Qass -4- '■:/'.. .. 1? ^ 7 (X / OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE BY y OLIVER WENDELL HOLMfeS s ^gH] ^^ jS^pla i m &s ^^Ml .9,U -^Ma- BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 1887 Copyright, 1887, By OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Cambridge •• Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Co. Co MY DAUGHTER AMELIA, (Mrs. turner SARGENT), MY FAITHFUL AND DEVOTED COMPANION, THIS OUTLINE OF OUR SUMMER EXCURSION IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED. CONTENTS. ♦ PAGE INTRODUCTORY. A Prospective Visit ] OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. I. The Voyage. — Liverpool. — Chester. — London. — Epsom 13 II. Epsom. — London. — Windsor 57 in. London. — Isle of Wight. — Cambridge. — Oxford. — York. — Edinburgh 99 IV. Stratford-on-Avon. — Great Malvern. — Tewkes- bury. — Bath. — Salisbury. — Stonehenge . . 138 V. Stonehenge. — Salisbury. — Old Sarum. — Bemer- TON. — Brighton 173 VI. London 207 iv CONTENTS. VII. Boulogne. — Paris. — London. — LiVERPOOii. — The Homeward Passage 246 VIII. General Impressions. — Miscellaneous Observa- tions 279 INTRODUCTORY. A PKOSPECTIVE VISIT. After an interval of more than fifty years I propose taking a second look at some parts of Europe. It is a Rip Van Winkle experiment which I am promising myself. The changes wrought by half a century in the countries I visited amount almost to a transformation. I left the England of William the Fourth, of the Duke of Wellington, of Sir Robert Peel ; the France of Louis Philippe, of Marshal Soult, of Thiers, of Guizot. I went from Manchester to Liverpool by the new railroad, the only one I saw in Europe. I looked upon England from the box of a stage-coach, upon France from the coupe of a diligence, upon Italy from the cush- ion of a carrozza. The broken windows of Apsley House were still boarded up when I was in London. The asphalt pavement was not laid 2 INTRODUCTORY. in Paris. The Obelisk of Luxor was lying in its great boat in tlio Seine, as I remember it. I dill not see it ereeteil ; it must have been an exciting scene to witness, the engineer standing underneath, so as to be crushed by the great stone if it disgraced him by falling in the pro- cess. As for the dynasties which have overlaid each other like Dr. Schliemann's Trojan cities, there is no need of moralizing over a history which instead of Finis is constantly ending with What next? With regard to the changes in the general conditions of society and the advance in human knowledge, think for one moment what lifty years have done I I have often imagined my- self escorting some wise man of the past to our Saturday Club, where we often have distin- guished strangers as our guests. Suppose there sat by me, I will not say Sir Isaac Newton, for he has been too long away from us, but that other great man, whom Professor Tyndall names as next to him in intellectual stature, as he passes along the line of master minds of his country, from the days of Newton to our own, — Dr. Thomas Young, who died in 1829. Would he A PROSPECTIVE VISIT. 3 or I bo tlio listener, if we were side by side? However liuiuble I iniglit feel in sneli a pre- sence, I should be ho ebid in tlie grandeur of the new discoveries, inventions, ideas, 1 had to impart to him that I should seem to myself like the ambassador of an Emperor. I should tell him of the ocean steamers, the railroads that s])read themselves like cobwebs over the civilized and half-civilized poitions of the earth, the telegraph and the telephone, the photogra])h and the spectroscope. I sliould hand him a paper with the morning news from Ijondon to read by the electric light, I should startle him with a friction match, 1 should amaze him with the incredible truths about anaisthesia, I should astonish him with the later conclusions of geology, I should dazzle him by the fully devel- oped law of the correlation of forces, I should delight him with the cell-doctrine, I should con- found him with the revolutionary apocalypse of Darwinism. All this change in tluj aspects, position, beliefs, of humanity since the time of Dr. Young's death, the date of my own gradua- tion from colh^gc ! I ought to consider myself highly favored to 4 INTRODUCTORY. liave lived through such a half century. But it seems to me that in walking the streets of Lon- don and Paris I shall revert to my student days, and appear to myself like a relic of a former generation. Those who have been born into the inheritance of the new civilization feel very dif- ferently about it from those who have lived their way into it. To the young and those approach- ing middle age all these innovations in life and thought are as natural, a3 much a matter of course, as the air they breathe ; they form a part of the inner framework of their intelligence, about which their mental life is organized. To men and women of more than threescore and ten they are external accretions, like the shell of a moUusk, the jointed plates of an articulate. This must be remembered in reading anything written by those who knew the century in its teens ; it is not likely to be forgotten, for the fact betrays itself in all the writer's thoughts and expressions. The story of my first visit to Europe is briefly this : my object was to study the medical pro- fession, chiefly in Paris, and I was in Europe about two years and a half, from April, 1833, to A PROSPECTIVE VISIT. 5 October, 1835. I sailed in the packet ship Phil- adelphia from New York for Portsmouth, where we arrived after a passage of twenty-four days. A week was spent in visiting Southampton, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Wilton, and the Isle of Wight. I then crossed the Channel to Havre, from which I went to Paris. In the spring and summer of 1834 I made my principal visit to England and Scotland. There were other ex- cursions to the Rhine and to Holland, to Swit- zerland and to Italy, but of these I need say nothing here. I returned in the packet ship Utica, sailing from Havre, and reaching New York after a passage of forty-two days. A few notes from my recollections will serve to recall the period of my first visit to Europe, and form a natural introduction to the experi- ences of my second. I take those circumstances which happen to suggest themselves. After a short excursion to Strasbourg, down the Rhine, and through Holland, a small steamer took us from Rotterdam across the Channel, and we found ourselves in the British capital. The great sight in London is — London. No man understands himself as an infinitesimal 6 INTRODUCTORY. until lie has been a drop in that ocean, a grain of sand on that sea-margin, a mote in its sun- beam, or the fog or smoke which stands for it ; in plainer phrase, a unit among its millions. I had two letters to persons in England : one to kind and worthy Mr. Petty Vaughan, who asked me to dinner ; one to pleasant Mr. Wil- liam Clift, conservator of the Ilunterian Mu- seum, who asked me to tea. To Westminster Abbdy. What a pity it could not borrow from Paris the towers of Notre Dame ! But the glory of its interior made up for this shortcoming. Among the monuments, one to Rear Admiral Charles Holmes, a hand- some young man, standing by a cannon. He accompanied Wolfe in his expedition which re- sulted in the capture of Quebec. Dryden has immortalized him, in the " Annus Mirabilis," as " the Achates of the general's fight." My relative, I will take it for granted, as I find him in Westminster Abbey. Blood is thicker than water, — and warmer than marble, I said to myself, as I laid my hand on the cold stone image of the once famous Admiral. To the Tower, to see the lions, — of all sorts. A PROSPECTIVE VISIT. 7 There I found a " poor relation," wlio made my acquaintance without introduction. A large baboon, or ape, — some creature of that family, — was sitting at the open door of his cage, when I gave him offence by approaching too near and inspecting him too narrowly. He made a spring at me, and if the keeper had not pulled me back would have treated me unhandsomely, like a quadrumanous rough, as he was. lie suc- ceeded in stripping my waistcoat of its buttons, as one would strip a pea-pod of its peas. To Vauxhall Gardens. All Americans went there in those days, as they go to Madame Tus- saud's in these times. There were fireworks and an exhibition of polar scenery. "Mr. Collins, the English PAGANINI," treated us to music on his violin. A comic singer gave us a song, of which I remember the line, "You '11 find it all in the agony bill." This referred to a bill proposed by Sir Andrew Agnew, a noted Scotch Sabbatarian agitator. To the opera to hear Grisi. The king, Wil- liam the Fourth, was in his box ; also the Prin- cess Victoria, with the Duchess of Kent. The king tapped with his white-gloved hand on the 8 INTRODUCTORY. ledge of the box when he was pleased with the singing. — To a morning concert and heard the real Paganini. To one of the lesser theatres and heard a monologue by the elder Mathews, who died a year or two after this time. To another theatre, where I saw Liston in Paul Pry. Is it not a relief that I am abstaining from descrip- tion of what everybody has heard described ? To Windsor. Machinery to the left of the road. Recognized it instantly, by recollection of the plate in "Rees's Cyclopedia," as Her- schel's great telescope. — Oxford. Saw only its outside. I knew no one there, and no one knew me. — Blenheim, — the Titians best remem- bered of its objects on exhibition. The great Derby day of the Epsom races. Went to the race with a coach-load of friends and acquaint- ances. Plenipotentiary, the winner, " rode by P. Connelly." So says Herring's picture of him, now before me. Chestnut, a great " bullock " of a horse, who easily beat the twenty-two that started. Every New England deacon ought to see one Derby day to learn what sort of a world this is he lives in. Man is a sporting as well as a praying animal. A PROSPECTIVE VISIT. 9 Stratford-on-Avon. Emotions, but no scrib- bling of name on walls. — Warwick. The cas- tle. A village festival, " The Opening of the Meadows," a true exhibition of the semi-bar- barism which had come down from Saxon times. — Yorkshire. " The Hangman's Stone." Story told in my book called the " Autocrat," etc. York Cathedral. — Northumberland. Aln- wick Castle. The figures on the walls which so frightened my man John when he ran away from Scotland in his boyhood. Berwick-on-Tweed. A regatta going on ; a very pretty show. Scotland. Most to be re- membered, the incomparable loveliness of Edin- burgh. — Sterling. The view of the Links of Forth from the castle. The whole country full of the romance of history and poetry. Made one acquaintance in Scotland, Dr. Robert Knox, who asked my companion and myself to break- fast. I was treated to five entertainments in Great Britain : the breakfast just mentioned ; lunch with Mrs. Macadam, — the good old lady gave me bread, and not a stone ; dinner with Mr. Vaughan ; one with Mr. Stanley, the sur- geon ; tea with Mr. Clift, — for all which at- 10 INTRODUCTORY. tentions I was then and am still grateful, for they were more than I had any claim to expect. Fascinated with Edinburgh. Strolls by Salis- bury Crag ; climb to the top of Arthur's Seat ; delight of looking up at the grand old castle, of looking down on Holyrood Palace, of watching the groups on Calton Hill, wandering in the quaint old streets and sauntering on the side- walks of the noble avenues, even at that time adding beauty to the new city. The weeks I spent in Edinburgh are among the most memo- rable of my European experiences. To the Highlands, to the Lakes, in short excursions ; to Glasgow, seen to disadvantage under gray skies and with slippery pavements. Through England rapidly to Dover and to Calais, where I found the name of M. Dessein still belonging to the hotel I sought, and where I read Sterne's " Preface Written in a Desobligeante," sitting in the vehicle most like one that I could find in the stable. From Calais back to Paris, where I began working again. All my travelling experiences, including a visit to Switzerland and Italy in the summer and autumn of 1835, were merely interludes of my A PROSPECTIVE VISIT. 11 student life in Paris. On my return to America, after a few years of hospital and private prac- tice, I became a Professor in Harvard Univer- sity, teaching Anatomy and Physiology, after- wards Anatomy alone, for the period of thirty- five years, during part of which time I paid some attention to literature, and became some- what known as the author of several works in prose and verse which have been well received. My prospective visit will not be a professional one, as I resigned my office in 1882, and am no longer known chiefly as a teacher or a practi- tioner. Boston, April, 1886. ^ OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. I. I BEGIN this record witb the columnar, self- reliant capital letter to signify that there is no disguise in its egoisms. If it were a chapter of autobiography, this is what the reader would look for as a matter of course. Let him con- sider it as being such a chapter, and its egoisms will require no apology. I have called the record our hundred days, because I was accompanied by my daughter, without the aid of whose younger eyes and live- lier memory, and especially of her faithful diary, which no fatigue or indisposition was allowed to interrupt, the whole experience would have remained in my memory as a photograph out of focus. We left Boston on the 29th of April, 1886, and reached New York on the 29th of August, four months of absence in all, of which nearly 14 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. three weeks were taken up by the two passages, one week was spent in Paris, and the rest of the time in England and Scotland. No one was so much surprised as myself at my undertaking this visit. Mr. Gladstone, a strong man for his years, is reported as saying that he is too old to travel, at least to cross the ocean, and he is younger than I am, — just four months, to a day, younger. It is true that Sir Henry Holland came to this country, and tra- velled freely about the world, after he was eighty years old ; but his pitcher went to the well once too often, and met the usual doom of fragile ar- ticles. When my friends asked me why I did not go to Europe, I reminded them of the fate of Thomas Parr. He was only twice my age, and was getting on finely towards his two hun- dredth year, when the Earl of Arundel carried him up to London, and, being feasted and made a lion of, he found there a premature and early grave at the age of only one hundred and fifty- two years. He lies in Westminster Abbey, it is true, but he would probably have preferred the upper side of his own hearth-stone to the under side of the slab which covers him. THE VOYAGE. 15 I should never have thought of such an expe- dition if it had not been suggested by a mem- ber of my family that I should accompany my daughter, who was meditating a trip to Europe. I remembered how many friends had told me I ought to go ; among the rest, Mr. Emerson, who had spoken to me repeatedly about it. I had not seen Europe for more than half a cen- tury, and I had a certain longing for one more sight of the places I remembered, and others it would be a delight to look upon. There were a few living persons whom I wished to meet. I was assured that I should be kindly received in England. All this was tempting enough, but there was an obstacle in the way which I feared, and, as it proved, not without good reason. I doubted whether I could possibly breathe in a narrow state-room. In certain localities I have found myself liable to attacks of asthma, and, although I had not had one for years, I felt sure that I could not escape it if I tried to sleep in a state-room. I did not escape it, and I am glad to tell my story about it, because it excuses some of my involuntary social shortcomings, and ena- bles me to thank collectively all those kind mem- 16 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. bers of the profession who trained all the artil- lery of the pharmacopoeia upon my troublesome enemy, from bicarbonate of soda and Vichy water to arsenic and dynamite. One costly con- trivance, sent me by the Reverend Mr. Haweis, whom I have never duly thanked for it, looked more like an angelic trump for me to blow in a better world than what I believe it is, an inhal- ing tube intended to prolong my mortal respira- tion. The best thing in my experience was rec- ommended to me by an old friend in London. It was Himrod's asthma cure, one of the many powders, the smoke of which when burning is in- haled. It is made in Providence, Rhode Island, and I had to go to London to find it. It never failed to give at least temporary relief, but noth- ing enabled me to sleep in my state-room, though I had it all to myself, the upper berth being removed. After the first night and part of the second, I never lay down at all while at sea. The captain allowed me to have a candle and sit up in the saloon, where I worried through the night as I best might. How could I be in a fit condition to accept the attention of my friends in Liverpool, after sitting up every night THE VOYAGE. 17 for more than a week ; and how could I be in a mood for the catechizing of interviewers, without having once lain down during the whole return passage ? I hope the reader will see why I men- tion these facts. They explain and excuse many things ; they have been alluded to, sometimes with exaggeration, in the newspapers, and I could not tell my story fairly without mention- ing them. I got along well enough as soon as I landed, and have had no return of the trouble since I have been back in my own home. I will not advertise an assortment of asthma remedies for sale, but I assure my kind friends I have had no use for any one of them since I have walked the Boston pavements, drank, not the Cochitu- ate, but the Belmont spring water, and breathed the lusty air of my native northeasters. My companion and I required an attendant, and we found one of those useful androgynous personages known as courier-maids^ who had travelled with friends of ours, and who was ready to start with us at a moment's warning. She was of English birth, lively, short-gaited, ser- viceable, more especially in the first of her dual capacities. So far as my wants were concerned, 18 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. I found her zealous and active in providing for my comfort. It was no sooner announced in the papers that I was going to England than I began to hear of preparations to welcome me. An invitation to a club meeting was cabled across the Atlantic. One of my countrywomen who has a house in London made an engagement for me to meet friends at her residence. A reverend friend, who thought I had certain projects in my head, wrote to me about lecturing : where I should ap- pear, what fees I should obtain, and such busi- ness matters. I replied that I was going to England to spend money, not to make it ; to hear speeches, very possibly, but not to make them ; to revisit scenes I had known in my younger days ; to get a little change of my routine, which I certainly did ; and to enjoy a little rest, which I as certainly did not, at least in London. In a word, I wished a short vacation, and had no thought of doing anything more important than rubbing a little rust off and enjoying myself, while at the same time I could make my com- panion's visit somewhat pleasanter than it would be if she went without me. The visit has an- THE VOYAGE. 19 swered most of its purposes for both of us, and if we have saved a few recollections which our friends can take any pleasure in reading, this slight record may be considered a work of super- erogation. The Cephalonia was to sail at half past six in the morning, and at that early hour a company of well-wishers was gathered on the wharf at East Boston to bid us good-by. We took with us many tokens of their thoughtful kindness; flowers and fruits from Boston and Cambridge, and a basket of champagne from a Concord friend whose company is as exhilarating as the sparkling wine he sent us. With the other gifts came a small tin box, about as big as a common round wooden match box. I supposed it to hold some pretty gimcrack, sent as a pleasant part- ing token of remembrance. It proved to be a most valued daily companion, useful at all times, never more so than when the winds were blow- ing hard and the ship was struggling with the waves. There must have been some magic secret in it, for I am sure that I looked five years younger after closing that little box than 20 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. when I opened it. Time will explain its myste- rious power. All the usual provisions for comfort made by sea-going experts we had attended to. Imper- meable rugs and fleecy shawls, head-gear to defy the rudest northeasters, sea-chairs of ample dimensions, which we took care to place in as sheltered situations as we could find, — all these were a matter of course. Everybody stays on deck as much as possible^ and lies wrapped up and spread out at full length on his or her sea- chair, so that the deck looks as if it had a row of mummies on exhibition. Nothing is more comfortable, nothing, I should say, more indis- pensable, than a hot- water bag, — or rather, two hot-water bags; for they will burst some- times, as I found out, and a passenger who has become intimate with one of these warm bosom friends feels its loss almost as if it were human. Passengers carry all sorts of luxuries on board, in the firm faith that they shall be able to profit by them all. Friends send them various indi- gestibles. To many all these well-meant prepa- rations soon become a mockery, almost an insult. It is a clear case of Sic(Tc) vos non vohis. The THE VOYAGE. 21 tougher neiglibor is the gainer by these acts of kindness ; the generosity ^of a sea-sick sufferer in giving away the delicacies which seemed so desirable on starting is not ranked very high on the books of the recording angel. With us three things were best : grapes, oranges, and especially oysters, of which we had provided a half barrel in the shell. The " butcher " of the ship opened them fresh for us every day, and they were more acceptable than anything else. Among our ship's company were a number of family relatives and acquaintances. We formed a natural group at one of the tables, where we met in more or less complete numbers. I myself never missed ; my companion, rarely. Others were sometimes absent, and sometimes came to time when they were in a very doubtful state, looking as if they were saying to them- selves, with Lear, — " Down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element 's below." As for the intellectual condition of the passen- gers, I should say that faces were prevailingly vacuous, their owners half hypnotized, as it seemed, by the monotonous throb and tremor of 22 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. the great sea-monster on whose back we were riding. I myself had few thoughts, fancies, emotions. One thing above all struck me as never before, — the terrible solitude of the ocean. " So lonely 't was that God himself Scarce seemed there to be. ' ' Whole days passed without our seeing a single sail. The creatures of the deep which gather around sailing vessels are perhaps frightened off by the noise and stir of the steamship. At any rate, we saw nothing more than a few por- poises, so far as I remember. No man can find himself over the abysses, the floor of which is paved with wrecks and white with the bones of the shrieking myriads of human beings whom the waves have swallowed up, without some thought of the dread possibili- ties hanging over his fate. There is only one way to get rid of them : that which an old sea- captain mentioned to me, namely, to keep one's self under opiates until he wakes up in the harbor where he is bound. I did not take this as serious advice, but its meaning is that one who has all his senses about him cannot help THE VOYAGE. 23 being anxious. My old friend, whose beard had been shaken in many a tempest, knew too well that there is cause enough for anxiety. What does the reader suppose was the source of the most ominous thought which forced itself upon my mind, as I walked the decks of the mighty vessel? Not the sound of the rushing winds, nor the sight of the foam-crested billows ; not the sense of the awful imprisoned force which was wrestling in the depths below me. The ship is made to struggle with the elements, and the giant has been tamed to obedience, and is manacled in bonds which an earthquake would hardly rend asunder. No ! It was the sight of the boats hanging along at the sides of the deck, — the boats, always suggesting the fearful possibility that before another day dawns one may be tossing about in the watery Sahara, shelterless, fireless, almost foodless, with a fate before him he dares not contemplate. No doubt we should feel worse without the boats ; still they are dreadful tell-tales. To all who re- member Gericault's Wreck of the Medusa, — and those who have seen it do not forget it, — the picture the mind draws is one it shudders at. 24 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. To be sure, the poor wretches in the painting were on a raft, but to think of fifty people in one of these open boats ! Let us go down into the cabin, where at least we shall not see them. The first morning at sea revealed the mystery of the little round tin box. The process of shav- ing^ never a delightful one, is a very unpleasant and awkward piece of business when the floor on which one stands, the glass in which he looks, and he himself are all describing those complex curves which make cycles and epicycles seem like simplicity itself. The little box contained a reaping machine, which gathered the capillary harvest of the past twenty-four hours with a thoroughness, a rapidity, a security, and a facil- ity which were a surprise, almost a revelation. The idea of a guarded cutting edge is an old one ; I remember the " Plantagenet " razor, so called, with the comb-like row of blunt teeth, leaving just enough of the edge free to do its work. But this little affair had a blade only an inch and a half long by three quarters of an inch wide. It had a long slender handle, which took apart for packing, and was put together with the greatest ease. It was, in short, a lawn-mower for the THE VOYAGE. 