Hill, and clambering some distance up its long slope.

You crossed the bridge, lingering on the way to admire the railroad bridge a few hundred yards farther down, reflected in the river-mirror. Between the two bridges are a couple of islets, only a few yards in diameter, but with trees growing on them; and hereabouts are generally moored three or four fishing-punts, in which sit patiently, all day long, stout, middle-aged fishermen, watching their cork floats drift down the stream, and faithfully hoping that each new cast will bring the long-expected fish. Often have I watched them, but the fish never came. Probably, as Hood conjectured, “it was caught yesterday.”

The river-side walk now continues along the Richmond side of the river. For half a mile it has the town on the right. Then the boundaries of Kew Gardens begin, and here is the most beautiful part of the walk. Immense trees stretch their ponderous boughs far across the path, and they droop so low that the pendent foliage almost sweeps the water. Through the fretted sun and shadow the path winds; every little way there is a hospitable bench, resting on which you gaze forth upon the quiet-moving river, with its passing wherries, its reflections of sky and cloud, and its battlemented residences far withdrawn beyond green meadows on the opposite side. The path is never overcrowded, even on holidays; but you may always see lovers wandering arm in arm along it; and occasionally there is a brisk exchange of “Thames chaff” between the occupants of the skimming boats and the loiterers on the shore. Meanwhile, the great domain of Kew keeps pace with you on the other hand. You are divided from it by a wide water-ditch, backed by a high stone embankment, in turn surmounted by an iron railing. But your eyes may stray whither feet cannot follow; and you note the lovely groves, the beautiful green glades and gracious vistas, the secluded paths weaving in and out, and now and then you catch the sparkle of lofty domes of glass rising above the trees, looking for all the world like gigantic soap-bubbles. It is a sort of fairy-land beyond there; and long before you arrive at the entrance your appetite for what lies within is sharp-set.

The feast in store for you more than fulfils expectation; but at this point, since we are journeying in imagination only, and miles count for nothing, we will turn back, and enter the gardens from the other end. By this route we approach its beauties gradually and in due order, and our pleasure has opportunity to grow from promising beginnings to complete content. The gate is small here, and the uniformed guardian simply gives us a glance, to assure himself that we are not toughs or pickpockets. Kew Gardens are free to the public in the afternoons, barring only the rowdy element. The public would like to have them free in the mornings, too; and, for aught I know, Sir Joseph Hooker may have yielded his assent by this time. But in the seventies, when I was there, he resisted, on the ground that it was necessary to close the gardens for half the day, in order to allow time for study, and for keeping the houses and plantations in order. The grounds are constantly visited by gardeners and botanists from all parts of the country, and from the world at large; and these persons require some measure of seclusion in order to prosecute their labors and investigations. Practical botany is not, as a rule, pursued at night; though, with the aid of electric lights, no doubt it might be.

However, we have by this time passed through some introductory shrubbery, and have emerged into a straight, open avenue, a third of a mile or more in length. Directly before us is an immensely high tower,—I should think nearly two hundred feet,—painted red, black, blue, and yellow, and fashioned to resemble a Chinese minaret or pagoda. The central shaft is circular, and, I believe, of masonry; but it is surrounded at short intervals by wooden balconies, and the roof is of a concave conical shape, like a mandarin’s hat. I never saw any signs of life in this tower, and do not know what it is used for; but I have heard that the son-in-law of Lord Capel (who first laid out Kew Gardens some two hundred years ago) added to the importance of the place by making it the head-quarters of English astronomy; and this tower, which certainly would make an excellent observatory, may have had something to do with that.

Beyond the tower extends a broad, straight path, between well-kept lawns, on which are planted trees of both native and foreign growth. Towards the river, on the left, the grounds are irregular and diversified with clumps of trees, ponds, and grassy undulations. On the right, concealed by a hedge of foliage, is the highway between Richmond and London. Before us, at the end of the walk, is an iron fence, dividing the inner enclosure—the Botanical Gardens proper—from this outer region. We reach it in due time, and, having passed the gate, are in the immediate neighborhood of the palm-house, whose bulbous domes we saw just now from the river bank. It is as beautiful a piece of glass building as ever I saw, handsomely proportioned, and of noble outline. Its great size is somewhat concealed by its charming symmetry; but when we are within, the vast dimensions are realized. Beneath its central dome the tallest palms rise unimpeded. You peep through long vistas of broad green fronds and slender, bending stems: it broadens and reaches out on every side; the strange, exotic foliage rejoices the eye, and the warm embracing atmosphere makes you feel that you are in the tropics.

To one who, like myself, pretends to no scientific knowledge of botany, and who, during these temperate summers and fitful winters, often hankers after the equator, the atmosphere of a thorough-going conservatory has a profound fascination. At one step I pass from the latitude of “the roaring forties” to that of Martinique or the Galapagos Islands. I unbutton my coat, and inhale deep breaths of air laden with the fragrance of the sun-lands. The heat is not enervating, but stimulating; for it is redolent with the life-giving emanations of plants that riot in luxuriance all the year round,—that know neither spring, autumn, nor winter,—whose multitudinous boughs were made to be the haunt of paroquets and monkeys, and amidst whose fern-enwrapped roots lurk lizards and gliding serpents. Here thrive the dark-skinned races of the torrid zone, innocent of clothes and civilization, seeking excitement not in the mutations of the stock-exchange or the scandals of society, but in trapping the alligator and shooting the jaguar and the antelope with arrows deadly with curari. Into the intricate depths of these jungles the fierce sun scarcely penetrates; the unstinted energy of his own rays has erected a barrier against himself. Here, when the rain falls, it falls in rushing torrents; when the wind blows, it blows a shrieking hurricane; when the lightning flashes, the whole dome of heaven is ablaze with passionate splendor. Here the stars poise and smoulder close to the earth, and the moon is brighter than the sun of hyperborean England. Sitting on a rustic bench hedged round with tapering palm-stems, and screened by leaves two or three of which would carpet the floor of an ordinary drawing-room, I love to think of these things.

