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 I °C^8 2925 ! 
 TRIP TO ENGLAND 
 
 BY 
 
 GOLDWIN SMITH, D.C.L. 
 
 J 3 
 
 j> J J, 
 
 « O »-, * 9 ° , " J J 3 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 MACMILLAN AND COMPANY 
 
 AND London 
 
 i8q2
 
 Copyright, 1892, 
 By MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co., Boston, I'.S.A. 
 
 Press work bv Berwick & Smith, 
 
 b351
 
 A TEIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 IT seems useful in visiting a country to 
 have not only a guide to places and 
 routes, but a framework for observations 
 and recollections. Otherwise the effect 
 produced on the retina of the mind is apt 
 to be like that produced by a whirl of suc- 
 cessive sights on the retina of the eye. 
 This is particularly the case when the ob- 
 jects of interest are of so many different 
 kinds as they are in England. To furnish 
 such a framework is the limited aim of this 
 paper, which is an expansion of a lecture 
 delivered to friends. 
 
 The voyage to England is now easy 
 enough, barring that curious little malady 
 which still defies medical science to trace 
 its cause and is so capricious in its range, 
 often taking the strong and leaving the 
 weak. There is nothing to be said about 
 the voyage. Only, as we career over those 
 wild waters in a vast floating hotel at the 
 
 5
 
 6 A TRIP TO ENGLAXD. 
 
 rate of five liundred miles a day, let us pay 
 a tribute to the brave hearts which first 
 crossed them in mere boats "without charts 
 or science of navigation. In the marvel- 
 lous strides which of late years humanity 
 has taken, nothing is more marvellous or 
 more momentous than the unification of 
 the world by the extinction of distance. 
 Already we have made one harvest : we are 
 fast making one mind and one heart for the 
 world. 
 
 As an old country, England perhaps is 
 naturally regarded first from the historical 
 point of view, and especially by us of whose 
 history she is the scene, whose monuments 
 and the graves of whose ancestors she 
 holds. It is an advantage which Canadians 
 have over Americans that they have not 
 broken with their history and cast off the 
 influences, at once exalting and sobering, 
 which the record of a long and grand fore- 
 time exerts upon the mind of a community. 
 An American has no history before the 
 Revolution, which took place at the end of 
 the last century. In his parlance, "Revo- 
 lutionary ' ' denotes that which is most 
 ancient : it is to the American the equiva- 
 lent for "Xorman." He says that the 
 " Revolutionary " so and so was his ances-
 
 HISTORICAL BlUTAIX. 7 
 
 tor, as an English nobleman would say- 
 that his ancestors came in with the Con- 
 quest. 
 
 Looking at the subject historically, we 
 have the England of the ancient Britons, 
 Roman England, Saxon England, the Eng- 
 land of the Middle Ages, the England of 
 the Tudors, the England of the Stuarts, the 
 England of Anne and the Georges, all rep- 
 resented by their monuments. Of the 
 primitive habits of the Britons we have 
 monuments in hut- circles of British vil- 
 lages still to be seen on Exmoor, where the 
 wild stag finds a shelter, and on wolds and 
 downs, near Whitby or Marlborough, where 
 the traces of the primeval world have not 
 yet been effaced by the plough. Of their 
 wild tribal wars we have monuments in the 
 numerous earthworks, once forts or places 
 of refuge for the tribe, which crown many 
 a hill and of which perhaps the largest and 
 most striking is the triple rampart of 
 "Maiden Castle " on a hill near Dorches- 
 ter. Of their dark and bloody superstition 
 and of the blind submissiveness to priestly 
 power still characteristic of the race, we 
 have a monument in Abury, with its ave- 
 nues of huge stones and the great circu-
 
 8 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 lar earthwork from which, if the antiqua- 
 ries are right, a dense ring of awe-struck 
 worshippers gazed, perhaps by night, on the 
 mystic forms of the priests moving among 
 the sacrificial fires ; and another in Stone- 
 henge, which seems ahnost certainly to have 
 been a temple, and which though it may 
 somewhat disappoint in size will not disap- 
 point in weirdness, if you see it, as it should 
 be seen, on a dark evening when it stands 
 amidst a number of other primeval relics 
 on the lonely expanse of Salisbury Plain. 
 Of the taste and skill in decoration where- 
 with the Celtic race was more largely 
 gifted than with any faculty or quality 
 which helps to form the solid basis of civ- 
 ilization, we have proofs in the golden 
 torques and other ornaments, found in bar- 
 rows, of which the Celtic museum at Dub- 
 lin displays a glittering array. Sepulchral 
 barrows also abound, and are memorials at 
 once of loyal reverence for chieftainship 
 and of the early craving for posthumous 
 fame. The interest of Celtic monuments 
 and antiquities belongs not merely to the 
 past. They are the records of a race which 
 still lives, with much of its original charac- 
 ter, both political and religious, in those 
 parts of the two islands Avhere the Celt
 
 THE CELTS. 9 
 
 found refuge in natural fastnesses from the 
 sword of the Saxon conqueror — in the hill 
 country of Devonshire and Cornwall, in the 
 Welsh mountains and the Highlands of 
 Scotland, but above all in Ireland, where 
 the w^eaker race was sheltered by the sea. 
 The history of England from one point of 
 view may be regarded as a long effort to 
 impart the political sentiments and institu- 
 tions of the Anglo-Saxon to the remnants 
 of the Celtic population. In Cornwall and 
 Devonshire and m the Highlands of Scotland 
 this, thanks to the co-operation of Protes- 
 tantism with Constitutionalism, has been in 
 large measure achieved : in AVales the work 
 is less complete, the Welsh in the more 
 mountainous districts retaining with the 
 language much of the original character of 
 their race. The Irish question, which is 
 mainly one of race, is in all its perplexity 
 still before us. 
 
 Of the Roman Empire, Britain was the re- 
 motest Western Province, the last won and 
 the first lost, the one which imbibed least 
 of the Roman civilization. The monuments 
 of Roman occupation are proportionate in 
 scale, and will not bear comparison with 
 Verona, Aries, or Treves ; yet they wear 
 the majestic impress of the Empire, which
 
 lO A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 built as if it were eternal. Between the 
 Solway and the Tyne are seen the massive 
 remains of the great Koman wall, the 
 western wing of a line of defences which 
 guarded civilization against the inroads of 
 barbarism from the Solway to the Eu- 
 phrates. In different parts of the country 
 may still be traced the Roman roads, which 
 run straight and regardless of obstacles as 
 the march of Roman ambition itself, and 
 which, extending over the whole of the 
 world under Roman sway, first united the 
 nations by universal lines of communica- 
 tion. Many, too, of the Roman camps re- 
 main, distinguished by their regular form, 
 as the camps of discipline, from the irregu- 
 lar earthworks of the Britons, and fancy 
 may people them with the forms of the 
 legionaries resting after their long march, 
 or in the case of the standing camps {castra 
 stativa), drilling and messing in their per- 
 manent quarters. At Richborough (Rutu- 
 pise), which was the favourite landing- 
 place, the Roman remains are very impos- 
 ing. But the English Pompeii is Silchester 
 (Calleva Abrebatum), three miles from the 
 Mortimer station of the railway betw^een 
 Reading and Basingstoke. The walls of 
 the city have defied time and the destroyer ;
 
 ROMAN ENGLAND. II 
 
 they stand almost intact ; but the city hav- 
 ing been probably stormed and burned by 
 the barbarians, nothing is left of the houses, 
 but the basements alone remain, with the 
 hypocausts, or furnaces, which warmed the 
 rooms, and which must have been sorely 
 needed by the Italian under British skies. 
 The lines of the streets, with the plan of the 
 judgment-hall (prsetorium), are plainly 
 visible. Outside the walls is the amphi- 
 theatre, in which no doubt the gay Koman 
 officer, condemned to these remote and un- 
 festive quarters, tried to indemnify himself 
 for his loss of the Colosseum. The remains 
 of villas with their tessellated pavements are 
 found in different parts of England, prov- 
 ing that the country had been thoroughly 
 subdued and that the Eoman magnate 
 could enjoy country life in safety. Inscrip- 
 tions, coins, weapons, sepulchral urns, pot- 
 tery, abound in the museums. In the 
 museum at York is a touching antiquity — 
 a tress of a Koman lady's hair. Of coins, 
 140,000 have been found at Richborough. 
 Great quantities are sometimes turned up by 
 the spade or plough. The Roman retiring 
 before barbarian invasion perhaps buried his 
 hoard, thinking to come back for it, but 
 came back no more. We look with interest
 
 12 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 on all the memorials of a race, which in so 
 many ways, and above all as the founder of 
 law, has stamped its image on humanity. 
 But Britain, unlike Italy, France, and Spain, 
 retained nothing of the Roman Province 
 except its ruins. Her character and insti- 
 tutions, as well as her language, were those 
 of a fresh race. 
 
 The crypt of Ripon Minster was pro- 
 nounced by that great antiquary, the late 
 Mr. Henry Parker, the Church of the 
 Saxon Apostle Wilfrid, and the earliest 
 monument of Christianity in those parts. 
 There are two church towers, in Saxon 
 style, at Lincoln. There is Saxon work at 
 Westminster, at Dover, and elsewhere. But 
 the Saxon was not a great builder even of 
 churches ; happily for himself he was not 
 at all a builder of castles. He thought not of 
 magnificence but of comfort. Such art as he 
 cultivated was rather that of the goldsmith 
 or the embroiderer. Beautifully chased 
 drinking cups and miracles of the needle 
 were the trophies which William took to 
 Normandy after the Conquest. Of Saxon 
 tombs, burial urns, and weapons, however, 
 there is good store. In the Ashmolean 
 Museum, at Oxford, there is a gem whicb
 
 SAXON ENGLAND. 1 3 
 
 was found on the Isle of Athelney, where 
 Alfred took refuge ; it bears the name of 
 Alfred, and may have belonged to the hero. 
 But the most important monument of the 
 Anglo-Saxons is really the White Horse, 
 cut in a chalk down of Berkshire, about the 
 " cleaning " of which we have been told by 
 Thomas Hughes. This is the trophy of a 
 great victory gained by the Saxon over the 
 Dane, by Christianity over heathendom, by 
 the moral civilization bound up with Chris- 
 tianity over the moral barbarism of its pagan 
 enemies. It deserves homage more than any 
 Arc de Triomphe. 
 
 At Pevensey is the beach on which the 
 Norman Conqueror landed. The castle on 
 the cliff of Hastings marks the spot where 
 he first planted his standard. From that 
 place it is easy to trace his line of march 
 till he saw Harold with the English army 
 facing him on the fatal hill of Senlac. The 
 battle-field is as well marked as that of 
 Waterloo, and fancy can recall the charges 
 of the Norman cavalry up the hillside against 
 the solid formation and the shield wall of 
 the Saxon precursors of our British infantry. 
 The ruins of Battle Abbey, the religious 
 trophy of the Conqueror, are still seen, and
 
 14 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 the site of the high altar exactly marks the 
 spot where the fatal arrow entering Harold's 
 brain slew not only a king, but a kingdom, 
 and marred the destiny of a race. We are 
 on the scene of one of the greatest catas- 
 trophes of history. Had that arrow missed 
 its mark, Anglo-Saxon institutions would 
 have developed themselves in their integ- 
 rity, the Anglo-Saxon tongue would have 
 perfected itself in its purity, Anglo-Norman 
 aristocracy would never have been, or have 
 left its evil traces on society, the fatal con- 
 nection of England and France, and the 
 numerous French wars of the Plantagenets 
 would have been blotted out of the book of 
 fate. 
 
 England now becomes for four centuries 
 and a half a member of Catholic and feu- 
 dal Europe, a partaker in Crusades and a 
 tilting-ground of chivalry. The informing 
 spirit of this period and the basis of its 
 peculiar morality is the Catholic religion, 
 having its centre in the Papacy, which tri- 
 umphed over national independence with 
 the Norman, by whom its sacred banner 
 was borne at Hastings. Of mediseval piety 
 we have glorious monuments in the cathe- 
 drals and the great churches. Nothing so 
 wonderful or beautiful has ever been built
 
 ENGLAND IN THE MIDDLE AGES. 1 5 
 
 by man as these fanes of mediaeval religion 
 which still, surviving the faith and the civil- 
 ization which reared them, rise above the 
 din and smoke of modern life into purity 
 and stillness. In religious impressiveness 
 they far excel all the works of heathen art 
 and all the classical temples of the Renais- 
 sance, Even in point of architectural skill 
 they stand unrivalled, though they are the 
 creations of an age before mechanical sci- 
 ence. Their groined roofs appear still to 
 baffle imitation. But we do not fully com- 
 prehend the marvel, unless we imagine the 
 cathedrals rising, as they did, out of towns 
 which were then little better than collec- 
 tions of hovels, with but small accumula- 
 tion of wealth, and without what we now 
 deem the appliances of civilized life. Never 
 did man's spiritual aspirations soar so high 
 above the realities of his worldly lot as 
 when he built the cathedrals. But we 
 must not look at the cathedrals or at the 
 churches as a group without distinguishing 
 the periods to which they severally belong 
 and the memories of which they recall. 
 There are four periods, marked by the 
 successive phases of the Gothic style : the 
 Norman, which should rather be called 
 Romanesque than Gothic, with its round
 
 l6 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 arch ; the Early English, with its pointed 
 arch and windows without mullions ; the 
 Decorated, with its mullions and increase 
 of ornament ; the Perpendicular, the lines 
 of which correspond to its name, while the 
 ornament, by its tendency to excess and 
 weakness, denotes a period of decay. VTe 
 see these styles often blended together in 
 successive portions of the same cathedral. 
 The best and most glorious age of Catholi- 
 cism, the age in which the Catholic faith 
 was fresh, in which the morality founded 
 on it and the heroism mspired by it were 
 at their highest, the age in which it pro- 
 duced such characters as Edward I. and 
 St. Louis, is hiarked by the Early English 
 style and the transition from this to the 
 Decorated. There is a satisfaction in con- 
 necting the beauty of a religious building 
 with the character and aspirations of the 
 builders. It is not so pleasant to think, as 
 we look at the glories of Milan, that they 
 are the work of the cruel, unprincipled, and 
 perfidious Visconti. Salisbury-, completed 
 in the Early English style, or in that of the 
 transition, is the most perfect monument 
 of mediaeval Christianity in England ; and, 
 amidst all the doubts and perplexities of 
 our own time, it is impossible not to look
 
 CHURCH ARCHITECTURE. 1/ 
 
 back with envy on men who, free from all 
 misgivings as to the absolnte truth of their 
 creed, spent their lives in rearing tliis work 
 of beauty or watching it rise, and with the 
 highest joys of art, combined the still 
 higher joy of feeling that art would min- 
 ister to the salvation of souls. The great 
 works of the Perpendicular period remmd 
 us rather of the class of worldly, ambitious, 
 and, if not sceptical, somewhat careless 
 Churchmen to which Fox and Wolsey be- 
 longed, and which in its sumptuous crea- 
 tions was moved more by love of art and 
 magnificence than by spiritual aspirations. 
 To Westminster Abbey we shall come when 
 we come to Westminster Hall. Of all the 
 other cathedrals Canterbury is the most 
 historical, as well as the metropolitan ; and 
 it has had the good fortune of being de- 
 scribed by Stanley, w^ho was one of its 
 canons and in whom historical topography 
 was a passion. In Canterbury is that 
 strange memorial of the priestly ambition 
 of the Middle Ages and of the great con- 
 flict between Church and State, the shrine 
 of Thomas a Becket. In Canterbury is the 
 tomb of the Black Prince, and over it hangs 
 the armour that speaks of Crecy and Poic- 
 tiers. Winchester also is full of history, 
 
 B
 
 1 8 A TRIP TO E^'GLAXD. 
 
 and though it is wanting in sublimity of 
 height, as the English cathedrals are gen- 
 erally, compared with their more soaring 
 sisters in France, there is something about 
 it peculiarly impressive. In height and 
 grandeur the palm is borne off by York ; 
 in beauty and poetry by Lincoln. Norman 
 Durham, '-half church of God, half castle 
 'gainst the Scot," is profoundly imposing 
 from its massiveness, which seems endur- 
 ing as the foundations of the earth, as well 
 as from its commanding situation. Ely is 
 also a glorious pile, while its site has his- 
 torical interest as the scene of the last stand 
 made by the Saxon against the Norman 
 Conqueror. Wells is lovely in itself, and 
 it stands on a broad expanse of lawn sur- 
 rounded by old ecclesiastical buildings 
 which escaped the destroyer, and present 
 a picture of old cathedral life. Wells and 
 Salisbury are perhaps the two best speci- 
 mens of the cathedral close, that haven of 
 religious calm amidst this bustling world, 
 in which a man tired of business and con- 
 tentious life might delight, especially if he 
 has a taste for books, to find tranquillity, 
 with quiet companionship, in his old age. 
 Take your stand on the Close of Salisbury 
 or Wells on a summer afternoon when the
 
 THE CATHEDRALS. 1 9 
 
 congregation is filing leisurely out from the 
 service and the sounds are still heard from 
 the cathedral, and you will experience a 
 sensation not to be experienced in the New 
 World. 
 
