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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Copyright No. 


Shelf 


UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



WHITE HOUSE LIBRARY 
DEPOSIT 








































































THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 


autograph <£tiition 

WITH PORTRAITS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AND FACSIMILES 

IN TWENTY-TWO VOLUMES 


VOLUME XI 





“S§&, 

THIS EDITION OF THE 
WRITINGS OF 
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
IS LIMITED 
TO FIVE HUNDRED 
SIGNED AND NUMBERED 
COPIES 

OF WHICH THIS IS 

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OUR OLD^HdME 

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BY 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
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THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

MAR. 5 1901 


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OPYRIGHT ENTRY 


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CLASS No. 

COPY B. 


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COPYRIGHT, 1863, BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 
COPYRIGHT, 189I, BY ROSE HAWTHORNE LATHROP 
COPYRIGHT, I9OO, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 


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TABLE OF CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
DEDICATION TO A FRIEND . 

CONSULAR EXPERIENCES . 

LEAMINGTON SPA .... 
ABOUT WARWICK 

RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN . 
LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER . 
PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 
NEAR OXFORD .... 
SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 
A LONDON SUBURB 

UP THE THAMES .... 
OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY 
CIVIC BANQUETS .... 


PAGE 

ix 

xvii 

i 

5 2 

89 

126 
173 
201 
243 
281 
3 11 
355 
406 

455 




















































































































































































































































LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


PAGI 

Warwick Castle (page 91) . E. C. Peixotto 

Frontispiece 

Vignette on Engraved Title-page: St Bo- 
tolph’s Tower, Old Boston (page 225) 
Lichfield Cathedral from the West. . 180 
Salisbury Cathedral from the Fields . 210 

From a photograph by Clifton Johnson 
Magdalen College, Oxford, from the 


Cherwell.278 

The Auld Brig o’ Doon, Ayr.306 

























INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


When Hawthorne was well established at 
The Wayside in Concord, with his books and 
papers about him, he turned to the “ seven 
closely written volumes of journal ” which he 
had sent home before leaving England for the 
Continent, and availed himself of his notes to 
write from month to month the papers which 
appeared in The Atlantic at intervals from i860 
to 1863, an d when collected into a volume, 
with the prefatory paper on his “ Consular Ex¬ 
periences,” then first printed, took the compre¬ 
hensive title, Our Old Home . 

Hawthorne was in a despondent mood when 
writing out these papers, due in part to physi¬ 
cal depression, in part to his dejection over the 
political situation; and it is fortunate that in 
writing he was not dependent on his memory, 
else it is to be feared he might have injected 
some of his present humor. “ We must re¬ 
member,” he said whimsically, “ that there is a 
good deal of intellectual ice mingled with this 
wine of memory.” Mr. Fields, who was then 
editing the Atlantic , cheered him with reports 
of the pleasure he was giving, and Hawthorne 
wrote: — 


IX 


OUR OLD HOME 


“ I am delighted at what you tell me about 
the kind appreciation of my articles, for I feel 
rather gloomy about them myself. I am really 
much encouraged by what you say; not but 
what I am sensible that you mollify me with 
a good deal of soft soap, but it is skilfully 
applied and effects all you intend it should.” 
On 22 February, i863,he wrote, when sending 
“Up the Thames : ” “Here is another article. 
I wish it would not be so wretchedly long, but 
there are many things which I shall find no 
opportunity to say unless I say them now; so 
the article grows under my hand, and one part 
of it seems just about as well worth printing as 
another. Heaven sees fit to visit me with an 
unshakable conviction that all this series of 
articles is good for nothing ; but that is none 
of my business, provided the public and you are 
of a different opinion. If you think any part 
of it can be left out with advantage, you are 
quite at liberty to do so. Probably I have not 
put Leigh Hunt quite high enough for your 
sentiments respecting him; but no more gen¬ 
uine characterization and criticism (so far as the 
writer’s purpose to be true goes) was ever done. 
It is very slight. I might have made more of 
it, but should not have improved it. I mean to 
write two more of these articles, and then hold 
my hand.” 

Hawthorne advised against using his “ Con- 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


sular Experiences ” except in the book, and 
wrote when he sent it, 30 April : “ The article 
has some of the features that attract the curiosity 
of the foolish public, being made up of personal 
narrative and gossip, with a few pungencies of 
personal satire, which will not be the less effec¬ 
tive because the reader can scarcely find out who 
was the individual meant. I am not without 
hope of drawing down upon myself a good 
deal of critical severity on this score, and would 
gladly incur more of it if I could do so with¬ 
out seriously deserving censure. The story of 
the Doctor of Divinity, I think, will prove a 
good card in this way. It is every bit true (like 
the other anecdotes), only not told so darkly 
as it might have been for the reverend gentle¬ 
man. I do not believe there is any danger of 
his identity being ascertained, and do not care 
whether it is so or no, as it could only be 
done by the impertinent researches of other 
people.” 

As the book drew near completion Haw¬ 
thorne considered the question of a dedication, 
and wrote Mr. Fields, 3 May : cc I am of three 
minds about dedicating the volume. First, it 
seems due to Frank Pierce (as he put me into 
the position where I made all those profound 
observations of English scenery, life, and char¬ 
acter) to inscribe it to him with a few pages of 
friendly and explanatory talk, which also would 
xi 


OUR OLD HOME 


be very gratifying to my own life-long affection 
for him. 

“ Secondly, I want to say something to Ben- 
noch to show him that I am thoroughly mind¬ 
ful of all his hospitality and kindness ; and I 
suppose he might be pleased to see his name at 
the head of a book of mine. 

“ Thirdly, I am not convinced that it is 
worthwhile to inscribe it to anybody. We will 
see hereafter.” 

On i July Hawthorne wrote again: “ I shall 
think over the prefatory matter for Our Old 
Home to-day, and will write it to-morrow. It 
requires some little thought and policy in order 
to say nothing amiss at this time ; for I intend 
to dedicate the book to Frank Pierce, come 
what may.” 

Mr. Pierce was a most unpopular public man 
at that time; for though he was no longer in 
office, his name stood for what the ardent Re¬ 
publicans of the day regarded as the pusillanim¬ 
ity which had much to do with bringing on the 
war. Some of Hawthorne’s friends through 
Mr. Fields tried to dissuade him from coupling 
his book with the name of a person in such dis¬ 
favor, but Hawthorne replied, 18 July, with a 
smothered indignation: cc I thank you for your 
note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my 
reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on 
your advice, smoke cigars over it, and see what 
xii 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


it might be possible for me to do towards taking 
it. I find that it would be a piece of poltroon¬ 
ery in me to withdraw either the dedication or 
the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate 
personal relations with Pierce render the dedica¬ 
tion altogether proper, especially as regards this 
book, which would have had no existence with¬ 
out his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly 
unpopular that his name is enough to sink the 
volume, there is so much the more need that 
an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, 
merely on account of pecuniary profit or liter¬ 
ary reputation, go back from what I have de¬ 
liberately felt and thought it right to do ; and 
if I were to tear out the dedication, I should 
never look at the volume again without remorse 
and shame. As for the literary public, it must 
accept my book precisely as I see fit to give it, 
or let it alone. 

“ Nevertheless, I have no fancy for making 
myself a martyr when it is honorably and con¬ 
scientiously possible to avoid it; and I always 
measure out my heroism very accurately accord¬ 
ing to the exigencies of the occasion, and should 
be the last man in the world to throw away a 
bit of it needlessly. So I have looked over the 
concluding paragraph and have amended it in 
such a way that, while doing what I know to 
be justice to my friend, it contains not a word 
that ought to be objectionable to any set of 
xiii 


OUR OLD HOME 


readers. If the public of the North see fit to 
ostracize me for this, I can only say that I 
would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two of dol¬ 
lars rather than retain the good will of such a 
herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels. ,, 
So the Dedication stands, and one would be 
sorry indeed to miss so stout a memorial of a 
long friendship. 

Our Old Home called out some impatient 
criticism in England, and Hawthorne took no¬ 
tice of some of these strictures in a letter to Mr. 
Field, 18 October, 1863. “ You sent me the 

Reader with a notice of the book, and I have 
received one or two others, one of them from 
Bennoch. The English critics seem to think 
me very bitter against their countrymen, and it 
is, perhaps, natural that they should, because 
their self-conceit can accept nothing short of 
indiscriminate adulation ; but I really think that 
Americans have more cause than they to com¬ 
plain of me. Looking over the volume, I am 
rather surprised to find that whenever I draw a 
comparison between the two people, I almost 
invariably cast the balance against ourselves. It 
is not a good nor a weighty book, nor does it 
deserve any great amount either of praise or 
censure.” And not long after, he wrote again 
to the same friend : “ I received several private 
letters and printed notices of Our Old Home 
xiv 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


from England. It is laughable to see the inno¬ 
cent wonder with which they regard my criticisms, 
accounting for them by jaundice, insanity, jeal¬ 
ousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting 
the least suspicion that there may be a particle 
of truth in them. The monstrosity of their self- 
conceit is such that anything short of unlimited 
admiration impresses them as malicious carica¬ 
ture. But they do me great injustice in sup¬ 
posing that I hate them. I would as soon hate 
my own people.” 

It is clear that Hawthorne, when giving the 
final form to his impressions of England, did 
not make a mere cento from his note-books, nor 
frugally use every scrap bearing upon the sub¬ 
ject in hand. Consequently the student of the 
English Note-Books often is haunted by a feel¬ 
ing that he has read something to the same 
effect in Our Old Home , and finds it an agree 
able task to trace the connection between the 
impressions set down at the moment and the 
more deliberate writing intended for the public 
eye. 

This comparison is made practicable now to 
all readers, by the annotation of the text from the 
note-books. Thus Hawthorne is made his own 
commentator, often with felicitous effect; as, for 
example, on pages 131, 132, where the latter 
half of the footnote clearly contains the first 
xv 


OUR OLD HOME 

form of the passage expanded into the fuller and 
richer expression in the text. The references 
are by volume and page to Notes of Travel in 
this edition. 


XVI 


TO 


FRANKLIN PIERCE, 

AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF A COLLEGE FRIENDSHIP, PROLONGED 
THROUGH MANHOOD, AND RETAINING ALL ITS VITALITY 
IN OUR AUTUMNAL YEARS, 

®ijts Volume 

IS INSCRIBED BY 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. 


TO A FRIEND 

I have not asked your consent, my dear 
General, to the foregoing inscription, because 
it would have been no inconsiderable disap¬ 
pointment to me had you withheld it; for I 
have long desired to connect your name with 
some book of mine, in commemoration of an 
early friendship that has grown old between 
two individuals of widely dissimilar pursuits 
and fortunes. I only wish that the offering 
were a worthier one than this volume of 
sketches, which certainly are not of a kind 
likely to prove interesting to a statesman in 

xvii 



OUR OLD HOME 


retirement, inasmuch as they meddle with no 
matters of policy or government, and have 
very little to say about the deeper traits of 
national character. In their humble way, they 
belong entirely to aesthetic literature, and can 
achieve no higher success than to represent to 
the American reader a few of the external as¬ 
pects of English scenery and life, especially 
those that are touched with the antique charm 
to which our countrymen are more susceptible 
than are the people among whom it is of native 

I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a vol¬ 
ume would not be all that I might write. These 
and other sketches, with which in a somewhat 
rougher form than I have given them here, my 
journal was copiously filled, were intended for 
the side scenes and backgrounds and exterior 
adornment of a work of fiction of which the 
plan had imperfectly developed itself in my 
mind, and into which I ambitiously proposed 
to convey more of various modes of truth than 
I could have grasped by a direct effort. Of 
course, I should not mention this abortive 
project, only that it has been utterly thrown 
aside and will never now be accomplished. 
The Present, the Immediate, the Actual, has 
proved too potent for me. It takes away not 
only my scanty faculty, but even my desire for 
imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly 
xviii 


TO A FRIEND 


content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies 
upon the hurricane that is sweeping us all along 
with it, possibly, into a Limbo where our na¬ 
tion and its polity may be as literally the frag¬ 
ments of a shattered dream as my unwritten 
Romance. But I have far better hopes for our 
dear country ; and for my individual share of 
the catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or not at 
all, and shall easily find room for the abortive 
work on a certain ideal shelf, where are repos- 
ited many other shadowy volumes of mine, 
more in number, and very much superior in 
quality, to those which I have succeeded in ren¬ 
dering actual. 

To return to these poor Sketches ; some of 
my friends have told me that they evince an as¬ 
perity of sentiment towards the English people 
which I ought not to feel, and which it is highly 
inexpedient to express. The charge surprises 
me, because, if it be true, I have written from a 
shallower mood than I supposed. I seldom 
came into personal relations with an English¬ 
man without beginning to like him, and feeling 
my favorable impression wax stronger with the 
progress of the acquaintance. I never stood in 
an English crowd without being conscious of 
hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it is un¬ 
deniable that an American is continually thrown 
upon his national antagonisn) by some acrid 
quality in the moral atmosphere of England, 
xix 


OUR OLD HOME 


These people think so loftily of themselves, 
and so contemptuously of everybody else, that 
it requires more generosity than I possess to 
keep always in perfectly good humor with 
them. Jotting down the little acrimonies of 
the moment in my journal, and transferring 
them thence (when they happened to be toler¬ 
ably well expressed) to these pages, it is very 
possible that I may have said things which a 
profound observer of national character would 
hesitate to sanction, though never any, I verily 
believe, that had not more or less of truth. If 
they be true, there is no reason in the world why 
they should not be said. Not an Englishman 
of them all ever spared America for courtesy’s 
sake or kindness ; nor, in my opinion, would it 
contribute in the least to our mutual advantage 
and comfort if we were to besmear one another 
all over with butter and honey. At any rate, we 
must not judge of an Englishman’s suscepti¬ 
bilities by our own, which likewise, I trust, are 
of a far less sensitive texture than formerly. 

And now farewell, my dear friend ; and ex¬ 
cuse (if you think it needs any excuse) the 
freedom with which I thus publicly assert a 
personal friendship between a private individual 
and a statesman who has filled what was then 
the most august position in the world. But I 
dedicate my boQk to the Friend, and shall 
defer a colloquy with the Statesman till 
xx 


some 


TO A FRIEND 


calmer and sunnier hour. Only this let me 
say, that, with the record of your life in my 
memory, and with a sense of your character 
in my deeper consciousness as among the few 
things that time has left as it found them, I 
need no assurance that you continue faithful 
forever to that grand idea of an irrevocable 
Union, which, as you once told me, was the 
earliest that your brave father taught you. For 
other men there may be a choice of paths, — 
for you, but one ; and it rests among my cer¬ 
tainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, 
no man’s hopes or apprehensions on behalf of 
our national existence more deeply heartfelt, or 
more closely intertwined with his possibilities 
of personal happiness, than those of Franklin 
Pierce. 

The Wayside, July 2, 1863. 


xxi 














OUR OLD HOME 


I 

CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

T HE Consulate of the United States, in 
my day, was located in Washington 
Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained 
edifice of four stories high, thus illustriously 
named in honor of our national establishment), 
at the lower corner of Brunswick Street, con¬ 
tiguous to the Goree Arcade, and in the neigh¬ 
borhood of some of the oldest docks. This 
was by no means a polite or elegant portion of 
England’s great commercial city, nor were the 
apartments of the American official so splendid 
as to indicate the assumption of much consular 
pomp on his part. A narrow and ill-lighted 
staircase gave access to an equally narrow and 
ill-lighted passageway on the first floor, at the 
extremity of which, surmounting a door frame, 
appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial represen¬ 
tation of the Goose and Gridiron, according to 
the English idea of those ever to be honored 
symbols. The staircase and passageway were 
often thronged, of a morning, with a set of beg¬ 
garly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no 

i 


OUR OLD HOME 


wrong to our own countrymen in styling them 
so, for not one in twenty was a genuine Ameri¬ 
can), purporting to belong to our mercantile 
marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool 
Blackballers and the scum of every maritime 
nation on earth ; such being the seamen by 
whose assistance we then disputed the naviga¬ 
tion of the world with England. These speci¬ 
mens of a most unfortunate class of people were 
shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and 
clothing; invalids asking permits for the hospi¬ 
tal ; bruised and bloody wretches complaining 
of ill treatment by their officers; drunkards, 
desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplex- 
ingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion 
of reasonably honest men. All of them (save 
here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped lands¬ 
man in his shore-going rags) wore red flannel 
shirts, in which they had sweltered or shivered 
throughout the voyage, and all required con¬ 
sular assistance in one form or another. 

Any respectable visitor, if he could make up 
his mind to elbow a passage among these sea 
monsters, was admitted into an outer office, 
where he found more of the same species, ex¬ 
plaining their respective wants or grievances to 
the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their ship¬ 
mates awaited their turn outside the door. 
Passing through this exterior court, the stranger 
was ushered into an inner privacy, where sat the 
2 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


Consul himself, ready to give personal attention 
to such peculiarly difficult and more important 
cases as might demand the exercise of (what we 
will courteously suppose to be) his own higher 
judicial or administrative sagacity. 

It was an apartment of very moderate size, 
painted in imitation of oak, and duskily lighted 
by two windows looking across a by-street at 
the rough brick side of an immense cotton ware¬ 
house, a plainer and uglier structure than ever 
was built in America. On the walls of the 
room hung a large map of the United States (as 
they were twenty years ago, but seem little 
likely to be, twenty years hence), and a similar 
one of Great Britain, with its territory so pro- 
vokingly compact, that we may expect it to sink 
sooner than sunder. Farther adornments were 
some rude engravings of our naval victories in 
the War of 1812, together with the Tennessee 
State House, and a Hudson River steamer, and 
a colored, life-size lithograph of General Taylor, 
with an honest hideousness of aspect, occupy¬ 
ing the place of honor above the mantel-piece. 
On the top of a bookcase stood a fierce and 
terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a 
military collar which rose above his ears, and 
frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman 
who might happen to cross the threshold. I 
am afraid, however, that the truculence of the 
old general’s expression was utterly thrown 
3 


OUR OLD HOME 


away on this stolid and obdurate race of men ; 
for, when they occasionally inquired whom this 
work of art represented, I was mortified to find 
that the younger ones had never heard of the 
battle of New Orleans, and that their elders had 
either forgotten it altogether, or contrived to 
misremember, and twist it wrong end foremost 
into something like an English victory. They 
have caught from the old Romans (whom they 
resemble in so many other characteristics) this 
excellent method of keeping the national glory 
intact by sweeping all defeats and humiliations 
clean out of their memory. Nevertheless, my 
patriotism forbade me to take down either the 
bust or the pictures, both because it seemed no 
more than right that an American Consulate 
(being a little patch of our nationality embedded 
into the soil and institutions of England) should 
fairly represent the American taste in the fine 
arts, and because these decorations reminded 
me so delightfully of an old-fashioned Ameri¬ 
can barber’s shop. 

One truly English object was a barometer 
hanging on the wall, generally indicating one or 
another degree of disagreeable weather, and so 
seldom pointing to Fair, that I began to con¬ 
sider that portion of its circle as made super¬ 
fluously. The deep chimney, with its grate of 
bituminous coal, was English, too, as was also 
the chill temperature that sometimes called for 
4 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


a fire at midsummer, and the foggy or smoky 
atmosphere which often, between November 
and March, compelled me to set the gas aflame 
at noonday. I am not aware of omitting any¬ 
thing important in the above descriptive inven¬ 
tory, unless it be some bookshelves filled with 
octavo volumes of the American Statutes, and 
a good many pigeon-holes stuffed with dusty 
communications from former Secretaries of 
State, and other official documents of similar 
value, constituting part of the archives of the 
Consulate, which I might have done my suc¬ 
cessor a favor by flinging into the coal grate. 
Yes ; there was one other article demanding 
prominent notice: the consular copy of the 
New Testament, bound in black morocco, and 
greasy, I fear, with a daily succession of per¬ 
jured kisses ; at least, I can hardly hope that 
all the ten thousand oaths, administered by me 
between two breaths, to all sorts of people and 
on all manner of worldly business, were reck¬ 
oned by the swearer as if taken at his soul’s 
peril. 

Such, in short, was the dusky and stifled 
chamber in which I spent wearily a considera¬ 
ble portion of more than four good years of my 
existence. At first, to be quite frank with the 
reader, I looked upon it as not altogether fit to 
be tenanted by the commercial representative of 
so great and prosperous a country as the United 
5 


OUR OLD HOME 


States then were ; and I should speedily have 
transferred my headquarters to airier and loftier 
apartments, except for the prudent consideration 
that my government would have left me thus to 
support its dignity at my own personal expense. 
Besides, a long line of distinguished predeces¬ 
sors, of whom the latest is now a gallant general 
under the Union banner, had found the locality 
good enough for them; it might certainly be 
tolerated, therefore, by an individual so little 
ambitious of external magnificence as myself. 
So I settled quietly down, striking some of my 
roots into such soil as I could find, adapting 
myself to circumstances, and with so much suc¬ 
cess, that, though from first to last I hated the 
very sight of the little room, I should yet have 
felt a singular kind of reluctance in changing it 
for a better. 

Hither, in the course of my incumbency, 
came a great variety of visitors, principally Amer¬ 
icans, but including almost every other nation¬ 
ality on earth, especially the distressed and 
downfallen ones, like those of Poland and Hun¬ 
gary. Italian bandits (for so they looked), pro¬ 
scribed conspirators from Old Spain, Spanish 
Americans, Cubans who professed to have stood 
by Lopez, and narrowly escaped his fate, scarred 
French soldiers of the Second Republic, — in 
a word, all sufferers, or pretended ones, in the 
cause of Liberty, all people homeless in the 
6 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


widest sense, those who never had a country, or 
had lost it, those whom their native land had 
impatiently flung off for planning a better sys¬ 
tem of things than they were born to, — a multi¬ 
tude of these and doubtless an equal number of 
jail-birds, outwardly of the same feather, sought 
the American Consulate, in hopes of at least a 
bit of bread and, perhaps, to beg a passage to 
the blessed shores of Freedom. In most cases 
there was nothing, and in any case distressingly 
little, to be done for them; neither was I of a 
proselyting disposition, nor desired to make my 
Consulate a nucleus for the vagrant discontents 
of other lands. And yet it was a proud thought, 
a forcible appeal to the sympathies of an Amer¬ 
ican, that these unfortunates claimed the priv¬ 
ileges of citizenship in our Republic on the 
strength of the very same noble misdemeanors 
that had rendered them outlaws to their native 
despotisms. So I gave them what small help I 
could. Methinks the true patriots and martyr 
spirits of the whole world should have been 
conscious of a pang near the heart, when a 
deadly blow was aimed at the vitality of a coun¬ 
try which they have felt to be their own in the 
last resort. 

As for my countrymen, I grew better ac¬ 
quainted with many of our national character¬ 
istics during those four years than in all my 
preceding life. Whether brought more strik- 
7 


OUR OLD HOME 

ingly out by the contrast with English manners, 
or that my Yankee friends assumed an extra 
peculiarity from a sense of defiant patriotism, 
so it was that their tones, sentiments, and be¬ 
havior, even their figures and cast of counte¬ 
nance, all seemed chiselled in sharper angles than 
ever I had imagined them to be at home. It 
impressed me with an odd idea of having some¬ 
how lost the property of my own person, when 
I occasionally heard one of them speaking of 
me as “ my Consul ” ! They often came to the 
Consulate in parties of half a dozen or more, on 
no business whatever, but merely to subject their 
public servant to a rigid examination, and see 
how he was getting on with his duties. These 
interviews were rather formidable, being char¬ 
acterized by a certain stiffness which I felt to be 
sufficiently irksome at the moment, though it 
looks laughable enough in the retrospect. It 
is my firm belief that these fellow citizens, 
possessing a native tendency to organization, 
generally halted outside of the door, to elect 
a speaker, chairman, or moderator, and thus 
approached me with all the formalities of a 
deputation from the American people. After 
salutations on both sides, — abrupt, awful, and 
severe on their part, and deprecatory on mine, 
— and the national ceremony of shaking hands 
being duly gone through with, the interview 
proceeded by a series of calm and well-consid- 
8 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


ered questions or remarks from the spokesman 
(no other of the guests vouchsafing to utter a 
word), and diplomatic responses from the Con¬ 
sul, who sometimes found the investigation a 
little more searching than he liked. I flatter 
myself, however, that, by much practice, I at¬ 
tained considerable skill in this kind of inter¬ 
course, the art of which lies in passing off com¬ 
monplaces for new and valuable truths, and 
talking trash and emptiness in such a way that 
a pretty acute auditor might mistake it for some¬ 
thing solid. If there be any better method of 
dealing with such junctures, — when talk is to 
be created out of nothing, and within the scope 
of several minds at once, so that you cannot 
apply yourself to your interlocutor’s individu¬ 
ality, — I have not learned it. 

Sitting, as it were, in the gateway between the 
Old World and the New, where the steam¬ 
ers and packets landed the greater part of our 
wandering countrymen, and received them again 
when their wanderings were done, I saw that 
no people on earth have such vagabond habits 
as ourselves. The Continental races never 
travel at all if they can help it; nor does an 
Englishman ever think of stirring abroad, un¬ 
less he has the money to spare, or proposes 
to himself some definite advantage from the 
journey; but it seemed to me that nothing 
was more common than for a young American 
9 


OUR OLD HOME 


deliberately to spend all his resources in an aes¬ 
thetic peregrination about Europe, returning 
with pockets nearly empty to begin the world 
in earnest. It happened, indeed, much oftener 
than was at all agreeable to myself, that their 
funds held out just long enough to bring them 
to the door of my Consulate, where they en¬ 
tered as if with an undeniable right to its shel¬ 
ter and protection, and required at my hands to 
be sent home again. In my first simplicity,— 
finding them gentlemanly in manners, passably 
educated, and only tempted a little beyond 
their means by a laudable desire of improving 
and refining themselves, or perhaps for the sake 
of getting better artistic instruction in music, 
painting, or sculpture than our country could 
supply, — I sometimes took charge of them on 
my private responsibility, since our govern¬ 
ment gives itself no trouble about its stray chil¬ 
dren, except the seafaring class. But, after a 
few such experiments, discovering that none of 
these estimable and ingenuous young men, 
however trustworthy they might appear, ever 
dreamed of reimbursing the Consul, I deemed 
it expedient to take another course with them. 
Applying myself to some friendly shipmaster, 
I engaged homeward passages on their behalf, 
with the understanding that they were to make 
themselves serviceable on shipboard; and I 
remember several very pathetic appeals from 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


painters and musicians, touching the damage 
which their artistic fingers were likely to incur 
from handling the ropes. But my observation 
of so many heavier troubles left me very little 
tenderness for their finger-ends. In time I 
grew to be reasonably hard hearted, though it 
never was quite possible to leave a countryman 
with no shelter save an English poorhouse, 
when, as he invariably averred, he had only to 
set foot on his native soil to be possessed of 
ample funds. It was my ultimate conclusion, 
however, that American ingenuity may be 
pretty safely left to itself, and that, one way or 
another, a Yankee vagabond is certain to turn 
up at his own threshold, if he has any, without 
help of a Consul, and perhaps be taught a les¬ 
son of foresight that may profit him hereafter. 

Among these stray Americans, I met with 
no other case so remarkable as that of an old 
man, who was in the habit of visiting me once 
in a few months, and soberly affirmed that he 
had been wandering* about England more than 
a quarter of a century (precisely twenty-seven 
years, I think), and all the while doing his 
utmost to get home again. Herman Melville, 
in his excellent novel or biography of Israel 
Potter, has an idea somewhat similar to this. 
The individual now in question was a mild and 
patient, but very ragged and pitiable old fellow, 
shabby beyond description, lean and hungry- 
n 


OUR OLD HOME 


looking, but with a large and somewhat red 
nose. He made no complaint of his ill for¬ 
tune, but only repeated in a quiet voice, with 
a pathos of which he was himself evidently 
unconscious, “ I want to get home to Ninety- 
Second Street, Philadelphia.” He described 
himself as a printer by trade, and said that he 
had come over when he was a younger man, in 
the hope of bettering himself, and for the sake 
of seeing the Old Country, but had never since 
been rich enough to pay his homeward passage. 
His manner and accent did not quite convince 
me that he was an American, and I told him 
so ; but he steadfastly affirmed, “ Sir, I was born 
and have lived in Ninety-Second Street, Phila¬ 
delphia,” and then went on to describe some 
public edifices and other local objects with 
which he used to be familiar, adding, with a 
simplicity that touched me very closely, “ Sir, 
I had rather be there than here ! ” Though I 
still manifested a lingering doubt, he took no 
offence, replying with the same mild depression 
as at first, and insisting again and again on 
Ninety-Second Street. Up to the time when 
I saw him, he still got a little occasional job- 
work at his trade, but subsisted mainly on such 
charity as he met with in his wanderings, shift¬ 
ing from place to place continually, and asking 
assistance to convey him to his native land. 
Possibly he was an impostor, one of the multi- 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


tudinous shapes of English vagabondism, and 
told his falsehood with such powerful simplicity, 
because, by many repetitions, he had convinced 
himself of its truth. But if, as I believe, the 
tale was fact, how very strange and sad was this 
old man’s fate ! Homeless on a foreign shore, 
looking always towards his country, coming 
again and again to the point whence so many 
were setting sail for it, — so many who would 
soon tread in Ninety-Second Street, — losing, 
in this long series of years, some of the dis¬ 
tinctive characteristics of an American, and at 
last dying and surrendering his clay to be a por¬ 
tion of the soil whence he could not escape in 
his lifetime. 

He appeared to see that he had moved me, 
but did not attempt to press his advantage 
with any new argument, or any varied form of 
entreaty. He had but scanty and scattered 
thoughts in his gray head, and in the intervals 
of those, like the refrain of an old ballad, came 
in the monotonous burden of his appeal, “ If I 
could only find myself in Ninety-Second Street, 
Philadelphia ! ” But even his desire of getting 
home had ceased to be an ardent one (if, indeed, 
it had not always partaken of the dreamy slug¬ 
gishness of his character), although it remained 
his only locomotive impulse, and perhaps the 
sole principle of life that kept his blood from 
actual torpor. 


l 3 


OUR OLD HOME 

The poor old fellow’s story seemed to me 
almost as worthy of being chanted in immortal 
song as that of Odysseus or Evangeline. I 
took his case into deep consideration, but dared 
not incur the moral responsibility of sending 
him across the sea, at his age, after so many 
years of exile, when the very tradition of him 
had passed away, to find his friends dead, or 
forgetful, or irretrievably vanished, and the 
whole country become more truly a foreign land 
to him than England was now, — and even 
Ninety-Second Street, in the weed-like decay 
and growth of our localities, made over anew 
and grown unrecognizable by his old eyes. 
That street, so patiently longed for, had trans¬ 
ferred itself to the New Jerusalem, and he must 
seek it there, contenting his slow heart, mean¬ 
while, with the smoke-begrimed thoroughfares 
of English towns, or the green country lanes 
and by-paths with which his wanderings had 
made him familiar ; for doubtless he had a 
beaten track, and was the “ long-remembered 
beggar ” now, with food and a roughly hospi¬ 
table greeting ready for him at many a farm¬ 
house door, and his choice of lodging under a 
score of haystacks. In America, nothing awaited 
him but that worst form of disappointment 
which comes under the guise of a long-cherished 
and late-accomplished purpose, and then a year 
or two of dry and barren sojourn in an alms- 

14 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


house, and death among strangers at last, where 
he had imagined a circle of familiar faces. So 
I contented myself with giving him alms, which 
he thankfully accepted, and went away with bent 
shoulders and an aspect of gentle forlornness ; 
returning upon his orbit, however, after a few 
months, to tell the same sad and quiet story of 
his abode in England for more than twenty- 
seven years, in all which time he had been en¬ 
deavoring, and still endeavored as patiently as 
ever, to find his way home to Ninety-Second 
Street, Philadelphia. 

I recollect another case, of a more ridiculous 
order, but still with a foolish kind of pathos 
entangled in it, which impresses me now more 
forcibly than it did at the moment. One day, 
a queer, stupid, good-natured, fat-faced individ¬ 
ual came into my private room, dressed in a 
sky-blue, cut-away coat and mixed trousers, 
both garments worn and shabby, and rather too 
small for his overgrown bulk. After a little 
preliminary talk, he turned out to be a country 
shopkeeper (from Connecticut, I think), who 
had left a flourishing business, and come over 
to England purposely and solely to have an in¬ 
terview with the Queen. Some years before he 
had named his two children, one for her Ma¬ 
jesty and the other for Prince Albert, and had 
transmitted photographs of the little people, as 
well as of his wife and himself, to the illustrious 
15 


OUR OLD HOME 


godmother. The Queen had gratefully ac¬ 
knowledged the favor in a letter under the hand 
of her private secretary. Now, the shopkeeper, 
like a great many other Americans, had long 
cherished a fantastic notion that he was one of 
the rightful heirs of a rich English estate; and 
on the strength of her Majesty's letter and the 
hopes of royal patronage which it inspired, he 
had shut up his little country store and come 
over to claim his inheritance. On the voyage, 
a German fellow passenger had relieved him of 
his money on pretence of getting it favorably 
exchanged, and had disappeared immediately on 
the ship’s arrival; so that the poor fellow was 
compelled to pawn all his clothes, except the 
remarkably shabby ones in which I beheld him, 
and in which (as he himself hinted, with a mel¬ 
ancholy, yet good-natured smile) he did not 
look altogether fit to see the Queen. I agreed 
with him that the bobtailed coat and mixed trou¬ 
sers constituted a very odd-looking court-dress, 
and suggested that it was doubtless his present 
purpose to get back to Connecticut as fast as 
possible. But no ! The resolve to see the 
Queen was as strong in him as ever; and it 
was marvellous the pertinacity with which he 
clung to it amid raggedness and starvation, and 
the earnestness of his supplication that I would 
supply him with funds for a suitable appearance 
at Windsor Castle. 


16 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

I never had so satisfactory a perception of a 
complete booby before in my life ; and it caused 
me to feel kindly towards him, and yet impatient 
and exasperated on behalf of common sense, 
which could not possibly tolerate that such an 
unimaginable donkey should exist. I laid his 
absurdity before him in the very plainest terms, 
but without either exciting his anger or shaking 
his resolution. “ O, my dear man,” quoth he, 
with good-natured, placid, simple, and tearful 
stubbornness, “if you could but enter into my 
feelings and see the matter from beginning to 
end as I see it! ” To confess the truth, I have 
since felt that I was hard hearted to the poor 
simpleton, and that there was more weight in 
his remonstrance than I chose to be sensible 
of, at the time; for, like many men who have 
been in the habit of making playthings or tools 
of their imagination and sensibility, I was too 
rigidly tenacious of what was reasonable in the 
affairs of real life. And even absurdity has 
its rights, when, as in this case, it has absorbed 
a human being’s entire nature and purposes. 
I ought to have transmitted him to Mr. Buch¬ 
anan, in London, who, being a good-natured 
old gentleman, and anxious, just then, to grat¬ 
ify the universal Yankee nation, might, for the 
joke’s sake, have got him admittance to the 
Queen, who had fairly laid herself open to his 
visit, and has received hundreds of our country- 
x 7 


OUR OLD HOME 


men on infinitely slighter grounds. But I was 
inexorable, being turned to flint by the insuffer¬ 
able proximity of a fool, and refused to interfere 
with his business in any way except to procure 
him a passage home. I can see his face of 
mild, ridiculous despair at this moment, and 
appreciate, better than I could then, how aw¬ 
fully cruel he must have felt my obduracy to 
be. For years and years, the idea of an inter¬ 
view with Queen Victoria had haunted his poor 
foolish mind; and now, when he really stood 
on English ground, and the palace door was 
hanging ajar for him, he was expected to turn 
back, a penniless and bamboozled simpleton, 
merely because an iron-hearted Consul refused 
to lend him thirty shillings (so low had his 
demand ultimately sunk) to buy a second-class 
ticket on the rail for London! 

He visited the Consulate several times after¬ 
wards, subsisting on a pittance that I allowed 
him in the hope of gradually starving him back 
to Connecticut, assailing me with the old peti¬ 
tion at every opportunity, looking shabbier at 
every visit, but still thoroughly good tempered, 
mildly stubborn, and smiling through his tears, 
not without a perception of the ludicrousness 
of his own position. Finally, he disappeared 
altogether, and whither he had wandered, and 
whether he ever saw the Queen, or wasted quite 
away in the endeavor, I never knew; but I 
18 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


remember unfolding the Times, about that pe¬ 
riod, with a daily dread of reading an account 
of a ragged Yankee’s attempt to steal into 
Buckingham Palace, and how he smiled tear¬ 
fully at his captors, and besought them to in¬ 
troduce him to her Majesty. I submit to Mr. 
Secretary Seward that he ought to make diplo¬ 
matic remonstrances to the British Ministry, 
and require them to take such order that the 
Queen shall not any longer bewilder the wits 
of our poor compatriots by responding to their 
epistles and thanking them for their photo¬ 
graphs. 

One circumstance in the foregoing incident — 
I mean the unhappy store-keeper’s notion of 
establishing his claim to an English estate — 
was common to a great many other applica¬ 
tions, personal or by letter, with which I was 
favored by my countrymen. The cause of this 
peculiar insanity lies deep in the Anglo-Ameri¬ 
can heart. After all these bloody wars and 
vindictive animosities, we have still an unspeak¬ 
able yearning towards England. When our 
forefathers left the old home, they pulled up 
many of their roots, but trailed along with 
them others, which were never snapt asunder 
by the tug of such a lengthening distance, nor 
have been torn out of the original soil by the 
violence of subsequent struggles, nor severed 
by the edge of the sword. Even so late as 
*9 


OUR OLD HOME 


these days, they remain entangled with our 
heartstrings, and might often have influenced 
our national cause like the tiller-ropes of a ship, 
if the rough gripe of England had been capable 
of managing so sensitive a kind of machinery. 
It has required nothing less than the boorish¬ 
ness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the con¬ 
temptuous jealousy, the half sagacity, invariably 
blind of one eye and often distorted of the 
other, that characterize this strange people, to 
compel us to be a great nation in our own right, 
instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, 
a province of their small island. What pains 
did they take to shake us off, and have ever 
since taken to keep us wide apart from them ! 
It might seem their folly, but was really their 
fate, or, rather, the Providence of God, who 
has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the 
massive materiality of the English character 
would have been too ponderous a dead weight 
upon our progress. And, besides, if England 
had been wise enough to twine our new vigor 
round about her ancient strength, her power 
would have been too firmly established ever to 
yield, in its due season, to the otherwise im¬ 
mutable law of imperial vicissitude. The earth 
might then have beheld the intolerable spectacle 
of a sovereignty and institutions, imperfect, but 
indestructible. 

Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril 

20 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


of so inauspicious and yet outwardly attractive 
an amalgamation. But as an individual, the 
American is often conscious of the deep-rooted 
sympathies that belong more fitly to times gone 
by, and feels a blind pathetic tendency to wan¬ 
der back again, which makes itself evident in 
such wild dreams as I have alluded to above, 
about English inheritances. A mere coinci¬ 
dence of names (the Yankee one, perhaps, hav¬ 
ing been assumed by legislative permission), a 
supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which 
an anciently engraved coat of arms has been 
half scrubbed out, a seal with an uncertain crest, 
an old yellow letter or document in faded ink, 
the more scantily legible the better, — rubbish 
of this kind, found in a neglected drawer, has 
been potent enough to turn the brain of many 
an honest Republican, especially if assisted by 
an advertisement for lost heirs, cut out of a 
British newspaper. There is no estimating or 
believing, till we come into a position to know 
it, what foolery lurks latent in the breasts of 
very sensible people. Remembering such sober 
extravagances, I should not be at all surprised 
to find that I am myself guilty of some unsus¬ 
pected absurdity, that may appear to me the 
most substantial trait in my character. 

I might fill many pages with instances of this 
diseased American appetite for English soil. A 
respectable-looking woman, well advanced in 
21 


OUR OLD HOME 


life, of sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but 
decidedly New Englandish in figure and man¬ 
ners, came to my office with a great bundle of 
documents, at the very first glimpse of which 
I apprehended something terrible. Nor was I 
mistaken. The bundle contained evidences of 
her indubitable claim to the site on which Cas¬ 
tle Street, the Town Hall, the Exchange, and 
all the principal business part of Liverpool have 
long been situated; and, with considerable per¬ 
emptoriness, the good lady signified her expec¬ 
tation that I should take charge of her suit, and 
prosecute it to judgment; not, however, on the 
equitable condition of receiving half the value 
of the property recovered (which, in case of 
complete success, would have made both of us 
ten or twenty fold millionnaires), but without 
recompense or reimbursement of legal expenses, 
solely as an incident of my official duty. An¬ 
other time came two ladies, bearing a letter of 
emphatic introduction from his Excellency the 
Governor of their native State, who testified in 
most satisfactory terms to their social respecta¬ 
bility. They were claimants of a great estate in 
Cheshire, and announced themselves as blood 
relatives of Queen Victoria, — a point, however, 
which they deemed it expedient to keep in the 
background until their territorial rights should 
be established, apprehending that the Lord 
High Chancellor might otherwise be less likely 
22 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


to come to a fair decision in respect to them, 
from a probable disinclination to admit new 
members into the royal kin. Upon my honor, 
I imagine that they had an eye to the possibil¬ 
ity of the eventual succession of one or both 
of them to the crown of Great Britain through 
superiority of title over the Brunswick line ; 
although, being maiden ladies, like their prede¬ 
cessor Elizabeth, they could hardly have hoped 
to establish a lasting dynasty upon the throne. 
It proves, I trust, a certain disinterestedness on 
my part, that, encountering them thus in the 
dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to put in a 
plea for a future dukedom. 

Another visitor of the same class was a gen¬ 
tleman of refined manners, handsome figure, 
and remarkably intellectual aspect. Like many 
men of an adventurous cast, he had so quiet a 
deportment, and such an apparent disinclination 
to general sociability, that you would have fan¬ 
cied him moving always along some peaceful 
and secluded walk of life. Yet, literally from 
his first hour, he had been tossed upon the 
surges of a most varied and tumultuous exist¬ 
ence, having been born at sea, of American par¬ 
entage, but on board of a Spanish vessel, and 
spending many of the subsequent years in voy¬ 
ages, travels, and outlandish incidents and vi¬ 
cissitudes, which, methought, had hardly been 
paralleled since the days of Gulliver or De Foe. 

23 


OUR OLD HOME 


When his dignified reserve was overcome, he 
had the faculty of narrating these adventures 
with wonderful eloquence, working up his de¬ 
scriptive sketches with such intuitive perception 
of the picturesque points that the whole was 
thrown forward with a positively illusive effect, 
like matters of your own visual experience. In 
fact, they were so admirably done that I could 
never more than half believe them, because the 
genuine affairs of life are not apt to transact 
themselves so artistically. Many of his scenes 
were laid in the East, and among those seldom 
visited archipelagoes of the Indian Ocean, so 
that there was an Oriental fragrance breath¬ 
ing through his talk, and an odor of the Spice 
Islands still lingering in his garments. He 
had much to say of the delightful qualities of 
the Malay pirates, who, indeed, carry on a pre¬ 
datory warfare against the ships of all civilized 
nations, and cut every Christian throat among 
their prisoners ; but (except for deeds of that 
character, which are the rule and habit of their 
life, and matter of religion and conscience with 
them) they are a gentle-natured people, of prim¬ 
itive innocence and integrity. 

But his best story was about a race of men 
(if men they were) who seemed so fully to real¬ 
ize Swift’s wicked fable of the Yahoos, that my 
friend was much exercised with psychological 
speculations whether or no they had any souls. 

24 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


They dwelt in the wilds of Ceylon, like other 
savage beasts, hairy, and spotted with tufts of 
fur, filthy, shameless, weaponless (though war¬ 
like in their individual bent), tool-less, house¬ 
less, language-less, except for a few guttural 
sounds, hideously dissonant, whereby they held 
some rudest kind of communication among 
themselves. They lacked both memory and 
foresight, and were wholly destitute of govern¬ 
ment, social institutions, or law or rulership of 
any description, except the immediate tyranny 
of the strongest; radically untamable, more¬ 
over, save that the people of the country 
managed to subject a few of the less ferocious 
and stupid ones to outdoor servitude among 
their other cattle. They were beastly in almost 
all their attributes, and that to such a degree 
that the observer, losing sight of any link be¬ 
twixt them and manhood, could generally wit¬ 
ness their brutalities without greater horror than 
at those of some disagreeable quadruped in a 
menagerie. And yet, at times, comparing what 
were the lowest general traits in his own race 
with what was highest in these abominable mon¬ 
sters, he found a ghastly similitude that half 
compelled him to recognize them as human 
brethren. 

After these Gulliverian researches, my agree¬ 
able acquaintance had fallen under the ban of 
the Dutch government, and had suffered (this, 

25 


OUR OLD HOME 


at least, being matter of fact) nearly two years’ 
imprisonment, with confiscation of a large 
amount of property, for which Mr. Belmont, 
our minister at the Hague, had just made a 
peremptory demand of reimbursement and 
damages. Meanwhile, since arriving in Eng¬ 
land, on his way to the United States, he had 
been providentially led to inquire into the cir¬ 
cumstances of his birth on shipboard, and had 
discovered that not himself alone, but another 
baby, had come into the world during the same 
voyage of the prolific vessel, and that there were 
almost irrefragable reasons for believing that 
these two children had been assigned to the 
wrong mothers. Many reminiscences of his 
early days confirmed him in the idea that his 
nominal parents were aware of the exchange. 
The family to which he felt authorized to at¬ 
tribute his lineage was that of a nobleman, in the 
picture-gallery of whose country-seat (whence, 
if I mistake not, our adventurous friend had 
just returned) he had discovered a portrait bear¬ 
ing a striking resemblance to himself. As soon 
as he should have reported the outrageous 
action of the Dutch government to President 
Pierce and the Secretary of State, and recovered 
the confiscated property, he purposed to return 
to England and establish his claim to the noble¬ 
man’s title and estate. 

I had accepted his Oriental fantasies (which, 
26 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


Indeed, to do him justice, have been recorded 
by scientific societies among the genuine phe¬ 
nomena of natural history), not as matters of 
indubitable credence, but as allowable specimens 
of an imaginative traveller’s vivid coloring and 
rich embroidery on the coarse texture and dull 
neutral tints of truth. The English romance 
was among the latest communications that he 
entrusted to my private ear ; and as soon as I 
heard the first chapter, — so wonderfully akin 
to what I might have wrought out of my own 
head, not unpractised in such figments, — I 
began to repent having made myself responsi¬ 
ble for the future nobleman’s passage home¬ 
ward in the next Collins steamer. Nevertheless, 
should his English rent-roll fall a little behind¬ 
hand, his Dutch claim for a hundred thousand 
dollars was certainly in the hands of our gov¬ 
ernment, and might at least be valuable to the 
extent of thirty pounds, which I had engaged 
to pay on his behalf. But I have reason to fear 
that his Dutch riches turned out to be Dutch 
gilt or fairy gold, and his English country-seat 
a mere castle in the air, — which I exceedingly 
regret, for he was a delightful companion and a 
very gentlemanly man. 

A Consul, in his position of universal re¬ 
sponsibility, the general adviser and helper, 
sometimes finds himself compelled to assume 
the guardianship of personages who, in their 
27 


OUR OLD HOME 


own sphere, are supposed capable of superin¬ 
tending the highest interests of whole com¬ 
munities. An elderly Irishman, a naturalized 
citizen, once put the desire and expectation of 
all our penniless vagabonds into a very suitable 
phrase, by pathetically entreating me to be a 
“ father to him ; ” and, simple as I sit scribbling 
here, I have acted a father’s part, not only by 
scores of such unthrifty old children as him¬ 
self, but by a progeny of far loftier pretensions. 
It may be well for persons who are conscious 
of any radical weakness in their character, any 
besetting sin, any unlawful propensity, any 
unhallowed impulse, which (while surrounded 
with the manifold restraints that protect a man 
from that treacherous and lifelong enemy, his 
lower self, in the circle of society where he is 
at home) they may have succeeded in keeping 
under the lock and key of strictest propriety, 
— it may be well for them, before seeking the 
perilous freedom of a distant land, released 
from the watchful eyes of neighborhoods and 
coteries, lightened of that wearisome burden, an 
immaculate name, and blissfully obscure after 
years of local prominence, — it may be well for 
such individuals to know that when they set 
foot on a foreign shore, the long imprisoned 
Evil, scenting a wild license in the unaccustomed 
atmosphere, is apt to grow riotous in its iron 
cage. It rattles the rusty barriers with gigantic 
28 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


turbulence, and if there be an infirm joint any¬ 
where in the framework, it breaks madly forth, 
compressing the mischief of a lifetime into a 
little space. 

A parcel of letters had been accumulating at 
the Consulate for two or three weeks, directed 
to a certain Doctor of Divinity, who had left 
America by a sailing-packet and was still upon 
the sea. In due time, the vessel arrived, and 
the reverend Doctor paid me a visit. He was 
a fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect 
model of clerical propriety, scholar-like, yet with 
the air of a man of the world rather than a stu¬ 
dent, though overspread with the graceful sanc¬ 
tity of a popular metropolitan divine, a part of 
whose duty it might be to exemplify the natural 
accordance between Christianity and good breed¬ 
ing. He seemed a little excited, as an Ameri¬ 
can is apt to be on first arriving in England, but 
conversed with intelligence as well as animation, 
making himself so agreeable that his visit stood 
out in considerable relief from the monotony 
of my daily commonplace. As I learned from 
authentic sources, he was somewhat distinguished 
in his own region for fervor and eloquence in 
the pulpit, but was now compelled to relinquish 
it temporarily for the purpose of renovating his 
impaired health by an extensive tour in Europe. 
Promising to dine with me, he took up his bun¬ 
dle of letters and went away. 

29 


OUR OLD HOME 

The Doctor, however, failed to make his ap¬ 
pearance at dinner-time, or to apologize the 
next day for his absence ; and in the course 
of a day or two more, I forgot all about him, 
concluding that he must have set forth on his 
Continental travels, the plan of which he had 
sketched out at our interview. But, by and by, 
I received a call from the master of the vessel 
in which he had arrived. He was in some 
alarm about his passenger, whose luggage re¬ 
mained on shipboard, but of whom nothing 
had been heard or seen since the moment of his 
departure from the Consulate. We conferred 
together, the captain and I, about the expediency 
of setting the police on the traces (if any were 
to be found) of our vanished friend; but it 
struck me that the good captain was singularly 
reticent, and that there was something a little 
mysterious in a few points that he hinted at 
rather than expressed ; so that, scrutinizing the 
affair carefully, I surmised that the intimacy of 
life on shipboard might have taught him more 
about the reverend gentleman than, for some 
reason or other, he deemed it prudent to reveal. 
At home, in our native country, I would have 
looked to the Doctor's personal safety and left 
his reputation to take care of itself, knowing 
that the good fame of a thousand saintly cler¬ 
gymen would amply dazzle out any lamentable 
spot on a single brother’s character. But in 
3 ° 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


scornful and invidious England, on the idea that 
the credit of the sacred office was measurably 
entrusted to my discretion, I could not endure, 
for the sake of American Doctors of Divinity 
generally, that this particular Doctor should cut 
an ignoble figure in the police reports of the 
English newspapers, except at the last necessity. 
The clerical body, I flatter myself, will acknow¬ 
ledge that I acted on their own principle. Be¬ 
sides, it was now too late ; the mischief and vio¬ 
lence, if any had been impending, were not of a 
kind which it requires the better part of a week 
to perpetrate ; and to sum up the entire matter, 
I felt certain, from a good deal of somewhat 
similar experience, that, if the missing Doctor 
still breathed this vital air, he would turn up at 
the Consulate as soon as his money should be 
stolen or spent. 

Precisely a week after this reverend person’s 
disappearance, there came to my office a tall, 
middle-aged gentleman in a blue military sur- 
tout, braided at the seams, but out at elbows, 
and as shabby as if the wearer had been bivouack¬ 
ing in it throughout a Crimean campaign. It 
was buttoned up to the very chin, except where 
three or four of the buttons were lost; nor was 
there any glimpse of a white shirt-collar illumi¬ 
nating the rusty black cravat. A grisly mustache 
was just beginning to roughen the stranger’s 
upper lip. He looked disreputable to the last 
3i 


OUR OLD HOME 

degree, but still had a ruined air of good society 
glimmering about him, like a few specks of pol¬ 
ish on a sword blade that has lain corroding in 
a mud puddle. I took him to be some Ameri¬ 
can marine officer, of dissipated habits, or per¬ 
haps a cashiered British major, stumbling into 
the wrong quarters through the unrectified be¬ 
wilderment of the last night's debauch. He 
greeted me, however, with polite familiarity, 
as though we had been previously acquainted; 
whereupon I drew coldly back (as sensible peo¬ 
ple naturally do, whether from strangers or 
former friends, when too evidently at odds with 
fortune), and requested to know who my visitor 
might be, and what was his business at the 
Consulate. “ Am I then so changed ? ” he ex¬ 
claimed with a vast depth of tragic intonation; 
and after a little blind and bewildered talk, be¬ 
hold ! the truth flashed upon me. It was the 
Doctor of Divinity! If I had meditated a scene 
or a coup de theatre , I could not have con¬ 
trived a more effectual one than by this simple 
and genuine difficulty of recognition. The 
poor Divine must have felt that he had lost his 
personal identity through the misadventures 
of one little week. And, to say the truth, he 
did look as if, like Job, on account of his es¬ 
pecial sanctity, he had been delivered over to 
the direst temptations of Satan, and proving 
weaker than the man of Uz, the Arch Enemy 
32 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


had been empowered to drag him through To- 
phet, transforming him, in the process, from the 
most decorous clergyman into the rowdiest and 
dirtiest of disbanded officers. I never fathomed 
the mystery of his military costume, but con¬ 
jectured that a lurking sense of fitness had in¬ 
duced him to exchange his clerical garments for 
this habit of a sinner; nor can I tell precisely 
into what pitfall, not more of vice than terrible 
calamity, he had precipitated himself, — being 
more than satisfied to know that the outcasts 
of society can sink no lower than this poor, 
desecrated wretch had sunk. 

The opportunity, I presume, does not often 
happen to a layman of administering moral and 
religious reproof to a Doctor of Divinity ; but 
finding the occasion thrust upon me, and the 
hereditary Puritan waxing strong in my breast, 
I deemed it a matter of conscience not to let it 
pass entirely unimproved. The truth is, I was 
unspeakably shocked and disgusted. Not, how¬ 
ever, that I was then to learn that clergymen 
are made of the same flesh and blood as other 
people, and perhaps lack one small safeguard 
which the rest of us possess, because they are 
aware of their own peccability, and therefore 
cannot look up to the clerical class for the proof 
of the possibility of a pure life on earth, with 
such reverential confidence as we are prone to 
do. But I remembered the innocent faith of 
33 


OUR OLD HOME 


my boyhood, and the good old silver-headed 
clergyman, who seemed to me as much a saint 
then on earth as he is now in heaven, and partly 
for whose sake, through all these darkening 
years, I retain a devout, though not intact nor 
unwavering respect for the entire fraternity. 
What a hideous wrong, therefore, had the back¬ 
slider inflicted on his brethren, and still more 
on me, who much needed whatever fragments 
of broken reverence (broken, not as concerned 
religion, but its earthly institutions and pro¬ 
fessors) it might yet be possible to patch into a 
sacred image ! Should all pulpits and commun¬ 
ion-tables have thenceforth a stain upon them, 
and the guilty one go unrebuked for it ? So I 
spoke to the unhappy man as I never thought 
myself warranted in speaking to any other mor¬ 
tal, hitting him hard, doing my utmost to find 
out his vulnerable part, and prick him into the 
depths of it. And not without more effect than 
I had dreamed of, or desired ! 

No doubt, the novelty of the Doctor’s re¬ 
versed position, thus standing up to receive such 
a fulmination as the clergy have heretofore ar¬ 
rogated the exclusive right of inflicting, might 
give additional weight and sting to the words 
which I found utterance for. But there was 
another reason (which had I in the least sus¬ 
pected it, would have closed my lips at once) 
for his feeling morbidly sensitive to the cruel 
34 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

rebuke that I administered. The unfortunate 
man had come to me, laboring under one of the 
consequences of his riotous outbreak, in the 
shape of delirium tremens ; he bore a hell within 
the compass of his own breast, all the torments 
of which blazed up with tenfold inveteracy when 
I thus took upon myself the Devil’s office of 
stirring up the red-hot embers. His emotions, 
as well as the external movement and expression 
of them by voice, countenance, and gesture, 
were terribly exaggerated by the tremendous 
vibration of nerves resulting from the disease. It 
was the deepest tragedy I ever witnessed. I 
know sufficiently, from that one experience, how 
a condemned soul would manifest its agonies; 
and for the future, if I have anything to do 
with sinners, I mean to operate upon them 
through sympathy and not rebuke. What had 
I to do with rebuking him ? The disease, long 
latent in his heart, had shown itself in a fright¬ 
ful eruption on the surface of his life. That 
was all ! Is it a thing to scold the sufferer for? 

To conclude this wretched story, the poor 
Doctor of Divinity, having been robbed of all 
his money in this little airing beyond the limits 
of propriety, was easily persuaded to give up 
the intended tour and return to his bereaved 
flock, who, very probably, were thereafter con¬ 
scious of an increased unction in his soul-stir¬ 
ring eloquence, without suspecting the awful 
35 


OUR OLD HOME 

depths into which their pastor had dived in 
quest of it. His voice is now silent. I leave 
it to members of his own profession to decide 
whether it was better for him thus to sin out¬ 
right, and so to be let into the miserable secret 
what manner of man he was, or to have gone 
through life outwardly unspotted, making the 
first discovery of his latent evil at the judgment- 
seat. It has occurred to me that his dire calam¬ 
ity, as both he and I regarded it, might have 
been the only method by which precisely such 
a man as himself, and so situated, could be re¬ 
deemed. He has learned, ere now, how that 
matter stood. 

For a man with a natural tendency to med¬ 
dle with other people’s business, there could not 
possibly be a more congenial sphere than the 
Liverpool Consulate. For myself, I had never 
been in the habit of feeling that I could suffi¬ 
ciently comprehend any particular conjunction 
of circumstances with human character, to jus¬ 
tify me in thrusting in my awkward agency 
among the intricate and unintelligible machinery 
of Providence. I have always hated to give 
advice, especially when there is a prospect of its 
being taken. It is only one-eyed people who 
love to advise, or have any spontaneous prompt¬ 
itude of action. When a man opens both his 
eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons 
for acting in any one way as in any other, and 
3b 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

quite as many for acting in neither ; and is 
therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate 
their own conduct, and also to remain quiet as 
regards his especial affairs till necessity shall 
prick him onward. Nevertheless, the world 
and individuals flourish upon a constant suc¬ 
cession of blunders. The secret of English 
practical success lies in their characteristic fac¬ 
ulty of shutting one eye, whereby they get so 
distinct and decided a view of what immediately 
concerns them that they go stumbling towards 
it over a hundred insurmountable obstacles, 
and achieve a magnificent triumph without ever 
being aware of half its difficulties. If Gen¬ 
eral McClellan could but have shut his left 
eye, the right one would long ago have guided 
us into Richmond. Meanwhile, I have strayed 
far away from the Consulate, where, as I was 
about to say, I was compelled, in spite of my 
disinclination, to impart both advice and assist¬ 
ance in multifarious affairs that did not person¬ 
ally concern me, and presume that I effected 
about as little mischief as other men in similar 
contingencies. The duties of the office carried 
me to prisons, police courts, hospitals, lunatic 
asylums, coroner’s inquests, death-beds, fu¬ 
nerals, and brought me in contact with insane 
people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild ad¬ 
venturers, diplomatists, brother consuls, and all 
manner of simpletons and unfortunates, in 
37 


OUR OLD HOME 


greater number and variety than I had ever 
dreamed of as pertaining to America ; in addi¬ 
tion to whom there was an equivalent multitude 
of English rogues, dexterously counterfeiting 
the genuine Yankee article. It required great 
discrimination not to be taken in by these last- 
mentioned scoundrels ; for they knew how to 
imitate our national traits, had been at great 
pains to instruct themselves as regarded Amer¬ 
ican localities, and were not readily to be caught 
by a cross-examination as to the topographical 
features, public institutions, or prominent in¬ 
habitants of the places where -they pretended to 
belong. The best shibboleth I ever hit upon 
lay in the pronunciation of the word c< been,” 
which the English invariably make to rhyme 
with “ green,” and we Northerners, at least (in 
accordance, I think, with the custom of Shake¬ 
speare’s time), universally pronounce cc bin.” 

All the matters that I have been treating of, 
however, were merely incidental, and quite dis¬ 
tinct from the real business of the office. A 
great part of the wear and tear of mind and 
temper resulted from the bad relations between 
the seamen and officers of American ships. 
Scarcely a morning passed, but that some sailor 
came to show the marks of his ill-usage on 
shipboard. Often, it was a whole crew of 
them, each with his broken head or livid bruise, 
and all testifying with one voice to a constant 
38 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

series of savage outrages during the voyage; 
or, it might be, they laid an accusation of actual 
murder, perpetrated by the first or second offi¬ 
cers, with many blows of steel-knuckles, a rope’s 
end, or a marline spike, or by the captain, in the 
twinkling of an eye, with a shot of his pistol. 
Taking the seamen’s view of the case, you 
would suppose that the gibbet was hungry for 
the murderers. Listening to the captain’s de¬ 
fence, you would seem to discover that he and 
his officers were the humanest of mortals,, but 
were driven to a wholesome severity by the 
mutinous conduct of the crew, who, moreover, 
had themselves slain their comrade in the 
drunken riot and confusion of the first day or 
two after they were shipped. Looked at judi¬ 
cially, there appeared to be no right side to the 
matter, nor any right side possible in so thor¬ 
oughly vicious a system as that of the Ameri¬ 
can mercantile marine. The Consul could do 
little, except to take depositions, hold forth the 
greasy Testament to be profaned anew with 
perjured kisses, and, in a few instances of mur¬ 
der or manslaughter, carry the case before an 
English magistrate, who generally decided that 
the evidence was too contradictory to authorize 
the transmission of the accused for trial in 
America. The newspapers all over England 
contained paragraphs, inveighing against the 
cruelties of American shipmasters. The British 
39 


OUR OLD HOME 


Parliament took up the matter (for nobody is 
so humane as John Bull, when his benevolent 
propensities are to be gratified by finding fault 
with his neighbor), and caused Lord John Rus¬ 
sell to remonstrate with our government on 
the outrages for which it was responsible be¬ 
fore the world, and which it failed to prevent 
or punish. The American Secretary of State, 
old General Cass, responded, with perfectly 
astounding ignorance of the subject, to the 
effect that the statements of outrages had prob¬ 
ably been exaggerated, that the present laws of 
the United States were quite adequate to deal 
with them, and that the interference of the 
British Minister was uncalled for. 

The truth is, that the state of affairs was 
really very horrible, and could be met by no 
laws at that time (or I presume now) in exist¬ 
ence. I once thought of writing a pamphlet 
on the subject, but quitted the Consulate be¬ 
fore finding time to effect my purpose; and 
all that phase of my life immediately assumed 
so dream-like a consistency that I despaired of 
making it seem solid or tangible to the public. 
And now it looks distant and dim, like troubles 
of a century ago. The origin of the evil lay 
in the character of the seamen, scarcely any 
of whom were American, but the offscourings 
and refuse of all the seaports of the world, 
such stuff as piracy is made of, together with 
40 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 

a considerable intermixture of returning emi¬ 
grants, and a sprinkling of absolutely kidnapped 
American citizens. Even with such material, 
the ships were very inadequately manned. The 
shipmaster found himself upon the deep, with a 
vast responsibility of property and human life 
upon his hands, and no means of salvation ex¬ 
cept by compelling his inefficient and demor¬ 
alized crew to heavier exertions than could 
reasonably be required of the same number of 
able seamen. By law he had been intrusted 
with no discretion of judicious punishment; he 
therefore habitually left the whole matter of 
discipline to his irresponsible mates, men often 
of scarcely a superior quality to the crew. 
Hence ensued a great mass of petty outrages, 
unjustifiable assaults, shameful indignities, and 
nameless cruelty, demoralizing alike to the per¬ 
petrators and the sufferers; these enormities 
fell into the ocean between the two countries, 
and could be punished in neither. Many mis¬ 
erable stories come back upon my memory as 
I write; wrongs that were immense, but for 
which nobody could be held responsible, and 
which, indeed, the closer you looked into them, 
the more they lost the aspect of wilful mis¬ 
doing, and assumed that of an inevitable ca¬ 
lamity. It was the fault of a system, the 
misfortune of an individual. Be that as it 
may, however, there will be no possibility of 
4i 


OUR OLD HOME 


dealing effectually with these troubles as long 
as we deem it inconsistent with our national 
dignity or interests to allow the English courts, 
under such restrictions as may seem fit, a juris¬ 
diction over offences perpetrated on board our 
vessels in mid-ocean. 

In such a life as this, the American ship¬ 
master develops himself into a man of iron 
energies, dauntless courage, and inexhaustible 
resource, at the expense, it must be acknow¬ 
ledged, of some of the higher and gentler traits 
which might do him excellent service in main¬ 
taining his authority. The class has deterio¬ 
rated of late years on account of the narrower 
field of selection, owing chiefly to the diminu¬ 
tion of that excellent body of respectably edu¬ 
cated New England seamen, from the flower 
of whom the officers used to be recruited. Yet 
I found them, in many cases, very agreeable 
and intelligent companions, with less nonsense 
about them than landsmen usually have, es- 
chewers of fine-spun theories, delighting in 
square and tangible ideas, but occasionally in¬ 
fested with prejudices that stuck to their brains 
like barnacles to a ship’s bottom. I never 
could flatter myself that I was a general favorite 
with them. One or two, perhaps, even now, 
would scarcely meet me on amicable terms. 
Endowed universally with a great pertinacity 
of will, they especially disliked the interference 
42 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


of a Consul with their management on ship¬ 
board ; notwithstanding which, I thrust in my 
very limited authority at every available open¬ 
ing, and did the utmost that lay in my power, 
though with lamentably small effect, towards 
enforcing a better kind of discipline. They 
thought, no doubt (and on plausible grounds 
enough, but scarcely appreciating just that one 
little grain of hard New England sense, oddly 
thrown in among the flimsier composition of 
the Consul’s character), that he, a landsman, a 
bookman, and, as people said of him, a fanciful 
recluse, could not possibly understand anything 
of the difficulties or the necessities of a ship¬ 
master’s position. But their cold regards were 
rather acceptable than otherwise, for it is ex¬ 
ceedingly awkward to assume a judicial austerity 
in the morning towards a man with whom you 
have been hobnobbing over night. 

With the technical details of the business of 
that great Consulate (for great it then was, 
though now, I fear, woefully fallen off, and per¬ 
haps never to be revived in anything like its 
former extent), I did not much interfere. They 
could safely be left to the treatment of two as 
faithful, upright, and competent subordinates, 
both Englishmen, as ever a man was fortunate 
enough to meet with, in a line of life altogether 
new and strange to him. I had come over with 
instructions to supply both their places with 
43 


OUR OLD HOME 


Americans, but, possessing a happy faculty of 
knowing my own interest and the public’s, I 
quietly kept hold of them, being little inclined 
to open the consular doors to a spy of the State 
Department or an intriguer for my own office. 
The venerable Vice-Consul, Mr. Pearce, had 
witnessed the successive arrivals of a score of 
newly appointed Consuls, shadowy and short¬ 
lived dignitaries, and carried his reminiscences 
back to the epoch of Consul Maury, who was 
appointed by Washington, and has acquired 
almost the grandeur of a mythical personage in 
the annals of the Consulate. The principal 
clerk, Mr. Wilding, who has since succeeded 
to the Vice-Consulship, was a man of English 
integrity, — not that the English are more hon¬ 
est than ourselves, but only there is a certain 
sturdy reliableness common among them, which 
we do not quite so invariably manifest in just 
these subordinate positions, — of English in¬ 
tegrity, combined with American acuteness of 
intellect, quick-wittedness, and diversity of tal¬ 
ent. It seemed an immense pity that he should 
wear out his life at a desk, without a step in 
advance from year’s end to year’s end, when, 
had it been his luck to be born on our side of 
the water, his bright faculties and clear probity 
would have ensured him eminent success in 
whatever path he might adopt. Meanwhile, it 
would have been a sore mischance to me, had 
44 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


any better fortune on his part deprived me of 
Mr. Wilding’s services. 

A fair amount of common sense, some ac¬ 
quaintance with the United States Statutes, an 
insight into character, a tact of management, a 
general knowledge of the world, and a reasona¬ 
ble but not too inveterately decided preference 
for his own will and judgment over those of 
interested people, — these natural attributes and 
moderate acquirements will enable a Consul to 
perform many of his duties respectably, but 
not to dispense with a great variety of other 
qualifications, only attainable by long experi¬ 
ence. Yet, I think, few Consuls are so well 
accomplished. An appointment of whatever 
grade, in the diplomatic or consular service of 
America, is too often what the English call a 
“job ; ” that is to say, it is made on private 
and personal grounds, without a paramount 
eye to the public good or the gentleman’s espe¬ 
cial fitness for the position. It is not too much 
to say (of course allowing for a brilliant excep¬ 
tion here and there), that an American never is 
thoroughly qualified for a foreign post, nor has 
time to make himself so, before the revolution 
of the political wheel discards him from his of¬ 
fice. Our country wrongs itself by permitting 
such a system of unsuitable appointments, and, 
still more, of removals for no cause, just when 
the incumbent might be beginning to ripen into 
45 


OUR OLD HOME 


usefulness. Mere ignorance of official detail is 
of comparatively small moment; though it is 
considered indispensable, I presume, that a man 
in any private capacity shall be thoroughly ac¬ 
quainted with the machinery and operation of 
his business, and shall not necessarily lose his 
position on having attained such knowledge. 
But there are so many more important things 
to be thought of, in the qualifications of a for¬ 
eign resident, that his technical dexterity or 
clumsiness is hardly worth mentioning. 

One great part of a Consul's duty, for exam¬ 
ple, should consist in building up for himself 
a recognized position in the society where he 
resides, so that his local influence might be felt 
in behalf of his own country, and, so far as they 
are compatible (as they generally are to the ut¬ 
most extent), for the interests of both nations. 
The foreign city should know that it has a per¬ 
manent inhabitant and a hearty well-wisher in 
him. There are many conjunctures (and one of 
them is now upon us) where a long-established, 
honored, and trusted American citizen, holding 
a public position under our government in such 
a town as Liverpool, might go far towards sway¬ 
ing and directing the sympathies of the inhab¬ 
itants. He might throw his own weight into 
the balance against mischief-makers ; he might 
have set his foot on the first little spark of 
malignant purpose, which the next wind may 
46 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


blow into a national war. But we wilfully give 
up all advantages of this kind. The position is 
totally beyond the attainment of an American ; 
there to-day, bristling all over with the por¬ 
cupine quills of our Republic, and gone to¬ 
morrow, just as he is becoming sensible of the 
broader and more generous patriotism which 
might almost amalgamate with that of England, 
without losing an atom of its native force and 
•flavor. In the changes that appear to await us, 
and some of which, at least, can hardly fail to 
be for good, let us hope for a reform in this 
matter. 

For myself, as the gentle reader would spare 
me the trouble of saying, I was not at all the 
kind of man to grow into such an ideal Consul 
as I have here suggested. I never in my life 
desired to be burdened with public influence. 
I disliked my office from the first, and never 
came into any good accordance with it. Its 
dignity, so far as it had any, was an encum¬ 
brance ; the attentions it drew upon me (such 
as invitations to Mayors* banquets and public 
celebrations of all kinds, where, to my horror, 
I found myself expected to stand up and speak) 
were — as I may say without incivility or in¬ 
gratitude, because there is nothing personal in 
that sort of hospitality—a bore. The official 
business was irksome, and often painful. There 
was nothing pleasant about the whole affair, 
47 


OUR OLD HOME 


except the emoluments ; 1 and even those, never 
too bountifully reaped, were diminished by 
more than half in the second or third year of 
my incumbency. All this being true, I was 
quite prepared, in advance of the inauguration 
of Mr. Buchanan, to send in my resignation. 
When my successor arrived, I drew the long, 
delightful breath which first made me thor¬ 
oughly sensible what an unnatural life I had 
been leading, and compelled me to admire 
myself for having battled with it so sturdily . 2 
The new-comer proved to be a very genial 
and agreeable gentleman, an F. F. V., and, 
as he pleasantly acknowledged, a Southern 
Fire-Eater, — an announcement to which I 
responded, with similar good humor and self- 
complacency, by parading my descent from an 
ancient line of Massachusetts Puritans. Since 

1 The pleasantest incident of the morning is when Mr. Pearce (the 
Vice-Consul) makes his appearance with the account-books, containing 
the receipts and expenditures of the preceding day, and deposits on my 
desk a little rouleau of the Queen’s coin, wrapped up in a piece of paper. 
This morning there were eight sovereigns, four half-crowns, and a shill¬ 
ing, — a pretty fair day’s work, though not more than the average 
ought to be. — Notes of Travel, I. i. 

2 I am sick to death of my office, —brutal captains and brutal sailors ; 
continual complaints of mutual wrong which I have no power to set 
right, and which, indeed, seem to have no right on either side; calls of 
idleness or ceremony from my travelling countrymen, who seldom know 
what they are in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never 
have attained any desirable end at the close of it ; beggars, cheats, sim¬ 
pletons, unfortunates, so mixed up that it is impossible to distinguish one 
from another, and so, in self-defence, the Consul distrusts them all. — 
Ibid. , I. 305. 


48 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


our brief acquaintanceship, my fire-eating friend 
has had ample opportunities to banquet on his 
favorite diet, hot and hot, in the Confederate 
service. For myself, as soon as I was out of 
office, the retrospect began to look unreal. I 
could scarcely believe that it was I, — that fig¬ 
ure whom they called a Consul, — but a sort 
of Double Ganger, who had been permitted 
to assume my aspect, under which he went 
through his shadowy duties with a tolerable 
show of efficiency, while my real self had lain, 
as regarded my proper mode of being and act¬ 
ing, in a state of suspended animation. 

The same sense of illusion still pursues me. 
There is some mistake in this matter. I have 
been writing about another man’s consular ex¬ 
periences, with which, through some mysterious 
medium of transmitted ideas, I find myself 
intimately acquainted, but in which I cannot 
possibly have had a personal interest. Is it not 
a dream altogether ? The figure of that poor 
Doctor of Divinity looks wonderfully lifelike ; 
so do those of the Oriental adventurer with the 
visionary coronet above his brow, and the moon¬ 
struck visitor of the Queen, and the poor old 
wanderer, seeking his native country through 
English highways and byways for almost thirty 
years; and so would a hundred others that I 
might summon up with similar distinctness. 
But were they more than shadows ? Surely, I 
49 


OUR OLD HOME 

think not. Nor are these present pages a bit 
of intrusive autobiography. Let not the reader 
wrong me by supposing it. I never should 
have written with half such unreserve, had it 
been a portion of this life congenial with my 
nature, which I am living now, instead of a se¬ 
ries of incidents and characters entirely apart 
from my own concerns, and on which the qual¬ 
ities personally proper to me could have had 
no bearing. Almost the only real incidents, 
as I see them now, were the visits of a young 
English friend, a scholar and a literary amateur, 
between whom and myself there sprung up an 
affectionate, and, I trust, not transitory regard. 
He used to come and sit or stand by my fire¬ 
side, talking vivaciously and eloquently with 
me about literature and life, his own national 
characteristics and mine, with such kindly en¬ 
durance of the many rough republicanisms 
wherewith I assailed him, and such frank and 
amiable assertion of all sorts of English preju¬ 
dices and mistakes, that I understood his coun¬ 
trymen infinitely the better for him, and was 
almost prepared to love the intensest English¬ 
man of them all, for his sake. It would grat¬ 
ify my cherished remembrance of this dear 
friend, if I could manage, without offending 
him, or letting the public know it, to introduce 
his name upon my page. Bright was the illu- 
50 


CONSULAR EXPERIENCES 


mination of my dusky little apartment, as often 
as he made his appearance there ! 

The English sketches which I have been of¬ 
fering to the public comprise a few of the more 
external, and therefore more readily manage¬ 
able, things that I took note of, in many escapes 
from the imprisonment of my consular servi¬ 
tude. Liverpool, though not very delightful 
as a place of residence, is a most convenient and 
admirable point to get away from. London is 
only five hours off by the fast train. Chester, 
the most curious town in England, with its en¬ 
compassing wall, its ancient rows, and its ven¬ 
erable cathedral, is close at hand. North Wales, 
with all its hills and ponds, its noble sea scenery, 
its multitude of gray castles and strange old 
villages, may be glanced at in a summer day or 
two. The lakes and mountains of Cumberland 
and Westmoreland may be reached before din¬ 
ner-time. The haunted and legendary Isle of 
Man, a little kingdom by itself, lies within the 
scope of an afternoon's voyage. Edinburgh or 
Glasgow are attainable over night, and Loch 
Lomond betimes in the morning. Visiting 
these famous localities, and a great many others, 
I hope that I do not compromise my American 
patriotism by acknowledging that I was often 
conscious of a fervent hereditary attachment to 
the native soil of our forefathers, and felt it to 
be our own Old Home. 

5i 


II 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

I N the course of several visits and stays of 
considerable length we acquired a homelike 
feeling towards Leamington, and came back 
thither again and again, chiefly because we had 
been there before. Wandering and wayside 
people, such as we had long since become, re¬ 
tain a few of the instincts that belong to a more 
settled way of life, and often prefer familiar and 
commonplace objects (for the very reason that 
they are so) to the dreary strangeness of scenes 
that might be thought much better worth the 
seeing. There is a small nest of a place in 
Leamington — at No. io Lansdowne Circus — 
upon which, to this day, my reminiscences are 
apt to settle as one of the cosiest nooks in Eng¬ 
land or in the world ; not that it had any special 
charm of its own, but only that we stayed long 
enough to know it well, and even to grow a lit¬ 
tle tired of it. In my opinion, the very tedious¬ 
ness of home and friends makes a part of what 
we love them for; if it be not mixed in suffi¬ 
ciently with the other elements of life, there may 
be mad enjoyment, but no happiness. 

52 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

The modest abode to which I have alluded 
forms one of a circular range of pretty, moderate¬ 
sized, two-story houses, all built on nearly the 
same plan, and each provided with its little 
grass-plot, its flowers, its tufts of box trimmed 
into globes and other fantastic shapes, and its 
verdant hedges shutting the house in from the 
common drive, and dividing it from its equally 
cosy neighbors. Coming out of the door, and 
taking a turn round the circle of sister dwellings, 
it is difficult to find your way back by any dis¬ 
tinguishing in dividuality of your own habitation. 
In the centre of the Circus is a space fenced in 
with iron railing, a small play-place and sylvan 
retreat for the children of the precinct, perme¬ 
ated by brief paths through the fresh English 
grass, and shadowed by various shrubbery; 
amid which, if you like, you may fancy your¬ 
self in a deep seclusion, though probably the 
mark of*eye-shot from the windows of all the 
surrounding houses. But, in truth, with regard 
to the rest of the town and the world at large, 
an abode here is a genuine seclusion ; for the 
ordinary stream of life does not run through 
this little, quiet pool, and few or none of the 
inhabitants seem to be troubled with any busi¬ 
ness or outside activities. I used to set them 
down as half-pay officers, dowagers of narrow 
income, elderly maiden ladies, and other people 
of respectability, but small account, such as 
53 


OUR OLD HOME 


hang on the world’s skirts, rather than actually 
belong to it. The quiet of the place was seldom 
disturbed, except by the grocer and butcher, 
who came to receive orders ; or by the cabs, 
hackney-coaches, and Bath-chairs, in which the 
ladies took an infrequent airing; or the livery 
steed which the retired captain sometimes be¬ 
strode for a morning ride ; or by the red-coated 
postman who went his rounds twice a day to 
deliver letters, and again in the evening, ring¬ 
ing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In 
merely mentioning these slight interruptions 
of its sluggish stillness, I seem to myself to 
disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that 
brooded over the spot; whereas its impression 
upon me was, that the world had never found 
the way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the 
fortunate inhabitants were the only ones who 
possessed the spell-word of admittance. No¬ 
thing could have suited me better at the time ; 
for I had been holding a position of public ser¬ 
vitude, which imposed upon me (among a great 
many lighter duties) the ponderous necessity of 
being universally civil and sociable. 

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bus¬ 
tle of society, he might find it more readily in 
Leamington than in most other English towns. 
It is a permanent watering-place, a sort of 
institution to which I do not know any close 
parallel in American life : for such places as 
54 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


Saratoga bloom only for the summer season, 
and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even then ; 
while Leamington seems to be always in flower, 
and serves as a home to the homeless all the 
year round. Its original nucleus, the plausible 
excuse for the town’s coming into prosperous 
existence, lies in the fiction of a chalybeate well, 
which, indeed, is so far a reality that out of its 
magical depths have gushed streets, groves, gar¬ 
dens, mansions, shops, and churches, and spread 
themselves along the banks of the little river 
Learn. This miracle accomplished, the benefi¬ 
cent fountain has retired beneath a pump-room, 
and appears to have given up all pretensions to 
the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. 
I know not whether its waters are ever tasted 
nowadays; but not the less does Leamington —r 
in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost 
point of England, in a good hunting neighbor¬ 
hood, and surrounded by country-seats and 
castles, — continue to be a resort of transient 
visitors, and the more permanent abode of a 
class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not 
very wealthy people, such as are hardly known 
among ourselves. Persons who have no coun¬ 
try-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate 
to a London expenditure, find here, I suppose, 
a sort of town and country life in one. 

In its present aspect the town is of no great 
age. In contrast with the antiquity of many 
55 


OUR OLD HOME 


places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new 
face, and seems almost to smile even amid the 
sombreness of an English autumn. Neverthe¬ 
less, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, 
if we reckon up that sleepy lapse of time during 
which it existed as a small village of thatched 
houses, clustered round a priory ; and it would 
still have been precisely such a rural village, but 
for a certain Dr. Jephson, who lived within the 
memory of man, and who found out the magic 
well, and foresaw what fairy wealth might be 
made to flow from it. A public garden has been 
laid out along the margin of the Learn, and 
called the Jephson Garden, in honor of him 
who created the prosperity of his native spot. 
A little way within the garden gate there is a 
circular temple of Grecian architecture, beneath 
the dome of which stands a marble statue of the 
good doctor, very well executed, and represent¬ 
ing him with a face of fussy activity and bene¬ 
volence : just the kind of man, if luck favored 
him, to build up the fortunes of those about 
him, or, quite as probably, to blight his whole 
neighborhood by some disastrous speculation. 

The Jephson Garden is very beautiful, like 
most other English pleasure grounds ; for, aided 
by their moist climate and not too fervid sun, 
the landscape gardeners excel in converting flat 
or tame surfaces into attractive scenery, chiefly 
through the skilful arrangement of trees and 
56 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

shrubbery. An Englishman aims at this effect 
even in the little patches under the windows of 
a suburban villa, and achieves it on a larger scale 
in a tract of many acres. The Garden is shad¬ 
owed with trees of a fine growth, standing alone, 
or in dusky groves and dense entanglements, 
pervaded by woodland paths; and emerging 
from these pleasant glooms, we come upon a 
breadth of sunshine, where the greensward — 
so vividly green that it has a kind of lustre in 
it — is spotted with beds of gem-like flowers. 
Rustic chairs and benches are scattered about, 
some of them ponderously fashioned out of the 
stumps of obtruncated trees, and others more 
artfully made with intertwining branches, or per¬ 
haps an imitation of such frail handiwork in 
iron. In a central part of the Garden is an 
archery ground, where laughing maidens prac¬ 
tise at the butts, generally missing their ostensi¬ 
ble mark, but, by the mere grace of their action, 
sending an unseen shaft into some young man’s 
heart. There is space, moreover, within these 
precincts, for an artificial lake, with a little green 
island in the midst of it; both lake and island 
being the haunt of swans, whose aspect and 
movement in the water are most beautiful and 
stately, — most infirm, disjointed, and decrepit, 
when, unadvisedly, they see fit to emerge, and 
try to walk upon dry land. In the latter case, 
they look like a breed of uncommonly ill-con- 
57 


OUR OLD HOME 


trived geese; and I record the matter here for 
the sake of the moral, — that we should never 
pass judgment on the merits of any person or 
thing, unless we behold them in the sphere 
and circumstances to which they are specially 
adapted. In still another part of the Garden 
there is a labyrinthine maze formed of an in¬ 
tricacy of hedge-bordered walks, involving him¬ 
self in which, a man might wander for hours in¬ 
extricably within a circuit of only a few yards. 
It seemed to me a sad emblem of the mental 
and moral perplexities in which we sometimes 
go astray, petty in scope, yet large enough to 
entangle a lifetime, and bewilder us with a weary 
movement, but no genuine progress. 