The enjoyment is perhaps enhanced by an occasional peep through the glass walls of the paradise, revealing the melancholy Britisher, close at hand in space, but thousands of miles distant in temperature, stalking rigidly about in overcoat and gloves. Then, too, the hot-house, while giving the charm and beauty of the tropics, dispenses with the inconveniences. Here are no coral-snakes to drop from the boughs down the back of your neck; no scorpions or tarantulas to crawl up your trousers; no apes to pelt you with cocoa-nuts; no rhinoceroses to toss you above the tree-tops; no tigers to disembowel you and bite your head off. On the contrary, everything is scrupulously neat and secure. The rich loam round the roots of the plants harbors nothing noxious; the asphalt walks that thread the thicket are clean and trustworthy. Ever and anon you come upon a native of the place,—not a savage, painted in red and black stripes and with his bow-string drawn to his ear, but—a quiet and sober gardener in his shirt-sleeves, pruning a dead leaf or bough, or raking the mould round the roots of a new importation, or wielding a watering-pot. The place is quite still; the huge leaves hang motionless; the noise of a pair of steps being dragged into position resounds through the building; and, if you listen, you will at all times hear the pleasant trickling of water in some reservoir or other. If the terrors of the jungle are still too much for your nerves, you may be comforted by observing that each plant wears a label, painted on wood or enamelled on tin, describing its scientific name and habitat. It cost money to bring them here, and the very leaves of their twigs are numbered.

But there are other places to be visited besides the palm-house. As we emerge from its luxurious warmth into the cool English air, we see in front of us a large, circular pool, with broad, shallow flights of stone steps leading down to it, and English willows bending over it. Water-fowl swim and quack here, and children elude their nurses and get their feet wet. If we pass round to the other side, and then look back to the palm-house, we behold it inverted in the smooth mirror of the water,—a delectable spectacle. It was like a fairy palace already; but this shadowy duplication of it quite removes it from the material sphere, and makes it a lovely dream. Kew Gardens are full of such felicitous devices.

To our right are acres of yet unexplored hot-houses. We stroll towards them along eccentric paths, amidst beds of purple rhododendrons, geraniums, tulips, narcissuses, hyacinths, according to the season; and everywhere is the matchless English turf, compact and flawless as velvet, and the leafy, overshadowing English trees. But let us seek the dwelling-place of the Victoria Regia. It grows, I believe, on the Amazon, which is as near the equator as one can well get; but latitudes are much mixed up in Kew Gardens, and this titanic water-lily is only a few rods distant. It basks on the surface of a pool, in an atmosphere of delicious warmth,—its leaves, each of the diameter of a dining-table, covering the water. Amidst these great green disks blossoms the flower, a nosegay of which would fill a farm-wagon. It is said that the native Brazilian savages and Guianians walk about on the green leaves, and use them as rafts or stepping-stones to cross the lagoons. As to the flowers, though it is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than our own water-lilies, yet these blossoms fairly surpass them, not only because they are a foot across, but because of the richness of the innumerable petals, and the gorgeous cluster of purple stamens that form the centre. And they fill the air with a fragrance vital and voluptuous. One longs to verify in his own experience that story about walking on the leaves,—not to speak of lopping off a flower or two to furnish one’s study withal. But the quiet gardener, in his shirt-sleeves, though he appears to be absorbed in his work, has his eye on you; and you can do nothing but stand and stare in admiration.

The hottest of the hot-houses, if my memory serves me, were the cactus-house and the fern-house. The cacti were not beautiful, but they were grotesque and curious. There were none that I should have cared to handle. Their uncouth shapes and awkward putting together seem characteristic of an epoch when Nature’s handiwork was much less skilful and comely than it is now. They call up visions of forlorn wastes and desert solitudes. Their armature of thorns and prickles appears to indicate that they consider themselves very attractive and take unusual pains in the way of self-protection. Perhaps the donkeys of their time were unreasonably voracious. The modern thistle certainly indicates increased refinement of taste on the donkeys’ part. Yet this ungainliness is occasionally redeemed by exquisite blossoms, of pale, pure hues, cropping out directly from the substance of the plant, without any pretence of a stem. One variety of cactus, in addition to its prickles, had provided itself with long white hair, which, surmounting its tall and rather meagre figure, gave it the aspect of an aged man of repulsive character. Among the cacti, though not of them, was a hideous plant (or it may have been a wax model of one) apparently of the fungus family. It grew on the bare sand or rock, and both flowers and leaves had a greasy, flesh-like surface, deeply tinted, and ornamented with poisonous-looking blotches. It was of immense size, the flowers being at least a foot in diameter; and if the Vale of Gehenna has any vegetation, I should expect it to be like this. A more depraved, diabolical plant it would be impossible to imagine. Its preposterous attempt to imitate the form and characteristics of ordinary vegetation made it still more revolting. The label described it as being very rare,—which is some comfort.

The fern-house, besides being hot, is dripping with moisture; and, the glass being tinged with green, the effect is somewhat like being submerged in a tropic ocean. The greenness of the ferns is vivid enough at any rate, but this artificial light adds such intensity to it that, after a few minutes, you are on the point of forgetting that there is any other color besides green in the world. The ferns are arranged in glass cases, or vivariums. There is nothing in nature to parallel their delicate and various beauty. I call it various; but it is chiefly beauty of form, and that, too, within comparatively narrow limitations. But the fineness, the subtilty, the changefulness of line, are endlessly charming; they may have other uses, but if they had been made for pure beauty it would be use enough. They must have been of great æsthetic value to artists, especially to architects, decorators, and chasers of metals. The mediæval illuminators certainly made capital out of them; reminiscences of their shapes render lovely the ornament of innumerable missals. As for the color, green seems to admit of more gradations than any other hue, as any one who has observed the woods in spring knows; and of all others it is the most grateful and wholesome to the eye. With the rough grays and browns of the rocks it makes enchanting combinations. But, really, this moist fern atmosphere is too languorous and enervating; we must escape into the outer world, which, for a time, will appear strangely red, like that which astronomers suppose to be characteristic of the planet Mars.