25 masculine growth of which the proprietor wishes to rid his countenance. The mowing operation required no glass, could be performed with al- most reckless boldness, as one cannot cut him- self, and in fact had become a pleasant amuse- ment instead of an irksome task. I have never used any other means of shaving from that day to this. I was so pleased with it that I exhib- ited it to the distinguished tonsors of Burlington Arcade, half afraid they would assassinate me for bringing in an innovation which bid fair to destroy their business. They probably took me for an agent of the manufacturers; and so I was, but not in their pay nor with their know- ledge. I determined to let other persons know what a convenience I had found the " Star Kazor " of Messrs. Kampf, of New York, with- out fear of reproach for so doing. I know my danger, — does not Lord Byron say, " I have even been accused of writing puffs for Warren's blacking " ? I was once offered pay for a poem in praise of a certain stove polish, but I de- clined. It is pure good-will to my race which leads me to commend the Star Razor to all who travel by land or by sea, as well as to all who stay at home. 26 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. "With the first sight of land many a passenger draws a long sigh of relief. Yet everybody knows that the worst dangers begin after we have got near enough to see the shore, for there are several ways of landing, not all of which are equally desirable. On Saturday, May 8th, we first caught a glimpse of the Irish coast, and at half past four in the afternoon we reached the harbor of Queenstown. A tug came off, bring- ing newspapers, letters, and so forth, among the rest some thirty letters and telegrams for me. This did not look much like rest, but this was only a slight prelude to what was to follow. I w^s in no condition to go on shore for sight- seeing, as some of the passengers did. We made our way througli the fog towards Liverpool, and arrived at 1.30, on Sunday, May 9th. A special tug came to take us off : on it were the American consul, Mr. Russell, the vice-consul, Mr. Sewall, Dr. Nevins, and Mr. Rathbone, who came on behalf of our as yet unseen friend, Mr. Willett, of Brighton, England. Our Liverpool friends were meditating more hospitalities to us than, in our fatigued condition, we were equal to supporting. They very kindly, LIVERPOOL. — CHESTER, 27 however, acquiesced in our wishes, which were for as much rest as we could possibly get before any attempt to busy ourselves with social engage- ments. So they conveyed us to the Grand Hotel for a short time, and then saw us safely off to the station to take the train for Chester, where we arrived in due season, and soon found our- selves comfortably established at the Grosvenor Arms Hotel. A large basket of Surrey prim- roses was brought by Mr. Eathbone to my com- panion. I had set before me at the hotel a very handsome floral harp, which my friend's friend had offered me as a tribute. It made melody in my ears as sweet as those hyacinths of Shelley's, the music of whose bells was so *' delicate, soft, and intense, It was felt like an odor within the sense." At Chester we had the blissful security of being unknown, and were left to ourselves. Americans know Chester better than most other old towns in England, because they so frequently stop there awhile on their way from Liverpool to London. It has a mouldy old cathedral, an old wall, partly Roman, strange old houses with overhanging upper floors, which make sheltered 28 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. sidewallis and dark basements. When one sees an old house in New England with the second floor projecting a foot or two beyond the wall of the ground floor, the country boy will tell him that " them haouses was built so th't th' folks up- stairs could shoot the Injins when they was try- in' to git three w th' door or int' th' winder," There are plenty of such houses all over Eng- land, where there are no " Injins " to shoot. But the story adds interest to the somewhat lean traditions of our rather dreary past, and it is hardly worth while to disturb it. I always heard it in my boyhood. Perhaps it is true ; certainly it was a very convenient arrange- ment for discouraging an untimely visit. The oval lookouts in porches, common in our Essex County, have been said to answer a similar pur- pose, that of warning against the intrusion of undesirable visitors. The walk round the old wall of Chester is wonderfully interesting and beautiful. At one part it overlooks a wide level field, over which the annual races are run. I noticed that here as elsewhere the short grass was starred with daisies. They are not consid- ered in place in a well-kept lawn. But remem- CHESTER. — EA TON HALL. 29 bering the cuckoo song in Love*s Labour Lost, " When daisies pied ... do paint the meadows with delight," it was hard to look at them as unwelcome intruders. The old cathedral seemed to me particularly- mouldy, and in fact too high-flavored with an- tiquity. I could not help comparing some of the ancient cathedrals and abbey churches to so many old cheeses. They have a tough gray rind and a rich interior, which find food and lodging for numerous tenants who live and die under their shelter or their shadow, — lowly servitors some of them, portly dignitaries others, humble holy ministers of religion many, I doubt not, — larva? of angels, who will get their wings by and by. It is a shame to carry the compari- son so far, but it is natural enough ; for Cheshire cheeses are among the first things we think of as we enter that section of the country, and this venerable cathedral is the first that greets the eyes of great numbers of Americans. We drove out to Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster, the many-millioned lord of a good part of London. It is a palace, high- roofed, marble - columned, vast, magnificent, 30 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. everything but homelike, and perhaps homelike to persons born and bred in such edifices. A painter like Paul Veronese finds a palace like this not too grand for his banqueting scenes. But to those who live, as most of us do, in houses of moderate dimensions, snug, comfort- able, which the owner's presence fills sufficiently, leaving room for a few visitors, a vast marble palace is disheartening and uninviting. I never get into a very large and lofty saloon without feeling as if I were a weak solution of myself, — my personality almost drowned out in the flood of space about me. The wigwam is more home- like than the cavern. Our wooden houses are a better kind of wigwam ; the marble palaces are artificial caverns, vast, resonant, chilling, good to visit, not desirable to live in, for most of us. One's individuality should betray itself in all that surrounds him ; he should secrete his shell, like a mollusk ; if he can sprinkle a few pearls through it, so much the better. It is best, per- haps, that one should avoid being a duke and living in a palace, — that is, if he has his choice in the robing chamber where souls are fitted with their earthly garments. CHESTER. — EATON HALL. 31 One of the most interesting parts of my visit to Eaton Hall was my tour through the stables. The Duke is a famous breeder and lover of the turf. Mr. Rathbone and myself soon made the acquaintance of the chief of the stable depart- ment. Readers of Homer do not want to be re- minded that hi2)2:»odamoio, horse-subduer, is the genitive of an epithet applied as a chief honor to the most illustrious heroes. It is the last word of the last line of the Iliad, and fitly closes the account of the funeral pageant of Hector, the tamer of horses. We Americans are a little shy of confessing that any title or conventional gran- deur makes an impression upon us. If at home we wince before any official with a sense of blighted inferiority, it is by general confession the clerk at the hotel office. There is an excuse for this, inasmuch as he holds our destinies in his hands, and decides whether, in case of acci- dent, we shall have to jump from the third or sixth story window. Lesser grandeurs do not find us very impressible. There is, however, something about the man who deals in horses which takes down the spirit, however proud, of him who is unskilled in equestrian matters and 82 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. unused to the horse-lover's vocabulary. We followed the master of the stables, meekly listen- ing and once in a while questioning. I had to fall back on my reserves, and summoned up memories half a century old to gain the respect and win the confidence of the great horse-sub- duer. He showed us various fine animals, some in their stalls, some outside of them. Chief of all was the renowned Bend Or, a Derby winner, a noble and beautiful bay, destined in a few weeks to gain new honors on the same turf in the triumph of his offspring Ormonde, whose acquaintance we shall make by and by. The next day, Tuesday, May 11th, at 4.25, we took the train for London. We had a saloon car, which had been thoughtfully secured for us through unseen, not unsuspected, agencies, which had also beautified the compartment with flowers. Here are some of my first impressions of Eng- land as seen from the carriage and from the cars. — How very English ! I recall Birket Foster's Pictures of English Landscape, — a beautiful, poetical series of views, but hardly more poetical than the reality. How thoroughly FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 83 England is groomed ! Our New England out- of-doors landscape often looks as if it had just got out of bed, and had not finished its toilet. The glowing green of everything strikes me : green hedges in place of our rail-fences, always ugly, and our rude stone-walls, which are not wanting in a certain look of fitness approaching to comeliness, and are really picturesque when lichen-coated, but poor features of landscape as compared to these universal hedges. I am dis- appointed in the trees, so far ; I have not seen one large tree as yet. Most of those I see are of very moderate dimensions, feathered all the way up their long slender trunks, with a lop-sided mop of leaves at the top, like a wig which has slipped awry. I trust that I am not finding everything coulenr de rose ; but I certainly do find the cheeks of children and young persons of such brilliant rosy hue as I do not remember that I have ever seen before. I am almost ready to think this and that child's face has been col- ored from a pink saucer. If the Saxon youth exposed for sale at Rome, in the days of Pope Gregory the Great, had complexions like these children, no wonder that the pontiff exclaimed, 34 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Not Angli, but angeli I All this may sound a little extravagant, but I am giving my impres- sions without any intentional exaggeration. How far these first impressions may be modified by after-experiences there will be time enough to find out and to tell. It is better to set them down at once just as they are. A first impres- sion is one never to be repeated; the second look will see much that was not noticed before, but it will not reproduce the sharp lines of the first proof, which is always interesting, no mat- ter what the eye or the mind fixes upon. " I see men as trees walking." That first experience could not be mended. When Dickens landed in Boston, he was struck with the brightness of all the objects he saw, — buildings, signs, and so forth. When I landed in Liverpool, everything looked very dark, very dingy, very massive, in the streets I drove through. So in London, but in a week it all seemed natural enough. We got to the hotel where we had engaged quarters, at eleven o'clock in the evening of Wednesday, the 12th of May. Everything was ready for us, — a bright fire blazing and supper waiting. When we came to look at the accom- LONDON. 35 modations, we found they were not at all adapted to our needs. It was impossible to stay there another night. So early the next morning we sent out our courier-maid, a dove from the ark, to find us a place where we could rest the soles of our feet. London is a nation of something like four millions of inhabitants, and one does not feel easy without he has an assured place of shelter. The dove flew all over the habitable districts of the city, — inquired at as manj^ as twenty houses. No roosting-place for our little flock of three. At last the good angel who fol- lowed us everywhere, in one shape or another, pointed the wanderer to a place which corre- sponded with all our requirements and wishes. This was at No. 17 Dover Street, Mackellar's Hotel, where we found ourselves comfortably lodged and well cared for during the whole time we were in London. It was close to Piccadilly and to Bond Street. Near us, in the same range, were Brown's Hotel and Batt's Hotel, both widely known to the temporary residents of London. We were but partially recovered from the fatigues and trials of the voyage when our 36 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. arrival pulled the string of the social shower- bath, and the invitations began pouring down upon us so fast that we caught our breath, and felt as if we should be smothered. The first evening saw us at a great dinner-party at our well-remembered friend Lady Harcourt's. Twenty guests, celebrities and agreeable per- sons, with or without titles. The tables were radiant with silver, glistening with choice porce- lain, blazing with a grand show of tulips. This was our " baptism of fire " in that long conflict which lasts through the London season. After dinner came a grand reception, most interesting, but fatiguing to persons hardly as yet in good condition for social service. We lived through it, however, and enjoyed meeting so many friends, known and unknown, who were very cordial and pleasant in their way of receiving us. It was plain that we could not pretend to an- swer all the invitations which flooded our tables. If we had attempted it, we should have found no time for anything else. A secretary was evi- dently a matter of immediate necessity. Through the kindness of Mrs. Pollock, we found a young lady who was exactly fitted for the place. She LONDON. 37 was installed in the little room intended for her, and began the work o£ accepting with pleasure and regretting our inability, of acknowledging the receipt of books, flowers, and other objects, and being very sorry that we could not subscribe to this good object and attend that meeting in behalf of a deserving charity, — in short, writ- ing almost everything for us except autographs, which I can warrant were always genuine. The poor young lady was almost tired out sometimes, having to stay at her table, on one occasion, so late as eleven in the evening, to get through her day's work. I simplified matters for her by giving her a set of formulae as a base to start from, and she proved very apt at the task of modifying each particular letter to suit its pur- pose. From this time forward continued a perpetual round of social engagements. Breakfasts, luncheons, dinners, teas, receptions with spread tables, two, three, and four deep of an evening, with receiving company at our own rooms, took up the day, so that we had very little time for common sight-seeing. Of these kinds of entertainment, the break- 38 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. fast, though pleasant enough when the company is agreeable, as I always found it, is the least convenient of all times and modes of visiting. You have already interviewed one breakfast, and are expecting soon to be coquetting with a tempting luncheon. If one had as many stom- achs as a ruminant, he would not mind three or four serious meals a day, not counting the tea as one of them. The luncheon is a very convenient affair : it does not require special dress ; it is informal ; it is soon over, and may be made light or heavy, as one chooses. The afternoon tea is almost a necessity in London life. It is considered useful as " a pick me up," and it serves an admirable purpose in the social system. It costs the household hardly any trouble or expense. It brings people together in the easiest possible way, for ten minutes or an hour, just as their engagements or fancies may settle it. A cup of tea at the right moment does for the virtuous reveller all that Falstaff claims for a good sherris-sack, or at least the first half of its " twofold operation : " "It ascends me into the brain ; dries me there all the foolish and duU and crudy vapors which en- LONDON. 39 viron it ; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes, which delivered over to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit." But it must have the right brain to work upon, and I doubt if there is any brain to which it is so congenial and from which it brings so much as that of a first-rate London old lady. I came away from the great city with the feel- ing that this most complex product of civiliza- tion was nowhere else developed to such perfec- tion. The octogenarian Londoness has been in society, — let us say the highest society, — all her days. She is as tough as an old macaw, or she would not have lasted so long. She has seen and talked with all the celebrities of three generations, all the beauties of at least half a dozen decades. Her wits have been kept bright by constant use, and as she is free of speech it requires some courage to face her. Yet nobody can be more agreeable, even to young persons, than one of these precious old dowagers. A great beauty is almost certainly thinking how she looks while one is talking with her ; an au- thoress is waiting to have one praise her book ; 40 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. but a grand old lady, who loves London society, who lives in it, who understands young people and all sorts of people, with her high-colored recollections of the past and her grand-maternal interests in the new generation, is the best of companions, especially over a cup of tea just I strong enough to stir up her talking ganglions. J A breakfast, a lunch, a tea, is a circumstance, an occurrence, in social life, but a dinner is an event. It is the full-blown flower of that cul- tivated growth of which those lesser products are the buds. I will not try to enumerate, still less to describe, the various entertainments to which we were invited, and many of which we attended. Among the professional friends I found or made during this visit to London, none were more kindly attentive than Dr. Priestley, who, with his charming wife, the daughter of the late Robert Chambers, took more pains to carry out our wishes than we could have asked or hoped for. At his house I first met Sir James Paget and Sir William Gull, long well known to me, as to the medical profession every- where, as preeminent in their several depart- ments. If I were an interviewer or a news- LONDON. 41 paper reporter, I should be tempted to give the impression which the men and women of dis- tinction I met made upon me ; but where all were cordial, where all made me feel as nearly as they could that I belonged where I found myself, whether the ceiling were a low or a lofty one, I do not care to differentiate my hosts and my other friends. Fortemque Gyan fortemque Cloanthum^ — I left my microscope and my test-papers at home. Our friends, several of them, had a pleasant way of sending their carriages to give us a drive in the Park, where, except in certain permitted regions, the common numbered vehicles are not allowed to enter. Lady Harcourt sent her car- riage for us to go to her sister's, Mrs. Mild- may's, where we had a pleasant little "tea," and met one of the most agreeable and remark- able of those London old ladies I have spoken of. For special occasions we hired an unnum- bered carriage, with professionally equipped driver and footman. Mrs. Bloomfield Moore sent her carriage for us to take us to a lunch at her house, where we met Mr. Browning, Sir Henry and Lady Lay- 42 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IX EUROPE. ard, Oscar Wilde and his handsome wife, and other well-known guests. After lunch, recita- tions, songs, etc. House full of pretty things. Among other curiosities a portfolio of drawings illustrating Keeley's motor, which, up to this time, has manifested a remarkably powerful vis inerticB, but which promises miracles. In the evening a gTand reception at Lady Gran- ville's, beginning (for us, at least) at eleven o'clock. The house a palace, and A thinks there were a thousand people there. We made the tour of the rooms, saw many great person- ages, had to wait for our carriage a long time, but got home at one o'clock. English people have queer notions about iced- water and ice-cream. " You will surely die, eating such cold stuff," said a lady to my com- panion. " Oh, no," she answered, " but I should certainly die were I to drink your two cups of strong tea." I approved of this " counter " on the teacup, but I did not think either of them was in much danger. The next day Rev. Mr. Haweis sent his car- riage, and we drove in the Park. In the after- noon we went to our Minister's to see the Amer- LONDON. 43 icaii ladies who had been presented at the draw- ing-room. After this, both of us were glad to pass a day or two in comparative quiet, except that we had a room full of visitors. So many persons expressed a desire to make our acquaint- ance that we thought it would be acceptable to them if we would give a reception ourselves. We were thinking how we could manage it with our rooms at the hotel, which were not arranged so that they could be thrown together. Still, we were planning to make the best of them, when Dr. and Mrs. Priestley suggested that we should receive our company at their house. This was a surprise, and a most welcome one, and A and her kind friend busied them- selves at once about the arrangements. We went to a luncheon at Lansdowne House, Lord Rosebery's residence, not far from our hotel. My companion tells a little incident which may please an American six-year-old: " The eldest of the four children, Sibyl, a pretty, bright child of six, told me that she wrote a let- ter to the Queen. I said, ' Did you begin. Dear Queen ? ' ' No,' she answered, ' I began. Your Majesty, and signed myself, Your little humble 44 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. servant, Sibyl." A very cordial and homelike reception at this groat house, where a couple of hours were passed most agreeably. On the following Sunday I went to Westmin- ster Abbey to hear a sermon from Canon Har- ford on A Cheerful Life. A lively, wholesome, and encouraging discourse, such as it would do many a forlorn New England congregation good to hoar. In the afternoon we both went together to the Abbey. Met our Beverly neighbor, Mrs. Vaughan, and adopted her as one of our party. The seats we were to have were full, and we had to be stowed where there was any place that would hold us. I was smuggled into a stall, going through long and narrow passages, be- tween crowded rows of people, and found my- self at last with a big book before me and a set of official personages around me, whose duties I did not clearly understand. I thought they might be mutes, or something of that sort, sal^ (^ried to look grave and keep quiet. After ser- vice we took tea with Dean Bradley, and after tea we visited the Jerusalem Chamber. I had been twice invited to weddinsfs in that famous room : once to the marriage of my friend Mot- LONDON. — LYCEUM THEATRE. 45 ley's daugliter, then to that of Mr. Frederick Locker's daughter to Lionel Tennyson, whose recent death has been so deei)ly mourned. I never expected to see that flerusaleni in which Harry the Fourth died, but there I found my- self in the large panelled chamber, with all its associati(ms. The ohler memories came up but vaguely ; an American finds it as hard to call j back anything over two or three centuries old ! as a sucking-pump to draw up water from a 1 depth of over thirty-three feet and a fraction. ' After this A went to a musical i)arty, dined witli the Vaughans, and had a good time among American friends. The next evening we went to the Lyceum Theatre to see Mr. Irving. He had placed the Royal box at our disposal, so we invited our friends the Priestleys to go with us, and we all enjoyed the evening mightily. Between the scenes we went behind the curtain, and saw the very curious and admirable machinery .of the dramatic spectacle. We made the acquaintance of several imps and demons, who were got up wonderfully well. Ellen Terry was as fascinat- ing as ever. I remembered that once before I 46 OUR nUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. had met her and Mr. Irving behind the scenes. It was at the Boston Theatre, and while I was talking with them a very heavy piece of scenery came crashing down, and filled the whole place with dust. It was but a short distance from where we were standing, and I could not help thinking how near our several life-dramas came to a simultaneous exeunt omncs. A long visit from a polite interviewer, shop- ping, driving, calling, arranging about the peo- ple to be invited to our reception, and an agree- able dinner at Chelsea with my American friend, Mrs. Merritt, filled np this day full enough, and left us in good condition for the next, which was to be a very busy one. In the Introduction to these papers, I men- tioned the fact that more than half a century ago I went to the famous Derby race at Epsom. I determined, if possible, to see the Derby of 1886, as I had seen that of 1834. I must have spoken of this intention to some interviewer, for I find the following paragraph in an English sporting newspaper, " The Field," for May 29th, 1886 : — " The Derby has always been the one event EPSOM. 47 in the racing year which statesmen, philoso- phers, poets, essayists, and litterateurs desire to see once in their lives. A few years since Mr. Gladstone was induced by Lord Granville and Lord Wolverton to run down to Epsom on the Derby day. The impression produced upon the Prime Minister's sensitive and emotional mind was that the mirth and hilarity displayed by his compatriots upon Epsom race-course was Italian rather than English in its character. On the other hand, Gustave Dore, who also saw the Derby for the first and only time in his life, ex- claimed, as he gazed with horror upon the faces below him, Quelle scene hrutale I We wonder to which of these two impressions Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes inclined, if he went last Wednesday to Epsom ! Probably the well- known, etc., etc. — Of one thing Dr. Holmes may rest finally satisfied: the Derby of 188G may possibly have seemed to him far less excit- ing than that of 1834 ; but neither in 1834 nor in any other year was the great race ever won by a better sportsman or more honorable man than the Duke of Westminster." My desire to see the Derby of this year was 48 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of the same origin and character as that which led me to revisit many scenes which I remem- bered. I cared quite as much about renewing old impressions as about getting new ones. I enjoyed everything which I had once seen all the more from the blending of my recollections with the present as it was before me. The Derby day of 1834 was exceedingly windy and dusty. Our party, riding on the out- side of the coach, was half smothered with the dust, and arrived in a very deteriorated condi- tion, but recompensed for it by the extraordi- nary sights we had witnessed. There was no train in those days, and the whole road between London and Epsom was choked with vehicles of all kinds, from four-in-hands to donkey-carts and wheelbarrows. My friends and I mingled freely in the crowds, and saw all the "humours" of the occasion. The thimble-riggers were out in great force, with their light, movable tables, the cups or thimbles, and the " little jokers," and the coachman, the sham gentleman, the country greenhorn, all properly got up and gathered about the table. I think we had " Aunt Sally," too, — the figure with a pipe in her mouth, EPSOM. 49 which one might shy a stick at for a penny or two and win something, I forget what. The clearing the course of stragglers, and the chas- ing about of the frightened little dog who had got in between the thick ranks of spectators, reminded me of what I used to see on old " ar- tillery election " days. It was no common race that I went to see in 1834. " It is asserted in the colunms of a con- tem])orary that Plenipotentiary was absolutely the IxNst horse of the century." This was tlie winner of the race I saw so long ago. Her- ring's colored portrait, which I have always kept, shows him as a great, powerful chestnut horse, well deserving the name of "bullock," whicli one of the jockeys applied to him. "Ru- mor credits Dr. Holmes," so "The Field" says, " witli desiring mentally to compare his two Derbies with each other." I wjis most fortu- nate in my objects of comparison. The horse I was about to see win was not unworthy of being named with tlie renowned champion of my ear- lier day. I (jiiote from a writer in the " Lon- don Morning Post," whose words, it will be seen, carry authority with them : — 50 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. " Deep as has hitherto been my reverence for Plenipotentiary, Bay Middleton, and Queen of Trumps from hearsay, and for Don John, Cru- cifix, etc., etc., from my own personal know- ledge, I am inclined to award the palm to Or- monde as the best three-year-old I have ever seen during close upon half a century's connec- tion with the turf." Ormonde, the Duke of Westminster's horse, was the son of that other winner of the Derby, Bend Or, whom I saw at Eaton Hall. Perhaps some coeval of mine may think it was a rather youthful idea to go to the race. I cannot help that. I was off on my first long vacation for half a century, and had a right to my whims and fancies. But it was one thing to go in with a vast crowd at five and twenty, and another thing to run the risks of the excursion at more than thrice that age. I looked about me for means of going safely, and could think of nothing better than to ask one of the plea- santest and kindest of gentlemen, to whom I had a letter from Mr. Winthrop, at whose house I had had the pleasure of making his acquaint- ance. Lord Eosebery suggested that the best EPSOM. 61 way would be for me to go in the special train which was to carry the Prince of Wales. First, then, I was to be introduced to his Royal High- ness, which office was kindly undertaken by our very obliging and courteous Minister, Mr. Phelps. After this all was easily arranged, and I was cared for as well as if I had been Mr. Phelps himself. On the grand stand I found myself in the midst of the great people, who were all very natural, and as much at their ease as the rest of the world. The Prince is of a lively temperament and a very cheerful aspect, — a young girl would call him " jolly " as well as "nice." I recall the story of "Mr. Pope" and his Prince of Wales, as told by Horace Walpole. " Mr. Pope, you don't love princes." " Sir, I beg your pardon." " Well, you don't love kings, then." " Sir, I own I love the lion best before his claws are grown." Certainly, nothing in Prince Albert Edward suggests any aggressive weapons or tendencies. The lovely, youthful - looking, gracious Alexandra, the al- ways affable and amiable Princess Louise, the tall youth who sees the crown and sceptre afar off in his dreams, the slips of girls so like many 62 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. school misses we left behind us, — all these grand personages, not being on exhibition, but ojff enjoying themselves, just as I was and as other people were, seemed very much like their fellow - mortals. It is really easier to feel at f home with the highest people in the land than with the awkward commoner who was knighted \^ yesterday. When " My Lord and Sir Paul " came into the Club which Goldsmith tells us of, the hilarity of the evening was instantly checked. The entrance of a dignitary like the present Prince of Wales would not have spoiled the fun of the evening. If there is any one accomplish- ment specially belonging to princes, it is that of making the persons they meet feel at ease. The grand stand to which I was admitted was a little privileged republic. I remember Thack- eray's story of his asking some simple question of a royal or semi-royal personage whom he met in the courtyard of an hotel, which question his Highness did not answer, but called a subordi- nate to answer for him. I had been talking some time with a tall, good-looking gentleman, whom I took for a nobleman to whom I had been introduced. Something led me to think I EPSOM. 63 was mistaken in the identity of tliis gentleman. I asked him, at last, if he were not So and So. " No," he said, " I am Prince Christian." You are a Christian prince, anyhow, I said to my self, if I may judge by your manners. I once made a similar mistake in addressing a young fellow-citizen of some social pretensions. I apologized for my error. "No offence," he answered. Offence indeed ! I should hope not. But he had not the " maniere de prince^'' or he would never have used that word. I must say something about the race I had taken so much pains to see. There was a pre- liminary race, which excited comparatively little interest. After this the horses were shown in the paddock, and many of our privileged party went down from the stand to look at them. Then they were brought out, smooth, shining, fine-drawn, frisky, spirit-stirring to look upon, — most beautiful of all the bay horse Ormonde, who could hardly be restrained, such was his eagerness for action. The horses disappear in the distance. — They are off, — not yet distin- guishable, at least to me. A little waiting time, 54 OCR HUNDRED DAYS IN ErROPE. and they swim into onr ken, bnt in what order of precedenco it is as yet not easy to say. Here they come ! Two horses have emerged from the niek, and are sweeping, rnsliing, storming, to- wards ns, abnost side by side. On6 slides by the other, half a length, a length, a length and a half. Those are Areher's colors, and tlie beantifnl bay Ormonde flashes by the line, win- ner of the Derby of 188l>. ^^ The Ixird" has made a good fight for the lirst place, mid comes in second. Poor Archer, the king of the jock- eys I He will bestride no more Derby winners. A few weeks later he died by his own hand. "Wliik* the race was going on, the yells of the betting erowtl beneath ns were incessant. It must have been the frantic cries and movements of these peo})lc that caused Gustave Dore to characterize it as a brutal scene. The vast mob which thronged the wide space beyond the shout- ing circle just round us was nuieh like that of any other fair, so far as I could see from my royal perch. The nu^st conspicuous object was a man on an inunensely tall pair of stilts, stalking about among the crowd. I think it probable that 1 had as nmch enjoyment in forming one of EPSOM. 