The Learn,—the “high complexioned Learn,” 
as Drayton calls it, — after drowsing across the 
principal street of the town, beneath a handsome 
bridge, skirts along the margin of the Garden 
without any perceptible flow. Heretofore I 
had fancied the Concord the laziest river in the 
world, but now assign that amiable distinction 
to the little English stream. Its water is by no 
means transparent, but has a greenish, goose- 
puddly hue, which, however, accords well with 
the other coloring and characteristics of the 
scene, and is disagreeable neither to sight nor 
smell. Certainly, this river is a perfect feature 
of that gentle picturesqueness in which England 
is so rich, sleeping, as it does, beneath a margin 
58 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


of willows that droop into its bosom, and other 
trees, of deeper verdure than our own country 
can boast, inclining lovingly over it. On the 
Garden side it is bordered by a shadowy, se¬ 
cluded grove, with winding paths among its 
boskiness, affording many a peep at the river’s 
imperceptible lapse and tranquil gleam; and on 
the opposite shore stands the priory church, 
with its churchyard full of shrubbery and tomb¬ 
stones. 

The business portion of the town clusters 
about the banks of the Learn, and is naturally 
densest around the well to which the modern 
settlement owes its existence. Here are the 
commercial inns, the post-office, the furniture- 
dealers, the ironmongers, and all the heavy and 
homely establishments that connect themselves 
even with the airiest modes of human life; 
while upward from the river, by a long and 
gentle ascent, rises the principal street, which is 
very bright and cheerful in its physiognomy, 
and adorned with shop fronts almost as splen¬ 
did as those of London, though on a diminu¬ 
tive scale. There are likewise side streets and 
cross-streets, many of which are bordered with 
the beautiful Warwickshire elm, a most unusual 
kind of adornment for an English town; and 
spacious avenues, wide enough to afford room 
for stately groves, with footpaths running be¬ 
neath the lofty shade, and rooks cawing and 
59 


OUR OLD HOME 


chattering so high in the tree-tops that their 
voices get musical before reaching the earth. 
The houses are mostly built in blocks and 
ranges, in which every separate tenement is a 
repetition of its fellow, though the architecture 
of the different ranges is sufficiently various. 
Some of them are almost palatial in size and 
sumptuousness of arrangement. Then, on the 
outskirts of the town, there are detached villas, 
enclosed within that separate domain of high 
stone fence and embowered shrubbery which 
an Englishman so loves to build and plant 
around his abode, presenting to the public only 
an iron gate, with a gravelled carriage-drive wind¬ 
ing away towards the half-hidden mansion. 
Whether in street or suburb, Leamington may 
fairly be called beautiful, and, at some points, 
magnificent: but by and by you become doubt¬ 
fully suspicious of a somewhat unreal finery: 
it is pretentious, though not glaringly so; it 
has been built with malice aforethought, as a 
place of gentility and enjoyment. Moreover, 
splendid as the houses look, and comfortable as 
they often are, there is a nameless something 
about them, betokening that they have not 
grown out of human hearts, but are the crea¬ 
tions of a skilfully applied human intellect: no 
man has reared any one of them, whether stately 
or humble, to be his lifelong residence, wherein 
to bring up his children, who are to inherit it 
60 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

as a home. They are nicely contrived lodg¬ 
ing-houses, one and all, — the best as well as 
the shabbiest of them, — and therefore inev¬ 
itably lack some nameless property that a home 
should have. This was the case with our own 
little snuggery in Lansdowne Circus, as with 
all the rest; it had not grown out of anybody’s 
individual need, but was built to let or sell, and 
was therefore like a ready-made garment, — a 
tolerable fit, but only tolerable . 1 

All these blocks, ranges, and detached villas 
are adorned with the finest and most aristocratic 
names that I have found anywhere in England, 
except perhaps in Bath, which is the great me¬ 
tropolis of that second-class gentility with which 
watering-places are chiefly populated. Lans¬ 
downe Crescent, Lansdowne Circus, Lansdowne 
Terrace, Regent Street, Warwick Street, Clar¬ 
endon Street, the Upper and Lower Parade: 
such are a few of the designations. Parade, 


1 This English custom of lodgings, of which we had some experience 
at Rhyl last year, has its advantages ; but is rather uncomfortable for 
strangers, who, in first settling themselves down, find that they must 
undertake all the responsibility of housekeeping at an instant’s warning, 
and cannot get even a cup of tea till they have made arrangements with 
the grocer. Soon, however, there comes a sense of being at home, and 
by our exclusive selves, which never can be attained at hotels nor boarding¬ 
houses. Our house is well situated and respectably furnished, with the 
dinginess, however, which is inseparable from lodging-houses, —as if 
others had used these things before and would use them again after we 
had gone, — a well-enough adaptation, but a lack of peculiar appropri¬ 
ateness ; and I think one puts off real enjoyment from a sense of not being 
truly fitted. — Notes of Travel , I. 214. 

6l 


OUR OLD HOME 


indeed, is a well-chosen name for the principal 
street, along which the population of the idle 
town draws itself out for daily review and display. 
I only wish that my descriptive powers would 
enable me to throw off a picture of the scene at 
a sunny noontide, individualizing each character 
with a touch: the great people alighting from 
their carriages at the principal shop-doors; the 
elderly ladies and infirm Indian officers drawn 
along in Bath-chairs ; the comely, rather than 
pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy 
bloom, which an American taste is apt to deem 
fitter for a milkmaid than for a lady; the mus- 
tached gentlemen with frogged surtouts and a 
military air; the nursemaids and chubby chil¬ 
dren, but no chubbier than our own, and scam¬ 
pering on slenderer legs; the sturdy figure of 
John Bull in all varieties and of all ages, but 
ever with the stamp of authenticity somewhere 
about him. 

To say the truth, I have been holding the 
pen bver my paper, purposing to write a descrip¬ 
tive paragraph or two about the throng on the 
principal Parade of Leamington, so arranging 
it as to present a sketch of the British out-of- 
door aspect on a morning walk of gentility; 
but I find no personages quite sufficiently dis¬ 
tinct and individual in my memory to supply 
the materials of such a panorama. Oddly 
enough, the only figure that comes fairly forth 
62 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


to my mind’s eye is that of a dowager, one of 
hundreds whom I used to marvel at, all over 
England, but who have scarcely a representa¬ 
tive among our own ladies of autumnal life, so 
thin, careworn, and frail, as age usually makes 
the latter. 

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity 
with which English ladies retain their personal 
beauty to a late period of life; but (not to sug¬ 
gest that an American eye needs use and culti¬ 
vation before it can quite appreciate the charm 
of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that 
an English lady of fifty is apt to become a crea¬ 
ture less refined and delicate, so far as her phy¬ 
sique goes, than anything that we Western 
people class under the name of woman. She 
has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, 
like the looser development of our few fat wo¬ 
men, but massive with solid beef and streaky 
tallow: so that (though struggling manfully 
against the idea) you inevitably think of her 
as made up of steaks and sirloins. When she 
walks, her advance is elephantine. When she 
sits down, it is on a great round space of her 
Maker’s footstool, where she looks as if nothing 
could ever move her. She imposes awe and 
respect by the muchness of her personality, to 
such a degree that you probably credit her with 
far greater moral and intellectual force than she 
can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and 


OUR OLD HOME 


stern, seldom positively forbidding, yet calmly 
terrible, not merely by its breadth and weight 
of feature, but because it seems to express so 
much well-founded self-reliance, such acquaint¬ 
ance with the world, its toils, troubles, and dan¬ 
gers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling 
down a foe. Without anything positively sa¬ 
lient, or actively offensive, or, indeed, unjustly 
formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect 
of a seventy-four-gun ship in time of peace; 
for, while you assure yourself that there is no 
real danger, you cannot help thinking how tre¬ 
mendous would be her onset if pugnaciously 
inclined, and how futile the effort to inflict any 
counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold — 
nay, a hundred-fold — better able to take care 
of herself than our slender-framed and haggard 
womankind; but I have not found reason to 
suppose that the English dowager of fifty has 
actually greater courage, fortitude, and strength 
of character than our women of similar age, or 
even a tougher physical endurance than they. 
Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in soci¬ 
ety, and in the common routine of social affairs, 
and would be found powerless and timid in any 
exceptional strait that might call for energy out¬ 
side of the conventionalities amid which she has 
grown up. 

You can meet this figure in the street, and 
live, and even smile at the recollection. But 
64 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, 
brawny arms that she invariably displays there, 
and all the other corresponding development, 
such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but 
a spectacle to howl at in such an overblown 
cabbage-rose as this. 

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there 
must be hidden the modest, slender, violet na¬ 
ture of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness 
has unkindly overgrown; for an English maiden 
in her teens, though very seldom so pretty as 
our own damsels, possesses, to say the truth, a 
certain charm of half-blossom, and delicately 
folded leaves, and tender womanhood shielded 
by maidenly reserves, with which, somehow or 
other, our American girls often fail to adorn 
themselves during an appreciable moment. It 
is a pity that the English violet should grow 
into such an outrageously developed peony as I 
have attempted to describe. I wonder whether 
a middle-aged husband ought to be considered 
as legally married to all the accretions that have 
overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since 
he led her to the altar, and which make her so 
much more than he ever bargained for! Is it 
not a sounder view of the case, that the matri¬ 
monial bond cannot be held to include the three 
fourths of the wife that had no existence when 
the ceremony was performed ? And as a mat¬ 
ter of conscience and good morals, ought not 

65 


OUR OLD HOME 


an English married pair to insist upon the cele¬ 
bration of a silver wedding at the end of twenty- 
five years, in order to legalize and mutually 
appropriate that corporeal growth of which both 
parties have individually come into possession 
since they were pronounced one flesh ? 

The chief enjoyment of my several visits to 
Leamington lay in rural walks about the neigh¬ 
borhood, and in jaunts to places of note and 
interest, which are particularly abundant in that 
region. The high-roads are made pleasant to 
the traveller by a border of trees, and often af¬ 
ford him the hospitality of a wayside bench be¬ 
neath a comfortable shade. But a fresher delight 
is to be found in the footpaths, which go wan¬ 
dering away from stile to stile, along hedges, 
and across broad fields, and through wooded 
parks, leading you to little hamlets of thatched 
cottages, ancient, solitary farmhouses, pictur¬ 
esque old mills, streamlets, pools, and all those 
quiet, secret, unexpected, yet strangely familiar 
features of English scenery that Tennyson shows 
us in his idyls and eclogues. These by-paths 
admit the wayfarer into the very heart of rural 
life, and yet do not burden him with a sense of 
intrusiveness. He has a right to go whitherso¬ 
ever they lead him ; for, with all their shaded 
privacy, they are as much the property of the 
public as the dusty high-road itself, and even 
by an older tenure. Their antiquity probably 
66 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


exceeds that of the Roman ways ; the footsteps 
of the aboriginal Britons first wore away the 
grass, and the natural flow of intercourse be¬ 
tween village and village has kept the track bare 
ever since. An American farmer would plough 
across any such path, and obliterate it with his 
hills of potatoes and Indian corn ; but here it 
is protected by law, and still more by the 
sacredness that inevitably springs up, in this 
soil, along the well-defined footprints of centu¬ 
ries. Old associations are sure to be fragrant 
herbs in English nostrils; we pull them up as 
weeds. 

I remember such a path, the access to which 
is from Lovers' Grove, a range of tall old oaks 
and elms on a high hill-top, whence there is a 
view of Warwick Castle, and a wide extent of 
landscape, beautiful, though bedimmed with 
English mist. This particular footpath, how¬ 
ever, is not a remarkably good specimen of its 
kind, since it leads into no hollows and seclu¬ 
sions, and soon terminates in a high-road. It 
connects Leamington by a short cut with the 
small neighboring village of Lillington, a place 
which impresses an American observer with its 
many points of contrast to the rural aspects of 
his own country. The village consists chiefly 
of one row of contiguous dwellings, separated 
only by party-walls, but ill matched among 
themselves, being of different heights, and ap- 
67 


OUR OLD HOME 


parently of various ages, though all are of an 
antiquity which we should call venerable. Some 
of the windows are leaden-framed lattices open¬ 
ing on hinges. These houses are mostly built 
of gray stone ; but others, in the same range, 
are of brick, and one or two are in a very old 
fashion, — Elizabethan, or still older, — having 
a ponderous framework of oak, painted black, 
and filled in with plastered stone or bricks. 
Judging by the patches of repair, the oak seems 
to be the more durable part of the structure. 
Some of the roofs are covered with earthen tiles ; 
others (more decayed and poverty-stricken) 
with thatch, out of which sprouts a luxurious 
vegetation of grass, house-leeks, and yellow 
flowers. What especially strikes an American 
is the lack of that insulated space, the inter¬ 
vening gardens, grass-plots, orchards, broad¬ 
spreading shade-trees, which occur between our 
own village houses. These English dwellings 
have no such separate surroundings ; they all 
grow together, like the cells of a honeycomb. 

Beyond the first row of houses, and hidden 
from it by a turn of the road, there was another 
row (or block, as we should call it) of small old 
cottages, stuck one against another, with their 
thatched roofs forming a single contiguity. 
These, I presume, were the habitations of the 
poorest order of rustic laborers; and the nar¬ 
row precincts of each cottage, as well as the close 
68 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

neighborhood of the whole, gave the impression 
of a stifled, unhealthy atmosphere among the 
occupants. It seemed impossible that there 
should be a cleanly reserve, a proper self-re¬ 
spect among individuals, or a wholesome un¬ 
familiarity between families, where human life 
was crowded and massed into such intimate 
communities as these. Nevertheless, not to 
look beyond the outside, I never saw a prettier 
rural scene than was presented by this range of 
contiguous huts. For in front of the whole 
row was a luxuriant and well-trimmed hawthorn 
hedge, and belonging to each cottage was a 
little square of garden ground, separated from 
its neighbors by a line of the same verdant 
fence. The gardens were chockfull, not of es¬ 
culent vegetables, but of flowers, familiar ones, 
but very bright colored, and shrubs of box, 
some of which were trimmed into artistic shapes; 
and I remember, before one door, a representa¬ 
tion of Warwick Castle, made of oyster shells. 
The cottagers evidently loved the little nests in 
which they dwelt, and did their best to make 
them beautiful, and succeeded more than tol¬ 
erably well, — so kindly did nature help their 
humble efforts with its verdure, flowers, moss, 
lichens, and the green things that grew out of the 
thatch. Through some of the open doorways we 
saw plump children rolling about on the stone 
floors, and their mothers, by no means very 
69 


OUR OLD HOME 


pretty, but as happy looking as mothers gener¬ 
ally are ; and while we gazed at these domestic 
matters, an old woman rushed wildly out of one 
of the gates, upholding a shovel, on which she 
clanged and clattered with a key. At first we 
fancied that she intended an onslaught against 
ourselves, but soon discovered that a more dan¬ 
gerous enemy was abroad ; for the old lady’s 
bees had swarmed, and the air was full of them, 
whizzing by our heads like bullets . 1 

Not far from these two rows of houses and 
cottages, a green lane, overshadowed with trees, 
turned aside from the main road, and tended 
towards a square, gray tower, the battlements 
of which were just high enough to be visible 
above the foliage. Wending our way thither¬ 
ward, we found the very picture and ideal of a 
country church and churchyard. The tower 
seemed to be of Norman architecture, low, mas¬ 
sive, and crowned with battlements. The body 
of the church was of very modest dimensions, 
and the eaves so low that I could touch them 


1 But the old, whitewashed stone cottage [near Liverpool] is still fre¬ 
quent, with its roof of slate or thatch, which, perhaps, is green with weeds 
or grass. Through its open door, you see that it has a pavement of flag¬ 
stones, or perhaps of red freestone ; and hogs and donkeys are familiar with 
the threshold. The door always opens directly into the kitchen, without any 
vestibule ; and, glimpsing in, you see that a cottager’s life must be the 
very plainest and homeliest that ever was lived by men and women. Yet 
the flowers about the door often indicate a native capacity for the beauti¬ 
ful ; but often there is only a pavement of round stones or of flagstones, 
like those within. — Notes of Travel , I. 307. 

70 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

with my walking-stick. We looked into the 
windows and beheld the dim and quiet interior, 
a narrow space, but venerable with the conse¬ 
cration of many centuries, and keeping its sanc¬ 
tity as entire and inviolate as that of a vast 
cathedral. The nave was divided from the side 
aisles of the church by pointed arches resting 
on very sturdy pillars; it was good to see how 
solemnly they held themselves to their age-long 
task of supporting that lowly roof. There was 
a small organ, suited in size to the vaulted hol¬ 
low, which it weekly filled with religious sound. 
On the opposite wall of the church, between 
two windows, was a mural tablet of white mar¬ 
ble, with an inscription in black letters,— the 
only such memorial that I could discern, al¬ 
though many dead people doubtless lay beneath 
the floor, and had paved it with their ancient 
tombstones, as is customary in old English 
churches. There were no modern painted 
windows, flaring with raw colors, nor other gor¬ 
geous adornments, such as the present taste for 
mediaeval restoration patches upon the decorous 
simplicity of the gray village church. It is 
probably the worshipping-place of no more 
distinguished a congregation than the farmers 
and peasantry who inhabit the houses and cot¬ 
tages which I have just described. Had the 
lord of the manor been one of the parishion¬ 
ers, there would have been an eminent pew 
7 1 


OUR OLD HOME 


near the chancel, walled high about, curtained, 
and softly cushioned, warmed by a fireplace of 
its own, and distinguished by hereditary tab¬ 
lets and escutcheons on the enclosed stone 
pillar. 

A well-trodden path led across the church¬ 
yard, and the gate being on the latch, we entered, 
and walked round among the graves and monu¬ 
ments. The latter were chiefly headstones, none 
of which were very old, so far as was discover¬ 
able by the dates ; some, indeed, in so ancient 
a cemetery, were disagreeably new, with inscrip¬ 
tions glittering like sunshine in gold letters. 
The ground must have been dug over and over 
again, innumerable times, until the soil is made 
up of what was once human clay, out of which 
have sprung successive crops of gravestones, 
that flourish their allotted time, and disappear, 
like the weeds and flowers in their briefer period. 
The English climate is very unfavorable to the 
endurance of memorials in the open air. Twenty 
years of it suffice to give as much antiquity of 
aspect, whether to tombstone or edifice, as a 
hundred years of our own drier atmosphere,— 
so soon do the drizzly rains and constant mois¬ 
ture corrode the surface of marble or freestone. 
Sculptured edges lose their sharpness in a year 
or two; yellow lichens overspread a beloved 
name, and obliterate it while it is yet fresh upon 
some survivor’s heart. Time gnaws an English 
72 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


gravestone with wonderful appetite; and when 
the inscription is quite illegible, the sexton takes 
the useless slab away, and perhaps makes a 
hearthstone of it, and digs up the unripe bones 
which it ineffectually tried to memorialize, and 
gives the bed to another sleeper. In the Char¬ 
ter Street burial ground at Salem, and in the old 
graveyard on the hill at Ipswich, I have seen 
more ancient gravestones, with legible inscrip¬ 
tions on them, than in any English church¬ 
yard. 

And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile 
as it generally is to the long remembrance of 
departed people, has sometimes a lovely way of 
dealing with the records on Certain monuments 
that lie horizontally in the open air. The rain 
falls into the deep incisions of the letters, and 
has scarcely time to be dried away before an¬ 
other shower sprinkles the flat stone again, and 
replenishes those little reservoirs. The unseen, 
mysterious seeds of mosses find their way into 
the lettered furrows, and are made to germinate 
by the continual moisture and watery sunshine 
of the English sky; and by and by, in a year, 
or two years, or many years, behold the com¬ 
plete inscription — 

tyzxt ILpett) tl )t 115oDp t 

and all the rest of the tender falsehood — beauti¬ 
fully embossed in raised letters of living green, 
73 


OUR OLD HOME 


a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab ! 
It becomes more legible, under the skyey in¬ 
fluences, after the world has forgotten the de¬ 
ceased, than when it was fresh from the stone¬ 
cutter’s hands. It outlives the grief of friends. 
I first saw an example of this in Bebbington 
churchyard, 1 in Cheshire, and thought that 
Nature must needs have had a special tender¬ 
ness for the person (no noted man, however, in 
the world’s history) so long ago laid beneath 
that stone, since she took such wonderful pains 
to “ keep his memory green.” Perhaps the 
proverbial phrase just quoted may have had 
its origin in the natural phenomenon here 
described. 

While we rested ourselves on a horizontal 
monument, which was elevated just high enough 
to be a convenient seat, I observed that one of 
the gravestones lay very close to the church,— 
so close that the droppings of the eaves would 
fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that 
grave had desired to creep under the church 
wall. On closer inspection, we found an almost 

1 There were monuments about the church [of Bebbington J, some lying 
flat on the ground, others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, 
and almost all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique. But on 
reading some of the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent j 
for, in fact, twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more 
antiquity of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, than a hundred years 
of our own, — so soon do lichens creep over the surface, so soon does it 
blacken, so soon do the edges lose their sharpness, so soon does Time 
gnaw away the records. — Notes of Travel , L 32. 

74 



LEAMINGTON SPA 


illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty 
made out this forlorn verse : — 

“ Poorly lived. 

And poorly died. 

Poorly buried. 

And no one cried.** 

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold 
and luckless life, death, and burial into fewer 
words, or more impressive ones ; at least, we 
found them impressive, perhaps because we had 
to re-create the inscription by scraping away 
the lichens from the faintly traced letters. The 
grave was on the shady and damp side of the 
church, endwise towards it, the headstone being 
within about three feet of the foundation wall; 
so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he 
must have been doubled up to fit him into his 
final resting-place. No wonder that his epitaph 
murmured against so poor a burial as this ! His 
name, as well as I could make it out, was Treeo, 
— John Treeo, I think, — and he died in 1810, 
at the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is 
so overgrown with grass and weeds, so covered 
with unsightly lichens, and so crumbly with time 
and foul weather, that it is questionable whether 
anybody will ever be at the trouble of decipher¬ 
ing it again. But there is a quaint and sad kind 
of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree 
as my pen may do it) the probabilities of ob¬ 
livion for poor John Treeo, and asking a little 
75 


OUR OLD HOME 


sympathy for him, half a century after his death, 
and making him better and more widely known, 
at least, than any other slumberer in Lillington 
churchyard : he having been, as appearances go, 
the outcast of them all. 

You find similar old churches and villages 
in all the neighboring country, at the distance 
of every two or three miles; and I describe 
them, not as being rare, but because they are 
so common and characteristic. The village of 
Whitnash, within twenty minutes* walk of Leam¬ 
ington, looks as secluded, as rural, and as little 
disturbed by the fashions of to-day, as if Dr. 
Jephson had never developed all those Parades 
and Crescents out of his magic well. I used to 
wonder whether the inhabitants had ever yet 
heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of pro¬ 
gress, had even reached the epoch of stage¬ 
coaches. As you approach the village, while it 
is yet unseen, you observe a tall, overshadow¬ 
ing canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you 
almost hesitate to follow the public road, on 
account of the remoteness that seems to exist 
between the precincts of this old-world com¬ 
munity and the thronged modern street out of 
which you have so recently emerged. Ventur¬ 
ing onward, however, you soon find yourself in 
the heart of Whitnash, and see an irregular ring 
of ancient rustic dwellings surrounding the vil¬ 
lage green, on one side of which stands the 
76 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


church, with its square Norman tower and bat¬ 
tlements, while close adjoining is the vicarage, 
made picturesque by peaks and gables. At 
first glimpse, none of the houses appear to be 
less than two or three centuries old, and they 
are of the ancient, wooden-framed fashion, with 
thatched roofs, which give them the air of birds’ 
nests, thereby assimilating them closely to the 
simplicity of nature. 

The church tower is mossy and much gnawed 
by time ; it has narrow loopholes up and down 
its front and sides, and an arched window over 
the low portal, set with small panes of glass, 
cracked, dim, and irregular, through which a 
bygone age is peeping out into the daylight. 
Some of those old, grotesque faces, called gar¬ 
goyles, are seen on the projections of the archi¬ 
tecture. The churchyard is very small, and is 
encompassed by a gray stone fence that looks 
as ancient as the church itself. In front of the 
tower, on the village green, is a yew-tree of in¬ 
calculable age, with a vast circumference of trunk, 
but a very scanty head of foliage ; though its 
boughs still keep some of the vitality which, per¬ 
haps, was in its early prime when the Saxon in¬ 
vaders founded Whitnash. A thousand years 
is no extraordinary antiquity in the lifetime of 
a yew. We were pleasantly startled, however, 
by discovering an exuberance of more youthful 
life than we had thought possible in so old a 
77 


OUR OLD HOME 


tree; for the faces of two children laughed at 
us out of an opening in the trunk, which had 
become hollow with long decay. On one side 
of the yew stood a framework of worm-eaten 
timber, the use and meaning of which puzzled 
me exceedingly, till I made it out to be the vil¬ 
lage stocks ; a public institution that, in its day, 
had doubtless hampered many a pair of shank- 
bones, now crumbling in the adjacent church¬ 
yard. It is not to be supposed, however, that 
this old-fashioned mode of* punishment is still 
in vogue among the good people of Whitnash. 
The vicar of the parish has antiquarian propen¬ 
sities, and had probably dragged the stocks out 
of some dusty hiding-place and set them up on 
the former site as a curiosity. 

I disquiet myself in vain with the effort to 
hit upon some characteristic feature, or assem¬ 
blage of features, that shall convey to the reader 
the influence of hoar antiquity lingering into 
the present daylight, as I so often felt it in these 
old English scenes. It is only an American who 
can feel it; and even he begins to find himself 
growing insensible to its effect, after a long resi¬ 
dence in England. But while you are still new 
in the old country, it thrills you with strange 
emotion to think that this little church of Whit¬ 
nash, humble as it seems, stood for ages under 
the Catholic faith, and has not materially changed 
since Wickliffe’s days, and that it looked as gray 
78 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


as now in Bloody Mary’s time, and that Crom¬ 
well’s troopers broke off the stone noses of those 
same gargoyles that are now grinning in your 
face. So, too, with the immemorial yew-tree ; 
you see its great roots grasping hold of the earth 
like gigantic claws, clinging so sturdily that no 
effort of time can wrench them away; and there 
being life in the old tree, you feel all the more 
as if a contemporary witness were telling you of 
the things that have been. It has lived among 
men, and been a familiar object to them, and 
seen them brought to be christened and mar¬ 
ried and buried in the neighboring church and 
churchyard, through so many centuries, that it 
knows all about our race, so far as fifty genera¬ 
tions of the Whitnash people can supply such 
knowledge. 

And, after all, what a weary life it must have 
been for the old tree! Tedious beyond imagi¬ 
nation ! Such, I think, is the final impression 
on the mind of an American visitor, when his 
delight at finding something permanent begins 
to yield to his Western love of change, and he 
becomes sensible of the heavy air of a spot 
where the forefathers and foremothers have 
grown up together, intermarried, and died, 
through a long succession of lives, without any 
intermixture of new elements, till family features 
and character are all run in the same inevitable 
mould. Life is there fossilized in its greenest 
79 


OUR OLD HOME 


leaf. The man who died yesterday or ever so 
long ago walks the village street to-day, and 
chooses the same wife that he married a hundred 
years since, and must be buried again to-mor¬ 
row under the same kindred dust that has already 
covered him half a score of times. The stone 
threshold of his cottage is worn away with his 
hobnailed footsteps, shuffling over it from the 
reign of the first Plantagenet to that of Victo¬ 
ria. Better than this is the lot of our restless 
countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them 
tend always towards “ fresh woods and pastures 
new.” Rather than such monotony of sluggish 
ages, loitering on a village green, toiling in he¬ 
reditary fields, listening to the parson’s drone 
lengthened through centuries in the gray Nor¬ 
man church, let us welcome whatever change 
may come, — change of place, social customs, 
political institutions, modes of worship, — trust¬ 
ing that, if all present things shall vanish, they 
will but make room for better systems, and for 
a higher type of man to clothe his life in them, 
and to fling them off in turn. 

Nevertheless, while an American willingly ac¬ 
cepts growth and change as the law of his own 
national and private existence, he has a singular 
tenderness for the stone-encrusted institutions 
of the mother country. The reason may be 
(though I should prefer a more generous ex¬ 
planation) that he recognizes the tendency of 
80 


LEAMINGTON SPA 

these hardened forms to stiffen her joints and 
fetter her ankles, in the race and rivalry of im¬ 
provement. I hated to see so much as a twig 
of ivy wrenched away from an old wall in Eng¬ 
land. Yet change is at work, even in such a 
village as Whitnash. At a subsequent visit, 
looking more critically at the irregular circle of 
dwellings that surround the yew-tree and con¬ 
front the church, I perceived that some of the 
houses must have been built within no long 
time, although the thatch, the quaint gables, 
and the old oaken framework of the others dif¬ 
fused an air of antiquity over the whole assem¬ 
blage. The church itself was undergoing repair 
and restoration, which is but another name for 
change. Masons were making patchwork on 
the front of the tower, and were sawing a slab 
of stone and piling up bricks to strengthen the 
side wall, or possibly to enlarge the ancient edi¬ 
fice by an additional aisle. Moreover, they had 
dug an immense pit in the churchyard, long and 
broad, and fifteen feet deep, two thirds of which 
profundity were discolored by human decay, 
and mixed up with crumbly bones. What this 
excavation was intended for I could nowise 
imagine, unless it were the very pit in which 
Longfellow bids the “ Dead Past bury its dead,” 
and Whitnash, of all places in the world, were 
going to avail itself of our poet’s suggestion. 
If so, it must needs be confessed that many pic- 
81 


OUR OLD HOME 


turesque and delightful things would be thrown 
into the hole, and covered out of sight forever. 

The article which I am writing has taken its 
own course, and occupied itself almost wholly 
with country churches; whereas I had purposed 
to attempt a description of some of the many 
old towns — Warwick, Coventry, Kenilworth, 
Stratford-on-Avon — which lie within an easy 
scope of Leamington. And still another church 
presents itself to my remembrance. It is that 
of Hatton, on which I stumbled in the course 
of a forenoon's ramble, and paused a little while 
to look at it for the sake of old Dr. Parr, who 
was once its vicar. Hatton, so far as I could 
discover, has no public house, no shop, no con¬ 
tiguity of roofs (as in most English villages, 
however small), but is merely an ancient neigh¬ 
borhood of farmhouses, spacious, and standing 
wide apart, each within its own precincts, and 
offering a most comfortable aspect of orchards, 
harvest-fields, barns, stacks, and all manner of 
rural plenty. It seemed to be a community of 
old settlers, among whom everything had been 
going on prosperously since an epoch beyond 
the memory of man ; and they kept a certain 
privacy among themselves, and dwelt on a cross¬ 
road, at the entrance of which was a barred gate, 
hospitably open, but still impressing me with a 
sense of scarcely warrantable intrusion. After 
all, in some shady nook of those gentle War- 
82 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


wickshire slopes, there may have been a denser 
and more populous settlement styled Hatton, 
which I never reached. 

Emerging from the by-road, and entering 
upon one that crossed it at right angles and led 
to Warwick, I espied the church of Dr. Parr. 
Like the others which I have described, it had a 
low stone tower, square, and battlemented at its 
summit: for all these little churches seem to 
have been built on the same model, and nearly at 
the same measurement, and have even a greater 
family likeness than the cathedrals. As I ap¬ 
proached, the bell of the tower (a remarkably 
deep-toned bell, considering how small it was) 
flung its voice abroad, and told me that it was 
noon. The church stands among its graves, a 
little removed from the wayside, quite apart 
from any collection of houses, and with no signs 
of a vicarage; it is a good deal shadowed by 
trees, and not wholly destitute of ivy. The 
body of the edifice, unfortunately (and it is an 
outrage which the English churchwardens are 
fond of perpetrating), has been newly covered 
with a yellowish plaster or wash, so as quite to 
destroy the aspect of antiquity, except upon the 
tower, which wears the dark gray hue of many 
centuries. The chancel window is painted with a 
representation of Christ upon the Cross, and all 
the other windows are full of painted or stained 
glass, but none of it ancient, nor (if it be fair to 
83 


OUR OLD HOME 


judge from without of what ought to be seen 
within) possessing any of the tender glory that 
should be the inheritance of this branch of Art, 
revived from mediaeval times. I stepped over 
the graves, and peeped in at two or three of 
the windows, and saw the snug interior of the 
church glimmering through the many-colored 
panes, like a show of commonplace objects 
under the fantastic influence of a dream: for the 
floor was covered with modern pews, very like 
what we may see in a New England meeting¬ 
house, though, I think, a little more favorable 
than those would be to the quiet slumbers of 
the Hatton farmers and their families. Those 
who slept under Dr. .Parr’s preaching now pro¬ 
long their nap, I suppose, in the churchyard 
round about, and can scarcely have drawn much 
spiritual benefit from any truths that he con¬ 
trived to tell them in their lifetime. It struck 
me as a rare example (even where examples are 
numerous) of a man utterly misplaced, that this 
enormous scholar, great in the classic tongues, 
and inevitably converting his own simplest ver¬ 
nacular into a learned language, should have 
been set up in this homely pulpit, and ordained 
to preach salvation to a rustic audience, to 
whom it is difficult to imagine how he could 
ever have spoken one available word. 

Almost always, in visiting such scenes as I 
have been attempting to describe, I had a sin- 
84 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


gular sense of having been there before. The 
ivy-grown English churches (even that of Beb- 
bington, 1 the first that I beheld) were quite as fa¬ 
miliar to me, when fresh from home, as the old 
wooden meeting-house in Salem, which used, 
on wintry Sabbaths, to be the frozen purgatory 
of my childhood. This was a bewildering, 
yet very delightful emotion, fluttering about 
me like a faint summer wind, and filling my 
imagination with a thousand half-remembrances, 
which looked as vivid as sunshine at a side 
glance, but faded quite away whenever I at¬ 
tempted to grasp and define them. Of course, 
the explanation of the mystery was, that history, 
poetry, and fiction, books of travel, and the 
talk of tourists, had given me pretty accurate 
preconceptions of the common objects of Eng¬ 
lish scenery, and these, being long ago vivified 
by a youthful fancy, had insensibly taken their 

1 Soon we reached the church, and I have seen nothing yet in England 
that so completely answered my idea of what such a thing was, as this old 
village church of Bebbington. It is quite a large edifice, built in the form 
of a cross, a low peaked porch in the side, over which, rudely cut in stone, 
is the date i 300 and something. The steeple has ivy on it, and looks 
old, old, old $ so does the whole church, though portions of it have been 
renewed, but not so as to impair the aspect of heavy, substantial endurance, 
and long, long decay, which may go on hundreds of years longer before 
the church is a ruin. There it stands, among the surrounding graves, look¬ 
ing just the same as it did in Bloody Mary’s days 5 just as it did in Crom¬ 
well’s time. A bird (and perhaps many birds) had its nest in the steeples 
and flew in and out of the loopholes that were opened into it. The stone 
framework of the windows looked particularly old. — Notes of Travel , I. 
3 *- 


85 


OUR OLD HOME 


places among the images of things actually seen. 
Yet the illusion was often so powerful, that I 
almost doubted whether such airy remembrances 
might not be a sort of innate idea, the print of 
a recollection in some ancestral mind, transmit¬ 
ted, with fainter and fainter impress through 
several descents, to my own. I felt, indeed, 
like the stalwart progenitor in person, returning 
to the hereditary haunts after more than two 
hundred years, and finding the church, the hall, 
the farmhouse, the cottage, hardly changed dur¬ 
ing his long absence, — the same shady by-paths 
and hedge-lanes, the same veiled sky, and green 
lustre of the lawns and fields, — while his own 
affinities for these things, a little obscured by 
disuse, were reviving at every step. 

An American is not very apt to love the 
English people, as a whole, on whatever length 
of acquaintance. I fancy that they would value 
our regard, and even reciprocate it in their 
ungracious way, if we could give it to them 
in spite of all rebuffs; but they are beset by a 
curious and inevitable infelicity, which compels 
them, as it were, to keep up what they seem to 
consider a wholesome bitterness of feeling be¬ 
tween themselves and all other nationalities, es¬ 
pecially that of America. 1 They will never con¬ 
fess it; nevertheless, it is as essential a tonic to 


1 If an Englishman were individually acquainted with all our twenty- 
five millions of Americans, and liked every one of them, and believed that 

86 


LEAMINGTON SPA 


them as their bitter ale. Therefore, — and pos¬ 
sibly, too, from a similar narrowness in his own 
character, — an American seldom feels quite as 
if he were at home among the English people. 
If he do so, he has ceased to be an American. 1 
But it requires no long residence to make him 
love their island, and appreciate it as thoroughly 
as they themselves do. For my part, I used 
to wish that we could annex it, transferring 
their thirty millions of inhabitants to some con¬ 
venient wilderness in the great West, and put¬ 
ting half or a quarter as many of ourselves into 
their places. The change would be beneficial 
to both parties. We, in our dry atmosphere, 
are getting too nervous, haggard, dyspeptic, 
extenuated, unsubstantial, theoretic, and need 
to be made grosser. John Bull, on the other 
hand, has grown bulbous, long bodied, short¬ 
legged, heavy witted, material, and, in a word, 
too intensely English. In a few more centuries 
he will be the earthliest creature that ever the 
earth saw. Heretofore Providence has obviated 

each man of those millions was a Christian, honest, upright, and kind, he 
would doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate, however he might 
love and honor the individuals. — Notes of Travel , II. 162. 

1 There are some Englishmen whom I like, — one or two for whom 
I might say I have an affection ; but still there is not the same union 
between us as if they were Americans. A cold, thin medium intervenes 
betwixt our most intimate approaches. It puts me in mind of Alnaschar 
and his princess, with the cold steel blade of his scimitar between them. 
Perhaps if I were at home I might feel differently ; but in a foreign land I 
can never forget the distincton between English and American. — Ibid., 
II. 21. 


87 


OUR OLD HOME 


such a result by timely intermixtures of alien 
races with the old English stock; so that each 
successive conquest of England has proved a 
victory by the revivification and improvement 
of its native manhood. Cannot America and 
England hit upon some scheme to secure even 
greater advantages to both nations ? 

88 


Ill 


ABOUT WARWICK 

B ETWEEN bright, new Leamington, the 
growth of the present century, and rusty 
Warwick, founded by King Cymbeline 
in the twilight ages, a thousand years before the 
mediaeval darkness, there are two roads, either 
of which may be measured by a sober-paced 
pedestrian in less than half an hour. 

One of these avenues flows out of the midst 
of the smart parades and crescents of the for¬ 
mer town, — along by hedges and beneath the 
shadow of great elms, past stuccoed Elizabethan 
villas and wayside alehouses, and through a ham¬ 
let of modern aspect, — and runs straight into 
the principal thoroughfare of Warwick. The 
battlemented turrets of the castle, embowered 
halfway up in foliage, and the tall, slender 
tower of St. Mary’s Church, rising from among 
clustered roofs, have been visible almost from 
the commencement of the walk. Near the 
entrance of the town stands St. John’s School- 
house, a picturesque old edifice of stone, with 
four peaked gables in a row, alternately plain 
and ornamented, and wide, projecting windows, 
89 


OUR OLD HOME 


and a spacious and venerable porch, all over¬ 
grown with moss and ivy, and shut in from the 
world by a high stone fence, not less mossy 
than the gabled front. There is an iron gate, 
through the rusty open-work of which you see 
a grassy lawn, and almost expect to meet the 
shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past 
generations, peeping forth from their infantile 
antiquity into the strangeness of our present 
life. I find a peculiar charm in these long-es¬ 
tablished English schools, where the schoolboy 
of to-day sits side by side, as it were, with his 
great-grandsire, on the same old benches, and 
often, I believe, thumbs a later, but unimproved 
edition of the same old grammar or arith¬ 
metic. The new-fangled notions of a Yankee 
school committee would madden many a peda¬ 
gogue, and shake down the roof of many a 
time-honored seat of learning, in the mother 
country. 

At this point, however, we will turn back, in 
order to follow up the other road from Leam¬ 
ington, which was the one that I loved best to 
take. It pursues a straight and level course, 
bordered by wide gravel walks and overhung 
by the frequent elm, with here a cottage and 
there a villa; on one side a wooden plantation, 
and on the other a rich field of grass or grain ; 
until, turning at right angles, it brings you to 
an arched bridge over the Avon. Its parapet 
90 


ABOUT WARWICK 

is a balustrade carved out of freestone, into the 
soft substance of which a multitude of persons 
have engraved their names or initials, many of 
them now illegible, while others, more deeply 
cut, are illuminated with fresh green moss. 
These tokens indicate a famous spot; and 
casting our eyes along the smooth gleam and 
shadow of the quiet stream, through a vista of 
willows that droop on either side into the water, 
we behold the gray magnificence of Warwick 
Castle, uplifting itself among stately trees, and 
rearing its turrets high above their loftiest 
branches. We can scarcely think the scene 
real, so completely do those machicolated tow¬ 
ers, the long line of battlements, the massive 
buttresses, the high-windowed walls, shape out 
our indistinct ideas of the antique time. It 
might rather seem as if the sleepy river (being 
Shakespeare's Avon, and often, no doubt, the 
mirror of his gorgeous visions) were dreaming 
now of a lordly residence that stood here many 
centuries ago ; and this fantasy is strengthened, 
when you observe that the image in the tran¬ 
quil water has all the distinctness of the actual 
structure. Either might be the reflection of 
the other. Wherever Time has gnawed one of 
the stones, you see the mark of his tooth just 
as plainly in the sunken reflection. Each is so 
perfect, that the upper vision seems a castle in 
the air, and the lower one an old stronghold of 
9i 


OUR OLD HOME 


feudalism, miraculously kept from decay in an 
enchanted river. 

A ruinous and ivy-grown bridge, that pro¬ 
jects from the bank a little on the hither side 
of the castle, has the effect of making the scene 
appear more entirely apart from the every-day 
world, for it ends abruptly in the middle of the 
stream, — so that, if a cavalcade of the knights 
and ladies of romance should issue from the 
old walls, they could never tread on earthly 
ground any more than we, approaching from 
the side of modern realism, can overleap the 
gulf between our domain and theirs. Yet, if 
we seek to disenchant ourselves, it may readily 
be done. Crossing the bridge on which we 
stand, and passing a little farther on, we come 
to the entrance of the castle, abutting on the 
highway, and hospitably open at certain hours 
to all curious pilgrims who choose to disburse 
half a crown or so toward the support of the 
earl’s domestics. The sight of that long series 
of historic rooms, full of such splendors and 
rarities as a great English family necessarily 
gathers about itself in its hereditary abode, and 
in the lapse of ages, is well worth the money, 
or ten times as much, if indeed the value of the 
spectacle could be reckoned in money’s worth. 
But after the attendant has hurried you from 
end to end of the edifice, repeating a guide¬ 
book by rote, and exorcising each successive 
92 


ABOUT WARWICK 


hall of its poetic glamour and witchcraft by 
the mere tone in which he talks about it, you 
will make the doleful discovery that Warwick 
Castle has ceased to be a dream. It is better, 
methinks, to linger on the bridge, gazing at 
Caesar’s Tower, and Guy’s Tower, in the dim 
English sunshine above, and in the placid Avon 
below, and still keep them as thoughts in your 
own mind, than climb to their summits, or touch 
even a stone of their actual substance. They 
will have all the more reality for you, as stal¬ 
wart relics of immemorial time, if you are rev¬ 
erent enough to leave them in the intangible 
sanctity of a poetic vision. 

From the bridge over the Avon, the road 
passes in front of the castle gate, and soon enters 
the principal street of Warwick, a little be¬ 
yond St. John’s Schoolhouse, already described. 
Chester itself, most antique of English towns, 
can hardly show quainter architectural shapes 
than many of the buildings that border this 
street. They are mostly of the timber-and-plas- 
ter kind, with bowed and decrepit ridge-poles, 
and a whole chronology of various patchwork 
in their walls ; their low-browed doorways open 
upon a sunken floor; their projecting stories 
peep, as it were, over one another’s shoulders, 
and rise into a multiplicity of peaked gables; 
they have curious windows, breaking out irreg¬ 
ularly all over the house, some even in the 
93 


OUR OLD HOME 


roof, set in their own little peaks, opening lat¬ 
tice-wise, and furnished with twenty small panes 
of lozenge-shaped glass. The architecture of 
these edifices (a visible oaken framework, show¬ 
ing the whole skeleton of the house, — as if a 
man’s bones should be arranged on his outside, 
and his flesh seen through the interstices) is 
often imitated by modern builders, and with 
sufficiently picturesque effect. The objection 
is, that such houses, like all imitations of by¬ 
gone styles, have an air of affectation; they do 
not seem to be built in earnest; they are no 
better than playthings, or overgrown baby- 
houses, in which nobody should be expected to 
encounter the serious realities of either birth or 
death. Besides, originating nothing, we leave 
no fashions for another age to copy, when we 
ourselves shall have grown antique. 

Old as it looks, all this portion of Warwick 
has over-brimmed, as it were, from the original 
settlement, being outside of the ancient wall. 
The street soon runs under an arched gateway, 
with a church or some other venerable structure 
above it, and admits us into the heart of the 
town. At one of my first visits, I witnessed a 
military display. A regiment of Warwickshire 
militia, probably commanded by the Earl, was 
going through its drill in the market-place; and 
on the collar of one of the officers was embroid¬ 
ered the Bear and Ragged Staff, which has been 
94 


ABOUT WARWICK 


the cognizance of the Warwick earldom from 
time immemorial. The soldiers were sturdy 
young men, with the simple, stolid, yet kindly 
faces of English rustics, looking exceedingly 
well in a body, but slouching into a yeoman-like 
carriage and appearance the moment they were 
dismissed from drill. Squads of them were 
distributed everywhere about the streets, and 
sentinels were posted at various points; and 
I saw a sergeant, with a great key in his hand 
(big enough to have been the key of the castle’s 
main entrance when the gate was thickest and 
heaviest), apparently setting a guard. 

Thus, centuries after feudal times are past, 
we find warriors still gathering under the old 
castle walls, and commanded by a feudal lord, 
just as in the days of the King-Maker, who, 
no doubt, often mustered his retainers in the 
same market-place where I beheld this modern 
regiment. 

The interior of the town wears a less old- 
fashioned aspect than the suburbs through which 
we approach it; and the High Street has shops 
with modern plate-glass, and buildings with 
stuccoed fronts, exhibiting as few projections to 
hang a thought or sentiment upon as if an archi¬ 
tect of to-day had planned them. And, indeed, 
so far as their surface goes, they are perhaps 
new enough to stand unabashed in an American 
street; but behind these renovated faces, with 
95 


OUR OLD HOME 


their monotonous lack of expression, there is 
probably the substance of the same old town 
that wore a Gothic exterior in the Middle Ages. 
The street is an emblem of England itself. 
What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and 
fortunate adaptation of what such a people as 
ourselves would destroy. The new things are 
based and supported on sturdy old things, 
and derive a massive strength from their deep 
and immemorial foundations, though with such 
limitations and impediments as only an Eng¬ 
lishman could endure. But he likes to feel 
the weight of all the past upon his back; and, 
moreover, the antiquity that overburdens him 
has taken root in his being, and has grown to 
be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is 
no getting rid of it without tearing his whole 
structure to pieces. In my judgment, as he 
appears to be sufficiently comfortable under the 
mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on with 
it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle 
which is by no means without its charm for a 
disinterested and unencumbered observer. 

When the old edifice, or the antiquated cus¬ 
tom or institution, appears in its pristine form, 
without any attempt at intermarrying it with 
modern fashions, an American cannot but ad¬ 
mire the picturesque effect produced by the 
sudden cropping up of an apparently dead and 
buried state of society into the actual present, 
96 


ABOUT WARWICK 

of which he is himself a part. We need not go 
far in Warwick without encountering an instance 
of the kind. Proceeding westward through the 
town, we find ourselves confronted by a huge 
mass of natural rock, hewn into something 
like architectural shape, and penetrated by a 
vaulted passage, which may well have been one 
of King Cymbeline’s original gateways; and on 
the top of the rock, over the archway, sits a 
small old church, communicating with an an¬ 
cient edifice, or assemblage of edifices, that look 
down from a similar elevation on the side of 
the street. A range of trees half hides the lat¬ 
ter establishment from the sun. It presents a 
curious and venerable specimen of the timber- 
and-plaster style of building, in which some of 
the finest old houses in England are constructed ; 
the front projects into porticoes and vestibules, 
and rises into many gables, some in a row, and 
others crowning semi-detached portions of the 
structure; the windows mostly open on hinges, 
but show a delightful irregularity of shape 
and position ; a multiplicity of chimneys break 
through the roof at their own will, or, at least, 
without any settled purpose of the architect. 
The whole affair looks very old, — so old, in¬ 
deed, that the front bulges forth, as if the timber 
framework were a little weary, at last, of stand¬ 
ing erect so long; but the state of repair is so 
perfect, and there is such an indescribable aspect 
97 


OUR OLD HOME 


of continuous vitality within the system of this 
aged house, that you feel confident that there 
may be safe shelter yet, and perhaps for cen¬ 
turies to come, under its time-honored roof. 
And on a bench, sluggishly enjoying the sun¬ 
shine, and looking into the street of Warwick 
as from a life apart, a few old men are generally 
to be seen, wrapped in long cloaks, on which 
you may detect the glistening of a silver badge 
representing the Bear and Ragged Staff. These 
decorated worthies are some of the twelve 
brethren of Leicester’s Hospital, — a commu¬ 
nity which subsists to-day under the identical 
modes that were established for it in the reign 
of Queen Elizabeth, and of course retains many 
features of a social life that has vanished almost 
everywhere else. 

The edifice itself dates from a much older 
period than the charitable institution of which 
it is now the home. It was the seat of a reli¬ 
gious fraternity far back in the Middle Ages, 
and continued so till Henry VIII. turned all 
the priesthood of England out of doors, and 
put the most unscrupulous of his favorites into 
their vacant abodes. In many instances, the old 
monks had chosen the sites of their domiciles 
so well, and built them on such a broad system 
of beauty and convenience, that their lay-occu¬ 
pants found it easy to convert them into stately 
and comfortable homes ; and as such they still 
98 


ABOUT WARWICK 

exist, with something of the antique reverence 
lingering about them. The structure now be¬ 
fore us seems to have been first granted to Sir 
Nicholas Lestrange, who perhaps intended, like 
other men, to establish his household gods in 
the niches whence he had thrown down the im¬ 
ages of saints, and to lay his hearth where an 
altar had stood. But there was probably a nat¬ 
ural reluctance in those days (when Catholicism, 
so lately repudiated, must needs have retained 
an influence over all but the most obdurate 
characters) to bring one’s hopes of domestic 
prosperity and a fortunate lineage into direct 
hostility with the awful claims of the ancient 
religion. At all events, there is still a supersti¬ 
tious idea, betwixt a fantasy and a belief, that 
the possession of former Church property has 
drawn a curse along with it, not only among 
the posterity of those to whom it was originally 
granted, but wherever it has subsequently been 
transferred, even if honestly bought and paid 
for. There are families, now inhabiting some 
of the beautiful old abbeys, who appear to in¬ 
dulge a species of pride in recording the strange 
deaths and ugly shapes of misfortune that have 
occurred among their predecessors, and may be 
supposed likely to dog their own pathway down 
the ages of futurity. Whether Sir Nicholas 
Lestrange, in the beef-eating days of Old Harry 
and Elizabeth, was a nervous man, and subject 
99 


OUR OLD HOME 


to apprehensions of this kind, I cannot tell; 
but it is certain that he speedily rid himself of 
the spoils of the Church, and that, within twenty 
years afterwards, the edifice became the property 
of the famous Dudley, Earl of Leicester, brother 
of the Earl of Warwick. He devoted the an¬ 
cient religious precinct to a charitable use, en¬ 
dowing it with an ample revenue, and making 
it the perpetual home of twelve poor, honest, 
and war-broken soldiers, mostly his own retain¬ 
ers, and natives either of Warwickshire or 
Gloucestershire. These veterans, or others 
wonderfully like them, still occupy their monk¬ 
ish dormitories, and haunt the time-darkened 
corridors and galleries of the hospital, leading a 
life of old-fashioned comfort, wearing the old- 
fashioned cloaks, and burnishing the identical 
silver badges which the Earl of Leicester gave 
to the original twelve. He is said to have been 
a bad man in his day ; but he has succeeded in 
prolonging one good deed into what was to him 
a distant future. 

On the projecting story, over the arched 
entrance, there is the date, 1571, and several 
coats of arms, either the Earl’s or those of his 
kindred, and immediately above the doorway a 
stone sculpture of the Bear and Ragged Staff. 

Passing through the arch, we find ourselves 
in a quadrangle, or enclosed court, such as always 
formed the central part of a great family resi- 
100 


ABOUT WARWICK 

dence in Queen Elizabeth’s time, and earlier. 
There can hardly be a more perfect specimen of 
such an establishment than Leicester’s Hospital. 
The quadrangle is a sort of sky-roofed hall, to 
which there is convenient access from all parts 
of the house. The four inner fronts, with their 
high, steep roofs and sharp gables, look into it 
from antique windows, and through open corri¬ 
dors and galleries along the sides; and there 
seems to be a richer display of architectural de¬ 
vices and ornaments, quainter carvings in oak, 
and more fantastic shapes of the timber frame¬ 
work, than on the side toward the street. On 
the wall opposite the arched entrance are the 
following inscriptions, comprising such moral 
rules, I presume, as were deemed most essential 
for the daily observance of the community : 
“ pernor all $0en ” — “ jfear <0od ” — “ ibonor the 
King ” — “ Lobe tfje BrotberbooD ; ” and again, 
as if this latter injunction needed emphasis and 
repetition among a household of aged people 
soured with the hard fortune of their previous 
lives, “!5e tun&lp affection** one to another,” 
One sentence, over a door communicating with 
the Master’s side of the house, is addressed to 
that dignitary, — “H?e that ruletb ober men must 
be fustt*” All these are charactered in old Eng¬ 
lish letters, and form part of the elaborate or¬ 
namentation of the house. Everywhere — on 
the walls, over windows and doors, and at all 

IOI 


L.of C. 


OUR OLD HOME 


points where there is room to place them — 
appear escutcheons of arms, cognizances, and 
crests, emblazoned in their proper colors, and 
illuminating the ancient quadrangle with their 
splendor. One of these devices is a large im¬ 
age of a porcupine on an heraldic wreath, being 
the crest of the Lords de Lisle. But especially 
is the cognizance of the Bear and Ragged Staff 
repeated over and over, and over again and 
again, in a great variety of attitudes, — at full 
length and half length, in paint and in oaken 
sculpture, in bas-relief and rounded image. The 
founder of the hospital was certainly disposed 
to reckon his own beneficence as among the 
hereditary glories of his race; and had he lived 
and died a half century earlier, he would have 
kept up an old Catholic custom, by enjoining 
the twelve bedesmen to pray for the welfare of 
his soul. 

At my first visit, some of the brethren were 
seated on the bench outside of the edifice, 
looking down into the street; but they did not 
vouchsafe me a word, and seemed so estranged 
from modern life, so enveloped in antique cus¬ 
toms and old-fashioned cloaks, that to converse 
with them would have been like shouting across 
the gulf between our age and Queen Eliz¬ 
abeth’s. So I passed into the quadrangle, and 
found it quite solitary, except that a plain and 
neat old woman happened to be crossing it, 
102 


ABOUT WARWICK 


with an aspect of business and carefulness that 
bespoke her a woman of this world, and not 
merely a shadow of the past. Asking her if I 
could come in, she answered very readily and 
civilly that I might, and said that I was free to 
look about me, hinting a hope, however, that I 
would not open the private doors of the brother¬ 
hood, as some visitors were in the habit of do¬ 
ing. Under her guidance, I went into what was 
formerly the great hall of the establishment, 
where King James I. had once been feasted by 
an Earl of Warwick, as is commemorated by an 
inscription on the cobwebbed and dingy wall. 
It is a very spacious and barnlike apartment, 
with a brick floor, and a vaulted roof, the rafters 
of which are oaken beams, wonderfully carved, 
but hardly visible in the duskiness that broods 
aloft. The hall may have made a splendid ap¬ 
pearance, when it was decorated with rich tapes¬ 
try, and illuminated with chandeliers, cressets, 
and torches glistening upon silver dishes, where 
King James sat at supper among his brilliantly 
dressed nobles ; but it has come to base uses in 
these latter days, — being improved, in Yankee 
phrase, as a brewery and wash-room, and as a 
cellar for the brethren’s separate allotments of 
coal. 

The old lady here left me to myself, and I 
returned into the quadrangle. It was very quiet, 
very handsome, in its own obsolete style, and 
103 


OUR OLD HOME 


must be an exceedingly comfortable place for 
the old people to lounge in, when the inclement 
winds render it inexpedient to walk abroad. 
There are shrubs against the wall, on one side; 
and on another is a cloistered walk, adorned with 
stags' heads and antlers, and running beneath a 
covered gallery, up to which ascends a balus- 
traded staircase. In the portion of the edifice 
opposite the entrance arch are the apartments of 
the Master; and looking into the window (as the 
old woman, at no request of mine, had specially 
informed me that I might), I saw a low, but 
vastly comfortable parlor, very handsomely fur¬ 
nished, and altogether a luxurious place. It had 
a fireplace with an immense arch, the antique 
breadth of which extended almost from wall to 
wall of the room, though now fitted up in such 
a way that the modern coal grate looked very 
diminutive in the midst. Gazing into this plea¬ 
sant interior, it seemed to me that, among these 
venerable surroundings, availing himself of 
whatever was good in former things, and eking 
out their imperfection with the results of mod¬ 
ern ingenuity, the Master might lead a not 
unenviable life. On the cloistered side of the 
quadrangle, where the dark oak panels made the 
enclosed space dusky, I beheld a curtained win¬ 
dow reddened by a great blaze from within, and 
heard the bubbling and squeaking of something 
— doubtless very nice and succulent — that was 
104 


ABOUT WARWICK 


being cooked at the kitchen fire. I think, 
indeed, that a whiff or two of the savory fra¬ 
grance reached my nostrils; at all events, the 
impression grew upon me that Leicester’s 
Hospital is one of the jolliest old domiciles in 
England. 

I was about to depart, when another old wo¬ 
man, very plainly dressed, but fat, comfortable, 
and with a cheerful twinkle in her eyes, came in 
through the arch, and looked curiously at me. 
This repeated apparition of the gentle sex 
(though by no means under its loveliest guise) 
had still an agreeable effect in modifying my 
ideas of an institution which I had supposed to 
be of a stern and monastic character. She asked 
whether I wished to see the hospital, and said 
that the porter, whose office it was to attend to 
visitors, was dead, and would be buried that very 
day, so that the whole establishment could not 
conveniently be shown me. She kindly invited 
me, however, to visit the apartment occupied by 
her husband and herself; so I followed her up 
the antique staircase, along the gallery, and into 
a small, oak-panelled parlor, where sat an old 
man in a long blue garment, who arose and 
saluted me with much courtesy. He seemed a 
very quiet person, and yet had a look of travel 
and adventure, and gray experience, such as I 
could have fancied in a palmer of ancient times, 
who might likewise have worn a similar costume. 

105 


OUR OLD HOME 


The little room was carpeted and neatly fur¬ 
nished ; a portrait of its occupant was hanging 
on the wall; and on a table were two swords 
crossed,— one, probably, his own battle weapon, 
and the other, which I drew half out of the scab¬ 
bard, had an inscription on the blade, purport¬ 
ing that it had been taken from the field of 
Waterloo. My kind old hostess was anxious 
to exhibit all the particulars of their house¬ 
keeping, and led me into the bedroom, which 
was in the nicest order, with a snow-white quilt 
upon the bed; and in a little intervening room 
was a washing and bathing apparatus; a con¬ 
venience (judging from the personal aspect and 
atmosphere of such parties) seldom to be met 
with in the humbler ranks of British life. 

The old soldier and his wife both seemed 
glad of somebody to talk with ; but the good 
woman availed herself of the privilege far more 
copiously than the veteran himself, insomuch 
that he felt it expedient to give her an occasional 
nudge with his elbow in her well-padded ribs. 
“ Don’t you be so talkative ! ” quoth he ; and, 
indeed, he could hardly find space for a word, 
and quite as little after his admonition as before. 
Her nimble tongue ran over the whole system 
of life in the hospital. The brethren, she said, 
had a yearly stipend (the amount of which she 
did not mention), and such decent lodgings as I 
saw, and some other advantages, free ; and, in- 
106 


ABOUT WARWICK 

stead of being pestered with a great many rules, 
and made to dine together at a great table, they 
could manage their little household matters as 
they liked, buying their own dinners, and hay¬ 
ing them cooked in the general kitchen, and eat¬ 
ing them snugly in their own parlors. “ And,” 
added she, rightly deeming this the crowning 
privilege, <c with the Master’s permission, they 
can have their wives to take care of them ; and 
no harm comes of it; and what more can an 
old man desire ? ” It was evident enough that 
the good dame found herself in what she con¬ 
sidered very rich clover, and, moreover, had 
plenty of small occupations to keep her from 
getting rusty and dull; but the veteran im¬ 
pressed me as deriving far less enjoyment from 
the monotonous ease, without fear of change or 
hope of improvement, that had followed upon 
thirty years of peril and vicissitude. I fancied, 
too, that, while pleased with the novelty of a 
stranger’s visit, he was still a little shy of be¬ 
coming a spectacle for the stranger’s curiosity; 
for, if he chose to be morbid about the matter, 
the establishment was but an almshouse, in spite 
of its old-fashioned magnificence, and his fine 
blue cloak only a pauper’s garment with a sil¬ 
ver badge on it that perhaps galled his shoulder. 
In truth, the badge and the peculiar garb, 
though quite in accordance with the manners 
of the Earl of Leicester’s age, are repugnant to 
107 


OUR OLD HOME 


modern prejudices, and might fitly and hu¬ 
manely be abolished. 

A year or two afterwards I paid another visit 
to the hospital, and found a new porter estab¬ 
lished in office, and already capable of talk¬ 
ing like a guide-book about the history, anti¬ 
quities, and present condition of the charity. 
He informed me that the twelve brethren are 
selected from among old soldiers of good char¬ 
acter, whose other resources must not exceed 
an income of five pounds; thus excluding all 
commissioned officers, whose half-pay would 
of course be more than that amount. They 
receive from the hospital an annuity of eighty 
pounds each, besides their apartments, a gar¬ 
ment of fine blue cloth, an annual abundance 
of ale, and a privilege at the kitchen fire ; so 
that, considering the class from which they are 
taken, they may well reckon themselves among 
the fortunate of the earth. Furthermore, they 
are invested with political rights, acquiring a 
vote for member of Parliament in virtue either 
of their income or brotherhood. On the other 
hand, as regards their personal freedom or con¬ 
duct, they are subject to a supervision which 
the Master of the hospital might render ex¬ 
tremely annoying, were he so inclined ; but the 
military restraint under which they have spent 
the active portion of their lives makes it easier 
for them to endure the domestic discipline here 
108 


ABOUT WARWICK 


imposed upon their age. The porter bore his 
testimony (whatever were its value) to their be¬ 
ing as contented and happy as such a set of old 
people could possibly be, and affirmed that they 
spent much time in burnishing their silver 
badges, and were as proud of them as a noble¬ 
man of his star. These badges, by the bye, ex¬ 
cept one that was stolen and replaced in Queen 
Anne’s time, are the very same that decorated 
the original twelve brethren. 

I have seldom met with a better guide than 
my friend the porter. He appeared to take a 
genuine interest in the peculiarities of the estab¬ 
lishment, and yet had an existence apart from 
them, so that he could the better estimate what 
those peculiarities were. To be sure, his know¬ 
ledge and observation were confined to external 
things, but, so far, had a sufficiently extensive 
scope. He led me up the staircase and exhib¬ 
ited portions of the timber framework of the 
edifice that are reckoned to be eight or nine 
hundred years old, and are still neither worm- 
eaten nor decayed ; and traced out what had 
been a great hall in the days of the Catholic 
fraternity, though its area is now filled up with 
the apartments of the twelve brethren ; and 
pointed to ornaments of sculptured oak, done 
in an ancient religious style of art, but hardly 
visible amid the vaulted dimness of the roof. 
Thence we went to the chapel — the Gothic 
109 


OUR OLD HOME 


church which I noted several pages back — sur¬ 
mounting the gateway that stretches half across 
the street. Here the brethren attend daily 
prayer, and have each a prayer-book of the fin¬ 
est paper, with a fair, large type for their old 
eyes. The interior of the chapel is very plain, 
with a picture of no merit for an altar-piece, and 
a single old pane of painted glass in the great 
eastern window, representing, — no saint, nor 
angel, as is customary in such cases, — but that 
grim sinner, the Earl of Leicester. Neverthe¬ 
less, amid so many tangible proofs of his human 
sympathy, one comes to doubt whether the Earl 
could have been such a hardened reprobate, 
after all. 

We ascended the tower of the chapel, and 
looked down between its battlements into the 
street, a hundred feet below us ; while clamber¬ 
ing halfway up were foxglove flowers, weeds, 
small shrubs, and tufts of grass, that had rooted 
themselves into the roughnesses of the stone 
foundation. Far around us lay a rich and lovely 
English landscape, with many a church spire 
and noble country-seat, and several objects of 
high historic interest. Edge Hill, where the 
Puritans defeated Charles I., is in sight on the 
edge of the horizon, and much nearer stands 
the house where Cromwell lodged on the night 
before the battle. Right under our eyes, and 
half enveloping the town with its high-shoul- 
no 


ABOUT WARWICK 


dering wall, so that all the closely compacted 
streets seemed but a precinct of the estate, was 
the Earl of Warwick's delightful park, a wide 
extent of sunny lawns, interspersed with broad 
contiguities of forest shade. Some of the cedars 
of Lebanon were there, — a growth of trees in 
which the Warwick family take an hereditary 
pride. 

The two highest towers of the castle heave 
themselves up out of a mass of foliage, and look 
down in a lordly manner upon the plebeian roofs 
of the town, a part of which are slate-covered 
(these are the modern houses), and a part are 
coated with old red tiles, denoting the more 
ancient edifices. A hundred and sixty or sev¬ 
enty years ago, a great fire destroyed a consid¬ 
erable portion of the town, and doubtless anni¬ 
hilated many structures of a remote antiquity; 
at least, there was a possibility of very old houses 
in the long past of Warwick, which King Cym- 
beline is said to have founded in the year one 
of the Christian era ! 

And this historic fact or poetic fiction, which¬ 
ever it may be, brings to mind a more inde¬ 
structible reality than anything else that has 
occurred within the present field of our vision; 
though this includes the scene of Guy of War¬ 
wick's legendary exploits, and some of those of 
the Round Table, to say nothing of the Bat¬ 
tle of Edge Hill. For perhaps it was in the 
hi 


OUR OLD HOME 


landscape now under our eyes that Posthumus 
wandered with the King’s daughter, the sweet, 
chaste, faithful, and courageous Imogen, the 
tenderest and womanliest woman that Shake¬ 
speare ever made immortal in the world. The 
silver Avon, which we see flowing so quietly by 
the gray castle, may have held their images in 
its bosom. 

The day, though it began brightly, had long 
been overcast, and the clouds now spat down a 
few spiteful drops upon us ; besides that, the 
east wind was very chill; so we descended the 
winding tower stair, and went next into the gar¬ 
den, one side of which is shut in by almost the 
only remaining portion of the old city wall. A 
part of the garden ground is devoted to grass 
and shrubbery, and permeated by gravel walks, 
in the centre of one of which is a beautiful stone 
vase of Egyptian sculpture, that formerly stood 
on the top of a Nilometer, or graduated pillar 
for measuring the rise and fall of the river Nile. 
On the pedestal is a Latin inscription by Dr. 
Parr, who (his vicarage of Hatton being so close 
at hand) was probably often the Master’s guest, 
and smoked his interminable pipe along these 
garden walks. Of the vegetable garden, which 
lies adjacent, the lion’s share is appropriated to 
the Master, and twelve small, separate patches 
to the individual brethren, who cultivate them 
at their own judgment and by their own labor; 

11 2 


ABOUT WARWICK 

and their beans and cauliflowers have a better 
flavor, I doubt not, than if they had received 
them directly from the dead hand of the Earl 
of Leicester, like the rest of their food. In the 
farther part of the garden is an arbor for the 
old men’s pleasure and convenience, and I 
should like well to sit down among them there, 
and find out what is really the bitter and the 
sweet of such a sort of life. As for the old gen¬ 
tlemen themselves, they put me queerly in mind 
of the Salem Custom House, and the venerable 
personages whom I found so quietly at anchor 
there. 

The Master’s residence, forming one entire 
side of the quadrangle, fronts on the garden, 
and wears an aspect at once stately and homely. 
It can hardly have undergone any perceptible 
change within three centuries; but the garden, 
into which its old windows look, has probably 
put off a great many eccentricities and quaint¬ 
nesses, in the way of cunningly clipped shrub¬ 
bery, since the gardener of Queen Elizabeth’s 
reign threw down his rusty shears and took his 
departure. The present Master’s name is Har¬ 
ris ; he is a descendant of the founder’s family, 
a gentleman of independent fortune, and a 
clergyman of the Established Church, as the 
regulations of the hospital require him to be. I 
know not what are his official emoluments ; but, 
according to all English precedent, an ancient 
ll 3 


OUR OLD HOME 


charitable fund is certain to be held directly for 
the behoof of those who administer it, and per¬ 
haps incidentally, in a moderate way, for the 
nominal beneficiaries; and, in the case before 
us, the twelve brethren being so comfortably 
provided for, the Master is likely to be at least 
as comfortable as all the twelve together. Yet 
I ought not, even in a distant land, to fling an 
idle gibe against a gentleman of whom I really 
know nothing, except that the people under his 
charge bear all possible tokens of being tended 
and cared for as sedulously as if each of them 
sat by a warm fireside of his own, with a daugh¬ 
ter bustling round the hearth to make ready his 
porridge and his titbits. It is delightful to 
think of the good life which a suitable man, in 
the Master’s position, has an opportunity to 
lead, — linked to time-honored customs, welded 
in with an ancient system, never dreaming of 
radical change, and bringing all the mellowness 
and richness of the past down into these rail¬ 
way days, which do not compel him or his com¬ 
munity to move a whit quicker than of yore. 
Everybody can appreciate the advantages of 
going ahead ; it might be well, sometimes, to 
think whether there is not a word or two to be 
said in favor of standing still or going to sleep. 

From the garden we went into the kitchen, 
where the fire was burning hospitably, and dif¬ 
fused a genial warmth far and wide, together 


ABOUT WARWICK 

with the fragrance of some old English roast 
beef, which, I think, must at that moment have 
been done nearly to a turn. The kitchen is a 
lofty, spacious, and noble room, partitioned off 
round the fireplace by a sort of semi-circular 
oaken screen, or rather, an arrangement of heavy 
and high-backed settles, with an ever-open en¬ 
trance between them, on either side of which is 
the omnipresent image of the Bear and Ragged 
Staff, three feet high, and excellently carved in 
oak, now black with time and unctuous kitchen 
smoke. The ponderous mantel-piece, likewise 
of carved oak, towers high towards the dusky 
ceiling, and extends its mighty breadth to take 
in a vast area of hearth, the arch of the fireplace 
being positively so immense that I could com¬ 
pare it to nothing but the city gateway. Above 
its cavernous opening were crossed two ancient 
halberds, the weapons, possibly, of soldiers who 
had fought under Leicester in the Low Coun¬ 
tries ; and elsewhere on the walls were displayed 
several muskets, which some of the present in¬ 
mates of the hospital may have levelled against 
the French. Another ornament of the mantel¬ 
piece was a square of silken needlework or em¬ 
broidery, faded nearly white, but dimly repre¬ 
senting that wearisome Bear and Ragged Staff, 
which we should hardly look twice at, only that 
it was wrought by the fair fingers of poor Amy 
Robsart, and beautifully framed in oak from 
ii5 


OUR OLD HOME 


Kenilworth Castle, at the expense of a Mr. 
Conner, a countryman of our own. Certainly, 
no Englishman would be capable of this little 
bit of enthusiasm. Finally, the kitchen fire¬ 
light glistens on a splendid display of copper 
flagons, all of generous capacity, and one of 
them about as big as a half-barrel; the smaller 
vessels contain the customary allowance of ale, 
and the larger one is filled with that foaming 
liquor on four festive occasions of the year, and 
emptied amain by the jolly brotherhood. I 
should be glad to see them do it; but it would 
be an exploit fitter for Queen Elizabeth's age 
than these degenerate times. 

The kitchen is the social hall of the twelve 
brethren. In the daytime, they bring their 
little messes to be cooked here, and eat them 
in their own parlors; but after a certain hour, 
the great hearth is cleared and swept, and the 
old men assemble round its blaze, each with 
his tankard and his pipe, and hold high con¬ 
verse through the evening. If the Master be 
a fit man for his office, methinks he will some¬ 
times sit down sociably among them; for there 
is an elbow-chair by the fireside which it would 
not demean his dignity to fill, since it was oc¬ 
cupied by King James at the great festival of 
nearly three centuries ago. A sip of the ale and 
a whiff of the tobacco pipe would put him in 
friendly relations with his venerable household ; 

116 


ABOUT WARWICK 

and then we can fancy him instructing them 
by pithy apothegms and religious texts, which 
were first uttered here by some Catholic priest, 
and have impregnated the atmosphere ever 
since. If a joke goes round, it shall be of an 
elder coinage than Joe Miller’s, as old as Lord 
Bacon’s collection, or as the jest-book that Mas¬ 
ter Slender asked for when he lacked small-talk 
for sweet Anne Page. No news shall be spoken 
of, later than the drifting ashore, on the north¬ 
ern coast, of some stern-post or figure-head, a 
barnacled fragment of one of the great galleons 
of the Spanish Armada. What a tremor would 
pass through the antique group, if a damp news¬ 
paper should suddenly be spread to dry before 
the fire! They would feel as if either that 
printed sheet or they themselves must be an 
unreality. What a mysterious awe, if the shriek 
of the railway train, as it reaches the Warwick 
station, should ever so faintly invade their ears ! 
Movement of any kind seems inconsistent with 
the stability of such an institution. Neverthe¬ 
less, I trust that the ages will carry it along 
with them; because it is such a pleasant kind of 
dream for an American to find his way thither, 
and behold a piece of the sixteenth century set 
into our prosaic times, and then to depart, and 
think of its arched doorway as a spell-guarded 
entrance which will never be accessible or visi¬ 
ble to him any more. 

ii 7 


OUR OLD HOME 


Not far from the market-place of Warwick 
stands the great church of St. Mary's: a vast 
edifice, indeed, and almost worthy to be a 
cathedral. People who pretend to skill in such 
matters say that it is in a poor style of architec¬ 
ture, though designed (or, at least, extensively 
restored) by Sir Christopher Wren; but I 
thought it very striking, with its wide, high, 
and elaborate windows, its tall towers, its im¬ 
mense length, and (for it was long before I out- - 
grew this Americanism, the love of an old thing 
merely for the sake of its age) the tinge of gray 
antiquity over the whole. Once, while I stood 
gazing up at the tower, the clock struck twelve 
with a very deep intonation, and immediately 
some chimes began to play, and kept up their 
resounding music for five minutes, as measured 
by the hand upon the dial. It was a very de¬ 
lightful harmony, as airy as the notes of birds, 
and seemed a not unbecoming freak of half- 
sportive fancy in the huge, ancient, and solemn 
church; although I have seen an old-fashioned 
parlor clock that did precisely the same thing, 
in its small way. 

The great attraction of this edifice is the 
Beauchamp (or, as the English, who delight in 
vulgarizing their fine old Norman names, call 
it, the Beechum) Chapel, where the Earls of 
Warwick and their kindred have been buried, 
from four hundred years back till within a recent 
118 


ABOUT WARWICK 


period. It is a stately and very elaborate chapel, 
with a large window of ancient painted glass, 
as perfectly preserved as any that I remember 
seeing in England, and remarkably vivid in its 
colors. Here are several monuments with mar¬ 
ble figures recumbent upon them, representing 
the earls in their knightly armor, and their 
dames in the ruffs and court finery of their 
day, looking hardly stiffer in stone than they 
must needs have been in their starched linen 
and embroidery. The renowned Earl of Lei¬ 
cester of Queen Elizabeth’s time, the benefac¬ 
tor of the hospital, reclines at full length on 
the tablet of one of these tombs, side by side 
with his Countess, — not Amy Robsart, but a 
lady who (unless I have confused the story 
with some other mouldy scandal) is said to have 
avenged poor Amy’s murder by poisoning the 
Earl himself. Be that as it may, both' figures, 
and especially the Earl, look like the very types 
of ancient Honor and Conjugal Faith. In con¬ 
sideration of his long-enduring kindness to the 
twelve brethren, I cannot consent to believe 
him as wicked as he is usually depicted; and it 
seems a marvel, now that so many well-es¬ 
tablished historical verdicts have been reversed, 
why some enterprising writer does not make 
out Leicester to have been the pattern noble¬ 
man of his age. 

In the centre of the chapel is the magnificent 
119 


OUR OLD HOME 


memorial of its founder, Richard Beauchamp, 
Earl of Warwick in the time of Henry VI. 
On a richly ornamented altar tomb of gray 
marble lies the bronze figure of a knight in 
gilded armor, most admirably executed: for 
the sculptors of those days had wonderful skill 
in their own style, and could make so lifelike 
an image of a warrior, in brass or marble, that, 
if a trumpet were sounded over his tomb, you 
would expect him to start up and handle his 
sword. The Earl whom we now speak of, how¬ 
ever, has slept soundly in spite of a more serious 
disturbance than any blast of a trumpet, unless 
it were the final one. Some centuries after his 
death, the floor of the chapel fell down and 
broke open the stone coffin in which he was 
buried; and among the fragments appeared the 
anciently entombed Earl of Warwick, with the 
color scarcely faded out of his cheeks, his eyes 
a little sunken, but in other respects looking 
as natural as if he had died yesterday. But 
exposure to the atmosphere appeared to begin 
and finish the long-delayed process of decay in 
a moment, causing him to vanish like a bubble; 
so that, almost before there had been time to 
wonder at him, there was nothing left of the 
stalwart Earl save his hair. This sole relic the 
ladies of Warwick made prize of, and braided 
it into rings and brooches for their own adorn¬ 
ment ; and thus, with a chapel and a ponderous 
120 


ABOUT WARWICK 


tomb built on purpose to protect his remains, 
this great nobleman could not help being brought 
untimely to the light of day, nor even keep his 
lovelocks on his skull after he had so long done 
with love. There seems to be a fatality that dis¬ 
turbs people in their sepulchres, when they have 
been over-careful to render them magnificent 
and impregnable, — as witness the builders of 
the Pyramids, and Hadrian, Augustus, and the 
Scipios, and most other personages whose mau¬ 
soleums have been conspicuous enough to at¬ 
tract the violator; and as for dead men’s hair, 
I have seen a lock of King Edward the Fourth’s, 
of a reddish brown color, which perhaps was 
once twisted round the delicate forefinger of 
Mistress Shore. 

The direct lineage of the renowned characters 
that lie buried in this splendid chapel has long 
been extinct. The earldom is now held by the 
Grevilles, descendants of the Lord Brooke who 
was slain in the Parliamentary War; and they 
have recently (that is to say, within a century) 
built a burial vault on the other side of the 
church, calculated (as the sexton assured me, 
with a nod as if he were pleased) to afford suit¬ 
able and respectful accommodation to as many 
as fourscore coffins. Thank Heaven, the old 
man did not call them “ caskets ” ! — a vile 
modern phrase, which compels a person of sense 
and good taste to shrink more disgustfully than 
121 


OUR OLD HOME 


ever before from the idea of being buried at all. 
But as regards those eighty coffins, only sixteen 
have as yet been contributed; and it may be a 
question with some minds, not merely whether 
the Grevilles will hold the earldom of Warwick 
until the full number shall be made up, but 
whether earldoms and all manner of lordships 
will not have faded out of England long before 
those many generations shall have passed from 
the castle to the vault. I hope not. A titled 
and landed aristocracy, if anywise an evil and 
an encumbrance, is so only to the nation which 
is doomed to bear it on its shoulders ; and an 
American, whose sole relation to it is to admire 
its picturesque effect upon society, ought to be 
the last man to quarrel with what affords him 
so much gratuitous enjoyment. Nevertheless, 
conservative as England is, and though I scarce 
ever found an Englishman who seemed really 
to desire change, there was continually a dull 
sound in my ears as if the old foundations of 
things were crumbling away. Some time or 
other, — by no irreverent effort of violence, but, 
rather, in spite of all pious efforts to uphold a 
heterogeneous pile of institutions that will have 
outlasted their vitality, — at some unexpected 
moment, there must come a terrible crash. The 
sole reason why I should desire it to happen in 
my day is, that I might be there to see ! But 
the ruin of my own country is, perhaps, all that 
122 


ABOUT WARWICK 


I am destined to witness; and that immense 
catastrophe (though I am strong in the faith 
that there is a national lifetime of a thousand 
years in us yet) would serve any man well 
enough as his final spectacle on earth. 

If the visitor is inclined to carry away any 
little memorial of Warwick, he had better go 
to an Old Curiosity Shop in the High Street, 
where there is a vast quantity of obsolete gew- 
gaws, great and small, and many of them so 
pretty and ingenious that you wonder how they 
came to be thrown aside and forgotten. As re¬ 
gards its minor tastes, the world changes, but 
does not improve ; it appears to me, indeed, 
that there have been epochs of far more exqui¬ 
site fancy than the present one, in matters of 
personal ornament, and such delicate trifles as 
we put upon a drawing-room table, a mantel¬ 
piece, or a whatnot. The shop in question is 
near the East Gate, but is hardly to be found 
without careful search, being denoted only by 
the name of “ Redfern,” painted not very con¬ 
spicuously in the top light of the door. Imme¬ 
diately on entering, we find ourselves among a 
confusion of old rubbish and valuables, ancient 
armor, historic portraits, ebony cabinets inlaid 
with pearl, tall, ghostly clocks, hideous old 
china, dim looking-glasses in frames of tarnished 
magnificence, — a thousand objects of strange 
aspect, and others that almost frighten you by 
123 


OUR OLD HOME 


their likeness in unlikeness to things now in use. 
It is impossible to give an idea of the variety 
of articles, so thickly strewn about that we can 
scarcely move without overthrowing some great 
curiosity with a crash, or sweeping away some 
small one hitched to our sleeves. Three stories 
of the entire house are crowded in like manner. 
The collection, even as we see it exposed to 
view, must have been got together at great cost; 
but the real treasures of the establishment lie in 
secret repositories, whence they are not likely 
to be drawn forth at an ordinary summons; 
though, if a gentleman with a competently long 
purse should call for them, I doubt not that the 
signet ring of Joseph’s friend Pharaoh, or the 
Duke of Alva’s leading-staff, or the dagger that 
killed the Duke of Buckingham (all of which I 
have seen), or any other almost incredible thing, 
might make its appearance. Gold snuff-boxes, 
antique gems, jewelled goblets, Venetian wine¬ 
glasses (which burst when poison is poured into 
them, and therefore must not be used for 
modern wine drinking), jasper-handled knives, 
painted Sevres teacups, — in short, there are all 
sorts of things that a virtuoso ransacks the world 
to discover. 

It would be easier to spend a hundred pounds 
in Mr. Redfern’s shop than to keep the money 
in one’s pocket; but, for my part, I contented 
myself with buying a little old spoon of silver- 
124 


ABOUT WARWICK 

gilt, and fantastically shaped, and got it at all the 
more reasonable rate because there happened to 
be no legend attached to it. I could supply any 
deficiency of that kind at much less expense than 
regilding the spoon ! 

