Jlatgf«lf)apct coition Cnglisi) Hours ii j\ Seep. /So MAGDALEN TOWER, OXFORD €nglirfi Hourg 15^ l^enr^ 3Iamejs €amtiriti0C ^rinteti at €()e ifiiber^ibe ^re^^ mticcccb COPYRIGHT 1S7S 1883 BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. COPYRIGHT 1S93 BY HARPER & BROTHERS COPYRIGHT 1905 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN & CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published October igoj fiUV 6 8S05 dot /2 3 6^i- l^umbet .AC .^.^--^-/^ -/^ S^f-Al> NOTE THE papers gathered into this series, originally published in various periodicals, have already been reprinted — the earliest in date more than thirty years ago ; the others, with the exception of two, more recently, in a volume entitled " Portraits of Places." They have been here once more placed together, for the great advantage they will be felt to derive from the company and support of Mr. Pennell's illustrations. Each article is marked with vi NOTE its date, and it is obvious that the impressions and observations they for the most part embody had sprung from an early stage of acquaintance with their general subject-matter. They represent a good many wonderments and judgments and emo- tions, whether felicities or mistakes, the fine fresh- ness of which the author has — to his misfortune, no doubt — sufficiently outlived. But they may perhaps on that very account present something of a curious interest. I may add that I have again attentively looked them over, with a view to any possible amendment of their form or enhancement of their meaning, and that I have nowhere scrupled to rewrite a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn. 1905- H. J; PUBLISHERS' NOTE THE chapters on " London " and " Browning in Westminster Abbey " are included in this volume by the courteous permission of Messrs. Harper & Brothers, publishers of the volume of Mr. James's " Portraits of Places " in which they originally appeared. Acknowledgment is also due to Messrs. Charles Scribner's Sons for permission to reprint the chap- ter on " Winchelsea, Rye, and * Denis Duval,' " which first appeared in " Scribner's Magazine." CONTENTS LONDON I BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY 5 1 CHESTER 6 1 LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 77 NORTH DEVON 93 WELLS AND SALISBURY 107 AN ENGLISH EASTER 121 LONDON AT MIDSUMMER 1 53 viii CONTENTS TWO EXCURSIONS . *7S IX WARXH-ICKSHIRE 197 AFFiFA'S ANP CASTLES .... 225 ENGLISH VTGXETTES 245 AN ENGLISH NEW VEAR . . 269 AX ENGLISH WATERING-PLACE 277 XHINCHELSEA. RVE AXP ' PEXTS PUA'Al 2S7 OLD SUFFOLK . 3*7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A Tower on the Walls, Chester Half-title Magdalen Tower, Oxford {see p. i8rj) . . . Frontispiece The Gate-House, Cambridge Title The Senate House, Oxford v Feterhouse Quad, Cambridge vii The Medway and Rochester Keep ix Richmond, from the Thames r St. Faurs,from Ludgate Hill 6 Entrance to St. fatnes's Fark, Duke of York's Column i6 In the Green Fark 22 St. PauPSffrom the Water 40 X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Terrace, Richmond 42 North Door of the Abbey 51 The Abbey, from Victoria Street 54 Eaton Hall 61 Chester High Street 64 The Rows, Chester 68 Chester Cathedral, West Front 72 Shrewsbury 76 Haddon Hall 77 Lichfield Cathedral 80 The Three Spires of Lichfield 82 Warwick Castle 88 Haddon Hall, from the Road 91 Lyftmouth 93 A Devonshire Lane 94 The Norman Towers of Exeter 98 For lock Church, Exmoor 105 The West Front, Wells 107 The Market-Place, Wells 112 Salisbury Cathedral 116 Stonehenge 118 Glastonbury 120 The Abbey and Victoria Tower, from St. fames'' s Park 121 Dark Mysterious London, Near Queen Anne's Gate, Westminster 126 In St. fames'' s Park 1 30 Baker Street 134 Canterbury , from the Meadows 140 Rochester Castle 144 The Cathedral Close, Canterbury 148 The Nave, Canterbury 150 The Great Tower, Canterbury 152 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi Greenwich Observatory I53 Piccadilly, near Devonshire House 15^ The Ship, Greenwich 162 Kensington Gardens 166 Greenwich Park 1 73 Epsom Heath, Derby Day I75 The Start for the Derby 180 The Finish of the Derby 184 On the Downs, Derby Day 196 Kenilworth 197 Stratford-on-Avon Church 208 C-Jiarlcote Park 214 The Hospital, Warwick 223 Ludlow Castle 225 Liidlow Castle, from the Moat 234 Stokesay Castle 240 Ludlow Tower 243 Portsmouth Harbor, and " The Victory " 245 Shanklin 254 Chichester Cross 260 Abbey Gateway, Bu7y St. Edmunds 264 Trinity Gate, Catnbridge 267 The Workhouse 269 A Factory Town at Night 272 A Factory Town 275 The Parade, Hastings 277 The Front, Brighton 280 A Crescent, Hastings 286 Winchelsea High Street 28 7 Rye, from Winchelsea Gate 290 Rye, from the Winchelsea Road 296 Rye, from the Marshes 300 The Sandgate, Rye 308 xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS A Street in Rye 315 FitsGerald^s House 317 In Old Suffolk 326 A Suffolk Common 330 ENGLISH HOURS LONDON THERE is a certain evening that I count as vir- tually a first impression, — the end of a wet, black Sunday, twenty years ago, about the first of March. There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned to grey, like faded ink, and the occasion I