It would take too long, even in imagination, to go through all Kew Gardens at this leisurely rate. Only, for splendor of color and voluptuousness of perfume, there is nothing comparable to the Conservatory, in which roses and all other bright-hued flowers are grouped and massed in sumptuous magnificence. The rose is England’s flower: she has taken possession of it, as of so many other good things, without troubling herself to prove any title to it; and there is nothing in her history or character to make her worthy of it. One can understand why Persia should claim the rose; and in our own Southern States the houses are smothered with roses, and the air that flows from them is sweeter than incense. I have, it is true, gathered English roses in December; and the houses of York and Lancaster wore roses which, red and white alike, were steeped in blood. But, if anything could justify England in her appropriation of the rose, it would be this rose-house at Kew, where criticism becomes impossible, and one can only gaze, and inhale, and love. Pink, white, crimson, golden, they cluster and triumph there: with their exquisite petals Venus and Mars might strew a couch worthy of an Olympian marriage. If love, romance, and beauty died out of human nature, this flower would bring them back; and so long as it stays with us, we may be sure that life will not lose the glory that entitles it to immortality.

While meditating these matters, we might take a turn in the wood-house,—by which I mean the building containing specimens, polished and in the rough, of all kinds of woods from all parts of the world. Their gamut of color embraces all the hues of the rainbow, and many others; and there are specimens of wood-mosaics that are inferior in beauty only to agate and marble. Or we may wander through the corridors and halls of the museum, which exhibits every sort of manufacture into which vegetable substances enter, including numberless fabrics of Indian or savage origin. One is surprised, after examining these things, that our little earth should be large enough to contain anything that is not more or less botanical.

CHATSWORTH CASTLE.

JOHN LEYLAND.

[“The Peak of Derbyshire,” concerning which Mr. Leyland has written a highly interesting book, presents in its vicinity numerous points of attraction. Here is the location of the castle of “Peveril of the Peak,” the hero of one of Scott’s romances. Here are two much more famous residences of the nobility, Haddon Hall and Chatsworth, the latter of which we have chosen as the subject of our present selection.]

If some have burst into rhapsody in describing the glories of Chatsworth, one can scarcely marvel at their extravagance, for there is in this “Palace of the Peak” and its wooded valley such a rare conjuncture of the fascinating beauties of nature with the finest expressions of art, that language can ill describe the things that are indelibly impressed upon the memory. The placid Derwent, here flowing gently between the meads on which the fallow deer are wont to herd; the graceful slopes bestudded with many a noble tree, whose spreading boughs cast down a wide expanse of shade; the hills on either hand rising in varied height and contour, crowned with a rich woodland of oak, chestnut, beech, and lime; a palace wherein every art finds most fitting expression, and where the fruits of learning are plenteously upstored,—small wonder, indeed, if here the imagination of many be stirred. As we approach the house from Baslow, crossing the Barbrook, which rises in the heights of East Moor, we enter the great park, and, passing the fruit and vegetable gardens on the right, its varied beauties are gradually unfolded with entrancing effect until Chatsworth itself is seen beyond the trees.

The House may be viewed in its majestic proportions from several points in the valley and on the slopes. From across the classic bridge of three arches, which Caius Gabriel Cibber (the father of Colley Cibber) adorned with statues, the dignity of its many-pillared façade has an imposing effect. More varied, however, is the view from the slope of the hill to the northward on the right bank of the river, where the later wing, added by the sixth Duke of Devonshire, lies prominently before the spectator, or again farther southward, where the same wing recedes in the perspective. If one would gain a fine prospect of the whole of this part of Derwent, and of the palatial edifice itself, there can be no better way than to climb to the old turreted hunting-tower, which is such a conspicuous object on the eastern hill.

There is nothing in the regular, classic lines of Chatsworth to remind us of that Chetel, the Saxon, who is believed to have given his name to the place in which he dwelt. His homestead and oxgangs of land fell, as Domesday records, to the Crown, and were given in custody to William Peveril, who had also the stronghold at Castleton, as we have seen, with Haddon by the Wye, and many a castle and manor besides. Nothing now remains of these times at Chatsworth, save, perhaps, the grove of venerable oaks, gnarled, shattered, and time-worn, upon the neighboring hill....

Sir William Cavendish and his wife built the first Chatsworth House of which we have any definite knowledge, for there is scanty record of any mediæval structure, and it was she who completed it some time after his death. The extraordinary lady—something of a vixen, we may believe—who was married to four husbands, and discomfited at any rate the last of them, was the builder also of Hardwick Hall, one of the most celebrated houses in England. The Chatsworth of her time was a quadrangular building of “surprising height,” as Cotton says, with an embattled top, and massive angle, and lateral turrets strengthening its many-windowed walls, as may be seen by a painting of it which now hangs at Chatsworth. The third husband of “Bess of Hardwick” (Sir William St. Lo) being dead, she married that powerful nobleman, George, Earl of Shrewsbury; and it was during his lifetime that Chatsworth became the residence of Mary, Queen of Scots, when she was in captivity under his charge. The unhappy prisoner is said to have passed many of her lonesome hours in that moated garden, called Queen Mary’s bower, which was laid out on the top of the low square tower or platform, seen by the visitor amid the trees as he approaches the house from the bridge; and certain rooms in the great quadrangle, though they were built long after her day, are still traditionally said to be hers. If the scandal of the Tudor court be true, the lovely queen and her imperious hostess did not well agree, and the story is not hard to believe. At any rate, the bickerings of the lady with her husband, the Earl, are matters of record, notwithstanding that Fuller has said she “was happy in her several marriages.”...