65 tho great mob m 1884 as I had among the gran- deurs in 1886, but the last is pleasanter to re- member and especially to tell of. After the race we had a luncheon served us, a comfoi'tablc and substantial one, which was very far from unwelcome. I did not go to tlio Derby to bet on the winner. But as I went in to luncheon, I passed a gentleman standing in cus- tody of a plate half covered with sovereigns. lie politely asked me if I would take a little paper from a heap there was lying by the plate, and add a sovereign to tho collection already there. I did so, and, unfolding my paper, found it was a blank, and ])assed on. The pool, as I afterwards learned, fell to the lot of the Turkish Ambassador. I found it very windy and uncom- fortable on the more exposed parts of the grand stand, and was glad that I had taken a shawl with me, in which I wrapped myself as if I had been on shipboard. This, 1 told my English friends, was tho more civilized form of the Indian's blanket. My report of the weather does not say much for the English May, but it is generally agreed upon that this is a backward and unpleasant spring. 66 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. After my return from the race we went to a lai'ge dinner at Mr. Phelps's house, where we met Mr. Browninq: afrain, and the Lord Chan- cellor Ilerschel, among others. Then to Mrs. Cyril Flower's, one of the most sumptuous houses in London ; and after that to Lady Kothschild's, another of the private palaces, with ceilings lofty as firmaments, and walls that might have been copied from the NeweTerusalem. There was still another great and splendid re- ception at Lady Dalhonsie's, and a party at Mrs. Smith's, but w^e were both tired enough to be willing to go home after what may be called a pretty good day's work at enjoying ourselves. We had been a fortnight in London, and were now inextricably entangled in the meshes of the golden web of London social life. II. The reader wlio glances over these papers, and, finding them too full of small details and the lesser personal matters which belong natu- rally to private correspondences, turns impa- tiently from them, has my entire sympathy and good-will. He is not one of those for whom these pages are meant. Having no particular interest in the writer or his affairs, he does not care for the history of " the migrations from tlie blue bed to the brown " and tlic many Mistress Quicklyisms of circumstantial narrative. Yet all this may be pleasant reading to relatives and friends. But I must not forget that a new generation of readers has come into being since I have been writing for the public, and that a new genera- tion of aspiring and brilliant authors has grown into general recognition. The dome of Boston State House, which is the centre of my little uni- verse, was glittering in its fresh golden pellicle 68 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. before I had reached the scriptural boundary of life. It has lost its lustre now, and the years which have dulled its surface have whitened the dome of that fragile structure in which my con- sciousness holds the session of its faculties. Time is not to be cheated. It is easy to talk of perennial youth, and to toy with the flattering fictions which every ancient personage accepts as true so far as he himself is concerned, and laughs at as foolish talk when he hears them applied to others. When, in my exidting immaturity, I wrote the lines not mikuown to the reading pub- lic mider the name of '' The Last Leaf," I spoke of the possibility that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds antl blossoms of a new spring were opening and spreading all ai'ound me. I am not as yet the solitary surW- vor of my literary contemporaries, and, remem- bering who my few coevals are, it may well be hoped that I shall not be. But I feel lonely, very lonely, in the pages through which I wan- der. These are new names in the midst of which I find my own. In another sense I am very far from alone. I have daily assurances that I have a constituency of known and un- EPSOM. 69 known personal friends, whose indulgence I have no need of asking. I know there are readers enough who will be pleased to follow me in my brief excursion, because I am myself., and will demand no better reason. If I choose to write for them, I do no injury to those for whom my personality is an object of indifference. They will find on every shelf some publications which are not intended for them, and which they pre- fer to let alone. No person is expected to help himself to everything set before him at a pub- lic table. I will not, therefore, hesitate to go on with the simple story of our Old World expe- riences. Thanks to my Indian blanket, — my shawl, I mean, — I found myself nothing the worse for my manifold adventures of the 27th of May. The cold wind sweeping over Epsom downs re- minded me of our own chilling easterly breezes ; especially the northeasterly ones, which are to me less disagreeable than the southeasterly. But the poetical illusion about an English May, " Zephyr with Aurora playing, As he met her once a-Maying-," and all that, received a shrewd thrust. Zephyr 60 OUR HCXDRED DAYS IS EUROPE. ought to have come in an ulster, and offered Aii- TorA a warm petticoat. However, in spite of all difficulties, I brought off my recollections of the Derby of 1SS6 iu triumph, and am now waiting for the colored porti*ait of Ormonde with Archer on his back, — Archer, the winner of live Derby races, one of which was won by the American hoi*se Iroquois. ^Vhen that picture, which I am daily expecting, arrives, I shall have it framed and hung by the side of Herring's picture of Plenipotentiary, the horse I saw win the Derby in IS 34. These two, with an old porti*ait of the gi-eat Eclipse, who, as my engraving of 1780 (^Stubbs's) says, *'was never beat, or ever had occation for ^YTiip or Spur," will constitnte my entire sporting gallery. I have not that vicious and demoralizing love of horse-flesh which makes it next to impossible to find a perfectly honest hippophile. But a racer is the i-ealiza- tion of an ideal quadruped. — *' A pard-like spirit, beautiful and shrift : " SO ethereal, so bird-like, that it is no wonder that the horse about whom those old story-tellers lied so stoutly, — telling of his running a mile in a minute, — was colled Flying Childers. LONDON. 61 The roses in Mrs. Pfeiffer's garden were hardly out of flower when I hmched with her at her pretty villa at Putney. There I met Mr. Browning, Mr. Holman Hunt, Mrs. Ritchie, Miss Anna Swanwick, the translator of ^scliy- lus, and other good company, besides that of my entertainer. One of my very agreeable experiences was a call from a gentleman with whom I had corre- sponded, but whom I had never met. This was Mr. John Bellows, of Gloucester, publisher, printer, man of letters, or rather of words ; for he is the author of that truly remarkable little manual, " The Bona Fide Pocket Dictionary of the French and English Languages." To the review of this little book, which is dedicated to Prince Lucien Bonaparte, the " London Times " devoted a full column. I never heard any one who had used it speak of it except with admira- tion. The modest Friend may be surprised to find himself at full length in my pages, but those who know the little miracle of typography, its conciseness, completeness, arrangement, will not wonder that I was gratified to see the author, who sent it to me, and who has written me most 62 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. interesting letters on the local antiquities of Gloucester and its neighborhood. We lunched that day at Lad}' Camperdown's, where we were happy to meet Miss Frances Power Cobbe. In the afternoon we went by in- vitation to a " tea and talk *' at the Reverend My. llaweis's, at Chelsea. We found the house close packed, but managed to get through the rooms, shaking innumerable hands of the rever- end gentleman's parishioners and other visitors. It was very well arranged, so as not to be too fatiguing, and we left tlie cordial gathering in good condition. We drove home with Bishop and Mrs. EUicott. After this Sir James Paget called, and took me to a small and early dinner-party ; and A went with my secretary, the young lady of whom I have spoken, to see " Human Na- ture,'' at Drury Lane Theatre. On the following day, after dining with Lady Holland (wife of Sir Henry, niece of Macaulay), we went across the street to our neighbor's. Lady Stanley's. There was to be a great meeting of schoolmistresses, in whose work her son, the Honorable Lyidph Stanley, is deeply interested. LONDON. 68 Alas ! The schoolma'ams wore just leaving as we entered the door, and all we saw of them was tlie trail of their descending robes. I was very sorry for this, for I have a good many friends among our own schoolmistresses, — friends whom I never saw, but know through the kind words they have addressed to me. No place in London looks more reserved and exclusive tlian Devonshire House, standing back behind its high wall, extending along Piccadilly. There is certainly nothing in its exterior which invites intrusion. We had the pleasure of tak- ing tea in the great house, accompanying our American friend. Lady ITarcourt, and were gra- ciously received and entertained by Lady Ed- ward Cavendish. Like the other great houses, it is a museum of paintings, statues, objects of interest of all sorts. It must be confessed that it is pleasanter to go througli the rooms with one of the ladies of the household than under the lead of a liveried servant. Lord llartington came in while we were there. All the men who are distinguished in political life become so famil- iar to the readers of " Punch " in their carica- tures, that we know them at sight. Even those 64 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. who can claim no such public distinction are occa- sionally the subjects of the caricaturist, as some of us have found out for ourselves. A good car- icature, which seizes the prominent features and gives them the character Nature hinted, but did not fully carry out, is a work of genius. Nature herself is a remorseless caricaturist, as oiu* daily intercourse with our fellow men and women makes evident to us, and as is curiously illus- trated in the figures of Charles Lebrun, showing the relations between certain human faces and those of various animals. Hardly an English statesman in bodily presence could be mistaken by any of '' Punch's " readers. On the same day that we made this quiet visit we attended a great and ceremonious assem- bly. There were two parts in the programme, in the first of which I was on the stage solus, — that is, without my companion ; in the second we were together. This day, Saturday, the 29th of May, was observed as the Queen's birth- day, although she was born on the 24th. Sir William Ilarcourt gave a great dinner to the officials of his department, and later in tlie even- ing Lady Rosebery held a reception at the For- LONDON. — OFFICIAL RECEPTIONS. Q^ eign Office. On both these occasions everybody is expected to be in court dress, but my host told me I might present myself in ordinary evening dress. I thought that I might feel awkwardly among so many guests, all in the wedding gar- ments, knee-breeches and the rest, without which I ventured among them. I never passed an easier evening in any company than among these official personages. Sir William took me under the shield of his ample presence, and answered all my questions about the various notable per- sonages at his table in a way to have made my fortune if I had been a reporter. From the din- ner I went to Mrs. Gladstone's, at 10 Downing Street, where A called for me. She had found a very small and distinguished company there, Prince Albert Victor among the rest. At half past eleven we walked over to the Foreign Office to Lady Rosebery's reception. Here Mr. Gladstone was of course the centre of a group, to which I was glad to add myself. His features are almost as familiar to me as my own, for a photograph of him in his library has long stood on my revolving bookcase, with a large lens before it. He is one of a small circle Q6 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of individuals in whom I have had and still have a special personal interest. The year 1809,^j which introduced me to atmospheric existence,! was the birth-year of Gladstone, Tennyson, Lord Houghton, and Darwin. It seems like an honor to have come into the world in such company, but it is more likely to promote humility than vanity in a common mortal to find himself coeval with such illustrious personages. Men born in the^ same year watch each other, especially as the \ sands of life begin to run low, as we can imagine | so many damaged hour-glasses to keep an eye on I each other. Women, of course, never know who / are their contemporaries. Familiar to me as were the features of Mr. Gladstone, I looked upon him with astonishment. For he stood before me with epaulets on his shoulders and a rapier at his side, as military in his aspect as if he had been Lord Wolseley, to whom I was introduced a short time afterwards. I was fortunate enough to see and hear Mr. Gladstone on a still more memorable occasion, and can afford to leave saying what were my impressions of the very eminent statesman until I speak of that occasion. LONDON. — OFFICIAL RECEPTIONS. 67 A great number of invitations had been given out for the reception at Lady Rosebery's, — over two thousand, my companion heard it said. Whatever the number was, the crowd was very great, — so great that one might well feel alarmed for the safety of any delicate person who was in the pack which formed itself at one place in the course of the evening. Some ob- struction must have existed afronte^ and the vis a tergo became fearful in its pressure on those who were caught in the jam. I began thinking of the crushes in which I had been caught, or which I had read and heard of : the terrible time at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty, where some forty persons were squeezed or tram- pled to death ; the Brooklyn Theatre and other similar tragedies ; the crowd I was in at the unveiling of the statue on the column of the Place Vendome, where I felt as one may suppose Giles Corey did when, in his misery, he called for "more weight" to finish him. But there was always a deus ex machina for us when we were in trouble. Looming up above the crowd was the smiling and encouraging countenance of the ever active, always present, always helpful 68 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Mr. Smalley. He cleared a breathing space be- fore us. For a short time it was really a for- midable wedging together of people, and if a lady had fainted in the press, she might have run a serious risk before she could have been extricated. No more " marble halls " for us, if we had to undergo \hQ peine forte et dure as the condition of our presence ! We were both glad to escape from this threatened asphyxia, and move freely about the noble apartments. Lady Rosebery, who was kindness itself, would have had us stay and sit down in comfort at the sup- per-table, after the crowd had thinned, but we were tired with all we had been through, and ordered our carriage. Ordered our carriage I " I can call spirits from the vasty deep." . . . "J5Mf will they come when you do call for them ? '' The most formidable thing about a London party is getting away from it. *' C'est le dernier pas quEcoute." A crowd of anxious persons in retreat is hanging about the windy door, and the breezy stairway, and the airy hall. A stentorian voice, hard as that of Rhadaman- thus, exclaims, — " Lady Vere de Vere's carriage stops the way ! " LONDON. 69 If my Lady Vere de Vere is not on hand, and that pretty quickly, off goes her carriage, and the stern voice bawls again, — " Mrs. Smith's carriage stops the way ! " Mrs. Smith's particular Smith may be worth his millions and live in his marble palace ; but if Mrs. Smith thinks her coachman is going to stand with his horses at that door until she ap- pears, she is mistaken, for she is a minute late, and now the coach moves on, and Rhadamanthus calls aloud, — " Mrs. Brown's carriage stops the way ! " Half the lung fevers that carry off the great people are got waiting for their carriages. I know full well that many readers would be disappointed if I did not mention some of the grand places and bring in some of the great names that lend their lustre to London society. We were to go to a fine musical party at Lady Rothschild's on the evening of the 30th of May. It happened that the day was Sunday, and if we had been as punctilious as some New England Sabbatarians, we might have felt compelled to decline the tempting invitation. But the party was given by a daughter of Abraham, and in TO OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. every Hebrew household the true Sabbath was over. We were content for that evening to shel- ter ourselves under the old dispensation. Tlie party, or concert, was a very brilliant affair. Patti sang to us, and a tenor, and a violinist played for us. llow we two Americans came to be in so favored a position I do not know ; all 1 do know is that we were shown to our places, and found them very agreeable ones. In the same row of seats was the Prince of Wales, two chairs off from A 's seat. Di- rectly in front of A was the Princess of Wales, " in ruby velvet, with six rows of pearls encircling her throat, and two more strings fall- ing quite low ; " and next her, in front of me, the startling presence of Lady de Grey, formerly Lady Lonsdale, and before that Gladys Herbert. On the other side of the Princess sat the Grand Duke JNIichael of Russia. As we are among the grandest of the gran- dees, I nuist enliven my sober account with an extract from my companion's diary : — '' There were several great beauties there, Lady Claude Hamilton, a queenly blonde, being one. Minnie Stevens Paget had with her the WINDSOR. 71 pretty Miss Langdon, of Now York. Royalty had one room for supper, with its attendant lords and ladies. Lord Rothschild took me down to a long table for a sit-down supper, — there were some thirty of us. The most superb pink orchids were on the table. The [Thane] of sat next me, and how he stared before he was introduced ! . . . This has been the finest party we have been to, sitting comfortably in such a beautiful ball-room, gazing at royalty in the flesh, and at the shades of departed beauties on the wall, by Sir Joshua and Gainsborough. It was a new experience to find that the royal lions fed up-stairs, and mixed animals below ! " A visit to Windsor had been planned, under the guidance of a friend whose kindness had al- ready shown itself in various forms, and who, before we left England, did for us more than we could have thought of owing to any one person. This gentleman, Mr. Willett, of Brighton, called with Mrs. Willett to take us on the visit which had been arranged between us. Windsor Castle, which everybody knows, or can easily learn, all about, is one of the largest of those huge caverns in which the descendants 72 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of the original cave men, when they have reached the height of human grandeur, delight to shelter themselves. It seems as if such a great lioUow quarry of rock would strike a chill through every tenant, but modern improvements reach even the palaces of kings and queens, and the regulation temperature of the castle, or of its in- habited portions, is fixed at sixty-five degrees of Fahrenheit. The royal standard was not float- ing from the tower of the castle, and everything was quiet and lonely. We saw all we wanted to, — pictures, furniture, and the rest. My namesake, the Queen's librarian, was not there to greet us, or I should have had a pleasant half-hour in the library with that very polite gentleman, whom I had afterwards the pleasure of meeting in London. After going through all the apartments in the castle that we cared to see, or our conductress cared to show us, we drove in the park, along the " three-mile walk," and in the by-roads leading from it. The beautiful avenue, the open spaces with scattered trees here and there, made this a most delightful excursion. I saw many fine oaks, one about sixteen feet of honest girth, WINDSOR. -THE HAWTHORN. 73 but no one which was very remarkable. I wished I could have compared the handsomest of them '. with one in Beverly, which I never look at with- j out taking my hat off. This is a young tree, / with a future before ifc, if barbarians do not meddle with it, more conspicuous for its spread than its circumference, stretching not very far from a hundred feet from bough-end to bough- end. I do not think I saw a specimen of the British Quercus rohur of such consummate beauty. But I know from Evelyn and Strutt what England has to boast of, and I will not challenge the British oak. Two sensations I had in Windsor park, or forest, for I am not quite sure of the boundary which separates them. The first was the lovely sight of the hawthorn in full bloom. I had al- ways thought of the hawthorn as a pretty shrub, growing in hedges ; as big as a currant bush or a barberry bush, or some humble plant of that character. I was surprised to see it as a tree, standing by itself, and making the most deli- cious roof a pair of young lovers could imagine to sit under. It looked at a little distance like a young apple-tree covered with new-fallen snow. 74 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. I shall never see the word hawthorn in poetry again without the image of the snowy but far from chilling canopy rising before me. It is the very bower of young love, and must have done more than any growth of the forest to soften the doom brought upon man by the fruit of the forbidden tree. No wonder that " In tlie spring: a young: man's fancy lightly tnrns to thonghts of love," with the object of his affections awaiting him in this boudoir of nature. What a pity that Zekle, who courted Huldy over the apples she was peeling, could not have made love as the bucolic youth does, when " Every shepherd tells liis tale Under the hawthorn in the dale " I (I will have it Zot?e-tale, in spite of Warton's comment.) But I suppose it does not make so much difference, for love transmutes the fruit in Huldy's lap into the apples of the Hesperides. In this way it is that the associations with the poetry we remember come up when we find our- selves surrounded by English scenery. The great poets build temples of song, and fill them with images and symbols which move us almost WINDSOR. -THE CUCKOO. iFy to adoration ; the lesser minstrels fill a panel or gild a cornice here and there, and make our hearts glad with glimpses of beauty. I felt all this as I looked around and saw the hawthorns in full bloom, in the openings among the oaks and other trees of the forest. Presently I heard a sound to which I had never listened before, and which I have never heard since : — Coooo — coooo ! Nature had sent one cuckoo from her aviary to sing his double note for me, that I might not pass away from her pleasing show without once hearing the call so dear to the poets. It was the last day of spring. A few more days, and the solitary voice might have been often heard ; for the bird becomes so common as to furnisli Shakespeare an image to fit " the skipping king : " — " He was but as the cuckoo is in June, Heard, not regarded." For the lyric poets the cuckoo is " companion of the spring," " darling of the spring ; " coming with the daisy, and the primrose, and the blos- soming sweet-pea. Where the sound came from I could not tell ; it puzzled Wordsworth, with 76 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. younger eyes than mine, to find whence issued " that cry Wliich made me look a thoiisand w ays In bush, and tree, and sky.' ' Only one hint of the prosaic troubled my emo- tional delight: I could not help thinking how capitally the little rogue imitated the cuckoo clock, with the sound of which I was pretty well acquainted. On our return from Windsor we had to cfet ready for another great dinner with our Minis- ter, Mr. Phelps. As we are in the habit of con- sidering our great officials as public property, and as some of my readers want as many glimpses of high life as a decent regard to republican sensibilities will permit, I will borrow a few words from the diary to which I have often re- ferred : — "The Princess Louise w^as there with the Marquis, and I had the best opportunity of see- ing how they receive royalty at private houses. Mr. and Mrs. Phelps went down to the door to meet her the moment she came, and then Mr. Phelps entered the drawing-room with the Prin- cess on his arm, and made the tour of the room LONDON. 11 with her, she bowing and speaking to each one of us. Mr, Goschen took me in to dinner, and Lord Lome was on my other side. All of the flowers were of the royal color, red. It was a grand dinner. . . . The Austrian Ambassador, Count Karoli, took Mrs. Phelps in [to dinner], his position being higher than that of even the Duke [of Argyll], who sat upon her right." It was a very rich experience for a single day : the stately abode of royalty, with all its mani- fold historical recollections, the magnificent av- enue of forest trees, the old oaks, the hawthorn in full bloom, and the one cry of the cuckoo, calling me back to Nature in her spring-time freshness and glory ; then, after that, a great London dinner-party at a house where the kind host and the gracious hostess made us feel at home, and where we could meet the highest peo- ple in the land, — the people whom we who live in a simpler way at home are naturally pleased to be with under such auspices. What of all this shall I remember longest ? Let me not seem ungrateful to my friends who planned the excursion for us, or to those who asked us to the brilliant evening entertainment, but I feel as 78 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Wordsworth felt about the cuckoo, — he will survive all the other memories. ' And I can listen to thee yet, Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again." Nothing is more hackneyed than an American's description of his feelings in the midst of the scenes and objects he has read of all his days, and is looking upon for the first time. To each of us it appears in some respects in the same way, but with a difference for every individual. We may smile at Irving' s emotions at the first sight of a distinguished Englishman on his own soil, — the ingenious Mr. Roscoe, as an earlier generation would have called him. Our tourists, who are constantly going forward and back be- tween England and America, lose all sense of the special distinctions between the two coun- tries which do not bear on their personal con- venience. Happy are those who go with unworn, unsatiated sensibilities from the New World to the Old ; as happy, it may be, those who come from the Old World to the New, but of that I cannot form a judgment. THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. 79 On the first day of June we called by appoint- ment upon Mr. Peel, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and went through the Houses of Parliament. We began with the train-bearer, then met the housekeeper, and presently were joined by Mr. Palgrave. The " Golden Trea- sury " stands on my drawing-room table at home, and the name on its title-page had a perfectly familiar sound. These accidental meetings with persons whom we know by their publications are very pleasant surprises. Among other things to which Mr. Palgrave called our attention was the death-warrant of Charles the First. One name in the list of sign- ers naturally fixed our eyes upon it. It was that of John Dixwell. A lineal descendant of the old regicide is very near to me by family connection. Colonel Dixwell having come to this country, married, and left a posterity, which has resmned the name, dropped for the sake of safety at the time when he, Goffe, and Whalley were in concealment in various parts of New Eng- land. We limched with the S^ieaker, and had the pleasure of the company of Archdeacon Farrar. ^y 80 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. In the aftornooii wo wont to a toa at a very grand house, where, as my companion says in her cliar}^ *' it took full six mon in rod satin knee-brooches to lot us in." Another grand per- sonage asked us to dine with her at her country place, but wo wore too full of engagements. In the evening we went to a large reception at Mr. Gosse's. It was pleasant to meet artists and scholars, — the kind of company to which we are much used in our jesthetic city. I found our host as agreeable at home as he was when in Boston, where he became a favorite, both as a looturor and as a visitor. Another day we visited Stafford House, where Lord Eonald Gower, himself an artist, did the honors of the house, showing us the pictures and sculptures, his own included, in a very obliging and agrooablo way. I have often taken note of the resomblances of living persons to the por- traits and statues of their remote ancestors. In showing us the portrait of one of his own far- back progenitors. Lord Konald placed a photo- graph of himself in the corner of the frame. The likeness was so close that the photograph might seem to have been copied from the paint- LONDON. 