Chapter VIII: The Cavalier (2)

And as we have been looking at a steeple, let us flit away for a moment and pay our reverence at the foot of the tallest spire in England,--that of Salisbury Cathedral. Here we see it from below, looking up,--one of the most striking pictures ever taken. Look well at it; Chichester has just fallen, and this is a good deal like it,--some have thought raised by the same builder. It has bent somewhat (as you may see in these other views) from the perpendicular; and though it has been strengthened with clamps and framework, it must crash some day or other, for there has been a great giant tugging at it day and night for five hundred years, and it will at last shut up into itself or topple over with a sound and thrill that will make the dead knights and bishops shake on their stone couches, and be remembered all their days by year-old children. This is the first cathedral we ever saw, and none ever so impressed us since. Vast, simple, awful in dimensions and height, just beginning to grow tall at the point where our proudest steeples taper out, it fills the whole soul, pervades the vast landscape over which it reigns, and, like Niagara and the Alps, abolishes that five- or six-foot personality in the beholder which is fostered by keeping company with the little life of the day in its little dwellings. In the Alps your voice is as the piping of a cricket. Under the sheet of Niagara the beating of your heart seems to trivial a movement to take reckoning of. In the buttressed hollow of one of these palaeozoic cathedrals you are ashamed of your ribs, and blush for the exiguous pillars of bone on which your breathing structure reposes. Before we leave Salisbury, let us look for a moment into its cloisters. A green court-yard, with a covered gallery on its level, opening upon it through a series of Gothic arches. You may learn more, young American, of the difference between your civilization and that of the Old World by one look at this than from an average lyceum-lecture an hour long. Seventy years of life means a great deal to you; how little, comparatively, to the dweller in these cloisters! You will have seen a city grow up about you, perhaps; your whole world will have been changed half a dozen times over. What change for him? The cloisters are just as when he entered them,--just as they were a hundred years ago,--just as they will be a hundred years hence.

These old cathedrals are beyond all comparison what are best worth seeing, of a man's handiwork, in Europe. How great the delight to be able to bring them, bodily, as it were, to our own firesides! A hundred thousand pilgrims a year used to visit Canterbury. Now Canterbury visits us. See that small white mark on the pavement. That marks the place where the slice of Thomas à Becket's skull fell when Reginald Fitz Urse struck it off with a "Ha!" that seems to echo yet through the vaulted arches. And see the broad stains, worn by the pilgrims' knees as they climbed to the martyr's shrine. For four hundred years this stream of worshippers was wearing itself into these stones. But there was the place where they knelt before the altar called "Beckets's Crown." No! the story that those deep hollows in the marble were made by the pilgrims' knees is too much to believe,--but there are the hollows, and that is the story.

And now, if you would see a perfect gem of the art of photography, and at the same time an unquestioned monument of antiquity which no person can behold without interest, look upon this,--the monument of the Black Prince. There is hardly a better piece of work to be found. His marble effigy lies within a railing, with a sounding board. Above this, on a beam stretched between two pillars, hang the arms he wore at the Battle of Poitiers,--the tabard, the shield, the helmet, the gauntlets, and the sheath that held his sword, which weapon it is said that Cromwell carried off. The outside casing of the shield has broken away, as you observe, but the lions or lizards, or whatever they were meant for, and the flower-de-laces or plumes may still be seen. The metallic scales, if such they were, have partially fallen from the tabard, or frock, and the leather shows bare in parts of it.

Here, hard by, is the sarcophagus of Henry IV. and his queen, also inclosed with a railing like the other. It was opened about thirty years ago, in presence of the dean of the cathedral. There was a doubt, so it was said, as to the monarch's body having been really buried there. Curiosity had nothing to do with it, it is to be presumed. Every over-ground sarcophagus is opened sooner or later, as a matter of course. It was hard work to get it open; it had to be sawed. They found a quantity of hay,--fresh herbage, perhaps, when it was laid upon the royal body four hundred years ago,--and a cross of twigs. A silken mask was on the face. They raised it and saw his red beard, his features well preserved, a gap in the front-teeth, which there was probably no court-dentist to supply,--the same the citizens looked on four centuries ago

"In London streets that coronation-day,
When Bolingbroke rode on roan Barbary";

then they covered it up to take another nap of a few centuries, until another dean has an historical doubt,--at last, perhaps, to be transported by some future Australian Barnum to the Sidney Museum and exhibited as the mummy of one of English Pharaohs. Look, too, at the "Warriors' Chapel," in the same cathedral. It is a very beautiful stereograph, and may be studied for a long time, for it is full of the most curious monuments.