125 


RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN 


F ROM Leamington to Stratford-on-Avon 
the distance is eight or nine miles, over 
a road that seemed to me most beauti¬ 
ful. Not that I can recall any memorable pe¬ 
culiarities ; for the country, most of the way, is 
a succession of the gentlest swells and subsi¬ 
dences, affording wide and far glimpses of cham¬ 
paign scenery here and there, and sinking almost 
to a dead level as we draw near Stratford. Any 
landscape in New England, even the tamest, 
has a more striking outline, and, besides, would 
have its blue eyes open in those lakelets that 
we encounter almost from mile to mile at home, 
but of which the Old Country is utterly desti¬ 
tute ; or it would smile in our faces through 
the medium of the wayside brooks that vanish 
under a low stone arch on one side of the road, 
and sparkle out again on the other. Neither 
of these pretty features is often to be found in 
an English scene. The charm of the latter 
consists in the rich verdure of the fields, in the 
stately wayside trees and carefully kept planta¬ 
tions of wood, and in the old and high cultiva- 
126 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


tion that has humanized the very sods by min¬ 
gling so much of man’s toil and care among 
them. To an American there is a kind of 
sanctity even in an English turnip-field, when 
he thinks how long that small square of ground 
has been known and recognized as a possession, 
transmitted from father to son, trodden often 
by memorable feet, and utterly redeemed from 
savagery by old acquaintanceship with civilized 
eyes . 1 

The wildest things in England are more than 
half tame. The trees, for instance, whether in 
hedge-row, park, or what they call forest, have 
nothing wild about them. They are never 
ragged ; there is a certain decorous restraint in 
the freest outspread of their branches, though 
they spread wider than any self-nurturing trees ; 
they are tall, vigorous, bulky, with a look of 
age-long life, and a promise of more years to 
come, all of which will bring them into closer 
kindred with the race of man. Somebody or 
other has known them from the sapling up- 

1 All the scenery we have yet met with is in excellent taste, and keeps 
itself within very proper bounds, — never getting too wild and rugged to 
shock the sensibilities of cultivated people, as American scenery is apt to 
do. On the rudest surface of English earth, there is seen the effect of 
centuries of civilization, so that you do not quite get at naked Nature 
anywhere. And then every point of beauty is so well known, and has 
been described so much, that one must needs look through other people’s 
eyes, and feels as if he were seeing a picture rather than a reality. Man 
has, in short, entire possession of Nature here, and I should think young 
men might sometimes yearn for a fresher draught. But an American 
likes it. — Notes of Travel , I. 228. 

I2 7 


OUR OLD HOME 


ward; and if they endure long enough, they 
grow to be traditionally observed and honored, 
and connected with the fortunes of old families, 
till, like Tennyson’s Talking Oak, they babble 
with a thousand leafy tongues to ears that can 
understand them. 

An American tree, however, if it could grow 
in fair competition with an English one of 
similar species, would probably be the more 
picturesque object of the two. The Warwick¬ 
shire elm has not so beautiful a shape as those 
that overhang our village street; and as for the 
redoubtable English oak, there is a certain John 
Bullism in its figure, a compact rotundity of 
foliage, a lack of irregular and various outline, 
that make it look wonderfully like a gigantic 
cauliflower . 1 Its leaf, too, is much smaller 
than that of most varieties of American oak ; 
nor do I mean to doubt that the latter, with 
free leave to grow, reverent care and cultiva¬ 
tion, and immunity from the axe, would live 
out its centuries as sturdily as its English 
brother, and prove far the nobler and more 
majestic specimen of a tree at the end of them. 

1 The oaks [in Knowsley Park] did not seem to me so magnificent as 
they should be in an ancient noble property like this. A century does 
not accomplish so much for a tree, in this slow region, as it does in ours. 
I think, however, that they were more individual and picturesque, with 
more character in their contorted trunks ; therein somewhat resembling 
apple-trees. Our forest-trees have a great sameness of character, like our 
people, — because one and the other grow too closely. — Notes of Travel , 
I. 95. 


128 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

Still, however one’s Yankee patriotism may 
s truggle against the admission, it must be owned 
that the trees and other objects of an English 
landscape take hold of the observer by num¬ 
berless minute tendrils, as it were, which, look 
as closely as we choose, we never find in an 
American scene. The parasitic growth is so 
luxuriant, that the trunk of the tree, so gray 
and dry in our climate, is better worth observ¬ 
ing than the boughs and foliage ; a verdant 
mossiness coats it all over ; so that it looks al¬ 
most as green as the leaves; and often, more¬ 
over, the stately stem is clustered about, high 
upward, with creeping and twining shrubs, the 
ivy, and sometimes the mistletoe, close-clinging 
friends, nurtured by the moisture and never too 
fervid sunshine, and supporting themselves by 
the old tree’s abundant strength. We call it a 
parasitical vegetation; but, if the phrase imply 
any reproach, it is unkind to bestow it on this 
beautiful affection and relationship which exist 
in England between one order of plants and an¬ 
other: the strong tree being always ready to 
give support to the trailing shrub, lift it to the 
sun, and feed it out of its own heart, if it crave 
such food; and the shrub, on its part, repay¬ 
ing its foster-father with an ample luxuriance 
of beauty, and adding Corinthian grace to the 
tree’s lofty strength. No bitter winter nips 
these tender little sympathies, no hot sun burns 
129 


OUR OLD HOME 


the life out of them ; and therefore they outlast 
the longevity of the oak, and, if the woodman 
permitted, would bury it in a green grave, when 
all is over. 

Should there be nothing else along the road 
to look at, an English hedge might well suffice 
to occupy the eyes, and, to a depth beyond what 
he would suppose, the heart of an American. 
We often set out hedges in our own soil, but 
might as well set out figs or pineapples and ex¬ 
pect to gather fruit of them. Something grows, 
to be sure, which we choose to call a hedge ; but 
it lacks the dense, luxuriant variety of vegetation 
that is accumulated into the English original, in 
which a botanist would find a thousand shrubs 
and gracious herbs that the hedge-maker never 
thought of planting there. Among them, grow¬ 
ing wild, are many of the kindred blossoms 
of the very flowers which our pilgrim fathers 
brought from England, for the sake of their sim¬ 
ple beauty and homelike associations, and which 
we have ever since been cultivating in gardens. 
There is not a softer trait to be found in the 
character of those stern men than that they 
should have been sensible of these flower roots 
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, 
and have felt the necessity of bringing them over 
sea and making them hereditary in the new land, 
instead of trusting to what rarer beauty the 
wilderness might have in store for them. 

130 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

Or, if the roadside has no hedge, the ugliest 
stone fence (such as, in America, would keep 
itself bare and unsympathizing till the end of 
time) is sure to be covered with the small handi¬ 
work of Nature; that careful mother lets nothing 
go naked there, and if she cannot provide cloth¬ 
ing, gives at least embroidery. No sooner is 
the fence built than she adopts and adorns it as 
a part of her original plan, treating the hard, 
uncomely construction as if it had all along 
been a favorite idea of her own. A little sprig 
of ivy may be seen creeping up the side of the 
low wall and clinging fast with its many feet to 
the rough surface; a tuft of grass roots itself 
between two of the stones, where a pinch or two 
of wayside dust has been moistened into nutri¬ 
tious soil for it; a small bunch of fern grows 
in another crevice; a deep, soft, verdant moss 
spreads itself along the top, and over all the 
available inequalities of the fence; and where 
nothing else will grow, lichens stick tenaciously 
to the bare stones, and variegate the monoto¬ 
nous gray with hues of yellow and red. Finally, 
a great deal of shrubbery clusters along the base 
of the stone wall, and takes away the hardness 
of its outline; and in due time, as the upshot of 
these apparently aimless or sportive touches, 
we recognize that the beneficent Creator of all 
things, working through his handmaiden whom 
we call Nature, has designed to mingle a charm 
I 3 I 


OUR OLD HOME 


of divine gracefulness even with so earthly an 
institution as a boundary fence. The clown who 
wrought at it little dreamed what fellow laborer 
he had . 1 

The English should send us photographs of 
portions of the trunks of trees, the tangled and 
various products of a hedge, and a square foot 
of an old wall. They can hardly send anything 
else so characteristic. Their artists, especially of 
the later school, sometimes toil to depict such 
subjects, but are apt to stiffen the lithe tendrils 
in the process. The poets succeed better, with 
Tennyson at their head, and often produce rav¬ 
ishing effects by dint of a tender minuteness of 
touch, to which the genius of the soil and cli¬ 
mate artfully impels them : for, as regards grand¬ 
eur, there are loftier scenes in many countries 

1 The roads give us beautiful walks along the river-side, or wind away 
among the gentle hills ; and if we had nothing else to look at in these walks, 
the hedges and stone fences would afford interest enough, so many and pretty 
are the flowers, roses, honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abun¬ 
dantly does the moss and ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which 
would never have a single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the 
very end of time. But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature 
sets to work to make it a part of herself. She adopts it and adorns it, as 
if it were her own child. A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the 
side, and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself be¬ 
tween two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been mois¬ 
tened into soil for it; a small bunch of fern grows in another such crevice 5 
a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all along the sides of 
the fence ; and wherever nothing else will grow, lichens adhere to the stones 
and variegate their hues. Finally, a great deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster 
along its extent, and take away all hardness from the outline; and so the 
whole stone fence looks as if God had had at least as much to do with it 
as man. —Notes of Travel , I. 237. 

132 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


than the best that England can show; but, for 
the picturesqueness of the smallest object that 
lies under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there 
is no scenery like it anywhere. 

In the foregoing paragraphs I have strayed 
away to a long distance from the road to Strat¬ 
ford-on-Avon ; for I remember no such stone 
fences as I have been speaking of in Warwick¬ 
shire, nor elsewhere in England, except among 
the Lakes, or in Yorkshire, and the rough and 
hilly countries to the north of it. Hedges there 
were along my road, however, and broad, level 
fields, rustic hamlets, and cottages of ancient 
date, — from the roof of one of which the occu¬ 
pant was tearing away the thatch, and show¬ 
ing what an accumulation of dust, dirt, mouldi¬ 
ness, roots of weeds, families of mice, swallows’ 
nests, and hordes of insects had been deposited 
there since that old straw was new. Estimat¬ 
ing its antiquity from these tokens, Shakespeare 
himself, in one of his morning rambles out of 
his native town, might have seen the thatch laid 
on; at all events, the cottage walls were old 
enough to have known him as a guest. A few 
modern villas were also to be seen, and perhaps 
there were mansions of old gentility at no great 
distance, but hidden among trees; for it is a point 
of English pride that such houses seldom allow 
themselves to be visible from the high-road. 
In short, I recollect nothing specially remark- 
133 


OUR OLD HOME 


able along the way, nor in the immediate ap¬ 
proach to Stratford; and yet the picture of that 
June morning has a glory in my memory, 
owing chiefly, I believe, to the charm of the 
English summer weather, the really good days 
of which are the most delightful that mortal 
man can ever hope to be favored with. Such 
a genial warmth ! A little too warm, it might 
be, yet only to such a degree as to assure an 
American (a certainty to which he seldom attains 
till attempered to the customary austerity of an 
English summer day) that he was quite warm 
enough. And after all, there was an unconquer¬ 
able freshness in the atmosphere, which every lit¬ 
tle movement of a breeze shook over me like 
a dash of the ocean spray. Such days need bring 
us no other happiness than their own light and 
temperature. No doubt, I could not have en¬ 
joyed it so exquisitely, except that there must be 
still latent in us Western wanderers (even after 
an absence of two centuries and more) an adap¬ 
tation to the English climate which makes us 
sensible of a motherly kindness in its scantiest 
sunshine, and overflows us with delight at its 
more lavish smiles. 

The spire of Shakespeare’s church — the 
Church of the Holy Trinity—begins to show 
itself among the trees at a little distance from 
Stratford. Next we see the shabby old dwell¬ 
ings, intermixed with mean-looking houses of 
*34 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

modern date ; and the streets being quite level, 
you are struck and surprised by nothing so 
much as the tameness of the general scene, as 
if Shakespeare’s genius were vivid enough to 
have wrought pictorial splendors in the town 
where he was born. Here and there, however, 
a queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with 
the individuality that belongs only to the do¬ 
mestic architecture of times gone by ; the house 
seems to have grown out of some odd quality 
in its inhabitant, as a seashell is moulded from 
within by the character of its inmate ; and hav¬ 
ing been built in a strange fashion, generations 
ago, it has ever since been growing stranger 
and quainter, as old humorists are apt to do. 
Here, too (as so often impressed me in decayed 
English towns), there appeared to be a greater 
abundance of aged people wearing small-clothes 
and leaning on sticks than you could assemble 
on our side of the water by sounding a trumpet 
and proclaiming a reward for the most vener¬ 
able. I tried to account for this phenomenon 
by several theories; as, for example, that our 
new towns are unwholesome for age and kill it 
off unseasonably ; or that our old men have a 
subtile sense of fitness, and die of their own ac¬ 
cord rather than live in an unseemly contrast 
with youth and novelty ; but the secret may be, 
after all, that hair-dyes, false teeth, modern arts 
of dress, and contrivances of a skin-deep youth- 
135 


OUR OLD HOME 


fulness have not crept into these antiquated 
English towns, and so people grow old without 
the weary necessity of seeming younger than 
they are. 

After wandering through two or three streets, 
I found my way to Shakespeare's birthplace, 
which is almost a smaller and humbler house 
than any description can prepare the visitor to 
expect; so inevitably does an august inhabitant 
make his abode palatial to our imaginations, re¬ 
ceiving his guests, indeed, in a castle in the air, 
until we unwisely insist; on meeting him among 
the sordid lanes and alleys of lower earth. The 
portion of the edifice with which Shakespeare 
had anything to do is hardly large enough, in 
the basement, to contain the butcher’s stall that 
one of his descendants kept, and that still re¬ 
mains there, windowless, with the cleaver-cuts 
in its hacked counter, which projects into the 
street under a little penthouse roof, as if wait¬ 
ing for a new occupant. 

The upper half of the door was open, and, on 
my rapping at it, a young person in black made 
her appearance and admitted me ; she was not 
a menial, but remarkably genteel (an American 
characteristic) for an English girl, and was prob¬ 
ably the daughter of the old gentlewoman who 
takes care of the house. This lower room has 
a pavement of gray slabs of stone, which may 
have been rudely squared when the house was 
136 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


new, but are now all cracked, broken, and disar¬ 
ranged in a most unaccountable way. One does 
not see how any ordinary usage, for whatever 
length of time, should have so smashed these 
heavy stones ; it is as if an earthquake had burst 
up through the floor, which afterwards had been 
imperfectly trodden down again. The room is 
whitewashed and very clean, but woefully shabby 
and dingy, coarsely built, and such as the most 
poetical imagination would find it difficult to 
idealize. 

In the rear of this apartment is the kitchen, 
a smaller room, of a similar rude aspect; it has 
a great rough fireplace, with space for a large 
family under the blackened opening of the 
chimney, and an immense passageway for the 
smoke, through which Shakespeare may have 
seen the blue sky by day and the stars glimmer¬ 
ing down at him by night. It is now a dreary 
spot where the long-extinguished embers used 
to be. A glowing fire, even if it covered only 
a quarter part of the hearth, might still do much 
towards making the old kitchen cheerful. But 
we get a depressing idea of the stifled, poor, 
sombre kind of life that could have been lived 
in such a dwelling, where this room seems to 
have been the gathering-place of the family, 
with no breadth or scope, no good retirement, 
but old and young huddled together cheek by 
jowl. What a hardy plant was Shakespeare’s 
137 


OUR OLD HOME 


genius, how fatal its development, since it could 
not be blighted in such an atmosphere ! It 
only brought human nature the closer to him, 
and put more unctuous earth about his roots. 

Thence I was ushered upstairs to the room 
in which Shakespeare is supposed to have been 
born; though, if you peep too curiously into 
the matter, you may find the shadow of an 
ugly doubt on this, as well as most other points 
of his mysterious life. It is the chamber over 
the butcher’s shop, and is lighted by one broad 
window containing a great many small, irregular 
panes of glass. The floor is made of planks, 
very rudely hewn, and fitting together with 
little neatness ; the naked beams and rafters, at 
the sides of the room and overhead, bear the 
original marks of the builder’s broad-axe, with 
no evidence of an attempt to smooth off the 
job. Again we have to reconcile ourselves to 
the smallness of the space enclosed by these il¬ 
lustrious walls, — a circumstance more difficult 
to accept, as regards places that we have heard, 
read, thought, and dreamed much about, than 
any other disenchanting particular of a mistaken 
ideal. A few paces — perhaps seven or eight 
— take us from end to end of it. So low it is, 
that I could easily touch the ceiling, and might 
have done so without a tiptoe-stretch, had it 
been a good deal higher ; and this humility of 
the chamber has tempted a vast multitude of 

138 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


people to write their names overhead in pencil. 
Every inch of the side walls, even into the ob¬ 
scurest nooks and corners, is covered with a 
similar record ; all the window-panes, moreover, 
are scrawled with diamond signatures, among 
which is said to be that of Walter Scott; but 
so many persons have sought to immortalize 
themselves in close vicinity to his name, that 
I really could not trace him out. Methinks 
it is strange that people do not strive to forget 
their forlorn little identities, in such situations, 
instead of thrusting them forward into the 
dazzle of a great renown, where, if noticed, they 
cannot but be deemed impertinent. 

This room, and the entire house, so far as I 
saw it, are whitewashed and exceedingly clean ; 
nor is there the aged, musty smell with which 
old Chester first made me acquainted, and which 
goes far to cure an American of his excessive 
predilection for antique residences. An old 
lady, who took charge of me upstairs, had the 
manners and aspect of a gentlewoman, and 
talked with somewhat formidable knowledge 
and appreciative intelligence about Shakespeare. 
Arranged on a table and in chairs were various 
prints, views of houses and scenes connected 
with Shakespeare's memory, together with edi¬ 
tions of his works and local publications about 
his home and haunts, from the sale of which 
this respectable lady perhaps realizes a hand- 
139 


OUR OLD HOME 


some profit. At any rate, I bought a good 
many of them, conceiving that it might be the 
civilest way of requiting her for her instructive 
conversation and the trouble she took in show¬ 
ing me the house. It cost me a pang (not a 
curmudgeonly, but a gentlemanly one) to offer 
a downright fee to the ladylike girl who had 
admitted me ; but I swallowed my delicate 
scruples with some little difficulty, and she 
digested hers, as far as I could observe, with no 
difficulty at all. In fact, nobody need fear 
to hold out half a crown to any person with 
whom he has occasion to speak a word in Eng¬ 
land . 1 

1 We got some biscuits at the hotel [in Eastham], and I gave the waiter 
(a splendid gentleman in black) four halfpence, being the surplus of a shil¬ 
ling. He bowed and thanked me very humbly. An American does not 
easily bring his mind to the small measure of English liberality to servants ; 
if anything is to be given, we are ashamed not to give more, especially to 
clerical-looking persons, in black suits and white neckcloths. — Notes of 
Travel , I. loo. 

The hotels are mostly very good all through this region, and this de¬ 
served that character. A black-coated waiter, of more gentlemanly ap¬ 
pearance than most Englishmen, yet taking a sixpence with as little scruple 
as a lawyer would take his fee ; the mistress, in ladylike attire, receiving 
us at the door, and waiting upon us to the carriage steps 5 clean, comely 
housemaids everywhere at hand, — all appliances, in short, for being com¬ 
fortable, and comfortable, too, within one’s own circle. And, on taking 
leave, everybody who has done anything for you, or who might by possibil¬ 
ity have done anything, is to be feed. You pay the landlord enough, in all 
conscience ; and then you pay all his servants, who have been your servants 
for the time. — Ibid ., I. 268. 

Perhaps a part of my weariness is owing to the hotel life which we lead. 
At an English hotel the traveller feels as if everybody, from the landlord 
downward, united in a joint and individual purpose to fleece him, because all 
the attendants who come in contact with him are to be separately considered. 

I4O 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


I should consider it unfair to quit Shake¬ 
speare’s house without the frank acknowledg¬ 
ment that I was conscious of not the slightest 
emotion while viewing it, nor any quickening of 
the imagination. This has often happened to 
me in my visits to memorable places. What¬ 
ever pretty and apposite reflections I may have 
made upon the subject had either occurred to 
me before I ever saw Stratford, or have been 
elaborated since. It is pleasant, nevertheless, 
to think that I have seen the place ; and I be¬ 
lieve that I can form a more sensible and vivid 
idea of Shakespeare as a flesh-and-blood indi¬ 
vidual now that I have stood on the kitchen 
hearth and in the birth-chamber ; but I am not 
quite certain that this power of realization is 

So, after paying, in the first instance, a very heavy bill, for what would seem 
to cover the whole indebtedness, there remain divers dues still to be paid, to 
no trifling amount, to the landlord’s servants, — dues not to be ascertained, 
and which you never can know whether you have properly satisfied. You 
can know, perhaps, when you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect 
of the waiter, which I wish I could describe, —not disrespectful in the 
slightest degree, but a look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin 
(which he nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know 
it, or could not believe his eyesight $ — all this, however, with the most 
quiet forbearance, a Christian-like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong 
and insult ; and finally, all in a moment’s space indeed, he quits you and 
goes about his other business. If you have given him too much, you are 
made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the 
bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep. Generally, you cannot 
very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong ; but, in almost 
all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced. — Notes of Travel , 
I. 294. 

Be it recorded that I never knew an Englishman to refuse a shilling, —- 
or, for that matter, a halfpenny. — Ibid ., II. 10. 

I 4 I 


OUR OLD HOME 


altogether desirable in reference to a great poet. 
The Shakespeare whom I met there took vari¬ 
ous guises, but had not his laurel on. He was 
successively the roguish boy,— the youthful 
deer-stealer, — the comrade of players, — the 
too familiar friend of Davenant’s mother,— 
the careful, thrifty, thriven man of property who 
came back from London to lend money on 
bond, and occupy the best house in Stratford, 
— the mellow, red-nosed, autumnal boon com¬ 
panion of John a’ Combe, — and finally (or else 
the Stratford gossips belied him), the victim of 
convivial habits, who met his death by tumbling 
into a ditch on his way home from a drinking 
bout, and left his second-best bed to his poor 
wife. 

I feel, as sensibly as the reader can, what hor¬ 
rible impiety it is to remember these things, be 
they true or false. In either case, they ought 
to vanish out of sight on the distant ocean line 
of the past, leaving a pure, white memory, even 
as a sail, though perhaps darkened with many 
stains, looks snowy white on the far horizon. 
But I draw a moral from these unworthy remi¬ 
niscences and this embodiment of the poet, as 
suggested by some of the grimy actualities of 
his life. It is for the high interests of the world 
not to insist upon finding out that its greatest 
men are, in a certain lower sense, very much the 
same kind of men as the rest of us, and often a 
142 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


little worse; because a common mind cannot 
properly digest such a discovery, nor ever know 
the true proportion of the great man’s good and 
evil, nor how small a part of him it was that 
touched our muddy or dusty earth. Thence 
comes moral bewilderment, and even intellect¬ 
ual loss, in regard to what is best of him. When 
Shakespeare invoked a curse on the man who 
should stir his bones, he perhaps meant the 
larger share of it for him or them who should 
pry into his perishing earthliness, the defects or 
even the merits of the character that he wore in 
Stratford, when he had left mankind so much 
to muse upon that was imperishable and divine. 
Heaven keep me from incurring any part of the 
anathema in requital for the irreverent sentences 
above written ! 

From Shakespeare’s house, the next step, of 
course, is to visit his burial place. The appear¬ 
ance of the church is most venerable and beau¬ 
tiful, standing amid a great green shadow of 
lime-trees, above which rises the spire, while 
the Gothic battlements and buttresses and vast 
arched windows are obscurely seen through the 
boughs. The Avon loiters past the churchyard, 
an exceedingly sluggish river, which might seem 
to have been considering which way it should 
flow ever since Shakespeare left off paddling in 
it and gathering the large forget-me-nots that 
grow among its flags and water-weeds. 

J 43 


OUR OLD HOME 


An old man in small-clothes was waiting at 
the gate; and inquiring whether I wished to go 
in, he preceded me to the church porch, and 
rapped. I could have done it quite as effect¬ 
ually for myself; but it seems the old people 
of the neighborhood haunt about the church¬ 
yard, in spite of the frowns and remonstrances 
of the sexton, who grudges them the half-elee¬ 
mosynary sixpence which they sometimes get 
from visitors. I was admitted into the church 
by a respectable-looking and intelligent man in 
black, the parish clerk, I suppose, and probably 
holding a richer incumbency than his vicar, if 
all the fees which he handles remain in his own 
pocket. He was already exhibiting the Shake¬ 
speare monuments to two or three visitors, and 
several other parties came in while I was there. 

The poet and his family are in possession of 
what may be considered the very best burial 
places that the church affords. They lie in a 
row, right across the breadth of the chancel, the 
foot of each gravestone being close to the ele¬ 
vated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest 
to the side wall, beneath Shakespeare's bust, is 
a slab bearing a Latin inscription addressed to 
his wife, and covering her remains; then his own 
slab, with the old anathematizing stanza upon 
it; then that of Thomas Nash, who married 
his granddaughter; then that of Dr. Hall, the 
144 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


husband of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, 
Susannah's own. Shakespeare’s is the common- 
est-looking slab of all, being just such a flag¬ 
stone as Essex Street in Salem used to be paved 
with, when I was a boy. Moreover, unless my 
eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a crack 
across it, as if it had already undergone some 
such violence as the inscription deprecates. Un¬ 
like the other monuments of the family, it bears 
no name, nor am I acquainted with the grounds 
or authority on which it is absolutely determined 
to be Shakespeare’s; although, being in a range 
with those of his wife and children, it might 
naturally be attributed to him. But, then, why 
does his wife, who died afterwards, take prece¬ 
dence of him and occupy the place next his bust ? 
And where are the graves of another daughter 
and a son, who have a better right in the fam¬ 
ily row than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law? 
Might not one or both of them have been laid 
under the nameless stone ? But it is dangerous 
trifling with Shakespeare’s dust; so I forbear to 
meddle further with the grave (though the pro¬ 
hibition makes it tempting), and shall let what¬ 
ever bones be in it rest in peace. Yet I must 
needs add that the inscription on the bust seems 
to imply that Shakespeare’s grave was directly 
underneath it. 

The poet’s bust is affixed to the northern wall 
i45 


OUR OLD HOME 

of the church, the base of it being about a man’s 
height, or rather more, above the floor of the 
chancel. The features of this piece of sculp¬ 
ture are entirely unlike any portrait of Shake¬ 
speare that I have ever seen, and compel me 
to take down the beautiful, lofty-browed, and 
noble picture of him which has hitherto hung 
in my mental portrait-gallery. The bust cannot 
be said to represent a beautiful face or an emi¬ 
nently noble head; but it clutches firmly hold 
of one’s sense of reality and insists upon your 
accepting it, if not as Shakespeare the poet, yet 
as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend 
of John a’ Combe, who lies yonder in the cor¬ 
ner. I know not what the phrenologists say 
to the bust. The forehead is but moderately 
developed, and retreats somewhat, the upper 
part of the skull rising pyramidally ; the eyes 
are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of 
the brow; the upper lip is so long that it must 
have been almost a deformity, unless the sculp¬ 
tor artistically exaggerated its length, in consid¬ 
eration, that, on the pedestal, it must be fore¬ 
shortened by being looked at from below. On 
the whole, Shakespeare must have had a sin¬ 
gular rather than a prepossessing face; and it 
is wonderful how, with this bust before its 
eyes, the world has persisted in maintaining an 
erroneous notion of his appearance, allowing 
painters and sculptors to foist their idealized 
146 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


nonsense on us all, instead of the genuine man. 
For my part, the Shakespeare of my mind's 
eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy 
English complexion, with a reasonably capacious 
brow, intelligent and quickly observant eyes, 
a nose curved slightly outward, a long, queer 
upper lip, with the mouth a little unclosed be¬ 
neath it, and cheeks considerably developed in 
the lower part and beneath the chin. But when 
Shakespeare was himself (for nine tenths of the 
time, according to all appearances, he was but 
the burgher of Stratford), he doubtless shone 
through this dull mask and transfigured it into 
the face of an angel. 

Fifteen or twenty feet behind the row of 
Shakespeare gravestones is the great east window 
of the church, now brilliant with stained glass 
of recent manufacture. On one side of this 
window, under a sculptured arch of marble, lies 
a full-length marble figure of John a' Combe, 
clad in what I take to be a robe of municipal 
dignity, and holding its hands devoutly clasped. 
It is a sturdy English figure, with coarse fea¬ 
tures, a type of ordinary man whom we smile 
to see immortalized in the sculpturesque mate¬ 
rial of poets and heroes ; but the prayerful 
attitude encourages us to believe that the old 
usurer may not, after all, have had that grim 
reception in the other world which Shakespeare’s 
squib foreboded for him. By the bye, till I 
147 


OUR OLD HOME 


grew somewhat familiar with Warwickshire pro¬ 
nunciation, I never understood that the point 
of those ill-natured lines was a pun. “ ‘ Oho! ’ 
quoth the Devil, c, t is my John a ’ Combe!’” 
— that is, “ My John has come ! ” 

Close to the poet’s bust is a nameless, ob¬ 
long, cubic tomb, supposed to be that of a cler¬ 
ical dignitary of the fourteenth century. The 
church has other mural monuments and altar 
tombs, one or two of the latter upholding the 
recumbent figures of knights in armor and their 
dames, very eminent and worshipful personages 
in their day, no doubt, but doomed to appear 
forever intrusive and impertinent within the 
precincts which Shakespeare has made his own. 
His renown is tyrannous, and suffers nothing 
else to be recognized within the scope of its ma¬ 
terial presence, unless illuminated by some side 
ray from himself. The clerk informed me that 
interments no longer take place in any part of 
the church. And it is better so ; for methinks 
a person of delicate individuality, curious about 
his burial place, and desirous of six feet of earth 
for himself alone, could never endure to lie 
buried near Shakespeare, but would rise up at 
midnight and grope his way out of the church 
door rather than sleep in the shadow of so stu¬ 
pendous a memory. 

I should hardly have dared to add another to 
the innumerable descriptions of Stratford-on- 
148 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


Avon, if it had not seemed to me that this 
would form a fitting framework to some remi¬ 
niscences of a very remarkable woman. Her 
labor, while she lived, was of a nature and pur¬ 
pose outwardly irreverent to the name of Shake¬ 
speare, yet, by its actual tendency, entitling her 
to the distinction of being that one of all his 
worshippers who sought, though she knew it 
not, to place the richest and stateliest diadem 
upon his brow. We Americans, at least, in the 
scanty annals of our literature, cannot afford to 
forget her high and conscientious exercise of 
noble faculties, which, indeed, if you look at the 
matter in one way, evolved only a miserable 
error, but, more fairly considered, produced a 
result worth almost what it cost her. Her faith 
in her own ideas was so genuine that, erroneous 
as they were, it transmuted them to gold, or, 
at all events, interfused a large proportion 
of that precious and indestructible substance 
among the waste material from which it can 
readily be sifted. 

The only time I ever saw Miss Bacon was 
in London, where she had lodgings in Spring 
Street, Sussex Gardens, at the house of a grocer, 
a portly, middle-aged, civil, and friendly man, 
who, as well as his wife, appeared to feel a per¬ 
sonal kindness towards their lodger. I was ush¬ 
ered up two (and I rather believe three) pair 
of stairs into a parlor somewhat humbly fur- 
149 


OUR OLD HOME 


nished, and told that Miss Bacon would come 
soon. There were a number of books on the 
table, and, looking into them, I found that every 
one had some reference, more or less immedi¬ 
ate, to her Shakespearean theory, — a volume 
of Raleigh’s History of the World, a volume 
of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon’s Let¬ 
ters, a volume of Shakespeare’s Plays ; and on 
another table lay a large roll of manuscript, 
which I presume to have been a portion of her 
work. To be sure, there was a pocket Bible 
among the books, but everything else referred 
to the one despotic idea that had got possession 
of her mind; and as it had engrossed her whole 
soul as well as her intellect, I have no doubt 
that she had established subtile connections be¬ 
tween it and the Bible likewise. As is apt to 
be the case with solitary students, Miss Bacon 
probably read late and rose late ; for I took up 
Montaigne (it was Hazlitt’s translation) and had 
been reading his journey to Italy a good while 
before she appeared. 

I had expected (the more shame for me, hav¬ 
ing no other ground for such expectation than 
that she was a literary woman) to see a very 
homely, uncouth, elderly personage, and was 
quite agreeably disappointed by her aspect. She 
was rather uncommonly tall, and had a striking 
and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which 
shone with an inward light as soon as she began 
150 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


to speak, and by and by a color came into her 
cheeks and made her look almost young. Not 
that she really was so; she must have been be¬ 
yond middle age : and there was no unkindness 
in coming to that conclusion, because, making 
allowance for years and ill health, I could sup¬ 
pose her to have been handsome and exceed¬ 
ingly attractive once. Though wholly estranged 
from society, there was little or no restraint or 
embarrassment in her manner: lonely people 
are generally glad to give utterance to their 
pent-up ideas, and often bubble over with them 
as freely as children with their new-found syl¬ 
lables. I cannot tell how it came about, but 
we immediately found ourselves taking a friendly 
and familiar tone together, and began to talk as 
if we had known one another a very long while. 
A little preliminary correspondence had indeed 
smoothed the way, and we had a definite topic 
in the contemplated publication of her book. 

She was very communicative about her theory, 
and would have been much more so had I de¬ 
sired it; but, being conscious within myself of 
a sturdy unbelief, I deemed it fair and honest 
rather to repress than draw her out upon the 
subject. Unquestionably, she was a monoma¬ 
niac ; these overmastering ideas about the au¬ 
thorship of Shakespeare's Plays, and the deep 
political philosophy concealed beneath the sur¬ 
face of them, had completely thrown her off 

151 


OUR OLD HOME 


her balance; but at the same time they had 
wonderfully developed her intellect, and made 
her what she could not otherwise have become. 
It was a very singular phenomenon : a system 
of philosophy growing up in this woman’s mind 
without her volition, — contrary, in fact, to the 
determined resistance of her volition, — and 
substituting itself in the place of everything 
that originally grew there. To have based 
such a system on fancy, and unconsciously elab¬ 
orated it for herself, was almost as wonderful as 
really to have found it in the plays. But, in 
a certain sense, she did actually find it there. 
Shakespeare has surface beneath surface, to an 
immeasurable depth, adapted to the plummet¬ 
line of every reader; his works present many 
phases of truth, each with scope large enough 
to fill a contemplative mind. Whatever you 
seek in him you will surely discover, provided 
you seek truth. There is no exhausting the 
various interpretation of his symbols; and a 
thousand years hence a world of new readers 
will possess a whole library of new books, as 
we ourselves do, in these volumes old already. 
I had half a mind to suggest to Miss Bacon 
this explanation of her theory, but forbore, be¬ 
cause (as I could readily perceive) she had as 
princely a spirit as Queen Elizabeth herself, 
and would at once have motioned me from the 
room. 

152 


/ 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

I had heard, long ago, that she believed that 
the material evidences of her dogma as to the 
authorship, together with the key of the new 
philosophy, would be found buried in Shake¬ 
speare’s grave. Recently, as I understood her, 
this notion had been somewhat modified, and 
was now accurately defined and fully developed 
in her mind, with a result of perfect certainty. 
In Lord Bacon’s Letters, on which she laid her 
finger as she spoke, she had discovered the key 
and clew to the whole mystery. There were 
definite and minute instructions how to find 
a will and other documents relating to the con¬ 
clave of Elizabethan philosophers, which were 
concealed (when and by whom she did not in¬ 
form me) in a hollow space in the under sur¬ 
face of Shakespeare’s gravestone. Thus the 
terrible prohibition to remove the stone was 
accounted for. The directions, she intimated, 
went completely and precisely to the point, obvi¬ 
ating all difficulties in the way of coming at the 
treasure, and even, if I remember right, were 
so contrived as to ward off any troublesome 
consequences likely to ensue from the inter¬ 
ference of the parish officers. All that Miss 
Bacon now remained in England for — indeed, 
the object for which she had come hither, and 
which had kept her here for three years past — 
was to obtain possession of these material and 
*53 


OUR OLD HOME 


unquestionable proofs of the authenticity of her 
theory. 

She communicated all this strange matter in 
a low, quiet tone; while, on my part, I listened 
as quietly, and without any expression of dis¬ 
sent. Controversy against a faith so settled 
would have shut her up at once, and that, too, 
without in the least weakening her belief in the 
existence of those treasures of the tomb; and 
had it been possible to convince her of their in¬ 
tangible nature, I apprehend that there would 
have been nothing left for the poor enthusiast 
save to collapse and die. She frankly confessed 
that she could no longer bear the society of 
those who did not at least lend a certain sym¬ 
pathy to her views, if not fully share in them ; 
and meeting little sympathy or none, she had 
now entirely secluded herself from the world. 
In all these years, she had seen Mrs. Farrar a 
few times, but had long ago given her up ; Car¬ 
lyle once or twice, but not of late, although he 
had received her kindly ; Mr. Buchanan, while 
Minister in England, had once called on her; 
and General Campbell, our Consul in London, 
had met her two or three times on business. 
With these exceptions, which she marked so 
scrupulously that it was perceptible what epochs 
they were in the monotonous passage of her 
days, she had lived in the profoundest solitude. 
She never walked out; she suffered much from 
*54 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


ill health; and yet, she assured me, she was 
perfectly happy. 

I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon im¬ 
agined herself to have received (what is certainly 
the greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a high 
mission in the world, with adequate powers for 
its accomplishment; and lest even these should 
prove insufficient, she had faith that special in¬ 
terpositions of Providence were forwarding her 
human efforts. This idea was continually com¬ 
ing to the surface, during our interview. She 
believed, for example, that she had been provi¬ 
dentially led to her lodging-house, and put in 
relations with the good-natured grocer and his 
family ; and, to say the truth, considering what 
a savage and stealthy tribe the London lodging- 
house keepers usually are, the honest kindness 
of this man and his household appeared to have 
been little less than miraculous. Evidently, 
too, she thought that Providence had brought 
me forward — a man somewhat connected with 
literature — at the critical juncture when she 
needed a negotiator with the booksellers; and, 
on my part, though little accustomed to regard 
myself as a divine minister, and though I might 
even have preferred that Providence should se¬ 
lect some other instrument, I had no scruple in 
undertaking to do what I could for her. Her 
book, as I could see by turning it over, was a 
very remarkable one, and worthy of being offered 
i55 


OUR OLD HOME 


to the public, which, if wise enough to appreciate 
it, would be thankful for what was good in it 
and merciful to its faults. It was founded on 
a prodigious error, but was built up from that 
foundation with a good many prodigious truths. 
And, at all events, whether I could aid her liter¬ 
ary views or no, it would have been both rash 
and impertinent in me to attempt drawing poor 
Miss Bacon out of her delusions, which were 
the condition on which she lived in comfort 
and joy, and in the exercise of great intellectual 
power. So I left her to dream as she pleased 
about the treasures of Shakespeare’s tombstone, 
and to form whatever designs might seem good 
to herself for obtaining possession of them. I 
was sensible of a ladylike feeling of propriety 
in Miss Bacon, and a New England orderliness 
in her character, and, in spite of her bewilder¬ 
ment, a sturdy common sense, which I trusted 
would begin to operate at the right time, and 
keep her from any actual extravagance. And 
as regarded this matter of the tombstone, so it 
proved. 

The interview lasted above an hour, during 
which she flowed out freely, as to the sole au¬ 
ditor, capable of any degree of intelligent sym¬ 
pathy, whom she had met with in a very long 
while. Her conversation was remarkably sug¬ 
gestive, alluring forth one’s own ideas and fan¬ 
tasies from the shy places where they usually 
156 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


haunt. She was indeed an admirable talker, 
considering how long she had held her tongue 
for lack of a listener, — pleasant, sunny, and 
shadowy, often piquant, and giving glimpses of 
all a woman’s various and readily changeable 
moods and humors ; and beneath them all there 
ran a deep and powerful undercurrent of ear¬ 
nestness, which did not fail to produce in the 
listener’s mind something like a temporary faith 
in what she herself believed so fervently. But 
the streets of London are not favorable to 
enthusiasms of this kind, nor, in fact, are they 
likely to flourish anywhere in the English at¬ 
mosphere ; so that, long before reaching Pater¬ 
noster Row, I felt that it would be a difficult 
and doubtful matter to advocate the publication 
of Miss Bacon’s book. Nevertheless, it did 
finally get published. 

Months before that happened, however, Miss 
Bacon had taken up her residence at Stratford- 
on-Avon, drawn thither by the magnetism of 
those rich secrets which she supposed to have 
been hidden by Raleigh, or Bacon, or I know 
not whom, in Shakespeare’s grave, and pro¬ 
tected there by a curse, as pirates used to bury 
their gold in the guardianship of a fiend. She 
took a humble lodging and began to haunt the 
church like a ghost. But she did not conde¬ 
scend to any stratagem or underhand attempt 
to violate the grave, which, had she been capable 
I 57 


OUR OLD HOME 


of admitting such an idea, might possibly have 
been accomplished by the aid of a resurrection- 
man. As her first step, she made acquaintance 
with the clerk, and began to sound him as to 
the feasibility of her enterprise and his own will¬ 
ingness to engage in it. The clerk apparently 
listened with not unfavorable ears ; but as his 
situation (which the fees of pilgrims, more 
numerous than at any Catholic shrine, render 
lucrative) would have been forfeited by any 
malfeasance in office, he stipulated for liberty to 
consult the vicar. Miss Bacon requested to tell 
her own story to the reverend gentleman, and 
seems to have been received by him with the 
utmost kindness, and even to have succeeded in 
making a certain impression on his mind as to 
the desirability of the search. As their inter¬ 
view had been under the seal of secrecy, he asked 
permission to consult a friend, who, as Miss 
Bacon either found out or surmised, was a prac¬ 
titioner of the law. What the legal friend ad¬ 
vised she did not learn; but the negotiation 
continued, and certainly was never broken off 
by an absolute refusal on the vicar’s part. He, 
perhaps, was kindly temporizing with our poor 
countrywoman, whom an Englishman of ordi¬ 
nary mould would have sent to a lunatic asylum 
at once. I cannot help fancying, however, that 
her familiarity with the events of Shakespeare’s 
life, and of his death and burial (of which she 
158 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


would speak as if she had been present at the 
edge of the grave), and all the history, litera¬ 
ture, and personalities of the Elizabethan age, 
together with the prevailing power of her own 
belief, and the eloquence with which she knew 
how to enforce it, had really gone some little way 
toward making a convert of the good clergyman. 
If so, I honor him above all the hierarchy of 
England. 

The affair certainly looked very hopeful. 
However erroneously, Miss Bacon had under¬ 
stood from the vicar that no obstacles would be 
interposed to the investigation, and that he 
himself would sanction it with his presence. It 
was to take place after nightfall; and all pre¬ 
liminary arrangements being made, the vicar 
and clerk professed to wait only her word in 
order to set about lifting the awful stone from 
the sepulchre. So, at least, Miss Bacon be¬ 
lieved ; and as her bewilderment was entirely 
in her own thoughts, and never disturbed her 
perception or accurate remembrance of external 
things, I see no reason to doubt it, except it be 
the tinge of absurdity in the fact. But, in this 
apparently prosperous state of things, her own 
convictions began to falter. A doubt stole into 
her mind whether she might not have mistaken 
the depository and mode of concealment of 
those historic treasures ; and, after once admit¬ 
ting the doubt, she was afraid to hazard the 
i59 


OUR OLD HOME 


shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing. 
She examined the surface of the gravestone, and 
endeavored, without stirring it, to estimate 
whether it were of such thickness as to be capa¬ 
ble of containing the archives of the Elizabethan 
club. She went over anew the proofs, the clews, 
the enigmas, the pregnant sentences, which she 
had discovered in Bacon’s Letters and else¬ 
where, and now was frightened to perceive that 
they did not point so definitely to Shakespeare’s 
tomb as she had heretofore supposed. There 
was an unmistakably distinct reference to a tomb, 
but it might be Bacon’s, or Raleigh’s, or Spen¬ 
ser’s ; and instead of the “ Old Player,” as she 
profanely called him, it might be either of those 
three illustrious dead, poet, warrior, or states¬ 
man, whose ashes, in Westminster Abbey, or 
the Tower burial ground, or wherever they sleep, 
it was her mission to disturb. It is very pos¬ 
sible, moreover, that her acute mind may always 
have had a lurking and deeply latent distrust 
of its own fantasies, and that this now became 
strong enough to restrain her from a decisive 
step. 

But she continued to hover around the 
church, and seems to have had full freedom of 
entrance in the daytime, and special license, on 
one occasion at least, at a late hour of the night. 
She went thither with a dark lantern, which 
could but twinkle like a glow-worm through 
160 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

the volume of obscurity that filled the great 
dusky edifice. Groping her way up the aisle 
and towards the chancel, she sat down on the 
elevated part of the pavement above Shake¬ 
speare's grave. If the divine poet really wrote 
the inscription there, and cared as much'about 
the quiet of his bones as its deprecatory ear¬ 
nestness would imply, it was time for those 
crumbling relics to bestir themselves under her 
sacrilegious feet. But they were safe. She 
made no attempt to disturb them ; though, I 
believe, she looked narrowly into the crevices 
between Shakespeare's and the two adjacent 
stones, and in some way satisfied herself that 
her single strength would suffice to lift the for¬ 
mer, in case of need. She threw the feeble ray 
of her lantern up towards the bust, but could 
not make it visible beneath the darkness of 
the vaulted roof. Had she been subject to 
superstitious terrors, it is impossible to conceive 
of a situation that could better entitle her to 
feel them, for, if Shakespeare's ghost would 
rise at any provocation, it must have shown 
itself then; but it is my sincere belief that, if 
his figure had appeared within the scope of her 
dark lantern, in his slashed doublet and gown, 
and with his eyes bent on her beneath the high, 
bald forehead, just as we see him in the bust, 
she would have met him fearlessly, and con¬ 
troverted his claims to the authorship of the 
161 


OUR OLD HOME 


plays, to his very face. She had taught herself 
to contemn “ Lord Leicester’s groom ” (it was 
one of her disdainful epithets for the world’s 
incomparable poet) so thoroughly, that even 
his disembodied spirit would hardly have found 
civil treatment at Miss Bacon’s hands. 

Her vigil, though it appears to have had no 
definite object, continued far into the night. 
Several times she heard a low movement in the 
aisles: a stealthy, dubious footfall prowling 
about in the darkness, now here, now there, 
among the pillars and ancient tombs, as if some 
restless inhabitant of the latter had crept forth 
to peep at the intruder. By and by the clerk 
made his appearance, and confessed that he had 
been watching her ever since she entered the 
church. 

About this time it was that a strange sort of 
weariness seems to have fallen upon her : her 
toil was all but done, her great purpose, as she 
believed, on the very point of accomplishment, 
when she began to regret that so stupendous a 
mission had been imposed on the fragility of a 
woman. Her faith in the new philosophy was 
as mighty as ever, and so was her confidence 
in her own adequate development of it, now 
about to be given to the world ; yet she wished, 
or fancied so, that it might never have been her 
duty to achieve this unparalleled task, and to 
stagger feebly forward under her immense bur- 
162 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


den of responsibility and renown. So far as 
her personal concern in the matter went, she 
would gladly have forfeited the reward of her 
patient study and labor for so many years, her 
exile from her country and estrangement from 
her family and friends, her sacrifice of health 
and all other interests to this one pursuit, if she 
could only find herself free to dwell in Strat¬ 
ford and be forgotten. She liked the old slum¬ 
berous town, and awarded the only praise that 
ever I knew her to bestow on Shakespeare, the 
individual man, by acknowledging that his taste 
in a residence was good, and that he knew how 
to choose a suitable retirement for a person 
of shy, but genial temperament. And at this 
point, I cease to possess the means of tracing 
her vicissitudes of feeling any further. In con¬ 
sequence of some advice which I fancied it my 
duty to tender, as being the only confidant 
whom she now had in the world, I fell under 
Miss Bacon’s most severe and passionate dis¬ 
pleasure, and was cast off by her in the twin¬ 
kling of an eye. It was a misfortune to which 
her friends were always particularly liable; but 
I think that none of them ever loved, or even 
respected, her most ingenuous and noble, but 
likewise most sensitive and tumultuous charac¬ 
ter, the less for it. 

At that time her book was passing through 
the press. Without prejudice to her literary 
163 


OUR OLD HOME 

ability, it must be allowed that Miss Bacon was 
wholly unfit to prepare her own work for pub¬ 
lication, because, among many other reasons, 
she was too thoroughly in earnest to know what 
to leave out. Every leaf and line was sacred, 
for all had been written under so deep a con¬ 
viction of truth as to assume, in her eyes, the 
aspect of inspiration. A practised book-maker, 
with entire control of her materials, would have 
shaped out a duodecimo volume full of elo¬ 
quent and ingenious dissertation, — criticisms 
which quite take the color and pungency out 
of other people's critical remarks on Shake¬ 
speare,— philosophic truths which she ima¬ 
gined herself to have found at the roots of his 
conceptions, and which certainly come from no 
inconsiderable depth somewhere. There was a 
great amount of rubbish, which any competent 
editor would have shovelled out of the way. 
But Miss Bacon thrust the whole bulk of in¬ 
spiration and nonsense into the press in a lump, 
and there tumbled out a ponderous octavo vol¬ 
ume, which fell with a dead thump at the feet 
of the public, and has never been picked up. 
A few persons turned over one or two of the 
leaves, as it lay there, and essayed to kick the 
volume deeper into the mud ; for they were 
the hack critics of the minor periodical press in 
London, than whom, I suppose, though excel¬ 
lent fellows in their way, there are no gentle- 
164 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

men in the world less sensible of any sanctity 
in a book, or less likely to recognize an author’s 
heart in it, or more utterly careless about bruis¬ 
ing, if they do recognize it. It is their trade. 
They could not do otherwise. I never thought 
of blaming them. It was not for such an Eng¬ 
lishman as one of these to get beyond the idea 
that an assault was meditated on England’s 
greatest poet. From the scholars and critics 
of her own country, indeed. Miss Bacon might 
have looked for a worthier appreciation, because 
many of the best of them have higher cultiva¬ 
tion, and finer and deeper literary sensibilities, 
than all but the very profoundest and brightest 
of Englishmen. But they are not a courageous 
body of men; they dare not think a truth that 
has an odor of absurdity, lest they should feel 
themselves bound to speak it out. If any 
American ever wrote a word in her behalf, 
Miss Bacon never knew it, nor did I. Our 
journalists at once published some of the most 
brutal vituperations of the English press, thus 
pelting their poor countrywoman with stolen 
mud, without even waiting to know whether 
the ignominy was deserved. And they never 
have known it, to this day, nor ever will. 

The next intelligence that I had of Miss 
Bacon was by a letter from the mayor of Strat- 
ford-on-Avon. He was a medical man, and 
wrote both in his official and professional char- 
165 


OUR OLD HOME 

acter, telling me that an American lady, who 
had recently published what the mayor called a 
“ Shakespeare book,” was afflicted with insan¬ 
ity. In a lucid interval she had referred to me, 
as a person who had some knowledge of her 
family and affairs. What she may have suf¬ 
fered before her intellect gave way, we had bet¬ 
ter not try to imagine. No author had ever 
hoped so confidently as she ; none ever failed 
more utterly. A superstitious fancy might sug¬ 
gest that the anathema on Shakespeare’s tomb¬ 
stone had fallen heavily on her head, in requital 
of even the unaccomplished purpose of disturb¬ 
ing the dust beneath, and that the “ Old Player ” 
had kept so quietly in his grave, on the night 
of her vigil, because he foresaw how soon and 
terribly he would be avenged. But if that be¬ 
nign spirit takes any care or cognizance of such 
things now, he has surely requited the injustice 
that she sought to do him — the high justice 
that she really did — by a tenderness of love 
and pity of which only he could be capable. 
What matters it though she called him by some 
other name ? He had wrought a greater mira¬ 
cle on her than on all the world besides. This 
bewildered enthusiast had recognized a depth 
in the man whom she decried, which scholars, 
critics, and learned societies, devoted to the 
elucidation of his unrivalled scenes, had never 
imagined to exist there. She had paid him 
166 


A GIFTED WOMAN 

the loftiest honor that all these ages of renown 
have been able to accumulate upon his memory. 
And when, not many months after the outward 
failure of her lifelong object, she passed into 
the better world, I know not why we should 
hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may 
have met her on the threshold and led her in, 
reassuring her with friendly and comfortable 
words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of 
gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of cer¬ 
tain mistaken speculations) for having inter¬ 
preted him to mankind so well. 

I believe that it has been the fate of this 
remarkable book never to have had more than 
a single reader. I myself am acquainted with it 
only in insulated chapters and scattered pages 
and paragraphs. But, since my return to Amer¬ 
ica, a young man of genius and enthusiasm has 
assured me that he has positively read the book 
from beginning to end, and is completely a con¬ 
vert to its doctrines. It belongs to him, there¬ 
fore, and not to me, — whom, in almost the last 
letter that I received from her, she declared un¬ 
worthy to meddle with her work, — it belongs 
surely to this one individual, who has done her 
so much justice as to know what she wrote, to 
place Miss Bacon in her due position before the 
public and posterity. 

This has been too sad a story. To lighten 
the recollection of it, I will think of my stroll 
167 


OUR OLD HOME 


homeward past Charlecote Park, where I beheld 
the most stately elms, singly, in clumps, and in 
groves, scattered all about in the sunniest, sha¬ 
diest, sleepiest fashion; so that I could not but 
believe in lengthened, loitering, drowsy enjoy¬ 
ment which these trees must have in their ex¬ 
istence. Diffused over slow-paced centuries, it 
need not be keen nor bubble into thrills and 
ecstasies, like the momentary delights of short¬ 
lived human beings. They were civilized trees, 
known to man, and befriended by him for ages 
past. There is an indescribable difference — as I 
believe I have heretofore endeavored to express 
— between the tamed, but by no means effete 
(on the contrary, the richer and more luxuriant), 
nature of England, and the rude, shaggy, bar¬ 
barous nature which offers us its racier compan¬ 
ionship in America. No less a change has been 
wrought among the wildest creatures that inhabit 
what the English call their forests. By and by, 
among those refined and venerable trees, I saw 
a large herd of deer, mostly reclining, but some 
standing in picturesque groups, while the stags 
threw their large antlers aloft, as if they had been 
taught to make themselves tributary to the scenic 
effect. Some were running fleetly about, van¬ 
ishing from light into shadow and glancing 
forth again, with here and there a little fawn 
careering at its mother’s heels. These deer are. 
almost in the same relation to the wild, natural 
168 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


state of their kind that the trees of an English 
park hold to the rugged growth of an American 
forest. They have held a certain intercourse 
with man for immemorial years ; and, most prob¬ 
ably, the stag that Shakespeare killed was one 
of the progenitors of this very herd, and may 
himself have been a partly civilized and hu¬ 
manized deer, though in a less degree than these 
remote posterity. They are a little wilder than 
sheep, but they do not snuff the air at the ap¬ 
proach of human beings, nor evince much alarm 
at their pretty close proximity ; although if you 
continue to advance, they toss their heads and 
take to their heels in a kind of mimic terror, or 
something akin to feminine skittishness, with a 
dim remembrance or tradition, as it were, of their 
having come of a wild stock. They have so long 
been fed and protected by man, that they must 
have lost many of their native instincts, and, I 
suppose, could not live comfortably through 
even an English winter without human help. 
One is sensible of a gentle scorn at them for 
such dependency, but feels none the less kindly 
disposed towards the half-domesticated race; and 
it may have been his observation of these tamer 
characteristics in the Charlecote herd that sug¬ 
gested to Shakespeare the tender and pitiful de¬ 
scription of a wounded stag, in As You Like It. 

At a distance of some hundreds of yards from 
Charlecote Hall, and almost hidden by the trees 
169 


OUR OLD HOME 


between it and the roadside, is an old brick 
archway and porter’s lodge. In connection with 
this entrance there appears to have been a wall 
and an ancient moat, the latter of which is still 
visible, a shallow, grassy scoop along the base 
of an embankment of the lawn. About fifty 
yards within the gateway stands the house, form¬ 
ing three sides of a square, with three gables in 
a row on the front, and on each of the two wings; 
and there are several towers and turrets at the 
angles, together with projecting windows, an¬ 
tique balconies, and other quaint ornaments suit¬ 
able to the half-Gothic taste in which the edifice 
was built. Over the gateway is the Lucy coat 
of arms, emblazoned in its proper colors. The 
mansion dates from the early days of Elizabeth, 
and probably looked very much the same as 
now when Shakespeare was brought before Sir 
Thomas Lucy for outrages among his deer. The 
impression is not that of gray antiquity, but of 
stable and time-honored gentility, still as vital 
as ever. 

It is a most delightful place. All about the 
house and domain there is a perfection of com¬ 
fort and domestic taste, an amplitude of con¬ 
venience, which could have been brought about 
only by the slow ingenuity and labor of many 
successive generations, intent upon adding all 
possible improvement to the home where years 
gone by and years to come give a sort of per- 
170 


A GIFTED WOMAN 


manence to the intangible present. An Ameri¬ 
can is sometimes tempted to fancy that only by 
this long process can real homes be produced . 1 
One man’s lifetime is not enough for the accom¬ 
plishment of such a work of art and nature, al¬ 
most the greatest merely temporary one that is 
confided to him; too little, at any rate, — yet 
perhaps too long when he is discouraged by the 
idea that he must make his house warm and 
delightful for a miscellaneous race of successors, 
of whom the one thing certain is, that his own 
grandchildren will not be among them. Such 
repinings as are here suggested, however, come 
only from the fact that, bred in English habits 
of thought, as most of us are, we have not yet 
modified our instincts to the necessities of our 
new forms of life. A lodging in a wigwam or 
under a tent has really as many advantages, when 
we come to know them, as a home beneath the 
roof tree of Charlecote Hall. But, alas! our 
philosophers have not yet taught us what is best, 

1 It is a wonder to behold — and it is always a new wonder to me — 
how comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves; locating 
their dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porters’ 
lodges, and the smoothest roads, and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and 
clumps of trees, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made the 
most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter can¬ 
not cause disarray ; and all this appropriated to the same family for genera¬ 
tions, so that I suppose they come to believe it created exclusively and on 
purpose for them. And, really, the result is good and beautiful. It is a 
home, — an institution which we Americans have not; but then I doubt 
whether anybody is entitled to a home in this world, in so full a sense. 
— Notes of Travel , I. 184. 

I7 1 


OUR OLD HOME 


nor have our poets sung us what is beautifullest, 
in the kind of life that we must lead ; and there¬ 
fore we still read the old English wisdom, and 
harp upon the ancient strings. And thence it 
happens that, when we look at a time-honored 
hall, it seems more possible for men who inherit 
such a home, than for ourselves, to lead noble 
and graceful lives, quietly doing good and lovely 
things as their daily work, and achieving deeds 
of simple greatness when circumstances require 
them. I sometimes apprehend that our institu¬ 
tions may perish before we shall have discovered 
the most precious of the possibilities which they 
involve. 


172 


V 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

AFTER my first visit to Leamington Spa, I 
A\ went by an indirect route to Lichfield, 
^ and put up at the Black Swan. Had I 
known where to find it, I would much rather 
have established myself at the inn formerly kept 
by the worthy Mr. Boniface, so famous for his 
ale in Farquhar’s time. The Black Swan is an 
old-fashioned hotel, its street front being pene¬ 
trated by an arched passage, in either side of 
which is an entrance door to the different parts 
of the house, and through which, and over the 
large stones of its pavement, all vehicles and 
horsemen rumble and clatter into an enclosed 
court-yard, with a thunderous uproar among the 
contiguous rooms and chambers. I appeared 
to be the only guest of the spacious establish¬ 
ment, but may have had a few fellow lodgers 
hidden in their separate parlors, and utterly es¬ 
chewing that community of interests which is 
the characteristic feature of life in an American 
hotel. At any rate, I had the great, dull, dingy, 
and dreary coffee-room, with its heavy old 
mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and 
173 


OUR OLD HOME 


not a soul to exchange a word with, except the 
waiter, who, like most of his class in England, 
had evidently left his conversational abilities 
uncultivated. No former practice of solitary 
living, nor habits of reticence, nor well-tested 
self-dependence for occupation of mind and 
amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, 
to dissipate the ponderous gloom of an English 
coffee-room under such circumstances as these, 
with no book at hand save the county directory, 
nor any newspaper but a torn local journal of 
five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes, in 
a huge heap of ancient feathers (there is no other 
kind of bed in these old inns), let my head sink 
into an unsubstantial pillow, and slept a stifled 
sleep, infested with such a fragmentary confu¬ 
sion of dreams that I took them to be a medley, 
compounded of the night troubles of all my pre¬ 
decessors in that same unrestful couch. And 
when I awoke, the musty odor of a bygone cen¬ 
tury was in my nostrils, — a faint, elusive smell, 
of which I never had any conception before 
crossing the Atlantic. 

In the morning, after a mutton-chop and a 
cup of chiccory in the dusky coffee-room, I 
went forth and bewildered myself a little while 
among the crooked streets, in quest of one or 
two objects that had chiefly attracted me to the 
spot. The city is of very ancient date, and its 
name in the old Saxon tongue has a dismal im- 
*74 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

port that would apply well, in these days and 
forever henceforward, to many an unhappy lo¬ 
cality in our native land. Lichfield signifies 
“ The Field of the Dead Bodies,” — an epithet, 
however, which the town did not assume in 
remembrance of a battle, but which probably 
sprung up by a natural process, like a sprig of 
rue or other funereal weed, out of the graves 
of two princely brothers, sons of a pagan king 
of Mercia, who were converted by St. Chad, 
and afterwards martyred for their Christian faith. 
Nevertheless, I was but little interested in the 
legends of the remote antiquity of Lichfield, 
being drawn thither partly to see its beautiful 
cathedra], and still more, I believe, because it 
was the birthplace of Dr. Johnson, with whose 
sturdy English character I became acquainted, 
at a very early period of my life, through the 
good offices of Mr. Boswell. In truth, he 
seems as familiar to my recollection, and al¬ 
most as vivid in his personal aspect to my 
mind’s eye, as the kindly figure of my own 
grandfather. It is only a solitary child, — left 
much to such wild modes of culture as he 
chooses for himself while yet ignorant what cul¬ 
ture means, standing on tiptoe to pull down 
books from no very lofty shelf, and then shut¬ 
ting himself up, as it were, between the leaves, 
going astray through the volume at his own 
pleasure, and comprehending it rather by his 
*75 


OUR OLD HOME 


sensibilities and affections than his intellect, — 
that child is the only student that ever gets the 
sort of intimacy which I am now thinking of 
with a literary personage. I do not remember, 
indeed, ever caring much about any of the 
stalwart Doctor’s grandiloquent productions, 
except his two stern and masculine poems, 
London, and The Vanity of Human Wishes ; 
it was as a man, a talker, and a humorist, that 
I knew and loved him, appreciating many of 
his qualities perhaps more thoroughly than I do 
now, though never seeking to put my instinc¬ 
tive perception of his character into language. 

Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser 
friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone 
he breathed was dense ; his awful dread of death 
showed how much muddy imperfection was to 
be cleansed out of him, before he could be 
capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only 
with the surface of life, and never cared to pene¬ 
trate further than to ploughshare depth ; his 
very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed 
clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes, 
standing beside his knee. And yet, consider¬ 
ing that my native propensities were towards 
Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is gener¬ 
ally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a 
New Englander, it may not have been altogether 
amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep 
pace with this heavy-footed traveller, and feed 
176 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


on the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. 
It is wholesome food even now. And, then, 
how English ! Many of the latent sympathies 
that enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so 
well, and that so readily amalgamated them¬ 
selves with the American ideas that seemed 
most adverse to them, may have been derived 
from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great 
English moralist. Never was a descriptive epi¬ 
thet more nicely appropriate than that! Dr. 
Johnson’s morality was as English an article as 
a beefsteak. 

The city of Lichfield (only the cathedral 
towns are called cities in England) stands on 
an ascending site. It has not so many old 
gabled houses as Coventry, for example, but 
still enough to gratify an American appetite for 
the antiquities of domestic architecture. The 
people, too, have an old-fashioned way with 
them, and stare at the passing visitor, as if the 
railway had not yet quite accustomed them to 
the novelty of strange faces moving along their 
ancient sidewalks. The old women whom I 
met, in several instances, dropt me a curtsy; 
and as they were of decent and comfortable ex¬ 
terior, and kept quietly on their way without 
pause or further greeting, it certainly was not 
allowable to interpret their little act of respect 
as a modest method of asking for sixpence; so 
that I had the pleasure of considering it a rem- 
1 77 


OUR OLD HOME 

nant of the reverential and hospitable manners 
of elder times, when the rare presence of a 
stranger might be deemed worth a general ac¬ 
knowledgment. Positively, coming from such 
humble sources, I took it all the more as a wel¬ 
come on behalf of the inhabitants, and would 
not have exchanged it for an invitation from 
the mayor and magistrates to a public dinner. 
Yet I wish, merely for the experiment’s sake, 
that I could have emboldened myself to hold 
out the aforesaid sixpence to at least one of the 
old ladies. 

In my wanderings about town, I came to an 
artificial piece of water, called the Minster Pool. 
It fills the immense cavity in a ledge of rock, 
whence the building materials of the cathedral 
were quarried out a great many centuries ago. 
I should never have guessed the little lake to 
be of man’s creation, so very pretty and quietly 
picturesque an object has it grown to be, with 
its green banks, and the old trees hanging over 
its glassy surface, in which you may see reflected 
some of the battlements of the majestic struc¬ 
ture that once lay here in unshaped stone. Some 
little children stood on the edge of the pool, 
angling with pinhooks ; and the scene reminded 
me (though really, to be quite fair with the 
reader, the gist of the analogy has now escaped 
me) of that mysterious lake in the Arabian 
Nights, which had once been a palace and a 
178 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


city, and where a fisherman used to pull out the 
former inhabitants in the guise of enchanted 
fishes. There is no need of fanciful associations 
to make the spot interesting. It was in the 
porch of one of the houses, in the street that 
runs beside the Minster Pool, that Lord Brooke 
was slain, in the time of the Parliamentary war, 
by a shot from the battlements of the cathe¬ 
dral, which was then held by the Royalists as a 
fortress. The incident is commemorated by an 
inscription on a stone, inlaid into the wall of 
the house. 

I know not what rank the Cathedral of Lich¬ 
field holds among its sister edifices in England, 
as a piece of magnificent architecture. Except 
that of Chester (the grim and simple nave of 
which stands yet unrivalled in my memory), 
and one or two small ones in North Wales, 
hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was 
the first that I had seen. To my uninstructed 
vision, it seemed the object best worth gaz¬ 
ing at in the whole world ; and now, after be¬ 
holding a great many more, I remember it with 
less prodigal admiration only because others are 
as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining 
in my memory represent it as airy rather than 
massive. A multitude of beautiful shapes ap¬ 
peared to be comprehended within its single 
outline; it was a kind of kaleidoscopic mystery, 
so rich a variety of aspects did it assume from 
179 


OUR OLD HOME 


each altered point of view, through the presen¬ 
tation of a different face, and the rearrangement 
of its peaks and pinnacles and the three battle- 
mented towers, with the spires that shot hea¬ 
venward from all three, but one loftier than its 
fellows. Thus it impressed you, at every change, 
as a newly created structure of the passing mo¬ 
ment, in which yet you lovingly recognized the 
half-vanished structure of the instant before, and 
felt, moreover, a joyful faith in the indestructi¬ 
ble existence of all this cloudlike vicissitude. A 
Gothic cathedral is surely the most wonderful 
work which mortal man has yet achieved, so 
vast, so intricate, and so profoundly simple, with 
such strange, delightful recesses in its grand fig¬ 
ure, so difficult to comprehend within one idea, 
and yet all so consonant that it ultimately draws 
the beholder and his universe into its harmony. 
It is the only thing in the world that is vast 
enough and rich enough. 

Not that I felt, or was worthy to feel, an un¬ 
mingled enjoyment in gazing at this wonder. I 
could not elevate myself to its spiritual height, 
any more than I could have climbed from the 
ground to the summit of one of its pinnacles. 
Ascending but a little way, I continually fell 
back and lay in a kind of despair, conscious that 
a flood of uncomprehended beauty was pouring 
down upon me, of which I could appropriate 
only the minutest portion. After a hundred 
180 


Lichfield Cathedral 















WVwVWA VvAyK\A 
















































LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

years, incalculably as my higher sympathies 
might be invigorated by so divine an employ¬ 
ment, I should still be a gazer from below and 
at an awful distance, as yet remotely excluded 
from the interior mystery. But it was some¬ 
thing gained, even to have that painful sense 
of my own limitations, and that half-smothered 
yearning to soar beyond them. The cathedral 
showed me how earthly I was, but yet whis¬ 
pered deeply of immortality. After all, this was 
probably the best lesson that it could bestow, 
and, taking it as thoroughly as possible home 
to my heart, I was fain to be content. If the 
truth must be told, my ill-trained enthusiasm 
soon flagged, and I began to lose the vision of 
a spiritual or ideal edifice behind the time-worn 
and weather-stained front of the actual structure. 
Whenever that is the case, it is most reverential 
to look another way ; but the mood disposes 
one to minute investigation, and I took advan¬ 
tage of it to examine the intricate and multi¬ 
tudinous adornment that was lavished on the 
exterior wall of this great church. Everywhere, 
there were empty niches where statues had been 
thrown down, and here and there a statue still 
lingered in its niche ; and over the chief en¬ 
trance, and extending across the whole breadth 
of the building, was a row of angels, sainted 
personages, martyrs, and kings, sculptured in 
reddish stone. Being much corroded by the 
181 


OUR OLD HOME 


turned to dust beneath the pavement, and the 
quaint devices and inscriptions still speak to you 
above. The statues, that stood or reclined in 
several recesses of the cathedral, had a kind of 
life, and I regarded them with an odd sort of 
deference, as if they were privileged denizens 
of the precinct. It was singular, too, how the 
memorial of the latest buried person, the man 
whose features were familiar in the streets of 
Lichfield only yesterday, seemed precisely as 
much at home here as his mediaeval predeces¬ 
sors. Henceforward he belonged to the cathe¬ 
dral like one of its original pillars. Methought 
this impression in my fancy might be the shadow 
of a spiritual fact. The dying melt into the 
great multitude of the Departed as quietly as a 
drop of water into the ocean, and, it may be, 
are conscious of no unfamiliarity with their new 
circumstances, but immediately become aware 
of an insufferable strangeness in the world which 
they have quitted. Death has not taken them 
away, but brought them home. 

The vicissitudes and mischances of sublunary 
affairs, however, have not ceased to attend upon 
these marble inhabitants ; for I saw the upper 
fragment of a sculptured lady, in a very old- 
fashioned garb, the lower half of whom had 
doubtless been demolished by Cromwell’s sol¬ 
diers when they took the minster by storm. 
And there lies the remnant of this devout lady 
184 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


on her slab, ever since the outrage, as for cen¬ 
turies before, with a countenance of divine se¬ 
renity, and her hands clasped in prayer, sym¬ 
bolizing a depth of religious faith which no 
earthly turmoil or calamity could disturb. An¬ 
other piece of sculpture (apparently a favorite 
subject in the Middle Ages, for I have seen sev¬ 
eral like it in other cathedrals) was a reclining 
skeleton, as faithfully representing an open-work 
of bones as could well be expected in a solid 
block of marble, and at a period, moreover, 
when the mysteries of the human frame were 
rather to be guessed at than revealed. What¬ 
ever the anatomical defects of his production, 
the old sculptor had succeeded in making it 
ghastly beyond measure. How much mischief 
has been wrought upon us by this invariable 
gloom of the Gothic imagination; flinging itself 
like a death-scented pall over our conceptions 
of the future state, smothering our hopes, hid¬ 
ing our sky, and inducing dismal efforts to raise 
the harvest of immortality out of what is most 
opposite to it, — the grave ! 

The cathedral service is performed twice every 
day : at ten o’clock and at four. When I first 
entered, the choristers (young and old, but 
mostly, I think, boys, with voices inexpressi¬ 
bly sweet and clear, and as fresh as bird-notes) 
were just winding up their harmonious labors, 
and soon came thronging through a side door 
185 


OUR OLD HOME 


from the chancel into the nave. They were all 
dressed in long white robes, and looked like a 
peculiar order of beings, created on purpose to 
hover between the roof and pavement of that 
dim, consecrated edifice, and illuminate it with 
divine melodies, reposing themselves, mean¬ 
while, on the heavy grandeur of the organ tones 
like cherubs on a golden cloud. All at once, 
however, one of the cherubic multitude pulled 
off his white gown, thus transforming himself 
before my very eyes into a commonplace youth 
of the day, in modern frock coat and trousers of 
a decidedly provincial cut. This absurd little 
incident, I verily believe, had a sinister effect in 
putting me at odds with the proper influences 
of the cathedral, nor could I quite recover a 
suitable frame of mind during my stay there. 
But, emerging into the open air, I began to be 
sensible that I had left a magnificent interior 
behind me, and I have never quite lost the per¬ 
ception and enjoyment of it in these intervening 
years. 

A large space in the immediate neighborhood 
of the cathedral is called the Close, and com¬ 
prises beautifully kept lawns and a shadowy 
walk bordered by the dwellings of the ecclesi¬ 
astical dignitaries of the diocese. All this row 
of episcopal, canonical, and clerical residences 
has an air of the deepest quiet, repose, and well- 
protected though not inaccessible seclusion. 

186 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

They seemed capable of including everything 
that a saint could desire, and a great many more 
things than most of us sinners generally succeed 
in acquiring. Their most marked feature is a 
dignified comfort, looking as if no disturbance 
or vulgar intrusiveness could ever cross their 
thresholds, encroach upon their ornamented 
lawns, or straggle into the beautiful gardens that 
surround them with flower beds and rich clumps 
of shrubbery. The episcopal palace is a stately 
mansion of stone, built somewhat in the Italian 
style, and bearing on its front the figures 1687, as 
the date of its erection. A large edifice of brick, 
which, if I remember, stood next to the palace, 
I took to be the residence of the second digni¬ 
tary of the cathedral; and, in that case, it must 
have been the youthful home of Addison, whose 
father was Dean of Lichfield. I tried to fancy 
his figure on the delightful walk that extends in 
front of those priestly abodes, from which and 
the interior lawns it is separated by an open-work 
iron fence, lined with rich old shrubbery, and 
overarched by a minster aisle of venerable trees. 
This path is haunted by the shades of famous 
personages who have formerly trodden it. John¬ 
son must have been familiar with it, both as a 
boy and, in his subsequent visits to Lichfield, 
an illustrious old man. Miss Seward, connected 
with so many literary reminiscences, lived in one 
of the adjacent houses. Tradition says that it 
187 


OUR OLD HOME 


from the chancel into the nave. They were all 
dressed in long white robes, and looked like a 
peculiar order of beings, created on purpose to 
hover between the roof and pavement of that 
dim, consecrated edifice, and illuminate it with 
divine melodies, reposing themselves, mean¬ 
while, on the heavy grandeur of the organ tones 
like cherubs on a golden cloud. All at once, 
however, one of the cherubic multitude pulled 
off his white gown, thus transforming himself 
before my very eyes into a commonplace youth 
of the day, in modern frock coat and trousers of 
a decidedly provincial cut. This absurd little 
incident, I verily believe, had a sinister effect in 
putting me at odds with the proper influences 
of the cathedral, nor could I quite recover a 
suitable frame of mind during my stay there. 
But, emerging into the open air, I began to be 
sensible that I had left a magnificent interior 
behind me, and I have never quite lost the per¬ 
ception and enjoyment of it in these intervening 
years. 

A large space in the immediate neighborhood 
of the cathedral is called the Close, and com¬ 
prises beautifully kept lawns and a shadowy 
walk bordered by the dwellings of the ecclesi¬ 
astical dignitaries of the diocese. All this row 
of episcopal, canonical, and clerical residences 
has an air of the deepest quiet, repose, and well- 
protected though not inaccessible seclusion. 

186 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

They seemed capable of including everything 
that a saint could desire, and a great many more 
things than most of us sinners generally succeed 
in acquiring. Their most marked feature is a 
dignified comfort, looking as if no disturbance 
or vulgar intrusiveness could ever cross their 
thresholds, encroach upon their ornamented 
lawns, or straggle into the beautiful gardens that 
surround them with flower beds and rich clumps 
of shrubbery. The episcopal palace is a stately 
mansion of stone, built somewhat in the Italian 
style, and bearing on its front the figures 1687, as 
the date of its erection. A large edifice of brick, 
which, if I remember, stood next to the palace, 
I took to be the residence of the second digni¬ 
tary of the cathedral; and, in that case, it must 
have been the youthful home of Addison, whose 
father was Dean of Lichfield. I tried to fancy 
his figure on the delightful walk that extends in 
front of those priestly abodes, from which and 
the interior lawns it is separated by an open-work 
iron fence, lined with rich old shrubbery, and 
overarched by a minster aisle of venerable trees. 
This path is haunted by the shades of famous 
personages who have formerly trodden it. John¬ 
son must have been familiar with it, both as a 
boy and, in his subsequent visits to Lichfield, 
an illustrious old man. Miss Seward, connected 
with so many literary reminiscences, lived in one 
of the adjacent houses. Tradition says that it 
187 


OUR OLD HOME 


was a favorite spot of Major Andre, who used 
to pace to and fro under these trees, waiting, 
perhaps, to catch a last angel glimpse of Hono- 
ria Sneyd, before he crossed the ocean to en¬ 
counter his dismal doom from an American 
court-martial. David Garrick, no doubt, scam¬ 
pered along the path in his boyish days, and, if 
he was an early student of the drama, must often 
have thought of those two airy characters of the 
Beaux' Stratagem, Archer and Aimwell, who, 
on this very ground, after attending service at 
the cathedral, contrive to make acquaintance 
with the ladies of the comedy. These creatures 
of mere fiction have as positive a substance now 
as the sturdy old figure of Johnson himself. 
They live, while realities have died. The shad¬ 
owy walk still glistens with their gold-embroid¬ 
ered memories. 

Seeking for Johnson's birthplace, I found it 
in St. Mary’s Square, which is not so much a 
square as the mere widening of a street. The 
house is tall and thin, of three stories, with a 
square front and a roof rising steep and high. 
On a side view, the building looks as if it had 
been cut in two in the midst, there being no 
slope of the roof on that side. A ladder slanted 
against the wall, and a painter was giving a live¬ 
lier hue to the plaster. In a corner room of 
the basement, where old Michael Johnson may 
be supposed to have sold books, is now what 
188 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


we should call a dry-goods store, or, according 
to the English phrase, a mercer's and haber¬ 
dasher's shop. The house has a private en¬ 
trance on a cross-street, the door being accessi¬ 
ble by several much worn stone steps, which are 
bordered by an iron balustrade. I set my foot 
on the steps and laid my hand on the balustrade, 
where Johnson's hand and foot must many a 
time have been, and ascending to the door, I 
knocked once, and again, and again, and got no 
admittance. Going round to the shop entrance, 
I tried to open it, but found it as fast bolted as 
the gate of Paradise. It is mortifying to be so 
balked in one’s little enthusiasms; but looking 
round in quest of somebody to make inquiries 
of, I was a good deal consoled by the sight 
of Dr. Johnson himself, who happened, just at 
that moment, to be sitting at his ease nearly in 
the middle of St. Mary's Square, with his face 
turned towards his father's house. 

Of course, it being almost fourscore years 
since the Doctor laid aside his weary bulk of 
flesh, together with the ponderous melancholy 
that had so long weighed him down, the in¬ 
telligent reader will at once comprehend that 
he was marble in his substance, and seated in a 
marble chair, on an elevated stone pedestal. In 
short, it was a statue, sculptured by Lucas, and 
placed here in 1838, at the expense of Dr. Law, 
the reverend chancellor of the diocese. 

189 


OUR OLD HOME 


The figure is colossal (though perhaps not 
much more so than the mountainous Doctor 
himself), and looks down upon the spectator, 
from its pedestal of ten or twelve feet high, 
with a broad and heavy benignity of aspect, 
very like in feature to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s 
portrait of Johnson, but calmer and sweeter in 
expression. Several big books are piled up be¬ 
neath his chair, and, if I mistake not, he holds 
a volume in his hand, thus blinking forth at 
the world out of his learned abstraction, owl¬ 
like, yet benevolent at heart. The statue is 
immensely massive, a vast ponderosity of stone, 
not finely spiritualized, nor, indeed, fully human¬ 
ized, but rather resembling a great stone boul¬ 
der than a man. You must look with the eyes 
of faith and sympathy, or, possibly, you might 
lose the human being altogether, and find only 
a big stone within your mental grasp . 1 On the 
pedestal are three bas-reliefs. In the first, John¬ 
son is represented as hardly more than a baby, 
bestriding an old man’s shoulders, resting his 
chin on the bald head, which he embraces with 
his little arms, and listening earnestly to the 


1 Against one of the pillars [in St. Paul’s Cathedral] stands a statue of 
Dr. Johnson, — a noble and thoughtful figure, with a development of mus¬ 
cle befitting an athlete. I doubt whether sculptors do not err in point of 
taste, by making all their statues models of physical perfection, instead of 
expressing by them the individual character and habits of the man. The 
statue in the market-place at Lichfield has more of the homely truth of 
Johnson’s actual personality than this. — Notes of Travel , I. 367. 

190 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


High-Church eloquence of Dr. Sacheverell. In 
the second tablet, he is seen riding to school on 
the shoulders of two of his comrades, while an¬ 
other boy supports him in the rear. 

The third bas-relief possesses, to my mind, 
a great deal of pathos, to which my appreciative 
faculty is probably the more alive, because I have 
always been profoundly impressed by the inci¬ 
dent here commemorated, and long ago tried to 
tell it for the behoof of childish readers. It 
shows Johnson in the market-place of Uttoxe- 
ter, doing penance for an act of disobedience to 
his father, committed fifty years before. He 
stands bareheaded, a venerable figure, and a 
countenance extremely sad and woe-begone, with 
the wind and rain driving hard against him, and 
thus helping to suggest to the spectator the 
gloom of his inward state. Some market-people 
and children gaze awe-stricken into his face, and 
an aged man and woman, with clasped and up¬ 
lifted hands, seem to be praying for him. These 
latter personages (whose introduction by the 
artist is none the less effective, because, in queer 
proximity, there are some commodities of mar¬ 
ket day in the shape of living ducks and dead 
poultry) I interpreted to represent the spirits 
of Johnson's father and mother, lending what 
aid they could to lighten his half-century's bur¬ 
den of remorse. 

I had never heard of the above described 

191 


OUR OLD HOME 


piece of sculpture before ; it appears to have no 
reputation as a work of art, nor am I at all posi¬ 
tive that it deserves any. For me, however, 
it did as much as sculpture could, under the 
circumstances, even if the artist of the Libyan 
Sibyl had wrought it, by reviving my interest 
in the sturdy old Englishman, and particularly 
by freshening my perception of a wonderful 
beauty and pathetic tenderness in the incident 
of the penance. So, the next day, I left Lich¬ 
field for Uttoxeter, on one of the few purely 
sentimental pilgrimages that I ever undertook, 
to see the very spot where Johnson had stood. 
Boswell, I think, speaks of the town (its name 
is pronounced Yuteoxeter) as being about nine 
miles off from Lichfield, but the county map 
would indicate a greater distance; and by rail, 
passing from one line to another, it is as much 
as eighteen miles. I have always had an idea of 
old Michael Johnson sending his literary mer¬ 
chandise by carrier’s wagon, journeying to Ut¬ 
toxeter afoot on market-day morning, selling 
books through the busy hours, and returning 
to Lichfield at night. This could not possibly 
have been the case. 