81 in^, the dress only beiii^i^ changed. Tlic Duke of Sutherland, wlio had just come back from Amer- ica, complained that the dinners and lunches had used him up. I was fast learning how to sym- pathize with him. Then to Grosvenor House to see the pictures. I best remember Gainsborough's beautiful Blue Boy, conunonly so called, from the color of his dress, and Sir Joshua's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which everybody knows in engrav- ings. We lunched in clerical company that day, at the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol's, with the Archbishop of York, the Reverend Mr. Haweis, and others as guests. I told A that she was not suHKciently impressed with her po- sition at the side of an arclibishop ; she was not crumhlmg bread in her ncivous excitement. The company did not seem to remember Sydney Smith's remark to the young lady next him at a dinner-party : " My dear, I see you are nervous, by your crumbling your bread as you do. / always crumble bread when 1 sit by a bishop, and when I sit by an archbishop 1 crumble bread with both hands." That evening I had the pleasure of dining with the distinguished 82 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Mr. Bryce, whose acquaintance I made in our own country, through my son, who has intro- duced me to many agreeable persons of his own generation, with whose companionship I am glad to mend the broken and merely fragmentary circle of old friendships. The 3d of June was a memorable day for us, for on the evening of that day we were to hold our reception. If Dean Bradley had proposed our meeting our guests in the Jerusalem cham- ber, I should hardly have been more astonished. But these kind friends meant what they said, and put the offer in such a shape that it was impossible to resist it. So we sent out our cards to a few hundreds of persons, — those who we thought might like invitations. I was particularly desirous that many members of the medical profession whom I had not met, but who felt well disposed towards me, should be at this gathering. The meeting was in every respect a success. I wrote a prescription for as many baskets of champagne as would be con- sistent with the well-being of our guests, and such light accompaniments as a London company is wont to expect under similar circumstances. LONDON. — OUR RECEPTION. 83 My own recollections o£ the evening-, unclouded by its festivities, but confused by its multitudi- nous succession of introductions, are about as definite as the Duke of Wellington's alleged monosyllabic description of the battle of Water- loo. But A writes in her diary : " From nine to twelve we stood, receiving over three hundred people out of the four hundred and fifty we invited.'* As I did not go to Europe to visit hospitals or museums, I might have missed seeing some of those professional brethren whose names I hold in honor and whose writings are in my library. If any such failed to receive our cards of invitation, it was an accident which, if I had known, I should have deeply regretted. So far as we could judge by all we heard, our unpretentious party gave general satisfaction. Many different social circles were represented, but it passed off easily and agreeably. I can say this more freely, as the credit of it belongs so largely to the care and self-sacrificing efforts of Dr. Priestley and his charming wife. I never refused to write in the birthday book or the album of the humblest schoolgirl or schoolboy, and I could not refuse to set my 84 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. name, with a verse from one of my poems, in tlie album of the Princess of Wales, which was sent me for that purpose. It was a nice new book, with only two or three names in it, and those of musical composers, — Rubinstein's, I think, was one of them, — so that I felt honored by the great lady's request. I ought to describe the book, but I only remember that it was quite large and sumptuously elegant, and that I copied into it the last verse of a poem of mine called " The Chambered Nautilus," as I have often done for plain republican albums. The day after our simple reception was nota- ble for three social events in which we had our part. The first was a lunch at the house of Mrs. Cyril Flower, one of the finest in London, — Surrey House, as it is called. Mr. Brown- ing, who seems to go everywhere, and is one of the vital elements of London society, was there as a matter of course. Miss Cobbe, many of whose essays I have read with great satisfaction, though I cannot accept all her views, was a guest whom I was very glad to meet a second time. In the afternoon we went to a garden-party given by the Princess Louise at Kensington LONDON. — A GARDEN-PARTY. 85 Palace, a gloomy-looking edifice, which might be taken for a hospital or a poorhouse. Of all the festive occasions which I attended, the gar- den-parties were to me the most formidable. They are all very well for young people, and for those who do not mind the nipping and eager air, with which, as I have said, the climate of England, no less than that of America, falsifies all the fine things the poets have said about May, and, I may add, even June. We wan- dered about the grounds, spoke with the great people, stared at the odd ones, and said to our- selves, — at least I said to myself, — with Ham- let, " The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold." The most curious personages were some East In- dians, a chocolate-colored lady, her husband, and children. The mother had a diamond on the side of her nose, its setting riveted on the in- side, one might suppose ; the effect was peculiar, far from captivating. A said that she should prefer the good old-fashioned nose-ring, as we find it described and pictured by travel- lers. She saw a great deal more than I did, of course. I quote from her diary : " The little So OCR IirXDKFD DAYS IX KTROPE. \\asicvn ohildron luado tlioir native salaam totho Prinooss by prostrating' tlunnsolvos tiat on their little stomaehs in front ot' her, putting their IkuuIs between her feet, pushing- them aside, and kissing the print of her feet ! *' 1 really believe one or both of ns would have run serious risks of eatehing our •" death o' eold," if we had waited for our own carriage, whieh seemed forever in eoming- forward. The good Lady Holland, who was more than onee oiu- guardian angel, brought us home in hers. So ^^e got warmed up at our own hearth, and were ready in due season for tlie large and tine dinner-party at Archdeacon Farrar's, where, among- other guests, were ^[rs. Phelps, our Min- ister's wife, who is a great favorite alike with Americans and English, Sir John Millais, Mr. Tyndall, and other inteivsting people. I am sorry that we could not have visited Xewstead Abbey. I had a letter fi*om ^Mr. Thornton Lothrop to Colonel AVebb, the present pivprietor, with whom we lunched. 1 have spoken of the pleasure 1 had when 1 came ac- cidentally upon pei*sons with whose name and fame I had long beeu acquainted. A similar LONDON, 87 imprcfiHion was that wlii-h I received when I found rnysf'lf in the company of the bearer of an old hiHtoric name. When my host at the luneh introduced a stat^dydookin^ gentleman as Sir Kenehn J>>igby, it gave me a start, as if a ghost ha^l stood before me. I recovered myself immediately, however, for there was nothing of the impalpable or immaterial about the stalwart personage who bore the name. I wanted to ask him if he carried any of his anr^str>r's " powder of sympathy " about witli him. Many, but not all, of my readers remember that famous man's famous preparation. When used to cure a wound, it was applied to the weapon that made it ; the pai-t was })ound up so as to bring the edges of the wound together, and by the won- drous influence of the sympathetic powder the healing prof;ess trjok place in the kindest possi- ble manner. Sir Kenelm, the ancestor, was a gallant soldier, a grand gentleman, and the hus- band of a wonderfully beautiful wife, whose charms he tried to preserve from the ravages of time by various experiments. lie was also the homccopathist of his day, the Elisha Perkins (metallic tractors} of his generation. Tlie 88 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. " mind cure " people might adopt him as one of their precursors. I heard a curious statement which was illus- trated in the person of one of the gentlemen we met at this table. It is that English sport- ing men are often deaf on one side, in conse- quence of the noise of the frequent discharge of their guns affecting the right ear. This is a very convenient infirmity for gentlemen who in- dulge in slightly aggressive remarks, but when they are hit back never seem to be conscious at all of the riposte^ — the return thrust of the fencer. Dr. AUchin called and took me to a dinner, where I met many professional brothers, and en- joyed myself highly. By this time every day was pledged for one or more engagements, so that many very attrac- tive invitations had to be declined. I will not lollow the days one by one, but content myself with mentioning some of the more memorable visits. I had been invited to the Rabelais Club, as I have before mentioned, by a cable message. This is a club of which the late Lord Houghton was president, and of which I am a member, as WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 89 are several other Americans. I was afraid that the gentlemen who met, *' To laugh and shake in Rabelals's easy-chair,'* might be more hilarious and demonstrative in their mirth than I, a sober New Englander in the superfluous decade, might find myself equal to. But there was no uproarious jollity ; on the contrary, it was a pleasant gathering of literary people and artists, who took their pleasure not sadly, but serenely, and I do not remember a single explosive guffaw. Another day, after going all over Dudley House, including Lady Dudley's boudoir, " in light blue satin, the prettiest room we have seen," A says, we went, by appointment, to Westminster Abbey, where we spent two hours under the guidance of Archdeacon Farrar. I think no part of the Abbey is visited with so much interest as Poets' Corner. We are all familiarly acquainted with it beforehand. We are all ready f or " O rare Ben Jonson ! " as we stand over the place where he was planted stand- ing upright, as if he had been dropped into a post-hole. We remember too well the foolish and flippant mockery of Gay's " Life is a Jest." 90 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. If I were dean of the cathedral, I should be tempted to alter the e/to a G, Then we could read it without contempt ; for life is a gest, an achievement, — or always ought to be. West- minster Abbey is too crowded with monuments to the illustrious dead and those who have been considered so in their day to produce any other than a confused impression. When we visit the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides, no side- lights interfere with the view before us in the field of mental vision. We see the Emperor ; Marengo, Austerlitz, Waterloo, Saint Helena, come before us, with him as their central figure. So at Stratford, — the Cloptons and the John a Combes, with all their memorials, cannot make us lift our eyes from the stone which covers the dust that once breathed and walked the streets of Stratford as Shakespeare. Ah, but here is one marble countenance that I know full well, and knew for many a year in the flesh ! Is there an American who sees the bust of LouG^fellow amons: the effi2:ies of the great authors of England without feeling a thrill of pleasure at recognizing the features of his native fellow-countryman in the Valhalla of his WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 91 ancestral fellow-countrymen ? There arc many memorials in Poets' Corner and elsewhere in the Abbey which could be better spared than that. Too many that were placed there as luminaries have become conspicuous by their obscurity in the midst of that illustrious company. On the whole, the Abbey produces a distinct sense of being overcrowded. It appears too much like a lapidary's store-room. Look up at the lofty roof, which we willingly pardon for shutting out the heaven above us, — at least in an average London day ; look down at the floor, and think of what precious relics it covers ; but do not look around you with the hope of getting any clear, concentrated, satisfying effect from this great museum of gigantic funereal bricabrac. Pardon me, shades of the mighty dead ! I had something of this feeling, but at another hour I might perhaps be overcome by emotion, and weep, as my fellow-countryman did at the grave of the earliest of his ancestors. I should love myself better in that aspect than I do in this cold-blooded criticism ; but it suggested itself, and as no flattery can soothe, so no censure can wound, " the dull, cold ear of death." 92 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Of course we saw all the sights of the Abbey in a hurried way, yet with such a guide and ex- positor as Archdeacon Farrar our two hours' visit was worth a whole day with an undiscrim- inating verger, who recites his lesson by rote, and takes the life out of the little mob that fol- lows him round by emphasizing the details of his lesson, until '' Patience on a monument " seems to the sufferer, who knows what he wants and what he does not want, the nearest emblem of himself he can think of. Amidst all the im- posing recollections of the ancient edifice, one impressed me in the inverse ratio of its impor- tance. The Archdeacon pointed out the little holes in the stones, in one place, where the boys of the choir used to play marbles, before America was discovered, probably, — centuries before, it may be. It is a strangely impressive glimpse of a living past, like the graffiti of Pom- peii. I find it is often the accident rather than the essential which fixes my attention and takes hold of my memory. This is a tendency of which I suppose I ought to be ashamed, if we have any right to be ashamed of those idiosyncrasies which are ordered for us. It is WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 93 the same tendency which often leads us to prefer the picturesque to the beautiful. Mr. Gilpin liked the donkey in a forest landscape better than the liorse. A touch of imperfection interferes with the beauty of an object and lowers its level to that of the picturesque. The accident of the holes in the stone of the noble building, for the boys to play marbles with, malces me a boy again and at home with them, after looking with awe upon the statue of Newton, and turning with a shudder from the ghastly monument of Mrs. Nightingale. What a life must be that of one whose years are passed chiefly in and about the great Abbey I Nowhere does Macbeth's expression " dusty death " seem so true to all around us. The dust of those who have been lying century after cen- tury below the marbles piled over them, — the dust on the monuments they lie beneath ; the dust on the memories those monuments were raised to keep living in the recollection of pos- terity, — dust, dust, dust, everywhere, and we ourselves but shapes of breathing dust moving amidst these objects and remembrances ! C'ome away I The good Archdeacon of the " Eternal 94 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Hope " has aslced us to take a cup of tea with him. The tea-cup will be a cheerful substitute for the fuueral uru, aud a freshly uiade iufusion of the fragraut leaf is oue of the best thiugs in the world to lay the dust of sad reflections. It is a somewhat fatiguing pleasure to go through the Abbey, in spite of the intense in- terest no one can help feeliug. But my day had but just begun when the two hours we had de- voted to the visit were over. At a quarter before eight, my friend Mr. Frederick Locker called for me to go to a dinner at the Literary Club. 1 was particidarly pleased to dine with this asso- ciation, as it reminded me of our own Saturday Club, which sometimes goes by the same name as the London one. They complimented me with a toast, and I made some kind of a reply. As I never went prepared with a speech for any such occasion, I take it for granted that I thanked the company in a way that showed my gratitude rather than my eloquence. And now, the dinner being over, my day was fairly begun. I'his was to be a memorable date in the rec- ord of the year, one long to be remembered in the political history of Great Britain. For ou MR. GLADSTONE'S SPEECH. 95 this day, the 7th of June, Mr. Gladstone was to make his great speech on the Irish question, and the division of the House on the Government of Irehmd Bill was to take ])lacc. The whole country, to the corners of its remotest colony, was looking forward to the results of this even- ing's meeting of Parliament. The kindness of the Speaker had furnished me with a ticket, en- titling me to a place among the " distinguished guests," which I presented without modestly questioning my right to the title. The pressure for entrance that evening was very great, and I, coming after my dinner with the Literary Club, was late upon the ground. The places for " distinguislied guests " were al- ready filled. But all England was in a conspi- racy to do everything possible to make my visit agreeable. I did not take up a great deal of room, — I might be put into a scat with the am- bassadors and foreign ministers. And among them I was presently installed. It was now between ten and eleven o'clock, as nearly as I recollect. The House had been in session since four o'clock. A gentleman was speaking, who was, as my unknown next neighbor told me, Sir 96 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Michael Hicks-Beach, a leading member, as we all know, of the opposition. When he sat down there was a hush of expectation, and presently Mr. Gladstone rose to his feet. A great burst of applause welcomed him, lasting more than a minute. His clean-cut features, his furrowed cheeks, his scanty and whitened hair, his well- shaped but not extraordinary head, all familiar- ized by innumerable portraits and emphasized in hundreds of caricatures, revealed him at once to every spectator. His great speech has been uni- versally read, and I need only speak of the way in which it was delivered. His manner was forcible rather than impassioned or eloquent; his voice was clear enough, but must have troubled him somewhat, for he had a small bot- tle from which he poured something into a glass from time to time and swallowed a little, yet I heard him very well for the most part. In the last portion of his speech he became animated and inspiriting, and his closing words were ut- tered with an impressive solemnity : " Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely, think not for a moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this bill." MR. GLADSTONE'S SPEECH. 97 After the burst of applause which followed the conclusion of Mr. Gladstone's speech, the House proceeded to the division on the question of passing the bill to a second reading. While the counting of the votes was going on there was the most intense excitement. A rumor ran round the House at one moment that the vote was go- ing in favor of the second reading. It soon be- came evident that this was not the case, and presently the result was announced, giving a ma- jority of thirty against the bill, and practically overthrowing the liberal administration. Then arose a tumult of applause from the conserva- tives and a wild confusion, in the midst of which an Irish member shouted, " Three cheers for the Grand Old Man ! " which were lustily given, with waving of hats and all but Donnybrook manifestations of enthusiasm. I forgot to mention that I had a very advanta- geous seat among the diplomatic gentlemen, and was felicitating myself on occupying one of the best positions in the House, when an usher politely informed me that the Russian Ambassa- dor, in whose place I was sitting, had arrived, and that I must submit to the fate of eviction. 98 OUR HUNDRED DAYS. IN EUROPE. Fortunately, there were some steps close by, on one of which I found a seat almost as good as the one I had just left. It was now two o'clock in the morning, and I had to walk home, not a vehicle being attain- able. I did not know my way to my headquar- ters, and I had no friend to go with me, but I fastened on a stray gentleman, who proved to be an ex-member of the House, and who accom- panied me to 17 Dover Street, where I sought my bed with a satisfying sense of having done a good day's work and having been well paid for it. III. On the 8th of June we visited the Record Office for a sight of the Domesday Book and other ancient objects of interest there preserved. As I looked at this too faithful memorial of an inexorable past, I thought of the battle of Hast- ings and all its consequences, and that reminded me of what I have long remembered as I read it in Dr. Eobert Knox's " Races of Men." Dr. Knox was the monoculous Waterloo surgeon, with whom I remember breakfasting, on my first visit to England and Scotland. His cele- brity is less owing to his book than to the un- fortunate connection of his name with the un- forgotten Burke and Hare horrors. This is his language in speaking of Hastings ; " . . . that bloody field, surpassing far in its terrible results the unhappy day of Waterloo. From this the Celt has recovered, but not so the Saxon. To this day he feels, and feels deeply, the most disas- trous day that ever befell his race ; here he was 100 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. trodden down by the Norman, whose iron heel is on him yet. ... To this day the Saxon race in England have never recovered a tithe of their rights, and probably never will." The Conqueror meant to have a thorough summing up of his stolen property. The Anglo- Saxon Chronicle says, — I quote it at second hand, — " So very straitly did he cause the sur- vey to be made, that there was not a single hyde, nor a yardland of ground, nor — it is shameful to say wluit he thought no shame to do — was there an ox or a cow, or a pig passed by, and that was not down in the accounts, and then all these writings were brought to him." The "looting" of England by William and his "twenty thousand thieves," as Mr. Emerson calls his army, was a singularly methodical pro- ceeding, and Domesday Book is a searching in- ventory of their booty, movable and immovable. From this reminder of the past we turned to the remembrances of home ; A going to dine with a transplanted Boston friend and other ladies from that blessed centre of New England life, while I dined with a party of gentlemen at my friend Mr. James Russell Low- ell's. DINNER AT MR. LOWELL'S. 101 I had looked forward to this meeting with high expectations, and they were abundantly satisfied. I knew that Mr. Lowell must gather about him, wherever he might be, the choicest company, but what his selection would be I was curious to learn. I found with me at the table my own countrymen and his, Mr. Smalley and Mr. Henry James. Of the other guests, Mr. Leslie Stephen was my only old acquaintance in person ; but Du Maurier and Tenniel I have met in my weekly " Punch " for many a year ; Mr. Lang, Mr. Oliphant, Mr. Townsend, we all know through their writings ; Mr. Burne Jones arid Mr. Alma Tadema, through the frequent repro- ductions of their works in engravings, as well as by their paintings. If I could report a din- ner-table conversation, I might be tempted to say something of my talk with Mr. Oliphant. I like well enough conversation which floats'^ safely over the shallows, touching bottom at ' intervals with a commonplace incident or truism to push it along ; I like better to find a few , fathoms of depth under the surface; there isj a still higher pleasure in the philosophical dis-1 course which calls for the deep sea line to reach 102 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. bottom ; but best of all, when one is in the right mood, is the contact of intelligences when they are off soundings in the ocean of thought. Mr. Oliphant is what many of us call a mystic, and I found a singular pleasure in listening to him. This dinner at Mr. Lowell's was a very remark- able one for the men it brought together, and I remember it with peculiar interest. My enter- tainer holds a master-key to London society, and he opened the gate for me into one of its choicest preserves on that evening. I did not undertake to renew my old acquaint- ance with hospitals and museums. I regretted that I could not be with my companion, who went through the Natural History Museum with the accomplished director, Professor W. H. Flower. One old acquaintance I did resuscitate. For the second time I took the hand of Charles O'Byrne, the celebrated Irish giant of the last century. I met him, as in my first visit, at the Eoyal College of Surgeons, where I accompa- nied Mr. Jonathan Hutchinson. He was in the condition so longed for by Sydney Smith on a very hot day ; namely, with his flesh taken off, and sitting, or rather standing, in his bones. VISIT TO TENNYSON. 103 The skeleton measures eight feet, and the living man's height is stated as having been eight feet two, or four inches, by different authorities. His hand was the only one I took, either in England or Scotland, which had not a warm grasp and a hearty welcome in it. A went with Boston friends to see " Faust " a second time, Mr. Irving having offered her the Royal box, and the polite Mr. Bram Stoker serv- ing the party with tea in the little drawing-room behind the box ; so that she had a good time while I was enjoying myself at a dinner at Sir Henry Thompson's, where I met Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Browning, and other distinguished gentle- men. These dinners of Sir Henry's are well known for the good company one meets at them, and I felt myself honored to be a guest on this occasion. Among the pleasures I had promised myself was that of a visit to Tennyson, at the Isle of Wight. I feared, however, that this would be rendered impracticable by reason of the very recent death of his younger son, Lionel. But I learned from Mr. Locker-Lampson, whose daughter Mr. Lionel Tennyson had married, 104 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. that the poet would be pleased to see me at his place, Farringford ; and by the kind interven- tion of Mr. Locker-Lampson, better known to the literary world as Frederick Locker, arrange- ments were made for my daughter and myself to visit him. I considered it a very great favor, for Lord Tennyson has a poet's fondness for the tranquillity of seclusion, which many curious explorers of society fail to remember. Lady Tennyson is an invalid, and though nothing could be more gracious than her reception of us both, I fear it may have cost her an effort which she would not allow to betray itself. Mr. Hal- lam Tennyson and his wife, both of most pleas- ing presence and manners, did everything to make our stay agreeable. I saw the poet to the best advantage, under his own trees and walking over his own domain. He took delight in pointing out to me the finest and the rarest of his trees, — and there were many beauties among them. I recalled my morning's visit to Whittier at Oak Knoll, in Danvers, a little more than a year ago, when he led me to one of his favorites, an aspir- ing evergreen which shot up like a flame. I thought of the graceful American elms in front of VISIT TO TENNYSON. 105 Longfellow's house and the sturdy English elms that stand in front of Lowell's. In this garden of England, the Isle of Wight, where every- thing grows with such a lavish extravagance of greenness that it seems as if it must bankrupt the soil before autumn, I felt as if weary eyes and overtasked brains might reach their happiest haven of rest. We all remember Shenstone's epigram on the pane of a tavern window. If we find our " warmest welcome at an inn,'/we find our most soothing companionship in the trees among which we have lived, some of which we may ourselves have planted. We lean against them, and they never betray our trust ; they shield us from the sun and from the rain ; their spring welcome is a new birth, which never loses its freshness; they lay their beautiful robes at our feet in autumn ; in winter they " stand and wait," emblems of patience and of truth, for they hide nothing, not even the little leaf-buds which hint to us of hope, the last element in their triple symbolism.^ This digression, suggested by the remem- brance of the poet under his trees, breaks my narrative, but gives me the opportunity of pay- lOG OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. ing a debt of gratitude. For I have owned many beautiful trees, and loved many more out- side of my own leafy harem. Those who wiite verses have no special claim to be lovers of trees, but so far as one is of the poetical tern- \ perament he is likely to be a tree-lover. Poets I have, as a rule, more than the average nervous \ sensibility and irritability. Trees have no j nerves. They live and die without suffering, | without self -questioning or self-reproach. ( They | have the divine gift of silence.) They cannot ^ obtrude upon the solitary moments when one is to himself the most agreeable of companions. The whole vegetable world, even " the meanest flower that blows," is lovely to contemplate. What if creation had paused there, and you or I had been called upon to decide whether self- conscious life should be added in the form of the existing animal creation, and the hitherto peace- ful universe should come under the rule of Nature as we now know her, *' red in tooth and claw " ? Are we not glad that the responsibility of the decision did not rest on us ? I am sorry that I did not ask Tennyson to VISIT TO TENNYSON. 