Before leaving these English churches and monuments, let us enter, if but for a moment, the famous Beauchamp Chapel at Warwick. The finest of the views (323, 324) recalls that of the Black Prince's tomb, as a triumph of photography. Thus, while the whole effect of the picture is brilliant and harmonious, we shall find, on taking a lens, that we can count every individual bead in the chaplet of the monk who is one of the more conspicuous reliefs on the sarcophagus. The figure of this monk itself is about half an inch in height, and its face may be completely hidden by the head of a pin. The whole chapel is a marvel of workmanship and beauty. The monument of Richard Beauchamp in the centre, with the frame of brass over the recumbent figure, intended to support the drapery thrown upon it to protect the statue,--with the mailed shape of the warrior, his feet in long-pointed shoes resting against the muzzled bear and the griffin, his hands raised, but not joined,--this monument, with the tomb of Dudley, Earl of Leicester,--Elizabeth's Leicester, --and that of the other Dudley, Earl of Warwick,--all enchased in these sculptured walls and illuminated through that pictured window, where we can dimly see the outlines of saints and holy maidens,--form a group of monumental jewels such as only Henry VII.'s Chapel can equal. For these two pictures (323 and 324) let the poor student pawn his outside-coat, if he cannot have them otherwise.

Of abbeys and castles there is no end, ago No. 4, Tintern Abbey, is the finest, on the whole, we have ever seen. No. 2 is also very perfect and interesting. In both, the masses of ivy that clothe the ruins are given with wonderful truth and effect. Some of these views have the advantage of being very well colored. Warwick Castle (81) is one of the best and most the interesting of the series of castles; Caernarvon is another still more striking.

We may as well break off here as anywhere, so far as England is concerned. England is one great burial-ground to an American. As islands are built up out of the shields of insects, so her soil is made the land of Burns, and see what one man can do to idealize and glorify the common life about him! Here is a poor "ten-footer", as we should call it, the cottage William "Burness" built with his own hands, where he carried his young bride Agnes, and where the boy Robert, his first-born, was given to the light and air which he made brighter and freer for mankind. Sit still and do not speak,--but see that your eyes do not grow dim as these pictures pass before them: The old hawthorn under which Burns sat with Highland Mary,--a venerable duenna-like tree, with thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty _chevelure_ of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No. 4),--a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift your hand to your eyes and draw a long breath,--for what words would come so near to us as these pictured, nay, real, memories of the dead poet who made a nation of a province, and the hearts of mankind its tributaries?

And so we pass to many-towered and turreted and pinnacled Abbotsford, and to large-windowed Melrose, and to peaceful Dryburgh, where, under a plain bevelled slab, lies the great Romancer whom Scotland holds only second in her affections to her great poet. Here in the foreground of the Melrose Abbey view (436) is a gravestone which looks as if it might be deciphered with a lens. Let us draw out this inscription from the black archives of oblivion. Here it is:

In Memory of
Francis Cornel, late
Labourer in Greenwell,
Who died 11th July, 1827,
aged 89 years. Also
Margaret Betty, his
Spouse, who died 2'd Dec'r,
1831, aged 89 years.

This is one charm, as we have said over and over, of the truth-telling photograph. We who write in great magazines of course float off from the wreck of our century, on our life-preserving articles, to immortality. What a delight it is to snatch at the unknown head that shows for an instant through the wave, and drag it out to personal recognition and a share in our own sempiternal buoyancy! Go and be photographed on the edge of Niagara, O unknown aspirant for human remembrance! Do not throw yourself, O traveller, into Etna, like Empedocles, but be taken by the camera standing on the edge of the crater! Who is that lady in the carriage at the door of Burns's cottage? Who is that gentleman in the shiny hat on the sidewalk in front of the Shakspeare house? Who are those two fair youths lying dead on a heap of dead at the trench's side in the cemetery of Melegnano, in that ghastly glass stereograph in our friend Dr. Bigelow's collection? Some Austrian mother has perhaps seen her boy's features in one of those still faces. All these seemingly accidental figures are not like the shapes put in by artists to fill the blanks in their landscapes, but real breathing persons, or forms that have but lately been breathing, not found there by chance, but brought there with a purpose, fulfilling some real human errand, or at least, as in the last-mentioned picture, waiting to be buried.

Before quitting the British Islands, it would be pleasant to wander through the beautiful Vale of Avoca in Ireland, and to look on those many exquisite landscapes and old ruins and crosses which have been so admirably rendered in the stereograph. There is the Giant's Causeway, too,--not in our own collection, but which our friend Mr. Waterston has transplanted with all its basaltic columns to his Museum of Art in Chester Square. Those we cannot stop to look at now, nor these many objects of historical or poetical interest which lie before us on our own table. Such are the pictures of Croyland Abbey, where they kept that jolly drinking-horn of "Witlaf, King of the Saxons", which Longfellow has made famous; Bedd-Gelert, the grave of the faithful hound immortalized by--nay, who has immortalized--William Spencer; the stone that marks the spot where William Rufus fell by Tyrrel's shaft; the Lion's Head in Dove Dale, fit to be compared with our own Old Man of the Mountain; the "Bowder Stone," or the great boulder of Borrowdale; and many others over which we love to dream at idle moments.

When we began these notes of travel, we meant to take our fellow-voyagers over the continent of Europe, and perhaps to all the quarters of the globe. We should make a book, instead of an article, if we attempted it. Let us, instead of this, devote the remaining space to an enumeration of a few of the most interesting pictures we have met with, many of which may be easily obtained by those who will take the trouble we have taken to find them.