 In thinking of the cathedrals we must 
 not forget the old parish churches, legacies 
 most of them of the Catholic ^Middle Ages, 
 often very fine, and always speaking pleas- 
 antly to the heart, especially when they fill 
 the air with the music of their Sabbath 
 chimes or of their wedding bells. But 
 among these, since the revival of Anglican- 
 ism, the hand of the restorer, or rather of 
 the rebuilder, has been so busy that in some 
 districts it is easier to find churches in an 
 ancient style than an ancient church. It 
 was no doubt right, from the point of view 
 of reUgious feeling as well as from that 
 of taste, to remove the high-backed pews, 
 the galleries which ruined the form of the 
 church, the hideous monuments which 
 defaced the chancel ; but these things, 
 which an Englishman who has passed sixty 
 remembers so well, had associations of 
 which the work of Gilbert Scott or Butter- 
 field, however correct as a reproduction of 
 mediceval Gothic, is devoid. Perhaps no 
 better representation of the old parish
 
 20 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 church is to be found than the church of 
 Iffley, which is close to Oxford, and is ex- 
 ceedingly interesting as a specimen of the 
 Norman style. Iffley churchyard, in which 
 stands a yew tree that may have seen the 
 Norman times, is also a good specimen of 
 the peace of death which an old English 
 churchyard presents, perhaps in a pleas- 
 anter, at all events in a more religious, 
 guise than these cemeteries of ours, with 
 their posthumous rivalries of vanity in 
 columns, pyramids, and obelisks, and their 
 somewhat ghastly attempts to make the 
 grave look pretty. In Iffley churchyard, as 
 well as in any other, you may find a local 
 habitation for the thoughts of Gray's Elegy. 
 The cathedral and the parish church 
 belong to the present as well as to the past. 
 Indeed, they have been recently exerting 
 a peculiar influence over the present, for 
 there can be no doubt that the spell of their 
 beauty and their adaptation, as places of 
 Catholic devotion, to the Eitualistic rather 
 than to the frotestant form of worship 
 have had a great effect in producing the 
 Neo-Catholic reaction of the last half cen- 
 tury. Creations of the religious genius of 
 the Middle Ages, they have been potent 
 missionaries of the mediaeval faith. But
 
 PARISH CHURCHES. 21 
 
 there is a part of Mediaeval Catliolicism 
 wliich belongs entirely to the past, and the 
 monuments of which present themselves 
 only in the form of ruins. Asceticism and 
 Monasticism were discarded by the Refor- 
 mation. Nothing but the \NTecks remain 
 of the vast and beautiful abodes in which 
 they dwelt. Of the monastic ruins the most 
 perfect and interesting is Foimtains Abbey, 
 near Ripon, and on the estate of Lord 
 Ripon, who, as a convert himself to Roman 
 Catholicism, has exemplified the lingering 
 influence of what Macaulay calls "that 
 august and fascinating superstition." In 
 romantic loveliness of situation the first 
 place is claimed by Tintern on the Wye, 
 the second by Rievaux or Bolton, both of 
 which are in Yorkshire, a great land of 
 monastic remains. The name of Tintern is 
 dear and familiar to many who have never 
 seen the ruin, but who well know the lines 
 which enslirine the poetic philosophy of 
 Wordsworth. The ruins of Glastonbury are 
 also most interesting, not only on account 
 of the grandeur' which the fragments of the 
 church bespeak, and the sumptuous hospi- 
 tality represented by the abbot's kitchen, 
 but because, as the great master of all 
 this lore, Professor Freeman, savs : "The
 
 22 A TRIP TO EXGLAXD. 
 
 church of Glastonbury, founded by the 
 Briton, honoured and enriched by the 
 Englishman, is the one great religious 
 foundation which lived through the storm 
 of English Conquest, and in which Briton 
 and Englishmen have an equal share."' 
 Here we are in the realm of Arthur, and 
 may read with enhanced enjoyment the 
 Idyls of the King. It is impossible not 
 to be touched by these ruins, or to forbear 
 the protest of the heart against the ruthless 
 destroyers of such loveliness. But there is 
 nothing except the architectural beauty to 
 regret. The monasteries had done their 
 appointed work during the iron times of feu- 
 dalism and private war as places of refuge 
 for the gentler spirits, as homes of such 
 culture as there was, and centres of civili- 
 zation. But the various orders to which 
 they belonged, Benedictine, Cistercian, 
 Franciscan, or Dominican, denote succes- 
 sive attempts to rise to an angelic life, each 
 soon followed by the collapse of the wings 
 of asceticism and contemplation on w-hich 
 the mortal strove to soar above his mortal 
 state. At the time of the Keformation the 
 spiritual character even of the least corrupt 
 of the monastic houses had probably waxed 
 verv faint, while in some, it cannot be
 
 THE MONASTERIES. 23 
 
 doubted, not only idleness and self-indul- 
 gence but the grossest vice had made their 
 abode. Even the work of copying books 
 and missal-painting, by which they had 
 done good service to literature and minor 
 art, was being superseded by printing. As 
 a class, these houses had become the 
 strongholds of reactionary superstition, the 
 ramparts of intolerance, and the great 
 obstacles to the progress of humanity. 
 They still offered hospitality to the way- 
 farer. They still fed the poor at their 
 gates, and as we look upon the ruined 
 portal arch we may see the weary traveller 
 dismount and the beadsmen gather beside 
 it. Their hospitality and their charity pre- 
 served their popularity in districts where, 
 as in the north, inns were few, and in a time 
 when public charity did not exist ; and the 
 great northern insurrection, called the Pil- 
 grimage of Grace, in which the abbots of 
 Yorkshire monasteries took part, was prob- 
 ably as much a social movement against 
 the destruction of the monasteries as a 
 religious movement against doctrinal inno- 
 vation. The nunneries seem, as might have 
 been expected, to have preserved their 
 purity and usefulness better than the mon- 
 astic houses of a sex of which the passions
 
 24 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 were stronger and less easily tamed by 
 monastic rule. Some of them were still 
 doing good service in the education of 
 women. We may think of this as we stand 
 among the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, near 
 Oxford, which possess a further interest as 
 having witnessed the last days of Henry the 
 Second's fair Rosamond, the legend of the 
 labyrinth notwithstanding. With the ruins 
 of ])ominican and Franciscan jMonasteries 
 is connected the memory of the vast devel- 
 opment at once of Asceticism, of Papal 
 power, and of crusading orthodoxy, in 
 the thirteenth century. The Dominican 
 churches are in their form specially adapted 
 for preaching, which was one of the great 
 functions of the order, the other being, 
 unhappily, the administration of the Inqui- 
 sition. There is a specimen, now restored 
 and turned into a modern church, at Read- 
 ing. Attached to the Cathedral of Peter- 
 borough is a Benedictine cloister, which 
 recalls to us very vividly the daily life of a 
 monk, while the cathedral itself stands first 
 perhaps among the cathedrals of the second 
 class. At Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, in 
 a romantic dell, is the monument of another 
 and still more intense kind of asceticism in 
 the form of a hermitage, which deserves a
 
 THE MONASTERIES. 25 
 
 visit. The spot has the additional attraction 
 of being the scene of tlie story of Eugene 
 Aram. Aram's erudite defence turned 
 upon the point that a hermit, after his 
 lonely life of mortification, was buried 
 alone in his cell, so that the body alleged 
 to be that of the murdered Clarke might in 
 reality be that of the hermit. There is 
 another hermitage at Warkworth, near the 
 ruins of the gi-eat castle. Those cells claim 
 at least the tribute due to an experiment in 
 perfection, however misdirected and abor- 
 tive. 
 
 Among the religious memorials of the 
 iNIiddle Ages are also to be numbered the 
 crosses to which the eye of mediaeval piety 
 was turned in the churchyard or the market- 
 place and by the wayside. Hardly any of 
 them escaped ruthless mutilation when the 
 tempest of popular wrath burst forth against 
 an ancient faith which had degenerated 
 into a hollow superstition. But a special 
 homage is due to the "Eleanor's Crosses," 
 of which the two best preserved will be 
 found at Waltham and Northampton, and 
 which are monuments raised to conjugal 
 love, in the best period of Catholicism, by 
 the noblest of kings and men. 
 
 Feudalism, like Monasticism, is a thing
 
 26 A TRIP TO EXGLAND. 
 
 of the past, though it has left its traces on 
 law and social organization. Its abodes, 
 like those of ^Nlonasticism, are ruins. One 
 here and there, like a knight exchanging 
 his armour for the weeds of peace when 
 war was over, has been softened and de- 
 veloped into a palace or a mansion, as in 
 the case of AVarwick, the abode of the 
 "Last of the Barons,-' of Alnwick, the 
 fortress of the Percies, and that of the great 
 keep of "Windsor itself. In every part of 
 the land, on heights and commanding points, 
 shattered ruins mark the seat from which 
 feudal lordship once looked down in its 
 might and pride upon a land of serfs. Even 
 the loftiness of the situation and the more 
 bracing air must have helped to nourish in 
 the Xorman chief the sense of superiority 
 to the peasants or burghers whose habita- 
 tions cowered below. In their day these 
 fortresses, the more important of them at 
 least, were creations of military architecture, 
 equal perhaps in its way to the ecclesiasti- 
 cal architecture which created the cathe- 
 drals. Owing his power, his security, his 
 importance to the strength of his castle, and 
 every day surveying it, the lord would be 
 always occupying himself in perfecting its 
 defences. To understand what a castle
 
 FEUDALISM AND ITS CASTLES. IJ 
 
 was, and how it was attacked and defended, 
 it is necessary to read some work on mili- 
 tary architecture, like that of Viollet Le 
 Due, and thus to enable ourselves to restore 
 in fancy not only the stone structure of 
 which the fragments are before us, but the 
 wooden platforms upon which the defenders 
 fought. " Destroyed by Cromwell," is the 
 usual epitaph of an English castle. But 
 generally speaking, gunpowder and social 
 progress were the combined powers before 
 wiiich the massy walls of the feudal Jericho 
 fell down. Sometimes the castle ruins 
 stand mute records of the past in the midst 
 of some thriving city, and the castle hill, 
 converted into a pleasure ground, forms the 
 evening lounge of tlie burghers whose fore- 
 fathers its frowning battlements overawed. 
 Evil memories haunt tliose dungeons, now 
 laid open to the light of day, in wdiich the 
 captives of feudalism once pined. Berkeley 
 rang with the shrieks of an agonizing king. 
 Pomfret, too, saw a dethroned monarch 
 meet the usual fate of the dethroned, and 
 afterwards saw the hapless enemies of 
 Richard III. pass to the tragic death which 
 in the time of the Wars of the Roses had 
 become almost the common lot of nobility 
 and ambition. With the very name of
 
 28 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 castle is connected the dreadful memory of 
 the anarchy in the time of King Stephen, 
 when castles were multiplied, and each of 
 them became the den and torture-house of 
 some P"ront-de-Bceuf, with his band of ma- 
 rauding mercenaries, so that the cry of the 
 people was that Christ and the saints slept. 
 This is the dark side of the history which 
 the ruins of castles recall. On the other 
 hand, it should be remembered that the 
 lord of the feudal castle did, after his fash- 
 ion, the necessary service of an iron time. 
 If he oppressed the dwellers beneath his 
 ramparts, he also protected them against 
 other oppressors. In the days before 
 regular and centralized administration, local 
 lordship was in fact, in the rural districts 
 at least, about the only possible instrument 
 of social and political organization. By it 
 alone could the rough justice of the times 
 be meted out, or the forces of the commu- 
 nity called forth for national or local 
 defence. The life of a lord then was not 
 one of sybaritism, but of very hard work. 
 If he was good, as a certain proportion of the 
 lords no doubt were, the tie between him and 
 his vassals, though repugnant to the ideas 
 of modern democracy, was not necessarily 
 hateful or degrading ; it has supplied con-
 
 FEUDAL CASTLES. 29 
 
 genial food for poetry and romance. Under 
 a weak king like Stephen the castles were 
 strongholds of anarchy, and Stephen's 
 strong successor, when he demolished a 
 great number of them, packed off the mer- 
 cenaries who had manned them, and strictly 
 enforced the law against unlicensed fortifi- 
 cation, must have been blessed by all his 
 people. But against a king who was too 
 strong and aimed at absolute power the 
 baronage was the rude champion and 
 trustee of liberty. Had the royal mercena- 
 ries been able to sweep the kingdom with- 
 out resistance, not law and order but the 
 untempered sway of a despot's will would 
 have been the result. Xor ought it to be 
 forgotten that rude and coarse as life in 
 these castles was, in them took place a very 
 happy change in the relations between the 
 sexes and the character of domestic life. 
 In the cities of antiquity the men lived 
 together in public, while the women were 
 shut up at home almost as in a harem. 
 But in the castle the sexes lived constantly 
 together, and the lord must have learned to 
 find his daily happiness in the company of 
 his lady. Thither, too, came the trouba- 
 dour with his lays and the trouvere with his 
 tales, thrice welcome when there was no
 
 30 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 newspaper, no salon, no theatre, and re- 
 fined the minds of the inmates of the castle 
 while they beguiled the weary hour. 
 
 In the architecture of the castles, as in 
 that of the cathedrals, there are successive 
 phases which mark the changing times. 
 A stem Norman keep, such as that of Roch- 
 ester, recalls the days in which the con- 
 quered Saxon looked up with fear and 
 hatred to the hold of the Conqueror. Gradu- 
 ally, as times grew milder, the Xorman 
 keep was softened through a series of modi- 
 fications into the fortified mansion, such as 
 Bodiam, in Sussex, built by one of the com- 
 panions-in-arms of Edward III., out of his 
 winnings in the French wars. At last we 
 come to a mansion like Hurstmonceaux, 
 also in Sussex, which betokens the final 
 transition into the manor house. Hurst- 
 monceaux is worth visiting were it only as 
 a specimen of brickwork which puts our age 
 to shame. Only a fragment of it, however, 
 remains. The rest was pulled down in a fit 
 of spleen, it is said, by a proprietor on 
 whose grave rests the antiquary's malison. 
 The castellated mansion of Hever, in Kent, 
 has been more fortunate. The great castles 
 of the north, such as Warkworth, Xawortli. 
 Alnwick, and Ford, recall the memories uf
 
 OLD CITY WALLS. 3 1 
 
 the wild Border wars of Hotspur and of 
 Chevy Chase. The castles of Wales, not- 
 ably Carnarvon, tell of the strategy and 
 policy of JEdward, the greatest not only of 
 the Plantagenets, but of all mediaeval 
 kings. 
 
 The cities of the Old World, with their 
 narrow and crooked streets, speak of the 
 time in which the burghers were huddled 
 together within the walls which guarded 
 their little realms of industry from feudal 
 violence, while the cities of the Xew World, 
 spreading out freely and in straight lines, 
 speak of the security of a happier era. Of 
 the ancient walls, about the best specimen 
 is to be seen at Chester, fortified m former 
 days against the wild Welsh. Of the walls 
 of York also there are fine remains, with 
 the ancient gateways or bars through which 
 the capital of the north saw many a mail- 
 clad column march, and many a procession 
 of state defile. The visitor to Oxford should 
 not fail to see the remnant of the city wall 
 within which lie New College and its gar- 
 dens, and which was kept in repair by vir- 
 tue of a covenant between the founder of 
 the College and the city. Conway, on the 
 north coast of Wales, presents or not long 
 ago presented, though on a small scale, the
 
 32 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 aspect of a walled town of the Middle Ages, 
 with its castle almost in the original state, 
 though the fast train from London to Holy- 
 head runs where the warder of the lonely 
 garrison once looked over the Welsh hills 
 and but rarely, like the warder of Norham 
 in Marmion, saw approach "a plump of 
 spears." 
 
 Of England's part — no mean part — in 
 the Crusades and of her chivalry the chief 
 monument is the Temple Church, in Lon- 
 don, with the tombs of the Templars which 
 it contains. Few things in the way of 
 monumental sculpture are more impressive 
 than these simple and soldier-like effigies of 
 the warriors of the Cross when we think of 
 the religious romance of lives spent in com- 
 bat with the Paynim on the fields of Pales- 
 tine. The Order of the Templars fell partly 
 no doubt through its own vices and pride, 
 the consequences of the wealth which Chris- 
 tian enthusiasm had lavished on it, and out 
 of which it built the proud fortress-mansion 
 to which the Church belonged. But it had 
 rendered illustrious service to Christendom 
 and to civilization by stemming the onrush- 
 ing tide of Mahometan conquest, and we 
 are glad to think that at least its dissolu- 
 tion was not attended in England by the
 
 CHIVALRY. ^^ 
 
 vile and dastardly cruelties which were in- 
 flicted on Jacques de Molay and his brethren 
 by a tyrant in France. In the home of the 
 redoutable and ambitious brotherhood a 
 peaceful society of lawyers now dwells, and 
 the preacher of the society bears the title of 
 "The Master of the Temple." When we 
 speak of chivalry we mean the genuine 
 chivalry of Sir Galahad and his fellows, 
 who, as soldiers of God and champions of 
 Christendom, went in quest of " the Holy 
 Grail," not of that fantastic aftergrowth 
 which appeared wiien the crusades were 
 over, and which swore on the swans, wor- 
 shipped women as goddesses, while it by no 
 means treated them as Dianas, performed 
 crazy vows in their honour, tilted in sense- 
 less tournaments, made reckless wars out 
 of a mere spirit of adventure, cultivated a 
 narrow class sense of honour, trampled on 
 the peasant, and at last sat for the portrait 
 of Don Quixote. The products and me- 
 morials of this bastard chivalry are the 
 orders, titles, and ceremonies of Knight- 
 hood, which have been transmuted in 
 course of time into a curious sort of Legion 
 of Honour, much, as we know, to the satis- 
 faction of Colonial ambition. 
 Among the relics of the feudal era may 
 

 
 34 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 be numbered the forests once dedicated to 
 the mdulgence of that passion for the chase 
 which devoured the restless Norman in the 
 intervals of war. and long the hateful scenes 
 of Norman tyranny, now pleasant retreats 
 of sylvan beauty and peace in a thronged 
 and busy country. The most considerable 
 of them is the New Forest, to create which 
 the Conqueror laid waste a wide district, 
 sweeping away hamlet, grange, and church, 
 and which, as the judgment of Heaven on 
 his tyranny, saw the deaths of two of his 
 sons. A stone marks the spot where a 
 party of charcoal burners found the body 
 of the Red King, slain by an unknown 
 hand and carried in their carts, like the 
 carcase of a wild boar, as a chronicle says, 
 to unhonoured burial at "NVhichester. 
 
 Of the purely domestic architecture of 
 the Middle Ages it was not likely that very 
 much either in town or country would re- 
 main. Antiquity and picturesqueness give 
 way to solidity and convenience. But in the 
 rows of Chester, in Coventry, in Shrews- 
 bury, in Bristol, in the remains now rapidly 
 diminishing of the ancient City of London, 
 in the out-of-the-way streets of almost 
 every old town, will be foimd some of 
 those curious timbered houses which pre- 
 
 '
 
 ELIZABETHAN MANOR HOUSES. 35 
 
 serve the impress of the past. At Bury 
 and Lincoln, houses even of the Norman 
 period are found. Coventry retains per- 
 haps the sanitary as wePl as the architec- 
 tural image of the Middle Ages, and excuses 
 the cynical judge who when a witness was 
 provokingly slow of utterance upbraided 
 him with keeping the court all that time at 
 Coventry. A few civic halls, as at Oakham 
 in Rutlandshire, remain. Of the ancient 
 county mansions, the queen is Haddon Hall, 
 in Derbyshire, most beautiful, now that it 
 is touched by time, and recalling by its 
 union of amplitude, stateliness, and rude- 
 ness, as we pass through its rooms, once 
 thronged with guests and serving-men, the 
 rough magnificence and roystering hospi- 
 talities of the old baronial life. But many 
 an ancient hall has fallen from its high 
 estate, ,and now presents itself in a dilapi- 
 dated condition under the humble guise of 
 a farm house. 
 
 Out of the wTeck of the mediaeval nobility 
 in the Wars of the Roses arose the power- 
 ful monarchy of the Tudors. Of this period 
 the monuments are the Elizabethan manor 
 houses, the palaces of that new nobihty of 
 the council chamber and the robe which
 
 36 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 supplanted the mail-clad baronage, and 
 which had been enriched by the confisca- 
 tion of Church lands. Nothing in the way 
 of domestic arcliitecture is more beautiful 
 or stately than those great houses. They 
 are at a disadvantage, in comparison with 
 the churches and abbeys of the Middle 
 Ages, only in having been built for the 
 purposes of private state and luxury, not 
 for the satisfaction of higher aspirations. 
 Pre-eminent in historical interest, as well 
 as in magnificence, are Burleigh and Hat- 
 field, the palaces of the two branches of 
 the great Elizabethan house of Cecil, and 
 memorials of the high services rendered to 
 the State in time of peril, albeit not untainted 
 with Machiavellian statecraft. Audley p]nd, 
 near Cambridge, displays the ill-gotten 
 wealth, and preserves the evil memory, of 
 one of the worst mmisters of the tyranny 
 of Henry A^III. Knowle, in Kent, is to be 
 seen if possible. It is a storehouse of 
 ancient memories, and a wonderful presen- 
 tation of the most magnificent life of the 
 Tudor times. Penshurst derives a charm 
 from its association with Sir Philip Sidney. 
 Bramshill, not very far from Basingstoke, 
 in the north of Hampshire, has the advan- 
 tage of presenthig its stately front on a
 
 THE AGE OF THE STUARTS. 37 
 
 rising ground, whereas most of the Eliza- 
 bethan mansions stand on flats, and of 
 being surrounded by a wild park with fine 
 Scotch firs. It was in that park that Arch- 
 bishop Abbott accidentally shot a keeper, 
 and thereby incurred an ecclesiastical dis- 
 qualification, which helped to clear Laud's 
 path to an ill-starred supremacy in the 
 Church, But in almost any part of the 
 country in which you may chance to be, 
 you will find an Elizabethan manor house. 
 The amplitude, solidity, and comfort of 
 these mansions being not less remarkable 
 than their beauty, no one has thought of 
 improving them out of existence. Ken- 
 il worth, however, the palace in which 
 Leicester's dark ambition entertained the 
 woman whose throne he hoped to share, is 
 now a huge ruin ; while, in place of the 
 royal palace of Greenwich, where the 
 statesmen and the heroic adventurers of 
 that age formed a peerless circle round 
 their queen, now, not inappropriately, 
 stands Greenwich Hospital. 
 