Queen Mary was brought to Chatsworth in 1570, and was there long afterwards. In that year Cecil visited the house to conduct certain negotiations, and subsequently wrote that Elizabeth was willing her rival should “take y^e ayre about your howss on horsbacke, so that your L. be in company, and not to pass from your howss above one or twoo myle except it be on y^e moores.” Several times during subsequent years she was permitted to visit Buxton, for its waters, in company with the Earl and Countess, and it will be remembered that so well did the Earl treat his charge at one time, that he thereby incurred suspicions of disloyalty to Elizabeth. During the Civil Wars the house was held by both parties. Sir John Gell occupied it for the Parliament in 1643, but, in the December of that year, the Earl of Newcastle captured it, and garrisoned it for the King, and Colonel Shalcross was besieged there in 1645 by the Parliamentary forces, but the leaguer was raised after fourteen days.

The descendants of Sir William Cavendish, and of his celebrated wife, were content, during these years, to preserve Chatsworth as it had been left to them. The present quadrangular building is the work of William, the fourth Earl and first Duke of Devonshire, who was one of those who brought about the Revolution of 1688, and placed the Prince of Orange on the throne. During the reign of James II., the Earl was committed to prison, as it is quaintly said, because he led Colonel Colepepper out of the royal presence-chamber by the nose, whereupon, after sundry difficulties, he betook himself to his estates, and, as a chronicler of the new order of things puts it, in order to prevent his patriotic mind from dwelling unduly upon the woes of his country, rebuilt the south side of Chatsworth....

Whatever the age possessed of skill and merit in every branch of art was employed for the beautification of the new Chatsworth. Caius Gabriel Cibber, the Laureate’s father, with Geeraerslius, Augustine Harris, Nost, Davis, Lanseroon, Nadauld, and others, carved the friezes, adorned with rich foliage the door-cases, worked upon many vases and other objects in and about the mansion, and peopled the gardens with nymphs and goddesses. Cibber himself has left notes of some of the sums he received, and it appears that he executed two statues in the pediments, others, both in the round and in relief, heads of Roman emperors, figures of dogs, sphinxes, and such-like. “For two statues as big as life, I had 35l. apiece, and all charges borne, and at this rate I shall endeavor to serve a nobleman in freestone.”

[Many others might be named who helped to give Chatsworth its wealth of carvings, but we shall omit the catalogue of their names.]

So completed, as a noble Palladian quadrangle, divided externally into sections by fluted Ionic pilasters, crested by a balustrade which is adorned with decorative vases, and having on its principal front a fine compartment with a sculptured pediment, Chatsworth remained, even then one of the noblest mansions of its kind in the kingdom, until the sixth Duke of Devonshire (ob. 1858) added to it the great northern wing, containing the magnificent dining-room, the sculpture-gallery, the orangery, and many other chambers, as well as a whole range of offices in the basement. Of this wing, which is three hundred and eighty-five feet in length, Sir Jeffrey Wyattville was the architect, and it will be observed that he has adopted a more broken style, and a somewhat more picturesque method, than that of Talmari, but there are many who think that his addition detracts from the classic character and fitting symmetry of the whole, to which, nevertheless, it must be admitted it gives a greater aspect of grandeur and magnificence.

We shall not here dwell at any very great length upon the many treasures of which Chatsworth is the storehouse, for they are described after the manner of a catalogue in several guide-books. Passing from the Porter’s lodge, the visitor, having traversed the whole length of the new wing, arrives at the quadrangle, which is entered through the sub-hall, where the ceiling is painted with a copy of Guido’s Aurora.

A corridor leads thence to the Great Hall, on the eastern side of the court-yard, which is a very impressive apartment, with its floor of black and white marble, laid down by the son of Watson, the wood-carver, the fine staircase at its farther end, its walls painted by Verrio and Laguerre with scenes from the life of Julius Cæsar,—among others the crossing of the Rubicon, the passage of the Adriatic, and the assassination by Brutus,—and the great scene of Cæsar’s apotheosis on the ceiling, where he goes to join the Immortals. One very noteworthy object in it is the immense slab of Derbyshire encrinitic marble that forms the top of its table. It also contains a great Turkish canoe which the sultan gave to the sixth Duke.

The south corridor, hung with pictures, leads from this hall to the Chapel, one of the most interesting chambers in Chatsworth. Here everything that art could do to lend enchantment to the classic interior has been done. The lower walls are richly panelled with fragrant cedar; above, Verrio and Laguerre have depicted the miracles of our Lord; and on the ceiling is the “Ascension;” over the altar Verrio’s “Incredulity of St. Thomas” is regarded as his masterpiece, though the work has been attributed to Laguerre; the baldacchino at the east end is of the choicest marbles and spars of Derbyshire, with figures of Faith and Hope by Gibber; and there are marvellous wood-carvings, probably by Samuel Watson and Thomas Young, but perhaps from the designs or with the assistance of Grinling Gibbons. Passing onward, the Gallery of Sketches is a place where not hours only, but days, might be spent with equal pleasure and profit, a treasure-chamber in which, as it were, the great masters of every school may be seen at their very work....

Entering the state apartments by the dressing-room, with its painted ceiling of the “Mission of Mercury to Paris,” its carved marble door-cases, and its tours de force in wood, by Gibbons or Watson, as the case may be, we notice the great vista through the open doors of the suite and pass on into the state bedroom. Here Aurora chases Night on the ceiling; we notice the fine embossed leather on the walls, the canopy embroidered, it is said, by “Bess of Hardwick,” the coronation chairs of George III. and Queen Charlotte, with their footstools, the wardrobe of Louis XVI., and much else. Next we come to the state music-room, which has similar decorations, and a strangely deceptive painting, attributed to Verrio, of a violin on its door. From this we enter the state drawing-room, where Phaeton drives the horses of the sun above us, where the walls are hung with Gobelin tapestry after the cartoons of Raffaelle, and where, in the malachite table and other fittings, there is much to attract the attention. In the state dining-room, which is the last of the suite, Verrio has depicted upon the ceiling, in his best manner, the “Fates cutting the Thread of Life.” In this luxurious chamber it is hard to think the wood-carving can be by any other than Gibbons, if we regard his characteristic manner; but whoever he may have been, the skilful craftsman has surpassed himself in giving the very touch of nature to these marvellous representations of flowers, fruit, birds, and shells....