Views of Paris are everywhere to be had, good and cheap. The finest illuminated or transparent paper view we have ever seen is one of the Imperial Throne. There is another illuminated view, the Palace of the Senate, remarkable for the beauty with which it gives the frescoes on the cupola. We have a most interesting stereograph of the Amphitheatre of Nismes, with a _bull-fight_ going on in its arena at the time when the picture was taken. The contrast of the vast Roman structure, with its massive arched masonry, and the scattered assembly, which seems almost lost in the spaces once filled by the crowd of spectators who thronged to the gladiatorial shows, is one of the most striking we have ever seen. At Quimperlé is a house so like the curious old building lately removed from Dock Square in Boston, that it is commonly taken for it at the first view. The Roman tombs at Arles and the quaint streets at Troyes are the only other French pictures we shall speak of, apart from the cathedrals to be mentioned.

Of the views in Switzerland, it may be said that the Glaciers are perfect, in the glass pictures, at least. Waterfalls are commonly poor: the water glares and looks like cotton-wool. Staubbach, with the Vale of Lauterbrunnen, is an exquisite exception. Here are a few signal specimens of Art. No. 4018, Seelisberg,--unsurpassed by any glass stereograph we have ever seen, in all the qualities that make a faultless picture. No. 4119, Mont Blanc from Sta. Rosa,--the finest view of the mountain for general effect we have met with. No. 4100, Suspension-Bridge of Fribourg,--very fine, but makes one giddy to look at it. Three different views of Goldau, where the villages lie buried under these vast masses of rock, recall the terrible catastrophe of 1806, as if it had happened but yesterday.

Almost everything from Italy is interesting. The ruins of Rome, the statues of the Vatican, the great churches, all pass before us but in a flash, as we are expressed by them on our ideal locomotive. Observe: next to snow and ice, stone is best rendered in the stereograph. Statues are given absolutely well, except where there is much foreshortening to be done, as in this of the Torso, where you see the thigh is unnaturally lengthened. See the mark on the Dying Gladiator's nose. That is where Michel Angelo mended it. There is Hawthorne's Marble Faun, (the one called of Praxiteles,) the Laocoön, the Apollo Belvedere, the Young Athlete with the Strigil, the Forum, the Cloaca Maxima, the Palace of the Caesars, the bronze Marcus Aurelius,--those wonders all the world flocks to see,--the God of Light has multiplied them all for you, and you have only to give a paltry fee to his servant to own in fee-simple the best sights that earth has to show.

But look in at Pisa one moment, not for the Leaning Tower and the other familiar objects, but for the interior of the Campo Santo, with its holy earth, its innumerable monuments, and the fading frescoes on its walls,--see! there are the Three Kings of Andrea Orgagna. And there hang the broken chains that once, centuries ago, crossed the Arno,--standing off from the wall, so that it seems as if they might clank, if you jarred the stereoscope. Tread with us the streets of Pompeii for a moment: there are the ruts made by the chariots of eighteen hundred years ago,--it is the same thing as stooping down and looking at the pavement itself. And here is the amphitheatre out of which the Pompeians trooped when the ashes began to fall round them from Vesuvius. Behold the famous gates of the Baptistery at Florence,--but do not overlook the exquisite iron gates of the railing outside; think of them as you enter our own Common in Boston from West Street, through those portals which are fit for the gates of--not paradise. Look at this sugar-temple,--no, it is of marble, and is the monument of one of the Scalas at Verona. What a place for ghosts that vast _palazzo_ behind it! Shall we stand in Venice on the Bridge of Sighs, and then take this stereoscopic gondola and go through it from St. Mark's to the Arsenal? Not now. We will only look at the Cathedral,--all the pictures under the arches show in our glass stereograph,--at the Bronze Horses, the Campanile, the Rialto, and that glorious old statue of Bartholomew Colleoni,--the very image of what a partisan leader should be, the broad-shouldered, slender-waisted, stern-featured old soldier who used to leap into his saddle in full armor, and whose men would never follow another leader when he died. Well, but there have been soldiers in Italy since his day. Here are the encampments of Napoleon's army in the recent campaign. This is the battle-field of Magenta with its trampled grass and splintered trees, and the fragments of soldiers' accoutrements lying about.

And here (leaving our own collection for our friend's before-mentioned) here is the great trench in the cemetery of Melegnano, and the heap of dead lying unburied at its edge. Look away, young maiden and tender child, for this is what war leaves after it. Flung together, like sacks of grain, some terribly mutilated, some without mark of injury, all or almost all with a still, calm look on their faces. The two youths, before referred to, lie in the foreground, so simple-looking, so like boys who had been overworked and were lying down to sleep, that one can hardly see the picture for the tears these two fair striplings bring into the eyes.

The Pope must bless us before we leave Italy. See, there he stands on the balcony of St. Peter's, and a vast crowd before him with uncovered heads as he stretches his arms and pronounces his benediction.