Arriving at the Uttoxeter station, the first 
objects that I saw, with a green field or two 
between them and me, were the tower and gray 
steeple of a church, rising among red-tiled roofs 
and a few scattered trees. A very short walk 
192 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 

takes you from the station up into the town. It 
had been my previous impression that the mar¬ 
ket-place of Uttoxeter lay immediately round¬ 
about the church ; and, if I remember the narra¬ 
tive aright, Johnson, or Boswell in his behalf, 
describes his father’s bookstall as standing in 
the market-place, close beside the sacred edifice. 
It is impossible for me to say what changes may 
have occurred in the topography of the town, 
during almost a century and a half since Michael 
Johnson retired from business, and ninety years, 
at least, since his son’s penance was performed. 
But the church has now merely a street of ordi¬ 
nary width passing around it, while the market¬ 
place, though near at hand, neither forms a part 
of it nor is really contiguous, nor would its throng 
and bustle be apt to overflow their boundaries 
and surge against the churchyard and the old 
gray tower. Nevertheless, a walk of a minute 
or two brings a person from the centre of the 
market-place to the church door; and Michael 
Johnson might very conveniently have located 
his stall and laid out his literary ware in the 
corner at the tower’s base ; better there, indeed, 
than in the busy centre of an agricultural market. 
But the picturesque arrangement and full im¬ 
pressiveness of the story absolutely require that 
Johnson shall not have done his penance in a 
corner, ever so little retired, but shall have been 
the very nucleus of the crowd, — the midmost 
193 


OUR OLD HOME 


man of the market-place, — a central image of 
Memory and Remorse, contrasting with and 
overpowering the petty materialism around him. 
He himself, having the force to throw vitality 
and truth into what persons differently consti¬ 
tuted might reckon a mere external ceremony, 
and an absurd one, could not have failed to see 
this necessity. I am resolved, therefore, that 
the true site of Dr. Johnson’s penance was in 
the middle of the market-place. 

That important portion of the town is a 
rather spacious and irregularly shaped vacuity, 
surrounded by houses and shops, some of them 
old, with red-tiled roofs, others wearing a pre¬ 
tence of newness, but probably as old in their 
inner substance as the rest. The people of 
Uttoxeter seemed very idle in the warm summer 
day, and were scattered in little groups along the 
sidewalks, leisurely chatting with one another, 
and often turning about to take a deliberate 
stare at my humble self; insomuch that I felt 
as if my genuine sympathy for the illustrious 
penitent, and my many reflections about him, 
must have imbued me with some of his own 
singularity of mien. If their great-grandfathers 
were such redoubtable starers in the Doctor’s 
day, his penance was no light one. This curios¬ 
ity indicates a paucity of visitors to the little 
town, except for market purposes, and I ques¬ 
tion if Uttoxeter ever saw an American before. 

194 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


The only other thing that greatly impressed me 
was the abundance of public houses, one at every 
step or two: Red Lions, White Harts, Bulls’ 
Heads, Mitres, Cross Keys, and I know not 
what besides. These are probably for the ac¬ 
commodation of the farmers and peasantry of 
the neighborhood on market day, and content 
themselves with a very meagre business on other 
days of the week. At any rate, I was the only 
guest in Uttoxeter at the period of my visit, and 
had but an infinitesimal portion of patronage to 
distribute among such a multitude of inns. The 
reader, however, will possibly be scandalized to 
learn what was the first, and, indeed, the only 
important affair that I attended to, after coming 
so far to indulge a solemn and high emotion, 
and standing now on the very spot where my 
pious errand should have been consummated. 
I stepped into one of the rustic hostelries and 
got my dinner, — bacon and greens, some mut¬ 
ton-chops, juicier and more delectable than all 
America could serve up at the President’s table, 
and a gooseberry pudding ; a sufficient meal for 
six yeomen, and good enough for a prince, be¬ 
sides a pitcher of foaming ale, the whole at the 
pitiful small charge of eighteen-pence ! 

Dr. Johnson would have forgiven me, for no¬ 
body had a heartier faith in beef and mutton than 
himself. And as regards my lack of sentiment 
in eating my dinner, — it was the wisest thing I 
195 


OUR OLD HOME 


had done that day. A sensible man had better 
not let himself be betrayed into these attempts 
to realize the things which he has dreamed about, 
and which, when they cease to be purely ideal 
in his mind, will have lost the truest of their 
truth, the loftest and profoundest part of their 
power over his sympathies. Facts, as we really 
find them, whatever poetry they may involve, are 
covered with a stony excrescence of prose re¬ 
sembling the crust on a beautiful seashell, and 
they never show their most delicate and divinest 
colors until we shall have dissolved away their 
grosser actualities by steeping them long in a 
powerful menstruum of thought. And seeking 
to actualize them again, we do but renew the 
crust. If this were otherwise,—if the moral 
sublimity of a great fact depended in any degree 
on its garb of external circumstances, things 
which change and decay, — it could not itself 
be immortal and ubiquitous, and only a brief 
point of time and a little neighborhood would 
be spiritually nourished by its grandeur and 
beauty. 

Such were a few of the reflections which I 
mingled with my ale, as I remember to have 
seen an old quaffer of that excellent liquor stir 
up his cup with a sprig of some bitter and fra¬ 
grant herb. Meanwhile I found myself still 
haunted by a desire to get a definite result out 
of my visit to Uttoxeter. The hospitable inn 
196 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


was called the Nag's Head, and, standing beside 
the market-place, was as likely as any other to 
have entertained old Michael Johnson in the 
days when he used to come hither to sell books. 
He, perhaps, had dined on bacon and greens, 
and drunk his ale, and smoked his pipe, in the 
very room where I now sat, which was a low, 
ancient room, certainly much older than Queen 
Anne's time, with a red-brick floor, and a white¬ 
washed ceiling, traversed by bare, rough beams, 
the whole in the rudest fashion, but extremely 
neat. Neither did it lack ornament, the walls 
being hung with colored engravings of prize 
oxen and other pretty prints, and the mantel¬ 
piece adorned with earthenware figures of shep¬ 
herdesses in the Arcadian taste of long ago. 
Michael Johnson's eyes might have rested on 
that self-same earthen image, to examine which 
more closely I had just crossed the brick pave¬ 
ment of the room. And, sitting down again, 
still as I sipped my ale, I glanced through the 
open window into the sunny market-place, and 
wished that I could honestly fix on one spot 
rather than another, as likely to have been the 
holy site where Johnson stood to do his pen¬ 
ance. 

How strange and stupid it is that tradition 
should not have marked and kept in mind the 
very place ! How shameful (nothing less than 
that) that there should be no local memorial of 
197 


OUR OLD HOME 


this incident, as beautiful and touching a pas¬ 
sage as can be cited out of any human life ! No 
inscription of it, almost as sacred as a verse of 
Scripture on the wall of the church ! No statue 
of the venerable and illustrious penitent in the 
market-place to throw a wholesome awe over its 
earthliness, its frauds and petty wrongs, of which 
the benumbed fingers of conscience can make 
no record, its selfish competition of each man 
with his brother or his neighbor, its traffic of 
soul substance for a little worldly gain! Such 
a statue, if the piety of the people did not raise 
it, might almost have been expected to grow up 
out of the pavement of its own accord, on the 
spot that had been watered by the rain that 
dripped from Johnson’s garments, mingled with 
his remorseful tears. 

Long after my visit to Uttoxeter, I was told 
that there were individuals in the town who could 
have shown me the exact, indubitable spot where 
Johnson performed his penance. I was assured, 
moreover, that sufficient interest was felt in the 
subject to have induced certain local discussions 
as to the expediency of erecting a memorial . 1 

1 While I was sitting in the central saloon [at the Manchester Art Ex¬ 
hibition], listening to the music, a young man accosted me, presuming that 
I was so-and-so, the American author. He himself was a traveller for a 
publishing firm; and he introduced conversation by talking of Uttoxeter, 
and my description of it in an annual. He said that the account had caused 
a good deal of pique among the good people of Uttoxeter, because of the 
ignorance which I attribute to them as to the circumstance which connects 
Johnson with their town. The spot where Johnson stood can, it appears, 

198 


LICHFIELD AND UTTOXETER 


With all deference to my polite informant, I 
surmise that there is a mistake, and decline, 
without further and precise evidence, giving 
credit to either of the above statements. The 
inhabitants know nothing, as a matter of general 
interest, about the penance, and care nothing 
for the scene of it. If the clergyman of the 
parish, for example, had ever heard of it, would 
he not have used the theme time and again, 
wherewith to work tenderly and profoundly on 
the souls committed to his charge ? If parents 
were familiar with it, would they not teach it to 
their young ones at the fireside, both to insure 
reverence to their own gray hairs, and to pro¬ 
tect the children from such unavailing regrets as 
Johnson bore upon his heart for fifty years? 
If the site were ascertained, would not the pave¬ 
ment thereabouts be worn with reverential foot¬ 
steps ? Would not every town-born child be 
able to direct the pilgrim thither ? While wait¬ 
ing at the station, before my departure, I asked 
a boy who stood near me, — an intelligent and 
gentlemanly lad twelve or thirteen years old, 
whom I should take to be a clergyman's son, — 
I asked him if he had ever heard the story of 
Dr. Johnson, how he stood an hour doing pen- 

still be pointed out. It is on one side of the market-place, and not in the 
neighborhood of the church. I forget whether I recorded, at the time, 
that an Uttoxeter newspaper was sent me, containing a proposal that a 
statue or memorial should be erected on the spot. It would gratify me ex¬ 
ceedingly if such a result should come from my pious pilgrimage thither. 
— Notes of Travel, III. 36. 


199 


OUR OLD HOME 


ance near that church, the spire of which rose 
before us. The boy stared and answered,— 
« No ! ” 

cc Were you born in Uttoxeter ? ” 

“ Yes.” 

I inquired if no circumstance such as I had 
mentioned was known or talked about among 
the inhabitants. 

“ No,” said the boy ; “ not that I ever heard 
of.” 

Just think of the absurd little town, know¬ 
ing nothing of the only memorable incident 
which ever happened within its boundaries since 
the old Britons built it, this sad and lovely 
story, which consecrates the spot (for I found 
it holy to my contemplation, again, as soon as 
it lay behind me) in the heart of a stranger from 
three thousand miles over the sea ! It but con¬ 
firms what I have been saying, that sublime and 
beautiful facts are best understood when ethe- 
realized by distance. 

200 


VI 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

W E set out at a little past eleven, and 
made our first stage to Manchester. 
We were by this time sufficiently 
Anglicized to reckon the morning a bright and 
sunny one ; although the May sunshine was 
mingled with water, as it were, and distempered 
with a very bitter east wind. 

Lancashire is a dreary county (all, at least, 
except its hilly portions), and I have never 
passed through it without wishing myself any¬ 
where but in that particular spot where I then 
happened to be. A few places along our route 
were historically interesting ; as, for example, 
Bolton, which was the scene of many remarka¬ 
ble events in the Parliamentary war, and in the 
market square of which one of the Earls of 
Derby was beheaded. We saw, along the way- 
side, the never-failing green fields, hedges, and 
other monotonous features of an ordinary Eng¬ 
lish landscape. There were little factory vil¬ 
lages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chim¬ 
neys, and their pennons of black smoke, their 
ugliness of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse 
201 


OUR OLD HOME 


matter from the furnace, which seems to be the 
only kind of stuff* which Nature cannot take 
back to herself and resolve into the elements, 
when man has thrown it aside. These hillocks 
of waste and effete mineral always disfigure the 
neighborhood of ironmongering towns, and, 
even after a considerable antiquity, are hardly 
made decent with a little grass. 

At a quarter to two we left Manchester by the 
Sheffield and Lincoln Railway. The scenery 
grew rather better than that through which we 
had hitherto passed, though still by no means 
very striking ; for (except in the show districts, 
such as the Lake country, or Derbyshire) Eng¬ 
lish scenery is not particularly well worth looking 
at, considered as a spectacle or a picture. It has 
a real, homely charm of its own, no doubt; and 
the rich verdure, and the thorough finish added 
by human art, are perhaps as attractive to an 
American eye as any stronger feature could be. 
Our journey, however, between Manchester and 
Sheffield was not through a rich tract of country, 
but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills 
extending straight as a rampart, and across black 
moorlands with here and there a plantation of 
trees. Sometimes there were long and gradual 
ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying 
the very impression which the reader gets from 
many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, and still 
more from those of her two sisters. Old stone 


202 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


or brick farmhouses, and, once in a while, an old 
church tower, were visible ; but these are almost 
too common objects to be noticed in an English 
landscape. 

On a railway, I suspect, what little we do see 
of the country is seen quite amiss, because it was 
never intended to be looked at from any point 
of view in that straight line; so that it is like 
looking at the wrong side of a piece of tapestry. 
The old highways and footpaths were as natural 
as brooks and rivulets, and adapted themselves 
by an inevitable impulse to the physiognomy 
of the country ; and, furthermore, every object 
within view of them had some subtile reference 
to their curves and undulations ; but the line of 
a railway is perfectly artificial, and puts all pre¬ 
cedent things at sixes and sevens. At any rate, 
be the cause what it may, there is seldom any¬ 
thing worth seeing within the scope of a railway 
traveller’s eye ; and if there were, it requires an 
alert marksman to take a flying shot at the pic¬ 
turesque. 

At one of the stations (it was near a village of 
ancient aspect, nestling round a church, on a 
wide Yorkshire moor) I saw a tall old lady in 
black, who seemed to have just alighted from 
the train. She caught my attention by a singu¬ 
lar movement of the head, not once only, but 
continually repeated, and at regular intervals, as 
if she were making a stern and solemn protest 
203 


OUR OLD HOME 


against some action that developed itself before 
her eyes, and were foreboding terrible disaster, 
if it should be persisted in. Of course, it was 
nothing more than a paralytic or nervous affec¬ 
tion ; yet one might fancy that it had its origin 
in some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated half a 
lifetime ago in this old gentlewoman’s presence, 
either against herself or somebody whom she 
loved still better. Her features had a wonderful 
sternness, which, I presume, was caused by her 
habitual effort to compose and keep them quiet, 
and thereby counteract the tendency to paralytic 
movement. The slow, regular, and inexorable 
character of the motion — her look of force and 
self-control, which had the appearance of render¬ 
ing it voluntary, while yet it was so fateful — 
have stamped this poor lady’s face and gesture 
into my memory; so that, some dark day or 
other, I am afraid she will reproduce herself in 
a dismal romance. 

The train stopped a minute or two, to allow 
the tickets to be taken, just before entering the 
Sheffield station, and thence I had a glimpse of 
the famous town of razors and penknives, en¬ 
veloped in a cloud of its own diffusing. My 
impressions of it are extremely vague and misty, 
— or rather, smoky: for Sheffield seems to me 
smokier than Manchester, Liverpool, or Bir¬ 
mingham, — smokier than all England besides, 
unless Newcastle be the exception. It might 
204 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

have been Pluto’s own metropolis, shrouded in 
sulphurous vapor ; and, indeed, our approach 
to it had been by the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death, through a tunnel three miles in length, 
quite traversing the breadth and depth of a 
mountainous hill. 

After passing Sheffield, the scenery became 
softer, gentler, yet more picturesque. At one 
point we saw what I believe to be the utmost 
northern verge of Sherwood Forest, — not con¬ 
sisting, however, of thousand-year oaks, extant 
from Robin Hood’s days, but of young and 
thriving plantations, which will require a cen¬ 
tury or two of slow English growth to give them 
much breadth of shade. Earl Fitzwilliam’s pro¬ 
perty lies in this neighborhood, and probably 
his castle was hidden among some soft depth 
of foliage not far off. Farther onward the coun¬ 
try grew quite level around us, whereby I judged 
that we must now be in Lincolnshire; and 
shortly after six o’clock we caught the first 
glimpse of the cathedral towers, though they 
loomed scarcely huge enough for our precon¬ 
ceived idea of them. But, as we drew nearer, 
the great edifice began to assert itself, making 
us acknowledge it to be larger than our recep¬ 
tivity could take in. 

At the railway station we found no cab (it 
being an unknown vehicle in Lincoln), but only 
an omnibus belonging to the Saracen’s Head, 
205 


OUR OLD HOME 


which the driver recommended as the best hotel 
in the city, and took us thither accordingly. It 
received us hospitably, and looked comfortable 
enough ; though, like the hotels of most old 
English towns, it had a musty fragrance of an¬ 
tiquity, such as I have smelt in a seldom-opened 
London church where the broad aisle is paved 
with tombstones. The house was of an ancient 
fashion, the entrance into its interior court-yard 
being through an arch, in the side of which is 
the door of the hotel. There are long corridors, 
an intricate arrangement of passages, an up and 
down meandering of staircases, amid which it 
would be no marvel to encounter some forgot¬ 
ten guest who had gone astray a hundred years 
ago, and was still seeking for his bedroom while 
the rest of his generation were in their graves. 
There is no exaggerating the confusion of mind 
that seizes upon a stranger in the bewildering 
geography of a great old-fashioned English inn. 

This hotel stands in the principal street of 
Lincoln, and within a very short distance of one 
of the ancient city gates, which is arched across 
the public way, with a smaller arch for foot pas¬ 
sengers on either side ; the whole, a gray, time- 
gnawn, ponderous, shadowy structure, through 
the dark vista of which you look into the Mid¬ 
dle Ages. The street is narrow, and retains 
many antique peculiarities; though, unquestion¬ 
ably, English domestic architecture has lost its 
206 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


most impressive features, in the course of the 
last century. In this respect, there are finer old 
towns than Lincoln: Chester, for instance, and 
Shrewsbury, — which last is unusually rich in 
those quaint and stately edifices where the gentry 
of the shire used to make their winter abodes, 
in a provincial metropolis . 1 Almost everywhere, 

1 On this account I never knew such pleasant walking as in old streets 
like those of Shrewsbury. And there are passages opening under archways, 
and winding up between high edifices, very tempting to the explorer, and 
generally leading to some court, or some queer old range of buildings or piece 
of architecture, which it would be the greatest pity to miss seeing. ... I 
have seen no such stately houses, in that style, as we found here in Shrews¬ 
bury. There were no such fine ones in Coventry, Stratford, Warwick, 
Chester, nor anywhere else where we have been. Their stately height and 
spaciousness seem to have been owing to the fact that Shrewsbury was a sort 
of metropolis of the country round about, and therefore the neighboring 
gentry had their town-houses there, when London was several days’ journey 
off, instead of a very few hours ; and, besides, it was once much the resort 
of kings, and the centre-point of great schemes of war and policy. One 
such house, formerly belonging to a now extinct family, that of Ireland, 
rises to the height of four stories, and has a front consisting of what look 
like four projecting towers. There are ranges of embowed windows, one 
above another, to the full height of the house, and these' are surmounted 
by peaked gables. The people of those times certainly did not deny them¬ 
selves light; and while window-glass was an article of no very remote in¬ 
troduction, it was probably a point of magnificence and wealthy display to 
have enough of it. One whole side of the room must often have been 
formed by the window. This Ireland mansion, as well as all the rest of 
the old houses in Shrewsbury, is a timber house, — that is, a skeleton of 
oak, filled up with brick, plaster, or other material, and with the beams 
of the timber marked out with black paint 5 besides which, in houses of any 
pretension, there are generally trefoils, and other Gothic-looking ornaments, 
likewise painted black. They have an indescribable charm for me, — the 
more, I think, because they are wooden; but, indeed, I cannot tell why it 
is that I like them so well, and am never tired of looking at them. A 
street was a development of human life, in the days when these houses were 
built, whereas a modern street is but the cold plan of an architect, without 
individuality or character, and without the human emotion which a man 

207 


/ 


OUR OLD HOME 


nowadays, there is a monotony of modern brick 
or stuccoed fronts, hiding houses that are older 
than ever, but obliterating the picturesque an¬ 
tiquity of the street. 

Between seven and eight o'clock (it being still 
broad daylight in these long English days) we 
set out to pay a preliminary visit to the exterior 
of the cathedral. Passing through the Stone 
Bow, as the city gate close by is called, we as¬ 
cended a street which grew steeper and narrower 
as we advanced, till at last it got to be the steep¬ 
est street I ever climbed, — so steep that any 
carriage, if left to itself, would rattle downward 
much faster than it could possibly be drawn up. 
Being almost the only hill in Lincolnshire, the 
inhabitants seem disposed to make the most of 
it. The houses on each side had no very re¬ 
markable aspect, except one with a stone portal 
and carved ornaments, which is now a dwelling- 
place for poverty-stricken people, but may have 
been an aristocratic abode in the days of the 
Norman kings, to whom its style of architecture 
dates back. This is called the Jewess’s House, 
having been inhabited by a woman of that faith 
who was hanged six hundred years ago. 

And still the street grew steeper and steeper. 
Certainly, the Bishop and clergy of Lincoln 
ought not to be fat men, but of very spiritual, 

kneads into the walls which he builds on a scheme of his own. — Notes of 
Travel , I. 323-315. 


208 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

saint-like, almost angelic, habit, if it be a fre¬ 
quent part of their ecclesiastical duty to climb 
this hill; for it is a real penance, and was proba¬ 
bly performed as such, and groaned over accord¬ 
ingly, in monkish times. Formerly, on the day 
of his installation, the Bishop used to ascend 
the hill barefoot, and was doubtless cheered and 
invigorated by looking upward to the grand¬ 
eur that was to console him for the humility 
of his approach. We, likewise, were beckoned 
onward by glimpses of the cathedral towers; 
and, finally, attaining an open square on the 
summit, we saw an old Gothic gateway to the 
left hand, and another to the right. The latter 
had apparently been a part of the exterior de¬ 
fences of the cathedral, at a time when the edi¬ 
fice was fortified. The west front rose behind. 
We passed through one of the side arches of 
the Gothic portal, and found ourselves in the 
cathedral close, a wide, level space, where the 
great old minster has fair room to sit, looking 
down on the ancient structures that surround it, 
all of which, in former days, were the habitations 
of its dignitaries and officers. Some of them 
are still occupied as such, though others are in 
too neglected and dilapidated a state to seem 
worthy of so splendid an establishment. Un¬ 
less it be Salisbury Close, however (which is 
incomparably rich as regards the old residences 
that belong to it), I remember no more com- 
209 


OUR OLD HOME 


fortably picturesque precincts round any other 
cathedral. But, in truth, almost every cathedral 
close, in turn, has seemed to me the loveliest, 
cosiest, safest, least wind-shaken, most decorous, 
and most enjoyable shelter that ever the thrift 
and selfishness of mortal man contrived for him¬ 
self. How delightful, to combine all this with 
the service of the temple ! 1 

Lincoln Cathedral is built of a yellowish 
brownstone, which appears either to have been 
largely restored, or else does not assume the 
hoary, crumbly surface that gives such a vener¬ 
able aspect to most of the ancient churches and 
castles in England. In many parts, the recent 
restorations are quite evident; but other, and 
much the larger, portions can scarcely have 
been touched for centuries: for there are still 


1 We now walked around the close [at Salisbury], which is surrounded 
by some of the quaintest and comfortablest ecclesiastical residences that can 
be imagined. These are the dwelling-houses of the Dean and the canons, 
and whatever other high officers compose the Bishop’s staff 5 and there 
was one large brick mansion, old, but not so ancient as the rest, which we 
took to be the Bishop’s palace. I never beheld anything —I must say 
again—so cosy, so indicative of domestic comfort for whole centuries to¬ 
gether, — houses so fit to live in or to die in, and where it would be so 
pleasant to lead a young wife beneath the antique portal, and dwell with her 
till husband and wife were patriarchal, — as these delectable old houses. 
They belong naturally to the cathedral, and have a necessary relation to it, 
and its sanctity is somehow thrown over them all, so that they do not quite 
belong to this world, though they look full to overflowing of whatever 
earthly things are good for man. These are places, however, in which 
mankind makes no progress; the rushing tumult of human life here sub¬ 
sides into a deep quiet pool, with perhaps a gentle circular eddy, but no on¬ 
ward movement. — Notes of Travel , II. 175. 

210 


Salisbury from the Fields 































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I'kWxA y5a m-(\ 




« 



























« 





















PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


the gargoyles, perfect, or with broken noses, as 
the case may be, but showing that variety and 
fertility of grotesque extravagance which no 
modern imitation can effect. There are in¬ 
numerable niches, too, up the whole height of 
the towers, above and around the entrance, and 
all over the walls: most of them empty, but a 
few containing the lamentable remnants of head¬ 
less saints and angels. It is singular what a 
native animosity lives in the human heart against 
carved images, insomuch that, whether they re¬ 
present Christian saint or Pagan deity, all un¬ 
sophisticated men seize the first safe opportunity 
to knock off their heads ! In spite of all dilap¬ 
idations, however, the effect of the west front 
of the cathedral is still exceedingly rich, being 
covered from massive base to airy summit with 
the minutest details of sculpture and carving: 
at least, it was so once; and even now the spir¬ 
itual impression of its beauty remains so strong, 
that we have to look twice to see that much of 
it has been obliterated. I have seen a cherry¬ 
stone carved all over by a monk, so minutely 
that it must have cost him half a lifetime of 
labor; and this cathedral front seems to have 
been elaborated in a monkish spirit, like that 
cherry-stone. Not that the result is in the 
least petty, but miraculously grand, and all the 
more so for the faithful beauty of the smallest 
details. 


211 


OUR OLD HOME 


An elderly man, seeing us looking up at the 
west front, came to the door of an adjacent 
house, and called to inquire if we wished to go 
into the cathedral; but as there would have 
been a dusky twilight beneath its roof, like the 
antiquity that has sheltered itself within, we 
declined for the present. So we merely walked 
round the exterior, and thought it more beauti¬ 
ful than that of York; though, on recollection, 
I hardly deem it so majestic and mighty as that. 
It is vain to attempt a description, or seek 
even to record the feeling which the edifice in¬ 
spires. It does not impress the beholder as an 
inanimate object, but as something that has 
a vast, quiet, long-enduring life of its own, — 
a creation which man did not build, though 
in some way or other it is connected with him, 
and kindred to human nature. In short, I fall 
straightway to talking nonsense, when I try to 
express my inner sense of this and other cathe¬ 
drals. 

While we stood in the close, at the eastern 
end of the minster, the clock chimed the quar¬ 
ters; and then Great Tom, who hangs in the 
Rood Tower, told us it was eight o’clock, in far 
the Sweetest and mightiest accents that I ever 
heard from any bell, — slow, and solemn, and 
allowing the profound reverberations of each 
stroke to die away before the next one fell. It 
was still broad daylight in that upper region of 
212 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

the town, and would be so for some time longer; 
but the evening atmosphere was getting sharp 
and cool. We therefore descended the steep 
street, — our younger companion running be¬ 
fore us, and gathering such headway that I fully 
expected him to break his head against some 
projecting wall. 

In the morning we took a fly (an English 
term for an exceedingly sluggish vehicle), and 
drove up to the minster by a road rather less 
steep and abrupt than the one we had previously 
climbed. We alighted before the west front, 
and sent our charioteer in quest of the verger; 
but, as he was not immediately to be found, a 
young girl let us into the nave. We found it 
very grand, it is needless to say, but not so 
grand, methought, as the vast nave of York 
Minster, especially beneath the great central 
tower of the latter. Unless a writer intends a 
professedly architectural description, there is but 
one set of phrases in which to talk of all the 
cathedrals in England and elsewhere. They are 
alike in their great features : an acre or two of 
stone flags for a pavement; rows of vast col¬ 
umns supporting a vaulted roof at a dusky 
height; great windows, sometimes richly be¬ 
dimmed with ancient or modern stained glass; 
and an elaborately carved screen between the 
nave and chancel, breaking the vista that might 
else be of such glorious length, and which is 
213 


OUR OLD HOME 

further choked up by a massive organ, — in 
spite of which obstructions you catch the broad, 
variegated glimmer of the painted east window, 
where a hundred saints wear their robes of trans¬ 
figuration. Behind the screens are the carved 
oaken stalls of the Chapter and Prebendaries, 
the Bishop's throne, the pulpit, the altar, and 
whatever else may furnish out the Holy of 
Holies. Nor must we forget the range of 
chapels (once dedicated to Catholic saints, but 
which have now lost their individual consecra¬ 
tion), nor the old monuments of kings, warriors, 
and prelates, in the side aisles of the chancel. 
In close contiguity to the main body of the 
Cathedral is the Chapter-House, which, here at 
Lincoln, as at Salisbury, is supported by one 
central pillar rising from the floor, and putting 
forth branches like a tree, to hold up the roof. 
Adjacent to the Chapter-House are the clois¬ 
ters, extending round a quadrangle, and paved 
with lettered tombstones, the more antique of 
which have had their inscriptions half obliterated 
by the feet of monks taking their noontide 
exercise in these sheltered walks, five hundred 
years ago. Some of these old burial stones, 
although with ancient crosses engraved upon 
them, have been made to serve as memorials to 
dead people of very recent date. 

In the chancel, among the tombs of forgot¬ 
ten bishops and knights, we saw an immense 
214 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

slab of stone purporting to be the monument 
of Catherine Swynford, wife of John of Gaunt; 
also, here was the shrine of the little Saint 
Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to 
have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. 
The cathedral is not particularly rich in mon¬ 
uments ; for it suffered grievous outrage and 
dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in 
Cromwell’s time. This latter iconoclast is in 
especially bad odor with the sextons and vergers 
of most of the old churches which I have vis¬ 
ited. His soldiers stabled their steeds in the 
nave of Lincoln Cathedral, and hacked and 
hewed the monkish sculptures, and the ances¬ 
tral memorials of great families, quite at their 
wicked and plebeian pleasure. Nevertheless, 
there are some most exquisite and marvellous 
specimens of flowers, foliage, and grapevines, 
and miracles of stone-work twined about arches, 
as if the material had been as soft as wax in the 
cunning sculptor’s hands, — the leaves being 
represented with all their veins, so that you 
would almost think it petrified Nature, for 
which he sought to steal the praise of Art. 
Here, too, were those grotesque faces which 
always grin at you from the projections of 
monkish architecture, as if the builders had 
gone mad with their own deep solemnity, or 
dreaded such a catastrophe, unless permitted to 
throw in something ineffably absurd. 

215 


OUR OLD HOME 


Originally, it is supposed, all the pillars of 
this great edifice, and all these magic sculptures, 
were polished to the utmost degree of lustre ; 
nor is it unreasonable to think that the artists 
would have taken these further pains, when 
they had already bestowed so much labor in 
working out their conceptions to the extremest 
point. But, at present, the whole interior of 
the cathedral is smeared over with a yellowish 
wash, the very meanest hue imaginable, and for 
which somebody’s soul has a bitter reckoning 
to undergo. 

In the centre of the grassy quadrangle about 
which the cloisters perambulate is a small, mean 
brick building, with a locked door. Our guide, 
— I forgot to say that we had been captured 
by a verger, in black, and with a white tie, but 
of a lusty and jolly aspect, — our guide un¬ 
locked this door, and disclosed a flight of steps. 
At the bottom appeared what I should have 
taken to be a large square of dim, worn, and 
faded oil-carpeting, which might originally have 
been painted of a rather gaudy pattern. This 
was a Roman tessellated pavement, made of 
small colored bricks, or pieces of burnt clay. 
It was accidentally discovered here, and has not 
been meddled with, further than by removing 
the superincumbent earth and rubbish. 

Nothing else occurs to me, just now, to be 
recorded about the interior of the cathedral, 
216 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

except that we saw a place where the stone 
pavement had been worn away by the feet of 
ancient pilgrims scraping upon it, as they knelt 
down before a shrine of the Virgin. 

Leaving the cathedral, we now went along a 
street of more venerable appearance than we 
had heretofore seen, bordered with houses, the 
high-peaked roofs of which were covered with 
red earthen tiles. It led us to a Roman arch, 
which was once the gateway of a fortification, 
and has been striding across the English street 
ever since the latter was a faint village path, 
and for centuries before. The arch is about 
four hundred yards from the cathedral, and it 
is to be noticed that there are Roman remains 
in all this neighborhood, some above ground, 
and doubtless innumerable more beneath it; for, 
as in ancient Rome itself, an inundation of ac¬ 
cumulated soil seems to have swept over what 
was the surface of that earlier day. The gate¬ 
way which I am speaking about is probably 
buried to a third of its height, and perhaps has 
as perfect a Roman pavement (if sought for at 
the original depth) as that which runs beneath 
the Arch of Titus. It is a rude and massive 
structure, and seems as stalwart now as it could 
have been two thousand years ago ; and though 
Time has gnawed it externally, he has made 
what amends he could by crowning its rough 
and broken summit with grass and weeds, and 
217 


OUR OLD HOME 


planting tufts of yellow flowers on the projec¬ 
tions up and down the sides. 

There are the ruins of a Norman castle, built 
by the Conqueror, in pretty close proximity to 
the cathedral; but the old gateway is obstructed 
by a modern door of wood, and we were de¬ 
nied admittance, because some parts of the pre¬ 
cincts are used as a prison. We now rambled 
about on the broad back of the hill, which, be¬ 
sides the cathedral and ruined castle, is the site 
of some stately and queer old houses, and of 
many mean little hovels. I suspect that all or 
most of the life of the present day has subsided 
into the lower town, and that only priests, poor 
people, and prisoners dwell in these upper re¬ 
gions. In the wide, dry moat, at the base of 
the castle wall, are clustered whole colonies of 
small houses, some of brick, but the larger por¬ 
tion built of old stones which once made part 
of the Norman keep, or of Roman structures 
that existed before the Conqueror’s castle was 
ever dreamed about. They are like toadstools 
that spring up from the mould of a decaying 
tree. Ugly as they are, they add wonderfully 
to the picturesqueness of the scene, being quite 
as valuable, in that respect, as the great, broad, 
ponderous ruin of the castle keep, which rose 
high above our heads, heaving its huge, gray 
mass out of a bank of green foliage and orna¬ 
mental shrubbery, such as lilacs, and other 
218 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


flowering plants, in which its foundations were 
completely hidden. 

After walking quite round the castle, I made 
an excursion through the Roman gateway, along 
a pleasant and level road bordered with dwell¬ 
ings of various character. One or two were 
houses of gentility, with delightful and shadowy 
lawns before them; many had those high, red- 
tiled roofs, ascending into acutely pointed ga¬ 
bles, which seem to belong to the same epoch 
as some of the edifices in our own earlier towns ; 
and there were pleasant-looking cottages, very 
sylvan and rural, with hedges so dense and high, 
fencing them in, as almost to hide them up to 
the eaves of their thatched roofs. In front of 
one of these I saw various images, crosses, and 
relics of antiquity, among which were fragments 
of old Catholic tombstones, disposed by way of 
ornament. 

We now went home to the Saracen’s Head; 
and as the weather was very unpropitious, and 
it sprinkled a little now and then, I would 
gladly have felt myself released from further 
thraldom to the cathedral. But it had taken 
possession of me, and would not let me be at 
rest; so at length I found myself compelled to 
climb the hill again between daylight and dusk. 
A mist was now hovering about the upper 
height of the great central tower, so as to dim 
and half obliterate its battlements and pinna- 
219 


OUR OLD HOME 


cles, even while I stood in the close beneath it. 
It was the most impressive view that I had had. 
The whole lower part of the structure was seen 
with perfect distinctness ; but at the very sum¬ 
mit the mist was so dense as to form an actual 
cloud, as well defined as ever I saw resting on 
a mountain-top. Really and literally, here was 
a “ cloud-capt tower.” 

The entire cathedral, too, transfigured itself 
into a richer beauty and more imposing majesty 
than ever. The longer I looked, the better I 
loved it. Its exterior is certainly far more beau¬ 
tiful than that of York Minster; and its finer 
effect is due, I think, to the many peaks in 
which the structure ascends, and to the pinna¬ 
cles which, as it were, repeat and reecho them 
into the sky. York Minster is comparatively 
square and angular in its general effect; but in 
this at Lincoln there is a continual mystery of 
variety, so that at every glance you are aware 
of a change, and a disclosure of something new, 
yet working an harmonious development of 
what you have heretofore seen. The west front 
is unspeakably grand, and may be read over and 
over again forever, and still show undetected 
meanings, like a great broad page, of marvellous 
writing in black-letter, — so many sculptured 
ornaments there are, blossoming out before your 
eyes, and gray statues that have grown there 
since you looked last, and empty niches, and a 
220 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


hundred airy canopies beneath which carved 
images used to be, and where they will show 
themselves again, if you gaze long enough. 
But I will not say another word about the 
cathedral. 

We spent the rest of the day within the som¬ 
bre precincts of the Saracen’s Head, reading yes¬ 
terday’s Times, The Guide-Book of Lincoln, 
and The Directory of the Eastern Counties. 
Dismal as the weather was, the street beneath 
our window was enlivened with a great bustle 
and turmoil of people all the evening, because 
it was Saturday night, and they had accom¬ 
plished their week’s toil, received their wages, 
and were making their small purchases against 
Sunday, and enjoying themselves as well as they 
knew how. A band of music passed to and fro 
several times, with the raindrops falling into 
the mouth of the brazen trumpet and pattering 
on the bass drum ; a spirit shop, opposite the 
hotel, had a vast run of custom ; and a coffee- 
dealer, in the open air, found occasional vent 
for his commodity, in spite of the cold water 
that dripped into the cups. The whole breadth 
of the street, between the Stone Bow and the 
bridge across the Witham, was thronged to 
overflowing, and humming with human life. 

Observing in the Guide-Book that a steamer 
runs on the river Witham between Lincoln and 
Boston, I inquired of the waiter, and learned 
221 


OUR OLD HOME 


that she was to start on Monday at ten o’clock. 
Thinking it might be an interesting trip, and 
a pleasant variation of our customary mode of 
travel, we determined to make the voyage. The 
Witham flows through Lincoln, crossing the 
main street under an arched bridge of Gothic 
construction, a little below the Saracen’s Head. 
It has more the appearance of a canal than of 
a river, in its passage through the town, — be¬ 
ing bordered with hewn-stone mason-work on 
each side, and provided with one or two locks. 
The steamer proved to be small, dirty, and 
altogether inconvenient. The early morning 
had been bright, but the sky now lowered upon 
us with a sulky English temper, and we had not 
long put off before we felt an ugly wind from 
the German Ocean blowing right in our teeth. 
There were a number of passengers on board, 
country people, such as travel by third class on 
the railway; for, I suppose, nobody but our¬ 
selves ever dreamt of voyaging by the steamer 
for the sake of what he might happen upon in 
the way of river scenery. 

We bothered a good while about getting 
through a preliminary lock ; nor, when fairly 
under way, did we ever accomplish, I think, six 
miles an hour. Constant delays were caused, 
moreover, by stopping to take up passengers and 
freight, — not at regular landing-places, but 
anywhere along the green banks. The scenery 
222 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


was identical with that of the railway, because 
the latter runs along by the river-side through 
the whole distance, or nowhere departs from it 
except to make a short cut across some sinuos¬ 
ity ; so that our only advantage lay in the drawl¬ 
ing, snail-like slothfulness of our progress, which 
allowed us time enough and to spare for the ob¬ 
jects along the shore. Unfortunately, there was 
nothing, or next to nothing, to be seen, — the 
country being one unvaried level over the whole 
thirty miles of our voyage, — not a hill in sight 
either near or far, except that solitary one on the 
summit of which we had left Lincoln Cathedral. 
And the cathedral was our landmark for four 
hours or more, and at last rather faded out than 
was hidden by any intervening object. 

It would have been a pleasantly lazy day 
enough, if the rough and bitter wind had not 
blown directly in our faces, and chilled us 
through, in spite of the sunshine that soon suc¬ 
ceeded a sprinkle or two of rain. These Eng¬ 
lish east winds, which prevail from February till 
June, are greater nuisances than the east wind 
of our own Atlantic coast, although they do 
not bring mist and storm, as with us, but some 
of the sunniest weather that England sees. 
Under their influence, the sky smiles and is 
villainous. 

The landscape was tame to the last degree, 
but had an English character that was abun- 
223 


OUR OLD HOME 


dandy worth our looking at. A green luxuri¬ 
ance of early grass; old, high-roofed farmhouses, 
surrounded by their stone barns and ricks of 
hay and grain ; ancient villages, with the square, 
gray tower of a church seen afar over the level 
country, amid the cluster of red roofs ; here 
and there a shadowy grove of venerable trees, 
surrounding what was perhaps an Elizabethan 
hall, though it looked more like the abode of 
some rich yeoman. Once, too, we saw the tower 
of a mediaeval castle, that of Tattershall, built 
by a Cromwell, but whether of the Protector’s 
family I cannot tell. But the gentry do not 
appear to have settled multitudinously in this 
tract of country; nor is it to be wondered at, 
since a lover of the picturesque would as soon 
think of settling in Holland. The river retains 
its canal-like aspect all along; and only in the 
latter part of its course does it become more 
than wide enough for the little steamer to turn 
itself round, — at broadest, not more than twice 
that width. 

The only memorable incident of our voyage 
happened when a mother duck was leading her 
little fleet of five ducklings across the river, just 
as our steamer went swaggering by, stirring the 
quiet stream into great waves that lashed the 
banks on either side. I saw the imminence of 
the catastrophe, and hurried to the stern of the 
boat to witness its consummation, since I could 
224 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


not possibly avert it. The poor ducklings had 
uttered their baby quacks, and striven with all 
their tiny might to escape; four of them, I be¬ 
lieve, were washed aside and thrown off unhurt 
from the steamer's prow ; but the fifth must have 
gone under the whole length of the keel, and 
never could have come up alive. 

At last, in mid-afternoon, we beheld the tall 
tower of Saint Botolph’s Church (three hundred 
feet high, the same elevation as the tallest tower 
of Lincoln Cathedral) looming in the distance. 
At about half past four we reached Boston 
(which name has been shortened, in the course 
of ages, by the quick and slovenly English 
pronunciation from Botolph’s town), and were 
taken by a cab to the Peacock, in the market¬ 
place. It was the best hotel in town, though 
a poor one enough ; and we were shown into a 
small, stifled parlor, dingy, musty, and scented 
with stale tobacco smoke, — tobacco smoke two 
days old, for the waiter assured us that the room 
had not more recently been fumigated. An 
exceedingly grim waiter he was, apparently a 
genuine descendant of the old Puritans of this 
English Boston, and quite as sour as those who 
people the daughter city in New England. Our 
parlor had the one recommendation of looking 
into the market-place, and affording a sidelong 
glimpse of the tall spire and noble old church. 

In my first ramble about the town, chance led 
225 


OUR OLD HOME 


me to the river-side, at that quarter where the 
port is situated. Here were long buildings of 
an old-fashioned aspect, seemingly warehouses, 
with windows in the high, steep roofs. The 
Custom House found ample accommodation 
within an ordinary dwelling-house. Two or 
three large schooners were moored along the 
river’s brink, which had here a stone margin; 
another large and handsome schooner was evi¬ 
dently just finished, rigged and equipped for her 
first voyage ; the rudiments of another were on 
the stocks, in a shipyard bordering on the river. 
Still another, while I was looking on, came up 
the stream, and lowered her mainsail, from a 
foreign voyage. An old man on the bank hailed 
her and inquired about her cargo ; but the Lin¬ 
colnshire people have such a queer way of talk¬ 
ing English that I could not understand the 
reply. Farther down the river, I saw a brig ap¬ 
proaching rapidly under sail. The whole scene 
made an odd impression of'bustle, and sluggish¬ 
ness, and decay, and a remnant of wholesome 
life ; and I could but contrast it with the mighty 
and populous activity of our own Boston, which 
was once the feeble infant of this old English 
town, — the latter, perhaps, almost stationary 
ever since that day, as if the birth of such an 
offspring had taken away its own principle of 
growth. I thought of Long Wharf, and Fan- 
euil Hall, and Washington Street, and the Great 
226 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

Elm, and the State House, and exulted lustily, 
— but yet began to feel at home in this good 
old town, for its very name’s sake, as I never 
had before felt, in England. 

The next morning we came out in the early 
sunshine (the sun must have been shining nearly 
four hours, however, for it was after eight 
o’clock), and strolled about the streets, like peo¬ 
ple who had a right to be there. The market¬ 
place of Boston is an irregular square, into one 
end of which the chancel of the church slightly 
projects. The gates of the churchyard were 
open and free to all passengers, and the common 
footway of the townspeople seems to lie to and 
fro across it. It is paved, according to English 
custom, with flat tombstones; and there are also 
raised or altar tombs, some of which have ar¬ 
morial bearings on them. One clergyman has 
caused himself and his wife to be buried right 
in the middle of the stone-bordered path that 
traverses the churchyard ; so that not an indi¬ 
vidual of the thousands who pass along this 
public way can help trampling over him or her. 
The scene, nevertheless, was very cheerful in 
the morning sun : people going about their 
business in the day’s primal freshness, which 
was just as fresh here as in younger villages; 
children with milk-pails loitering over the bur¬ 
ial stones; schoolboys playing leap-frog with the 
altar tombs; the simple old town preparing itself 
227 


OUR OLD HOME 


for the day, which would be like myriads of other 
days that had passed over it, but yet would be 
worth living through. And down on the church¬ 
yard, where were buried many generations whom 
it remembered in their time, looked the stately 
tower of Saint Botolph ; and it was good to see 
and think of such an age-long giant intermarry¬ 
ing the present epoch with a distant past, and 
getting quite imbued with human nature by 
being so immemorially connected with men’s 
familiar knowledge and homely interests. It is 
a noble tower; and the jackdaws, evidently, 
have pleasant homes in their hereditary nests 
among its topmost windows, and live delight¬ 
ful lives, flitting and cawing about its pinnacles 
and flying buttresses. I should almost like to 
be a jackdaw myself, for the sake of living up 
there. 

In front of the church, not more than twenty 
yards off, and with a low brick wall between, 
flows the river Witham. On the hither bank 
a fisherman was washing his boat; and another 
skiff, with her sail lazily half twisted, lay on the 
opposite strand. The stream at this point is 
about of such width that, if the tall tower were 
to tumble over flat on its face, its topstone might 
perhaps reach to the middle of the channel. On 
the farther shore there is a line of antique-look¬ 
ing houses, with roofs of red tile, and windows 
opening out of them, — some of these dwellings 
228 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

being so ancient that the Reverend Mr. Cotton, 
subsequently our first Boston minister, must 
have seen them with his own bodily eyes when 
he used to issue from the front portal after ser¬ 
vice. Indeed, there must be very many houses 
here, and even some streets, that bear much the 
aspect that they did when the Puritan divine 
paced solemnly among them. 

In our rambles about town, we went into a 
bookseller’s shop to inquire if he had any de¬ 
scription of Boston for sale. He offered me 
(or, rather, produced for inspection, not suppos¬ 
ing that I would buy it) a quarto history of the 
town, published by subscription, nearly forty 
years ago. The bookseller showed himself a 
well-informed and affable man, and a local an¬ 
tiquary, to whom a party of inquisitive strangers 
were a godsend. He had met with several 
Americans, who, at various times, had come on 
pilgrimages to this place, and he had been in 
correspondence with others. Happening to 
have heard the name of one member of our 
party, he showed us great courtesy and kind¬ 
ness, and invited us into his inner domicile, 
where, as he modestly intimated, he kept a few 
articles which it might interest us to see. So 
we went with him through the shop, upstairs, 
into the private part of his establishment; and, 
really, it was one of the rarest adventures I ever 
met with, to stumble upon this treasure of a 
229 


OUR OLD HOME 


man, with his treasury of antiquities and curios¬ 
ities, veiled behind the unostentatious front of 
a bookseller's shop, in a very moderate line of 
village business. The two upstairs rooms into 
which he introduced us were so crowded with 
inestimable articles, that we were almost afraid 
to stir for fear of breaking some fragile thing 
that had been accumulating value for unknown 
centuries. 

The apartment was hung round with pictures 
and old engravings, many of which were ex¬ 
tremely rare. Premising that he was going to 
show us something very curious, Mr. Porter 
went into the next room and returned with 
a counterpane of fine linen, elaborately em¬ 
broidered with silk, which so profusely covered 
the linen that the general effect was as if the 
main texture were silken. It was stained and 
seemed very old, and had an ancient fragrance. 
It was wrought all over with birds and flowers 
in a most delicate style of needlework, and among 
other devices, more than once repeated, was the 
cipher M. S., — being the initials of one of the 
most unhappy names that ever a woman bore. 
This quilt was embroidered by the hands of 
Mary Queen of Scots, during her imprison¬ 
ment at Fotheringay Castle; and having evi¬ 
dently been a work of years, she had doubtless 
shed many tears over it, and wrought many 
doleful thoughts and abortive schemes into its 
230 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


texture, along with the birds and flowers. As 
a counterpart to this most precious relic, our 
friend produced some of the handiwork of a 
former Queen of Otaheite, presented by her to 
Captain Cook; it was a bag, cunningly made 
of some delicate vegetable stuff, and ornamented 
with feathers. Next, he brought out a green 
silk waistcoat of very antique fashion, trimmed 
about the edges and pocket-holes with a rich 
and delicate embroidery of gold and silver. 
This (as the possessor of the treasure proved, 
by tracing its pedigree till it came into his 
hands) was once the vestment of Queen Eliza¬ 
beth’s Lord Burleigh; but that great statesman 
must have been a person of very moderate girth 
in the chest and waist; for the garment was 
hardly more than a comfortable fit for a boy 
of eleven, the smallest American of our party, 
who tried on the gorgeous waistcoat. Then, 
Mr. Porter produced some curiously engraved 
drinking-glasses, with a view of Saint Botolph’s 
steeple on one of them, and other Boston edi¬ 
fices, public or domestic, on the remaining two, 
very admirably done. These crystal goblets 
had been a present, long ago, to an old master 
of the Free School from his pupils ; and it is 
very rarely, I imagine, that a retired school¬ 
master can exhibit such trophies of gratitude 
and affection, won from the victims of his birch 
rod. 


231 


OUR OLD HOME 


Our kind friend kept bringing out one unex¬ 
pected and wholly unexpectable thing after an¬ 
other, as if he were a magician, and had only to 
fling a private signal into the air, and some at¬ 
tendant imp would hand forth any strange relic 
he might choose to ask for. He was especially 
rich in drawings by the Old Masters, producing 
two or three, of exquisite delicacy, by Raphael, 
one by Salvator, a head by Rembrandt, and 
others, in chalk or pen and ink, by Giordano, 
Benvenuto Cellini, and hands almost as famous; 
and besides what were shown us, there seemed 
to be an endless supply of these art treasures 
in reserve. On the wall hung a crayon portrait 
of Sterne, never engraved, representing him as 
a rather young man, blooming, and not un¬ 
comely ; it was the worldly face of a man fond 
of pleasure, but without that ugly, keen, sar¬ 
castic, odd expression that we see in his only 
engraved portrait. The picture is an original, 
and must needs be very valuable; and we wish 
it might be prefixed to some new and worthier 
biography of a writer whose character the world 
has always treated with singular harshness, con¬ 
sidering how much it owes him. There was 
likewise a crayon portrait of Sterne’s wife, look¬ 
ing so haughty and unamiable that the won¬ 
der is, not that he ultimately left her, but how 
he ever contrived to live a week with such an 
awful woman. 


232 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

After looking at these, and a great many more 
things than I can remember, above stairs, we 
went down to a parlor, where this wonderful 
bookseller opened an old cabinet, containing 
numberless drawers, and looking just fit to be 
the repository of such knick-knacks as were 
stored up in it. He appeared to possess more 
treasures than he himself knew of, or knew 
where to find; but, rummaging here and there, 
he brought forth things new and old: rose- 
nobles, Victoria crowns, gold angels, double sov¬ 
ereigns of George IV., two-guinea pieces of 
George II.; a marriage medal of the first Na¬ 
poleon, only forty-five of which were ever struck 
off, and of which even the British Museum does 
not contain a specimen like this, in gold ; a brass 
medal, three or four inches in diameter, of a 
Roman emperor; together with buckles, brace¬ 
lets, amulets, and I know not what besides. 
There was a green silk tassel from the fringe 
of Queen Mary’s bed at Holyrood Palace. 
There were illuminated missals, antique Latin 
Bibles, and (what may seem of especial interest 
to the historian) a Secret-book of Queen Eliza¬ 
beth, in manuscript, written, for aught I know, 
by her own hand. On examination, however, 
it proved to contain, not secrets of state, but 
recipes for dishes, drinks, medicines, washes, 
and all such matters of housewifery, the toilet, 
and domestic quackery, among which we were 
233 


OUR OLD HOME 


horrified by the title of one of the nostrums, 
“ How to kill a Fellow quickly ! ” We never 
doubted that bloody Queen Bess might often 
have had occasion for such a recipe, but won¬ 
dered at her frankness, and at her attending 
to these anomalous necessities in such a me¬ 
thodical way. The truth is, we had read amiss, 
and the Queen had spelt amiss: the word 
was “ Fellon,” a sort of whitlow,— not “ Fel¬ 
low.” 

Our hospitable friend now made us drink a 
glass of wine, as old and genuine as the curiosi¬ 
ties of his cabinet; and, while sipping it, we un¬ 
gratefully tried to excite his envy, by telling him 
various things, interesting to an antiquary and 
virtuoso, which we had seen in the course of 
our travels about England. We spoke, for in¬ 
stance, of a missal bound in solid gold and set 
around with jewels, but of such intrinsic value 
as no setting could enhance, for it was ex¬ 
quisitely illuminated, throughout, by the hand 
of Raphael himself. We mentioned a little 
silver case which once contained a portion of 
the heart of Louis XIV. nicely done up in 
spices, but, to the owner’s horror and astonish¬ 
ment, Dean Buckland popped the kingly mor¬ 
sel into his mouth, and swallowed it. We 
told about the black-letter prayer-book of King 
Charles the Martyr, used by him upon the scaf¬ 
fold, taking which into our hands, it opened of 
234 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


itself at the Communion Service ; and there, on 
the left-hand page, appeared a spot about as 
large as a sixpence, of a yellowish or brownish 
hue: a drop of the king’s blood had fallen 
there. 

Mr. Porter now accompanied us to the church, 
but first leading us to a vacant spot of ground, 
where old John Cotton’s vicarage had stood 
till a very short time since. According to our 
friend’s description, it was a humble habitation, 
of the cottage order, built of brick, with a 
thatched roof. The site is now rudely fenced 
in, and cultivated as a vegetable garden. In 
the right-hand aisle of the church there is an 
ancient chapel, which, at the time of our visit, 
was in process of restoration, and was to be 
dedicated to Mr. Cotton, whom these English 
people consider as the founder of our American 
Boston. It would contain a painted memorial 
window, in honor of the old Puritan minister. 
A festival in commemoration of the event was 
to take place in the ensuing July, to which I 
had myself received an invitation, but I knew 
too well the pains and penalties incurred by an 
invited guest at public festivals in England to 
accept it. It ought to be recorded (and it seems 
to have made a very kindly impression on our 
kinsfolk here) that five hundred pounds had 
been contributed by persons in the United 
States, principally in Boston, towards the cost 
235 


OUR OLD HOME 


of the memorial window, and the repair and 
restoration of the chapel. 

After we emerged from the chapel, Mr. Porter 
approached us with the vicar, to whom he kindly 
introduced us, and then took his leave. May 
a stranger’s benediction rest upon him ! He is 
a most pleasant man; rather, I imagine, a vir¬ 
tuoso than an antiquary ; for he seemed to value 
the Queen of Otaheite’s bag as highly as Queen 
Mary’s embroidered quilt, and to have an om¬ 
nivorous appetite for everything strange and 
rare. Would that we could fill up his shelves 
and drawers (if there are any vacant spaces left) 
with the choicest trifles that have dropped out 
of Time’s carpet-bag, or give him the carpet¬ 
bag itself, to take out what he will! 

The vicar looked about thirty years old, a 
gentleman, evidently assured of his position (as 
clergymen of the Established Church invariably 
are), comfortable and well-to-do, a scholar and 
a Christian, and fit to be a bishop, knowing how 
to make the most of life without prejudice to 
the life to come. I was glad to see such a model 
English priest so suitably accommodated with 
an old English church. He kindly and courte¬ 
ously did the honors, showing us quite round 
the interior, giving us all the information that 
we required, and then leaving us to the quiet 
enjoyment of what we came to see. 

The interior of St. Botolph’s is very fine and 
236 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

satisfactory, as stately, almost, as a cathedral, 
and has been repaired — so far as repairs were 
necessary — in a chaste and noble style. The 
great eastern window is of modern painted glass, 
but is the richest, mellowest, and tenderest mod¬ 
ern window that I have ever seen: the art of 
painting these glowing transparencies in pristine 
perfection being one that the world has lost. 
The vast, clear space of the interior church de¬ 
lighted me. There was no screen,— nothing 
between the vestibule and the altar to break the 
long vista; even the organ stood aside,—though 
it by and by made us aware of its presence by 
a melodious roar. Around the walls there were 
old engraved brasses, and a stone coffin, and an 
alabaster knight of Saint John, and an alabaster 
lady, each recumbent at full length, as large as 
life, and in perfect preservation, except for a 
slight modern touch at the tips of their noses. 
In the chancel we saw a great deal of oaken work, 
quaintly and admirably carved, especially about 
the seats formerly appropriated to the monks, 
which were so contrived as to tumble down with 
a tremendous crash if the occupant happened to 
fall asleep. 

We now essayed to climb into the upper 
regions. Up we went, winding and still wind¬ 
ing round the circular stairs, till we came to the 
gallery beneath the stone roof of the tower, 
whence we could look down and see the raised 
2 37 


OUR OLD HOME 

Font, and my Talma lying on one of the steps, 
and looking about as big as a pocket-handker¬ 
chief. Then up again, up, up, up, through a 
yet smaller staircase, till we emerged into another 
stone gallery, above the jackdaws, and far above 
the roof beneath which we had before made a 
halt. Then up another flight, which led us into 
a pinnacle of the temple, but not the highest; 
so, retracing our steps, we took the right turret 
this time, and emerged into the loftiest lantern, 
where we saw level Lincolnshire, far and near, 
though with a haze on the distant horizon. 
There were dusty roads, a river, and canals, 
converging towards Boston, which — a congre¬ 
gation of red-tiled roofs — lay beneath our feet, 
with pygmy people creeping about its narrow 
streets. We were three hundred feet aloft, and 
the pinnacle on which we stood is a landmark 
forty miles at sea. 

Content, and weary of our elevation, we de¬ 
scended the corkscrew stairs and left the church; 
the last object that we noticed in the interior being 
a bird, which appeared to be at home there, and 
responded with its cheerful notes to the swell of 
the organ. Pausing on the church steps, we ob¬ 
served that there were formerly two statues, one 
on each side of the doorway; the canopies still 
remaining and the pedestals being about a yard 
from the ground. Some of Mr. Cotton’s Puri¬ 
tan parishioners are probably responsible for 
238 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 

the disappearance of these stone saints. This 
doorway at the base of the tower is now much 
dilapidated, but must once have been very rich 
and of a peculiar fashion. It opens its arch 
through a great square tablet of stone, reared 
against the front of the tower. On most of the 
projections, whether on the tower or about the 
body of'the church, there are gargoyles of genu¬ 
ine Gothic grotesqueness, — fiends, beasts, an¬ 
gels, and combinations of all three; and where 
portions of the edifice are restored, the modern 
sculptors have tried to imitate these wild fan¬ 
tasies, but with very poor success. Extravagance 
and absurdity have still their law, and should 
pay as rigid obedience to it as the primmest 
things on earth. 

In our further rambles about Boston, we 
crossed the river by a bridge, and observed 
that the larger part of the town seems to lie on 
that side of its navigable stream. The crooked 
streets and narrow lanes reminded me much of 
Hanover Street, Ann Street, and other portions 
of the North End of our American Boston, as I 
remember that picturesque region in my boyish 
days. It is not unreasonable to suppose that 
the local habits and recollections of the first 
settlers may have had some influence on the 
physical character of the streets and houses in 
the New England metropolis ; at any rate, here 
is a similar intricacy of bewildering lanes, and 
*39 


OUR OLD HOME 

numbers of old peaked and project!ng-storied 
dwellings, such as I used to see there. It is 
singular what a home feeling and sense of kin¬ 
dred I derived from this hereditary connection 
and fancied physiognomical resemblance between 
the old town and its well-grown daughter, and 
how reluctant I was, after chill years of banish¬ 
ment, to leave this hospitable place on that ac¬ 
count. Moreover, it recalled some of the features 
of another American town, my own dear native 
place, when I saw the seafaring people leaning 
against posts, and sitting on planks, under the 
lee of warehouses, — or lolling on long-boats, 
drawn up high and dry, as sailors and old wharf- 
rats are accustomed to do, in seaports of little 
business. In other respects, the English town 
is more village-like than either of the American 
ones. The women and budding girls chat to¬ 
gether at their doors, and exchange merry greet¬ 
ings with young men; children chase one another 
in the summer twilight; schoolboys sail little 
boats on the river, or play at marbles across the 
flat tombstones in the churchyard ; and ancient 
men, in breeches and long waistcoats, wander 
slowly about the streets, with a certain familiar¬ 
ity of deportment, as if each one were every¬ 
body’s grandfather. I have frequently observed, 
in old English towns, that Old Age comes forth 
more cheerfully and genially into the sunshine 
than among ourselves, where the rush, stir, 
240 


PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 


bustle, and irreverent energy of youth are so pre¬ 
ponderant that the poor, forlorn grandsires begin 
to doubt whether they have a right to breathe 
in such a world any longer, and so hide their 
silvery heads in solitude. Speaking of old men, 
I am reminded of the scholars of the Boston 
Charity School, who walk about in antique, 
long-skirted blue coats, and knee-breeches, and 
with bands at their necks, — perfect and gro¬ 
tesque pictures of the costume of three centuries 
ago. 

On the morning of our departure, I looked 
from the parlor window of the Peacock into the 
market-place, and beheld its irregular square 
already well covered with booths, and more in 
process of being put up, by stretching tattered 
sailcloth on poles. It was market day. The 
dealers were arranging their commodities, con¬ 
sisting chiefly of vegetables, the great bulk of 
which seemed to be cabbages. Later in the 
forenoon there was a much greater variety of 
merchandise : basket-work, both for fancy and 
use; twig brooms, beehives, oranges, rustic at¬ 
tire ; all sorts of things, in short, that are com¬ 
monly sold at a rural fair. I heard the lowing of 
cattle, too, and the bleating of sheep, and found 
that there was a market for cows, oxen, and pigs, 
in another part of the town. A crowd of towns¬ 
people and Lincolnshire yeomen elbowed one 
another in the square ; Mr. Punch was squeak- 
241 


OUR OLD HOME 


ing in one corner, and a vagabond juggler tried 
to find space for his exhibition in another: so 
that my final glimpse of Boston was calculated 
to leave a livelier impression than my former 
ones. Meanwhile the tower of Saint Botolph’s 
looked benignantly down; and I fancied it was 
bidding me farewell, as it did Mr. Cotton, two 
or three hundred years ago, and telling me to 
describe its venerable height, and the town be¬ 
neath it, to the people of the American city, 
who are partly akin, if not to the living inhabit¬ 
ants of Old Boston, yet to some of the dust 
that lies in its churchyard. 

One thing more. They have a Bunker Hill 
in the vicinity of their town ; and (what could 
hardly be expected of an English community) 
seem proud to think that their neighborhood 
has given name to our first and most widely 
celebrated and best remembered battlefield. 

242 


N 


VII 

NEAR OXFORD 

O N a fine morning in September we set 
out on an excursion to Blenheim, — 
the sculptor and myself being seated 
on the box of our four-horse carriage, two more 
of the party in the dicky, and the others less 
agreeably accommodated inside. We had no 
coachman, but two postilions in short scarlet 
jackets and leather breeches with top-boots, 
each astride of a horse; so that, all the way 
along, when not otherwise attracted, we had the 
interesting spectacle of their up and down bob¬ 
bing in the saddle. It was a sunny and beau¬ 
tiful day, a specimen of the perfect English 
weather, just warm enough for comfort,— in¬ 
deed a little too warm, perhaps, in the noontide 
sun, — yet retaining a mere spice or suspicion 
of austerity, which made it all the more enjoy¬ 
able. 

The country between Oxford and Blenheim 
is not particularly interesting, being almost level, 
or undulating very slightly ; nor is Oxfordshire, 
agriculturally, a rich part of England. We saw 
one or two hamlets, and I especially remember 
243 


OUR OLD HOME 


a picturesque old gabled house at a turnpike 
gate, and, altogether, the wayside scenery had 
an aspect of old-fashioned English life ; but 
there was nothing very memorable till we 
reached Woodstock, and stopped to water our 
horses at the Black Bear. This neighborhood 
is called New Woodstock, but has by no means 
the brand-new appearance of an American town, 
being a large village of stone houses, most of 
them pretty well time-worn and weather-stained. 
The Black Bear is an ancient inn, large and 
respectable, with balustraded staircases, and 
intricate passages and corridors, and queer old 
pictures and engravings hanging in the entries 
and apartments. We ordered a lunch (the 
most delightful of English institutions, next to 
dinner) to be ready against our return, and then 
resumed our drive to Blenheim. 

The park gate of Blenheim stands close to 
the end of the village street of Woodstock. 
Immediately on passing through its portals we 
saw the stately palace in the distance, but made 
a wide circuit of the park before approaching 
it. This noble park contains three thousand 
acres of land, and is fourteen miles in circum¬ 
ference. Having been, in part, a royal domain 
before it was granted to the Marlborough family, 
it contains many trees of unsurpassed antiquity, 
and has doubtless been the haunt of game and 
deer for centuries. We saw pheasants in abun- 
244 


V 

NEAR OXFORD 

dance, feeding in the open lawns and glades ; 
and the stags tossed their antlers and bounded 
away, not affrighted, but only shy and game¬ 
some, as we drove by. It is a magnificent plea¬ 
sure ground, not too tamely kept, nor rigidly 
subjected within rule, but vast enough to have 
lapsed back into nature again, after all the pains 
that the landscape gardeners of Queen Anne’s 
time bestowed on it, when the domain of Blen¬ 
heim was scientifically laid out. The great, 
knotted, slanting trunks of the old oaks do not 
now look as if man had much intermeddled 
with their growth and postures. The trees of 
later date, that were set out in the Great Duke’s 
time, are arranged on the plan of the order 
of battle in which the illustrious commander 
ranked his troops at Blenheim ; but the ground 
covered is so extensive, and the trees now so 
luxuriant, that the spectator is not disagreeably 
conscious of their standing in military array, as 
if Orpheus had summoned them together by 
beat of drum. The effect must have been very 
formal a hundred and fifty years ago, but has 
ceased to be so,— although the trees, I presume, 
have kept their ranks with even more fidelity 
than Marlborough’s veterans did. 

One of the park-keepers, on horseback, rode 
beside our carriage, pointing out the choice views 
and glimpses at the palace, as we drove through 
the domain. There is a very large artificial lake 
245 


OUR OLD HOME 


(to say the truth, it seemed to me fully worthy 
of being compared with the Welsh lakes, at 
least, if not with those of Westmoreland), which 
was created by Capability Brown, and fills the 
basin that he scooped for it, just as if Nature 
had poured these broad waters into one of her 
own valleys. It is a most beautiful object at a 
distance, and not less so on its immediate banks; 
for the water is very pure, being supplied by a 
small river, of the choicest transparency, which 
was turned thitherward for the purpose. And 
Blenheim owes not merely this water scenery, 
but almost all its other beauties, to the contriv¬ 
ance of man. Its natural features are not strik¬ 
ing ; but Art has effected such wonderful things 
that the uninstructed visitor would never guess 
that nearly the whole scene was but the embod¬ 
ied thought of a human mind. A skilful painter 
hardly does more for his blank sheet of canvas 
than the landscape gardener, the planter, the 
arranger of trees, has done for the monotonous 
surface of Blenheim, — making the most of 
every undulation, — flinging down a hillock, a 
big lump of earth out of a giant’s hand, wher¬ 
ever it was needed, — putting in beauty as often 
as there was a niche for it, — opening vistas to 
every point that deserved to be seen, and throw¬ 
ing a veil of impenetrable foliage around what 
ought to be hidden; — and then, to be sure, the 
lapse of a century has softened the harsh outline 
246 


NEAR OXFORD 


of man's labors, and has given the place back 
to Nature again with the addition of what con¬ 
summate science could achieve. 

After driving a good way, we came to a bat- 
tlemented tower and adjoining house, which 
used to be the residence of the Ranger of Wood- 
stock Park, who held charge of the property for 
the King before the Duke of Marlborough pos¬ 
sessed it. The keeper opened the door for us, 
and in the entrance-hall we found various things 
that had to do with the chase and woodland 
sports. We mounted the staircase, through sev¬ 
eral stories, up to the top of the tower, whence 
there was a view of the spires of Oxford, and 
of points much farther off, — very indistinctly 
seen, however, as is usually the case with the 
misty distances of England. Returning to the 
ground floor, we were ushered into the room in 
which died Wilmot, the wicked Earl of Roches¬ 
ter, who was Ranger of the Park in Charles II.’s 
time. It is a low and bare little room, with a 
window in front and a smaller one behind; and 
in the contiguous entrance-room there are the 
remains of an old bedstead, beneath the canopy 
of which, perhaps, Rochester may have made 
the penitent end that Bishop Burnet attributes 
to him. I hardly know what it is, in this poor 
fellow's character, which affects us with greater 
tenderness on his behalf than for all the other 
profligates of his day, who seem to have been 
247 


OUR OLD HOME 


neither better nor worse than himself. I rather 
suspect that he had a human heart which never 
quite died out of him, and the warmth of which 
is still faintly perceptible amid the dissolute 
trash which he left behind. 

Methinks, if such good fortune ever befell a 
bookish man, I should choose this lodge for my 
own residence, with the topmost room of the 
tower for a study, and all the seclusion of cul¬ 
tivated wildness beneath to ramble in. There 
being no such possibility, we drove on, catching 
glimpses of the palace in new points of view, and 
by and by came to Rosamond’s Well. The par¬ 
ticular tradition that connects Fair Rosamond 
with it is not now in my memory ; but if Rosa¬ 
mond ever lived and loved, and ever had her 
abode in the maze of Woodstock, it may well be 
believed that she and Henry sometimes sat be¬ 
side this spring. It gushes out from a bank, 
through some old stone-work, and dashes its lit¬ 
tle cascade (about as abundant as one might turn 
out of a large pitcher) into a pool, whence it steals 
away towards the lake, which is not far removed. 
The water is exceedingly cold, and as pure as 
the legendary Rosamond was not, and is fancied 
to possess medicinal virtues, like springs at 
which saints have quenched their thirst. There 
were two or three old women and some children 
in attendance with tumblers, which they present 
to visitors, full of the consecrated water; but 
248 


NEAR OXFORD 

most of us filled the tumblers for ourselves, and 
drank. 

Thence we drove to the Triumphal Pillar 
which was erected in honor of the Great Duke, 
and on the summit of which he stands, in a 
Roman garb, holding a winged figure of Vic¬ 
tory in his hand, as an ordinary man might 
hold a bird. The column is I know not how 
many feet high, but lofty enough, at any rate, to 
elevate Marlborough far above the rest of the 
world, and to be visible a long way off; and it 
is so placed in reference to other objects that, 
wherever the hero wandered about his grounds, 
and especially as he issued from his mansion, 
he must inevitably have been reminded of his 
glory. In truth, until I came to Blenheim, I 
never had so positive and material an idea of 
what Fame really is — of what the admiration 
of his country can do for a successful warrior — 
as I carry away with me and shall always retain. 
Unless he had the moral force of a thousand 
men together, his egotism (beholding himself 
everywhere, imbuing the entire soil, growing in 
the woods, rippling and gleaming in the water, 
and pervading the very air with his greatness) 
must have been swollen within him like the 
liver of a Strasburg goose. On the huge tablets 
inlaid into the pedestal of the column, the en¬ 
tire Act of Parliament, bestowing Blenheim on 
the Duke of Marlborough and his posterity, is 
249 


OUR OLD HOME 


engraved in deep letters, painted black on the 
marble ground. The pillar stands exactly a 
mile from the principal front of the palace, in a 
straight line with the precise centre of its en¬ 
trance-hall ; so that, as already said, it was the 
Duke’s principal object of contemplation. 

We now proceeded to the palace gate, which 
is a great pillared archway, of wonderful lofti¬ 
ness and state, giving admittance into a spacious 
quadrangle. A stout, elderly, and rather surly 
footman in livery appeared at the entrance, and 
took possession of whatever canes, umbrellas, 
and parasols he could get hold of, in order to 
claim sixpence on our departure. This had a 
somewhat ludicrous effect. There is much pub¬ 
lic outcry against the meanness of the present 
Duke in his arrangements for the admission of 
visitors (chiefly, of course, his native country¬ 
men) to view the magnificent palace which their 
forefathers bestowed upon his own. In many 
cases, it seems hard that a private abode should 
be exposed to the intrusion of the public merely 
because the proprietor has inherited or created 
a splendor which attracts general curiosity; in¬ 
somuch that his home loses its sanctity and 
seclusion for the very reason that it is better 
than other men’s houses. But in the case of 
Blenheim, the public have certainly an equitable 
claim to admission, both because the fame of 
its first inhabitant is a national possession, and 
250 


NEAR OXFORD 


because the mansion was a national gift, one of 
the purposes of which was to be a token of grati¬ 
tude and glory to the English people themselves. 
If a man chooses to be illustrious, he is very 
likely to incur some little inconveniences him¬ 
self, and entail them on his posterity. Never¬ 
theless, his present Grace of Marlborough abso¬ 
lutely ignores the public claim above suggested, 
and (with a thrift of which even the hero of 
Blenheim himself did not set the example) sells 
tickets admitting six persons at ten shillings; 
if only one person enters the gate, he must pay 
for six; and if there are seven in company, two 
tickets are required to admit them. The at¬ 
tendants, who meet you everywhere in the park 
and palace, expect fees on their own private 
account, — their noble master pocketing the ten 
shillings. But, to be sure, the visitor gets his 
money’s worth, since it buys him the right to 
speak just as freely of the Duke of Marlbor¬ 
ough as if he were the keeper of the Cremorne 
Gardens . 1 

Passing through a gateway on the opposite 
side of the quadrangle, we had before us the 
noble classic front of the palace, with its two 
projecting wings. We ascended the lofty steps 

1 The above was written two or three years ago or more$ and the 
Duke of that day has since transmitted his coronet to his successor, who, 
we understand, has adopted much more liberal arrangements. There is 
seldom anything to criticise or complain of, as regards the facility of ob¬ 
taining admission to interesting private houses in England. 

2 5 I 


OUR OLD HOME 


of the portal, and were admitted into the en¬ 
trance-hall, the height of which, from floor to 
ceiling, is not much less than seventy feet, be¬ 
ing the entire elevation of the edifice. The hall 
is lighted by windows in the upper story, and, 
it being a clear, bright day, was very radiant 
with lofty sunshine, amid which a swallow was 
flitting to and fro. The ceiling was painted by 
Sir James Thornhill in some allegorical design 
(doubtless commemorative of Marlborough’s 
victories), the purport of which I did not take 
the trouble to make out, — contenting myself 
with the general effect, which was most splen¬ 
didly and effectively ornamental. 

We were guided through the show-rooms by 
a very civil person, who allowed us to take 
pretty much our own time in looking at the 
pictures. The collection is exceedingly valu¬ 
able, — many of these works of art having been 
presented to the Great Duke by the crowned 
heads of England or the Continent. One room 
was all aglow with pictures by Rubens; and 
there were works of Raphael and many other 
famous painters, any one of which would be 
sufficient to illustrate the meanest house that 
might contain it. I remember none of them, 
however (not being in a picture-seeing mood), 
so well as Vandyck’s large and familiar picture 
of Charles I. on horseback, with a figure and 
face of melancholy dignity such as never by 
252 


NEAR OXFORD 


any other hand was put on canvas. Yet, on 
considering this face of Charles (which I find 
often repeated in half-lengths) and translating 
it from the ideal into literalism, I doubt whether 
the unfortunate king was really a handsome or 
impressive-looking man : a high, thin-ridged 
nose, a meagre, hatchet face, and reddish hair 
and beard, — these are the literal facts. It is 
the painter’s art that has thrown such pensive 
and shadowy grace around him. 

On our passage through this beautiful suite 
of apartments, we saw, through the vista of 
open doorways, a boy of ten or twelve years 
old coming towards us from the farther rooms. 
He had on a straw hat, a linen sack that had 
certainly been washed and rewashed for a sum¬ 
mer or two, and gray trousers a good deal worn, 
— a dress, in short, which an American mother 
in middle station would have thought too shabby 
for her darling schoolboy’s ordinary wear. This 
urchin’s face was rather pale (as those of Eng¬ 
lish children are apt to be, quite as often as our 
own), but he had pleasant eyes, an intelligent 
look, and an agreeable boyish manner. It was 
Lord Sunderland, grandson of the present Duke, 
and heir — though not, I think, in the direct 
line — of the blood of the great Marlborough, 
and of the title and estate. 

After passing through the first suite of rooms, 
we were conducted through a corresponding 
253 


OUR OLD HOME 


suite on the opposite side of the entrance-hall. 
These latter apartments are most richly adorned 
with tapestries, wrought and presented to the 
first Duke by a sisterhood of Flemish nuns; 
they look like great, glowing pictures, and com¬ 
pletely cover the walls of the rooms. The 
designs purport to represent the Duke's battles 
and sieges ; and everywhere we see the hero him¬ 
self, as large as life, and as gorgeous in scarlet 
and gold as the holy sisters could make him, 
with a three-cornered hat and flowing wig, rein¬ 
ing in his horse, and extending his leading-staff 
in the attitude of command. Next to Marl¬ 
borough, Prince Eugene is the most prominent 
figure. In the way of upholstery, there can 
never have been anything more magnificent 
than these tapestries; and, considered as works 
of art, they have quite as much merit as nine 
pictures out of ten. 

One whole wing of the palace is occupied by 
the library, a most noble room, with a vast per¬ 
spective length from end to end. Its atmos¬ 
phere is brighter and more cheerful than that 
of most libraries ; a wonderful contrast to the 
old college libraries of Oxford, and perhaps less 
sombre and suggestive of thoughtfulness than 
any large library ought to be; inasmuch as so 
many studious brains as have left their deposit 
on the shelves cannot have conspired without 
producing a very serious and ponderous result. 

254 


NEAR OXFORD 


Both walls and ceiling are white, and there are 
elaborate doorways and fireplaces of white mar¬ 
ble. The floor is of oak, so highly polished 
that our feet slipped upon it as if it had been 
New England ice. At one end of the room 
stands a statue of Queen Anne in her royal 
robes, which are so admirably designed and 
exquisitely wrought that the spectator certainly 
gets a strong conception of her royal dignity; 
while the face of the statue, fleshy and feeble, 
doubtless conveys a suitable idea of her personal 
character . 1 The marble of this work, long as 
it has stood there, is as white as snow just fallen, 
and must have required most faithful and reli¬ 
gious care to keep it so. As for the volumes of 
the library, they are wired within the cases, and 
turn their gilded backs upon the visitor, keep¬ 
ing their treasures of wit and wisdom just as 
intangible as if still in the unwrought mines of 
human thought. 

I remember nothing else in the palace, except 
the chapel, to which we were conducted last, and 
where we saw a splendid monument to the first 
Duke and Duchess, sculptured by Rysbrach, at 
the cost, it is said, of forty thousand pounds. 
The design includes the statues of the deceased 
dignitaries, and various allegorical flourishes, 


1 In front of St. Paul’s there is a statue of Queen Anne, which looks 
rather more majestic, I doubt not, than that fat old dame ever did. — 
Notes of Travel , I. 342. 


255 


OUR OLD HOME 


fantasies, and confusions ; and beneath sleep 
the great Duke and his proud wife, their veri¬ 
table bones and dust, and probably all the Marl- 
boroughs that have since died. It is not quite 
a comfortable idea that these mouldy ancestors 
still inhabit, after their fashion, the house where 
their successors spend the passing day ; but the 
adulation lavished upon the hero of Blenheim 
could not have been consummated, unless the 
palace of his lifetime had become likewise a 
stately mausoleum over his remains, — and such 
we felt it all to be, after gazing at his tomb. 

The next business was to see the private gar¬ 
dens. An old Scotch under-gardener admitted 
us and led the way, and seemed to have a fair 
prospect of earning the fee all by himself; but 
by and by another respectable Scotchman made 
his appearance and took us in charge, proving to 
be the head-gardener in person. He was ex¬ 
tremely intelligent and agreeable, talking both 
scientifically and lovingly about trees and plants, 
of which there is every variety capable of Eng¬ 
lish cultivation. Positively, the Garden of 
Eden cannot have been more beautiful than this 
private garden of Blenheim. It contains three 
hundred acres, and by the artful circumlocution 
of the paths, and the undulations, and the skil¬ 
fully interposed clumps of trees, is made to ap¬ 
pear limitless. The sylvan delights of a whole 
country are compressed into this space, as whole 
256 


NEAR OXFORD 


fields of Persian roses go to the concoction of 
an ounce of precious attar. The world within 
that garden fence is not the same weary and 
dusty world with which we outside mortals are 
conversant: it is a finer, lovelier, more harmoni¬ 
ous Nature; and the Great Mother lends her¬ 
self kindly to the gardener’s will, knowing that 
he will make evident the half-obliterated traits 
of her pristine and ideal beauty, and allow her to 
take all the credit and praise to herself. I doubt 
whether there is ever any winter within that pre¬ 
cinct, — any clouds, except the fleecy ones of 
summer. The sunshine that I saw there rests 
upon my recollection of it as if it were eternal. 
The lawns and glades are like the memory of 
places where one has wandered when first in love. 

What a good and happy life might be spent 
in a paradise like this ! And yet, at that very 
moment, the besotted Duke (ah ! I have let 
out a secret which I meant to keep to myself; 
but the ten shillings must pay for all) was in 
that very garden (for the guide told us so, and 
cautioned our young people not to be too up¬ 
roarious), and, if in a condition for arithmetic, 
was thinking of nothing nobler than how many 
ten-shilling tickets had that day been sold. 
Republican as I am, I should still love to think 
that noblemen lead noble lives, and that all this 
stately and beautiful environment may serve to 
elevate them a little way above the rest of us. 

257 


OUR OLD HOME 


If it fail to do so, the disgrace falls equally upon 
the whole race of mortals as on themselves ; be¬ 
cause it proves that no more favorable conditions 
of existence would eradicate our vices and weak¬ 
nesses. How sad, if this be so ! Even a herd 
of swine, eating the acorns under those magnifi¬ 
cent oaks of Blenheim, would be cleanlier and 
of better habits than ordinary swine. 

Well, all that I have written is pitifully mea¬ 
gre, as a description of Blenheim ; and I hate to 
leave it without some more adequate expression 
of the noble edifice, with its rich domain, all as 
I saw them in that beautiful sunshine ; for, if a 
day had been chosen out of a hundred years, it 
could not have been a finer one. But I must 
give up the attempt; only further remarking 
that the finest trees here were cedars, of which I 
saw one— and there may have been many such 
— immense in girth, and not less than three cen¬ 
turies old. I likewise saw a vast heap of laurel, 
two hundred feet in circumference, all growing 
from one root; and the gardener offered to show 
us another growth of twice that stupendous size. 
If the Great Duke himself had been buried in 
that spot, his heroic heart could not have been 
the seed of a more plentiful crop of laurels. 

We now went back to the Black Bear and sat 
down to a cold collation, of which we ate abun¬ 
dantly, and drank (in the good old English 
fashion) a due proportion of various delightful 
258 


NEAR OXFORD 


liquors. A stranger in England, in his rambles 
to various quarters of the country, may learn 
little in regard to wines (for the ordinary Eng¬ 
lish taste is simple, though sound, in that par¬ 
ticular), but he makes acquaintance with more 
varieties of hop and malt liquor than he previ¬ 
ously supposed to exist. I remember a sort 
of foaming stuff*, called hop-champagne, which 
is very vivacious, and appears to be a hybrid 
between ale and bottled cider. Another excel¬ 
lent tipple for warm weather is concocted by 
mixing brown-stout or bitter ale with ginger- 
beer, the foam of which stirs up the heavier 
liquor from its depths, forming a compound of 
singular vivacity and sufficient body. But of 
all things ever brewed from malt (unless it be the 
Trinity Ale of Cambridge, which I drank long 
afterwards, and which Barry Cornwall has cele¬ 
brated in immortal verse), commend me to the 
Archdeacon, as the Oxford scholars call it, in 
honor of the jovial dignitary who first taught 
these erudite worthies how to brew their favor¬ 
ite nectar. John Barleycorn has given his very 
heart to this admirable liquor; it is a superior 
kind of ale, the Prince of Ales, with a richer fla¬ 
vor and a mightier spirit than you can find else¬ 
where in this weary world. Much have we been 
strengthened and encouraged by the potent 
blood of the Archdeacon ! 