107 read or repeat to nic some lines of his own. Hardly any one perfectly understands a pocjni but the poet himself. One naturally loves his own poem as no one else can. It fits the mental mould in which it was cast, and it will not exactly fit any other. For this reason I had rather listen to a poet reading his own verses than hear the best elocutionist that ever spouted recite them. He may not have a good voice or enunciation, but he puts his heart and his inter- penetrative intelligence into every line, word, and syllable. I should have liked to hear Ten- nyson read such lines as " Laborious orient ivory, sphere in sphere ; " and in spite of my good friend Matthew Ar- nold's in tcrrorem^ I should have liked to hear Macaulay read, ' ' And Aulus the Dictator Stroked Aiister's raven mane," and other good mouthable lines, from the '' Lays of Ancient Kome." Not less should I like to hear Mr. Arnold himself read the passage be- ginning, — " In his cool hall with liag'jj^ard eyes The Roman nohlo lay." 108 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. The next day Mrs. Hallam Tennyson took A in her pony cart to see Alum Bay, The Needles, and other objects of interest, while I wandered over the grounds with Tennyson. After lunch his carriage called for us, and we were driven across the island, through beautiful scenery, to Veutnor, where we took the train to Hyde, and there the steamer to Portsmouth, from which two hours and a half of travel carried us to London. My first visit to Cambridge was at the invita- tion of Mr. Gosse, who asked me to spend Sun- day, the 13th of June, with him. The rooms in Neville Court, Trinity College, occupied by Sir William Vernon Harcourt when lecturing at Cambridge, were placed at my disposal. The room I slept in was imposing with the ensigns armorial of the Harcourts and others which ornamented its walls. I had great delight in walking through the quadrangles, along the banks of the Cam, and beneath the beautiful trees which border it. Mr. Gosse says that I stopped in the second court of Clare, and looked around and smiled as if I were bestowing my CAMBRIDGE. 109 benediction. He was mistaken : I smiled as if I were receiving a benediction from my dear old grandmother ; for Cambridge in New England is my mother town, and Harvard University in Cambridge is my Alma Mater. She is the daughter of Cambridge in Old England, and my relationship is thus made clear. Mr. Gosse introduced me to many of the younger and some of the older men of the uni- versity. Among my visits was one never to be renewed and never to be forgotten. It was to the Master of Trinity, the Reverend William Hepworth Thompson. I hardly expected to have the privilege of meeting this very distin- guished and greatly beloved personage, famous not alone for scholarship, or as the successor of Dr. Whewell in his high office, but also as hav- ing said some of the wittiest things which we have heard since Voltaire's pour encourager les autres. I saw him in his chamber, a feeble old man, but noble to look upon in all " the monu- mental pomp of age." He came very near be- longing to the little group I have mentioned as my coevals, but was a year after us. Gentle, dignified, kindly in his address as if I had been 110 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. his schoolmate, he left a very charming impres- sion. He gave me several mementoes of my visit, among them a beautiful engraving of Sir Isaac Newton, representing him as one of the handsomest of men. Dr. Thompson looked as if he could not be very long for this world, but his death, a few weeks after my visit, was a painful surprise to me. I had been just in time to see " the last of the great men " at Cam- bridge, as my correspondent calls him, and I was very grateful that I could store this memory among the hoarded treasures I have been laying by for such possible extra stretch of time as may be allowed me. My second visit to Cambridge will be spoken of in due season. While I was visiting Mr. Gosse at Cambridge, A was not idle. On Saturday she went to Lambeth, where she had the pleasure and honor of shaking hands with the Archbishop of Can- terbury in his study, and of looking about the palace with Mrs. Benson. On Sunday she went to the Abbey, and heard " a broad and liberal sermon " from Archdeacon Farrar. Our young lady-secretary stayed and dined with her, and VISIT TO DRURY LANE THEATRE. Ill after dinner sang to her. " A peaceful, happy- Sunday," A says in her diary, — not less peaceful, I suspect, for my being away, as my callers must have got many a " not at 'ome " from young Robert of the multitudinous buttons. On Monday, the 14th of June, after getting ready for our projected excursions, we had an appointment which promised us a great deal of pleasure. Mr. Augustus Harris, the enter- prising and celebrated manager of Drury Lane Theatre, had sent us an invitation to occupy a box, having eight seats, at the representation of "Carmen." We invited the Priestleys and our Boston friends, the Shimminses, to take seats with us. The chief singer in the opera was Marie Roze, who looked well and sang well, and the evening went off very happily. After the performance we were invited by Mr. Harris to a supper of some thirty persons, where we were the special guests. The manager toasted me, and I said something, — I trust appropriate ; but just what I said is as irrecoverable as the orations of Demosthenes on the sea-shore, or the sermons of St. Francis to the beasts and birds. Of all the attentions I received in England, 112 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. this was, j)(m1i:i|)s, the Ic^ast to bo anticipated or droaiiied of. To bo foted and toastod and to mako a s])cech in Drnry Lano Tlioatro would not have entered into my iiiglitiest eoneepiions, if I had made out a i)rogranimo beforeliand. It is a singularly gratifying recolleetion. Drnry Lano Theatre is so full of associations with literature, with the great actors and actresses of the past, with the famous beauties who have stood behind the footlights and the splendid audiences that have sat before them, that it is an admirable nucleus for romend)rances to clus- ter around, it was but a vague spot in memory before, but now it is a bright centre for other images of the past. That one evening seems to make me the possessor of all its traditions from the time when it rose from its ashes, when By- ron's poem was written and recited, and when the brothers Smith gave us the " Address with- out a Plia3nix," and all those exquisite parodies which make us feel towards their originals some- what as our dearly remembered Tom A])i)leton did when he saiil, in praise of some real green turtle soup, that it was almost as good as mock. With much regret we gave up an invitation CAMBRIDGE. 113 we had accepted to go to Durdans to dine with Lord Rosebcry. We must have felt very tired indeed to make so great a sacrifice, but we had to be up until one o'clock getting ready for the next day's journey ; writing, packing, and at- tending to what we left behind us as well as what was in prospect. On the morning of Wednesday, June 16th, Dr. Donald Macalister called to attend us on our second visit to Cambridge, where we were to be the guests of his cousin, Alexander Mac- alister, Professor of Anatomy, who, with Mrs. Macalister, received us most cordially. There was a large luncheon-party at their house, to which we sat down in our travelling dresses. In the evening they had a dinner-party, at which were present, among others, Professor Stokes, President of the Koyal Society, and Professor Wright. We had not heard much talk of politi- cal matters at the dinner-tables where we had been guests, but A sat near a lady who was very earnest in advocating the Irish side of the great impending question. The 17th of June is memorable in the annals 114 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of my country. On that day of the year 1775 the battle of Bunker's Hill was fought on the height I sec from the window of my library, where I am now writing. The monument raised in memory of our defeat, which was in truth a victory, is almost as much a part of the furniture of the room as its chairs and tables ; outside, as they are inside, furniture. But the 17th of June, 188G, is memorable to me above all the other anniversaries of that day I have known. For on that day I received from the ancient University of Cambridge, England, the degree of Doctor of Letters, " Doctor Litt.," in its ab- breviated academic form. The honor was an unexpected one ; that is, until a short time be- fore it was conferred. Invested with the academic gown and cap, I repaired in due form at the appointed hour to the Senate Chamber. Every seat was filled, and among the audience were youthful faces in large numbers, looking as if they were ready for any kind of outbreak of enthusiasm or hilarity. The first degree conferred was that of LL. D., on Sir W. A. White, G. C. M., G. C. B., to whose long list of appended initials it seemed CAMBRIDGE. 115 like throwing a perfume on the violet to add three more letters. When I was called up to receive my honorary title, the young voices were true to the promise of the young faces. There was a great noise, not hostile nor unpleasant in its character, in answer to which I could hardly help smiling my acknowledgments. In presenting me for my de- gree the Public Orator made a Latin speech, from which I venture to give a short extract, which I would not do for the woild if it were not disguised by being hidden in the mask of a dead language. But there will be here and there a Latin scholar who will be pleased with the way in which the speaker turned a compli- ment to the candidate before him, with a refer- ence to one of his poems and to some of his prose works. '''' Juvat nuper audlvisse eum cvjus carmen prope primum ' Solium ultimum ' nominatum est^ folia adhuc plura e scriniis suis esse prola- turum. Novimus quanto lepore descripserit colloquia ilia antemeridiana, symposia ilia so- hria ct severa, sed eadem /estiva et faceta^ in quihus totiens mutata persona^ modo poeta^ 116 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. modo professor^ modo princeps et arbiter, lo- quendl, inter convlvas siios regnat.^' I had no sooner got tlirongli listening to the speech and receiving my formal sentence as Doctor of Letters than the young voices broke out in fresh clamor. There were cries of " A speech ! a speech ! " mingled with the title of a favorite poem by John Howard Payne, having a certain amount of coincidence with the sound of my name. The play upon the word was not absolutely a novelty to my ear, but it was good- natured, and I smiled again, and perhaps made a faint inclination, as much as to say, " I hear you, young gentlemen, but I do not forget that I am standing on my dignity, especially now since a new degree has added a moral cubit to my stature." Still the cries went on, and at last I saw nothing else to do than to edge back among the silk gowns, and so lose myself and be lost to the clamorous crowd in the mass of dignitaries. It was not indifference to the warmth of my welcome, but a feeling that I had no claim to address the audience because some of its younger members were too demonstrative. I have not forgotten my very cordial reception, CAMBRIDGE. 117 which made me feel almost as much at home in the old Cambridge as in the new, where I was born and took my degrees, academic, profes- sional, and honorary. The university town left a very deep impres- sion upon my mind, in which a few grand ob- jects predominate over the rest, all being of a delightful character. I was fortunate enough to see the gathering of the boats, which was the last scene in their annual procession. The show was altogether lovely. The pretty river, about as wide as the Housatonic, I should judge, as that slender stream winds through " Canoe Meadow," my old Pittsfield residence, the gaily dressed people who crowded the banks, the flower-crowned boats, with the gal- lant young oarsmen who handled them so skil- fully, made a picture not often equalled. The walks, the bridges, the quadrangles, the historic college buildings, all conspired to make the place a delight and a fascination. The library of Trinity College, with its rows of busts by Roubiliac and Woolner, is a truly noble hall. But beyond, above ail the rest, the remembrance of King's College Chapel, with its audacious 118 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. and richly wrought roof and its wide and lofty windows, glowing with old devices in colors which are ever fresh, as if just from the furnace, holds the first place in my gallery of Cambridge recollections. I cannot do justice to the hospitalities which were bestowed upon us in Cambridge. Profes- sor and Mrs. Macalister, aided by Dr. Donald Macalister, did all that thoughtful hosts could do to make us feel at home. In the after- noon the ladies took tea at Mr. Oscar Brown- ing's. In the evening we went to a large dinner at the invitation of the Vice-Chancellor. Many little points which I should not have thought of are mentioned in A 's diary. I take the following extract from it, toning down its viva- city more nearly to my own standard : — " Twenty were there. The Master of St. John's took me in, and the Vice-Chancellor was on the other side. . . . The Vice-Chancellor rose and returned thanks after the meats and before the sweets, as usual. I have now got used to this proceeding, which strikes me as ex- traordinary. Everywhere here in Cambridge, and the same in Oxford, I believe, they say CAMBRIDGE. \\^ grace and give thanks. A gilded ewer and flat basin were passed, with water in the basin to wash with, and we all took our turn at the bath ! Next to this came the course with the finger- bowls ! . . . Why two baths?" On Friday, the 18th, I went to a breakfast at the Combination Room, at which about fifty gentlemen were present. Dr. Sandys taking the chair. After the more serious business of the morning's repast was over. Dr. Macalister, at the call of the chairman, arose, and proposed my welfare in a very complimentary way. I of course had to respond, and I did so in the words which came of their own accord to my lips. After my unpremeditated answer, which was kindly received, a young gentleman of the uni- versity, Mr. Heitland, read a short poem, of which the following is the title : — LINES OF GREETING TO DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. AT BEEAKFAST IN COMBINATION BOOM, ST. JOHn's COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND. I wish I dared quote more than the last two verses of these lines, which seemed to me, not unused to giving and receiving complimentary 120 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. tributes, singularly liappy, and were so consid- ered by all who heard them. I think I may venture to give the two verses referred to : — " By all sweet memory of tlie saints and sages Who wrought among- us in tlie days of yore ; By youths who, turning now life's early pages, llipeu to match the worthies gone before : "On us, son of England's greatest daughter, A kindly word from heart and tongue bestow ; Then chase the sunsets o'er the western water, And be:u' our blessing with you as you go." 1 need not say that I left the English Cam- bridge with a heart full of all grateful and kindly emotions. I must not forget that I found at Cambridge, very pleasantly established and successfully prac- tising his profession, a former student in the dental department of our Harvard Medical School, Dr. George Cunningham, who used to attend my lectures on anatomy. In the garden behind the quaint old house in which he lives is a large medlar-tree, — the first I remember seeing. On this same day we bade good-by to Cam- bridge, and took the two o'clock train to Oxford, OXFORD. 121 where we arrived at half past five. At this first visit we were to be the guests of Professor Max Miiller, at his fine residence in Norliain Gar- dens. We met there, at dinner, Mr. llerkomer, whom we have recently had with us in Boston, and one or two others. In the evening we had music ; the professor playing on the piano, his two daugliters, Mrs. Conybeare and her unmar- ried sister, singing, and a young lady playing the violin. It was a very lovely family picture ; a pretty house, surrounded by attractive scenery ; scholarship, refinement, simple elegance, giving distinction to a home which to us seemed a pat- tern of all we could wisli to see beneath an Eng- lish roof. It all comes back to me very sweetly, but very tenderly and sadly, for the voice of the elder of the two sisters who sang to us is heard no more on earth, and a deep shadow has fallen over the household we found so bright and cheerful. Everything was done to mak(; me enjoy my visit to Oxford, but I was suffering from a severe cold, and was paying the penalty of too much occupation and excitement. I missed a great deal in consequence, and carried away a 122 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. less distinct recollection of this magnificent seat of learning than of the sister university. If one wishes to know the magic of names, let him visit the places made memorable by the lives of the illustrious men of the past in the Old World. As a boy I used to read the po- etry of Pope, of Goldsmith, and of Johnson. How could I look at the Bodleian Library, or wander beneath its roof, without recalling the lines from " The Vanity of Human Wishes " ? " When fii*st the college rolls receive liis name, Tlie youngs enthusiast quits his ease for fame ; Resistless burns the fever of renown, Caught from the strong contagion of the gown : O'er Bodley's dome his future labors spread, And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head." The last line refers to Roger Bacon. " There is a tradition that the study of Friar Bacon, built on an arch over the bridge, will fall when a man greater than Bacon shall pass under it. To prevent so shocking an accident, it was pulled down many years since." We shall meet with a similar legend in another university city. Many persons have been shy of these localities, who were in no danger whatever of meeting the fate threatened by the prediction. OXFORD. 123 Wc passed through the T>()(llol!iu Tjibrary, only glaiKjing at a fow of its choicest treasures, arnoiif^- wliic-h the cx([uisit(?ly ilhiiiiinated missals were cspc(;ially tcinj)ting- objects of study. It was almost like a inoc^kcry to sec them opened and closed, without liaving tlic; time to study their wonderfid miniature paintings. A walk tlirough tlie grounds of Magdahm C^ollc^gci, un- der the guidance of the j)resident of tliat col- lege, showed us some of the fine trees for which 1 was always looking. One of tlieso, a wych- elm (Scotcli (dm of some books), was so largo tliat I insisted on liaving it nu^asured. A string was procured and carefully carried round the trunk, above the spread of the roots and below tliat of tli(; branches, so as to give; the smallest circumference. 1 was curious to know how the size of the tiunk of this tree would compai'O with that of the tiunks of some of our larg(;st New England elms. I have measured a good many of these. About sixteen feet is the mea- surement of a hu'ge elm, like that on Boston Common, which all middle-aged people remem- ber. From twenty-two to twenty-three feet is the ordinary maxinmm of the very largest trees. 124 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. I never found but one exceed it : that was the great Springfield ehn, which h)okcd as if it might have been formed by the coalescence from the earliest period of growth, of two young trees. When I measured this in 1837, it was twenty- four feet eight inches in circumference at five feet from the ground ; growing larger above and below. I remembered this tree well, as we measured the string which was to tell the size of its English rival. As we came near the end of the string, I felt as I did when I was looking at the last dash of Ormonde and The Bard at Epsom. — Twenty feet, and a long piece of string left. — Twenty - one. — Twenty - two. — Twenty-three. — An extra heartbeat or two. — Twenty - four ! — Twenty - five and six inches over I ! — The Sj^ringfield elm may have grown a foot or more since I measured it, fifty years ago, but the tree at Magdiden stands ahead of all my old measurements. Many of the fine old trees, this in particular, may have been known in their younger days to Addison, whose favor- ite walk is still pointed out to the visitor. I would not try to compare the two university towns, as one might who had to choose between OXFORD. 125 them. They have a noble rivalry, each honor- ing the other, and it would take a great deal of weighing one point of superiority against an- other to call either of them the first, except in its claim to antiquity. After a garden-party in the afternoon, a plea- sant evening at home., when the professor played and his daughter Beatrice sang, and a garden- party the next day, I found myself in somewhat better condition, and ready for the next move. At noon on the 23d of June we left for Edin- burgh, stopping over night at York, where we found close by the station an excellent hotel, and where the next morning we got one of the best breakfasts we had in our whole travelling experience. At York we wandered to and through a flower-show, and did the cathedral, as people do all the sights they see under the lead of a paid exhibitor, who goes through his lesson like a sleepy old professor. I missed see- ing the slab with the inscription miserrimus. There may be other stones bearing this sad su- perlative, but there is a story connected with this one, which sounds as if it might be true. In the year 1834, I spent several weeks in 126 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Edinburgh. I was fascinated by the singular beauties of that " romantic town," which Scott called his own, and which holds his memory, with that of Burns, as a most precious part of its inheritance. The castle with the precipitous rocky wall out of which it grows, the deep ra- vines with their bridges, pleasant Calton Hill and memorable Holyrood Palace, the new town and the old town with their strange contrasts, and Arthur's Seat overlooking all, — these va- ried and enchanting objects account for the fondness with which all who have once seen Edinburgh will always regard it. We were the guests of Professor Alexander Crum Brown, a near relative of the late beloved and admired Dr. John Brown. Professor and Mrs. Crum Brown did everything to make our visit a pleasant one. We met at their house many of the best known and most distinguished people of Scotland. The son of Dr. John Brown dined with us on the day of our arrival, and also a friend of the family, Mr. Barclay, to whom we made a visit on the Sunday following. Among the visits I paid, none was more gratify- ing to me than one which I made to Dr. John EDINBURGH. 127 Brown's sister. No man could leave a sweeter memory than the author of " Rab and his Friends," of " Pet Marjorie," and other writ- ings, all full of the same loving, human spirit. I have often exchanged letters with him, and I thought how much it would have added to the enjoyment of my visit if I could have taken his warm hand and listened to his friendly voice. I brought home with mo a precious little manu- script, written expressly for me by one who had known Dr. John Brown from the days of licr girlhood, in which his character appears in the same lovable and loving light as that which shines in every page he himself has written. On Friday, the 25th, I went to the hall of the university, where I was to receive the degree of LL. D. The ceremony was not unlike that at Cambridge, but had one peculiar feature: the separate special investment of the candidate with the hood^ which Johnson defines as "an ornamental fold which hangs down the back of a graduate." There were great numbers of stu- dents present, and they showed the same exu- berance of spirits as that which had forced me to withdraw from the urgent calls at Cambridge. 128 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. The cries, if possible, were still louder and more persistent; they must have a speech and they would have a speech, and what could I do about it ? I saw but one way of pacifying a crowd as noisy and long-breathed as that which for about the space of two hours cried out, " Great is Diana of the Ephesians ! " So I stepped to the front and made a brief speech, in which, of course, I spoke of the '''' 2:)erfervidum ingenium Scotorumy A speech without that would have been like that " Address without a Phoenix " before referred to. My few remarks were well received, and quieted the shouting Ephesians of the warm-brained and warm-hearted northern university. It gave me great pleasure to meet my friend Mr. Underwood, now American con- sul in Glasgow, where he has made himself highly esteemed and respected. In my previous visit to Edinburgh in 1834, I was fond of rambling along under Salisbury Crags, and climbing the sides of Arthur's Seat. I had neither time nor impulse for such walks during this visit, but in driving out to dine at Nidrie, the fine old place now lived in by Mr. Barclay and his daughters, we passed under the EDINBURGH, 129 crags and by the side of the great hill. I had never heard, or if I had I had forgotten, the name and the story of " Samson's Kibs." These are the cohimnar masses of rock which form the face of Salisbury Crags. There is a legend that one day one of these pillars will fall and crush the greatest man that ever passes under them. It is said that a certain professor was always very shy of "Samson's Ribs," for fear the prophecy might be fulfilled in his person. We were most hospitably received at Mr. Barclay's, and the presence of his accomplished and pleas- ing daughters made the visit memorable to both of us. There was one picture on their walls, that of a lady, by Sir Joshua, which both of us found very captivating. This is what is often happening in the visits we make. Some paint- ing by a master looks down upon us from its old canvas, and leaves a lasting copy of itself, to be be stored in memory's picture gallery. These surprises are not so likely to happen in the New World as in the Old. It seemed cruel to be forced to tear ourselves away from Edinburgh, where so much had been done to make us happy, where so much was left 130 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. to see and enjoy, but we were due in Oxford, where I was to receive the last of the three de- grees with which I was honored in Great Bri- tain. Our visit to Scothind gave us a mere glimpse of the land and its people, but I have a very vivid recollection of both as I saw them on my first visit, when I made an excursion into the Highlands to Stirling and to Glasgow, where I went to church, and wondered over the uncouth ancient psalmody, which I believe is still re- tained in use to this day. I was seasoned to that kind of poetry in my early days by the verses of Tate and Brady, which I used to hear " en- tuned in the nose ful swetely," accompanied by vigorous rasping of a huge bass-viol. No won- der that Scotland welcomed the song of Burns I On our second visit to Oxford we were to be the guests of the Vice-Chancellor of the univer- sity. Dr. Jowett. This famous scholar and ad- ministrator lives in a very pleasant establish- ment, presided over by the Muses, but without the aid of a Vice-Chanccllorcss. The hospitality of this classic mansion is well known, and we OXFORD. 131 added a second pleasant chapter to our previous experience under the roof of Professor Max Miiller. There was a little company there before us, including the Lord Chancellor and Lady Ilerschel, Lady Camilla Wallop, Mr. Browning, and Mr. Lowell. We were too late, in consequence of the bad arrangement of the trains, and had to dine by ourselves, as the whole party had gone out to a dinner, to which we should have accompanied them had we not been delayed. We sat up long enough to see them on their return, and were glad to get to bed, after our day's journey from Edinburgh to Oxford. At eleven o'clock on the following day we who were to receive degrees met at Balliol Col- lege, whence we proceeded in solemn procession to the Sheldonian Theatre. Among my com- panions on this occasion were Mr. John Bright, the Lord Chancellor Ilerschel, and Mr. Aldis Wright. I have an instantaneous photograph, which was sent me, of this procession. I can identify Mr. Bright and myself, but hardly any of the others, though many better acquainted with their faces would no doubt recognize them. 132 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. There is a certain sensation in finding one's self invested with the academic gown, conspicuous by- its red facings, and the cap with its square top and depending tassel, which is not without its accompanying satisfaction. One can walk the streets of any of the university towns in his aca- demic robes without being jeered at, as I am afraid he would be in some of our own thor- oughfares. There is a noticeable complacency in the members of our Phi Beta Kappa society when they get the pink and blue ribbons in their buttonholes, on the day of annual meeting. How much more when the scholar is wrapped in those flowing folds, with their flaming borders, and feels the dignity of the distinction of which they are the symbol ! I do not know how Mr. John Bright felt, but I cannot avoid the impression that some in the ranks which moved from Bal- liol to the Sheldonian felt as if Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like the candidates for the degree of D. C. L. After my experience at Cambridge and Edin- burgh, I might have felt some apprehension about my reception at Oxford. I had always supposed the audience assembled there at the OXFORD. 133 conferring of degrees was a more demonstrative one than that at any other of the universities, and I did not wish to be forced into a retreat by calls for a speech, as I was at Cambridge, nor to repeat my somewhat irregular proceeding of addressing the audience, as at Edinburgh. But when I found that Mr. John Bright was to be one of the recipients of the degree I felt safe, for if he made a speech I should be justified in saying a few words, if I thought it best ; and if he, one of the most eloquent men in England, remained silent, I surely need not make myself heard on the occasion. It was a great triumph for him, a liberal leader, to receive the testimo- nial of a degree from the old conservative uni- versity. To myself it was a graceful and pleas- ing compliment ; to him it was a grave and significant tribute. As we marched through the crowd on our way from Balliol, the people standing around recognized Mr. Bright, and cheered him vociferously. The exercises in the Sheldonian Theatre were more complex and lasted longer than those at the other two universities. The candidate stepped forward and listened to one sentence, 134 OUR HUNDRED DAYS TN EUROPE. then made another move forward and listened to other words, and at last was welcomed to all the privileges conferred by the degree of Doctor of Common Law, which was announced as being bestowed upon him. Mr. Bright, of course, was received with immense enthusiasm. I had every reason to be gratified with my own reception. The only " chaffing " I heard was the question from one of the galleries, " Did he come in the One Hoss Shay ? " — at which there was a hearty laugh, joined in as heartily by myself. A part of the entertainment at this ceremony consisted in the listening to the reading of short extracts from the prize essays, some or all of them in the dead languages, which could not have been particularly intelligible to a large part of the audience. During these readings there were frequent interpellations., as the French call such interruptions, something like these : " That will do, sir ! " or " You had better stop, sir!" — always, I noticed, with the sir at the end of the remark. With us it would have been " Dry up ! " or "Hold on ! " At last came forward the young poet of the occasion, who read an elaborate poem, "Savonarola,'* which OXFORD. 