Before entering Spain we must look at the Circus of Gavarni, a natural amphitheatre in the Pyrenees. It is the most picturesque of stereographs, and one of the best. As for the Alhambra, we can show that in every aspect; and if you do not vote the lions in the court of the same a set of mechanical h----gs and nursery bugaboos, we have no skill in entomology. But the Giralda, at Seville, is really a grand tower, worth looking at. The Seville Boston-folks consider it the linchpin, at least, of this rolling universe. And what a fountain this is in the Infanta's garden! what shameful beasts, swine and others, lying about on their stomachs! the whole surmounted by an unclad gentleman squeezing another into the convulsions of a galvanized frog! Queer tastes they have in the Old World. At the Fountain of the Ogre in Berne, the giant, or large-mouthed private person, upon the top of the column, is eating a little infant as one eats a radish, and has plenty more,--a whole bunch of such,--in his hand, or about him.

A voyage down the Rhine shows us nothing better than St. Goar, (No. 2257,) every house on each bank clean and clear as a crystal. The Heidelberg views are admirable;--you see a slight streak in the background of this one: we remember seeing just such a streak from the castle itself, and being told that it was the Rhine, just visible, afar off. The man with the geese in the goose-market at Nuremberg gives stone, iron, and bronze, each in perfection.

So we come to quaint Holland, where we see windmills, _ponts-levis_, canals, galiots, houses with gable-ends to the streets and little mirrors outside the windows, slanted so as to show the frows inside what is going on.

We must give up the cathedrals, after all: Santa Maria del Fiore, with Brunelleschi's dome, which Michel Angelo wouldn't copy and couldn't beat; Milan, aflame with statues, like a thousand-tapered candelabrum; Tours, with its embroidered portal, so like the lace of an archbishop's robe; even Notre Dame of Paris, with its new spire; Rouen, Amiens, Chartres,--we must give them all up.

Here we are at Athens, looking at the buttressed Acropolis and the ruined temples,--the Doric Parthenon, the Ionic Erechtheum, the Corinthian temple of Jupiter, and the beautiful Caryatides. But see those steps cut in the natural rock. Up those steps walked the Apostle Paul, and from that summit, Mars Hill, the Areopagus, he began his noble address, "Ye men of Athens!"

The Great Pyramid and the Sphinx! Herodotus saw them a little fresher, but of unknown antiquity,--far more unknown to him than to us. The Colossi of the Plain! Mighty monuments of an ancient and proud civilization standing alone in a desert now.

My name is Osymandyas, King of Kings;
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

But nothing equals these vast serene faces of the Pharaohs on the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel (Ipsambul) (No. 1, F. 307). It Is the sublimest of stereographs, as the temple of Kardasay, this loveliest of views on glass, is the most poetical. But here is the crocodile lying in wait for us on the sandy bank of the Nile, and we must leave Egypt for Syria.

Damascus makes but a poor show, with its squalid houses, and glaring clayed roofs. We always wanted to invest in real estate there in Abraham Street or Noah Place, or some of its well-established thoroughfares, but are discouraged since we have had these views of the old town. Baalbec does better. See the great stones built into the wall there,--the biggest 64 x 13 x 13! What do you think of that?--a single stone bigger than both your parlors thrown into one, and this one of three almost alike, built into a wall as if just because they happened to be lying round, handy! So, then, we pass on to Bethlehem, looking like a fortress more than a town, all stone and very little window,--to Nazareth, with its brick oven-like houses, its tall minaret, its cypresses, and the black-mouthed, open tombs, with masses of cactus growing at their edge,--to Jerusalem,--to the Jordan, every drop of whose waters seems to carry a baptismal blessing,--to the Dead Sea,--and to the Cedars of Lebanon. Almost everything may have changed in these hallowed places, except the face of the stream and the lake, and the outlines of hill and valley. But as we look across the city to the Mount of Olives, we know that these lines which run in graceful curves along the horizon are the same that He looked upon as he turned his eyes sadly over Jerusalem. We know that these long declivities, beyond Nazareth, were pictured in the eyes of Mary's growing boy just as they are now in ours sitting here by our own firesides.

This is no _toy_, which thus carries us into the very presence of all that is most inspiring to the soul in the scenes which the world's heroes and martyrs, and more than heroes, more than martyrs, have hallowed and solemnized by looking upon. It is no toy: it is a divine gift, placed in our hands nominally by science, really by that inspiration which is revealing the Almighty through the lips of the humble students of Nature. Look through it once more before laying it down, but not at any earthly sight. In these views, taken through the telescopes of De la Rue of London and of Mr. Rutherford of New York, and that of the Cambridge Observatory by Mr. Whipple of Boston, we see the "spotty globe" of the moon with all its mountains and chasms, its mysterious craters and groove-like valleys. This magnificent stereograph by Mr. Whipple was taken, the first picture February 7th, the second April 6th. In this way the change of position gives the solid effect of the ordinary stereoscopic views, and the sphere rounds itself out so perfectly to the eye that it seems as if we could grasp it like an orange.

If the reader is interested, or like to become interested, in the subject of sun-sculpture and stereoscopes, he may like to know what the last two years have taught us as to the particular instruments best worth owning. We will give a few words to the subject. Of simple instruments, for looking at one slide at a time, Smith and Beck's is the most perfect we have seen, but the most expensive. For looking at paper slides, which are light, an instrument which may be held in the hand is very convenient. We have had one constructed which is better, as we think, than any in the shops. Mr. Joseph L. Bates, 129, Washington Street, has one of them, if any person is curious to see it. In buying the instruments which hold many slides, we should prefer two that hold fifty to one that holds a hundred. Becker's small instrument, containing fifty paper slides, back to back, is the one we like best for these slides, but the top should be arranged so as to come off,--the first change we made in our own after procuring it.