 The age of the Stuarts was one rather of 
 conflict and destruction than of creation of 
 any kind. Castles shattered by Cromwell's 
 artillery, church carvings and monuments 
 defaced by Puritan iconoclasm, traces of
 
 38 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 field works and trenches, military relics of 
 Edgehill, Marston. and Xaseby, are the 
 characteristic monuments of a period of 
 revolution and civil war. Near Basingstoke, 
 and not far from Silchester and Bramshill, 
 may be seen the vast substructions of Basing 
 House, the fortified palace of the ^larquis 
 of Winchester, which, as the readers of 
 Carlyle know, after long holding out against 
 the forces of the Parliament, was stormed 
 and razed by Cromwell himself. It is a 
 relic eminently symbolical of the era in 
 which the marquises went down before the 
 onset of the Cromwells. This series of 
 relics is closed by the wall of Magdalen 
 College, "against which," as Croker told 
 the Duke of Wellington, "James the Sec- 
 ond ran his head.'' The monument most 
 closely connected with the hapless dynasty 
 is the noble banqueting-house at Whitehall, 
 out of the window of which Charles I. 
 passed to the scaffold. To the Stuarts, 
 however, may fairly be ascribed St. Paul's, 
 for the restoration of which Charles and 
 Laud began to collect funds, and which is a 
 monument at once of the High Church 
 revival and of the prevalence of classical or 
 Italian taste in architecture. Nor could a 
 dynasty desire a nobler monument. Like
 
 THE AGE OF THE STUARTS. 39 
 
 St. Peter's, St. PauPs is wanting in poetry 
 and in religious impressiveness compared 
 with the cathedrals of the Catholic Middle 
 Ages ; yet it is a magnificent temple. Few 
 will deny that externally it is superior to 
 St. Peter's. Internally it is far inferior, 
 Protestantism having stinted the decora- 
 tions which are essential to a rich and 
 luminous effect. These, however, an effort 
 is now being made to supply. A more 
 sinister memorial of the ecclesiastical reac- 
 tion is the porch of the University Church 
 at Oxford, built by Laud, and surmounted 
 with the image, hateful to Puritan eyes, of 
 the Virgin and the child. The statue of 
 Charles stands at Charing Cross on the 
 pedestal from which triumphant Puritanism 
 once cast it down, and the statue of James 
 II., left unmolested over the gateway of 
 University College, Oxford, bespeaks the 
 comparative mildness of the Second Revo- 
 lution. Great houses, such as historic 
 Wilton and Long Leat, in which the genius 
 of Inigo Jones displayed itself in presiding 
 over the transition from the Tudor to the 
 Italian style, are also memorials of the 
 reign of Charles I. Of the reign of Charles 
 II. the most characteristic memorials are 
 the portraits of beauties at Hampton 
 Court.
 
 40 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 Of the Augustan age of Anne, with its 
 classic tastes and its privileges, its not 
 unpicturesque formality and its grand 
 manners, Blenheim Palace is the typical 
 monument. A stately monument it is, and, 
 more than any other building in England 
 except Windsor Castle, worthy of the name 
 of a palace, though perhaps its style may be 
 open to the charge of being at once heavy 
 and fantastic. Nothing in England vies 
 with the si)lendours of Louis XIV. so much 
 as the abode built by public gratitude for 
 his conqueror. For the conqueror of 
 Napoleon it was intended to build a coun- 
 terpart of Blenheim at Strathfieldsaye, but 
 the simplicity and thrift of Wellington put 
 the money in the funds, and were contented 
 with the enlargement of a common country 
 house. There is something about Blenheim 
 exactly corresponding to the historic figure 
 of the great captain and diplomatist, with 
 that superb manner which almost made 
 knavery august. Let us remember that the 
 age had not only its Marlborough, Godol- 
 phin, and Pope, but its Newton, Locke, and 
 Bentley. It was a period in all lines of 
 solid greatness. The latter histoiy of Blen- 
 heim is not happy. The palace is being 
 rifled of its objects of art and soon perhaps
 
 THE AGE OF THE GEORGES. 4I 
 
 may be rifled of its historic relics. Such 
 is the state to which hereditary dynasties, 
 whether royal or territorial, are exposed. 
 A visit to Blenheim should on no account 
 be omitted. Besides the Palace you will 
 see there an excellent specimen of that 
 lovely appanage of British wealth and rank, 
 the Park, with its immemorial oaks, and 
 the deer trooping through its ferny glades. 
 Why cannot those who inherited such 
 abodes manage to be moral and happy ? 
 Because, as a rule, there is no virtue with- 
 out labour. 
 
 Of the period of the Georges the chief 
 monuments are the palaces built in the 
 classical or Italian style by the heads of the 
 great Houses which then ruled England, 
 swaying Parliament through their territorial 
 influence and their nomination boroughs, 
 sharing among them a vast patronage and 
 reducing the monarchy to the state of pupil- 
 age from which George III. at last strug- 
 gled to set himself free. Among the most 
 splendid of these palaces are Stowe, Chats- 
 worth, and Castle Howard. Clumber, the 
 seat of Horace Walpole's Duke of New- 
 castle, the arch borough-monger and in- 
 trig-uer of his day, is more splendid within 
 than imposing without. These great houses
 
 42 A TRIP TO ENGLAND . 
 
 were full of objects of historic interest ; but 
 one after another, by the sad law of family 
 decadence, they fell into spendthrift hands ; 
 and the wreck of Stowe, after the ruin of 
 the powerful house of Buckingham, was a 
 catastrophe of aristocracy as well as a carni- 
 val of the auctioneer. 
 
 Oxford and Cambridge belong at once to 
 the past and to the present. These univer- 
 sity cities, with their numerous colleges, are 
 peculiar to England. In Canada and the 
 United States each college is a university. 
 But the universities of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge are federations of colleges. The 
 university is the federal authority, holds the 
 examinations, gi'ants all the degrees and 
 honours, and through its staff of professors 
 carries on the higher teaching ; though the 
 duties of an Oxford or Cambridge professor 
 are held to consist as much in the* advance- 
 ment of learning or science as in teaching, 
 with which he is not overburdened. It is 
 governed by a university council and a 
 legislature. But each college is a corpora- 
 tion in itself, having, so to speak, its own 
 state rights, holding and administering its 
 own estates, governed by its own Head and 
 Fellows, exercising discipline over its own
 
 THE UNIVERSITIES. 43 
 
 Students within its walls, and conducting 
 the ordinary teaching through its staff of 
 tutors. The immediate and the closer tie 
 of the student is to his college, while the 
 higher tie is to the university. Originally, 
 Oxford and Cambridge were like the Ger- 
 man universities at the present day, the 
 students not being collected in colleges, but 
 boarding in private houses or in hostels. 
 In the thirteenth century, when there was 
 a gi'eat awakening of intellectual life in 
 Europe, students flocked in to the English 
 as well as to the other universities. There 
 being then few books, knowledge was to be 
 attained only by hearing the professors, who 
 taught wherever they could find a hall or a 
 stand, while the eager crowd of students 
 drank the words of wisdom and power from 
 their lips. Those were the days in which 
 Roger Bacon first kindled at Oxford the 
 lamp of science, and, as a matter of course, 
 fell under the Church's ban as a professor 
 of unhallowed aits. Research, since the 
 days of the school philosophy, has become 
 more rational and more fruitful ; but never 
 perhaps has it been so full of hope and 
 romance as it was in the thirteenth cen- 
 tury. Oxford, which afterwards became 
 the citadel of Tory reaction, was then in the
 
 44 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 van of progress, political and religious as 
 well as scientific. With all this generous 
 activity of mind there were among the 
 youthful population of the academical city 
 much disorder, turbulence, and vice ; there 
 were affrays between nationalities far 
 bloodier than the duels of German student 
 clubs. Seehig this, and at the same time 
 desiring to promote learning. Bishop Walter 
 de Merton, the Chancellor of Henry III., 
 devised an institution in which secular 
 studies might be combined with something 
 of the strictness of monastic discipline, and 
 with daily religious worship. Merton Col- 
 lege, his foundation, is the first regular 
 college, and the dark little quadrangle, 
 called, nobody knows why, "Mob Quad," 
 is the cradle of collegiate life. The new 
 institution met the needs of the time ; it 
 prospered and was imitated. College after 
 college grew up both at Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge. The taste for founding them 
 waxed as that for founding monasteries 
 waned. Pre-eminent among them at Ox- 
 ford were New College, founded by William 
 of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, and 
 Chancellor of Edward III., to which a 
 school for boys at AVinchester was attached 
 as a seed-plot ; ISIagdalen College, the love-
 
 THE COLLEGES. 45 
 
 liest of all homes of learning, founded by 
 William of Waynflete, another Bishop of 
 Winchester, and Chancellor of Henry VI., 
 in the stormy days of the Wars of the 
 Koses ; Christ Church, the splendid Con- 
 ception of AVolsey, and magnificent still, 
 though shorn of half its projected grandeur 
 by its founder's fall ; and at Cambridge, 
 Trinity, with its ample courts and the pic- 
 tures of Xewton, Bentley. and Bacon in its 
 noble hall. The type of all is a quadrangle 
 of semi-monastic character, a common 
 dining-hall, and domestic chapel. Gradu- 
 ally the colleges absorbed the free univer- 
 sity, and at last all students were con- 
 strained by law to be members of colleges. 
 In the Catholic Middle Ages intellectual 
 institutions were clerical ; and this require- 
 ment surviving, with a mass of other me- 
 diseval and semi-monastic regulations em- 
 bodied in the Statutes of Founders, the 
 epoch to which they belonged, paralyzed 
 the colleges after the Keformation and 
 made them and the universities which they 
 had absorbed little more than seminaries of 
 the clerical profession. Oxford especially 
 sank into an organ of the Jacobite clergy 
 and their party. The consequence was a 
 century and a half of literary and scientific
 
 46 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 torpor, redeemed by few great names, of 
 which Cambridge, where practically cleri- 
 cism prevailed least, had the most illustrious. 
 With the renewal of progress in the present 
 century came reform, or rather emancipa- 
 tion, and Oxford and Cambridge are now 
 once more in the van of intellectual Eng- 
 land, though they never can be again what 
 they were in the thirteenth century, when 
 the only source of knowledge was the oral 
 teaching of the professor. Perhaps they 
 will always be centres of learning more than 
 of experimental science, which takes the 
 world for its field. 
 
 A great change has lately come not only 
 over the literary, but over the social life of 
 the colleges. The mediaeval fraternities of 
 students being clerical, were celibate, nor 
 did the structure and arrangements of the 
 college admit family life. From the reten- 
 tion of the statutable celibacy, while me- 
 dicBval asceticism was discarded, grew the 
 social life of the college Common Room. 
 That life was pleasant enough while the 
 Fellow was young ; but its luxury palled at 
 last, and as years crept on it became dreary, 
 and was gladly exchanged for a college 
 benefice, on which the Fellow could marry. 
 The retention of ceUbacy indeed had an-
 
 OXFOKD AND CAMBRIDGE. 47 
 
 Other and a curious effect on specially cler- 
 ical and religious natures : combined with 
 the mediaeval character of the buildings 
 and associations it had a tendency to revive 
 the monk, and thus Oxford Colleges pro- 
 duced Xewman and the leaders of the 
 Anglo-Catholic reaction, as two centuries 
 before they had been the nursing mothers 
 of the ecclesiastical reaction under Laud. 
 But now the rule for celibacy has been 
 relaxed, and a circle of married professors 
 and tutors has come into existence, which, 
 combining intellectuality with the simpli- 
 city of living enforced by moderate incomes, 
 forms a society about as pleasant as any in 
 the world. The railway brings down poli- 
 ticians and men of business as well as men 
 of letters, to pass the Sunday, and the 
 pedantic seclusion of Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge from the world is now a thing of the 
 past. -There is no use in transcribing the 
 guide book. Cambridge, in the chapel of 
 King's College, has a single glory which 
 Oxford cannot match, and certainly noth- 
 ing at Oxford can charm more than the 
 walk along the Cam at the backs of the 
 Cambridge Colleges. But Oxford is a 
 more academic city. It will be noted that 
 the Gothic style lingered there with other
 
 48 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 traces of the Middle Ages, to the time of 
 Charles I. The local stone, of which some 
 of the colleges are built, soon changes 
 colour under the action of the weather. 
 An American visitor, pointing to a black- 
 looking pile, asked his host whether that 
 building was not very old. "Oh, no!" 
 was the reply, " its colour deceives you ; it 
 has not been built much more than two 
 hundred y eai-s. ' ' With this may be coupled 
 the story of a Fellow of a College, who, 
 being asked how they managed to get such 
 perfect sward in those Oxford lawns, re- 
 plied, "It is the simplest thing in the 
 world ; you have only to mow and roll 
 regularly for about four hundred years." 
 The recent revival of the universities has 
 caused large modern additions to the build- 
 ings, of the taste of which the visitor will 
 judge. At Oxford, unfortunately, some of 
 the new buildings are too large for the gen- 
 eral scale of the city, which is small. Let 
 not the visitor to Oxford omit to get a gen- 
 eral view from the top of the Sheldonian 
 Theatre or of the Radcliffe Library. Let 
 him not omit to get a distant view from 
 Hinksey (after reading Matthew Arnold's 
 poem), Bagley, Whytham, or Stowe Wood, 
 Oxford should be visited in May or early in
 
 OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE. 49 
 
 June, when the place is at once in its full 
 beauty and thoroughly academical. At 
 Commemoration time, which people are apt 
 to choose, Oxford is not a university, but a 
 vast banqueting hall and ball room, full of 
 revellers brought together under pretence 
 of seeing honorary degrees conferred and 
 hearing prize poems recited. A guest at 
 Commemoration time may well fancy that 
 student life at Oxford and Cambridge is 
 fully portrayed by descriptions of the fast 
 student, such as Verdant Green, or by the 
 first plate of Frith's series, "The Road to 
 Ruin." There is too much of this sort of 
 thing in universities which are the resort of 
 wealth and aristocracy ; but there are also 
 hard study, high aspirations, ardent friend- 
 ships, and all the romance which, especially 
 among the cultured and active-minded, 
 hovers about the portals of life. Of late 
 student tastes, like those of society in gen- 
 eral, seem to have grown softer and more 
 refined. At many of the windows in the 
 dark old quadrangle there are boxes of 
 flowers, and from many rooms the sound 
 of the piano is heard. 
 
 It is perhaps at Oxford or Cambridge in 
 the summer term, when the boat races and 
 the cricket matches are going on, that 
 
 D
 
 50 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 English atlileticism can best be seen. A 
 gay and animating sight is a boat race, 
 ^Yhile a cricket match is apt to be tedious 
 to the uninitiated. Athleticism, in its pres- 
 ent prominence, not to say its present 
 extravagance, is a recent development, and 
 finds a philosophical justification in the re- 
 cently recognized importance of the physi- 
 cal basis of humanity. AVe have yet to see 
 whether it will develop health as well as 
 muscle, and force of character as well as 
 force of body. Instead of increased force 
 of character there has been of late in public 
 life rather an ominous exhibition of levity 
 and fatalism. After all, games and exer- 
 cises carried beyond a certain measure, 
 though they may not injure the body like 
 some other indulgences, are but dissipations 
 to the mind. They often serve as a safe- 
 guard, it is true, against dissipations of a 
 worse sort. 
 
 Not to be omitted in taking even a bird's- 
 eye view of England are the Public Schools. 
 To define a Public School would perhaps be 
 difficult. If you make size or importance 
 the test, you cannot exclude Rugby or 
 Cheltenham. If you make antiquity the 
 test, you can hardly include Harrow. But
 
 THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 5 1 
 
 the three schools which play in the Public 
 School cricket matches are Eton, Winches- 
 ter, and Harrow. Harrow has practically 
 taken the place of Westminster, which was- 
 long the most famous of the group, and in 
 the last century sent forth a long line of 
 worthies, but has recently been depressed by 
 the disadvantage of a situation less healthy 
 than historic. It is at the Public School 
 matches that the singular feeling connected 
 with these institutions is displayed in its ut- 
 most intensity, and to attend one of them 
 should therefore, if possible, be a part of 
 the programme. Nowhere else in the world, 
 probably, can a great crowd of the govern- 
 ing classes be seen in a state of wild excite- 
 ment over a boys' game. The chief claim 
 of Winchester to be one of the privileged 
 three is perhaps antiquity, in which it ex- 
 cels all the rest, having been the school 
 founded by the great mediaeval restorer of 
 education, AVilliam of Wykeham, beneath 
 the shadow of his own most venerable 
 cathedral, to supply scholars to the college 
 which he founded at Oxford. Eton and 
 Harrow, but especially Eton, are the 
 schools of the aristocracy, and their pe- 
 culiar character is in fact that of the class 
 to which the boys belong. They are the
 
 52 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 special training-places of the English "gen- 
 tleman." The strong point of the English 
 gentleman is not hard work, nor is hard 
 work the strong point of Eton or Harrow, 
 though the system of instruction has been 
 greatly improved of late, and it can no 
 longer be said, as it might have been said 
 fifty years ago, that the only things to be 
 learned at Eton are a little Latin and 
 Greek and a great deal of cricket and rowing. 
 The strong points are the union of freedom 
 with discipline, and the generous character 
 of the social law which the boys uphold 
 among themselves. Harrow is close to 
 London, but there is nothing in the way of 
 antiquities to see. Eton is within half-an- 
 hour's run of London by rail, and may be 
 taken in a day with Windsor ; and at Eton 
 there is a great deal in the way of antiqui- 
 ties, as well as in that of educational pe- 
 culiarities, to be seen. That ancient quad- 
 rangle, with the great, gray chapel rising 
 over its other buildings, and the statue of 
 the Plantagenet founder in its centre, the 
 green expanse of the playgroimd shaded by 
 stately elms stretching beside it, and the 
 castle palace of the English kings looking 
 down on it from the other side of the 
 Thames, is of all places of education about
 
 THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 53 
 
 the most historic ; and history is worth 
 something- in a place of education. The 
 equipments of the great scliool room would 
 hardly satisfy a school board in these days 
 of progi-ess ; but on its rough panels are to 
 be seen, carved by boyish hands, names 
 which afterwards became illustrious in the 
 annals of England. Those who think of 
 education only will go to Rugby, and pay 
 their devotions at the shrine of Dr. Arnold, 
 after reading Stanley's Life of the great 
 school reformer. 
 