135 was listened to in most respectful silence, and loudly applauded at its close, as I thought, de- servedly. Prince and Princess Christian were among the audience. They were staying with Professor and Mrs. Max Miiller, whose hospital- ities I hope they enjoyed as much as we did. One or two short extracts from A 's diary will enliven my record : " The Princess had a huge bouquet, and going down the aisle had to bow both ways at once, it seemed to me : but then she has the Guelph spine and neck ! Of course it is necessary th^t royalty should have more elasticity in the frame than we poor ordi- nary mortals. After all this we started for a luncheon at All Souls, but had to wait (impa- tiently) for H. R. H. to rest herself, while our resting was done standing." It is a long while since I read Madame d'Ar- blay's Recollections, but if I remember right, standing while royalty rests its bones is one of the drawbacks to a maid of honor's felicity. " Finally, at near three, we went into a great luncheon of some fifty. There were different tables, and I sat at the one with royalty. The Provost of Oriel took me in, and Mr. Browning 136 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. was on my other side. Finally, we went home to rest, but the others started out again to go to a garden-party, but that was beyond us." After all this came a dinner-party of twenty at the Vice-Chancellor's, and after that a reception, where among others we met Lord and Lady Coleridge, the lady resplendent in jewels. Even after London, this could hardly be called a day of rest. The Chinese have a punishment which con- sists simply in keeping the subject of it awake, by the constant teasing of a succession of indi- viduals employed for the purpose. The best of our social pleasures, if carried beyond the natu- ral power of physical and mental endurance, be- gin to approach the character of such a penance. After this we got a little rest ; did some mild sight-seeing, heard some good music, called on the Max Miillers, and bade them good-by with the warmest feeling to all the members of a household which it was a privilege to enter. There only remained the parting from our kind entertainer, the Vice - Chancellor, who added another to the list of places which in England and Scotland were made dear to us by hospital- OXFORD. 137 ity, and are remembered as true homes to us while we were under their roofs. On the second day of July we left the Vice- Chancellor's, and went to the Randolph Hotel to meet our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Willett, from Brighton, with whom we had an appointment of long standing. With them we left Oxford, to enter on the next stage of our pilgrimage. IV. It had been the intention of Mr. Willett to go with us to visit JVIi-. Eusldn, with whom he is in the most friendly relations. But a letter from Mr. Ruskin's sister spoke of his illness as being too serious for him to see company, and we reluctantly gave up this part of our plan. My first wish was to revisit Stratford-on- Avon, and as our travelling host was guided in everything by our inclinations, we took the cars for Stratford, where we arrived at five o'clock in the afternoon. It had been arranged before- hand that we should be the guests of Mr. Charles E. Flower, one of the chief citizens of Stratford, who welcomed us to his beautiful mansion in the most cordial way, and made us once more at home under an English roof. I well remembered my visit to Stratford in 1834. The condition of the old house in which Shakespeare was born was very different from that in which we see it to-day. A series of pho- STRA TFORD-ON-A VON, 139 tographs taken in different years shows its grad- ual transformation since the time when the old projecting angular sign-board told all who ap- proached " The immortal Shakespeare was born in this House.'* IIow near the old house came to sharing the fortunes of Jumbo under the man- agement of our enterprising countryman, Mr. Barnura, I am not sure ; but that he would have " traded " for it, if the proprietors had been will- ing, I do not doubt, any more than I doubt that he would make an offer for the Tower of Lon- don, if that venerable structure were in the mar- ket. The house in which Shakespeare was born is the Santa Casa of England. What with my recollections and the photographs with which I was familiarly acquainted, it had nothing very new for me. Its outside had undergone great changes, but its bare interior was little altered. My previous visit was a hurried one, — I took but a glimpse, and then went on my way. Now, for nearly a week I was a resident of Stratford- on-Avon. How shall I describe the perfectly ideal beauty of the new home in which I found myself ! It is a fine house, surrounded by de- lightful grounds, which skirt the banks of the 140 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Avon for a considerable distance, and come close up to the enclosure of the Church of the Holy Trinity, beneath the floor of which lie the mortal remains of Shakespeare. The Avon is one of those narrow English rivers in which half a dozen boats might lie side by side, but hardly wide enough for a race between two rowing abreast of eacli other. Just here the river is comparatively broad and quiet, there being a dam a little lower down the stream. The wa- ters were a perfect mirror, as I saw them on one of the still days we had at Stratford. I do not remember ever before seeing cows walking with their legs in the air, as I saw them reflected in the Avon. Along the banks the young people were straying. I wondered if the youthful swains quoted Shakespeare to their lady-loves. Could they help recalling Romeo and Juliet? It is quite impossible to think of any human being growing up in this place which claims Shakespeare as its child, about the streets of which he ran as a boy, on the waters of which he must have often floated, without having his image ever present. Is it so ? There are some boys, from eight to ten or a dozen years old, fish- STRA TFORD-ON-A VON. 141 ing in the Avon, close by the grounds of " Avon- bank," the place at which we are staying. I call to the little group. I say, "Boys, who was this man Shakespeare, people talk so much about ? " Boys turn round and look up with a plentiful lack of intelligence in their counte- nances. " Don't you know who he was nor what he was ? " Boys look at each other, but confess ignorance. — Let us try the universal stimulant of human faculties. "Here are some pennies for the boy that will tell me what that Mr. Shakespeare was." The biggest boy finds his tongue at last. " He was a writer, — he wrote plays." That was as much as I could get out of the youngling. I remember meeting some boys under the monument upon Bunker Hill, and testing their knowledge as I did that of the Stratford boys. " What is this great stone pil- lar here for ? " I asked. " Battle fought here, — great battle." "Who fought?" "Americans and British." (I never hear the expression Britishers.) "Who was the general on the American side ? " " Don' know, — General Washington or somebody." — What is an old battle, though it may have settled the destinies 142 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of a nation, to the ganio of base-ball between the Boston and Chicago Nines which is to come off to-morrow, or to the game of marbles which Tom and Dick are just going to play together under the shadow of the great obelisk which commemorates the conflict? The room more especially assigned to me looked out, at a distance of not more than a stone's-throw, on the northern aspect of the church wliere Shakespeare lies buried. AVork- men were busy on the roof, of the transept. I could not conveniently climb up to have a talk with the roofers, but I have my doubts whether they were thinking all the time of the dust over which they were working. ITow small a matter /' literature is to the great seething, toiling, strug- i gling, love-making, bread-winning, child-rearing, \ death-awaiting men and women who fill this huge, palpitating world of ours ! It would be worth while to pass a week or a month among the plain, average people of Stratford. What is the relative importance in human well-being of the emendations of the text of Ilandet and the patching of the old trousers and the darning of the old stockings which task the needles of STRA T FORD-ON- A VON. 143 the hard-working households that fight the hattle of life in these narrow streets and alleys ? I ask the question ; the reader may answer it. Our host, Mr. Flower, is more deeply inter- ested, perhaps, than any other individual in the " Shakespeare Memorial " buildings which have been erected on the banks of the Avon, a short distance above tlie Church of the Holy Trinity. Under Mr. Flower's guidance we got into one of his boats, and were rowed up the stream to the Memorial edifice. There is a theatre, in a round tower which has borrowed some traits from the octagon " Globe " theatre of Shakespeare's day ; a Shakespeare library and portrait gallery are forming ; and in due time these buildings, of stately dimensions and built solidly of brick, will constitute a Shakespearean centre which will attract to itself many mementoes now scattered about in various parts of the country. On the 4th of July we remembered our native land with all the affectionate pride of temporary exiles, and did not forget to drink at lunch to the prosperity and continued happiness of the United States of America. In the afternoon we took to the boat again, and were rowed up the 144 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. river to the residence of Mr. Edgar Flower, where we found another characteristic English family, with its nine children, one of whom was the typical English boy, most pleasing and at- tractive in look, voice, and manner. I attempt no description of the church, the birthplace, or the other constantly visited and often described localities. The noble bridge, built in the reign of Henry VII. by Sir Hugh Clopton, and afterwards widened, excited my ad- miration. It was a much finer piece of work than the one built long afterwards. I have hardly seen anything which gave me a more striking proof of the thoroughness of the old English workmen. They built not for an age, but for all time, and the New Zealander will have to wait a long while before he will find in any one of the older bridges that broken arch from which he is to survey the ruins of London. It is very pleasant to pick up a new epithet to apply to the poet upon whose genius our lan- guage has nearly exhausted itself. It delights me to speak of him in the words which I have just found in a memoir not yet a century old, as " the Warwickshire bard," " the inestimable Shakespeare." STRA TFORD-ON-A VON. 145 Ever since Miss Bacon made her insane at- tempt to unearth what is left of Shakespeare's bodily frame, tlie thought of doing reverently and openly what she would have done by stealth has been entertained by psychologists, artists, and others who would like to know what were his cranial developments, and to judge from the conformation of the skull and face which of the various portraits is probably the true one. There is little doubt that but for the curse in- voked upon the person who should disturb his bones, in the well-known lines on the slab which covers him, he would rest, like Napoleon, like Washington, in a fitting receptacle of marble or porphyry. In the transfer of his remains the curiosity of men of science and artists would have been gratified, if decay had spared the more durable portions of his material structure. It was probably not against such a transfer that the lines were written, — whoever was their author, — but in the fear that they would be carried to the charnel-house. *' In this charnel-house was contained a vast collection of human bones. How long they had been deposited there is not easily to be deter- 146 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. mined ; but it is evident, from the immense quantity contained in the vault, it could have been used for no other purpose for many ages." "It is probable tliat from an early contemplation of tliis dreary ^pot Shakespeare imbibed that horror of a viofation of sepulture which is obser- vable in many parts of his writings." The body of Raphael was disinterred in 1833 to settle a question of identity of the remains, and placed in a new coffin of lead, which was deposited in a marble sarcophagus presented by the Pope. The sarcophagus, with its contents, was replaced in the same spot from which the remains had been taken. But for the inscription such a transfer of the bones of Shakespeare would have been proposed, and possibly carried out. Kings and emperors have frequently been treated in this way after death, and the proposi- tion is no more an indignity than was that of the exhumation of the remains of Napoleon, or of Andre, or of the author of " Home, Sweet Home." But sentiment, a tender regard for the supposed wishes of the dead poet, and a natural dread of the consequences of violating a dying wish, coupled with the execration of its contem- STRATFORD-ON-A VON. 147 ncr, aro too powerful for the arguments of sci- ence and the pleadings of art. Jf Shake.speare's body had been ombalnied, — which there is no reason that I know of to suppose, — the desire to compare his features with the bust and the portraits would have been mueli more imperative. When the body of Charles the First was exam- ined, under tlic direction of Sir Ib^nry ilalford, in the presence of the Kegi^nt, afterwards (ieorgc the Fourtli, tlie face would liave been recognized at once by all who were accjuainted witli Van- dyke's portrait of the monarch, if ilie litiiograph which comes attaelied to Sir Henry's memoir is an accurate representation of what they found. Even the bony framework of the face, as I have had occasion to know, has sometlnu^s a striking- likeness to what it was when clotlied in its nat- ural features. As between tlie first engraved portrait and the bust in the church, the form of the bones of the head and face would probably be decisive. But the world can afford to live without solving tliis dou})t, and leave his perish- ing vesture of decay to its repose. After seeing the Shakcs})eare slirlnes, we drove over to Shottery, and visited the Anne 148 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Hathaway cottage. I am not sure whether I ever saw it before, but it was as familiar to me as if I had lived in it. The old lady who showed it was agreeably communicative, and in perfect keeping with the place. A delightful excursion of ten or a dozen miles carried our party, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Flower, Mr. and Mrs. Willett, with A and myself, to Compton Wynyate, a most interest- ing old mansion, belonging to the Marquis of Northampton, who, with his daughter-in-law, Lady William Compton, welcomed us and showed us all the wonders of the place. It was a fine morning, but hot enough for one of our American July days. The drive was through English rural scenery ; that is to say, it was lovely. The old house is a great curiosity. It was built in the reign of Henry the Eighth, and has passed through many vicissitudes. The place, as well as the edifice, is a study for the antiquarian. Remains of the old moat which surrounded it are still distinguishable. The twisted and variously figured chimneys are of singular variety and exceptional forms. Comp- ton Wynyate is thought to get its name from the COMPTON WYNYATE. 149 vineyards formerly under cultivation on the hill- sides, which show the signs of having been laid out in terraces. The great hall, with its gallery, and its hangings, and the long table made from the trunk of a single tree, carries one back into the past centuries. There are strange nooks and corners and passages in the old building, and one place, a queer little " cubby-hole," lias the appearance of having been a Roman Catho- lic chapel. I asked the master of the house, who pointed out the curiosities of the place most courteously, about the ghosts who of course were tenants in common with the living proprietors. I was surprised when he told me there were none. It was incredible, for here was every ac- commodation for a spiritual visitant. I should have expected at least one liaunted chamber, to say nothing of blood-stains that could never be got rid of ; but there were no legends of the su- pernatural or the terrible. Refreshments were served us, among which were some hot-house peaches, ethereally delicate as if they had grown in the Elysian Fields and been stolen from a banquet of angels. After this we went out on the lawn, where, at Lady 150 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. William Compton's request, I recited one or two poems ; the only time I did such a thing in Eng- land. It seems as if Compton Wynyate must have been written about in some novel or romance, — perhaps in more than one of both. It is the place of all others to be the scene of a romantic story. It lies so hidden away among the hills that its vulgar name, according to old Camden, was "Compton in the Hole." I am not sure that it was the scene of any actual conflict, but it narrowly escaped demolition in the great civil war, and in 1646 it was garrisoned by the Par- liament army. On the afternoon of July 6th, our hosts had a large garden-party. If nothing is more trying than one of these out-of-door meetings on a cold, windy, damp day, nothing can be more delight- ful than such a social gathering if the place and the weather are just what we could wish them. The garden-party of this afternoon was as near perfection as such a meeting could well be. The day was bright and warm, but not uncomforta- bly hot, to me, at least. The company strolled about the grounds, or rested on the piazzas, or watched the birds in the aviary, or studied STRATFORD-ON-A VON. 151 rudimentary humanity in the monkey, or, better still, in a charming baby, for the first time on exhibition since she made the acquaintance of sunshine. Every one could dispose of himself or herself as fancy might suggest. I broke away at one time, and wandered alone by the side of the Avon, under the shadow of the tall trees upon its bank. The whole scene was as poetical, as inspiring, as any that I remember. It would be easy to write verses about it, but unwritten poems are so much better ! One reminiscence of that afternoon claims precedence over all the rest. The reader must not forget that I have been a medical practi- tioner, and for thirty-five years a professor in a medical school. Among the guests whom I met in the grounds was a gentleman of the medical profession, whose name I had often heard, and whom I was very glad to see and talk with. This was Mr. Lawson Tait, F. R. C. S., M. D., of Birmingham. Mr., or more properly Dr., Tait has had the most extraordinary success in a class of cases long considered beyond the reach of surgery. If I refer to it as a scientific hari kari, not for the taking but for the saving of 152 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. life, I shall come near enough to its description. This operation is said to have been first per- formed by an American surgeon in Danville, Kentucky, in the year 1809. So rash and dan- gerous did it seem to most of the profession that it was sometimes spoken of as if to attempt it were a crime. Gradually, however, by improved methods, and especially by the most assiduous care in nursing the patient after the operation, the mortality grew less and less, until it was recognized as a legitimate and indeed an invalu- able addition to the resources of surgery. Mr. Lawson Tait has had, so far as I have been able to learn, the most wonderful series of successful cases on record: namely, one hundred and thirty -nine consecutive operations without a sin- gle death. As I sat by the side of this great surgeon, a question suggested itself to my mind which I leave the reader to think over. Which would give the most satisfaction to a thoroughly hu- mane and unselfish being, of cultivated intelli- gence and lively sensibilities : to have written all the plays which Shakespeare has left as an in- heritance for mankind, or to have snatched from STRA TFORD'ON-A VON. 153 the jaws of death more than a hundred fellow- creatures, — almost seven scores of suffering women, — and restored them to sound and com- fortable existence ? It would be curious to get the answers of a hundred men and a hundred women, of a hundred young people and a hun- dred old ones, of a hundred scholars and a hun- dred operatives. My own specialty is asking questions, not answering them, and I trust I shall not receive a peck or two of letters inquir- ing of me how I should choose if such a ques- tion were asked me. It may prove as fertile a source of dispute as " The Lady or the Tiger." It would have been a great thing to pass a single night close to the church where Shake- speare's dust lies buried. A single visit by daylight leaves a comparatively slight impres- sion. But when, after a night's sleep, one wakes up and sees the spire and the old walls fuU before him, that impression is very greatly deepened, and the whole scene becomes far more a reality. Now I was nearly a whole week at Stratford-on-Avon. The church, its exterior, its interior, the birthplace, the river, had time to make themselves permanent images 154 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. in my mind. To effect this requires a certain amount of exposure, as much as in the case of a photographic negative. And so we bade good-by to Stratford-on- Avon and its hospitalities, with grateful remem- brances of our kind entertainers and all they did for our comfort and enjoyment. Where should we go next? Our travelling host proposed Great Malvern, a famous water- ing-place, where we should find peace, rest, and good accommodations. So there we went, and soon found ourselves installed at the " Foley Arms " hotel. The room I was shown to looked out upon an apothecary's shop, and from the window of that shop stared out upon me a plas- ter bust which I recognized as that of Samuel Hahnemann. I was glad to change to another apartment, but it may be a comfort to some of his American followers to know that traces of homoeopathy, — or what still continues to call itself so, — survive in the Old World, which we have understood was pretty well tired of it. We spent several days very pleasantly at Great Malvern. It lies at the foot of a range GREAT MALVERN. 155 of hills, the loftiest of which is over a thousand feet in height. A and I thought we would go to the top of one of these, known as the Beacon. We hired a "four-wheeler," dragged by a much-enduring horse and in charge of a civil young man. We turned out of one of the streets not far from the hotel, and found our- selves facing an ascent which looked like what I should suppose would be a pretty steep tobog- gan slide. We both drew back. "Facilis ascensus," I said to myself, "sed revocare gradum." It is easy enough to get up if you are dragged up, but how will it be to come down such a declivity? When we reached it on our return, the semi-precipice had lost all its terrors. We had seen and travelled over so much worse places that this little bit of slanting road seemed as nothing. The road which wound up to the summit of the Beacon was narrow and uneven. It ran close to the edge of the steep hillside, — so close that there were times when every one of our forty digits curled up like a bird's claw. If we went over, it would not be a fall down a good honest precipice, — a swish through the air and a smash at the bottom, — 156 orn hundred days in e trope. but a tumbling, and a rolling over and over, and a bouncing and bumping, ever accelerating, until wo bounded into the level below, all ready for the coroner. At one sudden turn of the road the horse's body projected so far over its edge that A declared if the beast had been an inch longer ho would have toppled over. When we got close to the sunnnit we found the wind blow- ing almost a gale. A says in her diary that I (meaning her honored parent^ '' nearly blew oft' from the top of the mountain.'' It is true that the force of the wind was something fearful, and seeing that two young men near me were exposed to its fury, I offered an arm to each of them, which they were not too proud to accept ; A was equally attentive to another young person ; and having seen as much of the prospect as we cared to, we were glad to get back to our four-wheeler and our hotel, after a perilous jour- ney almost comparable to Mark Twain's ascent of the Kiftelberg. At Great JNIalvern we were delioiously idle. Wo walked about the place, rested quietly, drove into the neighboring country, and made a single excursion, — to Tewkesbury. There arc few places better worth seeing than this line old GIIEA T MAL VERN. - TE WKESB UR Y. 1 57 town, full of liifltorical associations and monn- mcntal relics. The magnificent old abbey church is the central object of intcM-cst. The noble Norman tower, one hundred and thii'ty-two feet in height, wa.s once Hunuounted by a spire, which fell during divine service on Kaster Day of the year 1559. The arch of the west entrance is sixteen feet high and thirty-four feet wide. The fourteen columns of the nave arc each six feet and tlinjc inclies in diamct(M- and thirty feet in height. I did not take these measurements from the fabric itself, but froui ilion llie van(;, which nothing terrestrial had ever looked down upon in its lofty position, except a l^ird, a bat, a sky-rocket, or a balloon. In saying that the exterior of Salisbury V/dr thedral is more interesting than its interior, I was perhaps unfair to the latter, which only yields to the surpassing claims of the wonderful structure as seen from the outside. One may get a little tired of marble Crusaders, with their crossed legs and Vjroken noses, especially if, as one sometimes finds them, they are covered with the pencilled autographs of cockney scribblers. But there are monuments in this cathedral which excite curiosity, and others which awaken the most striking associations. There is the " Boy Bishop," his marble effigy protected from vandalism by an iron cage. There is the skel- 182 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. eton figure representing Fox (who should have been called Goose), the poor creature who - starved lilniself to death in trying to imitate the fast of forty days in the wilderness. Since this performance has been taken out of the list of miracles, it is not so likely to be repeated by fanatics. I confess to a strong suspicion that this is one of the ambulatory or movable stories, like the " hangman's stone " legend, which I have found in so many different parts of Eng- land. Skulls and crossbones, sometimes skele- tons or skeleton-like figures, are not uncommon among the sepulchral embellishments of an ear- lier period. Where one of these figures is found, the forty-day-fast story is likely to grow out of it, as the mistletoe springs from the oak or apple tree. With far different emotions we look upon the spot where lie buried many of the Herbert fam- ily, among the rest, "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," for whom Ben Jonson wrote the celebrated ep- itaph. I am almost afraid to say it, but I never could admire the line, "Lies the subject of all verse," SALISBURY. 18:] nor the idea of Time dropping his hour-glass and scythe to throw a dart at the fleshless figure of Death. This last image seems to me a})out the (Kjiiivaleiit in mortuary poetry of lifjuhiliac's monument to Mrs. Nightingale in mortuary seulpture, — poor conceits both of them, without the suggestion of a tear in the verses or in tlie marble ; but the rhetorical exaggeration does not prevent us from fe(;ling that we arc standing by the resting-place of one who was ** learn 'd and fair anrl ^ood " enough to stir the soul of stalwart Ben Jonson, and the names of Sidney and Herbert make us forg(;t the strange hyperboles. History meets us ev(;ry where, as we stray among these ancient monuments. Under that effigy lie the great bones of Sir John Cheyne, a mighty man of war, said to have Ixicn " over- thrown" by Kiehard the Third at the battle of Bos worth Field. What was left of him was un- earthed in 1789 in the demolition of the l>eau- champ chapel, and his thigh-bone was found to be four inches longer than that of a man of common stature. The reader may remember how my recollec- 184 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. tions started from tlieir hiding-place when I came, in one of our excursions, upon the name of Lechmere, as belonging to the owner of a fine estate by or through which we were driving. I had a similar twinge of reminiscence at meet- ing with the name of Gorges, which is perpetu- ated by a stately monument at the end of the north aisle of the cathedral. Sir Thomas Gor- ges, Knight of Longford Castle, may or may not have been of the same family as the well- remembered grandiose personage of the New England Pilgrim period. The title this gentle- man bore had a far more magnificent sound than those of his contemporaries. Governor Carver and Elder Brewster. No title ever borne among us has filled the mouth quite so full as that of " Sir Ferdinando Gorges, Lord Palatine of the Province of Maine," a province with " Gorge- ana" (late the plantation of Agamenticus) as its capital. Everywhere in England a New Englander is constantly meeting with names of families and places which remind him that he comes of a graft from an old tree on a new stock. I could not keep down the associations called up by the name of Gorges. There is a SALISBURY. 