We are allowed to mention the remarkable instrument contrived by our friend Dr. H.J. Bigelow, for holding fifty glass slides. The spectator looks in: all is darkness. He turns a crank: the gray dawn of morning steals over some beautiful scene or the _façade_ of a stately temple. Still, as he turns, the morning brightens through various tints of rose and purple, until it reaches the golden richness of high noon. Still turning, all at once night shuts down upon the picture as at a tropical sunset, suddenly, without blur or gradual dimness,--the sun of the picture going down,

"Not as in Northern climes obscurely bright,
But one unclouded blaze of living light."

We have not thanked the many friendly dealers in these pictures, who have sent us heaps and hundreds of stereographs to look over and select from, only because they are too many to thank. Nor do we place any price on this advertisement of their most interesting branch of business. But there are a few stereographs we wish some of them would send us, with the bill for the same: such as Antwerp and Strasbourg Cathedrals,--Bologna, with its brick towers,--the Lions of Mycenae, if they are to be had,--the Walls of Fiesole,--the Golden Candlestick in the Arch of Titus,--and others which we can mention, if consulted; some of which we have hunted for a long time in vain. But we write principally to wake up an interest in a new and inexhaustible source of pleasure, and only regret that the many pages we have filled can do no more than hint the infinite resources which the new art has laid open to us all.

THE LONDON WORKING-MEN'S COLLEGE.

In what is now as near the centre of the Map of London as any house can properly be said to be is an old-fashioned dwelling-house on Great-Ormond Street, which is occupied, and densely occupied, by Frederic Denison Maurice's "Working-Men's College." The house looks, I suppose, very much as it did in 1784, when Great-Ormond Street bordered on the country,--when Lord Thurlow, the Chancellor of England, lived in this house,--when some thieves jumped over his garden-wall, forced two bars from the kitchen-window, entered a room adjoining the Lord Chancellor's study, and stole the Great Seal of England, "inclosed in two bags, one of leather and one of silk." London has grown so much since, that anything that is stolen from the Working-Men's College will not be stolen by thieves entering from the fields. I may say, in passing, that this theft "threw London into consternation"; there being an impression, that, for want of the Great Seal, all the functions of the Executive Government must be suspended. The Privy-Council, however, did not share this impression. They had a new seal made before night; and though the Government of England has often moved very slowly since, it has never confessedly stopped, as some Governments nearer home have done, from that day to this day.

In view of what is done in Lord Thurlow's old house now, it is worth while to linger a moment on what it was then and what he was. He was the Keeper of George III.'s conscience, until he caballed against Mr. Pitt, and was unceremoniously turned out by him. As Lord High-Chancellor, he was guardian-in-chief of all the wards in Chancery; and I suppose, for instance, without looking up the quotation in Boswell, that he was the particular Lord Chancellor to whom Dr. Johnson said he should like to intrust the making of all the matches in England. Louis Napoleon has just now undertaken to make all the friction-matches in France,--but Dr. Johnson's proposal referred to the matrimonial matches, the _dénouemens_ of the comedies and tragedies of domestic life. To us Americans, Thurlow is notable for the strong and uncompromising language which he used against us all through our Revolution, which excessively delighted the King. As to his faculty for keeping a conscience, it may be said, that, though he never married, he resided in this Great-Ormond Street house with his own mistress and his illegitimate children. Lord Campbell, who mentions this fact, informs us, that, as early as his own youth, the British Bench had reached such purity that judges were expected to marry their mistresses when they were appointed to the Bench. He adds, that it is long since any such condition as that was necessary. In Thurlow's time this stage of decency had not been attained even by Lord Chancellors. His humanity may be indicated by his stiff opposition to every reform ever proposed in the English criminal law, or in the social order of the time. He battled the bills for suppressing the slave-trade with all his might. "I desire of you, my Lords, in your humane frenzy, to show some humanity to the whites as well as to the negroes",--illustrating this remark by a picture of the sufferings of an English trader who had risked thirty thousand pounds on the slave-trade that year. When an entering wedge was attempted for the improvement of the bloody code of criminal law, Thurlow opposed it with passion. The particular clause selected by the reformers was one which demanded that women who had been connected with any treasonable movements should be burnt alive. It was proposed to reduce their punishment to the same scale as men's. Thurlow made it his duty to defend the ancient practice. He was, in short, mixed up with every effort of his time, which we now consider disgraceful, for arresting the gradual progress of reform.