 Of the British Monarchy the official and 
 diplomatic seat is St. James', a dingy and 
 shabby pile of brick, which by its mean- 
 ness, compared with the Tuileries and Ver- 
 sailles aptly symbolizes the relation of the 
 power which built it to that of the Monarchy 
 of Louis XIV. The power which built St. 
 James' has, however, by reason of its very 
 feebleness, managed to prolong its existence; 
 while the power which built the Tuileries 
 and Versailles, having by its despotism 
 provoked the revolutionary storm, has been 
 laid with all its grandeurs in the dust. At 
 St. James' are still held the Levees. But 
 those rooms having been found too small 
 for the prodigiously increasing crowd of 
 ladies, foreign and colonial, who pant, by
 
 54 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 passing under the eye of Royalty, to obtain 
 the baptism of fashion, the Drawing-Rooms 
 are now held in Buckingham Palace. '' Ex- 
 clusiveness " was pronounced by a Canadian 
 professor of etiquette to be the character- 
 istic charm of the Queen's Drawing-Rooms. 
 But instead of being exclusive, a Drawing- 
 Room will soon become a mob. Though 
 the political sceptre has departed from 
 British Royalty the social sceptre has not. 
 Conscious apparently of its loss of political 
 power, Royalty has of late retired into 
 private residences, where the enthusiastic 
 worshipper or the enterprising reporter can 
 only reconnoitre it through the telescope. 
 Here it leads a domestic life, goes picnicking, 
 and records its picnics together with family 
 occurrences in its diary. Even in death it 
 seems inclined to separate itself from the 
 monarchs who wore a real crown. It has 
 its private mausoleum at Frogmore, apart 
 from the tombs of the Kings in St. George's 
 Chapel and at "Westminster. The Hano- 
 verians, moreover, have always remained a 
 German family with German habits, tastes, 
 and friendships, as well as German connec- 
 tions. The modern town residence of Roy- 
 alty, Buckingham Palace, is large without 
 being magnificent, and devoid of interest of
 
 THE ROYAL PALACES. 55 
 
 any kind, historical or architectural. The 
 edifice belongs to the Regency, and the 
 Regent liked low ceilings. He who wants 
 to see State apartments without stateliness 
 may see them here. It is to the ancient 
 seats of the Monarchy that the interest 
 belongs. First among these must be named 
 the Tower, built originally by the Conqueror 
 to curb London, afterwards the fortress- 
 palace of his descendants, and in the end the 
 State prison, from which a long procession 
 of the ill-starred great went forth to lay their 
 heads on the block on Tower Hill ; while 
 State murders, like those of Henry VI. and 
 the two young sons of Edward IV., were 
 done in the dark chambers of the Tower it- 
 self. Evers'body knows Macaulay's passage 
 on the graves in the chapel. The Bastile has 
 been razed, the Tower has become a show, 
 and in their respective fates they typify the 
 contrast between French Revolution and 
 British progress. Of Westminster, the his- 
 toric seat of the Monarchy in former days, 
 nothing remains but that glorious hall, the 
 name of which is more associated with 
 justice than with Royalty, and the banquet- 
 ing house at Whitehall, with its window of 
 tragic memory. But of all the Royal 
 palaces the noblest, the only one indeed
 
 56 A TRIP TO EXGLAND. 
 
 worthy of the name, is "Windsor, built in 
 the times when the Kings of England were 
 Kings indeed. It may well challenge com- 
 parison with Versailles, so far as a creation 
 of the Plantagenets can be compared with 
 a creation of Louis XIV, It is disappoint- 
 ing to find how much of Windsor is the 
 work of the restorer, and of a restorer who 
 wrought before a real knowledge of mediae- 
 val architecture had been recovered. Still 
 nothing can spoil the effect of such a pile on 
 such a site. The Round Tower has been 
 raised, but still it is the Round Tower. The 
 glory" of St. George's Chapel is unimpaired, 
 and above the stalls may be read the names 
 of the first Knights of the Garter, the com- 
 rades in arms of Edward III. and the Black 
 Prince. These heroic adventurers are now 
 rather curiously represented by a set of 
 elderly gentlemen in purple velvet cloaks 
 and white satin tights, who chiefly prize the 
 Garter, as one of them avowed, because it 
 is the only thing nowadays that is not 
 given by merit. In St. George's Hall, 
 modernized though it is, imagination may 
 assemble again the victors of Crecy and 
 Poictiers, with their brave Queen and her 
 ladies, holding festivals which were en- 
 nobled by the recollection of glorious toils.
 
 ^yINDSOR CASTLE. 57 
 
 Long afterwards it was that the body of the 
 iUustrious successor of Edward was borne 
 across the courts of Windsor amidst the 
 falling snow, and beneath the fierce glances 
 of revolutionary soldiery, without funeral 
 pomp or requiem, to its nameless grave. 
 Around the Castle still stretches the great 
 Park, and. not many years ago a leafless 
 trunk in it was shown as Heme the Hunt- 
 er's Oak. Between Windsor and Staines 
 lies Runnymede, where the camps of John 
 and his Barons once faced each other, 
 where it was decided that the British Mon- 
 archy should not be despotic but constitu- 
 tional, and in the rude but vigorous form 
 of the Great Charter the first of European 
 constitutions was framed. Eltham, not far 
 from London, was another seat of the Plan- 
 tagenets and retains traces of its grandeur. 
 Its memories are sad, since it saw the 
 degraded dotage of Edward III, Hampton 
 Court claims a visit. One of its quad- 
 rangles and its magnificent hall are the 
 monuments of Wolsey's soaring ambition ; 
 but with these is combined the little Ver- 
 sailles of Louis the Fourteenth's arch-en- 
 emy, William the Third, and the gardens 
 laid out by Dutch William's taste, and now, 
 in summer, gorgeous with such beds of
 
 58 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 flowers as Dutch William never beheld. 
 Here Cromwell used to rest after his week 
 of overwhelming care, and here, in quieter 
 times, the last sovereign of Charles' house, 
 " Great Anne," used "sometimes counsel to 
 take and sometimes tea." The chestnuts 
 in the neighbouring park of Bushey are the 
 glory of English trees. Kensington and 
 Kew, minor seats of Royalty, have their 
 reminiscences and their anecdotes of the 
 Court of George III. and Charlotte. 
 
 "The British infantry," said the French 
 General Foy, "is the best ; fortunately there 
 is very little of it." Of the cavalry there is 
 still less. Sea-girt Britain owed the preser- 
 vation of her political liberties in no small 
 measure to the absence of any necessity 
 for a great standing army. Even now, 
 when instead of being girt by any sea her 
 members are scattered over the globe, and 
 five-sixths of the population of her Empne 
 are in Asia, her standing army is a mere 
 "thin red line" compared with the hosts 
 of the great military Powers. Seventy 
 thousand British soldiers hold India, with 
 its two hundred and fifty millions of peo- 
 ple. Of the Duke of Wellington's seventy 
 thousand at Waterloo, not thirty thousand
 
 THE ARMY AND NA\^. 59 
 
 were British, and it is doubtful whether 
 England has ever put more than thirty 
 thousand men of her own on any field of 
 battle. The stranger, therefore, will see 
 little of the military manifestations of 
 power, or of the pride, pomp, and circum- 
 stance of war. In St. James' Park he may 
 see, and if he cares for the Old Flag, he 
 will see not without proud and pensive 
 emotion, the march of the Guards. Thirty 
 years ago, had he been standing on that 
 spot, he might have seen the Guards march 
 in with the majestic simplicity which marks 
 the triumph of the true soldier, their uni- 
 forms and bearskins weather-stained by 
 Crimean storms, and their colours torn by 
 the shot of Alma and Inkerman. He may 
 also see the array of Cuirassiers, superb 
 and glittering, but a relic of the past ; for, 
 since the improvement of the rifle, the 
 Cuirassier, whose armour would be pierced 
 like pasteboard, has become almost as use- 
 less as an elephant. These corps are also 
 memorials of the times in which the army 
 was an appanage of the aristocracy, who 
 amused their youth with soldiering, went 
 through no professional training, and as 
 leaders of the troops in the field were, as 
 Carlyle says, "valiant cocked hats upon a
 
 6o A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 pole." Valiant the cocked hat, beyond 
 question, was, as many a hillside stained 
 with blood, and with the blood of the 
 Guards not least, proved ; and as even 
 Fontenoy, though a lost field, could bear 
 witness. But Lord Cardwell and Lord 
 Wolseley changed all this. The British 
 army is now, like the armies of the Conti- 
 nent, professional : it will henceforth bring 
 science as well as valour into the field. 
 Those who would see it manoeuvre must go 
 to Aldershot. 
 
 To Aldershot the visitor must go to see 
 the regular army ; but by going to the Vol- 
 unteer Eeview at Easter, wherever it may 
 be held, or even to one of the district re- 
 views, he may see the military spirit com- 
 bined with the patriotism of the country. 
 What the volunteers are actually worth as 
 a force in case of war it must be left to the 
 professional soldier to determine. They 
 are good stuff, at all events, for an army, 
 and some of the corps are well drilled. 
 But the Volunteer movement may be safely 
 pronounced the most wholesome that there 
 has been in England for many a year. 
 More than anything else on the social or 
 political horizon, it gives reason for hope 
 that the destinies of the country will be
 
 THE ARMY AND NAVY. 6l 
 
 determined in the last resort by the spirit 
 which has made it great. 
 
 The other and the stronger arm of Eng- 
 land is to be seen at Portsmouth and Ply- 
 mouth, unless you should be lucky enough 
 to come in for a display of its full might at 
 a naval review. But the British navy no 
 longer appears in the guise of the gi'eat 
 sailing ships which fifty years ago we used 
 to see moving in their majesty and beauty 
 over the waters of Plymouth Sound or of 
 Spithead. The very name sailor is now, as 
 regards the navy, almost an anachronism. 
 Old Admiral Farragut, when desired by his 
 Government to transfer his flag from a 
 wooden ship to an ironclad, replied, that 
 he did not want to go to what the Revised 
 Version calls " Hades " in a tea-kettle. To 
 Hades in a tea-kettle, in case of a naval 
 w^ar, many a British seaman would now go. 
 These wonderful machines, the latest off- 
 spring of the science of destruction, are 
 fraught with far more terrible thunders 
 than the ships of Rodney and Xelson ; but 
 the grandeur and romance of the navy are 
 gone. AVhat will be the result of a collision 
 between two of these monsters, with their 
 armour, their colossal guns, and their tor- 
 pedoes, who can undertake to say ? It is
 
 62 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 difficult to believe that the old qualities of 
 the British tar, his aptitude for close fight- 
 ing and for boarding, would preserve their 
 ascendancy unimpaired. It is difficult also 
 to believe that in these days of steam it 
 ^vould be as easy as once it vras to guard 
 the shores of the island against the sudden 
 descent of an enemy. But these are the 
 dread secrets of the future. Some of the 
 men-of-war of former days may still be 
 seen laid up at the war ports ; and, no 
 doubt, while her timbers can hold together, 
 the Victory will be preserved, and we shall 
 be allowed to see the spot on which Nelson 
 fell. But the best memorial of the old 
 British navy, perhaps, is Turner's picture 
 of the Fighting Temeraire. 
 
 Still Great Britain is an island. The 
 maritime tastes of her people are strong ; 
 and though steam yachts are coming in, at 
 Cowes and on Southampton "Water the 
 beauty of the sailing vessel, though not the 
 majesty of the line-of-battle ship under can- 
 vas, is yet to be seen. 
 
 The immense debt of England to her sail- 
 ors is not unworthily represented by Green- 
 wich Hospital, which is also a fit monument 
 of William and Mary. A monument it now 
 is and nothing more. The veterans are no
 
 COUNTRY LIFE. 6;^ 
 
 longer to be seen grouped in its courts on a 
 summer day and talking about their battles 
 and voyages. The rules of the institution 
 galled them, and they preferred to take 
 their pensions, with homes of their o\Yn, 
 though on the humblest scale. 
 
 In describing almost any other land than 
 England, notably in describing France, we 
 should go first to its capital, as the centre 
 of its life. But in England the centre of 
 life is not in the capital, but in the country ; 
 hitherto at least this has been the case, 
 though now, in England as elsewhere, there 
 is an ominous set of population from the 
 country to the city. Hitherto country soci- 
 ety has been the best society, ownership of 
 land in the country has been the great ob- 
 ject of ambition, the country has been the 
 eniei seat of political power, and for that, 
 as well as for the social reason, land has 
 borne a fancy price. Every lawyer, physi- 
 cian, and man of business has looked for- 
 ward after making his fortune in the city to 
 ending his life in a country house ; every 
 city mechanic has kept, if he could, some 
 plant or bird to remind him of the country. 
 A charm attaches in all our minds to the 
 idv;>a of English country life. The organiza-
 
 64 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 tion of that life, widely different from any- 
 thing which exists on this continent, may 
 be surveyed, in a certain sense, from the 
 train. Everywhere in the rural districts as 
 you shoot along your eye catches the tower 
 or spire of the parish church, with the rec- 
 tory adjoining, the hall of the squire, the 
 homestead of the tenant farmer, and the 
 labourer's cottage. The little dissenting 
 chapel, which steals away a few religious 
 rustics from the parish church, and repre- 
 sents social as well as religious antagonism 
 to the " squirearchy and hierarchy," hardly 
 anywhere obtrudes itself on the view. The 
 parish is the Unit ; it is thoroughly a unit 
 so far as the common people are concerned, 
 not only of rural administration but of so- 
 ciety and gossip. Every one of its denizens 
 knows everything about all the rest, and 
 usually none of them knows much about 
 the world outside. Any one who wished to lie 
 hid could not choose a worse hiding-place 
 than one of these apparently sequestered 
 communities, in which not only no strange 
 man but no strange dog could well escape 
 notice for twenty-four hours. The parish 
 is the unit, and the parish church is still the 
 centre. Even those who go to the meeting- 
 house to hear the Methodist preacher go to
 
 COUNTRY LIFE. 65 
 
 the church for christenings, marriages, and 
 burials. The farmer, though no theologian, 
 is a churchman by habit ; he likes to meet 
 his fellow-farmers at church on Sunday and 
 to gossip with them after and before ser- 
 vice ; not to do so seems to him unsocial. 
 
 The clergyman is the parish almoner ; by 
 him or his wife, a personage who, if she is 
 good and active, is second only to him in 
 importance, charitable and philanthropic 
 organizations are headed. When he plays 
 iiis part well he is the general friend and 
 adviser, and his parsonage is the centre of 
 the village civilization. Herbert's country 
 parson is realized in his life. But the king 
 of the little realm is the master of the hall, 
 which is seen standing in the lordly seclu- 
 sion of its park. "The stately homes of 
 England," is a phrase full of poetry to our 
 ears, and the life of the dwellers in such 
 homes, as fancy presents it, is the object of 
 our envious admiration. Life in a home of 
 beauty with family portraits and memories, 
 fair gardens, and ancestral trees, with use- 
 ful and important occupations such as offer 
 themselves to the conscientious squire, yet 
 without any of the dust and sweat of the 
 vulgar working world, ought to be not only 
 pleasant but poetic ; and the " Sumner
 
 66 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 Place" of Tennyson's Talking Oak, no 
 doubt, has its charming counterpart in real- 
 ity. But all depends on the voluntary per- 
 formance of social duties, without which 
 life in the loveliest and most historic of 
 manor houses is merely sybaritism, aggra- 
 vated by contrast with the opportunities 
 and surroundings ; and unfortunately the 
 voluntary performance of duty of any kind 
 is not the thing to which human nature in 
 any of us is most inclined. Not one man 
 in a hundred, probably, will undergo real 
 labour without the spur either of need or of 
 ambition. The country gentlemen of Eng- 
 land are seldom dissolute, the healthiness 
 of their sports in itself is an antidote to 
 filthy sensuality ; but many of them are 
 sportsmen and nothing more. Their tem- 
 per and the temper of all those around them 
 is apt to be tried by a long frost which sus- 
 pends fox-hunting ; and they too often 
 close a useless life by a peevish or morose 
 old age. We have heard of one who, after 
 riding all his life after the fox, ended his 
 days alone in a great mansion, with no sol- 
 ace when he was bed- ridden but hearing his 
 huntsman call over the hounds at his bed- 
 side ; and of another, who being paralyzed 
 on one side could find no diversion for his
 
 THE COUXTKY SQUIRE. 6"] 
 
 declining years but preserving rabbits, 
 which eat up no small portion of the prod- 
 uce of his estate, and going out to shoot 
 them in a cart, seated on a music-stool by 
 turning on which he could manage to get 
 his shot. Till lately, however, the squire 
 at all events lived in his country-house 
 among his tenants and people ; even Squire 
 Western did this and he thus retained his 
 local influence and a certain amount of 
 local popularity. But now the squire, in- 
 fected by the general restlessness and thirst 
 of pleasure, has taken to living much in 
 London or in the pleasure cities of the Con- 
 tinent. The tie between him and the vil- 
 lage had thus been loosened, and in many 
 cases entirely broken. The first Duke of 
 Wellington, whenever he could be spared 
 from the Horse Guards and the House of 
 Lords, used to come down to Strathfield- 
 saye, do his duty as a country gentleman, 
 show hospitality to his neighbours, and go 
 among his people ; his successor came down 
 now and then to a battue, bringing his party 
 with him from town. And now another 
 blow, and one of the most fatal kind, is 
 about to be struck at squirearchy by the 
 political reform which is introducing elec- 
 tive government into the counties. Hith-
 
 68 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 erto the old feudal connection between land 
 and local government has been so far re- 
 tained that the chief landowners, as justices 
 of the peace, have administered rural jus- 
 tice and collectively managed the affairs of 
 the county in Quarter Sessions. The jus- 
 tice, no doubt, has sometimes been very 
 rural, especially in the case of the poacher, 
 but the management has been good, and it 
 has been entirely free from corruption. 
 Government by the people would be the 
 best if it were really government by the 
 people ; unfortunately what it really is too 
 often and tends everywhere to be, is gov- 
 ernment by the Boss. Quarter Sessions, 
 however, are now, in deference to the ten- 
 dencies of the age, to be replaced by elective 
 councils, from which the small local politi- 
 cian is pretty sure in the end to oust the 
 squire, who, thus left without local dignity 
 or occupation, will have nothing but field 
 sports to draw him to his country seat. 
 
 Even of field sports the end may be near. 
 Game-preserving will die unlamented by 
 anybody but the game-preserver, for slaugh- 
 tering barn door pheasants is sorry work, 
 imprisoning peasants for poaching is sorrier 
 work still, and the temptation to poach is 
 a serious soiu-ce of rustic demoralization.
 
 FOX HUNTING. 69 
 
 Fox-liunting is manly as well as exciting, 
 and overworked statesmen or men of busi- 
 ness say that they find it the best of all re- 
 freshments for the wearied brain ; but it is 
 in great peril of being killed by high-pressure 
 farming which will not allow crops to be 
 ridden over or fences to be broken, com- 
 bined with the growth of democratic senti- 
 ment. The farmer who rode with the 
 hounds was a farmer sitting at an easy rent 
 and with time as well as a horse to spare. 
 So if anyone cares to see a " meet " in front 
 of a manor house, with the gentlemen of 
 the county in scarlet on their hunters, he 
 had better lose no time. In seeing the 
 meet, he will see the county club ; for this 
 is the^^reat social as well as the gi*eat sport- 
 ing gathering, and the gentleman in an 
 English county who does not hunt must 
 find his life somewhat lonely and dull. 
 
