Chapter II: Part 2

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.

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-Elysees, 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.