A few days after our excursion to Blenheim, 
259 


OUR OLD HOME 


the same party set forth, in two flies, on a tour 
to some other places of interest in the neighbor¬ 
hood of Oxford. It was again a delightful day ; 
and, in truth, every day, of late, had been so 
pleasant that it seemed as if each must be the 
very last of such perfect weather ; and yet, the 
long succession had given us confidence in as 
many more to come. The climate of England 
has been shamefully maligned: its sulkiness and 
asperities are not nearly so offensive as English¬ 
men tell us (their climate being the only attri¬ 
bute of their country which they never over¬ 
value) ; and the really good summer weather is 
the very kindest and sweetest that the world 
knows. 

We first drove to the village of Cumnor, about 
six miles from Oxford, and alighted at the en¬ 
trance of the church. Here, while waiting for 
the keys, we looked at an old wall of the church¬ 
yard, piled up of loose gray stones, which are 
said to have once formed a portion of Cumnor 
Hall, celebrated in Mickle’s ballad and Scott’s 
romance. The hall must have been in very 
close vicinity to the church, — not more than 
twenty yards off; and I waded through the 
long, dewy grass of the churchyard, and tried 
to peep over the wall, in hopes to discover some 
tangible and traceable remains of the edifice. 
But the wall was just too high to be overlooked, 
and difficult to clamber over without tumbling 
260 


NEAR OXFORD 


down some of the stones; so I took the word 
of one of our party, who had been here before, 
that there is nothing interesting on the other 
side. The churchyard is in rather a neglected 
state, and seems not to have been mown for the 
benefit of the parson’s cow; it contains a good 
many gravestones, of which I remember only 
some upright memorials of slate to individuals 
of the name of Tabbs. 

Soon a woman arrived with the key of the 
church door, and we entered the simple old edi¬ 
fice, which has the pavement of lettered tomb¬ 
stones, the sturdy pillars and low arches, and 
other ordinary characteristics of an English 
country church. One or two pews, probably 
those of the gentlefolk of the neighborhood, 
were better furnished than the rest, but all in a 
modest style. Near the high altar, in the holi¬ 
est place, there is an oblong, angular, ponder¬ 
ous tomb of blue marble, built against the wall, 
and surmounted by a carved canopy of the same 
material ; and over the tomb, and beneath the 
canopy, are two monumental brasses, such as 
we oftener see inlaid into a church pavement. 
On these brasses are engraved the figures of a 
gentleman in armor and a lady in an antique 
garb, each about a foot high, devoutly kneeling 
in prayer ; and there is a long Latin inscription 
likewise cut into the enduring brass, bestowing 
the highest eulogies on the character of Anthony 
261 


OUR OLD HOME 


Forster, who, with his virtuous dame, lies buried 
beneath this tombstone. His is the knightly 
figure that kneels above ; and if Sir Walter 
Scott ever saw this tomb, he must have had an 
even greater than common disbelief in laudatory 
epitaphs, to venture on depicting Anthony Fors¬ 
ter in such hues as blacken him in the romance. 
For my part, I read the inscription in full faith, 
and believe the poor deceased gentleman to be 
a much-wronged individual, with good grounds 
for bringing an action of slander in the courts 
above. 

But the circumstance, lightly as we treat it, 
has its serious moral. What nonsense it is, this 
anxiety which so worries us about our good 
fame, or our bad fame, after death ! If it were 
of the slightest real moment, our reputations 
would have been placed by Providence more in 
our own power, and less in other people’s, than 
we now find them to be. If poor Anthony 
Forster happens to have met Sir Walter in 
the other world, I doubt whether he has ever 
thought it worth while to complain of the lat¬ 
ter’s misrepresentations. 

We did not remain long in the church, as it 
contains nothing else of interest; and, driving 
through the village, we passed a pretty large and 
rather antique-looking inn, bearing the sign of 
the Bear and Ragged Staff. It could not be so 
262 


NEAR OXFORD 


old, however, by at least a hundred years, as 
Giles Gosling’s time ; nor is there any other 
object to remind the visitor of the Elizabethan 
age, unless it be a few ancient cottages, that are 
perhaps of still earlier date. Cumnor is not 
nearly so large a village, nor a place of such 
mark, as one anticipates from its romantic and 
legendary fame ; but, being still inaccessible by 
railway, it has retained more of a sylvan char¬ 
acter than we often find in English country 
towns. In this retired neighborhood the road 
is narrow and bordered with grass, and some¬ 
times interrupted by gates; the hedges grow 
in unpruned luxuriance ; there is not that close- 
shaven neatness and trimness that characterize 
the ordinary English landscape. The whole 
scene conveys the idea of seclusion and remote¬ 
ness. We met no travellers, whether on foot 
or otherwise. 

I cannot very distinctly trace out this day’s 
peregrinations; but, after leaving Cumnor a few 
miles behind us, I think we came to a ferry over 
the Thames, where an old woman served as 
ferryman, and pulled a boat across by means of 
a rope stretching from shore to shore. Our 
two vehicles being thus placed on the other side, 
we resumed our drive, — first glancing, how¬ 
ever, at the old woman’s antique cottage, with 
its stone floor, and the circular settle round the 
263 


OUR OLD HOME 


kitchen fireplace, which was quite in the medi¬ 
aeval English style. 

We next stopped at Stanton Harcourt, where 
we were received at the parsonage with a hos¬ 
pitality which we should take delight in describ¬ 
ing, if it were allowable to make public acknow¬ 
ledgment of the private and personal kindnesses 
which we never failed to find ready for our 
needs. An American in an English house will 
soon adopt the opinion that the English are the 
very kindest people on earth, and will retain 
that idea as long, at least, as he remains on the 
inner side of the threshold. Their magnetism 
is of a kind that repels strongly while you keep 
beyond a certain limit, but attracts as forcibly if 
you get within the magic line. 

It was at this place, if I remember right, 
that I heard a gentleman ask a friend of mine 
whether he was the author of The Red Letter 
A; and, after some consideration (for he did not 
seem to recognize his own book, at first, under 
this improved title), our countryman responded 
doubtfully that he believed so. The gentle¬ 
man proceeded to inquire whether our friend had 
spent much time in America, — evidently think¬ 
ing that he must have been caught young, and 
have had a tincture of English breeding, at least, 
if not birth, to speak the language so tolerably, 
and appear so much like other people. This 
insular narrowness is exceedingly queer, and of 
264 


NEAR OXFORD 

very frequent occurrence, and is quite as much 
a characteristic of men of education and culture 
as of clowns. 

Stanton Harcourt is a very curious old place. 
It was formerly the seat of the ancient family 
of Harcourt, which has now its principal abode 
at Nuneham Courtney, a few miles off. The 
parsonage is a relic of the family mansion, or 
castle, other portions of which are close at hand ; 
for, across the garden, rise two gray towers, both 
of them picturesquely venerable, and interest¬ 
ing for more than their antiquity. One of these 
towers, in its entire capacity, from height to 
depth, constituted the kitchen of the ancient 
castle, and is still used for domestic purposes, 
although it has not, nor ever had, a chimney; 
or, we might rather say, it is itself one vast chim¬ 
ney, with a hearth of thirty feet square, and a 
flue and aperture of the same size. There are 
two huge fireplaces within, and the interior walls 
of the tower are blackened with the smoke that 
for centuries used to gush forth from them, and 
climb upward, seeking an exit through some 
wide air-holes in the conical roof, full seventy 
feet above. These lofty openings were capable 
of being so arranged, with reference to the wind, 
that the cooks are said to have been seldom 
troubled by the smoke ; and here, no doubt, 
they were accustomed to roast oxen whole, with 
as little fuss and ado as a modern cook would 
265 


OUR OLD HOME 


roast a fowl. The inside of the tower is very 
dim and sombre (being nothing but rough stone 
walls, lighted only from the apertures above 
mentioned), and has still a pungent odor of 
smoke and soot, the reminiscence of the fires 
and feasts of generations that have passed away. 
Methinks the extremest range of domestic econ¬ 
omy lies between an American cooking-stove 
and the ancient kitchen, seventy dizzy feet in 
height and all one fireplace, of Stanton Har- 
court. 

Now—the place being without a parallel in 
England, and therefore necessarily beyond the 
experience of an American — it is somewhat 
remarkable that, while we stood gazing at this 
kitchen, I was haunted and perplexed by an idea 
that somewhere or other I had seen just this 
strange spectacle before. The height, the black¬ 
ness, the dismal void, before my eyes, seemed 
as familiar as the decorous neatness of my grand¬ 
mother's kitchen; only my unaccountable mem¬ 
ory of the scene was lighted up with an image 
of lurid fires blazing all round the dim interior 
circuit of the tower. I had never before had so 
pertinacious an attack, as I could not but sup¬ 
pose it, of that odd state of mind wherein we 
fitfully and teasingly remember some previous 
scene or incident, of which the one now passing 
appears to be but the echo and reduplication. 
Though the explanation of the mystery did not 
266 


NEAR OXFORD 


for some time occur to me, I may as well con¬ 
clude the matter here. In a letter of Pope’s, 
addressed to the Duke of Buckingham, there 
is an account of Stanton Harcourt (as I now 
find, although the name is not mentioned), 
where he resided while translating a part of the 
Iliad. It is one of the most admirable pieces of 
description in the language, — playful and pic¬ 
turesque, with fine touches of humorous pathos, 
— and conveys as perfect a picture as ever was 
drawn of a decayed English country-house; and 
among other rooms, most of which have since 
crumbled down and disappeared, he dashes off 
the grim aspect of this kitchen, — which, more¬ 
over, he peoples with witches, engaging Satan 
himself as head cook, who stirs the infernal 
caldrons that seethe and bubble over the fires. 
This letter, and others relative to his abode here, 
were very familiar to my earlier reading, and, 
remaining still fresh at the bottom of my mem¬ 
ory, caused the weird and ghostly sensation that 
came over me on beholding the real spectacle 
that had formerly been made so vivid to my 
imagination. 

Our next visit was to the church, which stands 
close by, and is quite as ancient as the remnants 
of the castle. In a chapel or side aisle, dedi¬ 
cated to the Harcourts, are found some very 
interesting family monuments,— and among 
them, recumbent on a tombstone, the figure of 
267 


OUR OLD HOME 


an armed knight of the Lancastrian party, who 
was slain in the Wars of the Roses. His fea¬ 
tures, dress, and armor are painted in colors, 
still wonderfully fresh, and there still blushes the 
symbol of the Red Rose, denoting the faction 
for which he fought and died. His head rests 
on a marble or alabaster helmet; and on the 
tomb lies the veritable helmet, it is to be pre¬ 
sumed, which he wore in battle, — a ponderous 
iron case, with the visor complete, and remnants 
of the gilding that once covered it. The crest 
is a large peacock, not of metal, but of wood. 
Very possibly this helmet was but an heraldic 
adornment of his tomb; and, indeed, it seems 
strange that it has not been stolen before now, 
especially in Cromwell's time, when knightly 
tombs were little respected, and when armor 
was in request. However, it is needless to dis¬ 
pute with the dead knight about the identity of 
his iron pot, and we may as well allow it to be 
the very same that so often gave him the head¬ 
ache in his lifetime. Leaning against the wall, 
at the foot of the tomb, is the shaft of a spear, 
with a woefully tattered and utterly faded ban¬ 
ner appended to it, — the knightly banner be¬ 
neath which he marshalled his followers in the 
field. As it was absolutely falling to pieces, I 
tore off one little bit, no bigger than a finger¬ 
nail, and put it into my waistcoat pocket; but 
seeking it subsequently, it was not to be found. 

268 


NEAR OXFORD 

On the opposite side of the little chapel, 
two or three yards from this tomb, is another 
monument, on which lie, side by side, one of 
the same knightly race of Harcourts and his 
lady. The tradition of the family is, that this 
knight was the standard-bearer of Henry of 
Richmond in the battle of Bosworth Field ; and 
a banner, supposed to be the same that he car¬ 
ried, now droops over his effigy. It is just 
such a colorless silk rag as the one already de¬ 
scribed. The knight has the order of the Gar¬ 
ter on his knee, and the lady wears it on her left 
arm, — an odd place enough for a garter; but, 
if worn in its proper locality, it could not be 
decorously visible. The complete preservation 
and good condition of these statues, even to the 
minutest adornment of the sculpture, and their 
very noses, — the most vulnerable part of a 
marble man, as of a living one, — are miracu¬ 
lous. Except in Westminster Abbey, among 
the chapels of the kings, I have seen none so 
well preserved. Perhaps they owe it to the 
loyalty of Oxfordshire, diffused throughout its 
neighborhood by the influence of the Univer¬ 
sity, during the great Civil War and the rule 
of the Parliament. It speaks well, too, for the 
upright and kindly character of this old family, 
that the peasantry, among whom they had lived 
for ages, did not desecrate their tombs, when it 
might have been done with impunity. 

269 


OUR OLD HOME 


There are other and more recent memorials 
of the Harcourts, one of which is the tomb of 
the last lord, who died about a hundred years 
ago. His figure, like those of his ancestors, lies 
on the top of his tomb, clad, not in armor, but 
in his robes as a peer. The title is now extinct, 
but the family survives in a younger branch, 
and still holds this patrimonial estate, though 
they have long since quitted it as a residence. 

We next went to see the ancient fish-ponds 
appertaining to the mansion, and which used to 
be of vast dietary importance to the family in 
Catholic times, and when fish was not otherwise 
attainable. There are two or three, or more, 
of these reservoirs, one of which is of very 
respectable size, — large enough, indeed, to be 
really a picturesque object, with its grass-green 
borders, and the trees drooping over it, and the 
towers of the castle and the church reflected 
within the weed-grown depths of its smooth 
mirror. A sweet fragrance, as it were, of ancient 
time and present quiet and seclusion was breath¬ 
ing all around; the sunshine of to-day had a 
mellow charm of antiquity in its brightness. 
These ponds are said still to breed abundance 
of such fish as love deep and quiet waters ; but I 
saw only some minnows, and one or two snakes, 
which were lying among the weeds on the top 
of the water, sunning and bathing themselves at 
once. 


270 


NEAR OXFORD 


I mentioned that there were two towers re¬ 
maining of the old castle: the one containing the 
kitchen we have already visited; the other, still 
more interesting, is next to be described. It is 
some seventy feet high, gray and reverend, but 
in excellent repair, though I could not perceive 
that anything had been done to renovate it. 
The basement story was once the family chapel, 
and is, of course, still a consecrated spot. At 
one corner of the tower is a circular turret, within 
which a narrow staircase, with worn steps of 
stone, winds round and round as it climbs up¬ 
ward, giving access to a chamber on each floor, 
and finally emerging on the battlemented roof. 
Ascending this turret stair, and arriving at the 
third story, we entered a chamber, not large, 
though occupying the whole area of the tower, 
and lighted by a window on each side. It was 
wainscoted from floor to ceiling with dark oak, 
and had a little fireplace in one of the corners. 
The window-panes were small and set in lead. 
The curiosity of this room is, that it was once 
the residence of Pope, and that he here wrote a 
considerable part of the translation of Homer, 
and likewise, no doubt, the admirable letters to 
which I have referred above. The room once 
contained a record by himself, scratched with a 
diamond on one of the window-panes (since re¬ 
moved for safe-keeping to Nuneham Courtney, 
where it was shown me), purporting that he had 
271 


OUR OLD HOME 

here finished the fifth book of the Iliad, on such 
a day. 

A poet has a fragrance about him, such as no 
other human being is gifted withal; it is inde¬ 
structible, and clings forevermore to everything 
that he has touched. I was not impressed, at 
Blenheim, with any sense that the mighty Duke 
still haunted the palace that was created for him ; 
but here, after a century and a half, we are still 
conscious of the presence of that decrepit little 
figure of Queen Anne’s time, although he was 
merely a casual guest in the old tower, during 
one or two summer months. However brief 
the time and slight the connection, his spirit can¬ 
not be exorcised so long as the tower stands. In 
my mind, moreover. Pope, or any other person 
with an available claim, is right in adhering to 
the spot, dead or alive; for I never saw a cham¬ 
ber that I should like better to inhabit, — so 
comfortably small, in such a safe and inaccessi¬ 
ble seclusion, and with a varied landscape from 
each window. One of them looks upon the 
church, close at hand, and down into the green 
churchyard, extending almost to the foot of the 
tower; the others have views wide and far, over 
a gently undulating tract of country. If desir¬ 
ous of a loftier elevation, about a dozen more 
steps of the turret stair will bring the occupant 
to the summit of the tower, — where Pope used 
to come, no doubt, in the summer evenings, and 
272 


NEAR OXFORD 


peep — poor little shrimp that he was ! — 
through the embrasures of the battlement. 

From Stanton Harcourt we drove — I forget 
how far — to a point where a boat was waiting 
for us upon the Thames, or some other stream ; 
for I am ashamed to confess my ignorance of 
the precise geographical whereabout. We were, 
at any rate, some miles above Oxford, and, I 
should imagine, pretty near one of the sources 
of England’s mighty river. It was little more 
than wide enough for the boat, with extended 
oars, to pass, — shallow, too, and bordered with 
bulrushes and water-weeds, which, in some 
places, quite overgrew the surface of the river 
from bank to bank. The shores were flat and 
meadow-like, and sometimes, the boatman told 
us, are overflowed by the rise of the stream. 
The water looked clean and pure, but not par¬ 
ticularly transparent, though enough so to show 
us that the bottom is very much weed-grown ; 
and I was told that the weed is an American 
production, brought to England with importa¬ 
tions of timber, and now threatening to choke 
up the Thames and other English rivers. I 
wonder it does not try its obstructive powers 
upon the Merrimack, the Connecticut, or the 
Hudson, — not to speak of the St. Lawrence 
or the Mississippi! 

It was an open boat, with cushioned seats 
astern, comfortably accommodating our party; 
273 


OUR OLD HOME 


the day continued sunny and warm, and per¬ 
fectly still; the boatman, well trained to his busi¬ 
ness, managed the oars skilfully and vigorously : 
and we went down the stream quite as swiftly as 
it was desirable to go, the scene being so pleasant, 
and the passing hours so thoroughly agreeable. 
The river grew a little wider and deeper, perhaps, 
as we glided on, but was still an inconsiderable 
stream ; for it had a good deal more than a hun¬ 
dred miles to meander through before it should 
bear fleets on its bosom, and reflect palaces and 
towers and Parliament houses and dingy and 
sordid piles of various structure, as it rolled to 
and fro with the tide, dividing London asunder. 
Not, in truth, that I ever saw any edifice what¬ 
ever reflected in its turbid breast, when the syl¬ 
van stream, as we beheld it now, is swollen into 
the Thames at London. 

Once, on our voyage, we had to land, while 
the boatman and some other persons drew our 
skiff round some rapids, which we could not 
otherwise have passed ; another time, the boat 
went through a lock. We, meanwhile, stepped 
ashore to examine the ruins of the old nunnery 
of Godstowe, where Fair Rosamond secluded 
herself, after being separated from her royal 
lover. There is a long line of ruinous wall, and 
a shattered tower at one of the angles; the whole 
much ivy-grown, — brimming over, indeed, with 
clustering ivy, which is rooted inside of the walls. 

274 


NEAR OXFORD 


The nunnery is now, I believe, held in lease 
by the city of Oxford, which has converted its 
precincts into a barnyard. The gate was under 
lock and key, so that we could merely look at 
the outside, and soon resumed our places in the 
boat. 

At three o’clock or thereabouts (or sooner or 
later, — for I took little heed of time, and only 
wished that these delightful wanderings might 
last forever) we reached Folly Bridge, at Oxford. 
Here we took possession of a spacious barge, 
with a house in it, and a comfortable dining¬ 
room or drawing-room within the house, and 
a level roof, on which we could sit at ease, or 
dance if so inclined. These barges are common 
at Oxford, — some very splendid ones being 
owned by the students of the different colleges, 
or by clubs. They are drawn by horses, like 
canal-boats ; and a horse being attached to our 
own barge, he trotted off at a reasonable pace, 
and we slipped through the water behind him, 
with a gentle and pleasant motion, which, save 
for the constant vicissitude of cultivated scenery, 
was like no motion at all. It was life without 
the trouble of living; nothing was ever more 
quietly agreeable. In this happy state of mind 
and body we gazed at Christ Church meadows, 
as we passed, and at the receding spires and 
towers of Oxford, and on a good deal of plea¬ 
sant variety along the banks : young men row- 
275 


OUR OLD HOME 


ing or fishing ; troops of naked boys bathing, 
as if this were Arcadia, in the simplicity of the 
Golden Age ; country-houses, cottages, water¬ 
side inns, all with something fresh about them, 
as not being sprinkled with the dust of the high¬ 
way. We were a large party now ; for a num¬ 
ber of additional guests had joined us at Folly 
Bridge, and we comprised poets, novelists, 
scholars, sculptors, painters, architects, men and 
women of renown, dear friends, genial, out¬ 
spoken, open-hearted Englishmen, — all voy¬ 
aging onward together, like the wise ones of 
Gotham in a bowl. I remember not a single 
annoyance, except, indeed, that a swarm of wasps 
came aboard of us and alighted on the head of 
one of our young gentlemen, attracted by the 
scent of the pomatum which he had been rub¬ 
bing into his hair. He was the only victim, and 
his small trouble the one little flaw in our day's 
felicity, to put us in mind that we were mortal. 

Meanwhile, a table had been laid in the in¬ 
terior of our barge, and spread with cold ham, 
cold fowl, cold pigeon-pie, cold beef, and other 
substantial cheer, such as the English love, and 
Yankees too, — besides tarts, and cakes, and 
pears, and plums, — not forgetting, of course, 
a goodly provision of port, sherry, and cham¬ 
pagne, and bitter ale, which is like mother’s 
milk to an Englishman, and soon grows equally 
acceptable to his American cousin. By the 
276 


NEAR OXFORD 


time these matters had been properly attended 
to, we had arrived at that part of the Thames 
which passes by Nuneham Courtney, a fine 
estate belonging to the Harcourts, and the pre¬ 
sent residence of the family. Here we landed, 
and, climbing a steep slope from the river-side, 
paused a moment or two to look at an archi¬ 
tectural object, called the Carfax, the purport 
of which I do not well understand. Thence 
we proceeded onward, through the loveliest park 
and woodland scenery I ever saw, and under as 
beautiful a declining sunshine as heaven ever 
shed over earth, to the stately mansion-house. 

As we here cross a private threshold, it is not 
allowable to pursue my feeble narrative of this 
delightful day with the same freedom as here¬ 
tofore ; so, perhaps, I may as well bring it to a 
close. I may mention, however, that I saw 
the library, a fine, large apartment, hung round 
with portraits of eminent literary men, princi¬ 
pally of the last century, most of whom were 
familiar guests of the Harcourts. The house 
itself is about eighty years old, and is built in 
the classic style, as if the family had been anx¬ 
ious to diverge as far as possible from the 
Gothic picturesqueness of their old abode at 
Stanton Harcourt. The grounds were laid out 
in part by Capability Brown, and seemed to me 
even more beautiful than those of Blenheim. 
Mason the poet, a friend of the house, gave the 
2 77 


OUR OLD HOME 


design of a portion of the garden. Of the 
whole place I will not be niggardly of my rude 
Transatlantic praise, but be bold to say that it 
appeared to me as perfect as anything earthly 
can be, — utterly and entirely finished, as if 
the years and generations had done all that the 
hearts and minds of the successive owners could 
contrive for a spot they dearly loved. Such 
homes as Nuneham Courtney are among the 
splendid results of long hereditary possession ; 
and we Republicans, whose households melt 
away like new-fallen snow in a spring morning, 
must content ourselves with our many coun¬ 
terbalancing advantages, — for this one, so ap¬ 
parently desirable to the far-projecting self¬ 
ishness of our nature, we are certain never to 
attain. 

It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that 
Nuneham Courtney is one of the great show- 
places of England. It is merely a fair speci¬ 
men of the better class of country-seats, and 
has a hundred rivals, and many superiors, in 
the features of beauty, and expansive, manifold, 
redundant comfort, which most impressed me. 
A moderate man might be content with such a 
home, — that is all. 

And now I take leave of Oxford, without 
even an attempt to describe it, — there being 
no literary faculty, attainable or conceivable by 
me, which can avail to put it adequately, or 
278 


Magdalen College , Oxford 










































































































































































































































































NEAR OXFORD 


even tolerably, upon paper. It must remain its 
own sole expression; and those whose sad for¬ 
tune it may be never to behold it have no bet¬ 
ter resource than to dream about gray, weather- 
stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint 
Gothic ornament, and standing around grassy 
quadrangles, where cloistered walks have echoed 
to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,— 
lawns and gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed 
with canopies of foliage, and lit up with sunny 
glimpses through archways of great boughs, — 
spires, towers, and turrets, each with its history 
and legend, — dimly magnificent chapels, with 
painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly 
diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of rich¬ 
est gloom, — vast college halls, high-windowed, 
oaken-panelled, and hung round with portraits 
of the men, in every age, whom the university 
has nurtured to be illustrious, — long vistas of 
alcoved libraries, where the wisdom and learned 
folly of all time is shelved, — kitchens (we 
throw in this feature by way of ballast, and be¬ 
cause it would not be English Oxford without 
its beef and beer), with huge fireplaces, capable 
of roasting a hundred joints at once, — and 
cavernous cellars, where rows of piled-up hogs¬ 
heads seethe and fume with that mighty malt 
liquor which is the true milk of Alma Mater: 
make all these things vivid in your dream, and 
you will never know nor believe how inade- 
279 


OUR OLD HOME 


quate is the result to represent even the merest 
outside of Oxford. 

We feel a genuine reluctance to conclude 
this article without making our grateful acknow¬ 
ledgments, by name, to a gentleman whose 
overflowing kindness was the main condition of 
all our sight-seeings and enjoyments. Delight¬ 
ful as will always be our recollection of Oxford 
and its neighborhood, we partly suspect that it 
owes much of its happy coloring to the genial 
medium through which the objects were pre¬ 
sented to us, — to the kindly magic of a hos¬ 
pitality unsurpassed, within our experience, in 
the quality of making the guest contented with 
his host, with himself, and everything about 
him. He has inseparably mingled his image 
with our remembrance of the Spires of Oxford. 

280 


VIII 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


E left Carlisle at a little past eleven, 
and within the half hour were at 
Gretna Green. Thence we rushed 



onward into Scotland through a flat and dreary- 
tract of country, consisting mainly of desert and 
bog, where probably the moss-troopers were 
accustomed to take refuge after their raids into 
England. Anon, however, the hills hove them¬ 
selves up to view, occasionally attaining a height 
which might almost be called mountainous. In 
about two hours we reached Dumfries, and 
alighted at the station there. 

Chill as the Scottish summer is reputed to be, 
we found it an awfully hot day, not a whit less 
so than the day before; but we sturdily adven¬ 
tured through the burning sunshine up into 
the town, inquiring our way to the residence of 
Burns. The street leading from the station is 
called Shakespeare Street; and at its farther 
extremity we read “ Burns Street ” on a corner 
house, — the avenue thus designated having 
been formerly know as “ Mill-Hole Brae.” It 
is a vile lane, paved with small, hard stones from 


281 


OUR OLD HOME 


side to side, and bordered by cottages or mean 
houses of whitewashed stone, joining one to an¬ 
other along the whole length of the street. With 
not a tree, of course, or a blade of grass between 
the paving-stones, the narrow lane was as hot 
as Tophet, and reeked with a genuine Scotch 
odor, being infested with unwashed children, and 
altogether in a state of chronic filth ; although 
some women seemed to be hopelessly scrubbing 
the thresholds of their wretched dwellings. I 
never saw an outskirt of a town less fit for a 
poet's residence, or in which it would be more 
miserable for any man of cleanly predilections to 
spend his days. 

We asked for Burns's dwelling ; and a woman 
pointed across the street to a two-story house, 
built of stone, and whitewashed, like its neigh¬ 
bors, but perhaps of a little more respectable 
aspect than most of them, though I hesitate in 
saying so. It was not a separate structure, but 
under the same continuous roof with the next. 
There was an inscription on the door, bearing 
no reference to Burns, but indicating that the 
house was now occupied by a ragged or in¬ 
dustrial school. On knocking, we were instantly 
admitted by a servant girl, who smiled intelli¬ 
gently when we told our errand, and showed us 
into a low and very plain parlor, not more than 
twelve or fifteen feet square. A young woman, 
who seemed to be a teacher in the school, soon 
282 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

appeared, and told us that this had been Burns's 
usual sitting-room, and that he had written many 
of his songs here. 

She then led us up a narrow staircase into a 
little bedchamber over the parlor. Connecting 
with it, there is a very small room, or windowed 
closet, which Burns used as a study ; and the 
bedchamber itself was the one where he slept in 
his later lifetime, and in which he died at last. 
Altogether, it is an exceedingly unsuitable place 
for a pastoral and rural poet to live or die in, — 
even more unsatisfactory than Shakespeare's 
house, which has a certain homely picturesque¬ 
ness that contrasts favorably with the suburban 
sordidness of the abode before us. The narrow 
lane, the paving-stones, and the contiguity of 
wretched hovels are depressing to remember; 
and the steam of them (such is our human weak¬ 
ness) might almost make the poet's memory less 
fragrant. 

As already observed, it was an intolerably hot 
day. After leaving the house, we found our 
way into the principal street of the town, which, 
it may be fair to say, is of very different aspect 
from the wretched outskirt above described. 
Entering a hotel (in which, as a Dumfries guide¬ 
book assured us, Prince Charles Edward had 
once spent a night), we rested and refreshed 
ourselves, and then set forth in quest of the 
mausoleum of Burns. 

283 


OUR OLD HOME 

Coming to St. Michael's Church, we saw a 
man digging a grave, and, scrambling out of the 
hole, he let us into the churchyard, which was 
crowded full of monuments. Their general shape 
and construction are peculiar to Scotland, being 
a perpendicular tablet of marble or other stone, 
within a framework of the same material, some¬ 
what resembling the frame of a looking-glass; 
and, all over the churchyard, these sepulchral 
memorials rise to the height of ten, fifteen, or 
twenty feet, forming quite an imposing collection 
of monuments, but inscribed with names of 
small general significance. It was easy, indeed, 
to ascertain the rank of those who slept below; 
for in Scotland it is the custom to put the occu¬ 
pation of the buried personage (as “ Skinner,” 
“ Shoemaker,” “ Flesher ”) on his tombstone. 
As another peculiarity, wives are buried under 
their maiden names, instead of those of their 
husbands, thus giving a disagreeable impression 
that the married pair have bidden each other an 
eternal farewell on the edge of the grave. 

There was a footpath through this crowded 
churchyard, sufficiently well worn to guide us 
to the grave of Burns; but a woman followed 
behind us, who, it appeared, kept the key of 
the mausoleum, and was privileged to show k 
to strangers. The monument is a sort of Gre¬ 
cian temple, with pilasters and a dome, covering 
a space of about twenty feet square. It was 
284 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

formerly open to all the inclemencies of the 
Scotch atmosphere, but is now protected and 
shut in by large squares of rough glass, each 
pane being of the size of one whole side of the 
structure. The woman unlocked the door, and 
admitted us into the interior. Inlaid into the 
floor of the mausoleum is the gravestone of 
Burns, — the very same that was laid over his 
grave by Jean Armour, before this monument 
was built. Displayed against the surrounding 
wall is a marble statue of Burns at the plough, 
with the Genius of Caledonia summoning the 
ploughman to turn poet. Methought it was 
not a very successful piece of work; for the 
plough was better sculptured than the man, 
and the man, though heavy and cloddish, was 
more effective than the goddess. Our guide 
informed us that an old man of ninety, who 
knew Burns, certifies this statue to be very like 
the original. 

The bones of the poet, and of Jean Armour, 
and of some of their children, lie in the vault 
over which we stood. Our guide (who was 
intelligent, in her own plain way, and very 
agreeable to talk withal) said that the vault was 
opened about three weeks ago, on occasion of 
the burial of the eldest son of Burns. The 
poet’s bones were disturbed, and the dry skull, 
once so brimming over with powerful thought 
and bright and tender fantasies, was taken away, 
285 


OUR OLD HOME 


and kept for several days by a Dumfries doctor. 
It has since been deposited in a new leaden 
coffin, and restored to the vault. We learned 
that there is a surviving daughter of Burns’s 
eldest son, and daughters likewise of the two 
younger sons, — and, besides these, an illegiti¬ 
mate posterity by the eldest son, who appears 
to have been of disreputable life in his younger 
days. He inherited his father’s failings, with 
some faint shadow, I have also understood, of 
the great qualities which have made the world 
tender of his father’s vices and weaknesses. 

We listened readily enough to this paltry 
gossip, but found that it robbed the poet’s mem¬ 
ory of some of the reverence that was its due. 
Indeed, this talk over his grave had very much 
the same tendency and effect as the home scene 
of his life, which we had been visiting just previ¬ 
ously. Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and 
its surroundings, and picturing his outward life 
and earthly manifestations from these, one does 
not so much wonder that the people of that day 
should have failed to recognize all that was ad¬ 
mirable and immortal in a disreputable, drunken, 
shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man, con¬ 
sorting with associates of damaged character, 
and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging 
the whiskey, which he too often tasted. Siding 
with Burns, as we needs must, in his plea against 
the world, let us try to do the world a little jus- 
286 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

tice too. It is far easier to know and honor a 
poet when his fame has taken shape in the spot¬ 
lessness of marble than when the actual man 
comes staggering before you, besmeared with 
the sordid stains of his daily life. For my part, 
I chiefly wonder that his recognition dawned so 
brightly while he was still living. There must 
have been something very grand in his imme¬ 
diate presence, some strangely impressive char¬ 
acteristic in his natural behavior, to have caused 
him to seem like a demigod so soon. 

As we went back through the churchyard, we 
saw a spot where nearly four hundred inhabit¬ 
ants of Dumfries were buried during the chol¬ 
era year; and also some curious old monuments, 
with raised letters, the inscriptions on which 
were not sufficiently legible to induce us to puz¬ 
zle them out; but, I believe, they mark the 
resting-places of old Covenanters, some of whom 
were killed by Claverhouse and his fellow ruf¬ 
fians. 

St. Michael's Church is of red freestone, and 
was built about a hundred years ago, on an old 
Catholic foundation. Our guide admitted us 
into it, and showed us, in the porch, a very 
pretty little marble figure of a child asleep, with 
a drapery over the lower part, from beneath 
which appeared its two baby feet. It was truly 
a sweet little statue ; and the woman told us that 
it represented a child of the sculptor, and that 
287 


OUR OLD HOME 


the baby (here still in its marble infancy) had 
died more than twenty-six years ago. “ Many 
ladies,” she said, “ especially such as had ever 
lost a child, had shed tears over it.” It was 
very pleasant to think of the sculptor bestowing 
the best of his genius and art to re-create his 
tender child in stone, and to make the represen¬ 
tation as soft and sweet as the original; but the 
conclusion of the story has something that jars 
with our awakened sensibilities. A gentleman 
from London had seen the statue, and was so 
much delighted with it that he bought it of the 
father-artist, after it had lain above a quarter 
of a century in the church porch. So this was 
not the real, tender image that came out of the 
father’s heart; he had sold that truest one for a 
hundred guineas, and sculptured this mere copy 
to replace it. The first figure was entirely naked 
in its earthly and spiritual innocence. The copy, 
as I have said above, has a drapery over the 
lower limbs. But, after all, if we come to the 
truth of the matter, the sleeping baby may be 
as fitly reposited in the drawing-room of a con¬ 
noisseur as in a cold and dreary church porch. 

We went into the church, and found it very 
plain and naked, without altar decorations, and 
having its floor quite covered with unsightly 
wooden pews. The woman led us to a pew, 
cornering on one of the side aisles, and, telling 
us that it used to be Burns’s family pew, showed 
288 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

us his seat, which is in the corner by the aisle. 
It is so situated, that a sturdy pillar hid him 
from the pulpit, and from the minister’s eye; 
“ for Robin was no great friends with the min¬ 
isters,” said she. This touch — his seat behind 
the pillar, and Burns himself nodding in sermon 
time, or keenly observant of profane things — 
brought him before us to the life. In the cor¬ 
ner seat of the next pew, right before Burns, 
and not more than two feet off, sat the young 
lady on whom the poet saw that unmentionable 
parasite, which he has immortalized in song. 
We were ungenerous enough to ask the lady’s 
name, but the good woman could not tell it. 
This was the last thing which we saw in Dum¬ 
fries worthy of record; and it ought to be noted 
that our guide refused some money which my 
companion offered her, because I had already 
paid her what she deemed sufficient. 

At the railway station we spent more than a 
weary hour, waiting for the train, which at last 
came up, and took us to Mauchline. We got 
into an omnibus, the only conveyance to be had, 
and drove about a mile to the village, where we 
established ourselves at the Loudoun Hotel, 
one of the veriest country inns which we have 
found in Great Britain. The town of Mauch¬ 
line, a place more redolent of Burns than al¬ 
most any other, consists of a street or two of 
contiguous cottages, mostly whitewashed, and 
289 


OUR OLD HOME 


with thatched roofs. It has nothing sylvan or 
rural in the immediate village, and is as ugly a 
place as mortal man could contrive to make, or 
to render uglier through a succession of untidy 
generations. The fashion of paving the village 
street, and patching one shabby house on the 
gable-end of another, quite shuts out all ver¬ 
dure and pleasantness ; but, I presume, we are 
not likely to see a more genuine old Scotch vil¬ 
lage, such as they used to be in Burns’s time, 
and long before, than this of Mauchline. The 
church stands about midway up the street, and 
is built of red freestone, very simple in its ar¬ 
chitecture, with a square tower and pinnacles. 
In this sacred edifice, and its churchyard, was 
the scene of one of Burns’s most characteristic 
productions, The Holy Fair. 

Almost directly opposite its gate, across the 
village street, stands Posie Nansie’s inn, where 
the “ Jolly Beggars ” congregated. The latter 
is a two-story, red-stone, thatched house, look¬ 
ing old, but by no means venerable, like a 
drunken patriarch. It has small, old-fashioned 
windows, and may well have stood for centuries, 
— though, seventy or eighty years ago, when 
Burns was conversant with it, I should fancy it 
might have been something better than a beg¬ 
gars’ alehouse. The whole town of Mauchline 
looks rusty and time-worn, — even the newer 
houses, of which there are several, being shad- 
290 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


owed and darkened by the general aspect of the 
place. When we arrived, all the wretched little 
dwellings seemed to have belched forth their 
inhabitants into the warm summer evening : 
everybody was chatting with everybody, on the 
most familiar terms ; the bare-legged children 
gambolled or quarrelled uproariously, and came 
freely, moreover, and looked into the window of 
our parlor. When we ventured out, we were 
followed by the gaze of the old town : people 
standing in their doorways, old women popping 
their heads from the chamber windows, and stal¬ 
wart men — idle on Saturday at e’en, after their 
week’s hard labor — clustering at the street cor¬ 
ners, merely to stare at our unpretending selves. 
Except in some remote little town of Italy 
(where, besides, the inhabitants had the intel¬ 
ligible stimulus of beggary), I have never been 
honored with nearly such an amount of public 
notice. 

The next forenoon my companion put me to 
shame by attending church, after vainly exhort¬ 
ing me to do the like; and it being Sacrament 
Sunday, and my poor friend being wedged into 
the farther end of a closely filled pew, he was 
forced to stay through the preaching of four sev¬ 
eral sermons, and came back perfectly exhausted 
and desperate. He was somewhat consoled, 
however, on finding that he had witnessed a 
spectacle of Scotch manners identical with that 
291 


OUR OLD HOME 


of Burns's Holy Fair, on the very spot where 
the poet located that immortal description. By 
way of further conformance to the customs of 
the country, we ordered a sheep’s head and the 
broth, and did penance accordingly; and at five 
o’clock we took a fly, and set out for Burns’s 
farm of Moss Giel. 

Moss Giel is not more than a mile from 
Mauchline, and the road extends over a high 
ridge of land, with a view of far hills and green 
slopes on either side. Just before we reached 
the farm, the driver stopped to point out a haw¬ 
thorn, growing by the wayside, which he said 
was Burns’s c< Lousie Thorn; ” and I devoutly 
plucked a branch, although I have really forgot¬ 
ten where or how this illustrious shrub has been 
celebrated. We then turned into a rude gate¬ 
way, and almost immediately came to the farm¬ 
house of Moss Giel, standing some fifty yards 
removed from the high-road, behind a tall hedge 
of hawthorn, and considerably overshadowed by 
trees. The house is a whitewashed stone cot¬ 
tage, like thousands of others in England and 
Scotland, with a thatched roof, on which grass 
and weeds have intruded a picturesque though 
alien growth. There is a door and one window 
in front, besides another little window that peeps 
out among the thatch. Close by the cottage, and 
extending back at right angles from it, so as to 
enclose the farmyard, are two other buildings of 
292 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

the same size, shape, and general appearance as 
the house: any one of the three looks just as 
fit for a human habitation as the two others, 
and all three look still more suitable for donkey- 
stables and pigsties. As we drove into the 
farmyard, bounded on three sides by these three 
hovels, a large dog began to bark at us; and 
some women and children made their appear¬ 
ance, but seemed to demur about admitting us, 
because the master and mistress were very reli¬ 
gious people, and had not yet come back from 
the Sacrament at Mauchline. 

However, it would not do to be turned back 
from the very threshold of Robert Burns ; and 
as the women seemed to be merely straggling 
visitors, and nobody, at all events, had a right 
to send us away, we went into the back door, 
and, turning to the right, entered a kitchen. It 
showed a deplorable lack of housewifely neat¬ 
ness, and in it there were three or four children, 
one of whom, a girl eight or nine years old, held 
a baby in her arms. She proved to be the daugh¬ 
ter of the people of the house, and gave us what 
leave she could to look about us. Thence we 
stepped across the narrow mid-passage of the 
cottage into the only other apartment below 
stairs, a sitting-room, where we found a young 
man eating bread and cheese. He informed 
us that he did not live there, and had only 
called in to refresh himself on his way home 
293 


OUR OLD HOME 


from church. This room, like the kitchen, was 
a noticeably poor one, and, besides being all 
that the cottage had to show for a parlor, it was 
a sleeping-apartment, having two beds, which 
might be curtained off, on occasion. The young 
man allowed us liberty (so far as in him lay) to 
go upstairs. Up we crept, accordingly; and a 
few steps brought us to the top of the staircase, 
over the kitchen, where we found the wretch- 
edest little sleeping-chamber in the world, with 
a sloping roof under the thatch, and two beds 
spread upon the bare floor. This, most prob¬ 
ably, was Burns’s chamber; or, perhaps, it may 
have been that of his mother’s servant-maid; 
and, in either case, this rude floor, at one time 
or another, must have creaked beneath the poet’s 
midnight tread. On the opposite side of the 
passage was the door of another attic chamber, 
opening which, I saw a considerable number of 
cheeses on the floor. 

The whole house was pervaded with a frowzy 
smell, and also a dunghill odor; and it is not 
easy to understand how the atmosphere of such 
a dwelling can be any more agreeable or salubri¬ 
ous morally than it appeared to be physically. 
No virgin, surely, could keep a holy awe about 
her while stowed higgledy-piggledy with coarse- 
natured rustics into this narrowness and filth. 
Such a habitation is calculated to make beasts of 
men and women; and it indicates a degree of 
294 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


barbarism which I did not imagine to exist in 
Scotland, that a tiller of broad fields, like the 
farmer of Mauchline, should have his abode in 
a pigsty. It is sad to think of anybody— not 
to say a poet, but any human being — sleeping, 
eating, thinking, praying, and spending all his 
home-life in this miserable hovel; but, me- 
thinks, I never in the least knew how to estimate 
the miracle of Burns’s genius, nor his heroic 
merit for being no worse man, until I thus learned 
the squalid hindrances amid which he developed 
himself. Space, a free atmosphere, and cleanli¬ 
ness have a vast deal to do with the possibilities 
of human virtue. 

The biographers talk of the farm of Moss 
Giel as being damp and unwholesome; but I 
do not see why, outside of the cottage walls, it 
should possess so evil a reputation. It occupies 
a high, broad ridge, enjoying, surely, whatever 
benefit can come of a breezy site, and sloping 
far downv/ard before any marshy soil is reached. 
The high hedge, and the trees that stand beside 
the cottage, give it a pleasant aspect enough to 
one who does not know the grimy secrets of 
the interior; and the summer afternoon was 
now so bright that I shall remember the scene 
with a great deal of sunshine over it. 

Leaving the cottage, we drove through a field, 
which the driver told us was that in which Burns 
turned up the mouse’s nest. It is the enclosure 
295 


OUR OLD HOME 


nearest to the cottage, and seems now to be a 
pasture, and a rather remarkably unfertile one. 
A little farther on, the ground was whitened 
with an immense number of daisies,— daisies, 
daisies everywhere; and in answer to my in¬ 
quiry, the driver said that this was the field 
where Burns ran his ploughshare over the daisy. 
If so, the soil seems to have been consecrated 
to daisies by the song which he bestowed on 
that first immortal one. I alighted, and plucked 
a whole handful of these “wee, modest, crim¬ 
son-tipped flowers,” which will be precious to 
many friends in our own country as coming from 
Burns's farm, and being of the same race and 
lineage as that daisy which he turned into an 
amaranthine flower while seeming to destroy it . 1 

From Moss Giel we drove through a variety 
of pleasant scenes, some of which were famil¬ 
iar to us by their connection with Burns. We 
skirted, too, along a portion of the estate of 
Auchinleck, which still belongs to the Boswell 
family, — the present possessor being Sir James 
Boswell , 2 a grandson of Johnson's friend, and 

1 Southport, May ioth. The grass has been green for a month,— 
indeed, it has never been entirely brown, — and now the trees and hedges 
are beginning to be in foliage. Weeks ago the daisies bloomed, even in the 
sandy grass-plot bordering on the promenade beneath our front windows; 
and in the progress of the daisy, and towards its consummation, I saw the 
propriety of Burns’s epithet, “wee, modest, crimson-tipped flower,” — 
its little white petals in the bud being fringed all round with crimson, which 
fades into pure white when the flower blooms. — Notes of Travel, II. 328. 

2 Sir James Boswell is now dead. 

296 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


son of the Sir Alexander who was killed in a 
duel. Our driver spoke of Sir James as a kind, 
free-hearted man, but addicted to horse-races 
and similar pastimes, and a little too familiar 
with the wine-cup ; so that poor Bozzy’s boozi¬ 
ness would appear to have become hereditary in 
his ancient line. There is no male heir to the 
estate of Auchinleck. The portion of the lands 
which we saw is covered with wood and much 
undermined with rabbit-warrens ; nor, though 
the territory extends over a large number of 
acres, is the income very considerable. 

By and by we came to the spot where Burns 
saw Miss Alexander, the Lass of Ballochmyle. 
It was on a bridge, which (or, more probably, 
a bridge that has succeeded to the old one, and 
is made of iron) crosses from bank to bank, 
high in air over a deep gorge of the road; so 
that the young lady may have appeared to Burns 
like a creature between earth and sky, and com¬ 
pounded chiefly of celestial elements. But, in 
honest truth, the great charm of a woman, in 
Burns’s eyes, was always her womanhood, and 
not the angelic mixture which other poets find 
in her. 

Our driver pointed out the course taken by the 
Lass of Ballochmyle, through the shrubbery, to 
a rock on the banks of the Lugar, where it seems 
to be the tradition that Burns accosted her. 
The song implies no such interview. Lovers, 
29 7 


OUR OLD HOME 


of whatever condition, high or low, could desire 
no lovelier scene in which to breathe their vows : 
the river flowing over its pebbly bed, sometimes 
gleaming into the sunshine, sometimes hidden 
deep in verdure, and here and there eddying at 
the foot of high and precipitous cliffs. This 
beautiful estate of Ballochmyle is still held by the 
family of Alexanders, to whom Burns’s song has 
given renown on cheaper terms than any other 
set of people ever attained it. How slight the 
tenure seems ! A young lady happened to walk 
out, one summer afternoon, and crossed the path 
of a neighboring farmer, who celebrated the little 
incident in four or five warm, rude,— at least, 
not refined, though rather ambitious, — and 
somewhat ploughman-like verses. Burns has 
written hundreds of better things; but hence¬ 
forth, for centuries, that maiden has free admit¬ 
tance into the dream-land of Beautiful Women, 
and she and all her race are famous. I should 
like to know the present head of the family, and 
ascertain what value, if any, the members of it 
put upon the celebrity thus won. 

We passed through Catrine, known here¬ 
abouts as “ the clean village of Scotland.” Cer¬ 
tainly, as regards the point indicated, it has 
greatly the advantage of Mauchline, whither we 
now returned without seeing anything else worth 
writing about. 

There was a rainstorm during the night, and, 
298 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


in the morning, the rusty, old, sloping street of 
Mauchline was glistening with wet, while fre¬ 
quent showers came spattering down. The in¬ 
tense heat of many days past was exchanged for 
a chilly atmosphere, much more suitable to a 
stranger’s idea of what Scotch temperature ought 
to be. We found, after breakfast, that the first 
train northward had already gone by, and that 
we must wait till nearly two o’clock for the next. 

I merely ventured out once, during the fore¬ 
noon, and took a brief walk through the village, 
in which I have left little to describe. Its chief 
business appears to be the manufacture of snuff¬ 
boxes. There are perhaps five or six shops, or 
more, including those licensed to sell only tea 
and tobacco; the best of them have the charac¬ 
teristics of village stores in the United States, 
dealing in a small way with an extensive variety 
of articles. I peeped into the open gateway of 
the churchyard, and saw that the ground was 
absolutely stuffed with dead people, and the sur¬ 
face crowded with gravestones, both perpendicu¬ 
lar and horizontal. All Burns’s old Mauchline 
acquaintance are doubtless there, and the Ar¬ 
mours among them, except Bonny Jean, who 
sleeps by her poet’s side. The family of Ar¬ 
mour is now extinct in Mauchline. 

Arriving at the railway station, we found a 
tall, elderly, comely gentleman walking to and 
fro and waiting for the train. He proved to be 
299 


OUR OLD HOME 


a Mr. Alexander, — it may fairly be presumed 
the Alexander of Ballochmyle, a blood relation 
of the lovely lass. Wonderful efficacy of a poet’s 
verse, that could shed a glory from Long Ago 
on this old gentleman’s white hair! These Alex¬ 
anders, by the bye, are not an old family on the 
Ballochmyle estate ; the father of the lass having 
made a fortune in trade, and established himself 
as the first landed proprietor of his name in these 
parts. The original family was named White- 
foord. 

Our ride to Ayr presented nothing very re¬ 
markable ; and, indeed, a cloudy and rainy day 
takes the varnish off the scenery, and causes a 
woeful diminution in the beauty and impressive¬ 
ness of everything we see. Much of our way 
lay along a flat, sandy level, in a southerly direc¬ 
tion. We reached Ayr in the midst of hope¬ 
less rain, and drove to the King’s Arms Hotel. 
In the intervals of showers I took peeps at the 
town, which appeared to have many modern 
or modern-fronted edifices ; although there are 
likewise tall, gray, gabled, and quaint-looking 
houses in the by-streets, here and there, beto¬ 
kening an ancient place. The town lies on both 
sides of the Ayr, which is here broad and stately, 
and bordered with dwellings that look from their 
windows directly down into the passing tide. 

I crossed the river by a modern and hand¬ 
some stone bridge, and recrossed it, at no great 
300 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


distance, by a venerable structure of four gray 
arches, which must have bestridden the stream 
ever since the early days of Scottish history. 
These are the u Two Briggs of Ayr,” whose 
midnight conversation was overheard by Burns, 
while other auditors were aware only of the rush 
and rumble of the wintry stream among the 
arches. The ancient bridge is steep and narrow, 
and paved like a street, and defended by a par¬ 
apet of red freestone, except at the two ends, 
where some mean old shops allow scanty room 
for the pathway to creep between. Nothing else 
impressed me hereabouts, unless I mention that, 
during the rain, the women and girls went about 
the streets of Ayr barefooted to save their shoes. 

The next morning wore a lowering aspect, as 
if it felt itself destined to be one of many con¬ 
secutive days of storm. After a good Scotch 
breakfast, however, of fresh herrings and eggs, 
we took a fly, and started at a little past ten 
for the banks of the Doon. On our way, at 
about two miles from Ayr, we drew up at a 
roadside cottage, on which was an inscription to 
the effect that Robert Burns was born within 
its walls. It is now a public house; and, of 
course, we alighted and entered its little sitting- 
room, which, as we at present see it, is a neat 
apartment, with the modern improvement of a 
ceiling. The walls are much over-scribbled with 
names of visitors, and the wooden door of a cup- 
301 


OUR OLD HOME 


board in the wainscot, as well as all the other 
wood-work of the room, is cut and carved with 
initial letters. So, likewise, are two tables, which, 
having received a coat of varnish over the in¬ 
scriptions, form really curious and interesting 
articles of furniture. I have seldom (though I 
do not personally adopt this mode of illustrat¬ 
ing my humble name) felt inclined to ridicule 
the natural impulse of most people thus to re¬ 
cord themselves at the shrines of poets and 
heroes. 

On a panel, let into the wall in a corner of 
the room, is a portrait of Burns, copied from 
the original picture by Nasmyth. The floor of 
this apartment is of boards, which are probably 
a recent substitute for the ordinary flag-stones 
of a peasant’s cottage. There is but one other 
room pertaining to the genuine birthplace of 
Robert Burns : it is the kitchen, into which we 
now went. It has a floor of flag-stones, even 
ruder than those of Shakespeare’s house, — 
though, perhaps, not so strangely cracked and 
broken as the latter, over which the hoof of 
Satan himself might seem to have been tram¬ 
pling. A new window has been opened through 
the wall, towards the road ; but on the oppo¬ 
site side is the little original window, of only 
four small panes, through which came the first 
daylight that shone upon the Scottish poet. 
At the side of the room, opposite the fireplace, 
302 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 


is a recess, containing a bed, which can be hid¬ 
den by curtains. In that humble nook, of all 
places in the world, Providence was pleased to 
deposit the germ of richest human life which 
mankind then had within its circumference. 

These two rooms, as I have said, make up 
the whole sum and substance of Burns’s birth¬ 
place : for there were no chambers, nor even 
attics ; and the thatched roof formed the only 
ceiling of kitchen and sitting-room, the height 
of which was that of the whole house. The 
cottage, however, is attached to another edifice 
of the same size and description, as these little 
habitations often are ; and, moreover, a splen¬ 
did addition has been made to it, since the po¬ 
et’s renown began to draw visitors to the way- 
side alehouse. The old woman of the house 
led us through an entry, and showed a vaulted 
hall, of no vast dimensions, to be sure, but mar¬ 
vellously large and splendid as compared with 
what might be anticipated from the outward 
aspect of the cottage. It contained a bust of 
Burns, and was hung round with pictures and 
engravings, principally illustrative of his life and 
poems. In this part of the house, too, there 
is a parlor, fragrant with tobacco smoke ; and, 
no doubt, many a noggin of whiskey is here 
quaffed to the memory of the bard, who pro¬ 
fessed to draw so much inspiration from that 
potent liquor. 


3°3 


OUR OLD HOME 


We bought some engravings of Kirk Allo- 
way, the Bridge of Doon, and the monument, 
and gave the old woman a fee besides, and took 
our leave. A very short drive farther brought 
us within sight of the monument, and to the 
hotel, situated close by the entrance of the or¬ 
namental grounds within which the former is 
enclosed. We rang the bell at the gate of the 
enclosure, but were forced to wait a consider¬ 
able time, because the old man, the regular 
superintendent of the spot, had gone to assist 
at the laying of the corner-stone of a new kirk. 
He appeared anon, and admitted us, but im¬ 
mediately hurried away to be present at the 
concluding ceremonies, leaving us locked up 
with Burns. 

The enclosure around the monument is beau¬ 
tifully laid out as an ornamental garden, and 
abundantly provided with rare flowers and 
shrubbery, all tended with loving care. The 
monument stands on an elevated site, and con¬ 
sists of a massive basement story, three-sided, 
above which rises a light and elegant Grecian 
temple, — a mere dome, supported on Corin¬ 
thian pillars, and open to all the winds. The 
edifice is beautiful in itself; though I know not 
what peculiar appropriateness it may have, as 
the memorial of a Scottish rural poet. 

The door of the basement story stood open ; 
and, entering, we saw a bust of Burns in a 
3°4 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

niche, looking keener, more refined, but not so 
warm and whole-souled as his pictures usually 
do. I think the likeness cannot be good. In 
the centre of the room stood a glass case, in 
which were reposited the two volumes of the lit¬ 
tle Pocket Bible that Burns gave to Highland 
Mary, when they pledged their troth to one an¬ 
other. It is poorly printed on coarse paper. 
A verse of Scripture referring to the solemnity 
and awfulness of vows is written within the 
cover of each volume, in the poet's own hand; 
and fastened to one of the covers is a lock of 
Highland Mary's golden hair. This Bible 
had been carried to America by one of her rel¬ 
atives, but was sent back to be fitly treasured 
here. 

There is a staircase within the monument, by 
which we ascended to the top, and had a view 
of both Briggs of Doon : the scene of Tam 
O’Shanter's misadventure being close at hand. 
Descending, we wandered through the enclosed 
garden, and came to a little building in a corner, 
on entering which, we found the two statues of 
Tam and Sutor Wat, — ponderous stone-work 
enough, yet permeated in a remarkable degree 
with living warmth and jovial hilarity. From 
this part of the garden, too, we again beheld the 
old Brigg of Doon, over which Tam galloped 
in such imminent and awful peril. It is a beau¬ 
tiful object in the landscape, with one high, 
3°5 


OUR OLD HOME 


graceful arch, ivy-grown, and shadowed all over 
and around with foliage. 

When we had waited a good while, the old 
gardener came, telling us that he had heard an 
excellent prayer at laying the corner-stone of 
the new kirk. He now gave us some roses 
and sweetbrier, and let us out from his plea¬ 
sant garden. We immediately hastened to Kirk 
Alloway, which is within two or three minutes* 
walk of the monument. A few steps ascend 
from the roadside, through a gate, into the old 
graveyard, in the midst of which stands the 
kirk. The edifice is wholly roofless, but the 
side walls and gable-ends are quite entire, 
though portions of them are evidently modern 
restorations. Never was there a plainer little 
church, or one with smaller architectural pre¬ 
tensions ; no New England meeting-house has 
more simplicity in its very self, though poetry 
and fun have clambered and clustered so wildly 
over Kirk Alloway that it is difficult to see it 
as it actually exists. By the bye, I do not un¬ 
derstand why Satan and an assembly of witches 
should hold their revels within a consecrated 
precinct; but the weird scene has so established 
itself in the world’s imaginative faith that it 
must be accepted as an authentic incident, in 
spite of rule and reason to the contrary. Pos¬ 
sibly, some carnal minister, some priest of pious 
aspect and hidden infidelity, had dispelled the 
306 


The Auld Brig o’Dooii 













v ovnCv ' v\wVv 




I 

























SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

consecration of the holy edifice by his pretence 
of prayer, and thus made it the resort of un- 
happy ghosts and sorcerers and devils. 

The interior of the kirk, even now, is ap¬ 
plied to quite as impertinent a purpose as when 
Satan and the witches used it as a dancing-hall; 
for it is divided in the midst by a wall of stone- 
masonry, and each compartment has been con¬ 
verted into a family burial-place. The name 
on one of the monuments is Crawfurd; the 
other bore no inscription. It is impossible not 
to feel that these good people, whoever they 
may be, had no business to thrust their prosaic 
bones into a spot that belongs to the world, and 
where their presence jars with the emotions, be 
they sad or gay, which the pilgrim brings thither. 
They shut us out from our own precincts, too, 
— from that inalienable possession which Burns 
bestowed in free gift upon mankind, by tak¬ 
ing it from the actual earth and annexing it to 
the domain of imagination. And here these 
wretched squatters have'lain down to their long 
sleep, after barring each of the two doorways of 
the kirk with an iron grate! May their rest 
be troubled, till they rise and let us in ! 

Kirk Alloway is inconceivably small, consid¬ 
ering how large a space it fills in our imagina¬ 
tion before we see it. I paced its length, out¬ 
side of the wall, and found it only seventeen of 
my paces, and not more than ten of them in 
307 


OUR OLD HOME 


breadth. There seem to have been but very 
few windows, all of which, if I rightly remem¬ 
ber, are now blocked up with mason-work of 
stone. One mullioned window, tall and nar¬ 
row, in the eastern gable, might have been seen 
by Tam O’Shanter, blazing with devilish light, 
as he approached along the road from Ayr; and 
there is a small and square one, on the side near¬ 
est the road, into which he might have peered, 
as he sat on horseback. Indeed, I could easily 
have looked through it, standing on the ground, 
had not the opening been walled up. There 
is an odd kind of belfry at the peak of one of 
the gables, with the small bell still hanging in 
it. And this is all that I remember of Kirk 
Alloway, except that the stones of its material 
are gray and irregular. 

The road from Ayr passes Alloway Kirk, and 
crosses the Doon by a modern bridge, without 
swerving much from a straight line. To reach 
the old bridge, it appears to have made a bend, 
shortly after passing the kirk, and then to have 
turned sharply towards the river. The new 
bridge is within a minute’s walk of the monu¬ 
ment ; and we went thither, and leaned over its 
parapet to admire the beautiful Doon, flowing 
wildly and sweetly between its deep and wooded 
banks. I never saw a lovelier scene ; although 
this might have been even lovelier if a kindly 
sun had shone upon it. The ivy-grown, an- 
308 


SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 

cient bridge, with its high arch, through which 
we had a picture of the river and the green 
banks beyond, was absolutely the most pictur¬ 
esque object, in a quiet and gentle way, that 
ever blessed my eyes. Bonny Doon, with its 
wooded banks, and the boughs dipping into the 
water ! The memory of them, at this moment, 
affects me like the song of birds, and Burns 
crooning some verses, simple and wild, in ac¬ 
cordance with their native melody. 

It was impossible to depart without cross¬ 
ing the very bridge of Tam’s adventure ; so we 
went thither, over a now disused portion of the 
road, and, standing on the centre of the arch, 
gathered some ivy leaves from that sacred spot. 
This done, we returned as speedily as might 
be to Ayr, whence, taking the rail, we soon 
beheld Ailsa Craig rising like a pyramid out of 
the sea. Drawing nearer to Glasgow, Ben Lo¬ 
mond hove in sight, with a domelike summit, 
supported by a shoulder on each side. But a 
man is better than a mountain; and we had 
been holding intercourse, if not with the real¬ 
ity, at least with the stalwart ghost of one of 
Earth’s memorable sons, amid the scenes where 
he lived and sung. We shall appreciate him 
better as a poet, hereafter; for there is no writer 
whose life, as a man, has so much to do with 
his fame, and throws such a necessary light 
upon whatever he has produced. Henceforth, 
3°9 


OUR OLD HOME 


there will be a personal warmth for us in every¬ 
thing that he wrote; and, like his countrymen, 
we shall know him in a kind of personal way, 
as if we had shaken hands with him, and felt 
the thrill of his actual voice. 

310 


IX 


A LONDON SUBURB 

O NE of our English summers looks, in 
the retrospect, as if it had been patched 
with more frequent sunshine than the 
sky of England ordinarily affords; but I be¬ 
lieve that it may be only a moral effect, — a 
“light that never was on sea or land,” — caused 
by our having found a particularly delightful 
abode in the neighborhood of London. In 
order to enjoy it, however, I was compelled to 
solve the problem of living in two places at 
once, — an impossibility which I so far accom¬ 
plished as to vanish, at frequent intervals, out 
of men’s sight and knowledge on one side of 
England, and take my place in a circle of 
familiar faces on the other, so quietly that I 
seemed to have been there all along. It was 
the easier to get accustomed to our new resi¬ 
dence, because it was not only rich in all the 
material properties of a home, but had also the 
home-like atmosphere, the household element, 
which is of too intangible a character to be let 
even with the most thoroughly furnished lodg¬ 
ing-house. A friend had given us his suburban 
3 11 


OUR OLD HOME 

residence, with all its conveniences, elegances, 
and snuggeries, — its drawing-rooms and li¬ 
brary, still warm and bright with the recollec¬ 
tion of the genial presences that we had known 
there, — its closets, chambers, kitchen, and even 
its wine cellar, if we could have availed our¬ 
selves of so dear and delicate a trust, — its 
lawn and cosy garden nooks, and whatever 
else makes up the multitudinous idea of an 
English home, — he had transferred it all to 
us, pilgrims and dusty wayfarers, that we might 
rest and take our ease during his summer’s ab¬ 
sence on the Continent. We had long been 
dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shiv¬ 
ering by hearths which, heap the bituminous 
coal upon them as we might, no blaze could 
render cheerful. I remember, to this day, the 
dreary feeling with which I sat by our first 
English fireside, and watched the chill and 
rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening 
down upon the garden; while the portrait of 
the preceding occupant of the house (evidently 
a most unamiable personage in his lifetime) 
scowled inhospitably from above the mantel¬ 
piece, as if indignant that an American should 
try to make himself at home there. Possibly 
it may appease his sulky shade to know that 
I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I 
entered it. But now, at last, we were in a gen¬ 
uine British home, where refined and warm¬ 
s' 


A LONDON SUBURB 


hearted people had just been living their daily 
life, and had left us a summer's inheritance of 
slowly ripened days, such as a stranger's hasty 
opportunities so seldom permit him to enjoy. 

Within so trifling a distance of the central 
spot of all the world (which, as Americans have 
at present no centre of their own, we may allow 
to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of 
St. Paul’s Cathedral), it might have seemed nat¬ 
ural that I should be tossed about by the tur¬ 
bulence of the vast London whirlpool. But I 
had drifted into a still eddy, where conflicting 
movements made a repose, and, wearied with a 
good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the 
quiet of my temporary haven more attractive 
than anything that the great town could offer. 
I already knew London well; that is to say, I 
had long ago satisfied (so far as it was capable 
of satisfaction) that mysterious yearning — the 
magnetism of millions of hearts operating upon 
one — which impels every man’s individuality 
to mingle itself with the immensest mass of 
human life within his scope. Day after day, at 
an earlier period, I had trodden the thronged 
thoroughfares, the broad, lonely squares, the 
lanes, alleys, and strange labyrinthine courts, the 
parks, the gardens and enclosures of ancient stu¬ 
dious societies, so retired and silent amid the 
city uproar, the markets, the foggy streets along 
the river-side, the bridges, — I had sought all 
3*3 


OUR OLD HOME 


parts of the metropolis, in short, with an un- 
weariable and indiscriminating curiosity; until 
few of the native inhabitants, I fancy, had turned 
so many of its corners as myself. These aim¬ 
less wanderings (in which my prime purpose and 
achievement were to lose my way, and so to find 
it the more surely) had brought me, at one time 
or another, to the sight and actual presence of 
almost all the objects and renowned localities 
that I had read about, and which had made 
London the dream city of my youth. I had 
found it better than my dream; for there is 
nothing else in life comparable (in that species 
of enjoyment, I mean) to the thick, heavy, op¬ 
pressive, sombre delight which an American is 
sensible of, hardly knowing whether to call it a 
pleasure or a pain, in the atmosphere of Lon¬ 
don. The result was, that I acquired a home¬ 
feeling there, as nowhere else in the world, — 
though afterwards I came to have a somewhat 
similar sentiment in regard to Rome ; and as 
long as either of those two great cities shall exist, 
the cities of the Past and of the Present, a man’s 
native soil may crumble beneath his feet with¬ 
out leaving him altogether homeless upon earth. 

Thus, having once fully yielded to its influ¬ 
ence, I was in a manner free of the city, and 
could approach or keep away from it as I 
pleased. Hence it happened that, living within 
a quarter of an hour’s rush of the London Bridge 
3H 


A LONDON SUBURB 

Terminus, I was oftener tempted to spend a 
whole summer day in our garden than to seek 
anything new or old, wonderful or common¬ 
place, beyond its precincts. It was a delightful 
garden, of no great extent, but comprising a 
good many facilities for repose and enjoyment, 
such as arbors and garden seats, shrubbery, 
flower-beds, rosebushes in a profusion of bloom, 
pinks, poppies, geraniums, sweet-peas, and a 
variety of other scarlet, yellow, blue, and purple 
blossoms, which I did not trouble myself to 
recognize individually, yet had always a vague 
sense of their beauty about me. The dim sky 
of England has a most happy effect on the col¬ 
oring of flowers, blending richness with delicacy 
in the same texture; but in this garden, as every¬ 
where else, the exuberance of English verdure 
had a greater charm than any tropical splendor or 
diversity of hue. The hunger for natural beauty 
might be satisfied with grass and green leaves 
forever. Conscious of the triumph of England 
in this respect, and loyally anxious for the 
credit of my own country, it gratified me to ob¬ 
serve what trouble and pains the English gar¬ 
deners are fain to throw away in producing a 
few sour plums and abortive pears and apples, 
— as, for example, in this very garden, where a 
row of unhappy trees were spread out perfectly 
flat against a brick wall, looking as if impaled 
alive, or crucified, with a cruel and unattainable 
3*5 


OUR OLD HOME 


purpose of compelling them to produce rich 
fruit by torture. For my part, I never ate an 
English fruit, raised in the open air, that could 
compare in flavor with a Yankee turnip. 

The garden included that prime feature of 
English domestic scenery, a lawn. It had been 
levelled, carefully shorn, and converted into a 
bowling-green, on which we sometimes essayed 
to practise the time-honored game of bowls, 
most unskilfully, yet not without a perception 
that it involves a very pleasant mixture of exer¬ 
cise and ease, as is the case with most of the old 
English pastimes. Our little domain was shut 
in by the house on one side, and in other direc¬ 
tions by a hedge fence and a brick wall, which 
last was concealed or softened by shrubbery and 
the impaled fruit-trees already mentioned. Over 
all the outer region, beyond our immediate pre¬ 
cincts, there was an abundance of foliage, tossed 
aloft from the near or distant trees with which 
that agreeable suburb is adorned. The effect 
was wonderfully sylvan and rural, insomuch that 
we might have fancied ourselves in the depths 
of a wooded seclusion ; only that, at brief in¬ 
tervals, we could hear the galloping sweep of 
a railway train passing within a quarter of a 
mile, and its discordant screech, moderated by a 
little farther distance, as it reached the Black- 
heath Station. That harsh, rough sound, seek¬ 
ing me out so inevitably, was the voice of the 

3i6 


A LONDON SUBURB 


great world summoning me forth. I know not 
whether I was the more pained or pleased to be 
thus constantly put in mind of the neighborhood 
of London; for, on the one hand, my conscience 
stung me a little for reading a book, or playing 
with children in the grass, when there were so 
many better things for an enlightened traveller 
to do, — while, at the same time, it gave a deeper 
delight to my luxurious idleness to contrast it 
with the turmoil which I escaped. On the whole, 
however, I do not repent of a single wasted hour, 
and only wish that I could have spent twice as 
many in the same way ; for the impression on 
my memory is, that I was as happy in that hos¬ 
pitable garden as the English summer day was 
long. 

One chief condition of my enjoyment was the 
weather. Italy has nothing like it, nor America. 
There never was such weather except in Eng¬ 
land, where, in requital of a vast amount of hor¬ 
rible east wind between February and June, and 
a brown October and black November, and a 
wet, chill, sunless winter, there are a few weeks 
of incomparable summer, scattered through July 
and August, and the earlier portion of Septem¬ 
ber, small in quantity, but exquisite enough to 
atone for the whole year's atmospherical delin¬ 
quencies. After all, the prevalent sombreness 
may have brought out those sunny intervals in 
such high relief that I see them, in my recollec- 
3 J 7 


OUR OLD HOME 

tion, brighter than they really were : a little light 
makes a glory for people who live habitually in 
a gray gloom. The English, however, do not 
seem to know how enjoyable the momentary 
gleams of their summer are; they call it broil¬ 
ing weather, and hurry to the seaside with red, 
perspiring faces, in a state of combustion and 
deliquescence; and I have observed that even 
their cattle have similar susceptibilities, seeking 
the deepest shade, or standing midleg deep in 
pools and streams to cool themselves, at temper¬ 
atures which our own cows would deem little 
more than barely comfortable. To myself, after 
the summer heats of my native land had some¬ 
what effervesced out of my blood and memory, 
it was the weather of Paradise itself. It might 
be a little too warm ; but it was that modest and 
inestimable superabundance which constitutes a 
bounty of Providence, instead of just a niggardly 
enough. During my first year in England, re¬ 
siding in perhaps the most ungenial part of the 
kingdom, I could never be quite comfortable 
without a fire on the hearth ; in the second 
twelvemonth, beginning to get acclimatized, I 
became sensible of an austere friendliness, shy, 
but sometimes almost tender, in the veiled, 
shadowy, seldom smiling summer; and in the 
succeeding years, — whether that I had renewed 
my fibre with English beef and replenished my 
blood with English ale, or whatever were the 
3i8 


A LONDON SUBURB 


cause, — I grew content with winter and espe¬ 
cially in love with summer, desiring little more 
for happiness than merely to breathe and bask. 
At the midsummer which we are now speaking 
of, I must needs confess that the noontide sun 
came down more fervently than I found alto¬ 
gether tolerable ; so that I was fain to shift my 
position with the shadow of the shrubbery, mak¬ 
ing myself the movable index of a sundial that 
reckoned up the hours of an almost intermina¬ 
ble day. 

For each day seemed endless, though never 
wearisome. As far as your actual experience is 
concerned, the English summer day has posi¬ 
tively no beginning and no end. When you 
awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already 
shining through the curtains ; you live through 
unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a 
calm variety of incident softly etched upon their 
tranquil lapse ; and at length you become con¬ 
scious that it is bedtime again, while there is still 
enough daylight in the sky to make the pages 
of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there 
be any such season, hangs down a transparent 
veil through which the bygone day beholds its 
successor; or, if not quite true of the latitude 
of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the 
more northern parts of the island, that To-mor¬ 
row is born before its Yesterday is dead. They 
exist together in the golden twilight, where the 
3*9 


OUR OLD HOME 


decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the 
ominous infant; and you, though a mere mor¬ 
tal, may simultaneously touch them both with 
one finger of recollection and another of pro¬ 
phecy. I cared not how long the day might be, 
nor how many of them. I had earned this re¬ 
pose by a long course of irksome toil and per¬ 
turbation, and could have been content never to 
stray out of the limits of that suburban villa and 
its garden. If I lacked anything beyond, it 
would have satisfied me well enough to dream 
about it, instead of struggling for its actual 
possession. At least, this was the feeling of 
the moment; although the transitory, flitting, 
and irresponsible character of my life there was 
perhaps the most enjoyable element of all, as 
allowing me much of the comfort of house and 
home, without any sense of their weight upon 
my back. The nomadic life has great advan¬ 
tages, if we can find tents ready pitched for us 
at every stage. 

So much for the interior of our abode, — a 
spot of deepest quiet, within reach of the intens- 
est activity. But, even when we stepped beyond 
our own gate, we were not shocked with any im¬ 
mediate presence of the great world. We were 
dwelling in one of those oases that have grown 
up (in comparatively recent years, I believe) on 
the wide waste of Blackheath, which otherwise 
offers a vast extent of unoccupied ground in sin- 
320 


A LONDON SUBURB 

gular proximity to the metropolis. As a gen¬ 
eral thing, the proprietorship of the soil seems 
to exist in everybody and nobody; but exclu¬ 
sive rights have been obtained, here and there, 
chiefly by men whose daily concerns link them 
with London, so that you find their villas or 
boxes standing along village streets which have 
often more of an American aspect than the elder 
English settlements. The scene is semi-rural. 
Ornamental trees overshadow the sidewalks, and 
grassy margins border the wheel-tracks. The 
houses, to be sure, have certain points of differ¬ 
ence from those of an American village, bearing 
tokens of architectural design, though seldom 
of individual taste ; and, as far as possible, they 
stand aloof from the street, and separated each 
from its neighbor by hedge or fence, in accord¬ 
ance with the careful exclusiveness of the Eng¬ 
lish character, which impels the occupant, more¬ 
over, to cover the front of his dwelling with as 
much concealment of shrubbery as his limits 
will allow. Through the interstices, you catch 
glimpses of well-kept lawns, generally orna¬ 
mented with flowers, and with what the English 
call rock-work, being heaps of ivy-grown stones 
and fossils, designed for romantic effect in a 
small way. Two or three of such village streets 
as are here described take a collective name,— 
as, for instance, Blackheath Park, — and con¬ 
stitute a kind of community of residents, with 
3 21 


OUR OLD HOME 


gateways, kept by a policeman, and a semi-pri¬ 
vacy, stepping beyond which you find yourself 
on the breezy heath. 

On this great, bare, dreary common I often 
went astray, as I afterwards did on the Cam- 
pagna of Rome, and drew the air (tainted with 
London smoke though it might be) into my 
lungs by deep inspirations, with a strange and 
unexpected sense of desert freedom. The misty 
atmosphere helps you to fancy a remoteness 
that perhaps does not quite exist. During the 
little time that it lasts, the solitude is as impress¬ 
ive as that of a Western prairie or forest; but 
soon the railway shriek, a mile or two away, in¬ 
sists upon informing you of your whereabout; 
or you recognize in the distance some landmark 
that you may have known, — an insulated villa, 
perhaps, with its garden-wall around it, or the 
rudimental street of a new settlement which is 
sprouting on this otherwise barren soil. Half 
a century ago, the most frequent tokens of 
man's beneficent contiguity might have been a 
gibbet, and the creak, like a tavern sign, of a 
murderer swinging to and fro in irons. Black- 
heath, with its highwaymen and footpads, was 
dangerous in those days; and even now, for 
aught I know, the Western prairie may still com¬ 
pare favorably with it as a safe region to go 
astray in. When I was acquainted with Black- 
heath, the ingenious device of garroting had re- 
322 


A LONDON SUBURB 


cently come into fashion ; and I can remember, 
while crossing those waste places at midnight, 
and hearing footsteps behind me, to have been 
sensibly encouraged by also hearing, not far off, 
the clinking hoof-tramp of one of the horse pa¬ 
trols who do regular duty there. About sunset, 
or a little later, was the time when the broad 
and somewhat desolate peculiarity of the heath 
seemed to me to put on its utmost impressive¬ 
ness. At that hour, finding myself on elevated 
ground, I once had a view of immense London, 
four or five miles off, with the vast Dome in the 
midst, and the towers of the two Houses of 
Parliament rising up into the smoky canopy, the 
thinner substance of which obscured a mass 
of things, and hovered about the objects that 
were most distinctly visible, — a glorious and 
sombre picture, dusky, awful, but irresistibly 
attractive, like a young man's dream of the 
great world, foretelling at that distance a grand¬ 
eur never to be fully realized. 

While I lived in that neighborhood, the tents 
of two or three sets of cricket players were con¬ 
stantly pitched on Blackheath, and matches were 
going forward that seemed to involve the honor 
and credit of communities or counties, exciting 
an interest in everybody but myself, who cared 
not what part of England might glorify itself 
at the expense of another. It is necessary to 
be born an Englishman, I believe, in order to 
3 2 3 


OUR OLD HOME 


enjoy this great national game ; at any rate, as a 
spectacle for an outside observer, I found it lazy, 
lingering, tedious, and utterly devoid of picto¬ 
rial effects. Choice of other amusements was at 
hand. Butts for archery were established, and 
bows and arrows were to be let, at so many shots 
for a penny, — there being abundance of space 
for a farther flight-shot than any modern archer 
can lend to his shaft. Then there was an ab¬ 
surd game of throwing a stick at crockery-ware, 
which I have witnessed a hundred times, and 
personally engaged in once or twice, without 
ever having the satisfaction to see a bit of broken 
crockery. In other spots you found donkeys 
for children to ride, and ponies of a very meek 
and patient spirit, on which the Cockney plea¬ 
sure-seekers of both sexes rode races and made 
wonderful displays of horsemanship. By way 
of refreshment there was gingerbread (but, as a 
true patriot, I must pronounce it greatly infe¬ 
rior to our native dainty), and ginger-beer, and 
probably stancher liquor among the booth-keep¬ 
er’s hidden stores. The frequent railway trains, 
as well as the numerous steamers to Greenwich, 
have made the vacant portions of Blackheath 
a playground and breathing-place for the Lon¬ 
doners, readily and very cheaply accessible ; so 
that, in view of this broader use and enjoyment, 
I a little grudged the tracts that have been 
filched away, so to speak, and individualized by 
3 2 4 


A LONDON SUBURB 

thriving citizens. One sort of visitors especially 
interested me : they were schools of little boys 
or girls, under the guardianship of their in¬ 
structors, — charity schools, as I often surmised 
from their aspect, collected among dark alleys 
and squalid courts ; and hither they were brought 
to spend a summer afternoon, these pale little 
progeny of the sunless nooks of London, who 
had never known that the sky was any broader 
than that narrow and vapory strip above their 
native lane. I fancied that they took but a 
doubtful pleasure, being half affrighted at the 
wide, empty space overhead and round about 
them, finding the air too little medicated with 
smoke, soot, and graveyard exhalations, to be 
breathed with comfort, and feeling shelterless 
and lost because grimy London, their slatternly 
and disreputable mother, had suffered them to 
stray out of her arms. 

Passing among these holiday people, we come 
to one of the gateways of Greenwich Park, open¬ 
ing through an old brick wall. It admits us 
from the bare heath into a scene of antique cul¬ 
tivation and woodland ornament, traversed in 
all directions by avenues of trees, many of which 
bear tokens of a venerable age. These broad 
and well-kept pathways rise and decline over 
the elevations, and along the bases of gentle 
hills, which diversify the whole surface of the 
park. The loftiest and most abrupt of them 
3 2 5 


OUR OLD HOME 


(though but of very moderate height) is one of 
the earth’s noted summits, and may hold up its 
head with Mont Blanc and Chimborazo, as be¬ 
ing the site of Greenwich Observatory, where, 
if all nations will consent to say so, the longi¬ 
tude of our great globe begins. I used to reg¬ 
ulate my watch by the broad dial-plate against 
the observatory wall, and felt it pleasant to be 
standing at the very centre of Time and Space. 

There are lovelier parks than this in the 
neighborhood of London, richer scenes of green¬ 
sward and cultivated trees ; and Kensington, es¬ 
pecially, in a summer afternoon, has seemed to 
me as delightful as any place can or ought to be, in 
a world which, some time or other, we must quit. 
But Greenwich, too, is beautiful, — a spot where 
the art of man has conspired with Nature, as 
if he and the great mother had taken counsel 
together how to make a pleasant scene, and the 
longest liver of the two had faithfully carried 
out their mutual design. It has, likewise, an 
additional charm of its own, because, to all ap¬ 
pearance, it is the people’s property and play¬ 
ground in a much more genuine way than the 
aristocratic resorts in closer vicinity to the me¬ 
tropolis. It affords one of the instances in which 
the monarch’s property is actually the people’s, 
and shows how much more natural is their 
relation to the sovereign than to the nobility, 
which pretends to hold the intervening space 
326 


A LONDON SUBURB 


between the two : for a nobleman makes a par¬ 
adise only for himself, and fills it with his own 
pomp and pride ; whereas the people are sooner 
or later the legitimate inheritors of whatever 
beauty kings and queens create, as now of Green¬ 
wich Park. On Sundays, when the sun shone, 
and even on those grim and sombre days when, 
if it do not actually rain, the English persist in 
calling it fine weather, it was too good to see 
how sturdily the plebeians trod under their own 
oaks, and what fulness of simple enjoyment 
they evidently found there. They were the 
people, — not the populace, — specimens of a 
class whose Sunday clothes are a distinct kind 
of garb from their week-day ones : and this, in 
England, implies wholesome habits of life, daily 
thrift, and a rank above the lowest. I longed 
to be acquainted with them, in order to investi¬ 
gate what manner of folks they were, what sort 
of households they kept, their politics, their 
religion, their tastes, and whether they were as 
narrow-minded as their betters. There can be 
very little doubt of it; an Englishman is Eng¬ 
lish, in whatever rank of life, though no more 
intensely so, I should imagine, as an artisan or 
petty shop-keeper, than as a member of Parlia¬ 
ment. 