 Rents have fallen immensely in conse- 
 quence of the agricultural depression, caused 
 by the intiux of American and Indian grain 
 into the British market ; nor is there much 
 hope of better times. Mortgage debts are 
 heavy, and the allowances to widows and 
 younger brothers, which the system of pri- 
 mogeniture entails, have still to be paid. 
 Thus the situation of the squire, and of the
 
 70 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 social structure which he crowns, is perilous. 
 Will he bravely face it ? Will he cut down 
 his luxuries, learn agriculture, become his 
 own bailiff, give up game-preserving, and 
 renounce idleness and pleasure-hunting, for 
 a life of labour and dutj- ? If he does, agri- 
 cultural depression may prove to him a 
 blessing in disguise. But it is too likely 
 that, instead of this, he will shut up the Hall 
 and go away to the city, or perhaps to the 
 Continent, there to live in reduced sybari- 
 tism on the remnant of his rents. The Hall 
 will then either stand vacant, like the cha- 
 teau after the Revolution, or pass, as not a 
 few of them have already, with its ancestral 
 portraits and memories, into the hands of 
 the rich trader or the Jew, perhaps of the 
 American millionnaire, who finds better ser- 
 vice and more enjoyment of wealth in the 
 less democratic world. A change is evidently 
 at hand, for land can no longer support 
 the three orders of agriculture, landlord, 
 tenant farmer, and labourer. If the Estab- 
 lished Church is abolished, as in all likeli- 
 hood it will be, and the rector departs as 
 well as the squire, the revolution in the ru- 
 ral society of England will be complete. 
 
 The bodily form of the British tenant 
 farmer is known to us all from a himdred
 
 THE BRITISH FARMER. 7 1 
 
 caricatures. It is he in fact who figures as 
 John Bull. He is not very refined or highly 
 educated; sometimes perhaps he is not so 
 well educated as the labourer who has been 
 taught in the village school, for in this re- 
 spect, as possibly in some others, he rather 
 falls between the stool of genteel indepen- 
 dence and that of dependence on the care 
 of the State. Tennyson's Lincolnshire 
 farmer is the portrait of the class as it ex- 
 ists or existed in Tennyson's boyhood in 
 a county which, when it rebelled against 
 Henry VIII., was graciously designated by 
 His Majesty as "the beastliest county in 
 the whole kingdom ; ' ' but the portrait only 
 requires softening to make it pretty gener- 
 ally true. The British farmer is strongly 
 conservative, in all senses, and if left to 
 himself unimproving. Left to himself he 
 would still be ploughing with four horses to 
 his plough. To make him yield to the exi- 
 gency of the time and give up his imme- 
 morial trade of wheat-growing for other 
 kinds of production, is very hard. Being 
 so tenacious of old habit, he does not make 
 the best of settlers in a new country. 
 Nevertheless, he has managed to make the 
 soil of his island, though not the most fer- 
 tile, bear the largest harvests in the world.
 
 72 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 He is a man withal of solid worth. Politi- 
 cally he adheres to his landlord, who is also 
 his social chief and his oiiicer in the yeo- 
 manry. Between him and the labourer the 
 social gulf has for some time been widening. 
 They have entirely ceased to sit at the same 
 board, while the farmer's wife plays the 
 piano, reads novels, and bears herself as a 
 great lady towards the wife of the labourer. 
 The antagonism was strongly accentuated 
 by the " Revolt of the Field" under Joseph 
 Arch. The farmer, however, met the revolt 
 with a firmness from which a salutary lesson 
 might have been drawn lay public men 
 whose nen'es have been shattered by dem- 
 agogism so that they have learned to regard 
 ever}' outcrj- as the voice of fate. 
 
 A great change has come within two gen- 
 erations over the outward vesture of English 
 country life. The old style of farming, 
 with its primitive implements and anti- 
 quated waj's, with its line of mowers and 
 haymakers in the summer field, with the 
 sound of its flail in the frosty air, and with 
 many other sights and sounds which linger 
 in the memory of one who was a boy in 
 England half a century ago, has been pass- 
 ing away ; the new agriculture with ma- 
 chineiy has been taking its place . Gone too.
 
 THE FARM LABOURER. 73 
 
 or fast going, is the clay cottage, with the 
 thatched roof, which was the characteristic 
 abode of Hodge, the farm labourer, and the 
 undermost in the three grades of the agri- 
 cultural hierarchy. Improving and phil- 
 anthropic landlordism has now generally 
 substituted the brick house, with slated roof, 
 more civilized than the thatched cottage, 
 though not so picturesque, nor perhaps so 
 comfortable, for the thatch was much 
 warmer than the slate in winter and much 
 cooler in summer. A corresponding change 
 has been taking place in Hodge's lot. It 
 was much needed. Within those pictur- 
 esque cottages, even when they were covered 
 with roses, too often dwelt not only penury 
 but misery, together with the grossest igno- 
 rance, the uncleanness, physical and moral, 
 which is the consequence of overcrowding, 
 and the hardening of the heart wiiich must 
 ensue when parent and child cannot both 
 be fed. The Union Workhouse, which with 
 its grim hideousness deforms the rural 
 landscape, w'as too often the symbol of 
 Hodge's condition, as well as the miserable 
 haven of his toil-worn and rheumatic age. 
 But now his wages have been raised, his 
 dwelling and his habits have been improved, 
 and the State has put him to school ; while
 
 74 A TKIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 the railroad has opened to him the labour 
 market of the whole country, whereas, be- 
 fore, he was confined to that of his parish, 
 and was practically, like the serf of old, 
 bound to the soil, and forced to take what- 
 ever wages the farmer of his parish chose 
 to give him. At last, in the grand Dutch 
 auction of Party, i)olitical power has been 
 thrust upon him, and he has suddenly be- 
 come arbiter of the destinies not only of 
 England but of two hundred and fifty mil- 
 lions of Lidia, and of the destinies of other 
 lands and peoples of which he never heard. 
 It need hardly be said that he votes in total 
 darkness, following as well as he can the 
 voice which promises him ' ' three acres and 
 a cow." Before the last general election 
 those who knew him best were utterly un- 
 able to divine what he would do, though 
 they thought that having failed to get the 
 promised three acres and a cow from one 
 party he would most likely try the other, as 
 in fact he did. In his own sphere he de- 
 serves the highest respect. Ko man has 
 done so hard a day's work as an English 
 labourer ; no man has stood so indomitably 
 as a soldier on the bloodstained hillside. 
 If he has too much frequented the village 
 ale-house, in his home he has been generally
 
 THE COUNTRY MANSION. 75 
 
 true and kind to "his old woman," as she 
 has been to "her old man," and there has 
 been a touching dignity in his resignation 
 to his hard lot and in the mournful com- 
 placency Avith which he has looked forward 
 to " a decent burial." He has, for the 
 most part, kept out of the workhouse when 
 he could. 
 
 The mansions of the squires are not the 
 only mansions which meet the traveller's 
 eye. Almost on every pleasant spot, es- 
 pecially near London, you see handsome 
 dwellings, many of them newly built, the 
 offspring of the wealth which since the in- 
 stallation of Free Trade has been advanc- 
 ing " by leaps and bounds." ISTot a few of 
 these are very large and magnificent. The 
 architecture of those recently built chal- 
 lenges attention and generally marks the 
 reversion of taste to the old English style. 
 But the general aspect is rather that of 
 luxury than that of stateliness, in which 
 these mansions of the new aristocracy of 
 wealth certainly fall below those of the 
 Tudor age. The details may be studied 
 and correct, but the mass is not imposing 
 and the front is seldom fine. Even Eaton, 
 the newly -built palace of the Duke of West- 
 minster, though vast and sumptuoiLS, lacks 
 a grand facade.
 
 76 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 People who lived in England half a cen- 
 tury ago remember the old coimtry town, 
 as it is depicted in Miss Mitford's Belford 
 Hfgis, with its remnant of timbered and 
 gabled houses and its unrestored church. 
 They remember the quiet that reigned in 
 its streets, except on market-day, or at the 
 time of the annual fair, which, with its 
 wandering merchants and showmen, told 
 of the commercial habits of the Middle 
 Ages. They remember the equipages of 
 the county magnates drawn up at the prin- 
 cipal haberdashery store. They remember 
 the Tory and moderately corrupt town 
 council, the orthodox, and somewhat drowsy 
 parson, the banker or man of business going 
 placidly on with his one post a day and no 
 telegraph or telephone, the old-fashioned 
 physician driving about in his chariot to 
 give his patient the satisfaction of "dying 
 regularly by the Faculty," the retired ad- 
 miral whose fast frigate had made his for- 
 tune in the great war, the retired general 
 who had served under Wellington, the re- 
 tired East Indian, the dowager who dwelt 
 in a solid-looking mansion, surrounded by 
 shade trees, in the outskirts. Those people 
 hardly ever left home ; they knew repose, 
 which is now a lost art ; the workers among
 
 THE COUNTRY TOWN. 'J'] 
 
 them enjoyed their holiday in leisure, not 
 in travelling as far as they could by rail. 
 They were very social, too, though not in 
 the most intellectual way. The same town 
 now has become a railroad centre ; it has 
 trebled its size ; its old buildings have been 
 pulled down ; its crooked streets have been 
 made straight by local improvement ; its 
 churches have been restored past recog- 
 nition ; it throbs and whizzes with prog- 
 ress ; its society is no longer stationary and 
 quiet, but emigTating and restless ; and 
 next door neighbours know nothing of 
 each other. Not all our material improve- 
 ments are, at least in their present stage, 
 equally improvements of our social state ; 
 nor have all the "leaps and bounds" of 
 English wealth been leaps and bounds of 
 happiness. In some of the old towns in 
 very rural districts which commerce has 
 passed by, the ancient tranquillity reigns, 
 few new houses are built, and people still 
 know their neighbours. But these sanctu- 
 aries of dull happiness are mere accidents. 
 Perhaps there will some day be a subsidence 
 after the ferment of invention and progress, 
 a less eager and unsatisfied race will enter 
 into the heritage of these labours, and the 
 art of repose will be recovered.
 
 78 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 If the old life of the rural parish and the 
 country town in England is doomed, its 
 departure will put an end to not a few ties 
 and relations which had their value and 
 their charms so long as people did their 
 duty. So thought the writer of these pages 
 as from the top of a cathedral he looked 
 down over the little town, with old man- 
 sions on its outskirts, to the country, with 
 its halls and farm houses and cottages be- 
 yond, and saw in a field beneath him the 
 volunteers drilling under the command of 
 the local gentlemen. But change is the 
 law, and the future no doubt has better 
 things in store. Only let us remember that 
 movement is not progress, unless it tends to 
 happiness. 
 
 England has no Alps, no Rocky ]\r(^un- 
 tains. no Niagara, no very grand or roman- 
 tic scenery. The English lakes are charm- 
 ing in their quiet way ; perhaps the quietest 
 of them, such as Grasmere, charm more 
 than those which, by their bolder scenery, 
 make higher claims on our admiration. 
 The mountain district of North Wales well 
 repays a visit : vSnowdon, though its height 
 is not Alpine, is in form a genuine moun- 
 tain, and the road from Barmouth to Dol
 
 PHYSICAL FEATURES. 79 
 
 gelly, under Cader Idris, is about the most 
 beautiful thing in the island. If the excur- 
 sion is extended to Scotland when the pur- 
 ple heather is in bloom, hills and lakes will 
 be seen which in brilliancy of colouring at 
 least vie with any lakes and hills in the 
 world. For the English lakes Wordsworth 
 has given us not only a poetic but a spiritual 
 handbook, while we see the Scotch High- 
 lands in the company of Walter Scott, who 
 imparts a sense of enjoyment as fresh as 
 Highland air. Killarney is famed above all 
 its rivals, Scotch or English, and almost the 
 whole of the coast of Ireland is as fine as 
 the interior is unattractive. The island has 
 been compared to an ugly picture set in a 
 beautiful frame." Beautiful above all is the 
 western coast of Ireland, with its purple 
 mountains and the long inlets, into which 
 the Atlantic rolls. The coast scenery of 
 Cornwall and Devonshire, too, is very 
 lovely, while its interest is enhanced by" 
 quaint old villages, such as Clovelly and 
 Polperro, perched on rocky eyries or nest- 
 ling in deep ' 'combes, "with which are linked 
 memories of maritime adventure, of daring 
 warfare with the Armada, of buccaneering 
 forays on the Spanish Main, or of the hardly 
 less daring though less honourable feats of
 
 So A TRir TO ENGLAND. 
 
 the smugglers in later days. From those 
 shores, too, sailed the adventurers who ex- 
 plored the New World and linked it to the 
 Old. The rocky amphitheatres of the north- 
 eastern coast are magnificent when the 
 waves of the German ( )cean climb them in 
 a storm. But the characteristic beauty of 
 England, the beauty in which she has no 
 rival, is of a kind of which mention is fit- 
 tingly made after a description of her rural 
 society and life. It is the beauty of a land 
 which combines the highest cultivation with 
 sylvan gi'eenness, of an ancient land and a 
 land of lovely hcmies. The eastern coun- 
 ties are flat and tame. But elsewhere the 
 country is rolling, and from every rising 
 ground the eye ranges over a landscape of 
 extraordinary richness and extraordinary 
 finish. The finish, which is the product of 
 immense wealth laid out on a small area, 
 is perhaps more striking than anything else 
 to the stranger who comes from a raw land 
 of promise. Trees being left in the hedge- 
 ro^Vs as well as in the parks and pleasure 
 grounds and in the copses, which serve as 
 covers for game, the general appearance 
 is that of woodland, though every rood of 
 the land is under the highest tillage. Gray 
 church towers, hamlets, mansions, home-
 
 RURAL ENGLAND. 51 
 
 steads, cottages, showing themselves every- 
 where, fill the landscape with human in- 
 terest. There is many a more picturesque, 
 there is no lovelier land, than Old England, 
 and a great body of essentially English 
 poetry from Co^v^Der to Tennyson attests at 
 once the unique character and the potency 
 of the charm. The sweetest season is 
 spring, when the landscape is most intensely 
 gi'een, when the May is in bloom in all the 
 hedges, and the air is full of its fragi*ance, 
 when the meadows are full of cowslips, the 
 banks of primroses and violets, the w^oods 
 of the wild hyacinth. Then you feel the 
 joyous spirit that breathes through certain 
 idyllic passages of Shakespeare. To appre- 
 ciate English scenery a carriage tour is 
 indispensable, for the railroads do not fol- 
 low the lines of beauty. After seeing 
 Stratford-on- Avon, Coventry, and Warwick, 
 you may take a carriage to Banbury, pass- 
 ing by Compton Winyard, one of the most 
 curious of the ancient manor houses, and 
 make your way to Edgehill, where the first 
 encounter took place between Charles and 
 the Parliamentary Army, and where a 
 clump of trees waves over the gi'ave of 
 many an Englislunan who died for Eng- 
 land's right. The way leads along the 
 r
 
 82 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 edge of the great central plateau of England, 
 from which you look dowTi upon as rich a 
 champaif,Ti as a painter ever drew. From 
 Banbury you may take the train to Oxford 
 and Blenheim, or you may take the train 
 to Henley, and from Henley go do-svn the 
 Thames in a boat to Windsor. The tract 
 of river scene from Henley to Maidenhead, 
 just above Windsor, is about the best in 
 England, and the view of Windsor as you 
 approach it on the water is the finest. The 
 landscape on which you look down from 
 the singular ridge of Malvern is not less rich 
 than that on which you look down from 
 Edgehill, and at Malvern you have the view 
 both ways. But anywhere in the rural 
 districts, except in the eastern counties, you 
 are sure of finding a landscape which de- 
 lights the heart. Look on the picture while 
 you may. When democratic agrarianism 
 shall have passed its equalizing plough over 
 all those parks and groves, there may be an 
 improvement in material conditions, but 
 the landscape will enchant no more. 
 
 Her perpetual greenness England owes to 
 her much maligned climate. The rain falls 
 not in a three days' storm or a water-spout, 
 but in frequent showers throughout the 
 year. On the Western coast, which re-
 
 THE ENGLISH CLIMATE. 83 
 
 ceives the clouds from the Atlantic, the 
 climate is wet. But the rainfall elsewhere 
 is not extraordinary. England is in the 
 latitude of Labrador. She owes the com- 
 parative mildness of her climate to the 
 Gulf Stream and other oceanic influences, 
 the range of which is limited, so that there 
 are in fact several climates in the island. 
 In the south, tender evergreens flourish and 
 the fig ripens. In the southwest, on the 
 coast of Devonshire and Cornwall where 
 the Gulf Stream warms the air, the myrtle 
 flourishes and flowers are seen at Christ- 
 mas. In the North, on the other hand, the 
 winter is very sharp, and the Flora is much 
 more limited. Americans, who cannot 
 bear to think that there is anything bad 
 in their country without comforting them- 
 selves with the reflection that there is some- 
 thing worse in England, generally, on a 
 disagreeable day, salute you with the re- 
 mark, "This is something like English 
 weather ! " They can show no weather 
 finer than an English summer evening 
 drawn out into a long twilight. The Lon- 
 don fogs are hideous and dangerous, but 
 they are not the climate of England ; they 
 are the coal-smoke of five millions of 
 people.
 
 84 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 From the praises of English scenery and 
 of the outward aspect of English life must 
 be emphatically excepted the manufactur- 
 ing districts. Than these, perhaps, earth 
 hardly holds anything less attractive. It 
 is easy to understand that to the soul of 
 the Kuskinite the sight must be torture, 
 though the Ruskinite wears the cloth, uses 
 the hardware, and, when he travels, is 
 drawn by engines and over rails produced 
 by these forges. The heart of the hideous- 
 ness is the Black Country of Staffordshire, 
 round AVolverhampton, where not only is 
 the scene by day "black" in the highest 
 degree and in every sense of the term, but 
 the night flares with dismal fires, while the 
 clank of the forges completes the resem- 
 blance to Pandemonium. The dark realm 
 extends with varying shades of darkness 
 over a great part of the North Midland 
 counties. Once these were pleasant dales, 
 down which coursed bright streams. The 
 streams, in fact, by the water power which 
 they afforded, first drew manufactures to 
 the district. Here and there in the out- 
 skirts of a manufacturing town an old 
 manor house will still be found standing as 
 a witness to the days of clear skies, fresh 
 air, and untainted waters. AVhere, in those
 
 THE MANUFACTURING DISTRICTS. 85 
 
 days, tlie hunter ranged and the falcon 
 flew, the population is now so dense that 
 the whole district seems one vast city. 
 Behold the greatest marvels which earth 
 has to show in the way of machinery, 
 mechanical skill, and industrial organiza- 
 tion. Pay the homage due to the mighty 
 power of production and gratefully ac- 
 knowledge the vast addition which it has 
 made to human wealth and comfort. Em- 
 brace in your view the possibilities of a 
 future economy of labour, such as may 
 in the times to come bring the toilers in- 
 crease of leisure, enjoyment and civilization. 
 Judge for yourself at the same time from 
 the aspect of the people and their habita- 
 tions whether a great extension of factory 
 life on its present footing is an unmixed 
 blessing to a nation, and whether on the 
 whole those nations are npt the happiest 
 for which^ the manufacturing is done by 
 others. The employment of women in fac- 
 tories and the effect of this upon the women 
 themselves, the health of offspring, and the 
 home are especially worthy of attention. , 
 Whether life is worth living is a question 
 which seems likely to present itself with no 
 ordinary force to one who toils in a cotton 
 mill or foundry, and dwells in one of those
 
 86 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 dismal rows of dingy cottages beneath a 
 constant pall of smoke. The ordinary 
 workman sees at all events the completed 
 work of his own hands and may have more 
 or less of satisfaction in its completion. If 
 it is well done he may have real joy in its 
 excellence. A factory hand sees nothing 
 but that particular part of the process which 
 forms the unvarying work of his own day ; 
 he is little more than a human hammer or 
 spindle, and ranks not with the artizan, 
 much less with the artist, but with the 
 almost automatic machine. He may well 
 be pardoned if his tastes are not high, and 
 if he indemnifies himself after his dull toil 
 by spending his wages in animal indulgence. 
 The scene can hardly be viewed with entire 
 satisfaction by any one but a millionaire 
 whose wealth is advancing by leaps and 
 bounds. The separation of the class of 
 employers from that of the employed is 
 a bad feature of the social organization of 
 these communities. The millionaire no 
 longer lives beside his mill ; naturally 
 enough, he prefers purer air ; the day's 
 business over, he drives off to his villa in 
 the suburbs and his hands can know him 
 only as a master. If they walk out into 
 the suburbs on a Sunday they see his man-
 
 MANUFACTURING TOWNS. 87 
 
 sion, tell each other that it is the produce 
 of their labour of which they have been 
 defrauded, and become ripe for Socialism 
 and strikes. A noble attempt was made 
 by the late Sir Titus Salt to organize fac- 
 tory life on a happier footing, to render it 
 brighter, healthier, cleaner, and to place 
 within the reach of the people the means 
 of culture and enjoyment. Saltaire, near 
 Bradford, his model manufacturing com- 
 munity, is well worth a visit. On the 
 whole, the benevolence which created and 
 sustains it seems to be rewarded, though 
 here, as at Pullman, the American comiter- 
 part of Saltaire, there are difficulties to 
 contend with in the somewhat stiff-necked 
 independence of the people, by w^hich the 
 patience of philanthropy is apt to be sorely 
 tried. 
 