185 certain pleasure in now and then sprinkling our prosaic colonial history with the holy water of a high-sounding title ; not that a " Sir " before a man's name makes him any better, — for are we not all equal, and more than equal, to each other? — but it sounds pleasantly. Sir Harry Vane and Sir Harry Frankland look prettily on the printed page, as the illuminated capital at the head of a chapter in an old folio pleases the eye of the reader. Sir Thomas Gorges was the builder of Longford Castle, now the seat of the Earl of Radnor, whose family name is Bou- verie. Whether our Sir Ferdinando was of the Longford Castle stock or not I must leave to my associates of the Massachusetts Historical Society to determine. We lived very quietly at our temporary home in Salisbury Close. A pleasant dinner with the Dean, a stroll through the grounds of the epis- copal palace, with that perpetual feast of the eyes which the cathedral offered us, made our residence delightful at the time, and keeps it so in remembrance. Besides the cathedral there were the very lovely cloisters, the noble chapter- house with its central pillar, — this structure 186 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. Las been restored and rejuvenated since my earlier visit, — and there were the peaceful dwellings, where I insist on believing that only virtue and happiness are ever tenants. Even outside the sacred enclosure there is a great deal to enjoy, in the ancient town of Salisbury. One may rest under tlie Poultry Cross, where twenty or thirty generations have rested before him. One may purchase his china at the well-fur- nished establishment of the tenant of a spacious apartment of ancient date, — *' the Halle of John Halle," a fine private edifice built in the year 1470, restored and beautified in 1834: ; the emblazonment of the royal arms having been executed by the celebrated architectural artist Pugin. The old houses are numerous, and some of them eminently picturesque. Salisbury was formerly very unhealthy, on account of the low, swampy nature of its grounds. The Sanitary Reform, dating from about thirty years ago, had a great effect on the condition of the place. Before the drainage the annual mortality was twenty-seven in the thou- sand ; since the drainage twenty in the thousand, which is below that of Boston. In the Close, SALISBURY - OUj SARUM. 187 wlilcli is a little Garden of Eden, with no Herpent in it that J could hear of, the deaths were only fourteen in a thouHand. Happy little enclosure, where thieves cannot break through and steal, where Death himself hesitates to enter, and makes a visit only now and then at long inter- vals, lest the fortunate inhabitants should think they had already reached the Celestial City ! It must have been a pretty bitter quarrel that drove the tenants of the airy height of Old Sarum to remove to the marshy level of tlie present site of the cathedral and the town. I wish v/e could have given more time to the ancient fortress and cathedral town. This is one of the most interesting historic localities of Great Britain. We looked from different points of view at the mounds and trenches which marked it as a strongly fortified position. For many centuries it played an important part in the history of England. At length, however, the jealousies of the laity and the clergy, a squabble like that of "town and gown," but with graver underlying causes, broke up the harmony and practically ended the existence of the place except as a monument of the past. It 188 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. seems a pity that the headquarters of the Prince of Peace coiihl not have managed to maintain tranquillity within its own borders. 15ut so it was ; and the consequence followed tliat Old Sarum, with all its grand recollections, is but a collection of mounds and hollows, — as nuich a tomb of its past as Birs Nimroud of that great city, Nineveh. Old Sarum is now best remem- bered by its long-surviving privilege, as a bo- rough, of sending two members to Parliament. The farcical ceremony of electing two representa- tives who had no real constituency behind them was put an end to by the lieform A(}t of 1832. Wilton, the seat of the Earl of Pembroke, within an easy drive's distance from Salisbury, was the first nobleman's residence I saw in my early visit. Not a great deal of what I then saw had survived in my memory. I recall the general effect of the stately mansion and its grounds. A picture or two of Vandyke's had not quite faded out of my recollection. I could not forget the armor of Anne de Montmorenci, — not another Maid of Orleans, but Constable of France, — said to have been taken in battle by an ancestor of the Herberts. It was one of SALISBURY.-^ WILTON HOUSE. 189 the first things that made me feel I was in the Old World. Milos Standish's sword was as fjir back as Now England collections of armor carried us at that day. The remarkable gal- l(;ry of ancient scnl})tures impressed me at the time, ])ut no one biist or statue survived as a distinct image. Even the beautiful Palladian bridge had not pictured itself on my mental tal)- let as it sliould have done, and I could not have taken my oath that I had seen it. But the pretty English maidens whom we m(;t on t}i(;day of our visit to Wilton, — daughters or grand- daughters of a famous inventor and (engineer, — still lingered as vague and pleasing visions, so lovely had they seemed among the daisies and primroses. The primroses and daisies wen; as fresh in the spring of 188G as they wen; in the spring of 1838, but I hardly dared to ask after the blooming maidens of that early period. One memory predominates over all others, in walking through the halls, or still more in wan- dering through the grounds, of Wilton 1 louse. Here Sir Philip Sidney wrote his "Arcadia," and the ever youthful pnjsence of the man himself rather than the recollection of his writings takes 190 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. possession of us. There are three young men in history whose names always present themselves to me in a special companionship : Pico della Miranclola, " the Phoenix of the Age " for his contemporaries ; " the Admirable Crichton," ac- cepting as true the accounts which have come down to us of his wonderful accomplishments ; and Sidney, the Bayard of England, " that glo- rious star, that lively pattern of virtue and the lovely joy of all the learned sort, . . . born into the world to show unto our age a sample of an- cient virtue." The English paragon of excel- lence was but thirty-two years old when he was slain at Zutphen, the Italian Phoenix but thirty- one when he was carried off by a fever, and the Scotch prodigy of gifts and attainments was only twenty-two when he was assassinated by his worthless pupil. Sir Philip Sidney is better re- membered by the draught of water he gave the dying soldier than by all the waters he ever drew from the fountain of the Muses, considerable as are the merits of his prose and verse. But here, where he came to cool his fiery spirit after the bitter insult he had received from tJie Earl of Leicester ; here, where he mused and wrote, and SALISBUR Y, — BEMERTON. 191 shaped his lofty plans for a glorious future, he lives once more in our imagination, as if his spirit haunted the English Arcadia he loved so dearly. Tl]c name of Herbert, which we have met with in the cathedral, and which belongs to the Earls of Pembroke, presents itself to us once more in a very different and very beautiful aspect. Between Salisbury and Wilton, three miles and a half distant, is the little village of Bemerton, where " holy George Herbert " lived and died, and where he lies buried. Many Americans who know little else of him recall the lines borrowed from him by Irving in the '' Sketch-Book " and by Emerson in " Nature." The " Sketch-Book " gives the lines thus : — ** Sweet day, so pure, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky." In other versions the fourth word is cool instead of pure^ and cool is, I believe, the correct read- ing. The day when we visited Bemerton was, according to A 's diary, " perfect." I was struck with the calm beauty of the scene around us, the fresh greenness of all growing things, and the stillness of the river which mirrored the 192 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. heavens above it. It must have been this re- flection which the poet was thinking of when he spoke of the bridal of the earth and sky. The river is the Wiltshire Avon ; not Shakespeare's Avon, but the southern stream of the same name, which empties into the British Channel. So much of George Herbert's intellectual and moral character repeat themselves in Emerson that if I believed in metempsychosis I should think that the English saint had reappeared in the American philosopher. Their features have a certain resemblance, but the type, though an exceptional and fine one, is not so very rare. I found a portrait in the National Gallery which was a good specimen of it ; the bust of a near friend of his, more intimate with him than al- most any other person, is often taken for that of Emerson. I see something of it in the portrait of Sir Philip Sidney, and I doubt not that traces of a similar mental resemblance ran through the whole group, with individual characteristics which were in some respects quite different. I will take a single verse of Herbert's from Em- erson's "Nature," — one of the five which he quotes ; — GEORGE HERBERT. 193 *' Nothing hath got so far But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; His eyes dismount the highest star : He is in little all the sphere. Herbs gladly cure our flesh because that they Find their acquaintance there." Emerson himself fully recognizes his obligations to " the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century," as he calls George Herbert. There are many passages in his writings which sound as if they were paraphrases from the elder poet. From him it is that Emerson gets a word he is fond of, and of which his imitators are too fond : — * ' Who sweeps a room as for thy laws Makes that and the action ./inc." The little chapel in which Herbert officiated is perhaps half as long again as the room in which I am writing, but it is four or five feet narrower, — and I do not live in a palace. Here this humble servant of God preached and prayed, and here by his faithful and loving service he so endeared himself to all around him that he has been canonized by an epithet no other saint of the English Church has had bestowed upon him. His life as pictured by Izaak Walton is, to borrow one of his own lines, 194 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. " A box where sweets compacted lie ; " and I felt, as I left his little chapel and the par- sonage which he rebuilt as a free-will offering, as a pilgrim might feel who had just left the holy places at Jerusalem. Among the places which I saw in my first visit was Longford Castle, the seat of the Earl of Radnor. I remembered the curious triangu- lar building, constructed with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, as churches are built in the form of the cross. I remembered how the omnipresent spire of the great cathedral, three miles away, looked down upon the grounds about the building as if it had been their next- door neighbor. I had not forgotten the two cel- ebrated Claudes, Morning and Evening. My eyes were drawn to the first of these two pictures when I was here before ; now they turned nat- urally to the landscape with the setting sun. I have read my St. Ruskin with due reverence, but I have never given up my allegiance to Claude Lorraine. But of all the fine paintings at Longford Castle, no one so much impressed me at my recent visit as the portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein. This is one of those pictures SALISBURY. — LONGFORD CASTLE. 195 which help to make the Old World worth a voy- age across the Atlantic. Portraits of Erasmus are not uncommon ; every scholar would know him if he met him in the other world with the look he wore on earth. All the etchings and their copies give a characteristic presentation of the spiritual precursor of Luther, who pricked the false image with his rapier which the sturdy monk slashed with his broadsword. What a face it is which Hans Holbein has handed down to us in this wonderful portrait at Longford Castle ! How dry it is with scholastic labor, how keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly- wise, how conscious of its owner's wide-awake sagacity ! Erasmus and Rabelais, — Nature used up all her arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hundred years and more before she could find shafts enough for the outfit of Voltaire, leaner and keener than Erasmus, and almost as free in his language as the audacious creator of Gargantua and Pantagruel. I have not generally given descriptions of the curious objects which I saw in the great houses and museums which I visited. There is, how- ever, a work of art at Longford Castle so remark- 196 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. able that I must speak of it. I was so much struck by the enormous amount of skilful inge- nuity and exquisite workmanship bestowed upon it that I looked up its history, which I found in the " Beauties of England and Wales." This is what is there said of the wonderful steel chair : " It was made by Thomas Rukers at the city of Augsburgh, in the year 1575, and consists of more than 130 compartments, all occupied by groups of figures representing a succession of events in the annals of the Roman Empire, from the landing of JEneas to the reign of Rodolphus the Second." It looks as if a life had gone into the making of it, as a pair or two of eyes go to the working of the bridal veil of an empress. Fifty years ago and more, when I was at Longford Castle with my two companions, who are no more with us, we found there a pleasant, motherly old housekeeper, or attendant of some kind, who gave us a draught of home-made ale and left a cheerful remembrance with us, as, I need hardly say, we did with her, in a material- ized expression of our good-will. It always rubbed very hard on my feelings to offer money to any persons who had served me well, as if they SALISBURY. 197 were doing it for their own pleasure. It may have been the granddaughter of the kindly old matron of the year 1833 who showed us round, and possibly, if I had sunk a shaft of inquiry, I might have struck a well of sentiment. But " Take, boatman, thrice thy fee," carried into practical life, is certain in its finan- cial result to the subject of the emotional im- pulse, but is less sure to call forth a tender feeling in the recipient. One will hardly find it worth while to go through the world weeping over his old recollections, and paying gold in- stead of silver and silver instead of copper to astonished boatmen and bewildered chamber- maids. On Sunday, the 18th of July, we attended morning service at the cathedral. The congre- gation was not proportioned to the size of the great edifice. These vast places of worship were built for ages when faith was the rule and questioning the exception. I will not say that faith has grown cold, but it has cooled from white heat to cherry red or a still less flaming color. As to church attendance, I have heard the saying attributed to a great statesman, that 198 OUR nUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. " once a day is Orthodox, but twice a day is Puritan." No doubt many of the same class of pcoi)le that used to fill the churches stay at home and read about evolution or telepathy, or what- ever new gospel they may have got hold of. Still the English seem to me a religious people ; they have leisure enough to say grace and give thanks before and after meals, and their institutions tend to keep alive the feelings of reverence which cannot be said to be distinctive of our own people. In coming out of the cathedral, on the Sunday I just mentioned, a gentleman addressed me as a fellow-countr^-man. There is somethhig, — I will not stop now to try and define it, — but there is something by which we recognize an American among the English before he speaks and betrays his origin. Our new friend proved to be the president of one of our American colleges ; an intelligent and well-instructed gen- tleman, of course. By the invitation of our host he came in to visit us in the evening, and made himself very welcome by his agreeable conver- sation. I took great delight in wandering about the SALISBURY. 199 old town of Salisbury. There are no such sur- prises in our oldest places as one finds in Ches- ter, or Tewkesbury, or Stratford, or Salisbury, and I have no doubt in scores or hundreds of similar places which I have never visited. The best substitute for such rambles as one can take through these mouldy boroughs (or burrows) is to be found in such towns as Salem, Newbury- port, Portsmouth. Without imagination, Shake- speare's birthplace is but a queer old house, and Anne Ilathaway's home a tumble-down cottage. With it, one can see the witches of Salem Vil- lage sailing out of those little square windows, which look as if they were made on purpose for them, or stroll down to Derby's wharf and gaze at " Cleopatra's Barge," precursor of the yachts of the Astors and Goulds and Vanderbilts, as she comes swimming into the harbor in all her gilded glory. But it must make a difference what the imagination has to work upon, and I do not at all wonder that Mr. Kuskin would not wish to live in a land where there are no old ruins of castles and monasteries. Man will not live on bread only ; he wants a great deal more, if he can get it, — frosted cake as well as corn- 200 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. bread ; and the New World keeps the iinagi- iiatioii on plain and scanty diet, compared to the rich traditional and historic food which fur- nishes the banquets of the Old World. What memories that week in Salisbury and tlie excursions from it have left in my mind's picture gallery ! The spire of the great cathe- dral had been witli me as a frequent presence during the last fifty years of my life, and this second visit has deepened every line of the im- pression, as Old Mortality refreshed the inscrip- tions on the tombstones of the Covenanters. I find that all these pictures which I have brought home with me to look at, with ' ' that inward eye Wlucli is the bliss of solitude," are becoming clearer and brighter as the excite- ment of overcrowded days and weeks gradually calms down. I can he in those places where I passed days and nights, and became habituated to the sight of the cathedral, or of the Church of the Holy Trinity, at morning, at noon, at evening, whenever I turned my e3^es in its direc- tion. I often close my eyelids, and startle my household by saying, " Now I am in Salisbury," SALISBURY. — BRIGHTON. • 201 or " Now I am in Stratford." It is a blessed thing to bo able, in the twilight of years, to il- luminate the soul with such visions. The Charles, which flows beneath my windows, which I look upon between the words of the sentence I am now writing, only turning my head as I sit at my table, — the Charles is hardly more real' to me than Shakespeare's Avon, since I floated on its still waters, or strayed along its banks and saw the cows reflected in the smooth ex- panse, their legs upward, as if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling. Salisbury Cathedral stands as substantial in my thouglit as our own King's Chapel, since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built by the architect of dreams. On Thursday, the 2 2d of July, we left Salis- bury for Brighton, where we were to be guests at Arnold House, the residence of our kind host. Here we passed another delightful week, with everything around us to contribute to our quiet comfort and happiness. The most thoughtful of entertainers, a house filled with choice works 202 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. of art, fine paintings, and wonderful pottery, pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the nmnber, rest and peace in a magnificent city- built for enjoyment, — what more could we have asked to make our visit memorable? Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate in the intervals of " the season." This was not the time of Brighton's influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes ; the shops are well supplied ; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the noble esplanade is lively with promenaders and Bath chairs, some of them occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I sus- pect, employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk. I took one myself, drawn by an old man, to see hov/ I liked it, and found it very convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me drag him. With the aid of the guide-book I could de- scribe the wonders of the pavilion and the vari- ous changes which have come over the great watering-place. The grand walks, the two piers, BRIGHTON. 203 the aquarium, and all the great sights which are shown to strangers deserve full attention from the tourist who writes for other travellers, but none of these thing's seem to me so interesting: as what we saw and heard in a little hamlet which has never, so far as I know, been vulgarized by sight -seers. AYe drove in an open carriage, — Mr. and Mrs. Willett, A , and myself, — into the country, which soon became bare, sparsely settled, a long succession of rounded hills and hollows. These are the South Downs, from which comes the famous mutton known all over England, not unknown at the table of our Saturday Club and other well-spread boards. After a drive of ten miles or more we arrived at a little '' settlement," as we Americans should call it, and drove up to the door of a modest parsonage, where dwells the shepherd of the South Down flock of Christian worshippers. I hope that the good clergyman, if he ever hap- pens to see what I am writing, will pardon me for making mention of his hidden retreat, which he himself speaks of as " one of the remoter nooks of the old country." Nothing I saw in England brought to my mind Goldsmith's 204 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. picture of ^' the man to all the country dear," and his surroundings, like this visit. The church dates, if 1 remember right, from the thirteenth century. Some of its stones show- marks, as it is thought, of having belonged to a Saxon edifice. The massive leaden font is of a very great antiquity. In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the priest is sup- posed to have sat and listened to the confession of the sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One epi- taph, which the unlettered Muse must have dic- tated, is worth recording. After giving the chief slumberer's name the epitaph adds, — " Here lies on either side, the remains of each of his former wives." Those of a third have found a resting-place close by, behind him. It seemed to me that Mr. Bunner's young man in search of Arcady might look for it here with as good a chance of being satisfied as any- where I can think of. But I suppose that men and women and especially boys, would prove to be a o-ood deal like the rest of the world, if one BRIGHTON. 205 lived here long enough to learn all about them. One thing I can safely say, — an English man or boy never goes anywhere without his fists. I saw a boy of ten or twelve years, whose pleasant face attracted my attention. I said to the rec- tor, " That is a fine-looking little fellow, and I should think an intelligent and amiable kind of boy." " Yes," he said, " yes ; he can strike from the shoulder pretty well, too. I had to stop him the other day, indulging in that exer- cise." Well, I said to myself, we have not yet reached the heaven on earth which I was fancy- ing might be embosomed in this peaceful-looking hollow. Youthful angels can hardly be in the habit of striking from the shoulder. But the well-known phrase, belonging to the pugilist rather than to the priest, brought me back from the ideal world into which my imagination had wandered. Our week at Brighton was passed in a very quiet but most enjoyable way. It could not be otherwise with such a host and hostess, always arranging everything with reference to our well- being and in accordance with our wishes. I be- came very fond of the esplanade, such a public 206 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. walk as I never saw anything to compare with. In these tranquil days, and long, honest nights of sleep, the fatigues of what we had been through were forgotten, the scales showed that we were becoming less ethereal every day, and we were ready for another move. We bade good-by to our hosts with the most grateful and the warmest feeling towards them, after a month of delightful companionship and the experience of a hospitality almost too gener- ous to accept, but which they were pleased to look upon as if we were doing them a favor. On the 29tli of July we found ourselves once more in London. VL We found our old quarters all ready and awaiting us. Mrs. Mackcllar's motherly smile, Sam's civil bow, and the rosy cheeks of many- buttoned Eobert made us feel at home as soon as we crossed the threshold. The dissolution of Parliament had brought " the season " abruptly to an end. London was empty. There were three or four millions of people in it, but the great houses were for the most part left without occupants except their liveried guardians. We kept as quiet as pos- sible, to avoid all engagements. For now we were in London for London itself, to do shop- ping, to see sights, to be our own master and mistress, and to live as independent a life as we possibly could. The first thing we did on the day of our arrival was to take a hansom and drive over to Chelsea, to look at the place where Carlyle passed the larger part of his life. The whole 208 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. region about him must have been greatly changed during his residence there, for the Thames Embankment was constructed long af- ter he removed to Chelsea. We had some lit- tle difficulty in finding the place we were in search of. Cheyne (pronounced " Chainie ") Walk is a somewhat extended range of build- ings. Cheyne Row is a passage which reminded me a little of my old habitat, Montgomery Place, now Bosworth Street. Presently our at- tention was drawn to a marble medallion por- trait on the corner building of an ordinary-look- ing row of houses. This was the head of Car- lyle, and an inscription informed us that he lived for forty-seven years in the house No. 24 of this row of buildings. Since Carlyle's home life has been made public, he has appeared to us in a different aspect from the ideal one which he had before occupied. He did not show to as much advantage under the Boswellizing pro- cess as the dogmatist of the last century, dear old Dr. Johnson. But he remains not the less one of the really interesting men of his genera- tion, — a man about whom we wish to know all that we have a right to know. CHELSEA. — CARLYLE. 209 The sight of an old nest over which two or three winters have passed is a rather sad- dening one. The dingy three-story brick house in which Carlyle lived, one in a block of sim- ilar houses, was far from attractive. It was untenanted, neglected ; its windows were un- washed, a pane of glass was broken ; its threshold appeared untrodden, its whole aspect forlorn and desolate. Yet there it stood be- fore me, all covered with its associations as an ivy-clad tower with its foliage. I wanted to see its interior, but it looked as if it did not expect a tenant and would not welcome a vis- itor. Was there nothing but this forbidding house-front to make the place alive with some breathing memory? I saw crossing the street a middle-aged woman, — a decent body, who looked as if she might have come from the lower level of some not opulent but respectable house- hold. She might have some recollection of an old man who was once her neighbor. I asked her if she remembered Mr. Carlyle. Indeed she did, she told us. She used to see him often, in front of his house, putting bits of bread on the railing for the birds. He did not like to see 210 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. anything wasted, she said. The merest scrap of information, but genuine and pleasing ; an instantaneous photograph only, but it makes a pretty vignette in the volume of my reminis- cences. There are many considerable men in every generation of mankind, but not a great number who are personally interesting, — not a great many of whom we feel that we cannot know too much ; whose foibles, even, we care to know about ; whose shortcomings we try to ex- cuse ; who are not models, but whose special traits make them attractive. Carlyle is one of these few, and no revelations can prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in his prenatal existence. The bricklayer's mor- tar of his father's calling stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a simpler expression of our common humanity. As we rolled in the cars by Ecclefechan, I strained my eyes to take in every point of the landscape, every cottage. CHELSEA. — CARL YLE. 21 1 every spire, if by any chance I could find one in that lonely region. There was not a bridge nor a bit of masonry of any kind that I did not eagerly scrutinize, to see if it were solid and honest enough to have been built by Carlyle's father. Solitary enough the country looked. I admired Mr. Emerson's devotion in seeking his friend in his bare home among what he de- scribes as the "desolate heathery hills" about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region through which we were passing. It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle. Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists, all of whom greatly interested their own gener- ation, and whose personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the trio, still in- terests us, — Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an oracle in his way, but unfortu- nately oracles are fallible to their descendants. The author of " Taxation no Tyranny " had wholesale opinions, and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in ex- pression : " Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow 212 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. tliem short of hanging." We smile compla- cently when we read this outburst, which Mr. Croker calls in question, but which agrees with his saying in the presence of Miss Seward, " I am willing to love all mankind except an Amer- ican.'''' A generation or two later comes along Cole- ridge, with his circle of reverential listeners. He says of Johnson that his fame rests princi- pally upon Bos well, and that " his how-icoio man- ner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced." As to Coleridge himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their exaltation of his genius, Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge's to which he listened : " The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than another fell from his tongue. . . . As I retired homeward I thought a second Johnson had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men." And De Quincey speaks of him as " the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that CHELSEA. — CARL YLE, 213 has yet existed amono^st men. " One is some- times tempted to wish that the superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old ex- perts. What are men to do when thoy get to heaven, after having exhausted their vocabulary of admiration on earth ? Now let us come down to Carlyle, and see what he says of Coleridge. We need not take those conversational utterances which called down the wrath of Mr. Swinburne, and found expression in an epigram which violates all the proprieties of literary language. Look at the full-length portrait in the Life of Sterling. Each oracle denies his predecessor, each magi- cian breaks the wand of the one who went be- fore him. There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and bur- ied it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again. It is rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral sensibilities on coming in con- tact with American rocks and currents, with which neither had any special occasion to con- '214 orn nrxDRED pays in Europe. corn himself, and wliioh both had a ij^roat deal better have steered elear of. But here I stand onee more before the homo of the long-suffering, mueh-laboring, loud-com- plaining Ileraclitus of his time, whose very smile had a grlniness in it more ominous than his scowl. Poor man ! Dyspeptic on a diet of oat- meal porridge ; kept wide awake by crowing cocks ; drummed out of his wits by long-contin- ned piano-pounding ; sharp of speech, I fear, to his high-strung wife, who gave him back as good as she got ! I hope I am inistalvcn about their every-day relations, but again I say, poor man ! — for all his complaining must have meant real discomfort, which a man of genius feels not less, certainly, than a common mortal. I made a second visit to the place where he lived, but I saw nothing more than at the first. I wanted to cross the threshold over which he walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write, to look at the chimney- place down which the soot came, to sit where ho used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure lip his wraith to look in once more upon Lis old deserted dwelling. That vision was denied me. LONDON. — r HE PA ILK. 2\') After visiting Cholsoa wo drovo round through Regent's Park. I suppose that if we use tlie superlative in speaking of Hyde Park, Regent's Park will be the comparative, and Battersea Park the positive, ranking them in the descend- ing grades of their hierarchy. But this is my conjecture ordy, and the social geography of London is a subject which only one who has be- come familiarly acquainted with the place should speak of with any confidence. A stranger com- ing tf> our city might think it made little differ- ence whether his travelling Boston acquaintance lived in Alpha Avenue or in Omega Square, but he would have to learn that it is farther from one of these places to the other, a great deal farther, than it is from Beacon Street, Boston, to Fifth Avenue, New York. An American finds it a little galling to be told that he must not drive in his numhered hansom or four-wheeler except in certain por- tions of Hyde Park. If he is rich enough to keep his own carriage, or if he will pay the ex- tra price of a vehicle not vulgarized by being on the numbered list, he may drive anywhere that his Grace or his Lordship does, and perhaps 21 G OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. have a menu sense of satisfaction at finding him- self in the chavniecl circle of exclusive " gignian- ity." It is a i)lcasuro to meet none but well- dressed and well-mannered people, in well-ap- pointed equipages. In the highroad of our own country, one is liable to fall in with people and conveyances that it is far from a pleasure to meet. I was once driving in an open carriage, with members of my family, towards my own house in the country town where I was then living. A cart drawn by oxen was in the road in front of us. Whenever we tried to pass, the men in it turned obliquely across the road and prevented us, and this was repeated again and again. I could have wished I had been driving in Hyde Park, where clowns and boors, with their carts and oxen, do not find admittance. Exclusiveness has its conveniences. The next day, as I was strolling through Bur- lington Arcade, I saw a figure just before me which I recognized as that of my townsman, Mr. Abbott Lawrence. He was accompanied by his son, who had just returned from a trip round the planet. There are three grades of recognition, entirely distinct from each other : LONDON, 217 the meeting of two persons of diffcr(;nt couTitncs who speak the same language, — an American and an Kn^li.sliman, for instance ; the meeting of two Aniciicans from different cities, as of a Bostonian and a New Yorker or a Chicagonian ; and the meeting of two from the same city, as of two Bostonians. The difference of these recognitions may be illustrated by supposing certain travelling phi- losophical instruments, endowed with intelligence and the power of speech, to come together in their wanderings, — let us say in a restaurant of the Palais Koyal. " Very hot," says the talk- ing Fahrenheit (Thermometer^ from I^oston, and calls for an ice, which he plunges his Ijulb into and cools down. In comes an intelligent and socially disposed English Barometer. The two travellers greet each other, not exactly as old acquaintances, but each has heard very frequently about the other, and their relatives have been often associated. " We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. " Of the same blood, as we may say ; quicksilver is thicker than water." " Yes," says the little Fahrenheit, " and we are both of the same mer- 218 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. curial temperament." While tlieir columns are dancing up and down with laughter at this somewhat tepid and low^-pressurc pleasantry, there come in a New York Reaumur and a Cen- tigrade from Chicago. The Fahrenheit, which has got w^armcd up to temperate^ rises to sum- mer heat, and even a little above it. They en- joy each other's company mightily. To be sure, their scales differ, but have they not the same freezino- and the same boiling point? To be sure, each thinks his own scale is the true stan- dard, and at home they might get into a con- test about the matter, but here in a strange land they do not think of disputing. Now, while they are talking about America and their own local atmosphere and temperature, there comes in a second Boston Fahrenheit. The two of the same name look at each other for a moment, and rush together so eagerly that their bulbs are endangered. How well they understand each other ! Thirty-two degrees marks the freezing point. Two hundred and twelve marks the boiling point. They have the same scale, the same fixed points, the same record : no won- der they prefer each other's company ! LONDON. 219 I hope that my reader has followed my illus- tration, and finished it off for himself. Let me give a few practical examples. An American and an Englishman meet in a foreign land. TPie Englishman has occasion to mention his weight, which he finds has gained in the course of his travels. " How much is it now ? " asks the American. " Fourteen stone. How much do you weigh ? " *' Within four pounds of two hun- dred." Neither of them takes at once any clear idea of what the other weighs. The Amei*ican has never thought of his own, or his friends', or anybody's weight in stonen of fourteen pounds. The Englishman has never thought of any one's weight in ^;ow7i(Z.s. They can calculate very easily with a slip of paper and a pencil, but not the less is their language but half intelligible as they speak and listen. The same thing is in a measure true of other matters they talk about. " It is about as large a space as the Common," says the Boston man. "It is as large as St. James's Park," says the Londoner. " As high as the State House," says the Bostonian, or " as tall as Bunker Hill Monument," or " about as big as the Frog Pond," where the Londoner 220 OUR HUNDnED DAYS IN EUROrE. would take St. Paul's, the Nelson (Column, the S(M'pentine, as his standard of comparison. The diftVronoe of scale docs not stop here ; it runs through a great i)art of tlio objects of thought and conversation. An average AnuM'ican and an average Englishman are talking together, and one of them speaks of the beauty of a field of corn. They are thiidving of two entirely differ- ent objects : one of a billowy level of soft wav- ing wheat, or rye, or barley ; the other of a rustling forest of tall, jointed stalks, tossing their plumes and showing their silken epaulettes, as if every stem in the ordered ranks wcu-e a soldier in full regimentals. An Englishman planted for tholirst time in the middle of a well- grown field of Indian corn would feel as nuicli lost as the babes in the wood. Conversation be- tween two Londoners, two New Yorkers, two Bostonians, requires no foot-notes, which is a great advantage in their intercourse. To return from my digression and my illus- tration. I did not do a great deal of shopping myself while in London, being contented to have it done for me. But in the way of looking in at shop windows I did a very large business. Cer- LONDON. 221 tain windows attracted mo })y a variety in unity which HurpaHHcjd anything I have Ixicn accus- tomed to. TIiuH one window showed every con- ceivable convenience that couhl be shaped in ivory, and nothing else. One shop had such a display of magnificent dressing-cases that I should have thougfit a whole royal family was setting out on its travels. I see the cost of one of them is two liundred and seventy guineas. Thirteen hundred and fifty dollars seems a good deal to pay for a dressing-case. On the other hand, some of the first-class tradesmen and workmen make no show wliat- ever. The tailor to whom I had credentials, and who proved highly satisfactory to me, as he had })roved to some of my countrymen and to Englishmen of high estate, had only one small sign, which was placed in one of his windows, and received his customers in a small room tliat would have made a closet for one of our stylish merchant tailors. 'J'he }>ootmaker to whom I went on good recommendation had hardly any- thing about his premises to remind one of his calling. He came into his studio, took my measure very carefully, and made me a pair of 222 OUR nUXDRED DAYS IN KmOPE. wliat Avo oall Congress boots, wliloh littod \\A\ when oneo on my foot, bnt which it cost more trouble to got into and to got out of than I could express my feelings about without dangerously enlarging my limited vocabulary. Bond Street, Old and New, offered the most inviting windows, and I indulged almost to pro- fligacy in the prolonged inspection of their con- tents. Stretching my walk along New Bond Street till I came to a great intersecting tho- roughfare, I found myself in Oxford Street. Here the character of the shop windows changed at once. Utility and convenience took the place of show and splendor. Here 1 found various articles of use in a household, some of which wore now to me. It is very likely that I could have found most of them in our own Boston Cornhill, but one often overlooks things at home which at once arrest his attention when ho sees them in a strange plaee. I saw great numbers of illuminating contrivances, some of which pleased me by their arrangement of reflectors. Bryant and IMay's safety matches seemed to be used everywhere. I procured some in Boston with these names on the box, but the label said LONDON. 223 they wore made in Sw^tdon, and tlioy fjiffuscd vapors that woro onougli to jnoduco asphyxia. I greatly admired somo of \)v. i>>roHser'8 water- cans and other contrivances, modelled more or less after the antique, but I found an abundant assortment of them here in Boston, and I have one I obtained here more original in desi'Ti and more serviceable in daily lise than any I saw in London. I should have regarded Wol- verhampton, as we glided through it, with more interest, if I had known at that time that the in- ventive \)\'. Dresser had his headquarters in tliat busy-looking town. One thing, at least, 1 learned from my London experience : better a small city where one knows all it has to offer, than a great city where one has no disinterested friend to direct him to the right places to find what he wants. But of course there are some grand magazines which are known all the world over, and which no one should leave London without entering as a looker-on, if not as a purchaser. There was one place 1 determined to visit, and one man I meant to see, before returning. The place was a certain book-store or book-shop, and 224 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. the person was its proprietor, Mr. Bernard Qua- ritch. I was getting very much pressed for time, and I allowed ten minutes only for my visit. 1 never had any dealings with Mr. Quaritch, but one of my near relatives had, and I had often received his catalogues, the scale of prices in which had given me an impression almost of sublimity. I found Mr. Bernard Quaritch at No. 15 Piccadilly, and introduced myself, not as one whose name he must know, but rather as a stranger, of whom he might have heard through my relative. The extensive literature of cata- logues is probably little known to most of my readers. I do not pretend to claim a thorough acquaintance with it, but I know the luxury of reading good catalogues, and such are those of Mr. Quaritch. I should like to deal with him ; for if he wants a handsome price for what he sells, he knows its value, and does not offer the refuse of old libraries, but, on the other hand, all that is most precious in them is pretty sure to pass through his hands, sooner or later. " Now, Mr. Quaritch," I said, after introdu- cing myself, " I have ten minutes to pass with you. You must not open a book ; if you do I LONDON. 225 am lost, for I shall have to look at every illumi- nated capital, from the first leaf to the colophon." Mr. Quaritch did not open a single book, but let me look round his establishment, and answered my questions very courteously. It so happened that while I was there a gentleman came in whom I had previously met, — my namesake, Mr. Holmes, the Queen's librarian at Windsor Castle. My ten minutes passed very rapidly in conversation with these two experts in books, the bibliopole and the bibliothecary. No place that I visited made me feel more thoroughly til at I was in London, the great central mart of all that is most precious in the world. Leave at home all your guineas^ ye who enter here^ would be a good motto to put over his door, unless you have them in plenty and can spare them, in which case Take all your guineas with you would be a better one. For you can here get their equivalent, and more than their equivalent, in the choicest products of the press and the finest work of the illuminator, the illustrator, and the binder. You will be sorely tempted. But do not be surprised when you ask the price of the volume you may happen to 226 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. fancy. Yon arc not Joaling with a houqiciniste of the Quais, in Paris. You are not foraging in an old book-shop of New York or Boston. Do not suppose that I undervahie these dealers in old and rare volumes. Many a nuich-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and Biirn- liam and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York ; and in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or an Elzevir, liave I found among the trumpery spread out on the 2)arapets of the quays. But there is a difference between going out on the Fourth of July with a militia nuisket to shoot any catbird or " chi])munk " that turns up in a piece of woods willilu a few miles of our own cities, and shooting partridges in a nobleman's preserves on the First of September. I confess to having felt a certain awe on entering the pre- cincts made sacred by their precious contents. The lord and master of so many Editiones I^rincipcs, the guardian of this great nursery full of Incnnahida^ did not seem to me like a simple tradesman. I felt that I was in the presence of the literary purveyor of vojiA and imperial libraries, the man before whom million- LONDON. 221 aires tremble as they calculate, and billionaires pause and consider. I have recently received two of Mr. Quaritch's catalogues, from which I will give my reader an extract or two, to show him what kind of articles this prince of biblio- poles deals in. Perhaps you would like one of those romances which turned the head of Don (Quixote. Here is a volume which will be sure to please you. It is on one of his lesser lists, confined princi- pally to Spanish and Portuguese works : — " Amadls de Gaula . . . folio, gothic letter. First edition, unique . . . red morocco super extra, double with olive moroc-fo, richly gilt, tooled to an elegant (J roller design, gilt edges ... in a neat case." A pretty present for a scholarly friend. A nice old book to cany home for one's own library. Two hundred pounds — one thousand dollars — will make you the happy owner of this volume. But if you would have also on your shelves the first edition of the " Cronica del famoso ca- baluero cid Ruy Diaz Campadero," not " richly gilt," not even bound in leather, but in " cloth 228 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. boards," you will have to pay two hundred and ton pounds to become its proprietor. After this you will not be frightened by the thought of paying three hundred dollars for a little quarto giving an account of the Virginia Adven- turers. You will not shrink from the idea of giving something more than a hundred guineas for a series of Hogarth's plates. But when it comes to Number 1001 in the IMay catalogue, and you see that if you w^ould possess a first folio Shakespeare, " untouched by the hand of liny modern renovator," you must be prepared to pay seven hundred and eighty-five pounds, almost four thousand dollars, for the volume, it would not be surprising if you changed color and your knees shook under you. No doubt some brave man will be found to carry off that prize, in spite of the golden battery which de- fends it, perhaps to Cincinnati, or Chicago, or San Francisco. But do not be frightened. These Alpine heights of extravagance climb up from the hund)le valley where shillings and six- pences are all that are required to make you a purchaser. One beauty of the Old World shops is that LONDON. 229 if a visitor oomes \nw\^ to the place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit. In driving down to the old city, to the place of business of the Barings, I found many streets little changed. Temple Bar was gone, and the much-abused griffm stood in its place. There was a shop close to Temple Bar, where, in 1834, I had bought some brushes. I had no difficulty in finding Front's, and I could not do less than go in and buy some more brushes. I did not ask the young man who served me how tlie old shopkeeper who attended to my wants on the earlier occasion was at this time. But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes smooth show from those that knew their prede- cessors in the earlier decade ! I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of by Artemus Ward as " a sweet boon," so vividly remembered by me as the scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the Tower me- nagerie. But the project added a stone to the floor of the underground thoroughfare which is paved with good intentions. 230 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. St. PauFs I must and did visit. The most striking addition since I was there is the mas- sive monument to the Duke of Wellington. The great temple looked rather bare and un- sympathetic. Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting in semi- nude exposure, looked to me as unhapj^y as our own half-naked Washington at the national capital. The Judas of Matthew Arnold's poem would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found himself in St. Paul's, and have earned another respite. We brought away little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at it. It gives us a greater idea of height than the sky itself, which we have become used to looking upon. A second visit to the National Gallery was made in company with A . It was the repetition of an attempt at a draught from the Cup of Tantalus. I was glad of a sight of the Botticellis, of which I had heard so much, and others of the more recently acquired paintings of the great masters ; of a sweeping glance at the Turners ; of a look at the well-remembered Ilogarths and the memorable portraits by Sir Joshua. I carried away a confused mass of im- LONDON. 231 prcssions, mucli as the soldiers that sack a city go off with all the precious things they can snatch up, huddled into clothes-bags and pillow- cases. I am reminded, too, of Mr. Galton's composite portraits ; a thousand glimpses, as one passes through the long halls lined with paint- ings, all blending in one not unpleasing general effect, out of which emerges from time to time some single distinct image. In the same way we passed through the ex- hibition of paintings at the Koyal Academy. I noticed thr.t A paid special attention to the portraits of young ladies by John Sargent and by Collier, while I was more particularly struck with the startling portrait of an ancient person- age in a full suit of wrinkles, such as Kembrandt used to bring out with wonderful effect. Hunt- ing in couples is curious and instructive ; the scent for this or that kind of game is sure to be very different in the two individuals. I made but two brief visits to the British Museum, and I can easily instruct my reader so that he will have no difficulty, if he will follow my teaching, in learning how not to see it. When he has a spare hour at his disposal, let 232 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. liim drop in at the Museum, and wander among its books and its various collections. He will know as much about it as the fly that buzzes in at one window and out at another. If I were asked whether I brought away anything from my two visits, I should say, Certainly I did. The fly sees some things, not very intelligently, but he cannot help seeing them. The great round reading-room, with its silent students, impressed me very much. I looked at once for the Elgin Marbles, but casts and photographs and engravings had made me familiar with their chief features. I thought I knew something of the sculptures brought from Nineveh, but I was astonished, almost awe-struck, at the sight of those mighty images which mingled with the visions of the Hebrew prophets. I did not maiwel more at the skill and labor expended upon them by the Assyrian artists than I did at the enterprise and audacity which had brought them safely from the mounds under which they were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city. I never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and the tablets in which the history of Nebu- LONDON. — THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 233 chadnczzar was rec.ortlcd spread before nic. The Empire of the Spade in the world of liis- tory was founded at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently at work at the present day. I feel very grateful that many of its reve- lations have been made since I have been a ten- ant of the travelling residence which holds so many secrets in its recesses. There is one lesson to be got from a visit of an hour or two to the Ihitish Museum, — namely, the fathomless abyss of our own igno- rance. One is almost ashamed of his little pal- try heartbeats in the presence of the rushing and roaring torrent of Niagara. So if he has published a little book or two, collected a few fossils, or coins, or vases, he is crushed bv the vastness of the treasures in the library and the collections of this universe of knowledge. I have shown how not to see the British Museum ; I will tell how to see it. Take lodgings next door to it, — in a garret, if you cannot afford anything better, — and pass all your days at the Museum during the whole 234 OUR HUNDRED DAYS IN EUROPE. period of your luitiiriil life. At threescore and ten you will liiivc some faint conception of tlio contents, significance, and value of this great British institution, which is as nearly as any one si)()t the nocud vital of human civilization, a stab at which by the dagger of anarchy would fitly begin the reign of chaos. On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wed- more, who had promised to be my guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a hansom for the old city. The first place we visited was the Temple, a collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of the edifices reminding me of our col- lege dormitories. One, however, was a most ex- traordinary exception, — the wonderful Temple church, or rather the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple. We had some trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us. It affected my imagi- nation strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old, or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their place there for some six or seven hundred years ; for the church LONDON. 235 was LullL In the year 1185, and tlio most rooont of llio cnisadci-H' nionutnents is said to date as far back as 1241. Tlieir effigies have lain in this vast city, and passed unharmed througli all its convulsions. The Great Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and tlj(jy must have shaken day and niglit, as tlie bodies of the vi(;tiins of the Plague were rattled over the pavements. Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain stone laid Hat on the turf bears these words : " Here lies Oliver Goldsmith." 1 b<'lieve doubt h;is beciu thrown uj)on the statement that Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some ])oet ought to have written, Whf!rt, is fliH; "The Broken Circle," ](;9-172; literature of, 173; mechanical problem, 174, 175. St. Paul's, monuments, 230 ; dome, 230. Strasbourg, statue of, 209. Stratford-on-Avon, 9, 90; visit to, 138-147; children at, 140, 141; Church of Holy Trinity, 143; bridge, 144 ; charnel-house, 145 ; a week at, 153; hot days at, 287 ; reminiscence claiming precedence, 151 ; question suggested by pre- sence of a great surgeon, 152. Strawberry, the, 258. Supper, at Foreign Office, 71 ; at Drury Lane Theatre, 111. Surgery, extraordinary success in, 151, 152. Sutherland, Duke of, 81. Swanwick, Mrs. Anna, 61. Swinburne, Mr., 213. Tadema, Alma, 101. Tait, Lawson, 151-153. Tea, 38, 42, 103. Teachers, outgrown, 251. Telescope, Uer.schel's, 8. Temple, the, 234, 235; crusaders' monuments, 235. Tenniel, 101. Tennyson, Lord, 66 ; visit to, 103- 108. Tennyson, Lady, 104. Tennyson, Mr. and Mrs. Hallam, 104, 108. Terry, Ellen, 45. Tewkesbury, excursion to, 156 ; ab- bey churcli, 157, 180 ; old houses, 157. Thackeray, story quoted, 52. Thompson, Rev. Wm. Hcpworth, Master of Trinity, 109, 110. Thompson, Sir Henry, 103. Titles, sound of, pleasant, 184, 185. Tower, the, 0, 229. Townsend, Mr., 101. Travellers of advanced years, 316, 317. Trees, 33, 159, 289-292; soothing companionship of, 105, 100 ; Ten- nyson's, 290. Trios, nature fond of, 211. Turkish ambassador, 55. Tussaud, Madame, 273. Tyndall, Mr., 2, 86. Types, repetition of, 299, 300. Umbrella in London and in Paris, 287. Underwood, F. H., Consul at Glas- gow, 128. University towns, the, not com- pared, i24. Vaccination, 263, Vauglian, Mr. Petty, 6, 9. Vaughan, Mrs., 44. Vauxhall Gardens, 7. Venus of Milo, 271. Verses, 120, l(i9, 170, 171, 172, 242. Victor Hugo, 285. Voltaire, 195, 2.57. Voyage, 5, 16, 20r26. Voysey, Rev. Mr., 301. Wallop, Lady Camilla, 131. Walpole, Horace, quoted, 51. Walsho, Dr. Walter Hayle, 240, 303. War, of 1812, 282 ; of secession, 282. Warwick, 9. Waterhouse, Dr. Benjamin, 240. Waterloo, mound at, 298. Watt and Watts, 242. Webb, Col., owner of Newstcad Ab- bey, 86. INDEX. 329 "Wellington on battle of Waterloo, 83. Wells Cathedral, 285, Westbury, white horse on hillside, 1G4. Westminster Abbey, 6, 44; Poets' Corner, 89 ; overcrowded, 91 ; visit of two hours, 9'2 ; holes for playing marbles, 9'2, 93; life in and about, 93. Westminster, Duke of, 31, 47. White of Selborne, 159, 284. Wliite, Sir W. A., 114. Wliittier, favorite tree of, at Dan- vers, 104. Wiglit, Isle of, 103, 105, 108. Wilde, Oscar, and wife, 42. Willett, Mr. Henry, 2G, 71, 137, 138, 285. Willows, 292. Wilson, Sir Erasmus, 273. Wilton, 1G8; pictures, 188; sculp- tures, 189; maidens, daisies, and primroses, 189 ; predominant memory, 189. Windsor, 8, 71 ; the castle, 72 ; the park, 73. Whithrop, Mr., 50. Wolseley, Lord, (IG. Wolverton, Lord, 47. Women do not know their contem- poraries, GG. Wordsworth, 76, 78, 285. Wreck of the Medusa, 23. Wright, Mr. Aldis, 131. Wriglit, Professor, 113. Wyman, Dr. Jeftries, 280. Year 1809, birth year of Gladstone, Tennyson, Darwin, GG. York, Archbisliop of, 81 ; breakfast at, 125 ; cathedral, 9, 125. Yorksliire, 9. Young, Dr. Thomas, 2. ^tantiarD anti f^opular EiBtarp 25oofei9f SELECTED FROM THE CATALOGUE OF HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, A Club of One. An Anonymous Volume, $1.25. Brooks Adams. The Emancipation of Massachusetts, crown 8vo, $1.50. John Adams and Abigail Adams. Familiar Letters of, during the Revolution, i2mo, ^2.00. Oscar Fay Adams. Handbook of English Authors, i6mo, 75 cents ; Handbook of American Authors, i6mo, 75 cents. Louis Agassiz. 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