The English character, as I conceive it, is by 
no means a very lofty one; they seem to have 
a great deal of earth and grimy dust clinging 
3 2 7 


OUR OLD HOME 

about them, as was probably the case with the 
stalwart and quarrelsome people who sprouted 
up out of the soil, after Cadmus had sown the 
dragon’s teeth. And yet, though the individ¬ 
ual Englishman is sometimes preternaturally 
disagreeable, an observer standing aloof has a 
sense of natural kindness towards them in the 
lump. They adhere closer to the original sim¬ 
plicity in which mankind was created than we 
ourselves do; they love, quarrel, laugh, cry, 
and turn their actual selves inside out with 
greater freedom than any class of Americans 
would consider decorous. It was often so with 
these holiday folks in Greenwich Park ; and, 
ridiculous as it may sound, I fancy myself to 
have caught very satisfactory glimpses of Ar¬ 
cadian life among the Cockneys there, hardly 
beyond the scope of Bow-Bells, picnicking in 
the grass, uncouthly gambolling on the broad 
slopes, or straying in motley groups or by sin¬ 
gle pairs of love-making youths and maidens, 
along the sun-streaked avenues. Even the 
omnipresent policemen or park-keepers could 
not disturb the beatific impression on my mind. 
One feature, at all events, of the Golden Age 
was to be seen in the herds of deer that encoun¬ 
tered you in the somewhat remoter recesses of 
the park, and were readily prevailed upon to 
nibble a bit of bread out of your hand. But, 
though no wrong had ever been done them, 
328 


A LONDON SUBURB 

and no horn had sounded nor hound bayed at 
the heels of themselves or their antlered pro¬ 
genitors for centuries past, there was still an 
apprehensiveness lingering in their hearts; so 
that a slight movement of the hand or a step 
too near would send a whole squadron of them 
scampering away, just as a breath scatters the 
winged seeds of a dandelion. 

The aspect of Greenwich Park, with all those 
festal people wandering through it, resembled 
that of the Borghese Gardens under the walls 
of Rome, on a Sunday or Saint’s day; but, I 
am not ashamed to say, it a little disturbed 
whatever grimly ghost of Puritanic strictness 
might be lingering in the sombre depths of a 
New England heart, among severe and sunless 
remembrances of the Sabbaths of childhood, and 
pangs of remorse for ill-gotten lessons in the 
catechism, and for erratic fantasies or hardly sup¬ 
pressed laughter in the middle of long sermons. 
Occasionally, I tried to take the long-hoarded 
sting out of these compunctious smarts by at¬ 
tending divine service in the open air. On a 
cart outside of the park wall (and, if I mistake 
not, at two or three corners and secluded spots 
within the park itself) a Methodist preacher 
uplifts his voice and speedily gathers a congre¬ 
gation, his zeal for whose religious welfare im¬ 
pels the good man to such earnest vociferation 
and toilsome gesture that his perspiring face is 
3 2 9 


OUR OLD HOME 

quickly in a stew. His inward flame conspires 
with the too fervid sun, and makes a positive 
martyr of him, even in the very exercise of his 
pious labor; insomuch that he purchases every 
atom of spiritual increment to his hearers by loss 
of his own corporeal solidity, and, should his 
discourse last long enough, must finally exhale 
before their eyes. If I smile at him, be it under¬ 
stood, it is not in scorn ; he performs his sacred 
office more acceptably than many a prelate. 
These wayside services attract numbers who 
would not otherwise listen to prayer, sermon, or 
hymn, from one year’s end to another, and who, 
for that very reason, are the auditors most likely 
to be moved by the preacher’s eloquence. Yon¬ 
der Greenwich pensioner, too, — in his costume 
of three-cornered hat, and old-fashioned, brass- 
buttoned blue coat with ample skirts, which 
makes him look like a contemporary of Admiral 
Benbow, — that tough old mariner may hear a 
word or two which will go nearer his heart than 
anything that the chaplain of the Hospital can 
be expected to deliver. I always noticed, more¬ 
over, that a considerable proportion of the audi¬ 
ence were soldiers, who came hither with a day’s 
leave from Woolwich,— hardy veterans in as¬ 
pect, some of whom wore as many as four or 
five medals, Crimean or East Indian, on the 
breasts of their scarlet coats. The miscellaneous 
congregation listen with every appearance of 
330 


A LONDON SUBURB 


heartfelt interest; and, for my own part, I must 
frankly acknowledge that I never found it pos¬ 
sible to give five minutes* attention to any other 
English preaching: so cold and commonplace 
are the homilies that pass for such, under the 
aged roofs of churches. And as for cathedrals, 
the sermon is an exceedingly diminutive and 
unimportant part of the religious services,— 
if, indeed, it be considered a part, — among 
the pompous ceremonies, the intonations, and 
the resounding and lofty-voiced strains of the 
choristers. The magnificence of the setting 
quite dazzles out what we Puritans look upon 
as the jewel of the whole affair; for I presume 
that it was our forefathers, the Dissenters in 
England and America, who gave the sermon its 
present prominence in the Sabbath exercises . 1 

The Methodists are probably the first and 
only Englishmen who have worshipped in the 
open air since the ancient Britons listened to 
the preaching of the Druids; and it reminded 
me of that old priesthood, to see certain memo¬ 
rials of their dusky epoch — not religious, how¬ 
ever, but warlike — in the neighborhood of the 
spot where the Methodist was holding forth. 

1 We all, together with Mr. Squarey, went to Chester last Sunday, and 
attended the cathedral service. ... In America the sermon is the principal 
thing ; but here all this magnificent ceremonial of prayer and chanted re¬ 
sponses and psalms and anthems was the setting to a short, meagre discourse, 
which would not have been considered of any account among the elaborate 
intellectual efforts of New England ministers. — Notes of Travel , I. 67. 

33 1 


OUR OLD HOME 

These were some ancient barrows, beneath or 
within which are supposed to lie buried the slain 
of a forgotten or doubtfully remembered battle, 
fought on the site of Greenwich Park as long 
ago as two or three centuries after the birth of 
Christ. Whatever may once have been their 
height and magnitude, they have now scarcely 
more prominence in the actual scene than the 
battle of which they are the sole monuments 
retains in history, — being only a few mounds 
side by side, elevated a little above the surface 
of the ground, ten or twelve feet in diameter, 
with a shallow depression in their summits. 
When one of them was opened, not long since, 
no bones nor armor, nor weapons were dis¬ 
covered, nothing but some small jewels, and a 
tuft of hair, — perhaps from the head of a val¬ 
iant general, who, dying on the field of his 
victory, bequeathed this lock, together with his 
indestructible fame, to after ages. The hair 
and jewels are probably in the British Museum, 
where the potsherds and rubbish of innumer¬ 
able generations make the visitor wish that each 
passing century could carry off all its fragments 
and relics along with it, instead of adding them 
to the continually accumulating burden which 
human knowledge is compelled to lug upon its 
back . 1 As for the fame, I know not what has 
become of it. 

1 The fact is, the world is accumulating too many materials for know- 

33 2 


A LONDON SUBURB 


After traversing the park, we come into the 
neighborhood of Greenwich Hospital, and will 
pass through one of its spacious gateways for 
the sake of glancing at an establishment which 
does more honor to the heart of England than 
anything else that I am acquainted with, of a 
public nature. It is very seldom that we can 
be sensible of anything like kindliness in the 
acts or relations of such an artificial thing as a 
National Government. Our own government, 
I should conceive, is too much an abstraction 
ever to feel any sympathy for its maimed sailors 
and soldiers, though it will doubtless do them a 
severe kind of justice, as chilling as the touch 
of steel. But it seemed to me that the Green¬ 
wich pensioners are the petted children of the 

ledge. We do not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish ; and under 
this head might be reckoned very many things one sees in the British Mu¬ 
seum : and, as each generation leaves its fragments and potsherds behind 
it, such will finally be the desperate conclusion of the learned. — Notes of 
Travel , I. 400. 

Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum $ 
an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at 
once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wish¬ 
ing (Heaven forgive me !) that the Elgin Marbles and the frieze of the 
Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues 
were hewn and squared into building-stones, and that the mummies had all 
turned to dust two thousand years ago j and, in fine, that all the material 
relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that 
produced them. The present is burdened too much with the past. We 
have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with 
life, and immediately around us; yet we heap up these old shells, out of 
which human life has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not 
see how future ages are to stagger onward under all this dead weight, 
with the additions that will be continually made to it. — Ibid ., II. 58. 

333 


OUR OLD HOME 

nation, and that the government is their dry- 
nurse, and that the old men themselves have a 
childlike consciousness of their position. Very 
likely, a better sort of life might have been ar¬ 
ranged, and a wiser care bestowed on them ; but, 
such as it is, it enables them to spend a sluggish, 
careless, comfortable old age, grumbling, growl¬ 
ing, gruff, as if all the foul weather of their past 
years were pent up within them, yet not much 
more discontented than such weather-beaten 
and battle-battered fragments of human-kind 
must inevitably be. Their home, in its outward 
form, is on a very magnificent plan. Its germ 
was a royal palace, the full expansion of which 
has resulted in a series of edifices externally more 
beautiful than any English palace that I have 
seen, consisting of several quadrangles of stately 
architecture, united by colonnades and gravel 
walks, and enclosing grassy squares, with statues 
in the centre, the whole extending along the 
Thames. It is built of marble, or very light- 
colored stone, in the classic style, with pillars 
and porticos, which (to my own taste, and, I 
fancy, to that of the old sailors) produce but a 
cold and shivery effect in the English climate. 
Had I been the architect, I would have stud¬ 
ied the characters, habits, and predilections of 
nautical people in Wapping, Rotherhithe, and 
the neighborhood of the Tower (places which I 
visited in affectionate remembrance of Captain 
334 


A LONDON SUBURB 


Lemuel Gulliver, and other actual or mytho¬ 
logical navigators), and would have built the 
hospital in a kind of ethereal similitude to the 
narrow, dark, ugly, and inconvenient, but snug 
and cosy homeliness of the sailor boarding¬ 
houses there. There can be no question that 
all the above attributes, or enough of them to 
satisfy an old sailor’s heart, might be reconciled 
with architectural beauty and the wholesome 
contrivances of modern dwellings, and thus a 
novel and genuine style of building be given to 
the world. 

But their countrymen meant kindly by the 
old fellows in assigning them the ancient royal 
site where Elizabeth held her court and Charles 
II. began to build his palace. So far as the 
locality went, it was treating them like so many 
kings ; and, with a discreet abundance of grog, 
beer, and tobacco, there was perhaps little more 
to be accomplished in behalf of men whose 
whole previous lives have tended to unfit them 
for old age. Their chief discomfort is probably 
for lack of something to do or think about. 
But, judging by the few whom I saw, a listless 
habit seems to have crept over them, a dim 
dreaminess of mood, in which they sit between 
asleep and awake, and find the long day wearing 
towards bedtime without its having made any 
distinct record of itself upon their conscious¬ 
ness. Sitting on stone benches in the sunshine, 
335 


OUR OLD HOME 

they subside into slumber, or nearly so, and 
start at the approach of footsteps echoing under 
the colonnades, ashamed to be caught napping, 
and rousing themselves in a hurry, as formerly 
on the midnight watch at sea. In their bright¬ 
est moments, they gather in groups and bore 
one another with their endless sea-yarns about 
their voyages under various admirals, and about 
gale and calm, battle and chase, and all that class 
of incident that has its sphere on the deck and 
in the hollow interior of a ship, where their 
world has exclusively been. For other pastime, 
they quarrel among themselves, comrade with 
comrade, and perhaps shake paralytic fists in fur¬ 
rowed faces. If inclined for a little exercise, they 
can bestir their wooden legs on the long espla¬ 
nade that borders by the Thames, criticising the 
rig of passing ships, and firing off volleys of 
malediction at the steamers, which have made 
the sea another element than that they used to 
be acquainted with. All this is but cold com¬ 
fort for the evening of life, yet may compare 
rather favorably with the preceding portions of 
it, comprising little save imprisonment on ship¬ 
board, in the course of which they have been 
tossed all about the world and caught hardly a 
glimpse of it, forgetting what grass and trees are, 
and never finding out what woman is, though 
they may have encountered a painted spectre 
which they took for her. A country owes much 
336 


A LONDON SUBURB 


to human beings whose bodies she has worn 
out and whose immortal part she has left un¬ 
developed or debased, as we find them here ; 
and having wasted an idle paragraph upon them, 
let me now suggest that old men have a kind 
of susceptibility to moral impressions, and even 
(up to an advanced period) a receptivity of 
truth, which often appears to come to them after 
the active time of life is past. The Greenwich 
pensioners might prove better subjects for true 
education now than in their schoolboy days ; 
but then, where is the Normal School that could 
educate instructors for such a class ? 

There is a beautiful chapel for the pensioners, 
in the classic style, over the altar of which hangs 
a picture by West. I never could look at it 
long enough to make out its design; for this 
artist (though it pains me to say it of so respect¬ 
able a countryman) had a gift of frigidity, a 
knack of grinding ice into his paint, a power of 
stupefying the spectator's perceptions and quell¬ 
ing his sympathy, beyond any other limner that 
ever handled a brush. In spite of many pangs 
of conscience, I seize this opportunity to wreak 
a lifelong abhorrence upon the poor, blameless 
man, for the sake of that dreary picture of Lear, 
an explosion of frosty fury, that used to be a 
bugbear to me in the Athenaeum Exhibition. 
Would fire burn it, I wonder ? 

The principal thing that they have to show 

337 


OUR OLD HOME 


you, at Greenwich Hospital, is the Painted 
Hall. It is a splendid and spacious room, at 
least a hundred feet long and half as high, with 
a ceiling painted in fresco by Sir James Thorn¬ 
hill. As a work of art, I presume, this frescoed 
canopy has little merit, though it produces an 
exceedingly rich effect by its brilliant coloring 
and as a specimen of magnificent upholstery. 
The walls of the grand apartment are entirely 
covered with pictures, many of them represent¬ 
ing battles and other naval incidents that were 
once fresher in the world’s memory than now, 
but chiefly portraits of old admirals, comprising 
the whole line of heroes who have trod the 
quarter-decks of British ships-for more than two 
hundred years back. Next to a tomb in West¬ 
minster Abbey, which was Nelson’s most ele¬ 
vated object of ambition, it would seem to be 
the highest meed of a naval warrior to have his 
portrait hung up in the Painted Hall; but, by 
dint of victory upon victory, these illustrious 
personages have grown to be a mob, and by no 
means a very interesting one, so far as regards 
the character of the faces here depicted. They 
are generally commonplace, and often singularly 
stolid ; and I have observed (both in the Painted 
Hall and elsewhere, and not only in portraits, 
but in the actual presence of such renowned 
people as I have caught glimpses of) that the 
countenances of heroes are not nearly so im- 
338 


A LONDON SUBURB 


pressive as those of statesmen, — except, of 
course, in the rare instances where warlike ability 
has been but the one-sided manifestation of a 
profound genius for managing the world’s af¬ 
fairs. 

Nine tenths of these distinguished admirals, 
for instance, if their faces tell truth, must needs 
have been blockheads, and might have served 
better, one would imagine, as wooden figure¬ 
heads for their own ships than to direct any 
difficult and intricate scheme of action from the 
quarter-deck. It is doubtful whether the same 
kind of men will hereafter meet with a simi¬ 
lar degree of success ; for they were victorious 
chiefly through the old English hardihood, ex¬ 
ercised in a field of which modern science had 
not yet got possession. Rough valor has lost 
something of its value since their days, and must 
continue to sink lower and lower in the com¬ 
parative estimate of warlike qualities. In the 
next naval war, as between England and France, 
I would bet, methinks, upon the Frenchman’s 
head. 

It is remarkable, however, that the great 
naval hero of England — the greatest, there¬ 
fore, in the world, and of all time — had none 
of the stolid characteristics that belong to his 
class, and cannot fairly be accepted as their re¬ 
presentative man. Foremost in the roughest of 
professions, he was as delicately organized as 
339 


OUR OLD HOME 

a woman, and as painfully sensitive as a poet. 
More than any other Englishman he won the 
love and admiration of his country, but won 
them through the efficacy of qualities that are 
not English, or, at all events, were intensified 
in his case and made poignant and powerful by 
something morbid in the man, which put him 
otherwise at cross-purposes with life. He was 
a man of genius ; and genius in an Englishman 
(not to cite the good old simile of a pearl in 
the oyster) is usually a symptom of a lack of 
balance in the general making-up of the char¬ 
acter ; as we may satisfy ourselves by running 
over the list of their poets, for example, and 
observing how many of them have been sickly 
or deformed, and how often their lives have been 
darkened by insanity. An ordinary English¬ 
man is the healthiest and wholesomest of 
human beings ; an extraordinary one is almost 
always, in one way or another, a sick man. It 
was so with Lord Nelson. The wonderful con¬ 
trast or relation between his personal qualities, 
the position which he held, and the life that he 
lived, makes him as interesting a personage as 
all history has to show; and it is a pity that 
Southey’s biography — so good in its superfi¬ 
cial way, and yet so inadequate as regards any 
real delineation of the man — should have taken 
the subject out of the hands of some writer 
endowed with more delicate appreciation and 
340 


A LONDON SUBURB 


deeper insight than that genuine Englishman 
possessed. But Southey accomplished his own 
purpose, which, apparently, was to present his 
hero as a pattern for England’s young midship¬ 
men. 

But the English capacity for hero worship 
is full to the brim with what they are able to 
comprehend of Lord Nelson’s character. Ad¬ 
joining the Painted Hall is a smaller room, the 
walls of which are completely and exclusively 
adorned with pictures of the great Admiral’s 
exploits. We see the frail, ardent man in all 
the most noted events of his career, from his 
encounter with a Polar Bear to his death at 
Trafalgar, quivering here and there about the 
room like a blue, lambent flame. No Briton 
ever enters that apartment without feeling the 
beef and ale of his composition stirred to its 
depths, and finding himself changed into a hero 
for the nonce, however stolid his brain, how¬ 
ever tough his heart, however unexcitable his 
ordinary mood. To confess the truth, I my¬ 
self, though belonging to another parish, have 
been deeply sensible to the sublime recollec¬ 
tions there aroused, acknowledging that Nel¬ 
son expressed his life in a kind of symbolic 
poetry which I had as much right to under¬ 
stand as these burly islanders . 1 Cool and criti- 

1 Even the great sailor, Nelson, was unlike his countrymen in the quali¬ 
ties that constituted him a hero; he was not the perfection of an English- 

341 


OUR OLD HOME 


cal observer as I sought to be, I enjoyed their 
burst of honest indignation when a visitor (not 
an American, I am glad to say) thrust his walk¬ 
ing-stick almost into Nelson’s face, in one of 
the pictures, by way of pointing a remark ; and 
the bystanders immediately glowed like so many 
hot coals, and would probably have consumed 
the offender in their wrath, had he not effected 
his retreat. But the most sacred objects of all 
are two of Nelson’s coats, under separate glass 
cases. One is that which he wore at the Bat¬ 
tle of the Nile, and it is now sadly injured by 
moths, which will quite destroy it in a few years, 
unless its guardians preserve it as we do Wash¬ 
ington’s military suit by occasionally baking it 
in an oven. The other is the coat in which 
he received his death-wound at Trafalgar. On 
its breast are sewed three or four stars and 
orders of knighthood, now much dimmed by 
time and damp, but which glittered brightly 
enough on the battle day to draw the fatal aim 
of a French marksman. The bullet-hole is 
visible on the shoulder, as well as a part of the 
golden tassels of an epaulet, the rest of which 
was shot away. Over the coat is laid a white 
waistcoat, with a great blood-stain on it, out of 
which all the redness has utterly faded, leav¬ 
ing it of a dingy yellow hue, in the threescore 

man, but a creature of another kind, — sensitive, nervous, excitable, and 
really more like a Frenchman. —Notes of Travel^ III. 35. 

342 


A LONDON SUBURB 


years since that blood gushed out. Yet it was 
once the reddest blood in England, — Nelson’s 
blood! 

The hospital stands close adjacent to the 
town of Greenwich, which will always retain a 
kind of festal aspect in my memory, in conse¬ 
quence of my having first become acquainted 
with it on Easter Monday. Till a few years 
ago, the first three days of Easter were a car¬ 
nival season in this old town, during which the 
idle and disreputable part of London poured 
itself into the streets like an inundation of the 
Thames, — as unclean as that turbid mixture of 
the offscourings of the vast city, and overflow¬ 
ing with its grimy pollution whatever rural inno¬ 
cence, if any, might be found in the suburban 
neighborhood. This festivity was called Green¬ 
wich Fair, the final one of which, in an imme¬ 
morial succession, it was my fortune to behold. 

If I had bethought myself of going through 
the fair with a note-book and pencil, jotting 
down all the prominent objects, I doubt not 
that the result might have been a sketch of 
English life quite as characteristic and worthy 
of historical preservation as an account of the 
Roman Carnival. Having neglected to do so, 
I remember little more than a confusion of 
unwashed and shabbily dressed people, inter¬ 
mixed with some smarter figures, but, on the 
whole, presenting a mobbish appearance such 
343 


OUR OLD HOME 


as we never see in our own country. It taught 
me to understand why Shakespeare, in speak¬ 
ing of a crowd, so often alludes to its attribute 
of evil odor. The common people of Eng¬ 
land, I am afraid, have no daily familiarity with 
even so necessary a thing as a washbowl, not to 
mention a bathing-tub. And, furthermore, it 
is one mighty difference between them and us, 
that every man and woman on our side of the 
water has a working-day suit and a holiday suit, 
and is occasionally as fresh as a rose, whereas, 
in the good old country, the griminess of his 
labor or squalid habits clings forever to the in¬ 
dividual, and gets to be a part of his personal 
substance. These are broad facts, involving 
great corollaries and dependencies. There are 
really, if you stop to think about it, few sadder 
spectacles in the world than a ragged coat, or a 
soiled and shabby gown, at a festival. 

This unfragrant crowd was exceedingly dense, 
being welded together, as it were, in the street 
through which we strove to make our way. 
On either side were oyster-stands, stalls of or¬ 
anges (a very prevalent fruit in England, where 
they give the withered ones a guise of freshness 
by boiling them), and booths covered with old 
sailcloth, in which the commodity that most 
attracted the eye was gilt gingerbread. It was 
so completely enveloped in Dutch gilding that 
I did not at first recognize an old acquaintance, 
344 


A LONDON SUBURB 

but wondered what those golden crowns and 
images could be. There were likewise drums 
and other toys for small children, and a variety 
of showy and worthless articles for children of 
a larger growth ; though it perplexed me to im¬ 
agine who, in such a mob, could have the inno¬ 
cent taste to desire playthings, or the money to 
pay for them. Not that I have a right to ac¬ 
cuse the mob, on my own knowledge, of being 
any less innocent than a set of cleaner and bet¬ 
ter dressed people might have been ; for, though 
one of them stole my pocket-handkerchief, I 
could not but consider it fair game, under the 
circumstances, and was grateful to the thief for 
sparing me my purse. They were quiet, civil, 
and remarkably good-humored, making due 
allowance for the national gruffness; there 
was no riot, no tumultuous swaying to and fro 
of the mass, such as I have often noted in an 
American crowd; no noise of voices, except fre¬ 
quent bursts of laughter, hoarse or shrill, and 
a widely diffused, inarticulate murmur, resem¬ 
bling nothing so much as the rumbling of the 
tide among the arches of London Bridge. 
What immensely perplexed me was a sharp, 
angry sort of rattle, in all quarters, far off and 
close at hand, and sometimes right at my own 
back, where it sounded as if the stout fabric of 
my English surtout had been ruthlessly rent in 
twain ; and everybody’s clothes, all over the 
345 


OUR OLD HOME 


fair, were evidently being torn asunder in the 
same way. By and by, I discovered that this 
strange noise was produced by a little instru¬ 
ment called “ The Fun of the Fair/’ —a sort 
of rattle, consisting of a wooden wheel, the cogs 
of which turn against a thin slip of wood, and 
so produce a rasping sound when drawn smartly 
against a person’s back. The ladies draw their 
rattles against the backs of their male friends 
(and everybody passes for a friend at Green¬ 
wich Fair), and the young men return the com¬ 
pliment on the broad British backs of the ladies ; 
and all are bound by immemorial custom to 
take it in good part and be merry at the joke. 
As it was one of my prescribed official duties to 
give an account of such mechanical contrivances 
as might be unknown in my own country, I have 
thought it right to be thus particular in describ¬ 
ing the Fun of the Fair. 

But this was far from being the sole amuse¬ 
ment. There were theatrical booths, in front 
of which were pictorial representations of the 
scenes to be enacted within ; and anon a drum¬ 
mer emerged from one of them, thumping on a 
terribly lax drum, and followed by the entire 
dramatis persona, who ranged themselves on a 
wooden platform in front of the theatre. They 
were dressed in character, but woefully shabby, 
with very dingy and wrinkled white tights, 
threadbare cotton velvets, crumpled silks, and 
34b 


A LONDON SUBURB 

crushed muslin, and all the gloss and glory 
gone out of their aspect and attire, seen thus in 
the broad daylight and after a long series of 
performances. They sang a song together, and 
withdrew into the theatre, whither the public 
were invited to follow them at the inconsidera¬ 
ble cost of a penny a ticket. Before another 
booth stood a pair of brawny fighting-men, dis¬ 
playing their muscle, and soliciting patronage 
for an exhibition of the noble British art of 
pugilism. There were pictures of giants, mon¬ 
sters, and outlandish beasts, most prodigious, 
to be sure, and worthy of all admiration, unless 
the artist had gone incomparably beyond his 
subject. Jugglers proclaimed aloud the mira¬ 
cles which they were prepared to work; and 
posture-makers dislocated every joint of their 
bodies and tied their limbs into inextricable 
knots, wherever they could find space to spread 
a little square of carpet on the ground. In the 
midst of the confusion, while everybody was 
treading on his neighbor’s toes, some little 
boys were very solicitous to brush your boots. 
These lads, I believe, are a product of modern 
society, — at least, no older than the time of 
Gay, who celebrates their origin in his Trivia; 
but in most other respects the scene reminded 
me of Bunyan’s description of Vanity Fair,— 
nor is it at all improbable that the Pilgrim may 
have been a merry-maker here in his wild youth. 
347 


OUR OLD HOME 


It seemed very singular — though, of course, 
I immediately classified it as an English char¬ 
acteristic — to see a great many portable weigh¬ 
ing-machines, the owners of which cried out 
continually and amain, “ Come, know your 
weight! Come, come, know your weight to¬ 
day ! Come, know your weight! ” and a mul¬ 
titude of people, mostly large in the girth, were 
moved by this vociferation to sit down in the 
machines. I know not whether they valued 
themselves on their beef, and estimated their 
standing as members of society at so much a 
pound; but I shall set it down as a national 
peculiarity, and a symbol of the prevalence of 
the earthly over the spiritual element, that Eng¬ 
lishmen are wonderfully bent on knowing how 
solid and physically ponderous they are. 

On the whole, having an appetite for the 
brown bread and the tripe and sausages of life, 
as well as for its nicer cates and dainties, I en¬ 
joyed the scene, and was amused at the sight 
of a gruff old Greenwich pensioner, who, for¬ 
getful of the sailor frolics of his young days, 
stood looking with grim disapproval at all these 
vanities. Thus we squeezed our way through 
the mob-jammed town, and emerged into the 
Park, where, likewise, we met a great many 
merry-makers, but with freer space for their 
gambols than in the streets. We soon found 
ourselves the targets for a cannonade with or- 
348 


A LONDON SUBURB 


anges (most of them in a decayed condition), 
which went humming past our ears from the 
vantage-ground of neighboring hillocks, some¬ 
times hitting our sacred persons with an ine¬ 
lastic thump. This was one of the privileged 
freedoms of the time, and was nowise to be re¬ 
sented, except by returning the salute. Many 
persons were running races, hand in hand, down 
the declivities, especially that steepest one on 
the summit of which stands the world-central 
Observatory, and (as in the race of life) the 
partners were usually male and female, and 
often caught a tumble together before reaching 
the bottom of the hill. Hereabouts we were 
pestered and haunted by two young girls, the 
elder not more than thirteen, teasing us to buy 
matches ; and finding no market for their com¬ 
modity, the taller one suddenly turned a som¬ 
erset before our faces, and rolled heels over 
head from top to bottom of the hill on which 
we stood. Then, scrambling up the acclivity, 
the topsy-turvy trollop offered us her matches 
again, as demurely as if she had never flung 
aside her equilibrium ; so that, dreading a rep¬ 
etition of the feat, we gave her sixpence and 
an admonition, and enjoined her never to do so 
any more. 

The most curious amusement that we wit¬ 
nessed here — or anywhere else, indeed — was 
an ancient and hereditary pastime called “ Kiss- 
349 


OUR OLD HOME 


ing in the Ring.” I shall describe the sport ex¬ 
actly as I saw it, although an English friend as¬ 
sures me that there are certain ceremonies with 
a handkerchief, which make it much more de¬ 
corous and graceful. A handkerchief, indeed ! 
There was no such thing in the crowd, except 
it were the one which they had just filched out 
of my pocket. It is one of the simplest kinds of 
games, needing little or no practice to make the 
player altogether perfect; and the manner of it 
is this : A ring is formed (in the present case, it 
was of large circumference and thickly gemmed 
around with faces, mostly on the broad grin), into 
the centre of which steps an adventurous youth, 
and, looking round the circle, selects whatever 
maiden may most delight his eye. He presents 
his hand (which she is bound to accept), leads 
her into the centre, salutes her on the lips, and 
retires, taking his stand in the expectant circle. 
The girl, in her turn, throws a favorable regard 
on some fortunate young man, offers her hand to 
lead him forth, makes him happy with a maid¬ 
enly kiss, and withdraws to hide her blushes, 
if any there be, among the simpering faces in 
the ring ; while the favored swain loses no time 
in transferring her salute to the prettiest and 
plumpest among the many mouths that are 
primming themselves in anticipation. And thus 
the thing goes on, till all the festive throng are 
inwreathed and intertwined into an endless and 
350 


A LONDON SUBURB 


inextricable chain of kisses ; though, indeed, it 
smote me with compassion to reflect that some 
forlorn pair of lips might be left out, and never 
know the triumph of a salute, after throwing 
aside so many delicate reserves for the sake of 
winning it. If the young men had any chivalry, 
there was a fair chance to display it by kissing 
the homeliest damsel in the circle. 

To be frank, however, at the first glance, and 
to my American eye, they looked all homely 
alike, and the chivalry that I suggest is more 
than I could have been capable of at any period 
of my life. They seemed to be country lasses, 
of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarse¬ 
grained, cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing 
to suppose, a stout texture of moral principle, 
such as would bear a good deal of rough usage 
without suffering much detriment. But how un¬ 
like the trim little damsels of my native land! I 
desire above all things to be courteous ; but, since 
the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate 
of England produce feminine beauty as rarely as 
they do delicate fruit; and though admirable 
specimens of both are to be met with, they are 
the hothouse ameliorations of refined society, 
and apt, moreover, to relapse into the coarseness 
of the original stock. The men are manlike, 
but the women are not beautiful, though the fe¬ 
male Bull be well enough adapted to the male. 
To return to the lasses of Greenwich Fair, their 
35i 


OUR OLD HOME 


charms were few, and their behavior, perhaps, 
not altogether commendable; and yet it was 
impossible not to feel a degree of faith in their 
innocent intentions, with such a half-bashful zest 
and entire simplicity did they keep up their part 
of the game. It put the spectator in good-humor 
to look at them, because there was still some¬ 
thing of the old Arcadian life, the secure freedom 
of the antique age, in their way of surrendering 
their lips to strangers, as if there were no evil or 
impurity in the world. As for the young men, 
they were chiefly specimens of the vulgar sed¬ 
iment of London life, often shabbily genteel, 
rowdyish, pale, wearing the unbrushed coat, un¬ 
shifted linen, and unwashed faces of yesterday, 
as well as the haggardness of last night’s jollity 
in a gin-shop. Gathering their character from 
these tokens, I wondered whether there were 
any reasonable prospect of their fair partners 
returning to their rustic homes with as much 
innocence (whatever were its amount or quality) 
as they brought to Greenwich Fair, in spite of 
the perilous familiarity established by Kissing in 
the Ring. 

The manifold disorders resulting from the fair, 
at which a vast city was brought into intimate 
relations with a comparatively rural district, have 
at length led to its suppression; this was the 
very last celebration of it, and brought to a close 
the broad-mouthed merriment of many hundred 
352 


A LONDON SUBURB 

years. Thus my poor sketch, faint as its colors 
are, may acquire some little value in the reader’s 
eyes from the consideration that no observer of 
the coming time will ever have an opportunity 
to give a better. I should find it difficult to be¬ 
lieve, however, that the queer pastime just de¬ 
scribed, or any moral mischief to which that and 
other customs might pave the way, can have led 
to the overthrow of Greenwich Fair; for it has 
often seemed to me that Englishmen of station 
and respectability, unless of a peculiarly phi¬ 
lanthropic turn, have neither any faith in the 
feminine purity of the lower orders of their 
countrywomen, nor the slightest value for it, 
allowing its possible existence. The distinction 
of ranks is so marked, that the English cottage 
damsel holds a position somewhat analogous to 
that of the negro girl in our Southern States. 
Hence comes inevitable detriment to the moral 
condition of those men themselves, who forget 
that the humblest woman has a right and a 
duty to hold herself in the same sanctity as 
the highest. The subject cannot well be dis¬ 
cussed in these pages; but I offer it as a seri¬ 
ous conviction, from what I have been able to 
observe, that the England of to-day is the 
unscrupulous old England of Tom Jones and 
Joseph Andrews, Humphrey Clinker and Rod¬ 
erick Random; and in our refined era, just the 
same as at that more free-spoken epoch, this 
353 


OUR OLD HOME 


singular people has a certain contempt for any 
fine-strained purity, any special squeamishness, 
as they consider it, on the part of an ingenuous 
youth. They appear to look upon it as a sus¬ 
picious phenomenon in the masculine character. 

Nevertheless, I by no means take upon me to 
affirm that English morality, as regards the phase 
here alluded to, is really at a lower point than 
our own. Assuredly, I hope so, because, mak¬ 
ing a higher pretension, or, at all events, more 
carefully hiding whatever may be amiss, we are 
either better than they, or necessarily a great 
deal worse. It impressed me that their open 
avowal and recognition of immoralities served 
to throw the disease to the surface, where it 
might be more effectually dealt with, and leave 
a sacred interior not utterly profaned, instead of 
turning its poison back among the inner vitali¬ 
ties of the character, at the imminent risk of 
corrupting them all. Be that as it may, these 
Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler 
people than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but 
if we can take it as compensatory on our part 
(which I leave to be considered) that they owe 
those noble and manly qualities to a coarser 
grain in their nature, and that, with a finer one 
in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble pol¬ 
ish of which they are unsusceptible, I believe 
that this may be the truth. 

354 


X 


UP THE THAMES 

T HE upper portion of Greenwich (where 
my last article left me loitering) is a 
cheerful, comely, old-fashioned town, 
the peculiarities of which, if there be any, have 
passed out of my remembrance. As you de¬ 
scend towards the Thames the streets get meaner, 
and the shabby and sunken houses, elbowing 
one another for frontage, bear the sign-boards 
of beer-shops and eating-rooms, with especial 
promises of whitebait and other delicacies in 
the fishing line. You observe, also, a frequent 
announcement of “Tea Gardens” in the rear; 
although, estimating the capacity of the premises 
by their external compass, the entire sylvan 
charm and shadowy seclusion of such blissful 
resorts must be limited within a small back yard. 
These places of cheap sustenance and recreation 
depend for support upon the innumerable plea¬ 
sure-parties who come from London Bridge by 
steamer, at a fare of a few pence, and who get 
as enjoyable a meal for a shilling a head as the 
Ship Hotel would afford a gentleman for a 
guinea. 


355 


OUR OLD HOME 


The steamers, which are constantly smoking 
their pipes up and down the Thames, offer much 
the most agreeable mode of getting to London. 
At least, it might be exceedingly agreeable, ex¬ 
cept for the myriad floating particles of soot 
from the stove-pipe, and the heavy heat of mid¬ 
summer sunshine on the unsheltered deck, or 
the chill, misty air-draught of a cloudy day, and 
the spiteful little showers of rain that may spat¬ 
ter down upon you at any moment, whatever 
the promise of the sky ; besides which there is 
some slight inconvenience from the inexhausti¬ 
ble throng of passengers, who scarcely allow you 
standing-room, nor so much as a breath of un¬ 
appropriated air, and never a chance to sit down. 
If these difficulties, added to the possibility of 
getting your pocket picked, weigh little with you, 
the panorama along the shores of the memora¬ 
ble river, and the incidents and shows of passing 
life upon its bosom, render the trip far preferable 
to the brief yet tiresome shoot along the railway 
track. On one such voyage, a regatta of wher¬ 
ries raced past us, and at once involved every 
soul on board our steamer in the tremendous 
excitement of the struggle. The spectacle was 
but a moment within our view, and presented 
nothing more than a few light skiffs, in each of 
which sat a single rower, bare-armed, and with 
little apparel, save a shirt and drawers, pale, anx¬ 
ious, with every muscle on the stretch, and plying 
356 


UP THE THAMES 


his oars in such fashion that the boat skimmed 
along with the aerial celerity of a swallow. I 
wondered at myself for so immediately catching 
an interest in the affair, which seemed to con¬ 
tain no very exalted rivalship of manhood ; but, 
whatever the kind of battle or the prize of vic¬ 
tory, it stirs one's sympathy immensely, and is 
even awful, to behold the rare sight of a man 
thoroughly in earnest, doing his best, putting 
forth all there is in him, and staking his very 
soul (as these rowers appeared willing to do) on 
the issue of the contest. It was the seventy- 
fourth annual regatta of the Free Watermen of 
Greenwich, and announced itself as under the 
patronage of the Lord Mayor and other dis¬ 
tinguished individuals, at whose expense, I sup¬ 
pose, a prize-boat was offered to the conqueror, 
and some small amounts of money to the inferior 
competitors. 

The aspect of London along the Thames, 
below Bridge, as it is called, is by no means so 
impressive as it ought to be, considering what 
peculiar advantages are offered for the display 
of grand and stately architecture by the passage 
of a river through the midst of a great city. It 
seems, indeed, as if the heart of London had been 
cleft open for the mere purpose of showing how 
rotten and drearily mean it had become. The 
shore is lined with the shabbiest, blackest, and 
ugliest buildings that can be imagined, decayed 
357 


OUR OLD HOME 


warehouses with blind windows, and wharves that 
look ruinous ; insomuch that, had I known no¬ 
thing more of the world's metropolis, I might 
have fancied that it had already experienced the 
downfall which I have heard commercial and 
financial prophets predict for it, within the cen¬ 
tury. And the muddy tide of the Thames, re¬ 
flecting nothing, and hiding a million of unclean 
secrets within its breast, — a sort of guilty con¬ 
science, as it were, unwholesome with the rivu¬ 
lets of sin that constantly flow into it, — is just 
the dismal stream to glide by such a city. The 
surface, to be sure, displays no lack of activity, 
being fretted by the passage of a hundred steam¬ 
ers and covered with a good deal of shipping, 
but mostly of a clumsier build than I had been 
accustomed to see in the Mersey: a fact which 
I complacently attributed to the smaller number 
of American clippers in the Thames, and the 
less prevalent influence of American example in 
refining away the broad-bottomed capacity of 
the old Dutch or English models. 

About midway between Greenwich and Lon¬ 
don Bridge, at a rude landing-place on the left 
bank of the river, the steamer rings its bell and 
makes a momentary pause in front of a large 
circular structure, where it may be worth our 
while to scramble ashore. It indicates the local¬ 
ity of one of those prodigious practical blunders 
that would supply John Bull with a topic of 
358 


UP THE THAMES 

inexhaustible ridicule if his cousin Jonathan had 
committed them, but of which he himself per¬ 
petrates ten to our one in the mere wantonness 
of wealth that lacks better employment. The 
circular building covers the entrance to the 
Thames Tunnel, and is surmounted by a dome 
of glass, so as to throw daylight down into the 
great depth at which the passage of the river 
commences. Descending a wearisome succession 
of staircases, we at last find ourselves, still in the 
broad noon, standing before a closed door, on 
opening which we behold the vista of an arched 
corridor that extends into everlasting midnight. 
In these days, when glass has been applied to 
so many new purposes, it is a pity that the archi¬ 
tect had not thought of arching portions of his 
abortive tunnel with immense blocks of the lucid 
substance, over which the dusky Thames would 
have flowed like a cloud, making the sub-fluvial 
avenue only a little gloomier than a street of 
upper London. At present, it is illuminated at 
regular intervals by jets of gas, not very bril¬ 
liantly, yet with lustre enough to show the damp 
plaster of the ceiling and walls, and the massive 
stone pavement, the crevices of which are oozy 
with moisture, not from the incumbent river, 
but from hidden springs in the earth’s deeper 
heart. There are two parallel corridors, with a 
wall between, for the separate accommodation 
of the double throng of foot-passengers, eques- 
359 


OUR OLD HOME 


trians, and vehicles of all kinds, which was 
expected to roll and reverberate continually 
through the tunnel. Only one of them has 
ever been opened, and its echoes are but feebly 
awakened by infrequent footfalls. 

Yet there seem to be people who spend their 
lives here, and who probably blink like owls, 
when, once or twice a year, perhaps, they happen 
to climb into the sunshine. All along the cor¬ 
ridor, which I believe to be a mile in extent, we 
see stalls or shops in little alcoves, kept princi¬ 
pally by women ; they were of a ripe age, I was 
glad to observe, and certainly robbed England 
of none of its very moderate supply of feminine 
loveliness by their deeper than tomb-like inter¬ 
ment. As you approach (and they are so accus¬ 
tomed to the dusky gaslight that they read all 
your characteristics afar off), they assail you with 
hungry entreaties to buy some of their merchan¬ 
dise, holding forth views of the tunnel put up 
in cases of Derbyshire spar, with a magnifying 
glass at one end to make the vista more effective. 
They offer you, besides, cheap jewelry, sunny 
topazes, and resplendent emeralds for sixpence, 
and diamonds as big as the Kohinoor at a not 
much heavier cost, together with a multifarious 
trumpery which has died out of the upper world 
to reappear in this Tartarean bazaar. That you 
may fancy yourself still in the realms of the liv¬ 
ing, they urge you to partake of cakes, candy, 
360 


UP THE THAMES 

ginger-beer, and such small refreshment, more 
suitable, however, for the shadowy appetite of 
ghosts than for the sturdy stomachs of Eng¬ 
lishmen. The most capacious of the shops con¬ 
tains a dioramic exhibition of cities and scenes 
in the daylight world, with a dreary glimmer of 
gas among them all; so that they serve well 
enough to represent the dim, unsatisfactory re¬ 
membrances that dead people might be sup¬ 
posed to retain from their past lives, mixing them 
up with the ghastliness of their unsubstantial 
state. I dwell the more upon these trifles, and 
do my best to give them a mockery of impor¬ 
tance, because, if these are nothing, then all this 
elaborate contrivance and mighty piece of work 
has been wrought in vain. The Englishman has 
burrowed under the bed of his great river, and 
set ships of two or three thousand tons a-roll- 
ing over his head, only to provide new sites for 
a few old women to sell cakes and ginger-beer ! 

Yet the conception was a grand one ; and 
though it has proved an absolute failure, swal¬ 
lowing an immensity of toil and money, with 
annual returns hardly sufficient to keep the 
pavement free from the ooze of subterranean 
springs, yet it needs, I presume, only an ex¬ 
penditure three or four (or, for aught I know, 
twenty) times as large, to make the enterprise 
brilliantly successful. The descent is so great 
from the bank of the river to its surface, and 
3 61 


OUR OLD HOME 


the tunnel dips so profoundly under the river’s 
bed, that the approaches on either side must 
commence a long way off, in order to render the 
entrance accessible to horsemen or vehicles ; so 
that the larger part of the cost of the whole affair 
should have been expended on its margins. It 
has turned out a sublime piece of folly ; and 
when the New Zealander of distant ages shall 
have moralized sufficiently among the ruins of 
London Bridge, he will bethink himself that 
somewhere thereabout was the marvellous Tun¬ 
nel, the very existence of which will seem to him 
as incredible as that of the hanging gardens of 
Babylon. But the Thames will long ago have 
broken through the massive arch, and choked 
up the corridors with mud and sand, and with 
the large stones of the structure itself, intermixed 
with skeletons of drowned people, the rusty 
iron-work of sunken vessels, and the great many 
such precious and curious things as a river al¬ 
ways contrives to hide in its bosom; the en¬ 
trance will have been obliterated, and its very 
site forgotten beyond the memory of twenty 
generations of men, and the whole neighbor¬ 
hood be held a dangerous spot on account of 
the malaria ; insomuch that the traveller will 
make but a brief and careless inquisition for the 
traces of the old wonder, and will stake his 
credit before the public, in some Pacific Monthly 
of that day, that the story of it is but a myth, 

362 


UP THE THAMES 


though enriched with a spiritual profundity which 
he will proceed to unfold. 

Yet it is impossible (for a Yankee, at least) 
to see so much magnificent ingenuity thrown 
away, without trying to endow the unfortunate 
result with some kind of usefulness, though per¬ 
haps widely different from the purpose of its 
original conception. In former ages, the mile- 
long corridors, with their numerous alcoves, 
might have been utilized as a series of dungeons, 
the fittest of all possible receptacles for prisoners 
of state. Dethroned monarchs and fallen states¬ 
men would not have needed to remonstrate 
against a domicile so spacious, so deeply se¬ 
cluded from the world’s scorn, and so admirably 
in accordance with their thenceforward sunless 
fortunes. An alcove here might have suited 
Sir Walter Raleigh better than that darksome 
hiding-place communicating with the great 
chamber in the Tower, pacing from end to end 
of which he meditated upon his History of 
the World. His track would here have been 
straight and narrow, indeed, and would there¬ 
fore have lacked somewhat of the freedom that 
his intellect demanded ; and yet the length to 
which his footsteps might have travelled forth 
and retraced themselves would partly have har¬ 
monized his physical movement with the grand 
curves and planetary returns of his thought, 
through cycles of majestic periods. Having it 

363 


OUR OLD HOME 

in his mind to compose the world's history, me- 
thinks he could have asked no better retirement 
than such a cloister as this, insulated from all 
the seductions of mankind and womankind, 
deep beneath their mysteries and motives, down 
into the heart of things, full of personal remi¬ 
niscences in order to the comprehensive measure¬ 
ment and verification of historic records, seeing 
into the secrets of human nature, — secrets that 
daylight never yet revealed to mortal, — but 
detecting their whole scope and purport with 
the infallible eyes of unbroken solitude and 
night. And then the shades of the old mighty 
men might have risen from their still profounder 
abodes and joined him in the dim corridor, 
treading beside him with an antique stateliness 
of mien, telling him in melancholy tones, grand, 
but always melancholy, of the greater ideas and 
purposes which their most renowned perform¬ 
ances so imperfectly carried out; that, magnifi¬ 
cent successes in the view of all posterity, they 
were but failures to those who planned them. 
As Raleigh was a navigator, Noah would have 
explained to him the peculiarities of construc¬ 
tion that made the ark so seaworthy ; as Ra¬ 
leigh was a statesman, Moses would have dis¬ 
cussed with him the principles of laws and 
government; as Raleigh was a soldier, Caesar 
and Hannibal would have held debate in his 
presence, with this martial student for their 
3 6 4 


UP THE THAMES 


umpire; as Raleigh was a poet, David, or what¬ 
ever most illustrious bard he might call up, 
would have touched his harp, and made mani¬ 
fest all the true significance of the past by means 
of song and the subtle intelligences of music. 

Meanwhile, I had forgotten that Sir Walter 
Raleigh’s century knew nothing of gaslight, and 
that it would require a prodigious and wasteful 
expenditure of tallow candles to illuminate the 
tunnel sufficiently to discern even a ghost. On 
this account, however, it would be all the more 
suitable place of confinement for a metaphysi¬ 
cian, to keep him from bewildering mankind 
with his shadowy speculations ; and, being shut 
off from external converse, the dark corridor 
would help him to make rich discoveries in those 
cavernous regions and mysterious by-paths of 
the intellect, which he had so long accustomed 
himself to explore. But how would every suc¬ 
cessive age rejoice in so secure a habitation for 
its reformers, and especially for each best and 
wisest man that happened to be then alive! He 
seeks to burn up our whole system of society, 
under pretence of purifying it from its abuses ! 
Away with him into the tunnel, and let him 
begin by setting the Thames on fire, if he is 
able! 

If not precisely these, yet akin to these were 
some of the fantasies that haunted me as I 
passed under the river: for the place is sugges- 
365 


OUR OLD HOME 

tive of such idle and irresponsible stuff by its 
own abortive character, its lack of whereabout 
on upper earth, or any solid foundation of real¬ 
ities. Could I have looked forward a few years, 
I might have regretted that American enterprise 
had not provided a similar tunnel, under the 
Hudson or the Potomac, for the convenience 
of our National Government in times hardly yet 
gone by. It would be delightful to clap up all 
the enemies of our peace and Union in the dark 
together, and there let them abide, listening to 
the monotonous roll of the river above their 
heads, or perhaps in a state of miraculously sus¬ 
pended animation, until, — be it after months, 
years, or centuries, — when the turmoil shall be 
all over, the Wrong washed away in blood (since 
that must needs be the cleansing fluid), and the 
Right firmly rooted in the soil which that blood 
will have enriched, they might crawl forth again 
and catch a single glimpse at their redeemed 
country, and feel it to be a better land than they 
deserve, and die! 

I was not sorry when the daylight reached me 
after a much briefer abode in the nether regions 
than, I fear, would await the troublesome per¬ 
sonages just hinted at. Emerging on the Surrey 
side of the Thames, I found myself in Rother- 
hithe, a neighborhood not unfamiliar to the read¬ 
ers of old books of maritime adventure. There 
being a ferry hard by the mouth of the tunnel, 
366 


UP THE THAMES 

I recrossed the river in the primitive fashion of 
an open boat, which the conflict of wind and 
tide, together with the swash and swell of the 
passing steamers, tossed high and low rather 
tumultuously. This inquietude of our frail 
skiff (which, indeed, bobbed up and down like 
a cork) so much alarmed an old lady, the only 
other passenger, that the boatmen essayed to 
comfort her. “ Never fear, mother ! ” grumbled 
one of them; “we ’ll make the river as smooth 
as we can for you. We ’ll get a plane, and plane 
down the waves ! ” The joke may not read very 
brilliantly ; but I make bold to record it as the 
only specimen that reached my ears of the old, 
rough water-wit for which the Thames used to 
be so celebrated. Passing directly along the line 
of the sunken tunnel, we landed in Wapping, 
which I should have presupposed to be the most 
tarry and pitchy spot on earth, swarming with 
old salts, and full of warm, bustling, coarse, 
homely, and cheerful life. Nevertheless, it 
turned out to be a cold and torpid neighborhood, 
mean, shabby, and unpicturesque, both as to its 
buildings and inhabitants : the latter comprising 
(so far as was visible to me) not a single unmis¬ 
takable sailor, though plenty of land-sharks, who 
get a half-dishonest livelihood by business con¬ 
nected with the sea. Ale and spirit vaults (as 
petty drinking-establishments are styled in Eng¬ 
land, pretending to contain vast cellars full of 
367 


OUR OLD HOME 


liquor within the compass of ten feet square 
above ground) were particularly abundant, to¬ 
gether with apples, oranges, and oysters, the 
stalls of fishmongers and butchers, and slop¬ 
shops, where blue jackets and duck trousers 
swung and capered before the doors. Every¬ 
thing was on the poorest scale, and the place 
bore an aspect of unredeemable decay. From 
this remote point of London I strolled leisurely 
towards the heart of the city ; while the streets, 
at first but thinly occupied by man or vehicle, 
got more and more thronged with foot-passen¬ 
gers, carts, drays, cabs, and the all-pervading and 
all-accommodating omnibus. But I lack cour¬ 
age, and feel that I should lack perseverance, 
as the gentlest reader would lack patience, to 
undertake a descriptive stroll through London 
streets ; more especially as there would be a vol¬ 
ume ready for the printer before we could reach 
a midway resting-place at Charing Cross. It 
will be the easier course to step aboard another 
passing steamer, and continue our trip up the 
Thames. 

The next notable group of objects is an as¬ 
semblage of ancient walls, battlements, and tur¬ 
rets, out of the midst of which rises prominently 
one great square tower, of a grayish hue, bor¬ 
dered with white stone, and having a small turret 
at each corner of the roof. This central struc¬ 
ture is the White Tower, and the whole circuit 
368 


UP THE THAMES 

of ramparts and enclosed edifices constitutes what 
is known in English history, and still more 
widely and impressively in English poetry, as 
the Tower. A crowd of river craft are generally 
moored in front of it; but if we look sharply at 
the right moment under the base of the rampart, 
we may catch a glimpse of an arched water-en¬ 
trance, half submerged, past which the Thames 
glides as indifferently as if it were the mouth of 
a city kennel. Nevertheless, it is the Traitor’s 
Gate, a dreary kind of triumphal passageway 
(now supposed to be shut up and barred forever), 
through which a multitude of noble and illus¬ 
trious personages have entered the Tower and 
found it a brief resting-place on their way to hea¬ 
ven. Passing it many times, I never observed 
that anybody glanced at this shadowy and omi¬ 
nous trap-door, save myself. It is well that 
America exists, if it were only that her vagrant 
children may be impressed and affected by the 
historical monuments of England in a degree of 
which the native inhabitants are evidently inca¬ 
pable. These matters are too familiar, too real, 
and too hopelessly built in amongst and mixed 
up with the common objects and affairs of life, 
to be easily susceptible of imaginative coloring 
in their minds; and even their poets and ro¬ 
mancers feel it a toil, and almost a delusion, to 
extract poetic material out of what seems em¬ 
bodied poetry itself to an American. An Eng- 
369 


OUR OLD HOME 


lishman cares nothing about the Tower, which 
to us is a haunted castle in dreamland. That 
honest and excellent gentleman, the late Mr. G. 
P. R. James (whose mechanical ability, one 
might have supposed, would nourish itself by- 
devouring every old stone of such a structure), 
once assured me that he had never in his life 
set eyes upon the Tower, though for years an 
historic novelist in London. 

Not to spend a whole summer’s day upon 
the voyage, we will suppose ourselves to have 
reached London Bridge, and thence to have 
taken another steamer for a farther passage up 
the river. But here the memorable objects suc¬ 
ceed each other so rapidly that I can spare but 
a single sentence even for the great Dome, 
though I deem it more picturesque, in that 
dusky atmosphere, than St. Peter’s in its clear 
blue sky . 1 I must mention, however (since 
everything connected with royalty is especially 

1 St. Paul’s appeared to me unspeakably grand and noble, and the more 
so from the throng and bustle continually going on around its base, without 
in the least disturbing the sublime repose of its great dome, and, indeed, of 
all its massive height and breadth. Other edifices may crowd close to its 
foundation, and people may tramp as they like about it ; but still the great 
cathedral is as quiet and serene as if it stood in the middle of Salisbury Plain. 
There cannot be anything else in its way so good in the world as just this 
effect of St. Paul’s in the very heart and densest tumult of London. I do 
not know whether the church is built of marble, or of whatever other white or 
nearly white material $ but in the time that it has been standing there, it has 
grown black with the smoke of ages, through which there are, neverthe¬ 
less, gleams of white, that make a most picturesque impression on the whole. 
It is much better than staring white $ the edifice would not be nearly so 
grand without this drapery of black. — Notes of Travel , I. 334. 

370 


UP THE THAMES 

interesting to my dear countrymen), that I once 
saw a large and beautiful barge, splendidly gilded 
and ornamented, and overspread with a rich cov¬ 
ering, lying at the pier nearest to St. Paul's 
Cathedral; it had the royal banner of Great Brit¬ 
ain displayed, besides being decorated with a 
number of other flags ; and many footmen (who 
are universally the grandest and gaudiest objects 
to be seen in England at this day, and these 
were regal ones, in a bright scarlet livery bedi¬ 
zened with gold lace, and white silk stockings) 
were in attendance. I know not what festive or 
ceremonial occasion may have drawn out this 
pageant; after all, it might have been merely a 
city spectacle, appertaining to the Lord Mayor; 
but the sight had its value in bringing vividly 
before me the grand old times when the sov¬ 
ereign and nobles were accustomed to use the 
Thames as the high street of the metropolis, and 
join in pompous processions upon it; whereas, 
the desuetude of such customs nowadays has 
caused the whole show of river life to consist in 
a multitude of smoke-begrimed steamers. An 
analogous change has taken place in the streets, 
where cabs and the omnibus have crowded out 
a rich variety of vehicles; and thus life gets 
more monotonous in hue from age to age, and 
appears to seize every opportunity to strip off 
a bit of its gold lace among the wealthier classes, 
and to make itself decent in the lower ones. 

37i 


OUR OLD HOME 


Yonder is Whitefriars, the old rowdy Alsa- 
tia, now wearing as decorous a face as any other 
portion of London ; and, adjoining it, the ave¬ 
nues and brick squares of the Temple, with 
that historic garden, close upon the river-side, 
and still rich in shrubbery and flowers, where 
the partisans of York and Lancaster plucked 
the fatal roses, and scattered their pale and 
bloody petals over so many English battle¬ 
fields. Hard by, we see the long white front 
or rear of Somerset House, and, farther on, 
rise the two new Houses of Parliament, with 
a huge unfinished tower already hiding its im¬ 
perfect summit in the smoky canopy, — the 
whole vast and cumbrous edifice a specimen 
of the best that modern architecture can effect, 
elaborately imitating the masterpieces of those 
simple ages when men cc builded better than 
they knew.” 1 Close by it, we have a glimpse 
of the roof and upper towers of the holy Ab- 


1 After coming out of the Abbey, we looked at the two Houses of 
Parliament, directly across the way, — an immense structure, and certainly 
most splendid, built of a beautiful warm-colored stone. The building has 
a very elaborate finish, and delighted me at first; but by and by I began to 
be sensible of a weariness in the effect, a lack of variety in the plan and 
ornament, a deficiency of invention ; so that instead of being more and 
more interested the longer one looks, as is the case with an old Gothic edi¬ 
fice, and continually reading deeper into it, one finds that one has seen all 
in seeing a little piece, and that the magnificent palace has nothing better 
to show one or to do for one. It is wonderful how the old weather-stained 
and smoke-blackened Abbey shames down this brand-newness ; not that the 
Parliament Houses are not fine objects to look at too. — Notes of Travel , 
1 - 35 2 - 


372 


UP THE THAMES 

bey ; while that gray, ancestral pile on the op¬ 
posite side of the river is Lambeth Palace, a 
venerable group of halls and turrets, chiefly 
built of brick, but with at least one large tower 
of stone . 1 In our course, we have passed be¬ 
neath half a dozen bridges, and, emerging out 
of the black heart of London, shall soon reach 
a cleanly suburb, where old Father Thames, if 
I remember, begins to put on an aspect of un¬ 
polluted innocence. And now we look back 
upon the mass of innumerable roofs, out of 
which rise steeples, towers, columns, and the 
great crowning Dome, — look back, in short, 
upon that mystery of the world's proudest city, 
amid which a man so longs and loves to be ; 
not, perhaps, because it contains much that is 
positively admirable and enjoyable, but because, 
at all events, the world has nothing better. 
The cream of external life is there; and what¬ 
ever merely intellectual or material good we fail 
to find perfect in London, we may as well con¬ 
tent ourselves to seek that unattainable thing 
no farther on this earth. 

The steamer terminates its trip at Chelsea, 
an old town endowed with a prodigious num- 

1 It stands immediately on the bank of the river, not far above the 
bridge. We merely walked round it, and saw only an old stone tower or 
two, partially renewed with brick, and a high connecting wall, within 
which appeared gables and other portions of the palace, all of an ancient 
plan and venerable aspect, though evidently much patched up and restored 
in the course of the many ages since its foundation. — Notes of Travel , 
II. 41. 


373 


OUR OLD HOME 


ber of pothouses, and some famous gardens, 
called the Cremorne, for public amusement. 
The most noticeable thing, however, is Chel¬ 
sea Hospital, which, like that of Greenwich, 
was founded, I believe, by Charles II. (whose 
bronze statue, in the guise of an old Roman, 
stands in the centre of the quadrangle), and 
appropriated as a home for aged and infirm sol¬ 
diers of the British army. The edifices are of 
three stories, with windows in the high roofs, 
and are built of dark, sombre brick, with stone 
edgings and facings. The effect is by no 
means that of grandeur (which is somewhat 
disagreeably an attribute of Greenwich Hospi¬ 
tal), but a quiet and venerable neatness. At 
each extremity of the street front there is a 
spacious and hospitably open gateway, loung¬ 
ing about which I saw some gray veterans in 
long scarlet coats of an antique fashion, and 
the cocked hats of a century ago, or occasion¬ 
ally a modern foraging cap. Almost all of 
them moved with a rheumatic gait, two or 
three stumped on wooden legs, and here and 
there an arm was missing. Inquiring of one 
of these fragmentary heroes whether a stranger 
could be admitted to see the establishment, 
he replied most cordially, “O yes, sir,— any¬ 
where ! Walk in and go where you please,— 
upstairs, or anywhere ! ” So I entered, and, 
passing along the inner side of the quadrangle, 
374 


UP THE THAMES 


came to the door of the chapel, which forms a 
part of the contiguity of edifices next the street. 
Here another pensioner, an old warrior of ex¬ 
ceedingly peaceable and Christian demeanor, 
touched his three-cornered hat and asked if I 
wished to see the interior ; to which I assenting, 
he unlocked the door, and we went in. 

The chapel consists of a great hall with a 
vaulted roof, and over the altar is a large paint¬ 
ing in fresco, the subject of which I did not 
trouble myself to make out. More appropri¬ 
ate. adornments of the place, dedicated as well 
to martial reminiscences as religious worship, 
are the long ranges of dusty and tattered ban¬ 
ners, that hang from their staves all round the 
ceiling of the chapel. They are trophies of 
battles fought and won in every quarter of the 
world, comprising the captured flags of all the 
nations with whom the British lion has waged 
war since James II.’s time, — French, Dutch, 
East Indian, Prussian, Russian, Chinese, and 
American, — collected together in this conse¬ 
crated spot, not to symbolize that there shall 
be no more discord upon earth, but drooping 
over the aisle in sullen, though peaceable, hu¬ 
miliation. Yes, I said “ American ” among the 
rest; for the good old pensioner mistook me 
for an Englishman, and failed not to point out 
(and, methought, with an especial emphasis of 
triumph) some flags that had been taken at 
375 


OUR OLD HOME 


Bladensburg and Washington. I fancied, in¬ 
deed, that they hung a little higher and drooped 
a little lower than any of their companions in 
disgrace. It is a comfort, however, that their 
proud devices are already indistinguishable, or 
nearly so, owing to dust and tatters and the 
kind offices of the moths, and that they will 
soon rot from the banner-staves and be swept 
out in unrecognized fragments from the chapel 
door. 

It is a good method of teaching a man how 
imperfectly cosmopolitan he is, to show him his 
country's flag occupying a position of dishonor 
in a foreign land. But, in truth, the whole sys¬ 
tem of a people crowing over its military tri¬ 
umphs had far better be dispensed with, both 
on account of the ill blood that it helps to keep 
fermenting among the nations, and because it 
operates as an accumulative inducement to fu¬ 
ture generations to aim at a kind of glory, the 
gain of which has generally proved more ruin¬ 
ous than its loss. I heartily wish that every 
trophy of victory might crumble away, and that 
every reminiscence or tradition of a hero, from 
the beginning of the world to this day, could 
pass out of all men’s memories at once and for¬ 
ever. I might feel very differently, to be sure, 
if we Northerners had anything especially valu¬ 
able to lose by the fading of those illuminated 
names. 


376 


UP THE THAMES 

I gave the pensioner (but I am afraid there 
may have been a little affectation in it) a mag¬ 
nificent guerdon of all the silver I had in my 
pocket, to requite him for having unintentionally 
stirred up my patriotic susceptibilities. He was 
a meek-looking, kindly old man, with a humble 
freedom and affability of manner that made it 
pleasant to converse with him. Old soldiers, 
I know not why, seem to be more accostable 
than old sailors. One is apt to hear a growl 
beneath the smoothest courtesy of the latter. 
The mild Veteran, with his peaceful voice, and 
gentle reverend aspect, told me that he had 
fought at a cannon all through the battle of 
Waterloo, and escaped unhurt; he had now 
been in the hospital four or five years, and was 
married, but necessarily underwent a separation 
from his wife, who lived outside of the gates. 
To my inquiry whether his fellow pensioners 
were comfortable and happy, he answered, with 
great alacrity, “ O yes, sir! ” qualifying his ev¬ 
idence, after a moment's consideration, by say¬ 
ing in an undertone, “ There are some people, 
your Honor knows, who could not be comfort¬ 
able anywhere." I did know it, and fear that 
the system of Chelsea Hospital allows too little 
of that wholesome care and regulation of their 
own occupations and interests which might as¬ 
suage the sting of life to those naturally uncom¬ 
fortable individuals by giving them something 
377 


OUR OLD HOME 


external to think about. But rfiy old friend 
here was happy in the hospital, and by this 
time, very likely, is happy in heaven, in spite 
of the bloodshed that he may have caused by 
touching off a cannon at Waterloo. 

Crossing Battersea Bridge, in the neighbor¬ 
hood of Chelsea, I remember seeing a distant 
gleam of the Crystal Palace, glimmering afar in 
the afternoon sunshine like an imaginary struc¬ 
ture, — an air-castle by chance descended upon 
earth, and resting there one instant before it 
vanished, as we sometimes see a soap-bubble 
touch unharmed on the carpet, — a thing of 
only momentary visibility and no substance, 
destined to be overburdened and crushed down 
by the first cloud-shadow that might fall upon 
that spot. Even as I looked, it disappeared . 1 
Shall I attempt a picture of this exhalation of 
modern ingenuity, or what else shall I try to 
paint ? Everything in London and its vicinity 
has been depicted innumerable times, but never 
once translated into intelligible images; it is an 
“ old, old story/’ never yet told, nor to be told. 
While writing these reminiscences, I am con¬ 
tinually impressed with the futility of the effort 

1 The Crystal Palace gleamed in the sunshine ; but I do not think a very 
impressive edifice can be built of glass, — light and airy, to be sure, but still 
it will be no other than an overgrown conservatory. It is unlike anything 
else in England $ uncongenial with the English character, without privacy, 
destitute of mass, weight, and shadow, unsusceptible of ivy, lichens, or any 
mellowness from age. — Notes of Travel , I. 391. 

378 


UP THE THAMES 

to give any creative truth to my sketch, so that 
it might produce such pictures in the reader’s 
mind as would cause the original scenes to ap¬ 
pear familiar when afterwards beheld. Nor have 
other writers often been more successful in re¬ 
presenting definite objects prophetically to my 
own mind. In truth, I believe that the chief 
delight and advantage of this kind of literature 
is not for any real information that it supplies 
to untravelled people, but for reviving the re¬ 
collections and reawakening the emotions of 
persons already acquainted with the scenes de¬ 
scribed. Thus I found an exquisite pleasure, 
the other day, in reading Mr. Tuckerman’s 
Month in England, — a fine example of the 
way in which a refined and cultivated American 
looks at the Old Country, the things that he 
naturally seeks there, and the modes of feeling 
and reflection which they excite. Correct out¬ 
lines avail little or nothing, though truth of 
coloring may be somewhat more efficacious. 
Impressions, however, states of mind produced 
by interesting and remarkable objects, these, 
if truthfully and vividly recorded, may work a 
genuine effect, and, though but the result of 
what we see, go further towards representing 
the actual scene than any direct effort to paint 
it. Give the emotions that cluster about it, 
and, without being able to analyze the spell by 
which it is summoned up, you get something 
379 


OUR OLD HOME 


like a simulachre of the object in the midst of 
them. From some of the above reflections I 
draw the comfortable inference, that, the longer 
and better known a thing may be, so much the 
more eligible is it as the subject of a descriptive 
sketch. 

On a Sunday afternoon, I passed through a 
side entrance in the time-blackened wall of a 
place of worship, and found myself among a con¬ 
gregation assembled in one of the transepts and 
the immediately contiguous portion of the nave. 
It was a vast old edifice, spacious enough, within 
the extent covered by its pillared roof and over¬ 
spread by its stone pavement, to accommodate 
the whole of church-going London, and with a 
far wider and loftier concave than any human 
power of lungs could fill with audible prayer. 
Oaken benches were arranged in the transept, 
on one of which I seated myself, and joined, as 
well as I knew how, in the sacred business that 
was going forward. But when it came to the 
sermon, the voice of the preacher was puny, and 
so were his thoughts, and both seemed imper¬ 
tinent at such a time and place, where he and all 
of us were bodily included within a sublime act 
of religion, which could be seen above and around 
us and felt beneath our feet. The structure 
itself was the worship of the devout men of long 
ago, miraculously preserved in stone without los¬ 
ing an atom of its fragrance and fervor ; it was 
380 


UP THE THAMES 


a kind of anthem strain that they had sung and 
poured out of the organ in centuries gone by; 
and being so grand and sweet, the Divine be¬ 
nevolence had willed it to be prolonged for the 
behoof of auditors unborn. I therefore came 
to the conclusion, that, in my individual case, 
it would be better and more reverent to let my 
eyes wander about the edifice than to fasten 
them and my thoughts on the evidently unin¬ 
spired mortal who was venturing — and felt it 
no venture at all — to speak here above his 
breath. 

The interior of Westminster Abbey (for the 
reader recognized it, no doubt, the moment we 
entered) is built of rich brown stone; and the 
whole of it — the lofty roof, the tall, clustered 
pillars, and the pointed arches — appears to be 
in consummate repair. At all points where de¬ 
cay has laid its finger, the structure is clamped 
with iron or otherwise carefully protected ; and 
being thus watched over, — whether as a place 
of ancient sanctity, a noble specimen of Gothic 
art, or an object of national interest and pride, 
— it may reasonably be expected to survive for 
as many ages as have passed over it already. It 
was sweet to feel its venerable quietude, its long- 
enduring peace, and yet to observe how kindly 
and even cheerfully it received the sunshine of 
to-day, which fell from the great windows into 
the fretted aisles and arches that laid aside some- 

38i 


OUR OLD HOME 


what of their aged gloom to welcome it. Sunshine 
always seems friendly to old abbeys, churches, 
and castles, kissing them, as it were, with a more 
affectionate, though still reverential familiarity, 
than it accords to edifices of later date. A square 
of golden light lay on the sombre pavement of 
the nave, afar off, falling through the grand 
western entrance, the folding leaves of which 
were wide open, and afforded glimpses of peo¬ 
ple passing to and fro in the outer world, while 
we sat dimly enveloped in the solemnity of an¬ 
tique devotion. In the south transept, separated 
from us by the full breadth of the minster, there 
were painted glass windows, of which the upper¬ 
most appeared to be a great orb of many-colored 
radiance, being, indeed, a cluster of saints and 
angels, whose glorified bodies formed the rays of 
an aureole emanating from a cross in the midst. 
These windows are modern, but combine soft¬ 
ness with wonderful brilliancy of effect. Through 
the pillars and arches, I saw that the walls in 
that distant region of the edifice were almost 
wholly encrusted with marble, now grown yellow 
with time, no blank, unlettered slabs, but memo¬ 
rials of such men as their respective generations 
deemed wisest and bravest. Some of them were 
commemorated merely by inscriptions on mural 
tablets, others by sculptured bas-reliefs, others 
(once famous, but now forgotten, generals or 
admirals, these) by ponderous tombs that aspired 
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towards the roof of the aisle, or partly curtained 
the immense arch of a window. These moun¬ 
tains of marble were peopled with the sisterhood 
of Allegory, winged trumpeters, and classic fig¬ 
ures in full-bottomed wigs ; but it was strange to 
observe how the old Abbey melted all such ab¬ 
surdities into the breadth of its own grandeur, 
even magnifying itself by what would elsewhere 
have been ridiculous. Methinks it is the test 
of Gothic sublimity to overpower the ridiculous 
without deigning to hide it; and these grotesque 
monuments of the last century answer a similar 
purpose with the grinning faces which the old 
architects scattered among their most solemn 
conceptions. 

From these distant wanderings (it was my 
first visit to Westminster Abbey, and I would 
gladly have taken it all in at a glance) my eyes 
came back and began to investigate what was 
immediately about me in the transept. Close 
at my elbow was the pedestal of Canning's 
statue. Next beyond it was a massive tomb, on 
the spacious tablet of which reposed the full- 
length figures of a marble lord and lady, whom 
an inscription announced to be the Duke and 
Duchess of Newcastle, — the historic Duke of 
Charles I.’s time, and the fantastic Duchess, 
traditionally remembered by her poems and 
plays. She was of a family, as the record on 
her tomb proudly informed us, of which all the 
3 8 3 


OUR OLD HOME 


brothers had been valiant and all the sisters virtu¬ 
ous. A recent statue of Sir John Malcolm, the 
new marble as white as snow, held the next place; 
and near by was a mural monument and bust 
of Sir Peter Warren. The round visage of this 
old British admiral has a certain interest for a 
New Englander, because it was by no merit of 
his own (though he took care to assume it as 
such), but by the valor and warlike enterprise 
of our colonial forefathers, especially the stout 
men of Massachusetts, that he won rank and 
renown, and a tomb in Westminster Abbey. 
Lord Mansfield, a huge mass of marble done 
into the guise of a judicial gown and wig, with 
a stern face in the midst of the latter, sat on the 
other side of the transept; and on the pedestal 
beside him was a figure of Justice, holding forth, 
instead of the customary grocer’s scales, an actual 
pair of brass steelyards. It is an ancient and 
classic instrument, undoubtedly ; but I had sup¬ 
posed that Portia (when Shylock’s pound of 
flesh was to be weighed) was the only judge that 
ever really called for it in a court of justice. 
Pitt and Fox were in the same distinguished 
company; and John Kemble, in Roman cos¬ 
tume, stood not far off, but strangely shorn of 
the dignity that is said to have enveloped him 
like a mantle in his lifetime. Perhaps the eva¬ 
nescent majesty of the stage is incompatible with 
the long endurance of marble and the solemn 

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reality of the tomb ; though, on the other hand, 
almost every illustrious personage here repre¬ 
sented has been invested with more or less of 
stage trickery by his sculptor. In truth, the 
artist (unless there be a divine efficacy in his 
touch, making evident a heretofore hidden dig¬ 
nity in the actual form) feels it an imperious law 
to remove his subject as far from the aspect of 
ordinary life as may be possible without sacrific¬ 
ing every trace of resemblance. The absurd ef¬ 
fect of the contrary course is very remarkable in 
the statue of Mr. Wilberforce, whose actual self, 
save for the lack of color, I seemed to behold, 
seated just across the aisle. 

This excellent man appears to have sunk into 
himself in a sitting posture, with a thin leg 
crossed over his knee, a book in one hand, and 
a finger of the other under his chin, I believe, 
or applied to the side of his nose, or to some 
equally familiar purpose ; while his exceedingly 
homely and wrinkled face, held a little on one 
side, twinkles at you with the shrewdest compla¬ 
cency, as if he were looking right into your eyes, 
and twigged something there which you had half 
a mind to conceal from him. He keeps this look 
so pertinaciously that you feel it to be insuffer¬ 
ably impertinent, and bethink yourself what 
common ground there may be between yourself 
and a stone image, enabling you to resent it. I 
have no doubt that the statue is as like Mr. Wil- 
385 


OUR OLD HOME 


berforce as one pea to another, and you might 
fancy, that, at some ordinary moment, when he 
least expected it, and before he had time to 
smooth away his knowing complication of wrin¬ 
kles, he had seen the Gorgon's head, and 
whitened into marble, — not only his personal 
self, but his coat and small-clothes, down to a 
button and the minutest crease of the cloth. 
The ludicrous result marks the impropriety of 
bestowing the age-long duration of marble upon 
small, characteristic individualities, such as might 
come within the province of waxen imagery. 
The sculptor should give permanence to the 
figure of a great man in his mood of broad and 
grand composure, which would obliterate all 
mean peculiarities; for, if the original were un¬ 
accustomed to such a mood, or if his features 
were incapable of assuming the guise, it seems 
questionable whether he could really have been 
entitled to a marble immortality. In point of 
fact, however, the English face and form are 
seldom statuesque, however illustrious the indi¬ 
vidual. 

It ill becomes me, perhaps, to have lapsed 
into this mood of half-jocose criticism in de¬ 
scribing my first visit to Westminster Abbey, a 
spot which I had dreamed about more rever¬ 
entially, from my childhood upward, than any 
other in the world, and which I then beheld, and 
now look back upon, with profound gratitude to 
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the men who built it, and a kindly interest, I 
may add, in the humblest personage that has 
contributed his little all to its impressiveness, 
by depositing his dust or his memory there. 
But it is a characteristic of this grand edifice that 
it permits you to smile as freely under the roof 
of its central nave as if you stood beneath the 
yet grander canopy of heaven. Break into 
laughter, if you feel inclined, provided the ver¬ 
gers do not hear it echoing among the arches. 
In an ordinary church you would keep your 
countenance for fear of disturbing the sanctities 
or proprieties of the place; but you need leave 
no honest and decorous portion of your human 
nature outside of these benign and truly hospi¬ 
table walls. Their mild awfulness will take care 
of itself. Thus it does no harm to the general 
impression, when you come to be sensible that 
many of the monuments are ridiculous, and 
commemorate a mob of people who are mostly 
forgotten in their graves, and few of whom ever 
deserved any better boon from posterity. You 
acknowledge the force of Sir Godfrey Kneller’s 
objection to being buried in Westminster Abbey, 
because “ they do bury fools there ! ” Never¬ 
theless, these grotesque carvings of marble, that 
break out in dingy white blotches on the old 
freestone of the interior walls, have come there 
by as natural a process as might cause mosses 
and ivy to cluster about the external edifice ; for 
387 


OUR OLD HOME 


they are the historical and biographical record of 
each successive age, written with its own hand, 
and all the truer for the inevitable mistakes, and 
none the less solemn for the occasional absurd¬ 
ity. Though you entered the Abbey expect¬ 
ing to see the tombs only of the illustrious, you 
are content at last to read many names, both 
in literature and history, that have now lost 
the reverence of mankind, if indeed they ever 
really possessed it. Let these men rest in peace. 
Even if you miss a name or two that you hoped 
to find there, they may well be spared. It mat¬ 
ters little a few more or less, or whether West¬ 
minster Abbey contains or lacks any one man’s 
grave, so long as the Centuries, each with the 
crowd of personages that it deemed memorable, 
have chosen it as their place of honored sepul¬ 
ture, and laid themselves down under its pave¬ 
ment. The inscriptions and devices on the 
walls are rich with evidences of the fluctuating 
tastes, fashions, manners, opinions, prejudices, 
follies, wisdoms, of the past, and thus they 
combine into a more truthful memorial of their 
dead times than any individual epitaph-maker 
ever meant to write. 

When the services were over, many of the 
audience seemed inclined to linger in the nave 
or wander away among the mysterious aisles ; 
for there is nothing in this world so fascinat- 
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ing as a Gothic minster, which always invites 
you deeper and deeper into its heart both by 
vast revelations and shadowy concealments. 
Through the open-work screen that divides the 
nave from the chancel and choir, we could dis¬ 
cern the gleam of a marvellous window, but were 
debarred from entrance into that more sacred 
precinct of the Abbey by the vergers. These 
vigilant officials (doing their duty all the more 
strenuously because no fees could be exacted 
from Sunday visitors) flourished their staves, 
and drove us towards the grand entrance like a 
flock of sheep. Lingering through one of the 
aisles, I happened to look down, and found my 
foot upon a stone inscribed with this familiar 
exclamation, “ O rare Ben Jonson ! '' and re¬ 
membered the story of stout old Ben's burial 
in that spot, standing upright, — not, I pre¬ 
sume, on account of any unseemly reluctance 
on his part to lie down in the dust, like other 
men, but because standing-room was all that 
could reasonably be demanded for a poet among 
the slumberous notabilities of his age. It made 
me weary to think of it ! — such a prodigious 
length of time to keep one's feet! — apart from 
the honor of the thing, it would certainly have 
been better for Ben to stretch himself at ease in 
some country churchyard. To this day, how¬ 
ever, I fancy that there is a contemptuous alloy 
3 8 9 


OUR OLD HOME 


mixed up with the admiration which the higher 
classes of English society profess for their liter¬ 
ary men. 

Another day — in truth, many other days — 
I sought out Poets' Corner, and found a sign¬ 
board and pointed finger directing the visitor to 
it, on the corner house of a little lane leading 
towards the rear of the Abbey. The entrance 
is at the southeastern end of the south transept, 
and it is used, on ordinary occasions, as the only 
free mode of access to the building. It is no 
spacious arch, but a small, lowly door, passing 
through which, and pushing aside an inner 
screen that partly keeps out an exceedingly 
chill wind, you find yourself in a dim nook of 
the Abbey, with the busts of poets gazing at 
you from the otherwise bare stone-work of the 
walls. Great poets, too ; for Ben Jonson is 
right behind the door, and Spenser’s tablet is 
next, and Butler’s on the same side of the tran¬ 
sept, and Milton’s (whose bust you know at 
once by its resemblance to one of his portraits, 
though older, more wrinkled, and sadder than 
that) is close by, and a profile medallion of Gray 
beneath it. A window high aloft sheds down 
a dusky daylight on these and many other sculp¬ 
tured marbles, now as yellow as old parchment, 
that cover the three walls of the nook up to an 
elevation of about twenty feet above the pave¬ 
ment. It seemed to me that I had always been 
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familiar with the spot. Enjoying a humble 
intimacy — and how much of my life had else 
been a dreary solitude ! — with many of its in¬ 
habitants, I could not feel myself a stranger 
there. It was delightful to be among them. 
There was a genial awe, mingled with a sense 
of kind and friendly presences about me ; and 
I was glad, moreover, at finding so many of 
them there together, in fit companionship, 
mutually recognized and duly honored, all 
reconciled now, whatever distant generations, 
whatever personal hostility or other miserable 
impediment, had divided them far asunder 
while they lived. I have never felt a similar 
interest in any other tombstones, nor have I 
ever been deeply moved by the imaginary pre¬ 
sence of other famous dead people. A poet’s 
ghost is the only one that survives for his fel¬ 
low mortals, after his bones are in the dust, — 
and he not ghostly, but cherishing many hearts 
with his own warmth in the chillest atmosphere 
of life. What other fame is worth aspiring for ? 
Or, let me speak it more boldly, what other 
long-enduring fame can exist? We neither re¬ 
member nor care anything for the past, except 
as the poet has made it intelligibly noble and 
sublime to our comprehension. The shades of 
the mighty have no substance ; they flit inef¬ 
fectually about the darkened stage where they 
performed their momentary parts, save when 
39i 


OUR OLD HOME 


the poet has thrown his own creative soul into 
them, and imparted a more vivid life than 
ever they were able to manifest to mankind 
while they dwelt in the body. And therefore 

— though he cunningly disguises himself in their 
armor, their robes of state, or kingly purple — 
it is not the statesman, the warrior, or the mon¬ 
arch that survives, but the despised poet, whom 
they may have fed with their crumbs, and to 
whom they owe all that they now are or have, 

— a name! 1 

In the foregoing paragraph I seem to have 
been betrayed into a flight above or beyond 
the customary level that best agrees with me ; 
but it represents fairly enough the emotions 

1 September 30, 1855. Poets’ Corner has never seemed like a strange 
place to me ; it has been familiar from the very first; at all events, I can¬ 
not now recollect the previous conception, of which the reality has taken 
the place. I seem always to have known that somewhat dim comer, with 
the bare brown stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding 
down its light on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover 
the three walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet. Prior’s is 
the largest and richest monument. It is observable that the bust and mon¬ 
ument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey. His duchess proba¬ 
bly thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the beggarly poets. 