Passing into the new wing through the dining-room (rarely shown), which is a grand chamber, simple in its style, but having a coved ceiling of white and gold, and adorned with rare marbles and splendid furniture, including tables of hornblende, porphyritic syenite, and Siberian jasper, hung with family portraits, and having sculptures by Westmacott, and others, we enter the sculpture-gallery, which is so well known that we need in this article only say that it contains works by Canova, Thorwaldsen, Schadow, Gibson, Wyatt, Westmacott, and several foreign artists. Attention is here drawn to a magnificent vase of the Blue John spar, which is said to be the largest in existence. Having then passed through the orangery, which is filled with sweet-scented blossoms or rich in ripening fruit, we leave the house and enter the gardens.

These stand high among the attractions of Chatsworth, and with their varied character of the natural and the artificial, their terraces and walks, their gay parterres, their fine trees, their fountains and rocks, their great conservatory, and their many other houses stored with choicest exotics, they are certainly among the finest gardens in England.

Few things can be more pleasant, having passed through the luxurious chambers, than to linger in these sweet-scented pathways, which are bordered by rich clusterings of flowers, to listen to the music of the waterfalls, and to see the dark-green trees, and the white-limbed nymphs, reflected in the pellucid basins. We pass down a short flight of steps, between dancing-girls after Canova, and vases of Elfdalen porphyry, and then proceeding through the French gardens, where the pathways are separated from the bright flower-beds by delicate creepers turning about lofty pedestals supporting busts and vases, we reach the great cascade, which pours from a stone water-temple, and rolls foaming down its long flight of formal descents below, to where, amid the rugged rocks at the bottom, it disappears underground.

The waterworks, which are by Grillet, and belong chiefly to the old Chatsworth, include a magnificent jet d’eau, rising from a long sheet of water between lime-trees, to a height of about two hundred and sixty feet, and a strange “weeping willow” of copper, which mysteriously pours copious streams of water from every leaf and twig. This last curiosity is in a sequestered gorge, where the rocks, placed with great labor and ingenuity, lie about apparently in wild confusion, and reared in lofty piles overgrown with moss and creeping plants.

From hence we issue by a curious gate-way of rock, turning upon a pivot, and, passing lofty cliffs over which pour deliciously cool cascades,—being, with much more in the formal gardens, the work of Sir Joseph Paxton,—reach the great conservatory, one of the wonders of Chatsworth. This magnificent house is a parallelogram in form, two hundred and seventy-six feet in length by one hundred and twenty-three feet in breadth, which rises from its basement, by two segmental curves on every side, the apex of the first forming the base of the second, to a height of seventy-six feet. So great is the extent of this wonderful building that, from its portico, which is of Grecian character, a carriage road runs from one end to the other, on either side of which, flourishing, as it were, in the warm air of their native climes, are lofty pines and palms of various kinds, dragon-trees, bananas, and many such tropical growths, with papyrus, lotus, and other water plants in tanks, and gorgeous flowering shrubs, making the air heavy with the rare perfumes of the East. Before descending to the lower gardens, it is well to survey from the terraces near the conservatory, or the quaint old hunting-tower above, the wide prospect of Chatsworth Park, with the palatial house by the Derwent, the picturesque village of Edensor on the slope beyond, and the hills rising, covered with umbrageous groves of trees. Below, in the pleasure gardens, passing many bright parterres, we reach some very fine forest-trees, and notably a magnificent Spanish chestnut, and then, beyond the great Emperor Fountain, pass trees planted by Her Majesty (then Princess Victoria) in 1832, as well as by her mother, the Duchess of Kent, by Prince Albert in 1843, and by the Emperor of Russia and the Grand Duke Michael in 1816 and 1818. The Italian garden, with its trim flower-beds, edged with privet, its beautiful acacia and other trees, its wall-like hedges, its long still basin and lofty fountain, surrounded by sculptured vases, is, from its very characteristic features, among the most attractive and interesting of the formal portion of the Chatsworth grounds.

We have given a brief and altogether imperfect account of the celebrated gardens, but this is scarcely the place in which to dwell upon the rare varieties of plants that are successfully cultivated there, or upon the scientific skill which has enabled the finest growths of tropical climes to flourish in Derwent Dale. Certainly no visitor who has lingered in these enchanting places will fail to appreciate the graceful compliment that Marshal Tallard, who was taken prisoner by Marlborough in 1704, paid to the Duke of Devonshire on leaving the “Palace by the Peak.” “My Lord Duke,” he said, “when I compute the days of my captivity in England, I shall omit those I passed at Chatsworth.”

KING ARTHUR’S LAND.

J. YOUNG.

[Cornwall, one of the last strongholds of the ancient Britons in their island realm, and famous as the scene of many of the adventures recorded of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights, has much in itself worthy of description, and we give in the following selection some appreciative Cornish notes.]

Large and merry was the party with which we sallied forth from Helstone on a beautiful September day to visit the Lizard and Kynance Cove. The drive itself is not especially interesting, but grand is the expanse of sea and coast which bursts upon you when you come in sight of the Lizard Point, which, be it remarked, is not considered to derive its name from any fancy resemblance between its shape and that of a lizard, or from the variegated color of the geological formation, but from the Cornish word Liazherd, a headland.

This is in every way a remarkable piece of coast,—to geologists especially so,—as it is the one district in all Great Britain in which the serpentine formation is to be met with, whereas most of the Cornish coast is either granite or slate. Of the peculiar beauty of the serpentine marble one has no occasion to speak, almost every one having seen a specimen of it in one shape or another, either as forming part of the internal decoration of a church, or as worked up into some trinket, as a brooch, bracelet, cross, sleeve-link, or other nicknack. It is of two kinds, the red and the green,—they are, indeed, frequently found intermixed,—the former somewhat resembling porphyry, and the latter verd antique. Frequently a vein of steatite, or soapstone, introduces a lustrous white streak into the serpentine, and occasionally it is crossed by a beautiful purple or lilac band.