 In the time of Charles I. wdien manufac- 
 turers w^ere only in the germ, and when feu- 
 dal relations and sentiments still lingered 
 in the north, these districts were the spe- 
 cial seat of Loyalism. They are now the 
 special seat of Radicalism. National senti- 
 ment is not strong among the factory hands. 
 They think more of the Trade Union than 
 of the country. The region is politically 
 not so much a part of Old England, as of
 
 88 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 the world's labour market. Whatever in- 
 fluence it may be destmecl to exert on the 
 future development of humanity, it has 
 little connection with the historic gi-eatness 
 of the nation. The chief danger to the great- 
 ness of the nation in truth arises from the m- 
 fluence of the factory hands in alliance with 
 other ultra-democratic and unpatriotic ele- 
 ments of the electorate. Municipal spirit is, 
 however, strong, and mmiicipal organization 
 is carried to a high perfection. Mr. Joseph 
 Chamberlain's Birmingham is a model 
 municipality in its way, though its way is 
 rather that of the '• authoritative Kadical" 
 than that of Liberals and Keformers of the 
 old school who had '' liberty and property " 
 for their watchword. 
 
 So mucli wealth could hardly fail, where 
 there was any feeling for beauty or local 
 pride, to embody itself in some forms of 
 magnificence. The new City Hall and other 
 public buildings in the great manufacturing 
 cities of the North of England vie in sump- 
 tuousness at least with the edifices of Ghent 
 and Antwerp, though the atmosphere laden 
 with smoke is a cruel drawback to archi- 
 tectural beauty. Nor are the great ware- 
 houses of Manchester, which is the chief 
 centre of distribution, without an austere
 
 THE OLD COACHING DAYS. 89 
 
 grandeur of their own. The mansions of 
 the chiefs of these vast armies of industry 
 in tlie outskirts of the cities are often very 
 handsome, and their owners are not seldom 
 munificent patrons of art. Manchester is 
 famous not only for her bales but for Art 
 Exhibitions. 
 
 It is with less mixed feelings that the 
 visitor's attention is called to the wonders 
 of the Liverj)ool docks, and of the mercan- 
 tile marine of England. In all the world of 
 labour there is nothing sounder, stronger, 
 braver than the British seaman. It is to 
 be feared that few lives in the world of 
 labour are harder than is his upon the win- 
 try seas. He is the very sinew of the coun- 
 try, as well as the greatest producer of its 
 wealth, and his qualities are a main source 
 of what is noblest in the national character. 
 Unhappily, while all the factory hands vote, 
 the seaman cannot vote ; thus the least na- 
 tional and patriotic part of the people exer- 
 cises its full influence in determining the 
 destinies of the country, while the most 
 national and patriotic exercises no influence 
 at all. 
 
 >^ 
 
 Fancy mail coaches still run. But the 
 genuine mail coach lives now only in old
 
 90 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 prints, or in those pen-pictures of Dickens, 
 which are the most admirable descriptions 
 of everything that met the eyes of Sam 
 "Weller fifty years ago, while in their con- 
 trast with what now exists they mark the 
 rapidity of change, for the subjects of some 
 of tliem belong as completely to the past as 
 the coats and cravats of the Regency. The 
 outside of a mail coach was pleasant enough 
 on a fine day ; it was not so pleasant in 
 rain, with the umbrella of the passenger on 
 the seat behind you dripping down your 
 back, or when you had to sit upright all 
 night afraid of sleeping lest you should fall 
 oft". Moreover, you were very liable to be 
 upset, in which case, as the luggage piled 
 on the coach top was apt to fall upon you, 
 the carnage among the outsiders was often 
 considerable. The British railroad, like 
 everj^thing else in England, is finished to 
 perfection, and on such a line as the Great 
 "Western, which bespeaks the lavish genius 
 of Brunei, you travel at the greatest attain- 
 able speed with the most perfect safety. 
 The service is altogether excellent, and 
 democracy has not yet found its way into 
 the manners of the guards and porters. As 
 a set-off there is a good deal of feeing. In 
 England generally indeed, you are too often
 
 RAILWAY TRAVEL. 9I 
 
 called upon to gTease the wheels of life in 
 this way. The Canadian or American will 
 remark differences between the English 
 railway fashions and ours. The carriages, 
 instead of being long and undivided, so as 
 to seat fifty or sixty people, are divided 
 into bodies, the bodies in the fu"st-class seat- 
 ing only six or eight, and those which seat 
 eight being sometimes divided again into two 
 compartments. The arrangement of the 
 carriages may be in part a survival of the 
 structure of the mail coach, but it has prob- 
 ably been also in part determined by the 
 structure of society. Aristocracy delights 
 in privacy and seclusion. "You would 
 bring down a gentleman," was the answer 
 of one of that class, when asked to come 
 into public life, "to the level of a king or 
 a gi'ocer." Among the gentry of former 
 days it was against caste to travel in a pub- 
 lic conveyance. Antipathy to such \adgari- 
 zation entered largely into the hatred of 
 railroads, expressed by that comic trouba- 
 dour of aristocracy, Theodore Hook. There 
 were persons of quality who lived far into 
 the railroad days, yet never entered a rail- 
 way carriage ; they persisted in posting 
 laboriously in their own carriages along the 
 line of a railway. At first the fashion was
 
 92 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 to have your own carriage strapped on a 
 truck behind tlie train ; a process which re- 
 quired you to be at the station an liour be- 
 fore the train started, while if the strapping 
 was not tight, the consequence was a mo- 
 tion of tlie carriage which made you sick. 
 A body or a compartment which you can 
 engage for your own party is the last rem- 
 nant of the cherished privacy. The absence 
 of the system of checking baggage is to be 
 accounted for partly by the multiplicity of 
 branch lines, which would make the pro- 
 cess very difficult ; but another cause prob- 
 ably is that members of the governing 
 class travel with valets and maids who save 
 them the trouble of looking after their bag- 
 gage. Looking after baggage on an Eng- 
 lish railway is no inconsiderable item in 
 those cares of travelling, which, when rec- 
 reation for the weary brain is sought not 
 in rest but in locomotion, sometimes worry 
 almost as much as the cares of business. 
 Your baggage is labelled with your desti- 
 nation. On some lines it is also labelled 
 with the initial letter of your name, and on 
 arrival at a terminus the pieces are dis- 
 tributed according to the letters, whence it 
 came to pass that an ecclesiastical digni- 
 tary, whose name began with L, had to
 
 / 
 
 RAILWAY TRAVEL. 93 
 
 lodge a complaint before the Board against 
 a porter, who when he asked for his bag- 
 gage had told him to go to " Hell ! ' ' 
 There are sleej^ing cars on one or two of 
 the longest trunk lines ; but in general there 
 is no need of sleeping cars. The wealth and 
 power of England lie in a very small com- 
 pass. We have all heard of the American 
 who when sojourning in the Island ab- 
 stained from going out at night " for fear 
 of falling off." ''This is a great country, 
 sir," cannot be said by an Englishman, 
 whatever his pride may whisper about the 
 greatness of his nation. 
 
 With the mail coach and the posting 
 system has departed the Old English Inn, 
 wherein a traveller in Johnson's time took 
 his pleasure, and the comforts of which 
 occupy a prominent place in the philosophy 
 of life according to Dickens. About your 
 only chance of enjoying the happiness, 
 which consists in being welcomed after a 
 cold journey by a smiling landlady and 
 warming your slippered feet before a bright 
 fire in a cosy private room, while your 
 neatly dressed dinner is being set upon the 
 table, depends upon your lighting upon one 
 of those country inns to which sportsmen 
 still resort for the hunting or fishing season.
 
 94 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 Hotels in the great cities of England are 
 not what they are in the United States, 
 where genius is devoted to hotel-keeping 
 which might make a great statesman or 
 general. People in England do not board 
 in hotels. That undomestic habit is largely 
 a consequence of the servant difficulty, 
 which, in lands where no one likes to call 
 anybody master or mistress, often makes 
 housekeeping purgatorial. In England as 
 well as here the difficulty exists, but not in 
 so desperate a form. The old-fashioned 
 English household, consisting of servants 
 who attached themselves to the family for 
 life, identified themselves with its interests, 
 and felt a pride in its consequence, is now 
 a memory of the past, or lingers as a reality 
 only in some very sequestered country 
 house with a very good master and mistress 
 of the old school. Servants are educated ; 
 they write letters and correspond with the 
 world without, which in more primitive 
 days they did not, and they share the gen- 
 eral restlessness by which society is per- 
 vaded. Moreover, the migratory habits of 
 the employers render the maintenance of 
 settled households very difficult, and there- 
 fore preclude strong attachment's. But the 
 democratic idea, which is the chief source
 
 THE RAILWAY SYSTEM. 95 
 
 of the trouble, and seems likely even to 
 prove fatal in the end to the relation alto- 
 gether, has not yet thoroughly penetrated 
 the English kitchen and servants' hall. 
 There is not the same strong preference for 
 the " independence " of factory life, nor 
 are things come to such a pass that your 
 cook takes herself off without notice, per- 
 haps on the morning of a dinner-party, and 
 leaves you to get your dinner cooked as you 
 may. 
 
 Among the marvels of England may cer- 
 tainly be counted the vastness and com- 
 plexity of the railway system, which will 
 be impressed upon your mind by standing 
 on the platform, say at Clapham Junction, 
 and watching the multiplicity of trains 
 rushing in different directions. Withal, 
 the punctuality, regularity, and freedom 
 from accidents are wonderful ; and they 
 depend, be it remembered, on the strict and 
 faithful performance of duty by every man 
 among many thousands, not taken from the 
 class in which the sense of honour is sup- 
 posed to have its peculiar seat, who are tried 
 by exposure to the roughest weather, and 
 to all the temptations of intemperance 
 which arise from fatigue and cold com- 
 bined. A moment of inattention on the
 
 96 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 part of a wearj^ pointsman or an extra glass 
 of grog taken on a bitter winter's night 
 would be followed by wreck and massacre. 
 Carlyle, spinning along in perfect safety at 
 the rate of forty or even sixty miles an 
 hour, among all those intersecting roads 
 and through numberless possibilities of col- 
 lision, might surely have inferred, if the 
 mind of the arch-cynic had been open to a 
 genial inference, that the Present was not 
 so much more anarchical than the Past as 
 the author of Past and Present had a.ssumed. 
 In the railway army, at all events, a disci- 
 pline prevails not inferior to that which 
 prevailed in the army of Frederick, while 
 the railway army is not recruited by crimp- 
 ing or held to its duty by the lash. There 
 is anarchy now, no doubt, and there is 
 roguery in trade and industry ; but there 
 was at least as much of both in the days of 
 Abbot Sampson, as Abbot Sampson's own 
 history proved. 
 
 To turn to London. The huge city per- 
 haps never impressed the imagination more 
 than when approaching it by night on the 
 top of a coach you saw its numberless lights 
 flaring, as Tennyson says, "like a dreary 
 dawn," The most impressive approach is
 
 THE METROPOLIS. 97 
 
 now by the river through the infinitude of 
 docks, quays, and shipping. London is not 
 a city, but a province of brick and stone. 
 Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or 
 of the Monument can anything like a view 
 of the city as a whole be obtained. It is in- 
 dispensable, however, to make one or the 
 other of those ascents w'hen a clear day can 
 be found, not so much because the view is 
 fine, as because you will get a sensation of 
 vastness and multitude not easily to be for- 
 gotten. There is, or was not long ago, a 
 point on the ridge that connects Hampstead 
 with Highgate from which, as you looked 
 over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the 
 modern Babylon presented something like 
 the aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon 
 may have vied with London in circum- 
 ference, but the greater part of its area 
 was occupied by open spaces ; the modern 
 Babylon is a dense mass of humanity. Lon- 
 don with its suburbs has five millions of 
 inhabitants, and still it grows. It grows 
 through the passion which seems to be seiz- 
 ing mankind everywhere, on this continent 
 as well as in Europe, for emigration from 
 the country into the tow'n, not only as the 
 centre of wealth and employment, but as the 
 centre of excitement, and, as the people 
 
 G
 
 98 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 fondly fancy, of enjoyment. It grows also 
 by immigration from other countries ; the 
 immigration of Germans is large enough to 
 oust the natives from many employments, 
 especially clerkships, and is breeding jeal- 
 ousy on that account. "Worst of all, London 
 is said within a recent period to have re- 
 ceived many thousand Polish Jews. What 
 municipal government can be expected to 
 contend successfully against such an influx, 
 added to all the distress and evils with 
 which every great capital in itself abounds? 
 The Empire and the commercial relations 
 of England draw representatives of trading 
 communities or subject races from all parts 
 of the globe, and the faces and costumes of 
 the Hindoo, the Parsi, the Lascar, and the 
 ubiquitous Chinaman, mingle in the motley 
 crowd with the merchants of Europe and 
 America. The streets of London are, in 
 this respect, to the modern what the great 
 Place of Tyre must have been to the ancient 
 world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice 
 on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and 
 you will not make the equal, or anything 
 near the equal, of London. Here is the great 
 mart of the world, to which the best and 
 richest products are brought from every 
 land and clime, so that if you have put
 
 LONDON A HUMAN HIVE. 99 
 
 money in your purse you may command 
 every object of utility or fancy which grows 
 or is made anywhere without going beyond 
 the circuit of the great cosmopolitan city. 
 Parisian, German, Eussian, Hindoo, Japan- 
 ese, Chinese industry is as much at your ser- 
 vice here, if you have the all-compelling talis- 
 man in your pocket, as in Paris, Berlin, St. 
 Petersburg, Benares, Yokohama, or Pekin. 
 That London is the great distributing centre 
 of the world is shown by the fleets of the 
 carrying-trade of which the countless masts 
 rise along her wharves and in her docks. 
 She is also the bank of the world. But we 
 are reminded of the vicissitudes of com- 
 merce and the precarious tenure by which 
 its empire is held when we consider that 
 the bank of the world in the middle of 
 the last century was Amsterdam. 
 
 The first and perhaps the greatest marvel 
 of London is the commissariat. How can 
 the five millions be regularly supplied with 
 food, and everything needful to life, even 
 with such things as milk and those kinds of 
 fruit which can hardly be left bej^ond a 
 day ? Here again we see reason for except- 
 ing to the sweeping jeremiads of cynicism, 
 and concluding that though there may be 
 fraud and scamping in the industrial world,
 
 lOO A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 genuine production, faithful service, disci- 
 plined energ}-, and skill in organization 
 cannot wholly have departed from the 
 earth. London is not only well fed, but 
 well supplied with water and well drained. 
 Vast and densely peopled as it is, it is a 
 healthy city. Yet the limit of practicable 
 extension seems to be nearly reached. It 
 becomes a question how the increasing 
 multitude shall be supplied not only with 
 food and water but with air. 
 
 There is something very impressive in the 
 roar of the vast city. It is a sound of a 
 Niagara of human life. It ceases not except 
 during the hour or two before da^^^l, when 
 the last carriages have rolled away from the 
 balls and the market carts have hardly be- 
 gun to come in. Only in returning from a 
 very late ball is the visitor likely to have a 
 chance of seeing what Wordsworth saw 
 from Westminster Bridge : 
 
 Earth has not anything to show more fair ; 
 Dull would he be of soul who could pass by 
 A sight so touchin,<; in its majesty ; 
 This City now doth, like a garment, wear 
 The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, 
 Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie 
 Open unto the tields, and to the sky ; 
 All bright and glittering in the open air.
 
 LONDON MISERY. lOI 
 
 Never did sun more beautifully steep 
 lu his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill ; 
 Xe'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! 
 The river glideth at his own sweet will : 
 Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; 
 And all that mighty heart is lying still ! 
 
 Everybody has something to say about 
 the painful contrast between the extremes 
 of wealth and poverty in London, and the 
 people from new countries, where the press- 
 ure on the means of subsistence is as yet 
 comparatively little felt, are very apt to turn 
 up their hands and eyes and thank heaven 
 that they are not as those English. Painful 
 the contrast is, and hideous some of the low 
 quarters of London are, above all at night, 
 when the fatal gin-palaces flare, and round 
 them gather sickly and ragged forms com- 
 ing to barter perhaps the last garment or the 
 bread of to-morrow^ for an hour of excite- 
 ment or oblivion. But in the first place we 
 must remember that pictures of London 
 misery have been sought out and presented 
 in the most glaring colours for the purposes 
 of literary sensation. In the second place 
 we must remember that among five millions 
 there is inevitably much distress, caused 
 not only by w'ant, but by disease, intemper- 
 ance, crime, and accidents, for which the
 
 I02 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 community is not to blame. In the third 
 place we must remember the gjeat immi- 
 gration of needy, or woree than needy, for- 
 eigners already mentioned. Charity, we 
 find on inquiry, is active; often in those 
 crowded and noisome alleys we shall meet 
 its gentle ministers, and we shall be told 
 that they pass safely on their mission even 
 through the worst haunts of crime. Xor 
 does the number of the destitute and suffer- 
 ing after all bear any proportion to the 
 number of those for whom the great city 
 provides a livelihood, and who are living in 
 decency and comfort, with all the opportu- 
 nities of domestic happiness and the appli- 
 ances of the most advanced civilization. 
 The misery of London is more repulsive 
 than that of some other cities in its aspect, 
 partly on account of the dinginess produced 
 by the smoke, partly because it is crowded 
 into such close quarters. The streets being, 
 like those of ancient cities generally, too 
 narrow and crooked for street railways, 
 the people are compelled to live close to 
 the centres of employment, especially to the 
 docks. Still, when all allowances have 
 been made, the bad quarters of London are 
 a sad sight, and one which it may be morally 
 useful to Dives amidst his purple and fine
 
 THE CENTRE OF COMMERCE. IO3 
 
 linen to have seen. They are sources of 
 social and political danger too, as recent 
 outbreaks of their squalid turbulence have 
 proved. They are the English Faubourg 
 St. Antoine. 
 