— Notes of Travel , I. 413. 

November 12, 1857. We found our way to Poets’ Corner, however, 
and entered those holy precincts, which looked very dusky and grim in the 
smoky light. ... I was strongly impressed with the perception that very 
commonplace people compose the great bulk of society in the home of the 
illustrious dead. It is wonderful how few names there are that one cares 
anything about a hundred years after their departure ; but perhaps each gen¬ 
eration acts in good faith in canonizing its own men. . . . But the fame of 
the buried person does not make the marble live, — the marble keeps merely 
a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man 
who needs a monument ever ought to have one. — Ibid ., III. 78. 

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with which I passed from Poets’ Corner into 
the chapels, which contain the sepulchres of 
kings and great people. They are magnificent 
even now, and must have been inconceivably 
so when the marble slabs and pillars wore their 
new polish, and the statues retained the bril¬ 
liant colors with which they were originally 
painted, and the shrines their rich gilding, of 
which the sunlight still shows a glimmer or a 
streak, though the sunbeam itself looks tar¬ 
nished with antique dust. Yet this recondite 
portion of the Abbey presents few memorials 
of personages whom we care to remember. The 
shrine of Edward the Confessor has a certain 
interest, because it was so long held in religious 
reverence, and because the very dust that set¬ 
tled upon it was formerly worth gold. The 
helmet and war saddle of Henry V., worn at 
Agincourt, and now suspended above his tomb, 
are memorable objects, but more for Shake¬ 
speare’s sake than the victor’s own. Rank has 
been the general passport to admission here. 
Noble and regal dust is as cheap as dirt under 
the pavement. I am glad to recollect, indeed 
(and it is too characteristic of the right English 
spirit not to be mentioned), one or two gigan¬ 
tic statues of great mechanicians, who contrib¬ 
uted largely to the material welfare of England, 
sitting familiarly in their marble chairs among 
forgotten kings and queens. Otherwise, the 
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OUR OLD HOME 


quaintness of the earlier monuments, and the 
antique beauty of some of them, are what chiefly 
gives them value. Nevertheless, Addison is 
buried among the men of rank; not on the 
plea of his literary fame, however, but because 
he was connected with nobility by marriage, 
and had been a Secretary of State. His grave¬ 
stone is inscribed with a resounding verse from 
Tickell’s lines to his memory, the only lines 
by which Tickell himself is now remembered, 
and which (as I discovered a little while ago) 
he mainly filched from an obscure versifier of 
somewhat earlier date. 

Returning to Poets’ Corner, I looked again 
at the walls, and wondered how the requisite 
hospitality can be shown to poets of our own 
and the succeeding ages. There is hardly a 
foot of space left, although room has lately 
been found for a bust of Southey and a full- 
length statue of Campbell. At best, only a 
little portion of the Abbey is dedicated to po¬ 
ets, literary men, musical composers, and others 
of the gentle artist breed, and even into that 
small nook of sanctity men of other pursuits 
have thought it decent to intrude themselves. 
Methinks the tuneful throng, being at home 
here, should recollect how they were treated in 
their lifetime, and turn the cold shoulder, look¬ 
ing askance at nobles and official personages, 
however worthy of honorable interment else- 
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where. Yet it shows aptly and truly enough 
what portion of the world's regard and honor 
has heretofore been awarded to literary emi¬ 
nence in comparison with other modes of great¬ 
ness, — this dimly lighted corner (nor even that 
quietly to themselves) in the vast minster the 
walls of which are sheathed and hidden under 
marble that has been wasted upon the illustrious 
obscure. Nevertheless, it may not be worth 
while to quarrel with the world on this account; 
for, to confess the very truth, their own little 
nook contains more than one poet whose mem¬ 
ory is kept alive by his monument, instead 
of imbuing the senseless stone with a spiritual 
immortality, — men of whom you do not ask, 
“ Where is he ? ” but, “ Why is he here ? ” I 
estimate that all the literary people who really 
make an essential part of one's inner life, 
including the period since English literature 
first existed, might have ample elbow-room to 
sit down and quaff their draughts of Castaly 
round Chaucer's broad, horizontal tombstone. 
These divinest poets consecrate the spot, and 
throw a reflected glory over the humblest of 
their companions. And as for the latter, it is 
to be hoped that they may have long outgrown 
the characteristic jealousies and morbid sensi¬ 
bilities of their craft, and have found out the lit¬ 
tle value (probably not amounting to sixpence 
in immortal currency) of the posthumous re- 
395 


OUR OLD HOME 


nown which they once aspired to win. It would 
be a poor compliment to a dead poet to fancy 
him leaning out of the sky and snuffing up the 
impure breath of earthly praise. 

Yet we cannot easily rid ourselves of the 
notion that those who have bequeathed us the 
inheritance of an undying song would fain be 
conscious of its endless reverberations in the 
hearts of mankind, and would delight, among 
sublimer enjoyments, to see their names embla¬ 
zoned in such a treasure-place of great memo¬ 
ries as Westminster Abbey. There are some 
men, at all events, — true and tender poets, 
moreover, and fully deserving of the honor, 
— whose spirits, I feel certain, would linger a 
little while about Poets’ Corner, for the sake 
of witnessing their own apotheosis among their 
kindred. They have had a strong natural yearn¬ 
ing, not so much for applause as sympathy, 
which the cold fortune of their lifetime did but 
scantily supply ; so that this unsatisfied appe¬ 
tite may make itself felt upon sensibilities at 
once so delicate and retentive, even a step or 
two beyond the grave. Leigh Hunt, for ex¬ 
ample, would be pleased, even now, if he could 
learn that his bust had been reposited in the 
midst of the old poets whom he admired and 
loved ; though there is hardly a man among the 
authors of to-day and yesterday whom the judg¬ 
ment of Englishmen would be less likely to 
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place there. He deserves it, however, if not for 
his verse (the value of which I do not estimate, 
never having been able to read it), yet for his 
delightful prose, his unmeasured poetry, the 
inscrutable happiness of his touch, working 
soft miracles by a life-process like the growth 
of grass and flowers. As with all such gentle 
writers, his page sometimes betrayed a vestige 
of affectation, but, the next moment, a rich, nat¬ 
ural luxuriance overgrew and buried it out of 
sight. I knew him a little, and (since. Heaven 
be praised, few English celebrities whom I 
chanced to meet have enfranchised my pen by 
their decease, and as I assume no liberties with 
living men) I will conclude this rambling arti¬ 
cle by sketching my first interview with Leigh 
Hunt. 

He was then at Hammersmith, occupying a 
very plain and shabby little house, in a contig¬ 
uous range of others like it, with no prospect 
but that of an ugly village street, and certainly 
nothing to gratify his craving for a tasteful en¬ 
vironment, inside or out. A slatternly maid¬ 
servant opened the door for us, and he himself 
stood in the entry, a beautiful and venerable old 
man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress-coat, 
tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive 
all over, and the gentlest and most naturally 
courteous manner. He ushered us into his lit¬ 
tle study, or parlor, or both, — a very forlorn 
397 


OUR OLD HOME 


room, with poor paper-hangings and carpet, 
few books, no pictures that I remember, and 
an awful lack of upholstery. I touch distinctly 
upon these external blemishes and this nudity 
of adornment, not that they would be worth 
mentioning in a sketch of other remarkable per¬ 
sons, but because Leigh Hunt was born with 
such a faculty of enjoying all beautiful things 
that it seemed as if Fortune did him as much 
wrong in not supplying them as in withholding 
a sufficiency of vital breath from ordinary men. 
All kinds of mild magnificence, tempered by his 
taste, would have 'become him well; but he had 
not the grim dignity that assumes nakedness as 
the better robe. 

I have said that he was a beautiful old man. 
In truth, I never saw a finer countenance, either 
as to the mould of features or the expression, 
nor any that showed the play of feeling so per¬ 
fectly without the slightest theatrical emphasis. 
It was like a child's face in this respect. At 
my first glimpse of him, when he met us in the 
entry, I discerned that he was old, his long 
hair being white and his wrinkles many; it was 
an aged visage, in short, such as I had not at 
all expected to see, in spite of dates, because his 
books talk to the reader with the tender viva¬ 
city of youth. But when he began to speak, 
and as he grew more earnest in conversation, I 
ceased to be sensible of his age; sometimes, 
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indeed, its dusky shadow darkened through the 
gleam which his sprightly thoughts diffused 
about his face, but then another flash of youth 
came out of his eyes and made an illumination 
again. I never witnessed such a wonderfully 
illusive transformation, before or since; and, 
to this day, trusting only to my recollection, I 
should find it difficult to decide which was his 
genuine and stable predicament, — youth or 
age. I have met no Englishman whose man¬ 
ners seemed to me so agreeable, soft, rather 
than polished, wholly unconventional, the nat¬ 
ural growth of a kindly and sensitive disposi¬ 
tion without any reference to rule, or else obe¬ 
dient to some rule so subtile that the nicest 
observer could not detect the application of it. 

His eyes were dark and very fine, and his de¬ 
lightful voice accompanied their visible language 
like music. He appeared to be exceedingly 
appreciative of whatever was passing among 
those who surrounded him, and especially of the 
vicissitudes in the consciousness of the person 
to whom he happened to be addressing himself 
at the moment. I felt that no effect upon my 
mind of what he uttered, no emotion, however 
transitory, in myself, escaped his notice, though 
not from any positive vigilance on his part, but 
because his faculty of observation was so pene¬ 
trative and delicate; and to say the truth, it a 
little confused me to discern always a ripple 
399 


OUR OLD HOME 

on his mobile face, responsive to any slightest 
breeze that passed over the inner reservoir of 
my sentiments, and seemed thence to extend 
to a similar reservoir within himself. On mat¬ 
ters of feeling, and within a certain depth, you 
might spare yourself the trouble of utterance, 
because he already knew what you wanted to 
say, and perhaps a little more than you would 
have spoken. His figure was full of gentle 
movement, though, somehow, without disturb¬ 
ing its quietude; and as he talked, he kept 
folding his hands nervously, and betokened in 
many ways a fine and immediate sensibility, 
quick to feel pleasure or pain, though scarcely 
capable, I should imagine, of a passionate ex¬ 
perience in either direction. There was not 
an English trait in him from head to foot, 
morally, intellectually, or physically. Beef, ale, 
or stout, brandy or port wine, entered not at 
all into his composition. In his earlier life, 
he appears to have given evidences of courage 
and sturdy principle, and of a tendency to fling 
himself into the rough struggle of humanity on 
the liberal side. It would be taking too much 
upon myself to affirm that this was merely a 
projection of his fancy world into the actual, 
and that he never could have hit a downright 
blow, and was altogether an unsuitable person 
to receive one. I beheld him not in his ar¬ 
mor, but in his peacefullest robes. Neverthe- 
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less, drawing my conclusion merely from what 
I saw, it would have occurred to me that his 
main deficiency was a lack of grit. Though 
anything but a timid man, the combative and 
defensive elements were not prominently devel¬ 
oped in his character, and could have been 
made available only when he put an unnatural 
force upon his instincts. It was on this account, 
and also because of the fineness of his nature 
generally, that the English appreciated him no 
better, and left this sweet and delicate poet 
poor, and with scanty laurels, in his declining 
age. 

It was not, I think, from his American blood 
that Leigh Hunt derived either his amiability 
or his peaceful inclinations; at least, I do not 
see how we can reasonably claim the former 
quality as a national characteristic, though the 
latter might have been fairly inherited from his 
ancestors on the mother's side, who were Penn¬ 
sylvania Quakers. But the kind of excellence 
that distinguished him — his fineness, subtilty, 
and grace — was that which the richest culti¬ 
vation has heretofore tended to develop in the 
happier examples of American genius, and which 
(though I say it a little reluctantly) is perhaps 
what our future intellectual advancement may 
make general among us. His person, at all 
events, was thoroughly American, and of the 
best type, as were likewise his manners; for we 
401 


OUR OLD HOME 


are the best as well as the worst mannered peo¬ 
ple in the world. 

Leigh Hunt loved dearly to be praised. 
That is to say, he desired sympathy as a flower 
seeks sunshine, and perhaps profited by it as 
much in the richer depth of coloring that it im¬ 
parted to his ideas. In response to all that we 
ventured to express about his writings (and, for 
my part, I went quite to the extent of my con¬ 
science, which was a long way, and there left the 
matter to a lady and a young girl, who happily 
were with me), his face shone, and he manifested 
great delight, with a perfect, and yet delicate, 
frankness, for which I loved him. He could not 
tell us, he said, the happiness that such appre¬ 
ciation gave him ; it always took him by sur¬ 
prise, he remarked, for — perhaps because he 
cleaned his own boots, and performed other little 
ordinary offices for himself — he never had been 
conscious of anything wonderful in his own per¬ 
son. And then he smiled, making himself and 
all the poor little parlor about him beautiful 
thereby. It is usually the hardest thing in the 
world to praise a man to his face; but Leigh 
Hunt received the incense with such gracious 
satisfaction (feeling it to be sympathy, not vul¬ 
gar praise), that the only difficulty was to keep 
the enthusiasm of the moment within the limit 
of permanent opinion. A storm had suddenly 
come up while we were talking ; the rain poured, 
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the lightning flashed, and the thunder broke; 
but I hope, and have great pleasure in believ¬ 
ing, that it was a sunny hour for Leigh Hunt. 
Nevertheless, it was not to my voice that he 
most favorably inclined his ear, but to those of 
my companions. Women are the fit ministers 
at such a shrine. 

He must have suffered keenly in his lifetime, 
and enjoyed keenly, keeping his emotions so 
much upon the surface as he seemed to do, and 
convenient for everybody to play upon. Being 
of a cheerful temperament, happiness had prob¬ 
ably the upper hand. His was a light, mildly 
joyous nature, gentle, graceful, yet seldom at¬ 
taining to that deepest grace which results from 
power; for beauty, like woman, its human re¬ 
presentative, dallies with the gentle, but yields 
its consummate favor only to the strong. I 
imagine that Leigh Hunt may have been more 
beautiful when I met him, both in person and 
character, than in his earlier days. As a young 
man, I could conceive of his being finical in cer¬ 
tain moods, but not now, when the gravity of 
age shed a venerable grace about him. I re¬ 
joiced to hear him say that he was favored with 
most confident and cheering anticipations in 
respect to a future life ; and there were abundant 
proofs, throughout our interview, of an unrepin¬ 
ing spirit, resignation, quiet relinquishment of 
the worldly benefits that were denied him, thank- 

403 


OUR OLD HOME 


ful enjoyment of whatever he had to enjoy, and 
piety, and hope shining onward into the dusk, 
— all of which gave a reverential cast to the feel¬ 
ing with which we parted from him. I wish 
that he could have had one full draught of pros¬ 
perity before he died. As a matter of artistic 
propriety, it would have been delightful to see 
him inhabiting a beautiful house of his own, in 
an Italian climate, with all sorts of elaborate up¬ 
holstery and minute elegances about him, and a 
succession of tender and lovely women to praise 
his sweet poetry from morning to night. I 
hardly know whether it is my fault, or the effect 
of a weakness in Leigh Hunt’s character, that I 
should be sensible of a regret of this nature, 
when, at the same time, I sincerely believe that 
he has found an infinity of better things in the 
world whither he has gone. 

At our leave-taking he grasped me warmly 
by both hands, and seemed as much interested 
in our whole party as if he had known us for 
years. All this was genuine feeling, a quick, 
luxuriant growth out of his heart, which was a 
soil for flower seeds of rich and rare varieties, 
not acorns, but a true heart, nevertheless. Sev¬ 
eral years afterwards I met him for the last time 
at a London dinner-party, looking sadly broken 
down by infirmities; and my final recollection 
of the beautiful old man presents him arm in 
arm with, nay, if I mistake not, partly embraced 
404 


UP THE THAMES 


and supported by, another beloved and honored 
poet, whose minstrel name, since he has a week¬ 
day one for his personal occasions, I will venture 
to speak. It was Barry Cornwall, whose kind 
introduction had first made me known to Leigh 
Hunt . 1 

1 Barry Cornwall, Mr. Procter, called on me a week or more ago, but I 
happened not to be in the office. Saturday last he called again, and as I had 
crossed to Rock Park, he followed me thither. A plain, middle-sized, Eng- 
lish-looking gentleman, elderly, with short white hair, and particularly quiet 
in his manners. He talks in a somewhat low tone without emphasis, 
scarcely distinct. . . . His head has a good outline, and would look well 
in marble. I liked him very well. He talked unaffectedly, showing an 
author’s regard to his reputation, and was evidently pleased to hear of his 
American celebrity. He said that in his younger days he was a scientific 
pugilist, and once took a journey to have a sparring encounter with the 
Game Chicken. Certainly no one would have looked for a pugilist in this 
subdued old gentleman. He is now Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes 
periodical circuits through the country, attending to the business of his office. 
He is slightly deaf, and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance, — 
owing to his not being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear. . . . 
He is a good man, and much better expressed by his real name, Procter, than 
by his poetical one, Barry Cornwall. . . . He took my hand in both of his 
at parting. ... — Notes of Travel , I. 108. 

405 


4 


v 


XI 


OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POV¬ 
ERTY 

B ECOMING an inhabitant of a great Eng¬ 
lish town, I often turned aside from the 
prosperous thoroughfares (where the edi¬ 
fices, the shops, and the bustling crowd differed 
not so much from scenes with which I was fa¬ 
miliar in my own country), and went designedly 
astray among precincts that reminded me of some 
of Dickens’s grimiest pages. There I caught 
glimpses of a people and a mode of life that were 
comparatively new to my observation, a sort of 
sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceedingly 
undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular 
interest and even fascination in its ugliness. 

Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over 
the world, being the symbolic accompaniment 
of the foul encrustation which began to settle 
over and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve 
had bitten the apple ; ever since which hapless 
epoch, her daughters have chiefly been engaged 
in a desperate and unavailing struggle to get rid 
of it. But the dirt of a poverty-stricken English 
street is a monstrosity unknown on our side of 
406 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

the Atlantic. It reigns supreme within its own 
limits, and is inconceivable everywhere beyond 
them. We enjoy the great advantage, that the 
brightness and dryness of our atmosphere keep 
everything clean that the sun shines upon, con¬ 
verting the larger portion of our impurities into 
transitory dust which the next wind can sweep 
away, in contrast with the damp, adhesive grime 
that incorporates itself with all surfaces (unless 
continually and painfully cleansed) in the chill 
moisture of the English air. Then the all-per¬ 
vading smoke of the city, abundantly intermin¬ 
gled with the sable snowflakes of bituminous 
coal, hovering overhead, descending, and alight¬ 
ing on pavements and rich architectural fronts, 
on the snowy muslin of the ladies, and the gen¬ 
tlemen’s starched collars and shirt-bosoms, in¬ 
vests even the better streets in a half-mourning 
garb. It is beyond the resources of Wealth to 
keep the smut away from its premises or its own 
fingers’ ends; and as for Poverty, it surrenders 
itself to the dark influence without a struggle. 
Along with disastrous circumstances, pinching 
need, adversity so lengthened out as to con¬ 
stitute the rule of life, there comes a certain 
chill depression of the spirits which seems espe¬ 
cially to shudder at cold water. In view of so 
wretched a state of things, we accept the ancient 
Deluge not merely as an insulated phenomenon, 
but as a periodical necessity, and acknowledge 
407 


OUR OLD HOME 


that nothing less than such a general washing- 
day could suffice to cleanse the slovenly old 
world of its moral and material dirt. 

Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit- 
vaults, are numerous in the vicinity of these poor 
streets, and are set off with the magnificence of 
gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the 
unclean customers who haunt there. Ragged 
children come thither with old shaving-mugs, 
or broken-nosed teapots, or any such makeshift 
receptacle, to get a little poison or madness for 
their parents, who deserve no better requital at 
their hands for having engendered them. In¬ 
conceivably sluttish women enter at noonday and 
stand at the counter among boon companions 
of both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a 
bumper together, and quaffing off the mixture 
with a relish. As for the men, they lounge there 
continually, drinking till they are drunken, — 
drinking as long as they have a halfpenny left, 
— and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a 
sixpenny miracle to be wrought in their pockets 
so as to enable them to be drunken again. Most 
of these establishments have a significant adver¬ 
tisement of “ Beds,” doubtless for the accom¬ 
modation of their customers in the interval 
between one intoxication and the next. I never 
could find it in my heart, however, utterly to con¬ 
demn these sad revellers, and should certainly 
wait till I had some better consolation to offer be- 
408 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


fore depriving them of their dram of gin, though 
death itself were in the glass ; for methought 
their poor souls needed such fiery stimulant 
to lift them a little way out of the smothering 
squalor of both their outward and interior life, 
giving them glimpses and suggestions, even if 
bewildering ones, of a spiritual existence that 
limited their present misery. The temperance 
reformers unquestionably derive their commis¬ 
sion from the Divine Beneficence, but have never 
been taken fully into its counsels. All may not 
be lost, though those good men fail. 

Pawnbrokers’ establishments — distinguished 
by the mystic symbol of the three golden balls, 
— were conveniently accessible ; though what 
personal property these wretched people could 
possess, capable of being estimated in silver or 
copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a 
problem that still perplexes me. Old clothes- 
men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and hung out 
ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There 
were butchers’ shops, too, of a class adapted to 
the neighborhood, presenting no such gener¬ 
ously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to 
gaze at in the market, no stupendous halves of 
mighty beeves, no dead hogs, or muttons orna¬ 
mented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their 
ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly British style 
of art, — not these, but bits and gobbets of lean 
meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and 
409 


OUR OLD HOME 


stringy morsels, bare bones smitten away from 
joints by the cleaver ; tripe, liver, bullocks’ feet, 
or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into 
the smallest lots. I am afraid that even such 
delicacies came to many of their tables hardly 
oftener than Christmas. In the windows of 
other little shops you saw half a dozen wizened 
herrings; some eggs in a basket, looking so din¬ 
gily antique that your imagination smelt them; 
fly-speckled biscuits, segments of a hungry 
cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now and 
then a sturdy milk-woman passed by with a 
wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a 
pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the 
composition of which was water and chalk and 
the milk of a sickly cow, who gave the best she 
had, poor thing ! but could scarcely make it rich 
or wholesome, spending her life in some close 
city nook and pasturing on strange food. I have 
seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one 
of these streets with panniers full of vegetables, 
and departing with a return cargo of what looked 
like rubbish and street-sweepings. No other 
commerce seemed to exist, except, possibly, a 
girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a 
worked collar, or a man whisper something mys¬ 
terious about wonderfully cheap cigars. And 
yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those 
regions, with their wares on the edge of the side¬ 
walk and their own seats right in the carriage- 
410 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and 
apples, toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs, and cheap 
jewelry, the coarsest kind of crockery, and little 
plates of oysters, — knitting patiently all day 
long, and removing their undiminished stock in 
trade at nightfall. All indispensable importa¬ 
tions from other quarters of the town were on a 
remarkably diminutive scale: for example, the 
wealthier inhabitants purchased their coal by the 
wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by the 
peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy 
spectacle, when an overladen coal-cart happened 
to pass through the street and drop a handful 
or two of its burden in the mud, to see half a 
dozen women and children scrambling for the 
treasure-trove, like a flock of hens and chickens 
gobbling up some spilt corn. In this connection 
I may as well mention a commodity of boiled 
snails (for such they appeared to me, though 
probably a marine production), which used to be 
peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an 
article of cheap nutriment. 

The population of these dismal abodes ap¬ 
peared to consider the sidewalks and middle of 
the street as their common hall. In a drama of 
low life, the unity of place might be arranged 
rigidly according to the classic rule, and the 
street be the one locality in which every scene 
and incident should occur. Courtship, quarrels, 
plot and counterplot, conspiracies for robbery 
411 


OUR OLD HOME 


and murder, family difficulties or agreements, — 
all such matters, I doubt not, are constantly dis¬ 
cussed or transacted in this sky-roofed saloon, 
so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal- 
smoke. Whatever the disadvantages of the 
English climate, the only comfortable or whole¬ 
some part of life, for the city poor, must be spent 
in the open air. The stifled and squalid rooms 
where they lie down at night, whole families and 
neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one 
another in the daytime, when a settled rain drives 
them within doors, are worse horrors than it is 
worth while (without a practical object in view) 
to admit into one’s imagination. No wonder 
that they creep forth from the foul mystery of 
their interiors, stumble down from their garrets, 
or scramble up out of their cellars, on the upper 
step of which you may see the grimy housewife, 
before the shower is ended, letting the raindrops 
gutter down her visage; while her children (an 
impish progeny of cavernous recesses below the 
common sphere of humanity) swarm into the 
daylight and attain all that they know of per¬ 
sonal purification in the nearest mud-puddle. It 
might almost make a man doubt the existence 
of his own soul, to observe how Nature has 
flung these little wretches into the street and left 
them there, so evidently regarding them as 
nothing worth, and how all mankind acquiesce 
in the great mother’s estimate of her offspring. 

412 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

For, if they are to have no immortality, what 
superior claim can I assert for mine ? And how 
difficult to believe that anything so precious as 
a germ of immortal growth can have been bur¬ 
ied under this dirt-heap, plunged into this cess¬ 
pool of misery and vice ! As often as I beheld 
the scene, it affected me with surprise and loath¬ 
some interest, much resembling, though in a far 
intenser degree, the feeling with which, when a 
boy, I used to turn over a plank or an old log 
that had long lain on the damp ground, and 
found a vivacious multitude of unclean and dev¬ 
ilish-looking insects scampering to and fro be¬ 
neath it. Without an infinite faith, there seemed 
as much prospect of a blessed futurity for those 
hideous bugs and many-footed worms as for 
these brethren of our humanity and co-heirs of 
all our heavenly inheritance. Ah, what a mys¬ 
tery ! Slowly, slowly, as after groping at the 
bottom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my 
hope struggles upward to the surface, bearing 
the half-drowned body of a child along with it, 
and heaving it aloft for its life, and my own life, 
and all our lives. Unless these slime-clogged 
nostrils can be made capable of inhaling celestial 
air, I know not how the purest and most intel¬ 
lectual of us can reasonably expect ever to taste 
a breath of it. The whole question of eternity 
is staked there. If a single one of those help¬ 
less little ones be lost, the world is lost! 

4i3 


OUR OLD HOME 

The women and children greatly preponder¬ 
ate in such places ; the men probably wandering 
abroad in quest of that daily miracle, a dinner 
and a drink, or perhaps slumbering in the day¬ 
light that they may thd better follow out their 
catlike rambles through the dark. Here are 
women with young figures, but old, wrinkled, 
yellow faces, tanned and blear-eyed with the 
smoke which they cannot spare from their scanty 
fires, — it being too precious for its warmth to 
be swallowed by the chimney. Some of them 
sit on the doorsteps, nursing their unwashed 
babies at bosoms which we will glance aside 
from, for the sake of our mothers and all wo¬ 
manhood, because the fairest spectacle is here 
the foulest. Yet motherhood, in these dark 
abodes, is strangely identical with what we have 
all known it to be in the happiest homes. No¬ 
thing, as I remember, smote me with more grief 
and pity (all the more poignant because perplex- 
ingly entangled with an inclination to smile) than 
to hear a gaunt and ragged mother priding her¬ 
self on the pretty ways of her ragged and skinny 
infant, just as a young matron might, when she 
invites her lady friends to admire her plump, 
white-robed darling in the nursery. Indeed, 
no womanly characteristic seemed to have alto¬ 
gether perished out of these poor souls. It was 
the very same creature whose tender torments 
make the rapture of our young days, whom we 
414 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


love, cherish, and protect, and rely upon in life 
and death, and whom we delight to see beautify 
her beauty with rich robes and set it off with jew¬ 
els though now fantastically masquerading in a 
garb of tatters, wholly unfit for her to handle. I 
recognized her, over and over again, in the 
groups round a doorstep or in the descent of a 
cellar, chatting with prodigious earnestness about 
intangible trifles, laughing for a little jest, sym¬ 
pathizing at almost the same instant with one 
neighbor’s sunshine and another’s shadow; wise, 
simple, sly, and patient, yet easily perturbed, 
and breaking into small feminine ebullitions 
of spite, wrath, and jealousy, tornadoes of a 
moment, such as vary the social atmosphere of 
her silken-skirted sisters, though smothered into 
propriety by dint of a well-bred habit. Not 
that there was an absolute deficiency of good¬ 
breeding, even here. It often surprised me to 
witness a courtesy and deference among these 
ragged folks, which, having seen it, I did not 
thoroughly believe in, wondering \vhence it 
should have come. I am persuaded, however, 
that there were laws of intercourse which they 
never violated, — a code of the cellar, the gar¬ 
ret, the common staircase, the doorstep, and the 
pavement, which, perhaps, had as deep a foun¬ 
dation in natural fitness as the code of the 
drawing-room. 

Yet again I doubt whether I may not have 
4i5 


OUR OLD HOME 

been uttering folly in the last two sentences, when 
I reflect how rude and rough these specimens 
of feminine character generally were. They 
had a readiness with their hands that reminded 
me of Molly Seagrim and other heroines in 
Fielding’s novels. For example, I have seen a 
woman meet a man in the street, and, for no 
reason perceptible to me, suddenly clutch him 
by the hair and cuff his ears, — an infliction 
which he bore with exemplary patience, only 
snatching the very earliest opportunity to take 
to his heels. Where a sharp tongue will not 
serve the purpose, they trust to the sharpness of 
their finger-nails, or incarnate a whole vocab¬ 
ulary of vituperative words in a resounding slap, 
or the downright blow of a doubled fist. All 
English people, I imagine, are influenced in a 
far greater degree than ourselves by this sim¬ 
ple and honest tendency, in cases of disagree¬ 
ment, to batter one another’s persons; and 
whoever has seen a crowd of English ladies 
(for instance, at the door of the Sistine Chapel, in 
Holy Week) will be satisfied that their belliger¬ 
ent propensities are kept in abeyance only by 
a merciless rigor on the part of society. It 
requires a vast deal of refinement to spiritualize 
their large physical endowments. Such being 
the case with the delicate ornaments of the draw¬ 
ing-room, it is less to be wondered at that 
women who live mostly in the open air, amid 
416 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

the coarsest kind of companionship and occupa¬ 
tion, should carry on the intercourse of life with 
a freedom unknown to any class of American 
females, though still, I am resolved to think, 
compatible with a generous breadth of natural 
propriety. It shocked me, at first, to see them 
(of all ages, even elderly, as well as infants that 
could just toddle across the street alone) going 
about in the mud and mire, or through the 
dusky snow and slosh of a severe week in win¬ 
ter, with petticoats high uplifted above bare, red 
feet and legs; but I was comforted by observ¬ 
ing that both shoes and stockings generally re¬ 
appeared with better weather, having been thrift¬ 
ily kept out of the damp for the convenience 
of dry feet within doors. Their hardihood was 
wonderful, and their strength greater than could 
have been expected from such spare diet as they 
probably lived upon. I have seen them carry¬ 
ing on their heads great burdens under which 
they walked as freely as if they were fashionable 
bonnets ; or sometimes the burden was huge 
enough almost to cover the whole person, looked 
at from behind, — as in Tuscan villages you 
may see the girls coming in from the country 
with great bundles of green twigs upon their 
backs, so that they resemble locomotive masses 
of verdure and fragrance. But these poor Eng¬ 
lish women seemed to be laden with rubbish, 
incongruous, and indescribable, such as bones 
4i7 


OUR OLD HOME 


and rags, the sweepings of the house and of the 
street, a merchandise gathered up from what 
poverty itself had thrown away, a heap of filthy 
stuff analogous to Christian’s bundle of sin. 

Sometimes, though very seldom, I detected 
a certain gracefulness among the younger wo¬ 
men that was altogether new to my observation. 
It was a charm proper to the lowest class. One 
girl I particularly remember, in a garb none of 
the cleanest, and nowise smart, and herself ex¬ 
ceedingly coarse in all respects, but yet endowed 
with a sort of witchery, a native charm, a robe 
of simple beauty and suitable behavior that she 
was born in and had never been tempted to 
throw off, because she had really nothing else 
to put on. Eve herself could not have been 
more natural. Nothing was affected, nothing 
imitated; no proper grace was vulgarized by an 
effort to assume the manners or adornments of 
another sphere. This kind of beauty, arrayed 
in a fitness of its own, is probably vanishing out 
of the' world, and will certainly never be found 
in America, where all the girls, whether daugh¬ 
ters of the upper-tendom, the mediocrity, the 
cottage, or the kennel, aim at one standard of 
dress and deportment, seldom accomplishing a 
perfectly triumphant hit or an utterly absurd 
failure. Those words, “ genteel ” and “ lady¬ 
like,” are terrible ones, and do us infinite mis¬ 
chief, but it is because (at least, I hope so) we 
418 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


are in a transition state, and shall emerge into 
a higher mode of simplicity than has ever been 
known to past ages. 

In such disastrous circumstances as I have 
been attempting to describe, it was beautiful to 
observe what a mysterious efficacy still asserted 
itself in character. A woman, evidently poor 
as the poorest of her neighbors, would be knit¬ 
ting or sewing on the doorstep, just as fifty 
other women were ; but round about her skirts 
(though woefully patched) you would be sensible 
of a certain sphere of decency, which, it seemed 
to me, could not have been kept more impreg¬ 
nable in the cosiest little sitting-room, where 
the teakettle on the hob was humming its good 
old song of domestic peace. Maidenhood had 
a similar power. The evil habit that grows 
upon us in this harsh world makes me faithless 
to my own better perceptions ; and yet I have 
seen girls in these wretched streets, on whose 
virgin purity, judging merely from their im¬ 
pression on my instincts as they passed by, I 
should have deemed it safe at the moment to 
stake my life. The next moment, however, 
as the surrounding flood of moral uncleanness 
surged over their footsteps, I would not have 
staked a spike of thistledown on the same 
wager. Yet the miracle was within the scope 
of Providence, which is equally wise and equally 
beneficent (even to those poor girls, though I 
419 


OUR OLD HOME 


acknowledge the fact without the remotest com¬ 
prehension of the mode of it), whether they 
were pure or what we fellow sinners call vile. 
Unless your faith be deep-rooted and of most 
vigorous growth, it is the safer way not to turn 
aside into this region so suggestive of miserable 
doubt. It was a place “with dreadful faces 
thronged,” wrinkled and grim with vice and 
wretchedness; and, thinking over the line of 
Milton here quoted, I come to the conclusion 
that those ugly lineaments which startled Adam 
and Eve, as they looked backward to the closed 
gate of Paradise, were no fiends from the pit, 
but the more terrible foreshadowings of what 
so many of their descendants were to be. God 
help them, and us likewise, their brethren and 
sisters ! Let me add, that, forlorn, ragged, care¬ 
worn, hopeless, dirty, haggard, hungry, as they 
were, the most pitiful thing of all was to see the 
sort of patience with which they accepted their 
lot, as if they had been born into the world for 
that and nothing else. Even the little children 
had this characteristic in as perfect development 
as their grandmothers. 

The children, in truth, were the ill-omened 
blossoms from which another harvest of pre¬ 
cisely such dark fruitage as I saw ripened around 
me was to be produced. Of course you would 
imagine these to be lumps of crude iniquity, 
tiny vessels as full as they could hold of naughti- 
420 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

ness ; nor can I say a great deal to the contrary. 
Small proof of parental discipline could I dis¬ 
cern, save when a mother (drunken, I sincerely 
hope) snatched her own imp out of a group of 
pale, half-naked, humor-eaten abortions that 
were playing and squabbling together in the 
mud, turned up its tatters, brought down her 
heavy hand on its poor little tenderest part, and 
let it go again with a shake. If the child knew 
what the punishment was for, it was wiser than 
I pretend to be. It yelled and went back to its 
playmates in the mud. Yet let me bear testi¬ 
mony to what was beautiful, and more touching 
than anything that I ever witnessed before in 
the intercourse of happier children. I allude 
to the superintendence which some of these 
small people (too small, one would think, to 
be sent into the street alone, had there been 
any other nursery for them) exercised over still 
smaller ones. Whence they derived such a 
sense of duty, unless immediately from God, I 
cannot tell; but it was wonderful to observe the 
expression of responsibility in their deportment, 
the anxious fidelity with which they discharged 
their unfit office, the tender patience with which 
they linked their less pliable impulses to the 
wayward footsteps of an infant, and let it guide 
them whithersoever it liked. In the hollow¬ 
cheeked, large-eyed girl of ten, whom I saw 
giving a cheerless oversight to her baby brother, 
421 


OUR OLD HOME 


I did not so much marvel at it. She had merely 
come a little earlier than usual to the perception 
of what was to be her business in life. But I 
admired the sickly looking little boy, who did 
violence to his boyish nature by making him¬ 
self the servant of his little sister, — she too 
small to walk, and he too small to take her in 
his arms, — and therefore working a kind of 
miracle to transport her from one dirt-heap to 
another. Beholding such works of love and 
duty, I took heart again, and deemed it not so 
impossible, after all, for these neglected chil¬ 
dren to find a path through the squalor and evil 
of their circumstances up to the gate of heaven. 
Perhaps there was this latent good in all of 
them, though generally they looked brutish, and 
dull even in their sports ; there was little mirth 
among them, nor even a fully awakened spirit 
of blackguardism. Yet sometimes, again, I saw, 
with surprise and a sense as if I had been asleep 
and dreaming, the bright, intelligent, merry face 
of a child whose dark eyes gleamed with viva¬ 
cious expression through the dirt that encrusted 
its skin, like sunshine struggling through a very 
dusty window-pane. 

In these streets the belted and blue-coated 
policeman appears seldom in comparison with 
the frequency of his occurrence in more repu¬ 
table thoroughfares. I used to think that the 
inhabitants would have ample time to murder 
422 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

one another, or any stranger, like myself, who 
might violate the filthy sanctities of the place, 
before the law could bring up its lumbering 
assistance. Nevertheless, there is a supervi¬ 
sion ; nor does the watchfulness of authority 
permit the populace to be tempted to any out¬ 
break. Once, in a time of dearth, I noticed a 
ballad-singer going through the street hoarsely 
chanting some discordant strain in a provincial 
dialect, of which I could only make out that it 
addressed the sensibilities of the auditors on the 
score of starvation; but by his side stalked the 
policeman, offering no interference, but watch¬ 
ful to hear what this rough minstrel said or 
sang, and silence him, if his effusion threatened 
to prove too soul-stirring. In my judgment, 
however, there is little or no danger of that 
kind: they starve patiently, sicken patiently, 
die patiently, not through resignation, but a dis¬ 
eased flaccidity of hope. If ever they should do 
mischief to those above them, it will probably 
be by the communication of some destructive 
pestilence ; for, so the medical men affirm, they 
suffer all the ordinary diseases with a degree of 
virulence elsewhere unknown, and keep among 
themselves traditionary plagues that have long 
ceased to afflict more fortunate societies. Char¬ 
ity herself gathers her robe about her to avoid 
their contact. It would be a dire revenge, in¬ 
deed, if they were to prove their claims to be 
423 


OUR OLD HOME 


reckoned of one blood and nature with the 
noblest and wealthiest, by compelling them to 
inhale death through the diffusion of their own 
poverty-poisoned atmosphere. 

A true Englishman is a kind man at heart, 
but has an unconquerable dislike to poverty 
and beggary. Beggars have heretofore been so 
strange to an American that he is apt to be¬ 
come their prey, being recognized through his 
national peculiarities, and beset by them in the 
streets. The English smile at him, and say that 
there are ample public arrangements for every 
pauper's possible need, that street charity pro¬ 
motes idleness and vice, and that yonder person¬ 
ification of misery on the pavement will lay up 
a good day's profit, besides supping more luxu¬ 
riously than the dupe who gives him a shilling. 
By and by the stranger adopts their theory and 
begins to practise upon it, much to his own 
temporary freedom from annoyance, but not 
entirely without moral detriment or sometimes a 
too late contrition. Years afterwards, it may be, 
his memory is still haunted by some vindictive 
wretch whose cheeks were pale and hunger- 
pinched, whose rags fluttered in the east wind, 
whose right arm was paralyzed and his left leg 
shrivelled into a mere nerveless stick, but whom 
he passed by remorselessly because an English¬ 
man chose to say that the fellow's misery looked 
too perfect, was too artistically got up, to be 
424 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


genuine. Even allowing this to be true (as, a 
hundred chances to one, it was), it would still 
have been a clear case of economy to buy him off 
with a little loose silver, so that his lamentable 
figure should not limp at the heels of your con¬ 
science all over the world . 1 To own the truth, 
I provided myself with several such imaginary 
persecutors in England, and recruited their num¬ 
ber with at least one sickly looking wretch whose 
acquaintance I first made at Assisi, in Italy, and, 
taking a dislike to something sinister in his 
aspect, permitted him to beg early and late, and 
all day long, without getting a single baiocco. At 
my latest glimpse of him, the villain avenged 
himself, not by a volley of horrible curses as any 
other Italian beggar would, but by taking an 
expression so grief-stricken, want-wrung, hope¬ 
less, and withal resigned, that I could paint his 
lifelike portrait at this moment. Were I to go 
over the same ground again, I would listen to 
no man’s theories, but buy the little luxury of 
beneficence at a cheap rate, instead of doing 
myself a moral mischief by exuding a stony 
incrustation over whatever natural sensibility 
I might possess. 

On the other hand, there were some mendi¬ 
cants whose utmost efforts I even now felicitate 

1 The natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beg¬ 
gars. It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do our¬ 
selves a wrong by hardening our hearts against them. — Notes of Travel y 
I- 4*3- 

425 


OUR OLD HOME 

myself on having withstood. Such was a pheno¬ 
menon abridged of his lower half, who beset me 
for two or three years together, and, in spite of 
his deficiency of locomotive members, had some 
supernatural method of transporting himself 
(simultaneously, I believe) to all quarters of the 
city. He wore a sailor's jacket (possibly, be¬ 
cause skirts would have been a superfluity to his 
figure), and had a remarkably broad-shouldered 
and muscular frame, surmounted by a large, 
fresh-colored face, which was full of power and in¬ 
telligence. His dress and linen were the perfec¬ 
tion of neatness. Once a day, at least, wherever 
I went, I suddenly became aware of this trunk 
of a man on the path before me, resting on his 
base, and looking as if he had just sprouted out 
of the pavement, and would sink into it again 
and reappear at some other spot the instant you 
left him behind. The expression of his eye was 
perfectly respectful, but terribly fixed, holding 
your own as by fascination, never once winking, 
never wavering from its point-blank gaze right 
into your face, till you were completely beyond 
the range of his battery of one immense rifled 
cannon. This was his mode of soliciting alms ; 
and he reminded me of the old beggar who 
appealed so touchingly to the charitable sym¬ 
pathies of Gil Bias, taking aim at him from the 
roadside with a long-barrelled musket. The 
intentness and directness of his silent appeal, 
426 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


his close and unrelenting attack upon your indi¬ 
viduality, respectful as it seemed, was the very 
flower of insolence ; or, if you give it a possibly 
truer interpretation, it was the tyrannical effort 
of a man endowed with great natural force of 
character to constrain your reluctant will to his 
purpose. Apparently, he had staked his salva¬ 
tion upon the ultimate success of a daily strug¬ 
gle between himself and me, the triumph of 
which would compel me to become a tributary to 
the hat that lay on the pavement beside him. 
Man or fiend, however, there was a stubborn¬ 
ness in his intended victim which this massive 
fragment of a mighty personality had not al¬ 
together reckoned upon, and by its aid I was 
enabled to pass him at my customary pace hun¬ 
dreds of times over, quietly meeting his terribly 
respectful eye, and allowing him the fair chance 
which I felt to be his due, to subjugate me, if 
he really had the strength for it. He never 
succeeded, but, on the other hand, never gave 
up the contest; and should I ever walk those 
streets again, I am certain that the truncated 
tyrant will sprout up through the pavement and 
look me fixedly in the eye, and perhaps get the 
victory . 1 

1 Among the beggars of Liverpool, the hardest to encounter is a man 
without any legs, and if I mistake not, likewise deficient in arms. You 
see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted halfway out of the 
earth, and would sink down and reappear in some other place the moment 
he has done with you. His countenance is large, fresh, and very intelli- 

427 


OUR OLD HOME 


I should think all the more highly of myself, 
if I had shown equal heroism in resisting another 
class of beggarly depredators, who assailed me 
on my weaker side and won an easy spoil. Such 
was the sanctimonious clergyman, with his white 
cravat, who visited me with a subscription paper, 
which he himself had drawn up, in a case of 
heart-rending distress; — the respectable and 
ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy 
and silent in his own person, but accompanied 
by a sympathizing friend, who bore testimony 
to his integrity, and stated the unavoidable 
misfortunes that had crushed him down ; 1 — or 

gent; but his great power lies in his fixed gaze, which is inconceivably dif¬ 
ficult to bear. He never once removes his eye from you till you are quite 
past his range$ and you feel it all the same, although you do not meet his 
glance. He is perfectly respectful; but the intentness and directness of his 
silent appeal is far worse than any impudence. In fact, it is the very flower 
of impudence. I would rather go a mile about than pass before his battery. 
I feel wronged by him, and yet unutterably ashamed. There must be great 
force in the man to produce such an effect. There is nothing of the cus¬ 
tomary squalidness of beggary about him, but remarkable trimness and clean¬ 
liness. — Notes of Travel , I. 78. 

1 It appears to be customary for people of decent station, but in distressed 
circumstances, to go round among their neighbors and the public, accom¬ 
panied by a friend, who explains the case. I have been accosted in the 
street in regard to one of these matters ; and to-day there came to my office 
a grocer, who had become security for a friend, and who was threatened 
with an execution, —with another grocer for supporter and advocate. The 
beneficiary takes very little active part in the affair, merely looking careworn, 
distressed, and pitiable, and throwing in a word of corroboration, or a sigh, 
or an acknowledgment, as the case may demand. . . . The whole matter 
is very foreign to American habits. No respectable American would think 
of retrieving his affairs by such means, but would prefer ruin ten times over ; 
no friend would take up his cause; no public would think it worth while 
to prevent the small catastrophe. And yet the custom is not without its 

428 











ENGLISH POVERTY 


the delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had 
been bred in affluence, but was suddenly thrown 
upon the perilous charities of the world by the 
death of an indulgent, but secretly insolvent 
father, or the commercial catastrophe and simul¬ 
taneous suicide of the best of husbands ; — or 
the gifted, but unsuccessful author, appealing 
to my fraternal sympathies, generously rejoi¬ 
cing in some small prosperities which he was 
kind enough to term my own triumphs in the 
field of letters, and claiming to have largely con¬ 
tributed to them by his unbought notices in the 
public journals. England is full of such peo¬ 
ple, and a hundred other varieties of peripatetic 
tricksters, higher than these, and lower, who act 
their parts tolerably well, but seldom with an 
absolutely illusive effect. I knew at once, raw 
Yankee as I was, that they were humbugs, al¬ 
most without an exception ; — rats that nibble 
at the honest bread and cheese of the commu¬ 
nity, and grow fat by their petty pilferings, — 
yet often gave them what they asked, and pri¬ 
vately owned myself a simpleton. There is a 
decorum which restrains you (unless you hap¬ 
pen to be a police constable) from breaking 
through a crust of plausible respectability, even 

good side, as indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient 
sense of neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we 
are more careless of a fellow creature’s ruin, because ruin with us is by no 
means the fatal and irretrievable event that it is in England. — Notes of 
Travel , I. 166. 


429 


OUR OLD HOME 


when you are certain that there is a knave be¬ 
neath it. 

After making myself as familiar as I decently 
could with the poor streets, I became curious 
to see what kind of a home was provided for 
the inhabitants at the public expense, fearing 
that it must needs be a most comfortless one, 
or else their choice (if choice it were) of so mis¬ 
erable a life outside was truly difficult to account 
for. Accordingly, I visited a great almshouse, 
and was glad to observe how unexceptionably all 
the parts of the establishment were carried on, 
and what an orderly life, full-fed, sufficiently 
reposeful, and undisturbed by the arbitrary ex¬ 
ercise of authority, seemed to be led there. Pos¬ 
sibly, indeed, it was that very orderliness, and the 
cruel necessity of being neat and clean, and even 
the comfort resulting from these and other Chris¬ 
tian-like restraints and regulations, that consti¬ 
tuted the principal grievance on the part of the 
poor, shiftless inmates, accustomed to a lifelong 
luxury of dirt and harum-scarumness. The wild 
life of the streets has perhaps as unforgetable 
a charm, to those who have once thoroughly 
imbibed it, as the life of the forest or the prairie. 
But I conceive rather that there must be insu¬ 
perable difficulties, for the majority of the poor, 
in the way of getting admittance to the alms¬ 
house, than that a merely aesthetic preference 
for the street would incline the pauper class to 
43 ° 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


fare scantily and precariously, and expose their 
raggedness to the rain and snow, when such a 
hospitable door stood wide open for their en¬ 
trance. It might be that the roughest and dark¬ 
est side of the matter was not shown me, there 
being persons of eminent station and of both 
sexes in the party which I accompanied; and, 
of course, a properly trained public functionary 
would have deemed it a monstrous rudeness, as 
well as a great shame, to exhibit anything to 
people of rank that might too painfully shock 
their sensibilities. 

The women’s ward was the portion of the 
establishment which we especially examined. It 
could not be questioned that they were treated 
with kindness as well as care. No doubt, as 
has been already suggested, some of them felt 
the irksomeness of submission to general rules 
of orderly behavior, after being accustomed to 
that perfect freedom from the minor proprieties, 
at least, which is one of the compensations of 
absolutely hopeless poverty, or of any circum¬ 
stances that set us fairly below the decencies 
of life. I asked the governor of the house 
whether he met with any difficulty in keeping 
peace and order among his inmates ; and he in¬ 
formed me that his troubles among the women 
were incomparably greater than with the men. 
They were freakish, and apt to be quarrelsome, 
inclined to plague and pester one another in 
43 1 


OUR OLD HOME 


ways that it was impossible to lay hold of, and 
to thwart his own authority by the like intan¬ 
gible methods. He said this with the utmost 
good-nature, and quite won my regard by so 
placidly resigning himself to the inevitable 
necessity of letting the women throw dust into 
his eyes. They certainly looked peaceable and 
sisterly enough as I saw them, though still it 
might be faintly perceptible that some of them 
were consciously playing their parts before the 
governor and his distinguished visitors. 

This governor seemed to me a man thor¬ 
oughly fit for his position. An American, in 
an office of similar responsibility, would doubt¬ 
less be a much superior person, better educated, 
possessing a far wider range of thought, more 
naturally acute, with a quicker tact of external 
observation and a readier faculty of dealing with 
difficult cases. The women would not succeed 
in throwing half so much dust into his eyes. 
Moreover, his black coat, and thin, sallow vis¬ 
age, would make him look like a scholar, and his 
manners would indefinitely approximate to those 
of a gentleman. But I cannot help questioning 
whether, on the whole, these higher endowments 
would produce decidedly better results. The 
Englishman was thoroughly plebeian both in 
aspect and behavior, a bluff, ruddy-faced, hearty, 
kindly, yeoman-like personage, with no refine¬ 
ment whatever, nor any superfluous sensibility, 
43 2 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

but gifted with a native wholesomeness of char¬ 
acter which must have been a very beneficial 
element in the atmosphere of the almshouse. 
He spoke to his pauper family in loud, good- 
humored, cheerful tones, and treated them with 
a healthy freedom that probably caused the for¬ 
lorn wretches to feel as if they were free and 
healthy likewise. If he had understood them 
a little better, he would not have treated them 
half so wisely. We are apt to make sickly peo¬ 
ple more morbid, and unfortunate people more 
miserable, by endeavoring to adapt our deport¬ 
ment to their especial and individual needs. 
They eagerly accept 0ur well-meant efforts ; but 
it is like returning their own sick breath back 
upon themselves, to be breathed over and over 
again, intensifying the inward mischief at every 
reception. The sympathy that would really 
do them good is of a kind that recognizes their 
sound and healthy parts, and ignores the part 
affected by disease, which will thrive under the 
eye of a too close observer like a poisonous 
weed in the sunshine. My good friend the 
governor had no tendencies in the latter direc¬ 
tion, and abundance of them in the former, and 
was consequently as wholesome and invigorat¬ 
ing as the west wind with a little spice of the 
north in it, brightening the dreary visages that 
encountered us as if he had carried a sunbeam 
in his hand. He expressed himself by his whole 
433 


OUR OLD HOME 


being and personality, and by works more than 
words, and had the not unusual English merit 
of knowing what to do much better than how 
to talk about it. 

The women, I imagine, must have felt one 
imperfection in their state, however comfortable 
otherwise. They were forbidden, or at all events 
lacked the means, to follow out their natural 
instinct of adorning themselves; all were well 
dressed in one homely uniform of blue-checked 
gowns, with such caps upon their heads as Eng¬ 
lish servants wear. Generally, too, they had 
one dowdy English aspect, and a vulgar type of 
features so nearly alike that they seemed liter¬ 
ally to constitute a sisterhood. We have few 
of these absolutely unilluminated faces among 
our native American population, individuals of 
whom must be singularly unfortunate, if, mix¬ 
ing as we do, no drop of gentle blood has con¬ 
tributed to refine the turbid element, no gleam 
of hereditary intelligence has lighted up the 
stolid eyes, which their forefathers brought from 
the Old Country. Even in this English alms¬ 
house, however, there was at least one person 
who claimed to be intimately connected with 
rank and wealth. The governor, after suggest¬ 
ing that this person would probably be gratified 
by our visit, ushered us into a small parlor, 
which was furnished a little more like a room in 
a private dwelling than others that we entered, 
434 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

and had a row of religious books and fashion¬ 
able novels on the mantel-piece. An old lady 
sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance, and 
rose to receive us with a certain pomp of man¬ 
ner and elaborate display of ceremonious cour¬ 
tesy, which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly 
question the genuineness of her aristocratic pre¬ 
tensions. But, at any rate, she looked like a 
respectable old soul, and was evidently glad¬ 
dened to the very core of her frost-bitten heart 
by the awful punctiliousness with which we re¬ 
sponded to her gracious and hospitable, though 
unfamiliar welcome. After a little polite con¬ 
versation, we retired; and the governor, with 
a lowered voice and an air of deference, told us 
that she had been a lady of quality, and had 
ridden in her own equipage, not many years 
before, and now lived in continual expectation 
that some of her rich relatives would drive up 
in their carriages to take her away. Meanwhile, 
he added, she was treated with great respect by 
her fellow paupers. I could not help thinking, 
from a few criticisable peculiarities in her talk 
and manner, that there might have been a mis¬ 
take on the governor's part, and perhaps a venial 
exaggeration on the old lady's, concerning her 
former position in society; but what struck me 
was the forcible instance of that most prevalent 
of English vanities, the pretension to aristocratic 
connection, on one side, and the submission 
435 


OUR OLD HOME 


and reverence with which it was accepted by 
the governor and his household, on the other. 
Among ourselves, I think, when wealth and 
eminent position have taken their departure, 
they seldom leave a pallid ghost behind them, 
— or, if it sometimes stalks abroad, few recog¬ 
nize it. 

We went into several other rooms, at the 
doors of which, pausing on the outside, we could 
hear the volubility, and sometimes the wrangling, 
of the female inhabitants within, but invariably 
found silence and peace when we stepped over 
the threshold. The women were grouped to¬ 
gether in their sitting-rooms, sometimes three or 
four, sometimes a larger number, classified by 
their spontaneous affinities, I suppose, and all 
busied, so far as I can remember, with the one 
occupation of knitting coarse yarn stockings. 
Hardly any of them, I am sorry to say, had 
a brisk or cheerful air, though it often stirred 
them up to a momentary vivacity to be accosted 
by the governor, and they seemed to like being 
noticed, however slightly, by the visitors. The 
happiest person whom I saw there (and running 
hastily through my experiences, I hardly recol¬ 
lect to have seen a happier one in my life, if you 
take a careless flow of spirits as happiness) was 
an old woman that lay in bed among ten or 
twelve heavy-looking females, who plied their 
knitting-work round about her. She laughed, 
43 6 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


when we entered, and immediately began to talk 
to us, in a thin, little, spirited quaver, claiming 
to be more than a century old; and the gov¬ 
ernor (in whatever way he happened to be cog¬ 
nizant of the fact) confirmed her age to be a 
hundred and four. Her jauntiness and cackling 
merriment were really wonderful. It was as if 
she had got through with all her actual business 
in life two or three generations ago, and now, 
freed from every responsibility for herself or 
others, had only to keep up a mirthful state of 
mind till the short time, or long time (and, 
happy as she was, she appeared not to care 
whether it were long or short), before Death, who 
had misplaced her name in his list, might remem¬ 
ber to take her away. She had gone quite round 
the circle of human existence, and come back to 
the playground again. And so she had grown 
to be a kind of miraculous old pet, the plaything 
of people seventy or eighty years younger than 
herself, who talked and laughed with her as if 
she were a child, finding great delight in her way¬ 
ward and strangely playful responses, into some 
of which she cunningly conveyed a gibe that 
caused their ears to tingle a little. She had done 
getting out of bed in this world, and lay there 
to be waited upon like a queen or a baby. 

In the same room sat a pauper who had once 
been an actress of considerable repute, but was 
compelled to give up her profession by a soften- 
437 


OUR OLD HOME 


ing of the brain. The disease seemed to have 
stolen the continuity out of her life, and dis¬ 
turbed all healthy relationship between the 
thoughts within her and the world without. On 
our first entrance, she looked cheerfully at us, 
and showed herself ready to engage in conver¬ 
sation ; but suddenly, while we were talking with 
the century-old crone, the poor actress began 
to weep, contorting her face with extravagant 
stage grimaces, and wringing her hands for some 
inscrutable sorrow. It might have been a remi¬ 
niscence of actual calamity in her past life, or, 
quite as probably, it was but a dramatic woe, be¬ 
neath which she had staggered and shrieked and 
wrung her hands with hundreds of repetitions 
in the sight of crowded theatres, and been as 
often comforted by thunders of applause. But 
my idea of the mystery was, that she had a sense 
of wrong in seeing the aged woman (whose empty 
vivacity was like the rattling of dry peas in a 
bladder) chosen as the central object of interest 
to the visitors, while she herself, who had agi¬ 
tated thousands of hearts with a breath, sat starv¬ 
ing for the admiration that was her natural food. 
I appeal to the whole society of artists of the 
Beautiful and the Imaginative, — poets, roman¬ 
cers, painters, sculptors, actors, — whether or 
no this is a grief that may be felt even amid the 
torpor of a dissolving brain ! 

We looked into a good many sleeping-cham- 
438 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

bers, where were rows of beds, mostly calculated 
for two occupants, and provided with sheets and 
pillow-cases that resembled sackcloth. It ap¬ 
peared to me that the sense of beauty was insuf¬ 
ficiently regarded in all the arrangements of the 
almshouse; a little cheap luxury for the eye, at 
least, might do the poor folks a substantial good. 
But, at all events, there was the beauty of per¬ 
fect neatness and orderliness, which, being here¬ 
tofore known to few of them, was perhaps as 
much as they could well digest in the remnant 
of their lives. We were invited into the laun¬ 
dry, where a great washing and drying were in 
process, the whole atmosphere being hot and 
vaporous with the steam of wet garments and 
bedclothes. This atmosphere was the pauper 
life of the past week or fortnight resolved into 
a gaseous state, and breathing it, however fas¬ 
tidiously, we were forced to inhale the strange 
element into our inmost being. Had the Queen 
been there, I know not how she could have es¬ 
caped the necessity. What an intimate brother¬ 
hood is this in which we dwell, do what we may 
to put an artificial remoteness between the high 
creature and the low one! A poor man’s breath, 
borne on the vehicle of tobacco smoke, floats 
into a palace window and reaches the nostrils of 
a monarch. It is but an example, obvious to 
the sense, of the innumerable and secret chan¬ 
nels by which, at every moment of our lives, 
439 


OUR OLD HOME 


the flow and reflux of a common humanity per¬ 
vade us all. How superficial are the niceties of 
such as pretend to keep aloof! Let the whole 
world be cleansed, or not a man or woman of 
us all can be clean. 

By and by we came to the ward where the 
children were kept, on entering which, we saw, 
in the first place, several unlovely and unwhole¬ 
some little people lazily playing together in a 
court-yard. And here a singular incommodity 
befell one member of our party. Among the 
children was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little 
thing (about six years old, perhaps, but I know 
not whether a girl or a boy), with a humor in 
its eyes and face, which the governor said was 
the scurvy, and which appeared to bedim its 
powers of vision, so that it toddled about grop- 
ingly, as if in quest of it did not precisely know 
what. This child — this sickly, wretched, hu¬ 
mor-eaten infant, the offspring of unspeakable 
sin and sorrow, whom it must have required 
several generations of guilty progenitors to ren¬ 
der so pitiable an object as we beheld it — 
immediately took an unaccountable fancy to the 
gentleman just hinted at. It prowled about 
him like a pet kitten, rubbing against his legs, 
following everywhere at his heels, pulling at his 
coat-tails, and, at last, exerting all the speed that 
its poor limbs were capable of, got directly be¬ 
fore him and held forth its arms, mutely insist- 
440 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


ing on being taken up. It said not a word, being 
perhaps underwitted and incapable of prattle. 
But it smiled up in his face, — a sort of woeful 
gleam was that smile, through the sickly blotches 
that covered its features, — and found means to 
express such a perfect confidence that it was go¬ 
ing to be fondled and made much of, that there 
was no possibility in a human heart of balking 
its expectation. It was as if God had promised 
the poor child this favor on behalf of that indi¬ 
vidual, and he was bound to fulfil the contract, 
or else no longer call himself a man among men. 
Nevertheless, it could be no easy thing for him 
to do, he being a person burdened with more 
than an Englishman’s customary reserve, shy 
of actual contact with human beings, afflicted 
with a peculiar distaste for whatever was ugly, 
and, furthermore, accustomed to that habit of 
observation from an insulated standpoint which 
is said (but, I hope, erroneously) to have the 
tendency of putting ice into the blood. 

So I watched the struggle in his mind with a 
good deal of interest, and am seriously of opin¬ 
ion that he did an heroic act, and effected more 
than he dreamed of towards his final salvation, 
when he took up the loathsome child and ca¬ 
ressed it as tenderly as if he had been its father. 
To be sure, we all smiled at him, at the time, 
but doubtless would have acted pretty much the 
same in a similar stress of circumstances. The 
441 


OUR OLD HOME 


child, at any rate, appeared to be satisfied with 
his behavior ; for when he had held it a consid¬ 
erable time, and set it down, it still favored him 
with its company, keeping fast hold of his fore¬ 
finger till we reached the confines of the place. 
And on our return through the court-yard, after 
visiting another part of the establishment, here 
again was this same little Wretchedness waiting 
for its victim, with a smile of joyful, and yet 
dull recognition about its scabby mouth and in 
its rheumy eyes. No doubt, the child’s mission 
in reference to our friend was to remind him 
that he was responsible, in his degree, for all 
the sufferings and misdemeanors of the world 
in which he lived, and was not entitled to look 
upon a particle of its dark calamity as if it were 
none of his concern : the offspring of a brother’s 
iniquity being his own blood-relation, and the 
guilt, likewise, a burden on him, unless he ex¬ 
piated it by better deeds. 1 

1 February 28, 1856. “After this, we went to the ward [West Derby 
Workhouse] where the children were kept, and, on entering this, we saw, 
in the first place, two or three unlovely and unwholesome little imps, who 
were lazily playing together. One of them (a child about six years old, but 
I know not whether girl or boy) immediately took the strangest fancy for 
me. It was a wretched, pale, half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its 
eyes which the governor said was the scurvy. I never saw, till a few mo¬ 
ments afterwards, a child that I should feel less inclined to fondle. But this 
little, sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking hold of my skirts, 
following at my heels, and at last held up its hands, smiled in my face, and, 
standing directly before me, insisted on my taking it up ! Not that it said 
a word, for I rather think it was underwitted, and could not talk ; but its 
face expressed such perfect confidence that it was going to be taken up and 
made much of, that it was impossible not to do it. It was as if God had 
442 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


All the children in this ward seemed to be 
invalids, and, going upstairs, we found more of 
them in the same or a worse condition than the 
little creature just described, with their mothers 
(or more probably other women, for the infants 
were mostly foundlings) in attendance as nurses. 
The matron of the ward, a middle-aged woman, 
remarkably kind and motherly in aspect, was 
walking to and fro across the chamber — on 
that weary journey in which careful mothers and 
nurses travel so continually and so far, and gain 
never a step of progress — with an unquiet baby 
in her arms. She assured us that she enjoyed 
her occupation, being exceedingly fond of chil¬ 
dren ; and, in fact, the absence of timidity in all 
the little people was a sufficient proof that they 
could have had no experience of harsh treat¬ 
ment, though, on the other hand, none of them 
appeared to be attracted to one individual more 
than another. In this point they differed widely 
from the poor child below stairs. They seemed 
to recognize a universal motherhood in woman¬ 
kind, and cared not which individual might be 

promised the child this favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfil the 
contract. I held my undesirable burden a little while ; and, after setting the 
child down, it still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with 
them, just as if it were a child of my own. It was a foundling, and out of all 
human-kind it chose me to be its father ! We went upstairs into another 
ward ; and, on coming down again, there was this same child waiting for me, 
with a sickly smile round its defaced mouth, and in its dim red eyes. ... I 
never should have forgiven myself if I had repelled its advances. ’ ’ — Notes 
of Travel , II. 29. 


443 


OUR OLD HOME 


the mother of the moment. I found their tame¬ 
ness as shocking as did Alexander Selkirk that 
of the brute subjects of his else solitary king¬ 
dom. It was a sort of tame familiarity, a per¬ 
fect indifference to the approach of strangers, 
such as I never noticed in other children. I 
accounted for it partly by their nerveless, un¬ 
strung state of body, incapable of the quick 
thrills of delight and fear which play upon the 
lively harpstrings of a healthy child’s nature, 
and partly by their woeful lack of acquaintance 
with a private home, and their being therefore 
destitute of the sweet home-bred shyness, which 
is like the sanctity of heaven about a mother- 
petted child. Their condition was like that of 
chickens hatched in an oven, and growing up 
without the especial guardianship of a matron 
hen : both the chicken and the child, methinks, 
must needs want something that is essential to 
their respective characters. 

In this chamber (which was spacious, contain¬ 
ing a large number of beds) there was a clear 
fire burning on the hearth, as in all the other 
occupied rooms ; and directly in front of the 
blaze sat a woman holding a baby, which, be¬ 
yond all reach of comparison, was the most hor¬ 
rible object that ever afflicted my sight. Days 
afterwards — nay, even now, when I bring it up 
vividly before my mind’s eye — it seemed to lie 
upon the floor of my heart, polluting my moral 
444 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

being with the sense of something grievously 
amiss in the entire conditions of humanity. 
The holiest man could not be otherwise than 
full of wickedness, the chastest virgin seemed 
impure, in a world where such a babe was pos¬ 
sible. The governor whispered me, apart, that, 
like nearly all the rest of them, it was the child 
of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes ! There was the 
mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous mock¬ 
ery of the visible link which Love creates be¬ 
tween man and woman, was born of disease and 
sin. Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful 
Disease its mother, and their offspring lay in 
the woman’s arms like a nursing Pestilence, 
which, could it live and grow up, would make 
the world a more accursed abode than ever 
heretofore. Thank Heaven, it could not live ! 
This baby, if we must give it that sweet name, 
seemed to be three or four months old, but, 
being such an unthrifty changeling, might have 
been considerably older. It was all covered 
with blotches, and preternaturally dark and dis¬ 
colored ; it was withered away, quite shrunken 
and fleshless ; it breathed only amid pantings 
and gaspings, and moaned painfully at every 
gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was 
the evident impossibility of its surviving to draw 
many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; 
and it would have been infinitely less heart-de¬ 
pressing to see it die, right before my eyes, than 
445 


OUR OLD HOME 


to depart and carry it alive in my remembrance, 
still suffering the incalculable torture of its lit¬ 
tle life. I can by no means express how horri¬ 
ble this infant was, neither ought I to attempt it. 
And yet I must add one final touch. Young as 
the poor little creature was, its pain and misery 
had endowed it with a premature intelligence, 
insomuch that its eyes seemed to stare at the by¬ 
standers out of their sunken sockets knowingly 
and appealingly, as if summoning us one and 
all to witness the deadly wrong of its existence. 
At least, I so interpreted its look, when it pos¬ 
itively met and responded to my own awe¬ 
stricken gaze, and therefore I lay the case, as far 
as I am able, before mankind, on whom God has 
imposed the necessity to suffer in soul and body 
till this dark and dreadful wrong be righted. 

Thence we went to the school-rooms, which 
were underneath the chapel. The pupils, like 
the children whom we had just seen, were, in 
large proportion, foundlings. Almost without 
exception, they looked sickly, with marks of 
eruptive trouble in their doltish faces, and a 
general tendency to diseases of the eye. More¬ 
over, the poor little wretches appeared to be un¬ 
easy within their skins, and screwed themselves 
about on the benches in a disagreeably sugges¬ 
tive way, as if they had inherited the evil habits 
of their parents as an innermost garment of the 
same texture and material as the shirt of Nessus, 
446 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

and must wear it with unspeakable discomfort 
as long as they lived. I saw only a single child 
that looked healthy; and on my pointing him 
out, the governor informed me that this little 
boy, the sole exception to the miserable aspect 
of his school-fellows, was not a foundling, nor 
properly a workhouse child, being born of re¬ 
spectable parentage, and his father one of the 
officers of the institution. As for the remain¬ 
der, — the hundred pale abortions to be counted 
against one rosy-cheeked boy, — what shall we 
say or do ? Depressed by the sight of so much 
misery, and uninventive of remedies for the evils 
that force themselves on my perception, I can 
do little more than recur to the idea already 
hinted at in the early part of this article, regard¬ 
ing the speedy necessity of a new deluge. So 
far as these children are concerned, at any rate, 
it would be a blessing to the human race, which 
they will contribute to enervate and corrupt, — 
a greater blessing to themselves, who inherit 
no patrimony but disease and vice, and in whose 
souls, if there be a spark of God’s life, this 
seems the only possible mode of keeping it 
aglow, — if every one of them could be drowned 
to-night, by their best friends, instead of being 
put tenderly to bed. This heroic method of 
treating human maladies, moral and material, is 
certainly beyond the scope of man’s discretion¬ 
ary rights, and probably will not be adopted 
447 


OUR OLD HOME 


by Divine Providence until the opportunity of 
milder reformation shall have been offered us 
again and again, through a series of future ages. 

It may be fair to acknowledge that the hu¬ 
mane and excellent governor, as well as other 
persons better acquainted with the subject than 
myself, took a less gloomy view of it, though 
still so dark a one as to involve scanty conso¬ 
lation. They remarked that individuals of the 
male sex, picked up in the streets and nurtured 
in the workhouse, sometimes succeed tolerably 
well in life, because they are taught trades be¬ 
fore being turned into the world, and, by dint 
of immaculate behavior and good luck, are not 
unlikely to get employment and earn a live¬ 
lihood. The case is different with the girls. 
They can only go to service, and are invariably 
rejected by families of respectability on account 
of their origin, and for the better reason of their 
unfitness to fill satisfactorily even the meanest 
situations in a well-ordered English household. 
Their resource is to take service with people 
only a step or two above the poorest class, with 
whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treat¬ 
ment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and 
finally drop into the slough of evil, through 
which, in their best estate, they do but pick 
their slimy way on stepping-stones. 

From the schools we went to the bake-house, 
and the brew-house (for such cruelty is not har- 
448 


ENGLISH POVERTY 


bored in the heart of a true Englishman as to 
deny a pauper his daily allowance of beer), and 
through the kitchens, where we beheld an im¬ 
mense pot over the fire, surging and walloping 
with some kind of a savory stew that filled it up 
to its brim. We also visited a tailor’s shop, 
and a shoemaker’s shop, in both of which a 
number of men, and pale, diminutive appren¬ 
tices, were at work, diligently enough, though 
seemingly with small heart in the business. 
Finally, the governor ushered us into a shed, 
inside of which was piled up an immense quan¬ 
tity of new coffins. They were of the plainest 
description, made of pine boards, probably of 
American growth, not very nicely smoothed by 
the plane, neither painted nor stained with 
black, but provided with a loop of rope at 
either end for the convenience of lifting the rude 
box and its inmate into the cart that shall carry 
them to the burial ground. There, in holes ten 
feet deep, the paupers are buried one above 
another, mingling their relics indistinguishably. 
In another world may they resume their indi¬ 
viduality, and find it a happier one than here ! 

As we departed, a character came under our 
notice which I have met with in all almshouses, 
whether of the city or village, or in England or 
America. It was the familiar simpleton, who 
shuffled across the court-yard, clattering his 
wooden-soled shoes, to greet us with a howl or 
449 


OUR OLD HOME 


a laugh, I hardly know which, holding out his 
hand for a penny, and chuckling grossly when 
it was given him. All underwitted persons, so 
far as my experience goes, have this craving for 
copper coin, and appear to estimate its value by 
a miraculous instinct, which is one of the earli¬ 
est gleams of human intelligence while the no¬ 
bler faculties are yet in abeyance. There may 
come a time, even in this world, when we shall 
all understand that our tendency to the indi¬ 
vidual appropriation of gold and broad acres, 
fine houses, and such good and beautiful things 
as are equally enjoyable by a multitude, is but 
a trait of imperfectly developed intelligence, like 
the simpleton's cupidity of a penny. When 
that day dawns, — and probably not till then, 
— I imagine that there will be no more poor 
streets nor need of almshouses. 

I was once present at the wedding of some 
poor English people, and was deeply impressed 
by the spectacle, though by no means with such 
proud and delightful emotions as seem to have 
affected all England on the recent occasion of 
the marriage of its Prince. It was in the Ca¬ 
thedral at Manchester, a particularly black and 
grim old structure, into which I had stepped to 
examine some ancient and curious wood-carv¬ 
ings within the choir. The woman in attend¬ 
ance greeted me with a smile (which always 
glimmers forth on the feminine visage, I know 
450 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

not why, when a wedding is in question), and 
asked me to take a seat in the nave till some 
poor parties were married, it being the Easter 
holidays, and a good time for them to marry, 
because no fees would be demanded by the 
clergyman. I sat down accordingly, and soon 
the parson and his clerk appeared at the altar, 
and a considerable crowd of people made their 
entrance at a side door, and ranged themselves 
in a long, huddled line across the chancel. They 
were my acquaintances of the poor streets, or 
persons in a precisely similar condition of life, 
and were now come to their marriage ceremony 
in just such garbs as I had always seen them 
wear : the men in their loafers’ coats, out at 
elbows, or their laborers’ jackets, defaced with 
grimy toil ; the women drawing their shabby 
shawls tighter about their shoulders, to hide the 
raggedness beneath ; all of them unbrushed, 
unshaven, unwashed, uncombed, and wrinkled 
with penury and care; nothing virgin-like in 
the brides, nor hopeful or energetic in the bride¬ 
grooms ; — they were, in short, the mere rags 
and tatters of the human race, whom some east 
wind of evil omen, howling along the streets, 
had chanced to sweep together into an unfra- 
grant heap. Each and all of them, conscious of 
his or her individual misery, had blundered into 
the strange miscalculation of supposing that 
they could lessen the sum of it by multiplying 
45i 


OUR OLD HOME 


it into the misery of another person. All the 
couples (and it was difficult, in such a confused 
crowd, to compute exactly their number) stood 
up at once, and had execution done upon them 
in the lump, the clergyman addressing only 
small parts of the service to each individual 
pair, but so managing the larger portion as to 
include the whole company without the trouble 
of repetition. By this compendious contriv¬ 
ance, one would apprehend, he came danger¬ 
ously near making every man and woman the 
husband or wife of every other ; nor, perhaps, 
would he have perpetrated much additional mis¬ 
chief by the mistake; but, after receiving a bene¬ 
diction in common, they assorted themselves in 
their own fashion, as they only knew how, and 
departed to the garrets, or the cellars, or the un¬ 
sheltered street corners, where their honeymoon 
and subsequent lives were to be spent. The 
parson smiled decorously, the clerk and the sex¬ 
ton grinned broadly, the female attendant tit¬ 
tered almost aloud, and even the married parties 
seemed to see something exceedingly funny in 
the affair ; but for my part, though generally 
apt enough to be tickled by a joke, I laid it 
away in my memory as one of the saddest sights 
I ever looked upon. 

Not very long afterwards, I happened to be 
passing the same venerable cathedral, and heard 
a clang of joyful bells, and beheld a bridal party 
452 


ENGLISH POVERTY 

coming down the steps towards a carriage and 
four horses, with a portly coachman and two 
postilions, that waited at the gate. One parson 
and one service had amalgamated the wretched¬ 
ness of a score of paupers ; a Bishop and three 
or four clergymen had combined their spiritual 
might to forge the golden links of this other 
marriage-bond. The bridegroom’s mien had a 
sort of careless and kindly English pride; the 
bride floated along in her white drapery, a crea¬ 
ture so nice and delicate that it was a luxury to 
see her, and a pity that her silk slippers should 
touch anything so grimy as the old stones of 
the churchyard avenue. The crowd of ragged 
people, who always cluster to witness what they 
may of an aristocratic wedding, broke into au¬ 
dible admiration of the bride’s beauty and the 
bridegroom’s manliness, and uttered prayers 
and ejaculations (possibly paid for in alms) for 
the happiness of both. If the most favorable 
of earthly conditions could make them happy, 
they had every prospect of it. They were go¬ 
ing to live on their abundance in one of those 
stately and delightful English homes, such as no 
other people ever created or inherited, a hall set 
far and safe within its own private grounds, and 
surrounded with venerable trees, shaven lawns, 
rich shrubbery, and trimmest pathways, the 
whole so artfully contrived and tended that 
summer rendered it a paradise, and even winter 
453 


OUR OLD HOME 

would hardly disrobe it of its beauty; and all 
this fair property seemed more exclusively and 
inalienably their own, because of its descent 
through many forefathers, each of whom had 
added an improvement or a charm, and thus 
transmitted it with a stronger stamp of rightful 
possession to his heir. And is it possible, after 
all, that there may be a flaw in the title-deeds ? 
Is, or is not, the system wrong that gives one 
married pair so immense a superfluity of luxuri¬ 
ous home, and shuts out a million others from 
any home whatever ? One day or another, safe 
as they deem themselves, and safe as the heredit¬ 
ary temper of the people really tends to make 
them, the gentlemen of England will be com¬ 
pelled to face this question. 

454 


XII 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

I T has often perplexed me to imagine how 
an Englishman will be able to reconcile 
himself to any future state of existence from 
which the earthly institution of dinner shall be 
excluded. Even if he fail to take his appetite 
along with him (which it seems to me hardly 
possible to believe, since this endowment is so 
essential to his composition), the immortal day 
must still admit an interim of two or three hours 
during which he will be conscious of a slight 
distaste, at all events, if not an absolute repug¬ 
nance, to merely spiritual nutriment. The idea 
of dinner has so embedded itself among his high¬ 
est and deepest characteristics, so illuminated 
itself with intellect and softened itself with the 
kindest emotions of his heart, so linked itself with 
Church and State, and grown so majestic with 
long hereditary customs and ceremonies, that, 
by taking it utterly away, Death, instead of put¬ 
ting the final touch to his perfection, would leave 
him infinitely less complete than we have already 
known him. He could not be roundly happy. 
Paradise, among all its enjoyments, would lack 
455 


OUR OLD HOME 


one daily felicity which his sombre little island 
possessed. Perhaps it is not irreverent to con¬ 
jecture that a provision may have been made, 
in this particular, for the Englishman's excep¬ 
tional necessities. It strikes me that Milton 
was of the opinion here suggested, and may have 
intended to throw out a delightful and consola¬ 
tory hope for his countrymen, when he repre¬ 
sents the genial archangel as playing his part 
with such excellent appetite at Adam's dinner- 
table, and confining himself to fruit and vege¬ 
tables only, because, in those early days of her 
housekeeping, Eve had no more acceptable 
viands to set before him. Milton, indeed, had 
a true English taste for the pleasures of the table, 
though refined by the lofty and poetic disci¬ 
pline to which he had subjected himself. It is 
delicately implied in the refection in Paradise, 
and more substantially, though still elegantly, 
betrayed in the sonnet proposing to “ Laurence, 
of virtuous father virtuous son,'' a series of nice 
little dinners in midwinter; and it blazes fully 
out in that untasted banquet, which, elaborate 
as it was, Satan tossed up in a trice from the 
kitchen ranges of Tartarus. 

Among this people, indeed, so wise in their 
generation, dinner has a kind of sanctity quite 
independent of the dishes that may be set upon 
the table ; so that, if it be only a mutton-chop, 
they treat it with due reverence, and are rewarded 
456 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

with a degree of enjoyment which such reckless 
devourers as ourselves do not often find in our 
richest abundance. It is good to see how stanch 
they are after fifty or sixty years of heroic eating, 
still relying upon their digestive powers and in¬ 
dulging a vigorous appetite; whereas an Amer¬ 
ican has generally lost the one and learned to 
distrust the other long before reaching the earli¬ 
est decline of life ; and thenceforward he makes 
little account of his dinner, and dines at his peril, 
if at all. I know not whether my countrymen 
will allow me to tell them, though I think it 
scarcely too much to affirm, that on this side of 
the water people never dine. At any rate, abun¬ 
dantly as nature has provided us with most of 
the material requisites, the highest possible din¬ 
ner has never yet been eaten in America. It is 
the consummate flower of civilization and re¬ 
finement ; and our inability to produce it, or to 
appreciate its admirable beauty if a happy inspi¬ 
ration should bring it into bloom, marks fatally 
the limit of culture which we have attained. 

It is not to be supposed, however, that the 
mob of cultivated Englishmen know how to dine 
in this elevated sense. The unpolishable rug¬ 
gedness of the national character is still an im¬ 
pediment to them, even in that particular line 
where they are best qualified to excel. Though 
often present at good men’s feasts, I remember 
only a single dinner, which, while lamentably 
457 


OUR OLD HOME 

conscious that many of its higher excellences 
were thrown away upon me, I yet could feel 
to be a perfect work of art. It could not, with¬ 
out unpardonable coarseness, be styled a matter 
of animal enjoyment, because, out of the very 
perfection of that lower bliss, there had arisen a 
dream-like development of spiritual happiness. 
As in the masterpieces of painting and poetry, 
there was a something intangible, a final deli¬ 
ciousness that only fluttered about your com¬ 
prehension, vanishing whenever you tried to 
detain it, and compelling you to recognize it by 
faith rather than sense. It seemed as if a diviner 
set of senses were requisite, and had been partly 
supplied, for the special fruition of this banquet, 
and that the guests around the table (only eight 
in number) were becoming so educated, polished, 
and softened, by the delicate influences of what 
they ate and drank, as to be now a little more 
than mortal for the nonce. And there was that 
gentle, delicious sadness, too, which we find in 
the very summit of our most exquisite enjoy¬ 
ments, and feel it a charm beyond all the gayety 
through which it keeps breathing its undertone. 
In the present case, it was worth a heavier sigh 
to reflect that such a festal achievement—the 
production of so much art, skill, fancy, inven¬ 
tion, and perfect taste — the growth of all the 
ages, which appeared to have been ripening for 
this hour, since man first began to eat and to 
458 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

moisten his food with wine — must lavish its 
happiness upon so brief a moment when other 
beautiful things can be made a joy forever. Yet 
a dinner like this is no better than we can get, 
any day, at the rejuvenescent Cornhill Coffee¬ 
house, unless the whole man, with soul, intel¬ 
lect, and stomach, is ready to appreciate it, and 
unless, moreover, there is such a harmony in 
all the circumstances and accompaniments, and 
especially such a pitch of well-according minds, 
that nothing shall jar rudely against the guest’s 
thoroughly awakened sensibilities. The world, 
and especially our part of it, being the rough, 
ill-assorted, and tumultuous place we find it, 
a beefsteak is about as good as any other din¬ 
ner. 