Now that Thurlow's wine-cellar is a college-chapel, that young men study arithmetic in the room the Great Seal was stolen from, that Mr. Ruskin teaches water-color drawing in Thurlow's bed-chamber, that Tom Brown, _alias_ Mr. Hughes, presides over a weekly tea-party in the three-pair back, and drills the awkward squad of the working-men's battalion in the garden, it seems worth while to show that at least some places in the world have improved in eighty years, whether the world itself is to be given up as a mistake or not. We will let Lord Thurlow go, as Lord Campbell does, with this charitable wish:--"I have not learned," he says, "any particulars of his end, but I will hope that it was a good one. I trust, that, conscious of the approaching change, having sincerely repented of his violence of temper, of the errors into which he had been led by worldly ambition, and of the irregularities of his private life, he had seen the worthlessness of the objects by which he had been allured; that, having gained the frame of mind which his awful situation required, he received the consolations of religion; and that, in charity with mankind, he tenderly bade a long and last adieu to the relations and friends who surrounded him." There is not an atom of fact known on which to found Lord Campbell's hope. But I, also, will leave Lord Thurlow with this charitable wish, and I will now ask the readers of the "Atlantic," who may be enough interested in social reform and a mutual education, to see what has happened between his wine-cellar and ridge-pole since the "London Working-Men's College" was established there.

The founder of the Working-Men's College, as I have intimated, is the Rev. Frederic Denison Maurice, the eminent practical theologian. Its age is now six years,--as it was founded in the autumn of 1854. He says himself, in a striking speech he made at Manchester not long since, that the plan originated in that "awful year 1848, which I shall always look upon as one of the great epochs in history." He says that "a knot of men, of different professions, lawyers, doctors, parsons, artists, chemists, and such like," thought they saw, in the convulsions of 1848, a handwriting on the wall, sent them by God himself, testifying, "that, if either rank or wealth or knowledge is not held as a trust for men, if any one of these things is regarded as a possession of our own, it must perish." In a real desire, then, to "make their own little education of use to such persons as had less," and, in so doing, to establish a vital and effective relation between themselves and the men of the working-classes below them, they looked round for opportunities to work in the education of _men_. Anybody who remembers "Amyas Leigh" will remember how earnestly Charles Kingsley there presses the theory that most of what we learn as children should be left to be learned by men, as it was in the days of Queen Bess. I suppose that Maurice's "knot of parsons and such like" shared that view. At all events, they lectured to Mechanics' Institutes, and did other such wish-wash work, which is not good for much, except for the motive it shows; and having found that out, they were all the more willing to join in arrangements more definite and profitable. According to Mr. Maurice, the formation of the People's College in Sheffield started them on the plan of a college, and determined them, as far as they could, to give consistency to their dreams by carrying out the plan of an English college in their arrangements for working-men.

At this point I must beg the accomplished company of readers to recollect what an English college is. In its organization, and in much of its consequent _esprit du corps_, it is as different from an American college as an Odd-Fellows' lodge is from a country academy. The difference is also of precisely the same sort. The man or the boy who connects himself with an English college is, in theory, still the student of a thousand years ago, who came on foot to Oxford or Cambridge, because he had heard, in the wilds of Mercia or of Wessex, that there were some books at those places,--and that some Alfred or Ethelred or Eldred had given some privileges to students coming there. When he has arrived, he joins one or other of the societies of students whom he may find there, just as the Mercian Athelstan may have done. From the moment that the established society has tested him,--and the tests are very mild,--he is admitted as a member of a fraternity, sharing the privileges of that fraternity, and, to a certain extent, its duties. He is at first a junior member, it is true. Among his duties, therefore, will be obedience to some of the senior members, and respect to all. But none the less is he a neophyte member of a corporation which extends back hundreds of years perhaps,--he is a co-proprietor of its honors and privileges, is responsible for their preservation, and is, from the first, inoculated with its _esprit du corps_.

Now in an American college there is _esprit du corps_ enough, and sense of college dignity enough. But the student's _esprit du corps_ is one thing, and the government's is another. The Commons Hall, for instance, has died out of most of our colleges. Why? Why, because it had ceased to be a _Commons_ Hall. It was not the place where the junior and senior members of a college, the pupils and all their instructors, met together. It was the place where the undergraduates were fed,--and where a few wretched tutors were fed at their sides. But every member of the governing body who could possibly escape did so. At our Cambridge, they even went so far as to set apart a Commons Hall for each class of undergraduates at last,--for fear men should see each other eat; as at "Separate Prisons" the idea of communion in worship is carried out by introducing each prisoner into a state-pew or royal-box whose partitions are so high that he cannot see his neighbors. This was before they gave the _coup-de-grace_ to the whole thing, and scattered the members of their college just as widely as they could at meal-times, as at all other times. The recitation, again, probably the only occasion when an American student meets his instructor, is conducted according to an arrangement by which the instructor meets all of a large section or class together, meeting them for recitation simply. In a word, the American college differs from any other American school chiefly in having larger endowments and older pupils.

In the English college, on the other hand, before a freshman has been there three months, he may have established his claim to some "scholarship," which shall be his post and his "foundation" there for years. From the very beginning, one or another honor or prize is proposed to him,--which is the first stepping-stone on a line of promotion of which the last may be his appointment to the highest dignities in the University or in the Church. From the beginning, therefore, he has his duties in the college assigned to him, if he have earned any right to such honors. Thus, it may be his place to read the Scripture Lesson at prayers, or to read the Latin grace at the end of dinner,--the President and Vice-President of his college having done the same at the beginning.