The beauty of the serpentine district, especially at the Lizard and Kynance Cove, can scarce be imagined by those who have not visited it, as the perpetual friction of the waves has worn the rocks to such a degree of smoothness as makes crag and cavern appear as if they had been subjected to a high polish. The serpentine formation is said to begin at the Manacles, a chain of rocks near Falmouth; but the marble of the Manacles is not true serpentine, being a much duller green, unrelieved by the bright red and purple tints. Serpentine is extensively employed in the interior decorations of churches, particularly in the West of England. It is also used for ornamental work in some of the London shops; but any one desirous of seeing it without the trouble of a journey to Cornwall may do so by going to the Geological Museum, Jermyn Street, which contains beautiful specimens of serpentine both in the architectural decorations and among the minerals collected for exhibition.

Among other objects of interest in the neighborhood of the Lizard is Llandewednack Church, famed as being the last edifice in which divine service was ever performed in Cornish. This latter fact is interesting to the philologist, but the naturalist and the epicure may care more to know that Asparagus Island, close to Kynance Cove, is the habitat of that vegetable which we deservedly reckon among the choicest of our spring delicacies. The Lizard Lighthouse and the curious piece of coast about Cadgwith are also worth a visit.

Our head-quarters at the time of making this excursion were at Helstone, rather an interesting old town. One ancient custom still exists there, in the observance of “Furry Day,” supposed to be the corruption of “Flora’s Day,” which festival is annually held on March 9, and is celebrated by the principal inhabitants dancing and carrying flowers up and down the High Street. The entertainment concludes with a ball in the evening at the town hall or one of the inns. Harvest is gathered in with great rejoicings in this part of the country, as in the whole West of England. When the last sheaf is gathered in, the farmer or the principal “hand” cries out, cutting off at the same time a handful of the corn and holding it by the neck,—i.e., stalk,—

“I hab ’im! I hab ’im! I hab ’im!”

The answer is,—

“What hab ye? What hab ye? What hab ye?”

And the rejoinder,—

“A neck! A neck! A neck!”

A handful, called collectively “the neck,” is preserved, decorated with flowers and ribbons, in farm-kitchen or hall of manor-house, as it may be, until the next harvest. There can be little doubt that we see in these old customs the traces of some long forgotten heathen observances.

Near Helstone is the Looe Pool, the largest lake of Southwestern England, and believed by some to be the lake described by Tennyson in the “Morte d’Arthur,” though the Rev. Mr. Hawker, in his “Footprints of Former Men in Old Cornwall,” claims the honor for the Dozmere or Dermary Pool in North Cornwall. If the mysterious mere into which the magic sword Excalibur was thrown by Sir Bedivere at the dying king’s command, and caught by the wondrous arm

“Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,”

was but a creature of the poet’s own brain, we fancy Dozmere Pool must have been the spot intended, the laureate being, we believe, better acquainted with northern than with western Cornwall. But if Tennyson founded his descriptions of the passing away of Arthur on old chronicles or romances partly handed down by tradition, we give our vote in favor of the Looe, which, like the lake in the idyll, has on its bank the remains of an ancient chapel, and in which the poet’s description of

“The long wave lapping on the shingly beach,”

is completely realized.

It is also comparatively near to Land’s End; and “the land of Lyonnesse,” so often alluded to in the legends of King Arthur, is said to be a district now submerged by the sea, but formerly lying between Land’s End and Scilly. All these are but conjectures, however. More reliable records of the past are to be found in the traces of charcoal-burning in the woods round the Looe, which bear evidence of the sacrifice of their trees made by the then owners of the property to the royal cause during the civil wars. The Cornishmen were mostly Royalists. Though the Looe is always spoken of as a lake, it is, in fact, only divided from the sea by a narrow neck of land called the Bar, which once in about every three years is cut through with a great amount of ceremony, the mayor of Helstone asking permission of the lord of the manor, and presenting him, as immemorial custom enjoins, with three half-pence.

Porthleven, the little port or watering-place of Helstone, may be interesting to Londoners as the shipping-place of much of the granite used in building the Thames embankment.

Between the Lizard and Mount’s Bay is a fine rugged piece of scenery, the grandest headland of which is called Trewarvas Point. From it can be seen the three noble capes of Mullion, Helzephron, and the Lizard; and at Trewarvas itself are some romantic fantastic-shaped rocks, one of which, from some fancied resemblance to an ecclesiastic in his robes, has obtained the name of the “Bishop.”

From Helstone we went to Falmouth, the enchanting beauty of the scenery round which place is little known to those who have merely paid a flying visit to that dirty seaport, and perhaps inspected the harbor. Falmouth itself, as we suppose most persons know, is not a particularly ancient town. Sir Walter Raleigh was the first to discover its great advantages of situation, and it was at his recommendation that Queen Elizabeth had the town and harbor built. But, comparatively modern as is Falmouth itself, its neighborhood abounds in the associations of antiquity. A gentleman’s seat on the shore of the beautiful creek known as Helford River still bears the name of Gyllindune,—i.e., “William’s grave,” from being a traditional burial-place of Prince William, son of Henry I., and lost in the wreck of “The White Ship.” This tradition goes far to contradict a statement we met with in a number of a popular magazine, to the effect that while the French popular mind retains many legends of the highest antiquity, in England popular tradition does not stretch back to a period more remote than the civil wars of the seventeenth century....