The foregoing reminiscence, however, has 
drawn me aside from the main object of my 
sketch, in which I purposed to give a slight idea 
of those public, or partially public banquets, the 
custom of which so thoroughly prevails among 
the English people, that nothing is ever decided 
upon, in matters of peace and war, until they 
have chewed upon it in the shape of roast beef, 
and talked it fully over in their cups. Nor are 
these festivities merely occasional, but of stated 
recurrence in all considerable municipalities and 
associated bodies. The most ancient times ap¬ 
pear to have been as familiar with them as the 
Englishmen of to-day. In many of the old Eng- 
459 


OUR OLD HOME 


lish towns, you find some stately Gothic hall or 
chamber in which the Mayor and other author¬ 
ities of the place have long held their sessions; 
and always, in convenient contiguity, there is a 
dusky kitchen, with an immense fireplace where 
an ox might lie roasting at his ease, though the 
less gigantic scale of modern cookery may now 
have permitted the cobwebs to gather in its chim¬ 
ney. St. Mary's Hall, in Coventry, is so good 
a specimen of an ancient banqueting-room, that 
perhaps I may profitably devote a page or two 
to the description of it. 

In a narrow street opposite to St. Michael's 
Church, one of the three famous spires of Cov¬ 
entry, you behold a mediaeval edifice, in the 
basement of which is such a venerable and now 
deserted kitchen as I have above alluded to, and, 
on the same level, a cellar, with low stone pillars 
and intersecting arches, like the crypt of a cathe¬ 
dral. Passing up a well-worn staircase, the oaken 
balustrade of which is as black as ebony, you 
enter the fine old hall, some sixty feet in length, 
and broad and lofty in proportion. It is lighted 
by six windows of modern stained glass, on one 
side, and by the immense and magnificent arch 
of another window at the farther end of the room, 
its rich and ancient panes constituting a genuine 
historical piece, in which are represented some 
of the kingly personages of old times, with their 
heraldic blazonries. Notwithstanding the col- 
460 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

ored light thus thrown into the hall, and though 
it was noonday when I last saw it, the panelling 
of black oak, and some faded tapestry that hung 
round the walls, together with the cloudy vault 
of the roof above, made a gloom, which the 
richness only illuminated into more appreciable 
effect. The tapestry is wrought with figures in 
the dress of Henry VI.’s time (which is the date 
of the hall), and is regarded by antiquaries as 
authentic evidence both for the costume of that 
epoch, and, I believe, for the actual portraiture 
of men known in history. They are as col¬ 
orless as ghosts, however, and vanish drearily 
into the old stitch-work of their substance when 
you try to make them out. Coats of arms were 
formerly emblazoned all round the hall, but 
have been almost rubbed out by people hanging 
their overcoats against them, or by women with 
dish-clouts and scrubbing-brushes, obliterating 
hereditary glories in their blind hostility to dust 
and spiders* webs. Full-length portraits of sev¬ 
eral English kings, Charles II. being the earli¬ 
est, hang on the walls; and on the dais, or ele¬ 
vated part of the floor, stands an antique chair 
of state, which several royal characters are tra¬ 
ditionally said to have occupied while feasting 
here with their loyal subjects of Coventry. It 
is roomy enough for a person of kingly bulk, 
or even two such, but angular and uncomforta¬ 
ble, reminding me of the oaken settles which 
461 


OUR OLD HOME 

used to be seen in old-fashioned New England 
kitchens. 

Overhead, supported by a self-sustaining 
power, without the aid of a single pillar, is the 
original ceiling of oak, precisely similar in shape 
to the roof of a barn, with all the beams and 
rafters plainly to be seen. At the remote height 
of sixty feet, you hardly discern that they are 
carved with figures of angels, and doubtless 
many other devices, of which the admirable 
Gothic art is wasted in the duskiness that has so 
long been brooding there. Over the entrance 
of the hall, opposite the great arched window, 
the party-colored radiance of which glimmers 
faintly through the interval, is a gallery for min¬ 
strels ; and a row of ancient suits of armor is 
suspended from its balustrade. It impresses me, 
too (for, having gone so far, I would fain leave 
nothing untouched upon), that I remember, 
somewhere about these venerable precincts, a 
picture of the Countess Godiva on horseback, in 
which the artist has been so niggardly of that 
illustrious lady's hair, that, if she had no ampler 
garniture, there was certainly much need for the 
good people of Coventry to shut their eyes. 
After all my pains, I fear that I have made but 
a poor hand at the description, as regards a trans¬ 
ference of the scene from my own mind to the 
reader's. It gave me a most vivid idea of an¬ 
tiquity that had been very little tampered with; 

462 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

insomuch that, if a group of steel-clad knights 
had come clanking through the doorway, and a 
bearded and beruffed old figure had handed in 
a stately dame, rustling in gorgeous robes of a 
long-forgotten fashion, unveiling a face of beauty 
somewhat tarnished in the mouldy tomb, yet 
stepping majestically to the trill of harp and 
viol from the minstrels' gallery, while the rusty 
armor responded with a hollow ringing sound 
beneath, — why, I should have felt that these 
shadows, once so familiar with the spot, had a 
better right in St. Mary's Hall than I, a stran¬ 
ger from a far country which has no Past. But 
the moral of the foregoing description is to show 
how tenaciously this love of pompous dinners, 
this reverence for dinner as a sacred institution, 
has caught hold of the English character; since, 
from the earliest recognizable period, we find 
them building their civic banqueting-halls as 
magnificently as their palaces or cathedrals. 

I know not whether the hall just described 
is now used for festive purposes, but others 
of similar antiquity and splendor still are. For 
example, there is Barber Surgeons' Hall, in 
London, a very fine old room, adorned with 
admirably carved wood-work on the ceiling and 
walls. It is also enriched with Holbein’s mas¬ 
terpiece, representing a grave assemblage of 
barbers and surgeons, all portraits (with such 
extensive beards that methinks one half of the 
463 


OUR OLD HOME 


company might have been profitably occupied 
in trimming the other), kneeling before King 
Henry VIII. Sir Robert Peel is said to have 
offered a thousand pounds for the liberty of 
cutting out one of the heads from this picture, he 
conditioning to have a perfect facsimile painted 
in . 1 The room has many other pictures of dis¬ 
tinguished members of the company in long-past 
times, and of some of the monarchs and states¬ 
men of England, all darkened with age, but dark¬ 
ened into such ripe magnificence as only age 
could bestow. It is not my design to inflict 
any more specimens of ancient hall-painting on 
the reader ; but it may be worth while to touch 
upon other modes of stateliness that still sur¬ 
vive in these time-honored civic feasts, where 
there appears to be a singular assumption of 
dignity and solemn pomp by respectable citi¬ 
zens who would never dream of claiming any 
privilege of rank outside of their own sphere. 
Thus, I saw two caps of state for the warden 
and junior warden of the company, caps of sil- 

1 In this room hangs the most valuable picture by Holbein now in exist¬ 
ence, representing the company of Barber Surgeons kneeling before Henry 
VIII., and receiving their charter from his hands. The picture is about six 
feet square. The king is dressed in scarlet, and quite fulfils one’s idea of 
his aspect. The Barber Surgeons, all portraits, are an assemblage of grave¬ 
looking personages, in dark costumes. The company has refused five thou¬ 
sand pounds for this unique picture ; and the keeper of the Hall told me that 
Sir Robert Peel had offered a thousand pounds for liberty to take out only 
one of the heads, that of a person named Penn, he conditioning to have a 
perfect facsimile painted in. I did not see any merit in this head over the 
others. —Notes of Travel , II. 49. 

464 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

ver (real coronets or crowns, indeed, for these 
city grandees) wrought in open-work and lined 
with crimson velvet. In a strong closet, open¬ 
ing from the hall, there was a great deal of rich 
plate to furnish forth the banquet-table, com¬ 
prising hundreds of forks and spoons, a vast 
silver punch-bowl, the gift of some jolly king 
or other, and, besides a multitude of less notice¬ 
able vessels, two loving-cups, very elaborately 
wrought in silver gilt, one presented by Henry 
VIII., the other by Charles II. These cups, 
including the covers and pedestals, are very large 
and weighty, although the bowl-part would 
hardly contain more than half a pint of wine, 
which, when the custom was first established, 
each guest was probably expected to drink off 
at a draught. In passing them from hand to 
hand adown a long table of compotators, there 
is a peculiar ceremony which I may hereafter 
have occasion to describe. Meanwhile, if I 
might assume such a liberty, I should be glad 
to invite the reader to the official dinner-table 
of his Worship, the Mayor, at a large English 
seaport where I spent several years. 

The Mayor's dinner-parties occur as often as 
once a fortnight, and, inviting his guests by fifty 
or sixty at a time, his Worship probably assem¬ 
bles at his board most of the eminent citizens 
and distinguished personages of the town and 
neighborhood more than once during his year's 
465 


OUR OLD HOME 


incumbency, and very much, no doubt, to the 
promotion of good feeling among individuals 
of opposite parties and diverse pursuits in life. 
A miscellaneous party of Englishmen can always 
find more comfortable ground to meet upon 
than as many Americans, their differences of 
opinion being incomparably less radical than 
ours, and it being the sincerest wish of all their 
hearts, whether they call themselves Liberals or 
what not, that nothing in this world shall ever 
be greatly altered from what it has been and is. 
Thus there is seldom such a virulence of political 
hostility that it may not be dissolved in a glass 
or two of wine, without making the good liquor 
any more dry or bitter than accords with Eng¬ 
lish taste. 

The first dinner of this kind at which I had 
the honor to be present took place during as¬ 
size time, and included among the guests the 
judges and the prominent members of the bar. 
Reaching the Town Hall at seven o’clock, I 
communicated my name to one of several splen¬ 
didly dressed footmen, and he repeated it to 
another on the first staircase, by whom it was 
passed to a third, and thence to a fourth at the 
door of the reception-room, losing all resem¬ 
blance to the original sound in the course of 
these transmissions ; so that I had the advan¬ 
tage of making my entrance in the character of 
a stranger, not only to the whole company, but 
466 


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to myself as well. His Worship, however, 
kindly recognized me, and put me on speaking- 
terms with two or three gentlemen, whom I 
found very affable, and all the more hospitably 
attentive on the score of my nationality. It is 
very singular how kind an Englishman will al¬ 
most invariably be to an individual American, 
without ever bating a jot of his prejudice against 
the American character in the lump. My new 
acquaintances took evident pains to put me at 
my ease; and, in requital of their good-nature, 
I soon began to look round at the general com¬ 
pany in a critical spirit, making my crude obser¬ 
vations apart, and drawing silent inferences, of 
the correctness of which I should not have been 
half so well satisfied a year afterwards as at that 
moment. 

There were two judges present, a good many 
lawyers, and a few officers of the army in uni¬ 
form. The other guests seemed to be princi¬ 
pally of the mercantile class, and among them 
was a ship-owner from Nova Scotia, with whom 
I coalesced a little, inasmuch as we were born 
with the same sky over our heads, and an un¬ 
broken continuity of soil between his abode and 
mine. There was one old gentleman, whose 
character I never made out, with powdered hair, 
clad in black breeches and silk stockings, and 
wearing a rapier at his side ; otherwise, with the 
exception of the military uniforms, there was 
467 


OUR OLD HOME 


little or no pretence of official costume. It 
being the first considerable assemblage of Eng¬ 
lishmen that I had seen, my honest impres¬ 
sion about them was that they were a heavy and 
homely set of people, with a remarkable rough¬ 
ness of aspect and behavior, not repulsive, but 
beneath which it required more familiarity with 
the national character than I then possessed 
always to detect the good-breeding of a gentle¬ 
man. Being generally middle-aged, or still fur¬ 
ther advanced, they were by no means graceful 
in figure ; for the comeliness of the youthful 
Englishman rapidly diminishes with years, his 
body appearing to grow longer, his legs to ab¬ 
breviate themselves, and his stomach to assume 
the dignified prominence which justly belongs to 
that metropolis of his system. His face (what 
with the acridity of the atmosphere, ale at lunch, 
wine at dinner, and a well-digested abundance 
of succulent food) gets red and mottled, and 
develops at least one additional chin, with a 
promise of more ; so that, finally, a stranger re¬ 
cognizes his animal part at the most superficial 
glance, but must take time and a little pains to 
discover the intellectual. Comparing him with 
an American, I really thought that our national 
paleness and lean habit of flesh gave us greatly 
the advantage in an aesthetic point of view. It 
seemed to me, moreover, that the English tailor 
had not done so much as he might and ought 
468 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

for these heavy figures, but had gone on wil¬ 
fully exaggerating their uncouthness by the 
roominess of their garments ; he had evidently 
no idea of accuracy of fit, and smartness was en¬ 
tirely out of his line. But, to be quite open with 
the reader, I afterwards learned to think that 
this aforesaid tailor has a deeper art than his 
brethren among ourselves, knowing how to dress 
his customers with such individual propriety 
that they look as if they were born in their 
clothes, the fit being to the character rather than 
the form. If you make an Englishman smart 
(unless he be a very exceptional one, of whom I 
have seen a few), you make him a monster; his 
best aspect is that of ponderous respectability. 

To make an end of these first impressions, I 
fancied that not merely the Suffolk bar, but the 
bar of any inland county in New England, might 
show a set of thin-visaged men looking wretch¬ 
edly worn, sallow, deeply wrinkled across the 
forehead, and grimly furrowed about the mouth, 
with whom these heavy-cheeked English law¬ 
yers, slow-paced and fat-witted as they must 
needs be, would stand very little chance in a 
professional contest. How that matter might 
turn out, I am unqualified to decide. But I 
state these results of my earliest glimpses at 
Englishmen, not for what they are worth, but 
because I ultimately gave them up as worth 
little or nothing. In course of time, I came to 
469 


OUR OLD HOME 


the conclusion that Englishmen of all ages are 
a rather good-looking people, dress in admir¬ 
able taste from their own point of view, and, 
under a surface never silken to the touch, have 
a refinement of manners too thorough and gen¬ 
uine to be thought of as a separate endowment, 
— that is to say, if the individual himself be a 
man of station, and has had gentlemen for his 
father and grandfather. The sturdy Anglo- 
Saxon nature does not refine itself short of the 
third generation. The tradesmen, too, and all 
other classes, have their own proprieties. 

The only value of my criticisms, therefore, 
lay in their exemplifying the proneness of a trav¬ 
eller to measure one people by the distinctive 
characteristics of another, — as English writers 
invariably measure us, and take upon them¬ 
selves to be disgusted accordingly, instead of 
trying to find out some principle of beauty 
with which we may be in conformity. 

In due time we were summoned to the table, 
and went thither in no solemn procession, but 
with a good deal of jostling, thrusting behind, 
and scrambling for places when we reached our 
destination. The legal gentlemen, I suspect, 
were responsible for this indecorous zeal, which 
I never afterwards remarked in a similar party. 
The dining-hall was of noble size, and, like the 
other rooms of the suite, was gorgeously painted 
and gilded and brilliantly illuminated. There 
470 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

was a splendid table-service, and a noble array 
of footmen, some of them in plain clothes, and 
others wearing the town livery, richly decorated 
with gold lace, and themselves excellent spe¬ 
cimens of the blooming young manhood of 
Britain. When we were fairly seated, it was 
certainly an agreeable spectacle to look up and 
down the long vista of earnest faces, and behold 
them so resolute, so conscious that there was 
an important business in hand, and so deter¬ 
mined to be equal to the occasion. Indeed, 
Englishman or not, I hardly know what can be 
prettier than a snow-white tablecloth, a huge 
heap of flowers as a central decoration, bright 
silver, rich china, crystal glasses, decanters of 
Sherry at due intervals, a French roll and an 
artistically folded napkin at each plate, all that 
airy portion of a banquet, in short, that comes 
before the first mouthful, the whole illuminated 
by a blaze of artificial light, without which a din¬ 
ner of made-dishes looks spectral, and the sim¬ 
plest viands are the best. Printed bills of fare 
were distributed, representing an abundant feast, 
no part of which appeared on the table until 
called for in separate plates. I have entirely 
forgotten what it was, but deem it no great mat¬ 
ter, inasmuch as there is a pervading common¬ 
place and identicalness in the composition of ex¬ 
tensive dinners, on account of the impossibility 
of supplying a hundred guests with anything 
47 1 


OUR OLD HOME 


particularly delicate or rare. It was suggested 
to me that certain juicy old gentlemen had a pri¬ 
vate understanding what to call for, and that it 
would be good policy in a stranger to follow in 
their footsteps through the feast. I did not care 
to do so, however, because, like Sancho Panza’s 
dip out of Camacho's caldron, any sort of pot- 
luck at such a table would be sure to suit my 
purpose; so I chose a dish or two on my own 
judgment, and, getting through my labors 
betimes, had great pleasure in seeing the Eng¬ 
lishmen toil onward to the end. 

They drank rather copiously, too, though 
wisely; for I observed that they seldom took 
Hock, and let the Champagne bubble slowly 
away out of the goblet, solacing themselves with 
Sherry, but tasting it warily before bestowing 
their final confidence. Their taste in wines, how¬ 
ever, did not seem so exquisite, and certainly 
was not so various, as that to which many Amer¬ 
icans pretend. This foppery of an intimate 
acquaintance with rare vintages does not suit a 
sensible Englishman, as he is very much in ear¬ 
nest about his wines, and adopts one or two as 
his lifelong friends, seldom exchanging them for 
any Delilahs of a moment, and reaping the re¬ 
ward of his constancy in an unimpaired stomach, 
and only so much gout as he deems wholesome 
and desirable. Knowing well the measure of his 
powers, he is not apt to fill his glass too often. 
47 2 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

Society, indeed, would hardly tolerate habitual 
imprudences of that kind, though, in my opin¬ 
ion,'the Englishmen now upon the stage could 
carry off their three bottles, at need, with as 
steady a gait as any of their forefathers. It is 
not so very long since the three-bottle heroes 
sank finally under the table. It may be (at 
least, I should be glad if it were true) that there 
was an occult sympathy between our temper¬ 
ance reform, now somewhat in abeyance, and 
the almost simultaneous disappearance of hard- 
drinking among the respectable classes in Eng¬ 
land. I remember a middle-aged gentleman 
telling me (in illustration of the very slight 
importance attached to breaches of temperance 
within the memory of men not yet old) that he 
had seen a certain magistrate. Sir John Link- 
water, or Drinkwater, — but I think the jolly 
old knight could hardly have staggered under 
so perverse a misnomer as this last, — while sit¬ 
ting on the magisterial bench, pull out a crown- 
piece and hand it to the clerk. “ Mr. Clerk,” 
said Sir John, as if it were the most indifferent 
fact in the world, “ I was drunk last night. 
There are my five shillings.” 

During the dinner, I had a good deal of 
pleasant conversation with the gentlemen on 
either side of me. One of them, a lawyer, ex¬ 
patiated with great unction on the social stand¬ 
ing of the judges. Representing the dignity 
473 


OUR OLD HOME 


and authority of the Crown, they take prece¬ 
dence, during assize time, of the highest military 
men in the kingdom, of the Lord Lieutenant 
of the county, of the Archbishops, of the royal 
Dukes, and even of the Prince of Wales. For 
the nonce, they are the greatest men in Eng¬ 
land. With a glow of professional complacency 
that amounted to enthusiasm, my friend assured 
me, that, in case of a royal dinner, a judge, if 
actually holding an assize, would be expected to 
offer his arm and take the Queen herself to the 
table. Happening to be in company with some 
of these elevated personages, on subsequent 
occasions, it appeared to me that the judges 
are fully conscious of their paramount claims to 
respect, and take rather more pains to impress 
them on their ceremonial inferiors than men of 
high hereditary rank are apt to do. Bishops, if 
it be not irreverent to say so, are sometimes 
marked by a similar characteristic. Dignified 
position is so sweet to an Englishman, that he 
needs to be born in it, and to feel it thoroughly 
incorporated with his nature from its original 
germ, in order to keep him from flaunting it 
obtrusively in the faces of innocent bystanders. 

My companion on the other side was a thick¬ 
set, middle-aged man, uncouth in manners, and 
ugly where none were handsome, with a dark, 
roughly hewn visage, that looked grim in re¬ 
pose, and seemed to hold within itself the 
474 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

machinery of a very terrific frown. He ate with 
resolute appetite, and let slip few opportunities 
of imbibing whatever liquids happened to be 
passing by. I was meditating in what way this 
grisly featured table-fellow might most safely 
be accosted, when he turned to me with a surly 
sort of kindness, and invited me to take a glass 
of wine. We then began a conversation that 
abounded, on his part, with sturdy sense, and, 
somehow or other, brought me closer to him 
than I had yet stood to an Englishman. I 
should hardly have taken him to be an educated 
man, certainly not a scholar of accurate training; 
and yet he seemed to have all the resources of 
education and trained intellectual power at com¬ 
mand. My fresh Americanism, and watchful 
observation of English characteristics, appeared 
either to interest or amuse him, or perhaps both. 
Under the mollifying influences of abundance 
of meat and drink, he grew very gracious (not 
that I ought to use such a phrase to describe 
his evidently genuine good-will), and by and 
by expressed a wish for further acquaintance, 
asking me to call at his rooms in London and 
inquire for Sergeant Wilkins, — throwing out 
the name forcibly, as if he had no occasion to 
be ashamed of it. I remembered Dean Swift's 
retort to Sergeant Bettesworth on a similar an¬ 
nouncement,— “ Of what regiment, pray, sir? ” 
— and fancied that the same question might 
475 


OUR OLD HOME 


not have been quite amiss, if applied to the 
rugged individual at my side. But I heard of 
him subsequently as one of the prominent men 
at the English bar, a rough customer, and a 
terribly strong champion in criminal cases ; 
and it caused me more regret than might have 
been expected, on so slight an acquaintanceship, 
when, not long afterwards, I saw his death an¬ 
nounced in the newspapers. Not rich in attrac¬ 
tive qualities, he possessed, I think, the most 
attractive one of all, — thorough manhood. 

After the cloth was removed, a goodly group 
of decanters were set before the Mayor, who 
sent them forth on their outward voyage, full 
freighted with Port, Sherry, Madeira, and Claret, 
of which excellent liquors, methought, the lat¬ 
ter found least acceptance among the guests. 
When every man had filled his glass, his Wor¬ 
ship stood up and proposed a toast. It was, 
of course, “ Our gracious Sovereign,” or words 
to that effect; and immediately a band of mu¬ 
sicians, whose preliminary tootings and thrum¬ 
mings I had already heard behind me, struck 
up “ God save the Queen! ” and the whole 
company rose with one impulse to assist in sing¬ 
ing that famous national anthem. It was the 
first time in my life that I had ever seen a body 
of men, or even a single man, under the active 
influence of the sentiment of Loyalty ; for, 
though we call ourselves loyal to our country 
476 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

and institutions, and prove it by our readiness 
to shed blood and sacrifice life in their behalf, 
still the principle is as cold and hard, in an 
American bosom, as the steel spring that puts 
in motion a powerful machinery. In the Eng¬ 
lishman's system, a force similar to that of our 
steel spring is generated by the warm throb- 
bings of human hearts. He clothes our bare 
abstraction in flesh and blood, — at present, in 
the flesh and blood of a woman, — and man¬ 
ages to combine love, awe, and intellectual rev¬ 
erence, all in one emotion, and to embody his 
mother, his wife, his children, the whole idea 
of kindred, in a single person, and make her 
the representative of his country and its laws. 
We Americans smile superior, as I did at the 
Mayor’s table ; and yet, I fancy, we lose some 
very agreeable titillations of the heart in con¬ 
sequence of our proud prerogative of caring 
no more about our President than for a man 
of straw, or a stuffed scarecrow straddling in a 
cornfield. 

But, to say the truth, the spectacle struck me 
rather ludicrously, to see this party of stout 
middle-aged and elderly gentlemen, in the ful¬ 
ness of meat and drink, their ample and ruddy 
faces glistening with wine, perspiration, and 
enthusiasm, rumbling out those strange old 
stanzas from the very bottom of their hearts 
and stomachs, which two organs, in the English 
477 


OUR OLD HOME 

interior arrangement, lie closer together than in 
ours. The song seemed to me the rudest old 
ditty in the world ; but I could not wonder at 
its universal acceptance and indestructible pop¬ 
ularity, considering how inimitably it expresses 
the national faith and feeling as regards the 
inevitable righteousness of England, the Al¬ 
mighty's consequent respect and partiality for 
that redoubtable little island, and his presumed 
readiness to strengthen its defence against the 
contumacious wickedness and knavery of all 
other principalities or republics. Tennyson 
himself, though evidently English to the very 
last prejudice, could not write half so good a 
song for the purpose. Finding that the entire 
dinner-table struck in, with voices of every 
pitch between rolling thunder and the squeak 
of a cart-wheel, and that the strain was not of 
such delicacy as to be much hurt by the harsh¬ 
est of them, I determined to lend my own as¬ 
sistance in swelling the triumphant roar. It 
seemed but a proper courtesy to the first Lady 
in the land, whose guest, in the largest sense, I 
might consider myself. Accordingly, my first 
tuneful efforts (and probably my last, for I pur¬ 
pose not to sing any more, unless it be “ Hail 
Columbia ” on the restoration of the Union) 
were poured freely forth in honor of Queen 
Victoria. The Sergeant smiled like the carved 
head of a Swiss nut-cracker, and the other gen- 
478 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

tlemen in my neighborhood, by nods and ges¬ 
tures, evinced grave approbation of so suitable a 
tribute to English superiority ; and we finished 
our stave and sat down in an extremely happy 
frame of mind. 

Other toasts followed in honor of the great 
institutions and interests of the country, and 
speeches in response to each were made by in¬ 
dividuals whom the Mayor designated or the 
company called for. None of them impressed 
me with a very high idea of English postpran¬ 
dial oratory. It is inconceivable, indeed, what 
ragged and shapeless utterances most English¬ 
men are satisfied to give vent to, without at¬ 
tempting anything like artistic shape, but clap¬ 
ping on a patch here and another there, and 
ultimately getting out what they want to say, 
and generally with a result of sufficiently good 
sense, but in some such disorganized mass as 
if they had thrown it up rather than spoken 
it. It seemed to me that this was almost as 
much by choice as necessity. An Englishman, 
ambitious of public favor, should not be too 
smooth. If an orator is glib, his countrymen 
distrust him. They dislike smartness. The 
stronger and heavier his thoughts, the better, 
provided there be an element of commonplace 
running through them; and any rough, yet 
never vulgar, force of expression, such as would 
knock an opponent down if it hit him, only it 
479 


OUR OLD HOME 


must not be too personal, is altogether to their 
taste ; but a studied neatness of language, or 
other such superficial graces, they cannot abide. 
They do not often permit a man to make him¬ 
self a fine orator of malice aforethought, that is, 
unless he be a nobleman (as, for example. Lord 
Stanley, of the Derby family), who, as an hered¬ 
itary legislator and necessarily a public speaker, 
is bound to remedy a poor natural delivery in 
the best way he can. On the whole, I partly 
agree with them, and, if I cared for any oratory 
whatever, should be as likely to applaud theirs 
as our own. When an English speaker sits 
down, you feel that you have been listening to 
a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments 
have a wholesome earth-smell in them, though, 
very likely, this apparent naturalness is as much 
an art as what we expend in rounding a sen¬ 
tence or elaborating a peroration. 

It is one good effect of this inartificial style, 
that nobody in England seems to feel any 
shyness about shovelling the untrimmed and 
untrimmable ideas out of his mind for the bene¬ 
fit of an audience. At least, nobody did on the 
occasion now in hand, except a poor little Ma¬ 
jor of Artillery, who responded for the Army 
in a thin, quavering voice, with a terribly hesi¬ 
tating trickle of fragmentary ideas, and, I ques¬ 
tion not, would rather have been bayoneted in 
front of his batteries than to have said a word. 

480 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

Not his own mouth, but the cannon’s, was this 
poor Major’s proper organ of utterance. 

While I was thus amiably occupied in criti¬ 
cising my fellow guests, the Mayor had got up 
to propose another toast; and listening rather 
inattentively to the first sentence or two, I soon 
became sensible of a drift in his Worship’s 
remarks that made me glance apprehensively 
towards Sergeant Wilkins. cc Yes,” grumbled 
that gruff personage, shoving a decanter of Port 
towards me, “ it is your turn next; ” and see¬ 
ing in my face, I suppose, the consternation of 
a wholly unpractised orator, he kindly added, 
cc It is nothing. A mere acknowledgment will 
answer the purpose. The less you say, the bet¬ 
ter they will like it.” That being the case, I 
suggested that perhaps they would like it best 
if I said nothing at all. But the Sergeant shook 
his head. Now, on first receiving the Mayor’s 
invitation to dinner, it had occurred to me that 
I might possibly be brought into my present 
predicament; but I had dismissed the idea from 
my mind as too disagreeable to be entertained, 
and, moreover, as so alien from my disposition 
and character that Fate surely could not keep 
such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing 
else prevented, an earthquake or the crack of 
doom would certainly interfere before I need 
rise to speak. Yet here was the Mayor getting 
on inexorably, — and, indeed, I heartily wished 
481 


OUR OLD HOME 


that he might get on and on forever, and of his 
wordy wanderings find no end. 

If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and 
closest confidant, deigns to desire it, I can im¬ 
part to him my own experience as a public 
speaker quite as indifferently as if it concerned 
another person. Indeed, it does concern an¬ 
other, or a mere spectral phenomenon, for it 
was not I, in my proper and natural self, that 
sat there at table or subsequently rose to speak. 
At the moment, then, if the choice had been 
offered me whether the Mayor should let off a 
speech at my head or a pistol, I should unhesi¬ 
tatingly have taken the latter alternative. I 
had really nothing to say, not an idea in my 
head, nor, which was a great deal worse, any 
flowing words or embroidered sentences in which 
to dress out that empty Nothing, and give it a 
cunning aspect of intelligence, such as might 
last the poor vacuity the little time it had to live. 
But time pressed; the Mayor brought his re¬ 
marks, affectionately eulogistic of the United 
States and highly complimentary to their distin¬ 
guished representative at that table, to a close, 
amid a vast deal of cheering; and the band 
struck up “ Hail Columbia,” I believe, though 
it might have been “ Old Hundred,” or “ God 
save the Queen ” over again, for anything that 
I should have known or cared. When the 
music ceased, there was an intensely disagreeable 
482 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

instant, during which I seemed to rend away 
and fling off the habit of a lifetime, and rose, 
still void of ideas, but with preternatural com¬ 
posure, to make a speech. The guests rattled 
on the table, and cried, “ Hear ! ” most vocifer¬ 
ously, as if now, at length, in this foolish and 
idly garrulous world, had come the long-ex¬ 
pected moment when one golden word was to 
be spoken ; and in that imminent crisis, I caught 
a glimpse of a little bit of an effusion of inter¬ 
national sentiment, which it might, and must, 
and should do to utter. 

Well; it was nothing, as the Sergeant had 
said. What surprised me most was the sound 
of my own voice, which I had never before 
heard at declamatory pitch, and which impressed 
me as belonging to some other person, who, 
and not myself, would be responsible for the 
speech : a prodigious consolation and encour¬ 
agement under the circumstances! I went on 
without the slightest embarrassment, and sat 
down amid great applause, wholly undeserved 
by anything that I had spoken, but well won 
from Englishmen, methought, by the new de¬ 
velopment of pluck that alone had enabled me 
to speak at all. “It was handsomely done ! ” 
quoth Sergeant Wilkins; and I felt like a re¬ 
cruit who had been for the first time under fire . 1 


1 Anybody may make an after-dinner speech who will be content to talk 
onward without saying anything. My speech was not more than two or 

483 


OUR OLD HOME 


I would gladly have ended my oratorical ca¬ 
reer then and there forever, but was often placed 
in a similar or worse position, and compelled to 
meet it as I best might; for this was one of the 
necessities of an office which I had voluntarily 
taken on my shoulders, and beneath which I 
might be crushed by no moral delinquency on 
my own part, but could not shirk without cow¬ 
ardice and shame. My subsequent fortune was 
various. Once, though I felt it to be a kind of 
imposture, I got a speech by heart, and doubt¬ 
less it might have been a very pretty one, only 
I forgot every syllable at the moment of need, 
and had to improvise another as well as I could. 
I found it a better method to prearrange a few 
points in my mind, and trust to the spur of 
the occasion, and the kind aid of Providence, 
for enabling me to bring them to bear. The 
presence of any considerable proportion of 
personal friends generally dumfounded me. I 
would rather have talked with an enemy in the 
gate. Invariably, too, I was much embarrassed 
by a small audience, and succeeded better with 
a large one, — the sympathy of a multitude 
possessing a buoyant effect, which lifts the 

three inches long ; and, considering that I did not know a soul there, 
except the Mayor himself, and that I am wholly unpractised in all sorts of 
oratory, and that I had nothing to say, it was quite successful. I hardly 
thought it was in me, but, being once started, I felt no embarrassment, and 
went through it as coolly as if I were going to be hanged. — Notes of 
Travel , I. 19. 


48+ 



CIVIC BANQUETS 

speaker a little way out of his individuality, 
and tosses him towards a perhaps better range 
of sentiment than his private one. Again, if I 
rose carelessly and confidently, with an expec¬ 
tation of going through the business entirely 
at my ease, I often found that I had little or 
nothing to say ; whereas, if I came to the charge 
in perfect despair, and at a crisis when failure 
would have been horrible, it once or twice hap¬ 
pened that the frightful emergency concentrated 
my poor faculties, and enabled me to give 
definite and vigorous expression to sentiments 
which an instant before looked as vague and 
far off as the clouds in the atmosphere. On 
the whole, poor as my own success may have 
been, I apprehend that any intelligent man with 
a tongue possesses the chief requisite of orator¬ 
ical power, and may develop many of the others, 
if he deems it worth while to bestow a great 
amount of labor and pains on an object which 
the most accomplished orators, I suspect, have 
not found altogether satisfactory to their highest 
impulses. At any rate, it must be a remarkably 
true man who can keep his own elevated con¬ 
ception of truth when the lower feeling of a 
multitude is assailing his natural sympathies, 
and who can speak out frankly the best that 
there is in him, when by adulterating it a little, 
or a good deal, he knows that he may make it 
ten times as acceptable to the audience. 

485 


OUR OLD HOME 


This slight article on the civic banquets of 
England would be too wretchedly imperfect 
without an attempted description of a Lord 
Mayor’s dinner at the Mansion House in Lon¬ 
don. I should have preferred the annual feast 
at Guildhall, but never had the good fortune to 
witness it. Once, however, I was honored with 
an invitation to one of the regular dinners, and 
gladly accepted it, — taking the precaution, 
nevertheless, though it hardly seemed necessary, 
to inform the City King, through a mutual 
friend, that I was no fit representative of Amer¬ 
ican eloquence, and must humbly make it a con¬ 
dition that I should not be expected to open 
my mouth, except for the reception of his Lord¬ 
ship’s bountiful hospitality. The reply was gra¬ 
cious and acquiescent; so that I presented 
myself in the great entrance-hall of the Mansion 
House, at half-past six o’clock, in a state of most 
enjoyable freedom from the pusillanimous ap¬ 
prehensions that often tormented me at such 
times. The Mansion House was built in Queen 
Anne’s days, in the very heart of old London, 
and is a palace worthy of its inhabitant, were 
he really as great a man as his traditionary state 
and pomp would seem to indicate. Times are 
changed, however, since the days of Whitting¬ 
ton, or even of Hogarth’s Industrious Appren¬ 
tice, to whom the highest imaginable reward of 
lifelong integrity was a seat in the Lord Mayor’s 
486 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

chair. People nowadays say that the real dig¬ 
nity and importance have perished out of the 
office, as they do, sooner or later, out of all 
earthly institutions, leaving only a painted and 
gilded shell like that of an Easter egg, and that 
it is only second-rate and third-rate men who 
now condescend to be ambitious of the Mayor¬ 
alty. I felt a little grieved at this ; for the origi¬ 
nal emigrants of New England had strong sym¬ 
pathies with the people of London, who were 
mostly Puritans in religion and Parliamentarians 
in politics, in the early days of our country; so 
that the Lord Mayor was a potentate of huge 
dimensions in the estimation of our forefathers, 
and held to be hardly second to the prime 
minister of the throne. The true great men of 
this city now appear to have aims beyond city 
greatness, connecting themselves with national 
politics, and seeking to be identified with the 
aristocracy of the country. 

In the entrance-hall I was received by a body 
of footmen dressed in a livery of blue coats and 
buff breeches, in which they looked wonderfully 
like American Revolutionary generals, only be¬ 
dizened with far more lace and embroidery than 
those simple and grand old heroes ever dreamed 
of wearing. There were likewise two very im¬ 
posing figures, whom I should have taken to be 
military men of rank, being arrayed in scarlet 
coats and large silver epaulets; but they turned 
487 


OUR OLD HOME 


out to be officers of the Lord Mayor's house¬ 
hold, and were now employed in assigning to 
the guests the places which they were respec¬ 
tively to occupy at the dinner-table. Our names 
(for I had included myself in a little group of 
friends) were announced; and ascending the 
staircase, we met his Lordship in the doorway 
of the first reception-room, where, also, we had 
the advantage of a presentation to the Lady 
Mayoress. As this distinguished couple retired 
into private life at the termination of their year 
of office, it is inadmissible to make any remarks, 
critical or laudatory, on the manners and bear¬ 
ing of two personages suddenly emerging from 
a position of respectable mediocrity into one 
of preeminent dignity within their own sphere. 
Such individuals almost always seem to grow 
nearly or quite to the full size of their office. 
If it were desirable to write an essay on the 
latent aptitude of ordinary people for grand¬ 
eur, we have an exemplification in our own 
country, and on a scale incomparably greater 
than that of the Mayoralty, though invested 
with nothing like the outward magnificence that 
gilds and embroiders the latter. If I have been 
correctly informed, the Lord Mayor's salary is 
exactly double that of the President of the 
United States, and yet is found very inadequate 
to his necessary expenditure. 

There were two reception-rooms, thrown into 
488 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

one by the opening of wide folding-doors; and 
though in an old style, and not yet so old as to 
be venerable, they are remarkably handsome 
apartments, lofty as well as spacious, with carved 
ceilings and walls, and at either end a splendid 
fireplace of white marble, ornamented with 
sculptured wreaths of flowers and foliage. The 
company were about three hundred, many of 
them celebrities in politics, war, literature, and 
science, though I recollect none preeminently 
distinguished in either department. But it is 
certainly a pleasant mode of doing honor to men 
of literature, for example, who deserve well of 
the public, yet do not often meet it face to face, 
thus to bring them together under genial au¬ 
spices, in connection with persons of note in 
other lines. I know not what may be the Lord 
Mayor’s mode or principle of selecting his 
guests, nor whether, during his official term, he 
can proffer his hospitality to every man of no¬ 
ticeable talent in the wide world of London, 
nor, in fine, whether his Lordship’s invitation is 
much sought for or valued ; but it seemed to 
me that this periodical feast is one of the many 
sagacious methods which the English have con¬ 
trived for keeping up a good understanding 
among different sorts of people. Like most 
oth^r distinctions of society, however, I presume 
that the Lord Mayor’s card does not often seek 
out modest merit, but comes at last when the 
489 


OUR OLD HOME 


recipient is conscious of the bore, and doubtful 
about the honor. 

One very pleasant characteristic, which I 
never met with at any other public or partially 
public dinner, was the presence of ladies. No 
doubt, they were principally the wives and 
daughters of city magnates ; and if we may judge 
from the many sly allusions in old plays and 
satirical poems, the city of London has always 
been famous for the beauty of its women and 
the reciprocal attractions between them and the 
men of quality. Be that as it might, while stray¬ 
ing hither and thither through those crowded 
apartments, I saw much reason for modifying 
certain heterodox opinions which I had imbibed, 
in my Transatlantic newness and rawness, as 
regarded the delicate character and frequent oc¬ 
currence of English beauty. To state the entire 
truth (being, at this period, some years old in 
English life), my taste, I fear, had long since 
begun to be deteriorated by acquaintance with 
other models of feminine loveliness than it was 
my happiness to know in America. I often 
found, or seemed to find, if I may dare to con¬ 
fess it, in the persons of such of my dear coun¬ 
trywomen as I now occasionally met, a certain 
meagreness (Heaven forbid that I should call it 
scrawniness !), a deficiency of physical develop¬ 
ment, a scantiness, so to speak, in the pattern 
of their material make, a paleness of complexion, 
490 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

a thinness of voice, — all of which characteris¬ 
tics, nevertheless, only made me resolve so much 
the more sturdily to uphold these fair creatures 
as angels, because I was sometimes driven to a 
half acknowledgment that the English ladies, 
looked at from a lower point of view, were per¬ 
haps a little finer animals than they. The ad¬ 
vantages of the latter, if any they could really 
be said to have, were all comprised in a few 
additional lumps of clay on their shoulders 
and other parts of their figures. It would be a 
pitiful bargain to give up the ethereal charm of 
American beauty in exchange for half a hundred¬ 
weight of human clay ! 

At a given signal we all found our way into 
an immense room, called the Egyptian Hall, I 
know not why, except that the architecture was 
classic, and as different as possible from the pon¬ 
derous style of Memphis and the Pyramids. A 
powerful band played inspiringly as we entered, 
and a brilliant profusion of light shone down on 
two long tables extending the whole length of 
the hall, and a cross-table between them, occu¬ 
pying nearly its entire breadth. Glass gleamed 
and silver glistened on an acre or two of snowy 
damask, over which were set out all the accompa¬ 
niments of a stately feast. We found our places 
without much difficulty, and the Lord Mayor’s 
chaplain implored a blessing on the food, — a 
ceremony which the English never omit, at a 
49 1 


OUR OLD HOME 


great dinner or a small one, yet consider, I fear, 
not so much a religious rite as a sort of prelimi¬ 
nary relish before the soup. 

The soup, of course, on this occasion, was 
turtle, of which, in accordance with immemorial 
custom, each guest was allowed two platefuls, in 
spite of the otherwise immitigable law of table 
decorum. Indeed, judging from the proceed¬ 
ings of the gentlemen near me, I surmised that 
there was no practical limit, except the appe¬ 
tite of the guests and the capacity of the soup 
tureens. Not being fond of this civic dainty, 
I partook of it but once, and then only in ac¬ 
cordance with the wise maxim, always to taste a 
fruit, a wine, or a celebrated dish, at its indige¬ 
nous site; and the fountain-head of turtle soup, 
I suppose, is in the Lord Mayor’s dinner-pot. 
It is one of those orthodox customs which 
people follow for half a century without know¬ 
ing why, to drink a sip of rum punch, in a very 
small tumbler, after the soup. It was excellently 
well brewed, and it seemed to me almost worth 
while to sup the soup for the sake of sipping the 
punch. The rest of the dinner was catalogued 
in a bill of fare printed on delicate white paper 
within an arabesque border of green and gold. 
It looked very good, not only in the English 
and French names of the numerous dishes, but 
also in the positive reality of the dishes them¬ 
selves, which were all set on the table to be 
492 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

carved and distributed by the guests. This an¬ 
cient and honest method is attended with a good 
deal of trouble, and a lavish effusion of gravy, 
yet by no means bestowed or dispensed in vain, 
because you have thereby the absolute assurance 
of a banquet actually before your eyes, instead of 
a shadowy promise in the bill of fare, and such 
meagre fulfilment as a single guest can contrive 
to get upon his individual plate. I wonder that 
Englishmen, who are fond of looking at prize 
oxen in the shape of butcher’s meat, do not 
generally better estimate the aesthetic gormand- 
ism of devouring the whole dinner with their 
eyesight, before proceeding to nibble the com¬ 
paratively few morsels which, after all, the most 
heroic appetite and widest stomachic capacity of 
mere mortals can enable even an alderman really 
to eat. There fell to my lot three delectable 
things enough, which I take pains to remember, 
that the reader may not go away wholly unsatis¬ 
fied from the Barmecide feast to which I have 
bidden him, — a red mullet, a plate of mush¬ 
rooms, exquisitely stewed, and part of a ptar¬ 
migan, a bird of the same family as the grouse, 
but feeding high up towards the summit of the 
Scotch mountains, whence it gets a wild delicacy 
of flavor very superior to that of the artificially 
nurtured English game-fowl. All the other 
dainties have vanished from my memory as 
completely as those of Prospero’s banquet after 
493 


OUR OLD HOME 


Ariel had clapped his wings over it. The band 
played at intervals, inspiriting us to new efforts, 
as did likewise the sparkling wines which the 
footmen supplied from an inexhaustible cellar, 
and which the guests quaffed with little appar¬ 
ent reference to the disagreeable fact that 
there comes a to-morrow morning after every 
feast. As long as that shall be the case, a pru¬ 
dent man can never have full enjoyment of his 
dinner. 

Nearly opposite to me, on the other side of 
the table, sat a young lady in white, whom I am 
sorely tempted to describe, but dare not, because 
not only the supereminence of her beauty, but its 
peculiar character, would cause the sketch to be 
recognized, however rudely it might be drawn. 
I hardly thought that there existed such a 
woman outside of a picture frame, or the covers 
of a romance : not that I had ever met with her 
resemblance even there, but, being so distinct 
and singular an apparition, she seemed likelier 
to find her sisterhood in poetry and picture than 
in real life. Let us turn away from her, lest a 
touch too apt should compel her stately and cold 
and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon 
my page with a strange repulsion and unattain¬ 
ableness in the very spell that made her beau¬ 
tiful . 1 At her side, and familiarly attentive to 

1 My eyes were mostly drawn to a young lady, who sat nearly opposite 
me, across the table. She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not dark, but 

494 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only 
a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and 
such a monstrous portent of a beard that you 
could discover no symptom of a mouth, except 
when he opened it to speak, or to put in a mor¬ 
sel of food. Then, indeed, you suddenly became 
aware of a cave hidden behind the impervious 
and darksome shrubbery. There could be no 
doubt who this gentleman and lady were. Any 
child would have recognized them at a glance. 
It was Bluebeard and a new wife (the loveliest 
of the series, but with already a mysterious gloom 
overshadowing her fair young brow) travelling 
in their honeymoon, and dining, among other 
distinguished strangers, at the Lord Mayor’s 
table. 


rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white ; but the purest and 
finest complexion, without a shade of color in it, yet anything but sallow or 
sickly. Her hair was a wonderful deep raven-black, black as night, black 
as death j not raven-black, for that has a shiny gloss, and hers had not, but 
it was hair never to be painted nor described, — wonderful hair, Jewish hair. 
Her nose had a beautiful outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too ; 
and that, and all her features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable 
art beside her, and certainly my pen is good for nothing. If any likeness 
could be given, however, it must be by sculpture, not painting. She was 
slender and youthful, and yet had a stately and cold, though soft and wo¬ 
manly grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old 
patriarchs in their maiden or early married days, — what Judith was, for, 
womanly as she looked, I doubt not she could have slain a man in a just 
cause, — what Bathsheba was, only she seemed to have no sin in her, — 
perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to 
eat the apple. . . . Whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense that 
she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance, simultane¬ 
ously with my perception that she was an admirable creature. — Notes of 
Travel, II. 98. 


495 


OUR OLD HOME 


After an hour or two of valiant achievement 
with knife and fork came the dessert; and at 
the point of the festival where finger-glasses are 
usually introduced, a large silver basin was car¬ 
ried round to the guests, containing rose-water, 
into which we dipped the ends of our napkins 
and were conscious of a delightful fragrance, in¬ 
stead of that heavy and weary odor, the hateful 
ghost of a defunct dinner. This seems to be an 
ancient custom of the city, not confined to the 
Lord Mayor’s table, but never met with west¬ 
ward of Temple Bar. 

During all the feast, in accordance with another 
ancient custom, the origin or purport of which 
I do not remember to have heard, there stood 
a man in armor, with a helmet on his head, be¬ 
hind his Lordship’s chair. When the after-din¬ 
ner wine was placed on the table, still another 
official personage appeared behind the chair, and 
proceeded to make a solemn and sonorous pro¬ 
clamation (in which he enumerated the principal 
guests, comprising three or four noblemen, sev¬ 
eral baronets, and plenty of generals, members 
of Parliament, aldermen, and other names of 
the illustrious, one of which sounded strangely 
familiar to my ears), ending in some such style 
as this : “ and other gentlemen and ladies, here 
present, the Lord Mayor drinks to you all in 
a loving-cup,” — giving a sort of sentimental 
twang to the two words, — cc and sends it round 
496 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

among you ! ” And forthwith the loving-cup 
— several of them, indeed, on each side of the 
tables — came slowly down with all the antique 
ceremony. 

The fashion of it is thus. The Lord Mayor, 
standing up and taking the covered cup in both 
hands, presents it to the guest at his elbow, 
who likewise rises, and removes the cover for 
his Lordship to drink, which being successfully 
accomplished, the guest replaces the cover and 
receives the cup into his own hands. He then 
presents it to his next neighbor, that the cover 
may be again removed for himself to take a 
draught, after which the third person goes 
through a similar manoeuvre with a fourth, and 
he with a fifth, until the whole company find 
themselves inextricably intertwisted and entan¬ 
gled in one complicated chain of love. When 
the cup came to my hands, I examined it criti¬ 
cally, both inside and out, and perceived it to 
be an antique and richly ornamented silver gob¬ 
let, capable of holding about a quart of wine. 
Considering how much trouble we all expended 
in getting the cup to our lips, the guests ap¬ 
peared to content themselves with wonderfully 
moderate potations. In truth, nearly or quite 
the original quart of wine being still in the gob¬ 
let, it seemed doubtful whether any of the com¬ 
pany had more than barely touched the silver 
rim before passing it to their neighbors, — a de- 
497 


OUR OLD HOME 


gree of abstinence that might be accounted for 
by a fastidious repugnance to so many compo- 
tators in one cup, or possibly by a disapproba¬ 
tion of the liquor. Being curious to know all 
about these important matters, with a view of 
recommending to my countrymen whatever they 
might usefully adopt, I drank an honest sip 
from the loving-cup, and had no occasion for 
another, — ascertaining it to be Claret of a poor 
original quality, largely mingled with water, and 
spiced and sweetened. It was good enough, 
however, for a merely spectral or ceremonial 
drink, and could never have been intended for 
any better purpose. 

The toasts now began in the customary order, 
attended with speeches neither more nor less 
witty and ingenious than the specimens of table 
eloquence which had heretofore delighted me. 
As preparatory to each new display, the herald, 
or whatever he was, behind the chair of state, 
gave awful notice that the Right Honorable the 
Lord Mayor was about to propose a toast. His 
Lordship being happily delivered thereof, to¬ 
gether with some accompanying remarks, the 
band played an appropriate tune, and the her¬ 
ald again issued proclamation to the effect that 
such or such a nobleman, or gentleman, gen¬ 
eral, dignified clergyman, or what not, was going 
to respond to the Right Honorable the Lord 
Mayor’s toast; then, if I mistake not, there 
498 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

was another prodigious flourish of trumpets and 
twanging of stringed instruments ; and, finally, 
the doomed individual, waiting all this while to 
be decapitated, got up and proceeded to make 
a fool of himself. A bashful young earl tried 
his maiden oratory on the good citizens of Lon¬ 
don, and, having evidently got every word by 
heart (even including, however he managed it, 
the most seemingly casual improvisations of the 
moment), he really spoke like a book, and made 
incomparably the smoothest speech I ever heard 
in England. 

The weight and gravity of the speakers, not 
only on this occasion, but all similar ones, was 
what impressed me as most extraordinary, not 
to say absurd. Why should people eat a good 
dinner, and put their spirits into festive trim 
with Champagne, and afterwards mellow them¬ 
selves into a most enjoyable state of quietude 
with copious libations of Sherry and old Port, 
and then disturb the whole excellent result by 
listening to speeches as heavy as an after-dinner 
nap, and in no degree so refreshing? If the 
Champagne had thrown its sparkle over the sur¬ 
face of these effusions, or if the generous Port 
had shone through their substance with a ruddy 
glow of the old English humor, I might have 
seen a reason for honest gentlemen prattling in 
their cups, and should undoubtedly have been 
glad to be a listener. But there was no attempt 
499 


OUR OLD HOME 


nor impulse of the kind on the part of the ora¬ 
tors, nor apparent expectation of such a phe¬ 
nomenon on that of the audience. In fact, I 
imagine that the latter were best pleased when 
the speaker embodied his ideas in the figurative 
language of arithmetic, or struck upon any hard 
matter of business or statistics, as a heavy-laden 
bark bumps upon a rock in mid-ocean . 1 The 
sad severity, the too earnest utilitarianism, of 
modern life, have wrought a radical and lament¬ 
able change, I am afraid, in this ancient and 
goodly institution of civic banquets. People 
used to come to them, a few hundred years ago, 
for the sake of being jolly; they come now with 
an odd notion of pouring sober wisdom into 
their wine by way of wormwood bitters, and thus 
make such a mess of it that the wine and wis¬ 
dom reciprocally spoil one another. 

Possibly, the foregoing sentiments have taken 
a spice of acridity from a circumstance that hap¬ 
pened about this stage of the feast, and very 
much interrupted my own further enjoyment 
of it. Up to this time, my condition had been 
exceedingly felicitous, both on account of the 

1 I rather think that Englishmen would purposely avoid eloquence or 
neatness in after-dinner speeches. It seems to be no part of their object. 
Yet any Englishman almost, much more generally than Americans, will 
stand up and talk on in a plain way, uttering one rough, ragged, and shape¬ 
less sentence after another, and will have expressed himself sensibly, though 
in a very rude manner, before he sits down. And this is quite satisfactory to 
his audience, who, indeed, are rather prejudiced against the man who speaks 
too glibly. — Notes of Travel , I. 162. 

500 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

brilliancy of the scene, and because I was in 
close proximity with three very pleasant Eng¬ 
lish friends. One of them was a lady, whose 
honored name my readers would recognize as a 
household word, if I dared write it; another, a 
gentleman, likewise well known to them, whose 
fine taste, kind heart, and genial cultivation are 
qualities seldom mixed in such happy propor¬ 
tion as in him. The third was the man to whom 
I owed most in England, the warm benignity 
of whose nature was never weary of doing me 
good, who led me to many scenes of life, in 
town, camp, and country, which I never could 
have found out for myself, who knew precisely 
the kind of help a stranger needs, and gave it 
as freely as if he had not had a thousand more 
important things to live for. Thus I never felt 
safer or cosier at anybody's fireside, even my 
own, than at the dinner-table of the Lord 
Mayor. 

Out of this serene sky came a thunderbolt. 
His Lordship got up and proceeded to make 
some very eulogistic remarks upon “ the literary 
and commercial ” — I question whether those 
two adjectives were ever before married by a 
copulative conjunction, and they certainly would 
not live together in illicit intercourse, of their 
own accord — “ the literary and commercial at¬ 
tainments of an eminent gentleman there pre¬ 
sent," and then went on to speak of the relations 
501 


OUR OLD HOME 


of blood and interest between Great Britain and 
the aforesaid eminent gentleman's native coun¬ 
try. Those bonds were more intimate than had 
ever before existed between two great nations, 
throughout all history, and his Lordship felt 
assured that that whole honorable company 
would join him in the expression of a fervent 
wish that they might be held inviolably sacred, 
on both sides of the Atlantic, now and forever. 
Then came the same wearisome old toast, dry 
and hard to chew upon as a musty sea-biscuit, 
which had been the text of nearly all the oratory 
of my public career. The herald sonorously an¬ 
nounced that Mr. So-and-so would now respond 
to his Right Honorable Lordship’s toast and 
speech, the trumpets sounded the customary 
flourish for the onset, there was a thunderous 
rumble of anticipatory applause, and finally a 
deep silence sank upon the festive hall. 

All this was a horrid piece of treachery on the 
Lord Mayor’s part, after beguiling me within 
his lines on a pledge of safe-conduct; and it 
seemed very strange that he could not let an 
unobtrusive individual eat his dinner in peace, 
drink a small sample of the Mansion House 
wine, and go away grateful at heart for the old 
English hospitality. If his Lordship had sent 
me an infusion of ratsbane in the loving-cup, I 
should have taken it much more kindly at his 
502 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

hands. But I suppose the secret of the mat¬ 
ter to have been somewhat as follows. 

All England, just then, was in one of those 
singular fits of panic excitement (not fear, though 
as sensitive and tremulous as that emotion), 
which, in consequence of the homogeneous char¬ 
acter of the people, their intense patriotism, and 
their dependence for their ideas in public affairs 
on other sources than their own examination 
and individual thought, are more sudden, perva¬ 
sive, and unreasoning than any similar mood of 
our own public. In truth, I have never seen 
the American public in a state at all similar, and 
believe that we are incapable of it. Our excite¬ 
ments are not impulsive, like theirs, but, right or 
wrong, are moral and intellectual. For example, 
the grand rising of the North, at the commence¬ 
ment of this war, bore the aspect of impulse and 
passion only because it was so universal, and 
necessarily done in a moment, just as the quiet 
and simultaneous getting-up of a thousand peo¬ 
ple out of their chairs would cause a tumult that 
might be mistaken for a storm. We were cool 
then, and have been cool ever since, and shall re¬ 
main cool to the end, which we shall take coolly, 
whatever it may be. There is nothing which 
the English find it so difficult to understand in 
us as this characteristic. They imagine us, in 
our collective capacity, a kind of wild beast, 
503 


OUR OLD HOME 

whose normal condition is savage fury, and are 
always looking for the moment when we shall 
break through the slender barriers of interna¬ 
tional law and comity, and compel the reason¬ 
able part of the world, with themselves at the 
head, to combine for the purpose of putting us 
into a stronger cage. At times this apprehen¬ 
sion becomes so powerful (and when one man 
feels it, a million do) that it resembles the pas¬ 
sage of the wind over a broad field of grain, 
where you see the whole crop bending and sway¬ 
ing beneath one impulse, and each separate stalk 
tossing with the self-same disturbance as its myr¬ 
iad companions. At such periods all English¬ 
men talk with a terrible identity of sentiment 
and expression. You have the whole country 
in each man; and not one of them all, if you 
put him strictly to the question, can give a rea¬ 
sonable ground for his alarm. There are but 
two nations in the world — our own country 
and France — that can put England into this 
singular state. It is the united sensitiveness of 
a people extremely well-to-do, careful of their 
country's honor, most anxious for the preser¬ 
vation of the cumbrous and moss-grown pros¬ 
perity which they have been so long in consoli¬ 
dating, and incompetent (owing to the national 
half-sightedness, and their habit of trusting to 
a few leading minds for their public opinion) to 
judge when that prosperity is really threatened. 

504 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

If the English were accustomed to look at the 
foreign side of any international dispute, they 
might easily have satisfied themselves that there 
was very little danger of a war at that particu¬ 
lar crisis, from the simple circumstance that their 
own Government had positively not an inch of 
honest ground to stand upon, and could not 
fail to be aware of the fact. Neither could they 
have met Parliament with any show of a justi¬ 
fication for incurring war. It was no such peril¬ 
ous juncture as exists now, when law and right 
are really controverted on sustainable or plau¬ 
sible grounds, and a naval commander may at 
any moment fire off the first cannon of a terri¬ 
ble contest. If I remember it correctly, it was 
a mere diplomatic squabble, in which the Brit¬ 
ish ministers, with the politic generosity which 
they are in the habit of showing towards their 
official subordinates, had tried to browbeat us 
for the purpose of sustaining an ambassador in 
an indefensible proceeding; and the American 
Government (for God had not denied us an 
administration of statesmen then) had retaliated 
with stanch courage and exquisite skill, putting 
inevitably a cruel mortification upon their oppo¬ 
nents, but indulging them with no pretence 
whatever for active resentment. 

Now the Lord Mayor, like any other Eng¬ 
lishman, probably fancied that War was on the 
western gale, and was glad to lay hold of even 
505 


OUR OLD HOME 


so insignificant an American as myself, who 
might be made to harp on the rusty old strings 
of national sympathies, identity of blood and 
interest, and community of language and liter¬ 
ature, and whisper peace where there was no 
peace, in however weak an utterance. And pos¬ 
sibly his Lordship thought, in his wisdom, that 
the good feeling which was sure to be expressed 
by a company of well-bred Englishmen, at his 
august and far-famed dinner-table, might have 
an appreciable influence on the grand result. 
Thus, when the Lord Mayor invited me to his 
feast, it was a piece of strategy. He wanted 
to induce me to fling myself, like a lesser Cur- 
tius, with a larger object of self-sacrifice, into 
the chasm of discord between England and 
America, and, on my ignominious demur, had 
resolved to shove me in with his own right 
honorable hands, in the hope of closing up the 
horrible pit forever. On the whole, I forgive 
his Lordship. He meant well by all parties, — 
himself, who would share the glory, and me, 
who ought to have desired nothing better than 
such an heroic opportunity, — his own country, 
which would continue to get cotton and bread- 
stuffs, and mine, which would get everything 
that men work with and wear. 

As soon as the Lord Mayor began to speak, 
I rapped upon my mind, and it gave forth a 
506 


CIVIC BANQUETS 

hollow sound, being absolutely empty of appro¬ 
priate ideas. I never thought of listening to 
the speech, because I knew it all beforehand 
in twenty repetitions from other lips, and was 
aware that it would not offer a single suggestive 
point. In this dilemma, I turned to one of 
my three friends, a gentleman whom I knew to 
possess an enviable flow of silver speech, and 
obtested him, by whatever he deemed holiest, 
to give me at least an available thought or two 
to start with, and, once afloat, I would trust my 
guardian angel for enabling me to flounder ashore 
again. He advised me to begin with some re¬ 
marks complimentary to the Lord Mayor, and 
expressive of the hereditary reverence in which 
his office was held, — at least, my friend thought 
that there would be no harm in giving his Lord- 
ship this little sugar-plum, whether quite the 
fact or no, — was held by the descendants of 
the Puritan forefathers. Thence, if I liked, get¬ 
ting flexible with the oil of my own eloquence, 
I might easily slide off into the momentous 
subject of the relations between England and 
America, to which his Lordship had made such 
weighty allusion. 

Seizing this handful of straw with a death- 
grip, and bidding my three friends bury me 
honorably, I got upon my legs to save both 
countries, or perish in the attempt. The tables 
507 


OUR OLD HOME 

roared and thundered at me, and suddenly were 
silent again. But, as I have never happened 
to stand in a position of greater dignity and 
peril, I deem it a stratagem of sage policy here 
to close these Sketches, leaving myself still erect 
in so heroic an attitude. 

508 






INDEX 
































































































































































































<* 



























































INDEX 


Actrxss, an, in an almshouse, 437 ; 
starving for admiration, 438. 

Addison, early home of, 187 ; buried 
among the men of rank, 394. 

Advice as to giving, 36. 

Ailsa Craig, 309. 

Alexander, Miss, the Lass of Bal- 
lochmyle, 297. 

Almshouse, a great English, 430— 
450. 

American flags, captured, displayed 
in Chelsea Hospital, 375. 

American mercantile marine, misrep¬ 
resented at Liverpool 2, 39 j its 
vicious system, 39, 41. 

American shipmasters, cruelties of, 
38-42. 

Americans, national characteristics 
of, as seen by a consul, 8 5 vaga¬ 
bond habits of, 9, 10; as claimants 
of English estates, 16, 19-26 ; 
growth and change the law of 
their existence, 80 ; their scholars 
and critics, 165 5 their light regard 
for the President, 477. 

Andre, Major, at Lichfield, 188. 

Anne, Queen, statue of, at Blen¬ 
heim, 255. 

Antiquity, hoar, in English scenes, 
78. 

Archdeacon ale, 259. 

Armour, Jean, 285, 299. 

Auchinleck, estate of, 296. 

Avon, the, arched bridge at War¬ 
wick, 90; a sluggish river, 143. 

Ayr, ride to, 300; its two bridges, 
301. 

Bacon, Lord, his Letters, 153. 

Bacon, Miss, a very remarkable 


woman, 149} her Shakespearean 
theory, 149, 150, 152-1555 her 
personal appearance, 150 ; her 
book, 155, 156, 164, 167 5 an 
admirable talker, 156 ; at Strat¬ 
ford, 157—165 ; her plans for 
searching Shakespeare’s grave, 
158—160 ; Hawthorne incurs her 
displeasure, 1635 her insanity, 
1665 her death, 167. 

Ballochmyle, the Lass of, 297. 

Banquets, civic, 455—508. 

Barber Surgeons’ Hall, in London, 
463-465. 

Bear and Ragged Staff, the, cogniz¬ 
ance of the Warwick Earldom, 
94 ; silver badge of, 98 ; represen¬ 
tations of, at Leicester’s Hospital, 
100, 102, 115. 

Beauchamp, Richard, Earl of War¬ 
wick, memorial of, 120; strange 
accident to, 120. 

Beauchamp Chapel, at Warwick, 
118-121. 

Bebbington, monuments at, 74, note; 
old village church of, 85, note . 

Beggar, a true Englishman’s dislike 
of a, 424 5 hardening the heart 
against, 425 ; a phenomenal, 426, 
427. 

Belmont, August, minister at the 
Hague, 26. 

Ben Lomond, 309. 

Black Swan Inn, Lichfield, 173. 

Blackheath, the wide waste of, 320 
—323 ; highwaymen on, 322; 
amusements at, 323, 324. 

Blenheim, excursion to, 243, 244; 
its park, 244-250; Marlbor¬ 
ough’s Triumphal Pillar at, 249 j 



INDEX 


its palace, 250-256 $ its gardens, 
256-258. 

Bolton, 201. 

Boston, Old, trip to, by steamer from 
Lincoln, 221—225 ; the river side 
of, 226 5 antique-looking houses 
at, 229 ; a bookseller’s shop at, 
229, 230 5 its crooked and nar¬ 
row streets, 2,39 ; its Charity 
School scholars, 241 3 market- 
day in, 241. 

Boswell, Sir James, grandson of 
Johnson’s friend, 296. 

Brooke, Lord, shot near the Min¬ 
ster Pool, 179. 

Brown, Capability, his lake at Blen¬ 
heim, 246 ; grounds at Nuneham 
Courtney, 277. 

Buchanan, James, in London, 17 5 
receives Hawthorne’s resignation, 
48 j calls on Miss Bacon, 154. 

Buckland, Dean, swallows part of 
Louis XIV.’s heart, 234. 

Bull, John, too intensely English, 

87- 

Bunker Hill, England, 242. 

Burleigh, Lord, waistcoat of, 231. 

Burns, Robert, his house at Dum¬ 
fries, 282, 283 5 his mausoleum, 
284, 285 ; marble statue of, 285 5 
his outward life, 286; his family 
pew in St. Michael’s Church, 2885 
his farm of Moss Giel, 292-296 ; 
his birthplace, 301-303 ; his mon¬ 
ument, 304, 305. 

Butchers’ shops, in poor streets of 
London, 409. 

Carfax, the, 277. 

Caskets, burial, (t a vile modem 
phrase,” 121. 

Cass, Lewis, responds to interference 
of British Minister, 40. 

Catrine, “ the clean village of Scot¬ 
land,” 298. 

Ceylon, wild men of, 25. 

Charlecote Hall, 169-172. 

Charlecote Park, 1685 deer in, 168, 
169. 


Charles, the Martyr, king, 234. 

Charles I., Vandyck’s picture of, 
252. 

Chelsea, 373. 

Chelsea Hospital, 373-377. 

Chester, most curious town in Eng¬ 
land, 51. 

Children in an English almshouse, 

44° — 448• 

Children, poor, in London streets, 
420-422 

Church of the Holy Trinity, Strat¬ 
ford, 134. 

Climate, English, unfavorable to 
open-air memorials, 72. 

Cockneys in Greenwich Park, 328. 

Coffee-room, English, ponderous 
gloom of, 173. 

Combe, John a’, boon companion 
of Shakespeare, 142 5 buried near 
Shakespeare, 146 ; marble figure 
of, 147 } Shakespeare’s squib on, 
148. 

Concord River compared with the 
Learn, 58. 

Connecticut shopkeeper, a, seeking 
interview with the Queen, 15—18. 

Conner, Mr., an American patron 
of Leicester’s Hospital, 116. 

Consul, as general adviser and helper, 
22, 23, 36, 37 ; as arbiter between 
seamen and their officers, 38-43 5 
not a favorite with shipmasters, 42 5 
necessary qualifications, 45 5 wrong 
system of appointment and re¬ 
moval, 45 ; important duties, 46 5 
emoluments, 48, note. 

Consulate, American, in Liverpool, 
its location, 1 ; its approaches, 1, 
2 j its furnishings, 3-6 5 visitors 
at, 6-185 faithful English subor¬ 
dinates, 43, 44 5 Hawthorne’s suc¬ 
cessor at, 48. 

Cook, Captain, present from Queen 
of Otaheite to, 231. 

Cornwall, Barry, 405. 

Cottages, rustic laborers’, 68-70. 

Cotton, Rev. John, in Old Boston, 
229, 235. 


512 



INDEX 


Crystal Palace, the, 378. 

Cumnor, village of, 260 ; its church, 
261. 

Cymbeline, King, founder of War¬ 
wick, 89, hi j one of his origi¬ 
nal gateways, 97. 

Deluge, necessity of a new, 407, 

447- 

Dinner, the English idea of, 455 ; 
Milton on, 456 ; a perfect work of 
art, 457, 458 j an English mayor’s, 
465-483 ; Lord Mayor’s, at the 
Mansion House, 486. 

Doctor of Divinity, an erring, 29- 

3 6 - . 

Doon, the bridge of, 308. 

Dowager, an English, 63-65. 

Dudley, Earl of Leicester, establishes 
Leicester’s Hospital, 100 ; a grim 
sinner, no; his monument in 
Beauchamp Chapel, 118 ; his long- 
enduring kindness, 119. 

Dumfries, excursion to, 281—289. 

Dutch government, an American 
under the ban of, 25. 

East winds, English, 223. 

Edward IV., King, a lock of his 
hair, 121. 

Edward the Confessor, shrine of, 

.393- 

Elizabeth, Queen, Secret-book of, 
233. 

Elm, the beautiful Warwickshire, 

59- 

England, conservative, 122 ; yet the 
foundations of its aristocracy crum¬ 
bling, 122. 

English, the, forgetful of defeats, 4 ; 
their character, massive materiality 
of, 20; secret of their practical 
success, 37 ; impostors betrayed by 
pronunciation of “been,” 38; 
their integrity, 44; their love of 
high stone fences and shrubbery, 
60, 371 ; curious infelicity of, 86 ; 
like to feel the weight of the past, 
96 ; the very kindest people on 


earth, 264 ; their insular narrow¬ 
ness, 264; their inability to enjoy 
summer, 318 ; original simplicity 
of, 328 ; eager to know their 
weight, 348 ; women not beautiful, 
35 1 5 their contempt for fine- 
strained purity, 353 ; their ten¬ 
dency to batter one another’s per¬ 
sons, 416. 

English crowds, unfragrant, 344. 

English post-prandial oratory, 479, 

499- 

English village, fossilized life of an, 
80, 81. 

English weather, 4, 5, 317-319. 

Englishman, a middle-aged, personal 
appearance of, 468. 

Epitaphs : illegible, on English grave¬ 
stones, 73 ; moss-embossed, 74 ; 
forlorn one on John Treeo, 75. 

Eugene, Prince, tapestry portraits of, 
254. 

Feeing, in England, 140, note. 

Feminine character among the Lon¬ 
don poor, 415—420. 

Fences, English stone, adorned by 
Nature, 131, 132, note. 

Forster, Anthony, buried in Cumnor 
Church, 261, 262. 

Fruit, English, poor flavor of, 315. 

Fun of the Fair, the, 346. 

Garrick, David, boyish days at Lich¬ 
field, 188. 

Gin-shops, London, 408. 

Girls, English and American, con¬ 
trasted, 62, 65, 351. 

Godiva, Countess, picture of, 462. 

Godstowe, old nunnery of, 274. 

Gravestones, English, successive 
crops of, 72; illegible inscriptions 
on, 73 ; moss-embossed inscriptions 
on, 74. 

Greenwich, its park, 325, 326, 
328, 329, 332 ; its observatory, 
the centre of Time and Space, 

326; its hospital, 333-343; its 
fair, 343-408. 


% 



INDEX 


Hatton, a community of old settlers, 
82 ; its church, 83, 84. 

H awthorne responds to toasts at civic 
banquets, 482, 483, 502—508. 

Hedges, English, 130. 

Henry V., his helmet and war- 
saddle displayed in Westminster 
Abbey, 393. 

Highland Mary, the pocket Bible 
that Burns gave her, 305. 

Holbein, masterpiece of, in Barber 
Surgeons’ Hall, 463. 

Home, a genuine British, 311—315. 

Hotels and hotel bills, English, 140, 
note. 

Houses of Parliament, the, 472. 

Hunt, Leigh, interview with, 396— 
405 5 final recollection of, 404. 

Imogen, Shakespeare’s womanliest 
woman, 112. 

Jackson, General, bust of, 4. 

James, G. P. R., never saw London 
Tower, 370. 

James I., King, feasted by an Earl 
of Warwick, 103, 116. 

Jephson, Dr., discoverer of chaly¬ 
beate well at Leamington, 56. 

Jephson Garden, on the Learn, 56- 
58. 

Johnson, Dr., born at Lichfield, 
175 5 as a man, a talker, and a 
humorist, 176 ; the great English 
moralist, 177 ; his birthplace, 188, 
189; his statue, by Lucas, 189 ; 
statue in St. Paul’s Cathedral, 

190; note ; doing penance in the 
market-place, 191, 194, 198, 

199, 200; his faith in beef and 
mutton, 195. 

Johnson, Michael, selling books on 
market-day, 192 ; his book-stall, 
193 ; at the Nag’s Head Inn, 197. 

Jolly Beggars, the, at Posie Nansie’s 
Inn, 290. 

Jonson, Ben, buried standing upright, 

389- 

Judges, social standing of, 473. 


Kemble, John, statue of, in West¬ 
minster Abbey, 384. 

Kirk Alloway, 306-308. 

“Kissing in the Ring,” 349, 350. 

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, his objection 
to being buried in Westminster 
Abbey, 387. 

Lambeth Palace, 373. 

Lancashire, a dreary county, 201. 

Lansdowne Circus, 525 its houses, 
535 its inhabitants, 53. 

Learn, the river, 55, 56; the laziest 
in the world, 58. 

Leamington Spa, 52; a permanent 
watering-place, 54, 555 the busi¬ 
ness portion of the town, 59 ; beau¬ 
tiful in street and suburb, 60 j but 
pretentious, 61; its aristocratic 
names, 61 ; the throng on its 
principal Parade, 62. 

Lear, West’s dreary picture of, 337. 

Leicester’s Hospital at Warwick : an 
assemblage of edifices, 97 j the 
twelve brethren of, 98, 100, 102, 
108, 114, 116, 117, a perfect 
specimen, 101 ; a jolly old domi¬ 
cile, 105 ; system of life in, 106 ; 
the porter at, 107, 108. 

Lestrange, Sir Nicholas, first pro¬ 
prietor of Leicester’s Hospital 
buildings, 99, 100. 

Lichfield, old-fashioned hotel at, 
173; origin of the name, 175} 
birthplace of Dr. Johnson, 175, 
188 ; its people old-fashioned, 
177; its cathedral, 179-186. 

Lillington, the village, 675 its 
church, 70, 71; its churchyard, 
72-75. 

Lincoln, cabs unknown there, 205 ; 
its cathedral, 205, 208-216, 220, 
221 $ its narrow principal street, 
206; Roman remains at, 217 j 
Norman ruins at, 218. 

Linkwater, Sir John, fines himself 
for drunkenness, 473. 

Liquor, varieties of hop and malt, in 
England, 259. 



INDEX 


Liverpool, a convenient starting-point 
for excursions, 51. 

Lodgings, English custom of, 61, 
note. 

London, suburb, a, 311 ; a distant 
view of, 323 ; grimy, 325. 

Lord Mayor’s dinner, at the Man¬ 
sion House, 486—508. 

Lovers’ Grove, at Leamington, 67. 

Loving-cup, the Lord Mayor’s, 496— 
498. 

Lucy, Sir Thomas, and Shakespeare, 
170. 

Malay pirates, delightful qualities of, 
24. 

Mansfield, Lord, statue of, in West¬ 
minster Abbey, 384. 

Mansion House, the, in London, 
486. 

Marlborough, Duke of, Triumphal 
Pillar of, 249. 

Mary Queen of Scots, quilt embroid¬ 
ered by, 230, 236. 

Mauchline, redolent of Burns, 289; 
rusty and time-worn, 290 ; its chief 
business, 2.99. 

Maury, Mr., appointed consul at 
Liverpool by Washington, 44. 

McClellan, General, before Rich¬ 
mond, 37. 

Melville, Herman, his “Israel Pot¬ 
ter ’ ’ referred to, 11. 

“ Memory green, keep his,” pos¬ 
sible origin of the phrase, 74. 

Methodist open-air preaching in 
Greenwich Park, 329—331. 

Minster Pool, the, at Lichfield, 178. 

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 
monument to, in Lichfield Cathe¬ 
dral, 183. 

Moss Giel, Burns’s farm of, 294- 
296. 

Museum, the British, too many 
materials for knowledge in, 332, 
333, note. 

Nag’s Head Inn, the, at Uttoxeter, 
197- 


Nelson, Admiral, his highest ambi¬ 
tion, 338 ; not a representative 
man, 339-341 ; Southey’s bio¬ 
graphy of, 341 ; pictures of his 
exploits, 341 ; two of his coats 
preserved at Greenwich Hospital, 
342 . 

Newcastle, Duke and Duchess of, 

383- 

New Orleans, battle of, forgotten 
by Englishmen, 4. 

Nuneham Courtney, 271, 277, 

278. 

Old age, cheerful and genial in 
England, 240. 

Open-air life of the London poor, 
411-415. 

Otaheite, Queen of, her present to 
Captain Cook, 231, 236, 271. 

Oxford, barges at, 275 ; indescrib¬ 
able, 278, 279. 

Painted Hall, the, at Greenwich 
Hospital, 338. 

Parliament, British, and American 
sailors, 40. 

Parr, Dr., once vicar of Hatton, 
82 $ his church, 835 a misplaced 
man, 84; a guest at Leicester’s 
Hospital, 112. 

Peacock Hotel, Old Boston, 225. 

Pearce, Mr., vice-consul at Liver¬ 
pool, 44. 

Peel, Sir Robert, and Holbein’s 
masterpiece in Barber Surgeons’ 
Hall, 463. 

Philadelphia printer, a, wandering 
about England, 11-14. 

Poets’ Corner, in Westminster 
Abbey, 390-396. 

Pope, Alexander, his account of 
Stanton Harcourt, 267 ; transla¬ 
tion of Homer, 271. 

Porter, Mr., bookseller at Old 
Boston, 230-236. 

Posie Nansie’s Inn at Mauchline 
290. 

Posthumus and Imogen, 112. 


515 



INDEX 


Poverty, glimpses of English, 406- 
452. 

Procter, Bryan Waller, 405. 

Raleigh, Sir Walter, and the Thames 
Tunnel, 363, 364. 

“Red Letter A,” author of, 264. 

Redfern’s Old Curiosity Shop, at 
Warwick, 123-125. 

Regatta of the Free Watermen of 
Greenwich, a, 357. 

Remorse, tragedy of, 35. 

Robsart, Amy, embroidery by, at 
Leicester’s Hospital, 1155 monu¬ 
ment of her avenger, 119. 

Rosamond, Fair, at the nunnery of 
Godstowe, 274. 

Rosamond’s Well, Blenheim, 248. 

Russell, Lord John, remonstrates 
against outrages on American 
sailors, 40. 

Sacheverell, Dr., 191. 

Sacrament Sunday at Mauchline, 
291. 

Sailors, American, ill-usage of, 38. 

St. Botolph’s Church, Old Boston, 
225, 228, 236-239. 

St. Chad, 175. 

St. Hugh, shrine of, in Lincoln 
Cathedral, 215. 

St. John’s School-house, at War¬ 
wick, 89. 

St. Mary’s Church, at Warwick, 
118. 

St. Mary’s Hall, at Coventry, 460- 
463. 

St. Mary’s Square, at Lichfield, 
188, 189. 

St. Michael’s Church, at Dumfries, 
284, 287-289. 

St. Paul’s Cathedral, 370. 

Sarcen’s Head Hotel, Lincoln, 205. 

Scenery, English, 126, 127, 201. 

Schools, English, long-established, 
90. 

Scott, Sir Walter, attractiveness of 
his name, 139} and Anthony 
Forster, 262. 

5 


Seward, Miss, at Lichfield, 187. 

Shakespeare, his church, 134; his 
birthplace, 136-141 $ his various 
guises, 142 $ his curse on the 
man who should stir his bones, 
143 5 his burial-place, 143-148 ; 
family monuments, 145 ; his 
bust, in the church at Stratford, 
145, 146 ; Miss Bacon’s theory, 
151 5 immeasurable depth of his 
plays, 152. 

Sheffield, the town of razors and 
smoke, 204. 

Sherwood Forest, 205. 

Shrewsbury, pleasant walks in, 207, 
note. 

Southey, Robert, his Life of Nelson, 
340. 

Stanton Harcourt, its hospitable par¬ 
sonage, 264 5 its old castle, 265, 
266, 271 j Pope’s connection 

with, 267, 271, 272 ; its church, 
267-269. 

Sterne, Laurence, crayon portrait of, 
232. 

Stocks, village, at Whitnash, 78. 

Stratford-on-Avon, scenery near, 
126; approach to, 133, 134 5 
queer edifices in, 135. 

Swans, aspect and movement of, 57. 

Swynford, Catherine, monument of, 
in Lincoln Cathedral, 215. 

Tam O’Shanter, statue of, 305. 

Taylor, General, portrait of, 4. 

Temple, the, 372. 

Tennyson and English scenery, 66. 

Testament, New, consular copy of, 

5» 39- 

Thames, ferry near Cumnor, 263 ; 
a summer day’s voyage on, 3 5 5— 
375 5 steamers on, 356 ; its muddy 
tide, 357. 

Thames Tunnel, the, 359-365. 

Thornhill, Sir James, 252, 338. 

Tickell, Thomas, his lines on Addi¬ 
son, 394. 

Tower of London, the, 369, 370. 

Traitor’s Gate, the, 369. 

6 



INDEX 


Treeo, John, forlorn epitaph on, 75. 

Trees, English and American, com¬ 
pared, 127-130. 

Tuckerman, H. T., his “Month 
in England,” 379. 

Uttoxeter, 192 ; its idle people, 194 ; 
its abundance of public houses, 

195- 

Vagabonds, Yankee, abroad, 9-19. 

Vandyck, his picture of Charles I., 
252. 

Victoria, Queen, a Connecticut 
shopkeeper goes to England to see 
her, 15-18} some American 
blood relatives, 22. 

Walmesley, Gilbert, monument to, 
in Lichfield Cathedral, 183. 

Wapping, cold and torpid, 367. 

Warren, Sir Peter, bust of, in West¬ 
minster Abbey, 384. 

Warwick, founded by Cymbeline, 
89, hi } its castle, 91, 93 ; its 
principal street, 93, 94; military 
display at, 94} the High Street, 
95 ; Leicester’s Hospital, 97-110; 
the home of Posthumus and 
Imogen, 112; church of St. 
Mary’s, 118} Redfern’s Old Curi¬ 
osity Shop, 123, 124. 

Warwickshire Elm, the beautiful, 

59- 

Wasps, attracted by pomatum, 276. 


Wedding, of some poor English 
people, 450-452; an aristocratic, 
in the same cathedral, 453. 
Wedding, silver, as a matter of con¬ 
science, 66. 

West, Benjamin, picture by, at 
Greenwich, 337. 

Westminster Abbey, a Sunday after¬ 
noon service in, 380 ; its interior, 
381 ; statues and tombs in, 383— 

386 ; “ they do bury fools there,” 

387 ; Poets’ Corner, 390-396. 
Whitefriars, the old rowdy Alsatia, 

37 2 - 

Whitnash, secluded village of, 76; 
yew-tree of incalculable age at, 77 ; 
village stocks of, 78 ; change at 
work in, 81. 

Wilberforce, William, statue of, in 
Westminster Abbey, 385. 
Wilding, Mr., vice-consul at Liver¬ 
pool, 44. 

Wilkins, Sergeant, 474, 475, 481. 
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 286. 
Witham, the river, 221, 228. 
Women, in the poorer streets of 
London, 414-418 ; in an Eng¬ 
lish almshouse, 431 ; at public 
dinners, 490. 

Woodstock, 244. 

Wren, Sir Christopher, restorer of 
St. Mary’s Church, Warwick, 
118. 

Yew-tree, extraordinary age of, 77. 


517 



Cfce fttoer?ibe 

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