These arrangements are not to be confounded with the services rendered by charity students. We have imitated some of these, which are so sadly described in "Tom Brown at Oxford." But we have no arrangements which correspond at all to those of the system which in England brings graduates and undergraduates to a certain extent into a common life, mutually interested in the honor and popularity of "Our College."

When Mr. Maurice and his friends spoke of "a college," they meant to carry to the utmost these social and mutual views of college life. They wanted to come into closer connection with the working-men of London, and formed the Working-Men's College that they might do so.

They had, therefore, something in mind very different from sitting for an hour in presence of a dozen students, hearing them recite a lesson, saying then, "_Ite, missa est_," and departing all, every man to his own way. They foresaw their difficulties, undoubtedly, and they have undoubtedly met some which they did not foresee. But they meant to establish, on paper, if nowhere else, a mutual society,--a society, it is true, in which those who knew the most should teach those who knew the least, but still a society where the learners and the teachers met as members of the same fraternity,--equals so far as the laws of that society went,--and with certain common interests arising from their connection with it.

Not only does the necessity for such an undertaking appear in England as it does not here, but the difficulty of it is, on a moderate calculation, ten thousand times greater than it is here. Here, in the first place, if the "working-man" as a boy has felt any particular fancy for algebra or Greek or Latin, (and those fancies, in a fast country, are apt to develop before the boy is eighteen,) he has e'en gone to a high-school, and, if he wanted, to a "college," where, if he had not the means himself, some State Scholarship or Education Society has floated him through, and he has gained his fill of algebra, Latin, or Greek, or is on the way to do so. Or, if he have not done this,--if the appetite for these things, or for physical science, historical science, or political science, has developed itself a little later in life, he has hoarded up books for a few years, and has made himself meanwhile rather more necessary to his master than he was before, so that, when he says, some day, "I think we must arrange so that I can leave the shop earlier in the afternoon," the master has bowed submiss, and the incipient chemist, historian, or politician has worked his own sweet will. Or, thirdly, if he wanted instruction from anybody in the category we first named, who had tried the high-school and college plan, he had only to go and ask for it.

Very likely the man is his brother; at all events, he is somebody's brother: and there is no difference in their social _status_ which makes any practical difficulty in their meeting together, man-fashion, to teach and to learn. But in saying all this, we speak of things which London understands no more than it does the system of society of the Chinese Empire. To begin: the thriving Oxford-Street retailer will tell you very frankly, perhaps, that he had rather his son should not learn to read, if he could only sign his name without learning. Reason: that the father has observed that his older son read so much more of bad than good, that he is left to doubt the benefits conferred by letters. I do not mean, that, practically, the London tradesman's son does not learn to read; but I do mean that that process meets this sort of prejudice. Grant, however, that he does learn to read, and has appetite for more; grant that he gets well through with A B C, and what follows; grant that he can read well enough to read the translations from French filth which his father is afraid of; but grant that his father and his mother, working with the blessing of his God, have kept him pure enough to steer clear of that temptation; grant that he becomes one-and-twenty, eager for algebra, for chemistry, for Latin, or for Greek. What are you going to do about it then? Then comes in the necessity which Mr. Maurice wanted to meet,--and there comes in, by the same steps, the exceeding difficulty of his experiment.

It is the difficulty of caste. I do not know how many castes there are in England; but I should think there were about thirty-seven. Any member of either of these finds it as hard to associate with a member of any other as a Sudra does to associate with a Brahmin, or a Brahmin with a Sudra. It is not that people are unwilling to condescend to the castes below them. At least, it is not that chiefly. It is, quite as much or more, that, with a good, solid, English pride, they do not care to be snobbish, and do not choose to put themselves upon people who are above them. They "know their place," they say. And, for a race which has as good reason as the English for pride in its ability to stand firm, to "know one's place" is a great thing to boast of. People who have travelled on the Continent have been amused to see how zealously Sir John and Lady Jane and Miss Jeanette talked together at the _table d'hôte_ for a week, never by accident speaking to Mr. Williams, Mrs. Williams, and Miss Williamina, who sat next them. This is not inability to condescend, however. The Ws are as unwilling to speak to the Js. This difficulty is the same difficulty which Mr. Litchfield describes in an account of his "Five Years' Teaching at Working-Men's College." "When a man first comes to our college," he says, "he is apt to walk into his class-room in the solemn and discreet manner befitting an entry into a public institution, and generally for a night or two will persist in regarding his teacher as a severely official personage, whose dignity is not to be lightly trifled with. Now nothing, I believe, can really be done, till this notion is extinguished,--till teacher and students have got to understand each other, and have agreed to banish the foolish _mauvaise honte_ which makes every Englishman shy of talking to a fellow-creature. The freer the colloquial intercourse between teacher and students, the more is learned in the time. To establish this is not easy; but harder still is the task of setting the students on a familiar footing with each other. There seems to be _some impassable obstacle to the fraternization of a dozen Londoners_, though sitting side by side, week after week, doing the same work." The truth being, that the dozen Londoners might belong to twelve different castes. And just as in "the Rifle Movement" the clerks in the Queen's civil service could not serve in the same battalion with architects' clerks on the one hand, or students at law on the other,--you may have, in your algebra class, a goldsmith who is afraid of being snobbish if he speaks to a map-engraver, or a tailor who does not presume to address an opinion on Archimedes' square to a piano-forte maker.