 The East of London, which is the old 
 city, is, as all know, the business quar- 
 ter. Let the worshipper of Mammon when 
 he sets foot in Lombard Street adore his 
 divinity, of all whose temples this is the 
 richest and the most famous. Note the 
 throng incessantly threading those narrow 
 and tortuous streets. Nowhere are the 
 faces so eager or the steps so hurried, ex- 
 cept perhaps in the business quarter of New 
 York. Commerce has still its centre here ; 
 but the old social and civic life of the city 
 has fled. What once were the dwellings of 
 the merchants of London are now vast col- 
 lections of offices. The merchants dwell 
 in the mansions of the West End, their 
 clerks in villas and boxes without number, 
 to which when their offices close they are 
 taken by the suburban railways. On Sun- 
 day a more than Sabbath stillness reigns in 
 those streets, while in the churches, the 
 monuments of Wren's architectural genius, 
 which m Wren's day were so crowded, the 
 clergyman sleepily performs the service to
 
 104 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 a congregation wliicli you may count upon 
 your lingers. It is worth while to visit the 
 city on a Sunday. Here and there, in a 
 back .street, may still be seen what was once 
 the mansion of a merchant prince, ample 
 and stately, with the rooms which in former 
 days displayed the pride of commercial 
 wealth and resounded with the festivities of 
 the olden time ; now the sound of the pen 
 alone is heard. These and other relics of 
 former days are fast disappearing before 
 the march of improvement, which is driving 
 straight new streets through the antique 
 labyrinth. Some of the old thoroughfares 
 as well as the old names remain. There is 
 Cheapside, along which through the change- 
 ful ages, so varied a procession of hi.story 
 has swept. There is Fleet Street, close to 
 which, in liolt Court, Johnson lived, and 
 which he preferred or affected to prefer to 
 the finest scenes of nature. Temple B ar, 
 once grimly garnished with the heads of 
 traitors, has been "numliered with the things 
 of the past, after furnishing Mr. Bright by 
 the manner in which the omnibuses were 
 jammed in it, with a vivid simile for a Leg- 
 islative deadlock. 
 
 In days of old when the city was not 
 only the capital of commerce and the cen-
 
 THE LORD MAYOR. I05 
 
 tre of commercial life, but a gxeat political 
 and even a gi'eat military power — when 
 not only did kings and party chiefs look to 
 it for the sinews of w^ar, but its trainbands 
 were able to hold their own in the field of 
 New^bury against Rupert's Cavaliers — the 
 Lord Mayor was one of the most important 
 personages in the realm. Foreigners, and 
 notably the French, persist in fancying that 
 he is one of the most important personages 
 of the realm still, and an ex-Lord Mayor 
 showed himself well-informed as to French 
 opinion, though not so well Instructed in 
 the French language, wdien travelling in 
 France he inscribed on his card ^\feu Lord 
 3Iaijor de Londres.'''' But now the curious 
 pageant, resembling that of an exaggerated 
 circus, w'hich on the 9th of November wends 
 itsw^ay from the City to "Westminster at the 
 installation of a new Lord Mayor, is an 
 apt emblem of the state of an office which 
 struggles to keep up its outward splendour 
 wdien its intrinsic grandeur has passed away. 
 The Lord Mayor represents the city's majes- 
 ty and provides its turtle ; he is the official 
 patron of benevolent movements and char- 
 ities, he is still treated by Royalty with for- 
 mal consideration, and receives a special com- 
 munication when a Prince or Princess is born.
 
 I06 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 But the power which city kings, like Gresham 
 or Whittington, wielded has passed away, 
 and the genuine dignity with the power. 
 The great chiefs of commerce do not take 
 the office, which in truth has contracted a 
 certain comic tinge. The essential qualifi- 
 cations of its holder are ability and willing- 
 ness to spend money freely in the hospital- 
 ities of which the Mansion House, once the 
 home of serious counsels, is now the pro- 
 verbial scene, and which are generally said 
 to be more lavish and sumptuous than in- 
 tellectual. To borrow a phrase from Tom 
 Moore, ''he who dines at the Mansion 
 House dines where more good things are 
 eaten than said," He goes to "feed," in 
 the most literal sense of the term, on turtle 
 and champagne. " Oh, Sir, I am so hun- 
 gry," said a beggar to an Alderman, who 
 was on his way to a Lord Maj'or's feast. 
 " Lucky dog, I wish / were," was the re- 
 ply. Perhaps the most important remnant 
 of former greatness is the customary pres- 
 ence at the Lord Mayor's inaugural bancpet 
 of the Prime Minister, who is expected to 
 take that opportunity of delivering himself 
 to the nation on public affairs. The Prime 
 Minister, being the real king, this may be 
 said to be the real king's speech, though
 
 THE CITY GUILDS. 10/ 
 
 like the constitutional performance of the 
 same kind it is naturally apt to be buck- 
 ram. 
 
 A sumptuous relic of the gi-eat commer- 
 cial city of the Middle Ages are the city 
 companies, with their great estates and 
 their splendid banqueting hall. The halls 
 of the Goldsmiths, the Merchant Tailors, 
 and the Fishmongers' Guilds will repay a 
 visit. Of the ancient functions of these 
 companies little of course remains. They 
 are now mercantile and social fraternities, 
 wath the dignity of antiquity, and such in- 
 fluences as belong to any gi-eat corporation 
 exercising a splendid hospitality and mak- 
 ing a benevolent use of part at least of their 
 wealth in the maintenance of schools and 
 charities. Some of them have assumed a 
 political tinge, the Goldsmiths being Tory 
 and the Fishmongers Whig. The axe of 
 reform has for some time been laid at the 
 foot of this tree ; but the tree still stands 
 and excellent repasts are spread under its 
 shade. 
 
 Society has migrated to the Westward, 
 leaving far behind the ancient abodes of 
 aristocracy, the Strand, where once stood a 
 long line of patrician dwellings, Great 
 Queen Street, where Shaftesbury's house
 
 Io8 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 may still be seen, Lincoln's Inn Fields, 
 where, in the time of George II., the Duke 
 of Newcastle held his levee of office-seekers, 
 and Russell Square, now reduced to a sort 
 of dowager gentility. Hereditary mansions 
 too ancient and magnificent to be deserted, 
 such as Norfolk House, Spencer House, and 
 Lansdowne House, stayed the westward 
 course of aristocracy at St. James's Square 
 and Street, Piccadilly, and Mayfair ; but 
 the general tide of fashion has swept far 
 beyond. In that vast realm of wealth and 
 pleasure, the AVest End of London, the eye 
 is not satisfied with seeing, neither the ear 
 with hearing. There is not, nor has there 
 ever been, anything like it in the world. 
 Notes of admiration might be accumulated 
 to any extent without enhancing the im- 
 pression. In every direction the visitor 
 may walk till he is weary through streets 
 and squares of houses, all evidently the 
 abodes of wealth, some of them veritable 
 palaces. The parks are thronged, the 
 streets are blocked with handsome equi- 
 pages, filled with the rich and gay. Shops 
 blaze with costly wares, and abound with 
 everything that can minister to luxury. 
 On a fine bright day of May or early June, 
 and days of May or early June are often as
 
 THE PARKS AND THE WEST END. IO9 
 
 bright in London as anywhere, the Park is 
 probably the greatest display of wealth and 
 of the pride of wealth in the world. The 
 contrast with the slums of the East End no 
 doubt is striking, and we cannot wonder if 
 the soul of the East End is sometimes filled 
 with bitterness at the sight. A social Jere- 
 miah might be moved to holy wrath by the 
 glittering scene. The seer, however, might 
 be reminded that not all the owners of those 
 carriages are the children of idleness, living 
 by the sweat of another man's brow ; many 
 of them are professional men or chiefs of in- 
 dustry, working as hard with their brains 
 as any mechanic works with his hands, and 
 indispensable ministers of the highest civili- 
 zation. The number and splendour of the 
 equipages are thought to have been some- 
 what diminished of late by the reduction 
 of rents. The architecture of the West 
 End of London is for the most part drearily 
 monotonous : its forms have too plainly 
 been determined by the builder, not by the 
 artist, though since the restoration of art, 
 varieties of style have been introduced and 
 individual beauty has been more cultivated. 
 It is the boundless expanse of opulence, 
 street after street, square after s(i«are, that 
 most impresses the beholder, and makes
 
 no A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 him wonder from what miraculous horn of 
 plenty such a tide of riches can have been 
 poured. 
 
 A notable feature of London life are the 
 Clubs, which form a line of palaces along 
 Pall Mall. On this side of the water we 
 have Clubs, but club-life has not reached 
 anytliiug like the same point of develop- 
 ment. Marriage in the Old Country is 
 later than it is here, the avenues of the 
 professions being more crowded, and to 
 board in hotels is not the fashion. Young 
 men take lodgings and board in their Club. 
 In the Club they have every possible luxury, 
 physical and intellectual, provided for them 
 at the cheapest rate, and they command an 
 establishment such as a millionaire could 
 scarcely afford to keep. Yet few of the 
 number would prefer to live on at the Club 
 when they could afford to exchange it even 
 for the least luxurious home. Better, most 
 of them would say, is cold mutton and 
 domestic cheerfulness therewith than soup, 
 fish, and entrees, followed by a lonely 
 evenmg. The Club, commonly speaking, 
 has ceased to be social, nor is common 
 membership an mtroduction, so that the 
 inmate oU a Club may sit lonely in a full 
 room. There is, of course, more fellow-
 
 CLUBS AND CLUB LIFE. Ill 
 
 ship iu the Clubs with special objects, 
 which form a tie among the members : iu 
 political Clubs, such as the Carlton and 
 the Reform and Brooke's ; in professional 
 Clubs, such as the United Service, or in 
 Clubs of particular circles, such as the 
 Travellers' and the Garrick. To enter 
 some of the select Clubs is to go socially 
 through the eye of a needle. At the head 
 of the list may be placed the Athenaeum, 
 in its origin literary and scientific, as the 
 name denotes, but now general, though 
 still with an intellectual cast. In its home, 
 on Waterloo Place, men of distinction in 
 all lines meet in the hours between the 
 closing of the offices and dinner. Entrance 
 is difficult, and the candidate has to wait 
 many years before his name comes on for 
 ballot. 
 
 The outside of London Society may be 
 seen on a fine day in the Park ; it may be 
 seen in full dress at the opera ; especially if 
 Royalty happens to be there ; it may be 
 seen in Court dress, rolling along the ave- 
 nues to Buckingham Palace on the afternoon 
 of a drawing-room, w^lien the curious may 
 also enjoy a view of the British family 
 chariot, with hammercloth, fat coachman 
 in wig and bouquet, and liveried flunkeys
 
 112 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 with stuffed calves and gold-headed canes 
 behind. Of the inside a glimpse of London 
 Society can be obtained by the stranger 
 only through the novel. Socially, as well 
 as commercially, London is unlike other 
 capitals in being the centre of everything at 
 once. Politics, commerce, law, literature, 
 science, and art, all are gathered there. 
 This lends to conversation at once a variety 
 and a solid interest which, in a mere politi- 
 cal city, hi a mere commercial city, or in a 
 mere pleasure city, it would not possess. 
 There is no formality or stiffness in London 
 Society ; no society in truth can be more free, 
 or even more hearty during the hours of 
 intercourse. "What is necessarily wanting, 
 when the circle is so immense, is intimacy, 
 the charm of life ; for no mere acquaintance, 
 however brilliant, can be so interesting as 
 those whom you know well. Intimacy is 
 possible only in smaller circles, which those 
 who have lived regularly in London may 
 form. Where there are such numbers to 
 be entertained there cannot fail to be a 
 good deal of the mere social battue ; there 
 are great dinner parties at which you have 
 no more intercourse with anyone but the 
 guest who sits beside you than if you were 
 all dining at the same restaurant ; there are
 
 LONDON SOCIETY. II3 
 
 balls, at which nobody can dance, and not 
 all can get upstairs ; there are crushes at 
 which you are jammed, perhaps in a sultry 
 summer evening, and struggling against 
 the overpowering buzz to talk to some one 
 against whom you have been jammed, but 
 to whom you do not want to talk about 
 something which you do not want to talk 
 about. Perhaps the best months for social 
 enjoyment are those which precede the 
 beginning of "the season," and during 
 which parties are small, while of those who 
 are most worth meeting, many have already 
 been brought by the government offices, 
 the law courts, or other professional work 
 to town. Of course, in London, as in every 
 quarter of Vanity Fair, there must be such 
 vanities as Thackeray describes. There 
 must be social grades with their jealousies 
 and heart-burnings and mean ambitions. 
 One hears of an aspirant to a higher gTade 
 getting some great lady who patronizes her 
 to invite the guests to her parties. One 
 hears even of bribery and of a large sum 
 given for an invitation to a high-caste ball. 
 These miseries and humiliations are excep- 
 tional and self-imposed ; in every vast con- 
 course of pleasure-seekers, there must be a 
 sense of hollowness. It is something to feel 
 
 H
 
 114 -^ TKir TO EXGLAXD. 
 
 that those among whom you live "will miss 
 you a little when you die. In such a world 
 as London, nobody can be much missed 
 when he dies. One would prefer at all 
 events, to end life in the country, and lay 
 one's bones in a country churchyard. 
 Xothing is more dismal than the pomp of a 
 funeral struggling with its mockery of woe 
 to the "Necropolis" through the tide of 
 business and pleasure in a London street. 
 
 The vastness of the circle and the light 
 humour of a pleasure-loving society, which 
 makes it impatient of intellectual display, 
 are likely to rather interfere with the ascend- 
 ency of great talkers such as reigned forty 
 or fifty years ago. Macaulay's style has 
 been often described. He tm-ned the con- 
 versation into a monologue and talked di- 
 luted essays, wonderful for their fluency, 
 finish, and for the stores of information 
 which they displayed, but naturally re- 
 garded as a bore by those who wanted to 
 talk themselves, and sometimes felt to be 
 a bore even by those who wanted only to 
 listen and be amused. It was provoking 
 when somebody had just begim a good story 
 or an interesting reminiscence to have him 
 silenced by a flood of dissertation. Macau- 
 lay had a wonderful power of keeping the
 
 INTELLECTUAL SOCIETY. II5 
 
 talk even in the largest company to himself, 
 and eating a very good dinner at the same 
 time, Rogers was a teller of stories, which 
 he had polished to the highest perfection, 
 and with which, at a dinner party, he gen- 
 erally entertained the men when the ladies 
 had left the room, amidst a silence of atten- 
 tion which it was highly penal to break, for 
 never was there a self-love more sensitive 
 or a bitterer tongue. Milman was a very 
 interesting talker ; he was a little learned 
 perhaps ; but his talk was a genuine out- 
 pouring, not a pedantic display. Sir David 
 Dundas, now forgotten, was the most charm- 
 ing of all ; he did not declaim but con- 
 versed, and drew out the company while he 
 displayed his own gift. After all, the most 
 popular of talkers must be he who makes 
 other people think that they have said good 
 things. Hayward was an anecdotist ; and 
 his fit audience was not so much London 
 society as a party in a great country house. 
 Those parties in the great country houses 
 are the reunions which most nearly corre- 
 spond in England to the old French Salon. 
 both in its light and its serious aspect. At 
 The Grange, in Hampshire, a party of this 
 kind used to be assembled by Lady i\shbur- 
 ton, whose name has been made familiar to
 
 Il6 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 US by the Life of Carlyle and by a bio- 
 graphical notice from the pen of Lord 
 Houghton, himself a notable Amphitryon. 
 Lady Ashbuiton was as near a counterpart 
 as England could produce of the great lady 
 of France before the Revolution, and was 
 endowed with conversational powers, es- 
 pecially with a power of repartee, which 
 fitted her to be the head as well as the host- 
 ess of her brilliant circle. Conspicuous 
 in that circle was Samuel, Bishop of Oxford, 
 the Episcopal side of whose character was 
 not the only side. Among men of the 
 world and wits Samuel Wilberforce was a 
 man of the world and a wit. All the time 
 no doubt he persuaded himself that he was 
 drawing the men of this world into the 
 Church's fold ; but which way the real at- 
 traction was, to observers at Lady Ashbur- 
 ton's dinner or breakfast-table, seemed 
 doubtful. Carlyle was another frequent 
 visitor and a prime favourite at The Grange, 
 as readers of the Life know. He poured 
 forth a continuous stream of cynicism, as 
 bitter and indiscriminate as the east wind, 
 on all things and men. There was no 
 measure or sense, though there was often 
 genius and gi-im humour in what he said. 
 You were struck at first with the force and
 
 SUBURBAN LIFE. 11/ 
 
 picturesqueness of the language ; but the 
 exaggeration and the monotony of the per- 
 petual jeremiads wearied most of his hear- 
 ers at last. 
 
 Some of the gi'eat mansions, in this era 
 of gambling speculation when fortunes are 
 quickly Avon and lost, have had strange 
 tales to tell. At Kensington, the other day, 
 rose a pile which vied with Royalty, but 
 before the builder could take up his abode 
 in it the gold given by the evil genii had 
 melted away. One of the great mansions 
 at Albert Gate was once the palace of the 
 Railway King, who, in his prosperous 
 hour, saw in his halls all the brightest and 
 proudest of the land, assembled to pay 
 homage to Mammon, and perhaps to beg a 
 moment's use of the AUadin's lamp which 
 makes men suddenly rich. The Railway 
 King, who set out an honest and prosper- 
 ous shopkeeper, died in penury, the whole 
 of his sinister gains having been wrung 
 from him as was supposed rmder threat of 
 the law. 
 
 The outskirts of London are full of villas, 
 but life there is said not to be social. For 
 no purpose can the dwellers of those villas 
 be brought together. The- man goes up to 
 town by the morning train, spends his day
 
 Il8 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 in business, comes home to dinner and after 
 dinner reads his paper. For a couple of 
 months in eacli year the pair go off to lodg- 
 ings by themselves at the seaside. Such is 
 the description given by those who know 
 suburban life well. ]SIore enjoyment might 
 be had at a less price than that for which 
 the master of the villa spends his days in 
 toil, and here again we seem to see that 
 what is called progi-ess, that is, increase of 
 wealth, is not necessarily increase of happi- 
 ness. 
 
 A beautiful city London cannot be called. 
 In beauty it is no match for Paris. The 
 smoke which not only blackens, but cor- 
 rodes, is fatal to the architecture as well as 
 to the atmosphere. Moreover, the luie 
 buildings, which if brought together would 
 form a magniticent assemblage, are scat- 
 tered over the immense city, and some of 
 them are ruined by their surroundings. 
 There is a fine group at Westminster, and 
 the view from the steps under the Duke 
 of York's column across St. James' Park 
 is beautiful. But even at Westminster 
 meanness jostles splendour, and the picture 
 is marred by Mr. Hankey's huge Tower of 
 Babel rising near. London has had no 
 Eedile like Hausmann. The Embankment
 
 CONSTITUTIONAL FICTIONS. 1 19 
 
 on the one side of the Thames is noble in 
 itself, but you look across from it at the 
 hideous warehouses and dirty wharves of 
 Southwark. Nothing is more charming 
 than a fine water street ; and this water 
 street might be very fine were it not marred 
 by the projection of a huge railway shed. 
 The new Courts of Law, a magnificent, 
 though it is said mconvenient, pile, instead 
 of being placed on the Embankment or in 
 some large open space, are choked up and 
 lost in rookeries. London, we must repeat, 
 has had no sedile. Perhaps the finest view 
 is that from a steamboat on the river, em- 
 bracing the Houses of Parliament, Somerset 
 House, and the Temple, with St. Paul's 
 rising above the whole. 
 