The scenery in the neighborhood of Falmouth, especially on the banks of Helford River, is beautiful in the extreme. Rugged wildness contrasted with fertility, tropical foliage, and an endless succession of romantic creeks and headlands, combine to form an earthly paradise. After several delightful weeks in this picturesque region, we proceeded northwards to the little town of Liskeard, in East Cornwall, in which we had been recommended to pass a couple of days, on account of its extreme quietude and seclusion. Our surprise may be easily imagined, therefore, when we found, on reaching this tranquil spot, that we were in the midst of Vanity Fair. We had not known, previously to our arrival, that the second and third of October were the grand saturnalia of the inhabitants of Liskeard and neighborhood, the annual honey fair, or St. Matthew’s Fair.

St. Matthew’s Day, indeed, takes place a fortnight previously, but doubtless the fair dates from a period antecedent to the alteration of the style. The sale of honey, cattle, etc., only occupies the morning of the first day; the afternoon, and, indeed, the night until a late hour, and the whole of the second day, being devoted to pleasuring. Sweetmeats of various kinds, particularly a sticky-looking kind of taffy, called, we believe, “clidgy,” seem the staple commodity of the pleasure fair. Some of the little baskets and other ornaments made out of these appetizing comestibles are really very elegant. Another great feature is the “Cheap Jack,” or rather “Cheap Jill,” a young lady who, with untiring lungs, sells by auction the whole day long fancy articles, of which bead fly-traps seem by far the most numerous. Could not this branch of female employment be suggested to those interested in enlarging the sphere of women’s occupations, as one especially appropriate to the fair sex? The two qualifications most necessary for a “Cheap Jack,” volubility and mercantile smartness, are usually considered, even by her detractors, as especial fortes of woman.

From the windows of our hotel we saw, as from a stage-box, the humors of the fair, and especially did we obtain an excellent view of “The Enchanted Temple of Science and Mystery,” and similar enlivening exhibitions. The wrestling booth was, as might be expected in this muscularly Christian country, a favorite resort. A peep within this gladiatorial arena, however, only revealed very mild-looking athletes, and spectators as grave as judges, looking much more as if they were at meeting than at a fair. It must be stated, to the credit of the Liskeard revellers, that everything went on with the utmost decorum and order. It shows the primitive simplicity of these west country folks that they can still find so much pleasure in these unsophisticated amusements, but it must be borne in mind that Liskeard is a town usually so quiet, not to say sleepy, that it has been declared by a resident that he could fire a gun down the street without hitting any one!...

The Cornish folk are, as a rule, earnest in their religious convictions, though, like other Kelts, occasionally inclined to fanaticism. All traces of the savagery which distinguished them in the rough days of the wreckers, have, of course, entirely passed away under the light of advancing civilization. The Cornishmen are extremely hospitable, and the county dainties of cider, clotted cream, potato cake, griddle or girdle cakes (baked upon the hearth), and fish or squab pies, are luxuries not to be despised any more than the figgadowdy (Anglicé, plum-puddings). Like all the inhabitants of remote districts, the Cornish folk are extremely clannish, and think much of the ties of kindred, the proverbial expression “A Cornish Jack” showing how every individual endeavors to prove himself everybody else’s “Cousin John.” They are very superstitious, though whether they yet retain the old beliefs mentioned by Polwhele, such as that of the ghost of a ship-wrecked mariner announcing his fate by calling his own name on the rock, and that when the wind roars boisterously it is the wicked giant Tregeagle roaring, we cannot, of course, say.

Many names of places bear witness to the widely scattered traditions connected with King Arthur. One group of rocks of various sizes goes by the name of “King Arthur’s cups and saucers,” a name involving a bold anachronism, for one hardly imagines saucers to have been much used before the introduction of tea and coffee, beverages, as every one knows, not brought into use in this country for more than a thousand years after the supposed period of King Arthur.

The belief in fairies has not yet gone out in this remote shire, and we have been in an old house said to be haunted by the ghost of a cow.

The fauna and flora of Cornwall are much the same as in other parts of Western England, except, of course, that some shrubs and other plants usually found only in warm climates or in greenhouses grow here freely out of doors. The Cornish chough among birds, and among plants the Cornish heath, are, as the names show, indigenous here. It is strange that the little harebell, so universal in Scotland and in most parts of England, should be here a great rarity. We recollect how, on our excursion to the Lizard, a lady of the neighborhood of Helstone had been entreated by a friend unable to accompany her to bring home a harebell, if she found any, as none grew near her own residence.

Those travelling in a country new to them are often more struck by some feature of the landscape different to what they have been accustomed to, than by the grander outlines of the scenery. Who, for instance, that has ever travelled in Western Cornwall, can fail to recollect the milestones in the shapes of obelisks, or the substitutes for stiles formed by narrow openings in the hedges with stepping-stones placed at equal distances, like the ploughshares in the ordeal by fire, for foot passengers to pass across? The little cabbage-plantation or mound of débris in the centre of a field is another characteristically Cornish institution. Any account of Cornwall would be incomplete without some allusion to the pilchard fishery, next to mining, the great industry of the county. Innumerable quantities of this fish are annually salted and exported to the Roman Catholic countries of Southern Europe to be eaten during Lent. The popular Cornish name of the pilchard, “Fair Maid,” is said to be from the Spanish fumado,—i.e., “smoked fish.”

THE ENGLISH LAKE DISTRICT.

AMELIA BARR.

[The lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, England, possess a double attraction to the tourist, the one being for their intrinsic beauty and charm, the other for their fame as the loved haunts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and other famed writers. They have become a place of pilgrimage to the devotees of poetry, and we give their story in the words of one who saw in them this double charm.]

While dinner was being prepared, we strolled to the bridge which spans the Leven,—at this point a swift, shallow stream, with an inconceivable sparkle, scarcely deep enough to float the light skiff in whose shadow a great trout was posing himself against the crystal water. In half an hour we had a couple of his fellows in a napkin, deliciously browned. It is worth while mentioning that Loch Lomond in Scotland and Lake Windermere in England discharge by rivers of the same length and name; but the Scotch Leven passes through a bleak, uninteresting country, while the English Leven ripples and dances through a vale of sylvan beauty, full of the music of many cascades.