But the Brahmin and the Sudra may both be converted to Christianity. In that case, though it seems very odd to both, the distinction of caste goes to the wall. And the "knot of parsons and such like," spoken of above, having, very fortunately for the world, been born into the Christian Church, made it, as we have seen, their business to face the difficulty because of the necessity,--and the Working-Men's College is the result of their endeavor. Mr. Maurice himself took the first step. Before the College itself was opened, he undertook a Bible-class. He invited whoever would to come. He read a portion of the Scriptures, explained its meaning as he could,--and invited all possible questioning. He testifies, in the most public way, that he got more good than he gave in the intercourse which followed. "I have learned more myself than I have imparted. Again and again the wish has come into my mind, when I have left those classes, 'Would to God that anything I have said to them has been as useful to them as what they have said to me has been to me!'"

If now the American reader will free his mind from any comparisons with an American college, and take, instead, his notion of this "Bible-class," we can give him some conception of what the Working-Men's College is. For there is not a clergyman in America who has not conducted such a class, for the benefit of any who would come. And such classes are considered as mutual classes. Everybody may ask questions,--everybody may bring in any contribution he can to the conversation. Very clearly there is no reason why chemistry, algebra, Latin, or Greek may not be taught from the same motive, in classes gathered in much the same way, and with a like feeling of cooperation among those concerned. This is what the Working-Men's College attempts. The instructors volunteer their services. They go, for the love of teaching, or to be of use, or to extend their acquaintance among their fellow-men. The students go, in great measure, doubtless, to learn. But they are encouraged to feel themselves members of a great coöperation society. So soon as possible, they are commissioned as teachers themselves, and are put in a position to take preparatory classes in the College. A majority of the finance-board consists of students. Let us now see what is the programme which grows out of such a plan. I have not at hand the schedule of exercises for the current year. I must therefore give that which was in force in the autumn of 1859, when by paying half-a-crown I became a member of the Working-Men's College. As I make this boast, I must confess that I never took any certificate of proficiency there, nor was I ever "sent up" for any, even the humblest, degree. For the Working-Men's College may send up students to the University of London for degrees.

Remember, then, that to accommodate London working-hours, all the classes begin as late as seven o'clock in the evening. There are some Women's Classes in the afternoon, but they are under a wholly different management. From seven to ten every evening, Lord Thurlow's house is, so to speak, in full blast. Mr. Ruskin is the earliest professor. He comes at seven on Thursday, to teach drawing in landscape from seven till half-past ten. Work begins on other evenings and in other classes at half-past seven. Four other teachers of drawing are at work with their pupils on different evenings of the week. Monday and Thursday are the Latin days, Monday and Wednesday the Greek,--all taught by graduates of the Universities. The mathematics are Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry in two classes, and Trigonometry. There was a class in Geology the winter I knew the College,--there had been classes in Botany and Chemistry. There were also classes in French, in German, in English Grammar, in Logic, in Political Economy, and in Vocal Music, a class on the Structure and Functions of the Human Body, and some general lectures or studies in History. There were also "practice classes," where the students worked with others more advanced than themselves on the subjects of the several exercises,--there were preparatory classes, and an adult school to teach men to read.

Now this is rather a rambling conspectus of a curriculum of study. But it teaches, I suppose, first, what the right men would volunteer to teach,--second, what the working-men wanted to learn. It is pretty clear, that, if the plan succeeds, it will bring up a body of young men who will know what is the advantage of a systematic line of study a good deal better than any of them can be expected to know at the beginning. Meanwhile here is certainly a very remarkable exhibition of instruction to any man in London for a price merely nominal. After he has once paid an entrance-fee,--half-a-crown, as I have said,--he may join any class in the College whenever he wishes, on the payment of a very insignificant additional fee. For the drawing-classes this fee is five shillings. For the courses of one hour a week it is two shillings sixpence, for those of two hours it is four shillings. The drawing-classes are a trifle more costly, because the room for drawing is kept open ready for practice-work every evening in the week. There is also open for everybody every evening a Library, and the Principal's Bible-class is open to all comers.

So much for the instruction side. Now to describe the social side, I had best perhaps give the detail of one or two of my own visits at the College. Walk into the front room on the lower floor of any house in Colonnade Row in Boston, where the entry is on the right of the house, and you see such a room as the present "Library" was when Lord Thurlow lived there. Here is the office of the College. Here I found Mr. Shorter, the Secretary, in a corner, at a little desk piled with catalogues, circulars, "Working-Men's College Magazines," etc. There was a coal fire in a grate, [_Mem._ Hot-air furnaces hardly known in England,] a plain suite of book-shelves on one or more sides of the room, and a suite of narrow tables for readers running across. There were, perhaps, a dozen young men sitting there to read. This is virtually a club-room for the College, and serves just the same purpose that the reading-room of the Christian Union or the Christian Association does with us, but that they take no newspapers. [_Mem. 2d_. If you are in England, you say, "They _take in_ none." In America, the newspapers take in the subscribers.]