 Westminster is the centre of politics. It 
 may be said historically to be the centre of 
 politics, not for London and Great Britain 
 only, but for the civilized world. All civil- 
 ized nations both in Europe and America, 
 as well as all the British Colonies, have now 
 adopted the constitution which was here 
 founded and developed, with a single head 
 of the State and two Chambers ; though 
 with regard to the headship of the State 
 and the Upper Chamber, the elective has, 
 in the most advanced politics, been substi-
 
 120 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 tilted for the hereditary principle, while in 
 the cases of the United States and Switzer- 
 land there is a federal as well as a national 
 element. The Roman imposed his institu- 
 tions with arms upon a conquered world ; 
 a willing world has adopted the mstitutions 
 which had their original seat at West- 
 minster. But the British Constitution now 
 means little more than the omnipotence of 
 the House of Commons. The immense 
 edifice is still styled the palace ; but the 
 king who now dwells in the palace is the 
 sovereign people, or perhaps rather the 
 sovereign caucus. If you chance, which is 
 very unlikely, to see the Queen open Par- 
 liament, you may get a lesson in Constitu- 
 tional Government. There she rides in her 
 gilded coach of State, with the State coach- 
 man and horses, with lords and ladies in 
 waiting, pages and equerries surrounding 
 her, and with a glittering guard of cuiras- 
 siers. Nominally, that lady ratifies or re- 
 jects all legislation at her good pleasure, at 
 her good pleasure makes war or peace, and 
 herself appoints all officers of State, all 
 judges, all commanders by land and sea. 
 Practically it has been settled that she has 
 not the power of appointing her own wait- 
 mg-women. The authority that once was
 
 THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. 121 
 
 hers now vests in that plainly dressed man 
 in the crowd, on whom no train attends, 
 for whom nobody makes way, to whom, it 
 may be, no one doffs his hat. The speech 
 which she reads is that man's speech, 
 and as he has written it she must read it. 
 They told George II. that a wretch had pre- 
 sumed to counterfeit the King's speech, but 
 he would soon be brought to justice. "Let 
 the poor fellow alone," replied the King, 
 " I have read both speeches, and I like the 
 counterfeit much the best." 
 
 That the Houses of Parliament, with the 
 colossal clock tower from which booms Big 
 Ben, are majestic and imposing cannot be 
 denied. Architecture is the most material 
 of the arts, and in its productions size and 
 costliness go a long way even without gen- 
 ius. The river front has been with too 
 much truth compared to a fender, and the 
 elaborate ornament of the exterior is 
 doomed to be spoiled by the smoke. Nor 
 in the inside, though all is rich and magnifi- 
 cent, is the effect that of spaciousness or 
 grandeur. The halls of debate are too 
 much ornamented. When this is the case 
 attention is distracted from tlie assembly 
 and the speakers. It is interesting to see 
 the constitutional fiction preserved, as it is
 
 122 A TRIP TO ENGLA>'D. 
 
 even in the Parliament House at Ottawa, 
 by decorating with special gorgeousness 
 the Chamber of that House which has 
 been stripped of all its power. The 
 Celestial Emperor of Japan has more 
 than one counterpart in England, ever con- 
 versative of forms. Curiously enough, the 
 collective science of the countiy which was 
 applied to the construction of those Houses, 
 failed both in the ventilation and the 
 acoustics. In the House of Lords it was so 
 difficult to hear that it used to be said that 
 members went out to buy an evening paper 
 that they might learn what the debate was 
 about. The Houses are divided down the 
 middle, in conformity with the Tarty theory 
 of government, the Ministerial sheep being 
 upon the right of the [Speaker's chair, the 
 Opposition goats upon the left. The 
 ancient forms meet and please the historic 
 eye. There is the '-bauble," waiting per- 
 haps for another Cromwell, when govern- 
 ment by faction shall have worn out the 
 patience of mankind. There is the Speak- 
 er's wig, which it was said Sheridan might 
 have plucked off with impunity after his 
 '•Begum speech," so transported was the 
 house with his eloquence. There is the 
 Sergeant-at-Arms with his sword to defend
 
 ENGLISH ORATORY. I23 
 
 the Commons against the bravoes of 
 Charles I. 
 
 A debate should be heard if possible from 
 a seat "under the gallery" where the 
 spectator is on a level with the speakers. 
 In the gallery you miss not a little of the 
 play. Hear it where you will, a debate is 
 no longer what it was in the days of the 
 Grand Remonstrance, in those of the great 
 party battles which raged through the reigns 
 of "William and Anne, or even in those of 
 "Walpole and Pitt. The real debate then 
 took place in the House, and the struggle 
 for political ascendancy was decided by the 
 efforts of rival speakers on that floor. The 
 real debate, m our times, takes place, not 
 on the floor of Parliament, but in the open 
 court of public opmion. Its chief organs 
 are not Parliamentary orators, but the jour- 
 nals whose representatives sit yonder in 
 the reporters' gallery, and whose oflices on 
 Fleet Street or in Printing House Square 
 bespeak, with their lighted fronts, the work 
 which subtle and active brains are carrying 
 on in them through the long night and 
 almost to dawn of day. The speeches de- 
 livered in the House of Commons, as a 
 rule, are hardly intended, much less ex- 
 pected, to turn votes ; they are manifestoes
 
 124 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 addressed fully as much to the country as 
 to the House, and for the most part they 
 contain substantially little which has not 
 appeared in the morning's editorials. Still 
 it is well wortJi the stranger's while to attend 
 a good debate in the House of Commons. 
 If he can get admission when a great faction 
 fight is going on and the fate of a Ministry 
 Is trembling in the balance, he will find the 
 entertainment at least as good as a play. 
 The average of speaking is not so high in 
 the House of Commons as in Congress ; 
 but the level of the best speakers is higher. 
 American oratory almost always savours 
 somewhat of the school of elocution, and 
 has the fatal drawback of being felt to aim 
 at effect. The greatest of English speakers, 
 such as John Bright, the greatest of all, or 
 Gladstone, create no such impression ; you 
 feel that their only aim is to produce con- 
 viction. 
 
 Westminster Abbey is pronounced by 
 Mr. Freeman the most glorious of English 
 churches. But its special attraction for 
 the stranger is that which it possesses as the 
 central fane of the English-speaking race 
 and the sepulchre of our great men. Its 
 character in this respect has been asserted 
 by the erection of a monument in it to an
 
 WESTMINSTER ABBEY. I 25 
 
 American poet and the performance of a 
 funeral service for an American President 
 beneath its roof. Not by any means all the 
 great men of England, however, are buried 
 in Westminster Abbey. To visit Shake- 
 speare's grave a special pilgrimage must be 
 made to his own Stratford-on-Avon, with 
 its old church and shady church walk, the 
 beloved and worthy retreat of his later 
 years. St. Paul' s holds some famous graves : 
 among them are those of Wellington and 
 Nelson. Peel sleeps among his family at 
 Drayton, Cobden in a country churchyard. 
 Selection did not begin early enough : and 
 among the illustrious dead are obtruded some 
 dead who are not illustrious and yet occupy 
 an immoderate space with their monuments. 
 Some of the monuments, it must be owned, 
 might with advantage be removed from a 
 Christian Church to a heathen Pantheon, 
 while some might be better for being 
 macadamized. Perhaps, as a monument, 
 nothing in Westminster Abbey is so strik- 
 ing as the simple sarcophagu.s of the Duke 
 of Wellington in the crypt of St. Paul's. 
 
 Law has now migrated from Westminster 
 Hall to the New Courts, though if another 
 Strafford or another Hastings were to be 
 impeached, the great judicial pageant, it is
 
 126 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 to be presumed, would be again exhibited 
 in Westminster Hall. But here also we are 
 on sacred ground. Here were preserved, 
 though under rude and sometimes half-bar- 
 barous forms, the great principles of justice, 
 while over the rest of Europe prevailed ar- 
 bitrary tribunals, secret procedure, impris- 
 onment without legal warrant, and judicial 
 torture. Trial by jury and the other great 
 judicial institutions of England have, like 
 her political institutions, gone round the 
 world. English Justice still keeps its scarlet 
 and ermine, with some other vestiges of an- 
 cient state, which may perhaps be displeas- 
 ing to the severe republican eye. But with 
 such outward lielps to reverence, the com- 
 mon people in England at any rate cannot 
 yet afford to di.spense. The ermine at all 
 events is stainless. A century and a half 
 ago Lord Macclesfield was impeached and 
 deprived, not for selling judgiuents, but for 
 selling offices. Otherwise, since the expul- 
 sion of the Stuarts, no suspicion has ever 
 been breathed against the incorruptibility 
 of an English judge. 
 
 Of all nations, with the possible excep- 
 tion of the Greeks, England has produced 
 the greatest and the finest body of poetry.
 
 EXGLISn ART. 1 27 
 
 It is singular that she should have produced 
 so little comparatively iu the way of art. 
 Indifferent to art she certainly is not, since 
 she has just given seventy thousand pounds 
 (•$350,000) for a not supremely interesting 
 Raphael. How^ever, in the National Gal- 
 lery, besides a general collection which is 
 allowed to be very fine and instructive, will 
 be seen some native paintings which seem 
 to show that the training and direction 
 rather than the faculty have hitherto been 
 wanting. There will be found the best 
 works of Turner, the supreme genius surely 
 of landscape painting, alone in his power of 
 producing on canvas what a poet sees in na- 
 ture. There, too, is Gainsborough, though 
 his "Blue Boy," which every one should 
 make a point of seeing, is in the private 
 collection of the Duke of "Westminster. 
 Hogarth belongs to a much humbler gi'ade, 
 yet few paintings are more pathetic than 
 the last in the series of " Marriage a la 
 Mode." The great general painters are 
 the best portrait painters : Reynolds cannot 
 vie with Titian, but he presents to us in 
 a very interesting way whatever was grace- 
 ful, sweet, and half-poetic in a polished and 
 refined society. The late Prince Consort 
 has been accused of meddlins; with things
 
 128 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 with which he liad better not have meddled ; 
 but he gave a real impulse to the study of 
 art in all its grades. Of that study the 
 great centre now is Kensington, and its 
 home is marked by the growth of buildings 
 of a highly festhetic character. It would 
 be presumptuous in any one who is ignorant 
 of art to express an opinion about the Ex- 
 hibitions of the Royal Academy. Few of 
 us perhaps would be able to discern how 
 the Masters of the present day fall below 
 the Old ^Masters in technical skill. What 
 to the unskilled eye seems wanting is not 
 greater technical skill, but more interesting 
 subjects. The power of expression appears 
 generally to exceed the wealth of ideas to 
 be expressed. The religious painters of the 
 Middle Ages and the Kenaissance had never 
 to look out for a subject ; the modern 
 painter has to look out for a subject, and 
 he not seldom lights on one very remote 
 from common interest. Happy is the 
 stranger who gets an invitation to an Acad- 
 emy dinner ; nowhere will he hear such 
 after-dinner speaking or see so many men 
 who are worth seeing. 
 
 It is curious that the finest extant works 
 both of Greek and Assyrian art should 
 meet under the same roof in London. Brit-
 
 SCIENCE IN ENGLAND. 1 29 
 
 ish adventure has rifled the world ahnost 
 like Roman conquest. The British Mu- 
 seum must be visited, were it only to see 
 the scidpture of Phidias and those brought 
 by Layard's enterjDrise and energy from 
 Nineveh. Greek art w^as nothing short of a 
 miracle. In form it remains supreme, as 
 he who looks on the friezes of the Parthe- 
 non must own, though in depth and rich- 
 ness of sentiment it has been transcended 
 by the widening mind and deepening heart 
 of humanity. 
 
 If Science has any special centre, perhaps 
 it is the Royal Institution in Albemarle 
 Street, over which Tyndall lately presided. 
 There at all events the great men lecture, 
 and there you can most easily get into con- 
 nection with the scientific world. Should 
 the British Science Association be sitting, 
 there would be an opportunity of seeing all 
 the most eminent men of science at once, 
 and at the same time of visiting some inter- 
 esting place in England under the best 
 auspices. But scientific institutions and 
 facilities of all kinds abound ; everywhere, 
 and not least in the literature which deals 
 with religious belief and in the conversation 
 of the educated classes on that subject, you 
 will mark the rapid and resistless advance
 
 130 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 of the power which seems destined in the 
 immediate future to assume the guidance of 
 humanity. 
 
 The tradition that Englishmen enjoy their 
 pleasures very sadly runs on like the tra- 
 ditions that they shoot themselves in No- 
 vember and sell their wives. But the Eng- 
 lish will now be hardly found wanting in 
 the love of pleasure. They have in fact 
 become an eminently pleasure-seeking and 
 excitement-loving people. Since the Great 
 Exhibition of 1851, which drew to London 
 everybody who could afford it and a good 
 many who could not, there has been a pas- 
 sion for excursions, and every show place 
 is now inundated by the crowds. London 
 has theatres in abundance, and every imag- 
 inable equipment of pleasure. The out-of- 
 door gaiety of the Boulevards is of course 
 impossible in that climate. It is on the 
 ISIarine Parade at Brighton or at one of the 
 favourite watering-places that something 
 like the aspect of the Boulevards will be 
 found. A Frenchman finds the Sunday 
 terribly dull ; but he may solace himself to 
 some extent by a trip to Richmond Terrace 
 with its glorious view, to Greenwich Park, 
 to Hampton Court, or some other junketing-
 
 ENGLISH PLEASURE-SEEKING. I3I 
 
 place in the neighbourhood of the metrop- 
 olis. The London Parks themselves, filled 
 with citizens and their families on a fine 
 evening, present London life perhaps in its 
 pleasantest aspect. Those Parks are un- 
 equalled of their kind, especially since the 
 Board of Works has improved their walks 
 and made them gay with paterres of flowers. 
 They are superior to the Central Park at 
 New York in having broad lawns, stately 
 shade trees, and large sheets of water ; but 
 above all in being in the centre of the city. 
 Not only are they the recreation-grounds, 
 but, together with the numerous squares, 
 they form the lungs of London. Nor are 
 they less essential to the moral than to the 
 physical health of the people, especially of 
 the young, who would otherwise be driven 
 to the amusements of the streets, as our 
 children will be in Toronto, when cruel 
 folly, to save a trifling sum of money, shall 
 have deprived us of the Queen's Park. It 
 is sad to hear that the Crystal Palace at 
 Sydenham is in imminent danger of being 
 closed. To the name " Crystal," the strict 
 devotees of the Lamp of Truth have perhaps 
 been right in taking exception ; but the place 
 with its splendid gardens is a magnificent 
 palace of the people. A fete at Versailles
 
 132 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 in the time of Louis XIV. got up at lavish 
 expense, was enjoyed, as the old prints 
 show us, by a few hundreds of privileged 
 courtiers. A fete at the Crystal Palace is 
 enjoyed by myriads. Here at all events is 
 progress in happiness. 
 
 The grand popular fete in England, as 
 everybody knows, is the Derby, and the 
 curious may go from London to Epsom to 
 see it as they would go to see a bullfight in 
 Spain. In point of wholesoraeness there is 
 unhappily not much to choose between the 
 two exhibitions. l*robably the bullfight is 
 the less extensively demoralizing of the two. 
 The Turf in England is now neither more 
 nor less than a vast national gambling- 
 table, of which the devil is the croupier, 
 and at which multitudes of gamblers take 
 their places and meet their ruin who know 
 nothing about horses and perhaps have 
 never seen a race. You can hardly take 
 up a country newspaper, especially in the 
 North of England, without being made 
 aware by its sporting column of the prev- 
 alence of this degrading and deadly mania. 
 If Agrarianism would pass its plough over 
 all the race-courses it would confer an un- 
 mixed benefit on the nation.
 
 SLAVES OF CIVILIZATION. 1 33 
 
 In enjoying the pleasures of London or 
 any other great city, let us not forget the 
 multitudes who minister to them, and whose 
 own share of them is often small. Let us 
 not be unkind to "Cabbie." Something 
 has been done for him of late, but his lot is 
 still a hard one, and few of the slaves of 
 civilization perhaps have a better claim to 
 compassion. He must sit on his box in all 
 weathers, often drenched to the skin, racked 
 with rheumatism, yet obliged to drive on. 
 To be near his stable he must live in mis- 
 erable quarters, for which he pays very 
 high. Hardly ever can he get an hour in 
 his home. Sometimes he takes to night- 
 work, as his only chance of seeing his wife 
 and children in the day. He drives you 
 very safely on the whole through the press 
 of vehicles, though in the height of the sea- 
 son, besides the regular cabmen, a number 
 of ephemeral "butterflies " are put on with 
 very miscellaneous drivers. Inquiry will 
 show that as a rule the cabman is respecta- 
 ble, and brings up his children as well as 
 he can. His general honesty is proved by 
 the great number of articles left in cabs 
 and brought by the drivers to Scotland 
 Yard. He is almost invariably civil to you 
 if you are not, like too many, uncivil to
 
 134 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. 
 
 him. His legal fares, it is believed, hardly 
 do more than pay for the hire of his cab 
 and horse, so that he must subsist practi- 
 cally on his gi-atuities. Do what he will it 
 appears that his end too often is the work- 
 house. 
 
 A tribute to philanthropic London will 
 fitly close this paper. It may be paid in no 
 unstinted measure, as the number of great 
 hospitals and charitable institutions proves. 
 Of that let the stranger remind himself if 
 he is tempted to censoriousness when he 
 looks on the social sores and plague-spots 
 of the Old "World. Hitherto in this New 
 AVorld there has been room enough and 
 plenty for all. Yet we are not exempt from 
 the social problems. They begin to con- 
 front us even now. 
 
 THE END.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 — • — 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Aldershot 60 
 
 Belford Regis 76 
 
 Blenheim Palace 40 
 
 British Museum 129 
 
 Buckingham Palace 54 
 
 Cambridge 43 
 
 Cathedrals 18 
 
 Celts (The) 9 
 
 Chivalry 33 
 
 Church Architecture 17 
 
 Clovelly 79 
 
 Coventry 81 
 
 Eleanor's Crosses 25 
 
 Elizabethan Manor Houses 35 
 
 England in the Middle Ages 15 
 
 Epsom 132 
 
 Feudal Castles 27 
 
 Georgean Age 41 
 
 Grasmere 78 
 
 Hampton Court 57 
 
 Henley 82 
 
 Highlands (The) 79 
 
 Killarney 79 
 
 London 97 
 
 Manchester 87 
 
 Monasteries 22 
 
 135
 
 136 INDEX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 National Gallery 127 
 
 Xew Forest 34 
 
 Old City Walls 31 
 
 Oxford 43 
 
 Pall Mall 110 
 
 Tarish Churches 20 
 
 Piiblic Schools oO 
 
 Roman England 10 
 
 Saltaire 87 
 
 Saxon England 12 
 
 Snowdon 78 
 
 Stonchenge £ 
 
 Stratford on Avon 81 
 
 Stuart Age (The) 38 
 
 Temple Church (The) 32 
 
 Tower (The) 5£ 
 
 Warwick 81 
 
 Westminster Abbey 124 
 
 Windsor 56 
 
 Wolverhampton 84
 
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