We hired a row-boat to take us up Windermere to the Ferry Inn; and here, as an old Laker, I may say, have nothing to do with a sail; take a row-boat, and you are safe; but all these mountain-locked waters are subject to what is known in the district as a “bottom-wind;” and the sail-boat caught in that passionate gust will need the most skilful handling.

As we neared Storrs Hall, all the bright loveliness of the lake broke upon us, as it did upon Scott in 1825, on that memorable day when Southey, Wilson, Wordsworth, and Canning met him here, and Windermere glittered with all her sails in honor of the great Northern minstrel. The Bailie had the whole passage from Lockhart’s Life of Scott by heart,—the brilliant cavalcades through the woods, the boatings on the lake by moonlight, the music and sunshine, the flags and streamers, the gay dresses and beautiful women, the hum of voices, the cheers of the multitude, and the splash of innumerable oars: he recalled for us the whole scene of the flotilla, as it wound among the beautiful isles of the loveliest lake in the world, half a century ago.

We had sent our luggage on to the Salutation Inn at Ambleside, for we had determined to stay one night at the Ferry Inn, nearly opposite Bowness, and about half-way up the lake. I had wonderful memories of this charming old hostelry, and many a time, when thousands of miles away, I had heard the pleasure-skiffs fret their cut-waters against the pebbly shore, many a time in dreams dripped silver from my oars in the moonlight, or wandered in the groves of laurel and lilacs and laburnums behind it.

Then it was a perfect old English inn, with a kitchen whose Homeric breadth and bright cheerfulness made it a constant picture. Then there was on one side of it a curiously carved and twisted oaken dresser, extending from the floor to the ceiling, black with age and bright with labor. Mugs and tankards of bright pewter stood out against this dark background; huge hams and sad-colored herbs descended from the rafters. A great wood-fire always blazed on the hearth. Lasses in snow-white jackets and linsey-woolsey petticoats went in and out about their duties. The handsome, motherly landlady looked after every guest; and Arnold, the jolliest landlord that ever lived, sat smoking in the ingle, chatting with some traveller, or listening to the yarn of a lake fisherman.

As we approached the little bay, I saw that the Ferry Inn had gone; a grand modern hotel stood upon its site. I refused to be disenchanted. Perhaps Arnold was dead also. Nothing could be as it had been, and I asked to cross over at once to Bowness. But, while I am speaking of Arnold, I may tell again a story he was very fond of telling about Wordsworth.

“Knaw’d Wadswuth?” he would say, with a merry twinkle. “I did, a few. This wuz the way I comed to knaw him, so as I shan’t forget ’n again in a hurry. When I wuz guard of the Whitehaven mail, as we wuz a-slapping along, and just coming to a sharpish turn,—the carner near the bridge, this side Keswick,—what should we see but sumthin’ uncommon tall and grand, tooling along a little pony-shay!

“‘Oh, Lord! here’s a smash,’ said I, and afore the words wuz out of my mouth, crash went the shay all to smitherins, and slap went the driver over a wall into a plantation, arms out and great-coat a-flying. We thought fur sure ’twas all over with ’n; but presently he picked hisself up uncommon tall again, and sez he, ‘I’ll have this matter thoroughly investigated.’ With that he walked off towards the public.

“‘Bill,’ said coachee to I, very down like, ‘who de think that is?’

“‘Well, who be ’t, Jem?’ sez I.

“‘Why, who but the powit Wadswuth.’”

Then he would add, “If you goes to Keswick, just by the bridge you’ll see the place where we spilt the powit! Ay, often and often since that, when I’ve a-seen the grand fowks draw up to the Mount, I’ve a-said sly like to myself, ‘Ah, gentlemen, you be going to see the powit, but you never had him to call upon you, unexpected like, on a flying visit over a wall.’”

Windermere at Bowness is like what the Thames is at Richmond. Bowness is the pleasure-village of the lake country. There yachtsmen flourish and beauties linger. The band makes music in the grounds of the Royal Hotel, and the crowds promenade or float gracefully past in the dreamy waltz. Every window is open, the balconies are full of life and color, lovely faces peep out from among the clustering clematis, twinkling lights and soft strains are on the lake until midnight, and flowers, flowers, flowers touch you everywhere.

Two men, as dissimilar as possible, I can always see in the streets of Bowness—the handsome Professor Wilson, poet and athlete, whom the Westmoreland people so aptly described as “strang as a lion, lish as a trout, wi’ sich antics as niver,” and the little, plain-faced, serious Wilberforce,—Wilson joyous and strong, and settling all things “wi’ the waff o’ his hand,” Wilberforce sauntering along, as he tells us in his diary, comforting himself by repeating the one hundred and nineteenth Psalm. Wilson lived at Elleray, now close to Windermere railway-station, and Wilberforce had a residence among the stately woods of Rayrigg, just outside Bowness.

The next morning we started for Ambleside, taking on the way the village of Troutbeck. Troutbeck is a funny misnomer for the rivulet so named, for not a trout has ever been found in it. But for a typically exquisite village, no dream of painter or poet can rival it. The cottages, with their numerous gables, seem to have been built on some model conceived by the rarest poetical genius. They are of the stone and slate of the country; age has given them “a green radiance” and bathed them in the lustre of lichens. The porches are of meeting tree-stems or reclining cliffs, and are dripping with roses and matted with virgin bower. Nowhere else in the world is there “a mile-long congregation of such rural dwellings, dropped down just where a painter or poet would wish them, and bound together by old groves of ash, oak, and sycamores, by flower-gardens and fruit-orchards rich as those of the Hesperides.”...

There are places we visit and forget, but this is never the case with Ambleside; walk through its streets, and they become forever a part of the spirit’s still domains. John Ruskin, in his “Characteristics of Nature,” has referred to the peculiar influence which is exerted upon people who live in a neighborhood where granite is abundant; and Wordsworth tells us that

“One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach us more of man,
Of moral evil, and of good,
Than all the sages can.”