speak of was a fresh beginning. No doubt I had mystic prescience of how fond of the murky modem Babylon I was one day to become; certain it is that as I look back I find every small circumstance of those hours of approach and arrival still as vivid as if the solemnity of an opening era had breathed 2 ENGLISH HOURS upon it. The sense of approach was already almost intolerably strong at Liverpool, where, as I remem- ber, the perception of the English character of every- thing was as acute as a surprise, though it could only be a surprise without a shock. It was expectation exquisitely gratified, superabundantly confirmed. There was a kind of wonder indeed that England should be as English as, for my entertainment, she took the trouble to be ; but the wonder would have been greater, and all the pleasure absent, if the sen- sation had not been violent. It seems to sit there again like a visiting presence, as it sat opposite to me at breakfast at a small table in a window of the old coffee-room of the Adelphi Hotel — the un- extended (as it then was), the unimproved, the unblushingly local Adelphi. Liverpool is not a ro- mantic city, but that smoky Saturday returns to me as a supreme success, measured by its associatioH with the kind of emotion in the hope of which, for the most part, we betake ourselves to far countries. It assumed this character at an early hour — or rather, indeed, twenty-four hours before — with the sight, as one looked across the wintry ocean, of the strange, dark, lonely freshness of the coast of Ire- land. Better still, before we could come up to the city, were the black steamers knocking about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in the thickest, Vv LONDON 3 windiest light. Spring was already in the air, in the town ; there was no rain, but there was still less sun — one wondered what had become, on this side of the world, of the big white splotch in the heavens; and the grey mildness, shading away into black at every pretext, appeared in itself a promise. This was how it hung about me, between the window and the fire, in the cofifee-room of the hotel — late in the morning for breakfast, as we had been long disembarking. The other passengers had dispersed, knowingly catching trains for London (we had only been a handful); I had the place to myself, and I felt as if I had an exclusive property in the im- pression. I prolonged it, I sacrificed to it, and it is perfectly recoverable now, with the very taste of the national muflSn, the creak of the waiter's shoes as he came and went (could anything be so English as his intensely professional back? it revealed a country of tradition), and the rustle of the news- paper I was too excited to read. I continued to sacrifice for the rest of the day; it did n't seem to me a sentient thing, as yet, to enquire into the means of getting away. My curiosity must indeed have languished, for I found myself on the morrow in the slowest of Sunday trains, pottering up to London with an interruptedness which might have been tedious without the conversation of an old gentleman who shared the carriage with me and 4 ENGLISH HOURS to whom my alien as well as comparatively youth- ful character had betrayed itself. He instructed me as to the sights of London and impressed upon me that nothing was more worthy of my attention than the great cathedral of St. Paul. "Have you seen St. Peter's in Rome? St. Peter's is more highly embellished, you know; but you may depend upon it that St. Paul's is the better building of the two." The impression I began with speaking of was, strictly, that of the drive from Euston, after dark, to Morley's Hotel in Trafalgar Square. It was not lovely — it was in fact rather horrible ; but as I move again through dusky, tortuous miles, in the greasy four-wheeler to which my luggage had com- pelled me to commit myself, I recognise the first step in an initiation of which the subsequent stages were to abound in pleasant things. It is a kind of humiliation in a great city not to know where you are going, and Morley's Hotel was then, to my im- agination, only a vague ruddy spot in the general immensity. The immensity was the great fact, and that was a charm; the miles of housetops and via- ducts, the complication of junctions and signals through which the train made its way to the station had already given me the scale. The weather had turned to wet, and we went deeper and deeper into the Sunday night. The sheep in the fields, on the way from Liverpool, had shown in their demeanour LONDON 5 a certain consciousness of the day; but this mo- mentous cab-drive was an introduction to the rigid- ities of custom. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of Hght more brutal still than the dark- ness. The custom of gin — that was equally rigid, and in this first impression the public-houses counted for much. Morley's Hotel proved indeed to be a ruddy spot ; brilliant, in my recollection, is the coffee-room fire, the hospitable mahogany, the sense that in the stupendous city this, at any rate for the hour, was a shelter and a point of view. My remembrance of the rest of the evening — I was probably very tired — is mainly a remembrance of a vast four-poster. My little bedroom-candle, set in its deep basin, caused this monument to project a huge shadow and to make me think, I scarce knew why, of "The Ingoldsby Legends." If at a tolerably early hour the next day I found myself approaching St. Paul's, it was not wholly in obedience to the old gentleman in the railway-carriage : I had an errand in the City, and the City was doubtless prodigious. But what I mainly recall is the romantic consciousness of passing under the Temple Bar, and the way two lines of "Henry Esmond" repeated themselves in my mind as I drew near the masterpiece of Sir 6 ENGLISH HOURS Christopher Wren. "The stout, red-faced woman" whom Esmond had seen tearing after the stag- hounds over the slopes at Windsor was not a bit like the effigy "which turns its stony back upon St. Paul's and faces the coaches struggling up Ludgate Hill." As I looked at Queen Anne over the apron of my hansom — she struck me as very small and dirty, and the vehicle ascended the mild incline without an effort — it was a thrilling thought that the statue had been familiar to the hero of the incom- parable novel. All history appeared to live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind. To this hour, as I pass along the Strand, I take again the walk I took there that afternoon. I love the place to-day, and that was the commencement of my passion. It appeared to me to present pheno- mena, and to contain objects of every kind, of an inexhaustible interest; in particular it struck me as desirable and even indispensable that I should pur- chase most of the articles in most of the shops. My eyes rest with a certain tenderness on the places where I resisted and on those where I succumbed. The fragrance of Mr. Rimmel's establishment is again in my nostrils; I see the slim young lady (I hear her pronunciation) who waited upon me there. Sacred to me to-day is the particular aroma of the hair-wash that I bought of her. I pause before the granite portico of Exeter Hall (it was unexpectedly ST. PAUL'S, FROM LUDGATE HILL LONDON 7 narrow and wedge-like), and it evokes a cloud of associations which are none the less impressive because they are vague; coming from I don't know where — from " Punch," from Thackeray, from vol- umes of the " Illustrated London News " turned over in childhood ; seeming connected with Mrs. Beecher Stowe and "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Memorable is a rush I made into a glover's at Charing Cross — the one you pass, going eastward, just before you turn into the station; that, however, now that I think of it, must have been in the morning, as soon as I issued from the hotel. Keen within me was a sense of the importance of deflowering, of despoiling the shop. A day or two later, in the afternoon, I found my- self staring at my fire, in a lodging of which I had taken possession on foreseeing that I should spend some weeks in London. I had just come in, and, having attended to the distribution of my luggage, sat down to consider my habitation. It was on the ground floor, and the fading dayhght reached it in a sadly damaged condition. It struck me as stuflFy and unsocial, with its mouldy smell and its decora- tion of lithographs and wax-flowers — an imper- sonal black hole in the huge general blackness. The uproar of Piccadilly hummed away at the end of the street, and the rattle of a heartless hansom passed close to my ears. A sudden horror of the whole 8 ENGLISH HOURS place came over me, like a tiger-pounce of home- sickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming; whether or no she was "careful of the type," she was as indifferent as Nature herself to the single life. In the course of an hour I should have to go out to my dinner, which was not supplied on the premises, and that effort assumed the form of a desperate and dangerous quest. It appeared to me that I would rather remain dinnerless, would rather even starve, than sally forth into the infernal town, where the natural fate of an obscure stranger would be to be trampled to death in Piccadilly and have his carcass thrown into the Thames. I did not starve, however, and I eventually attached myself by a hundred human hnks to the dreadful, delight- ful city. That momentary vision of its smeared face and stony heart has remained memorable to me, but I am happy to say that I can easily summon up others. II It is, no doubt, not the taste of every one, but for the real London-lover the mere immensity of the place is a large part of its savour. A small London would be an abomination, as it fortunately is an impossibility, for the idea and the name are beyond everything an expression of extent and number. LONDON 9 Practically, of course, one lives in a quarter, in a plot; but in imagination and by a constant mental act of reference the accommodated haunter enjoys the whole — and it is only of him that I deem it worth while to speak. He fancies himself, as they say, for being a particle in so unequalled an aggre- gation; and its immeasurable circumference, even though unvisited and lost in smoke, gives him the sense of a social, an intellectual margin. There is a luxury in the knowledge that he may come and go without being noticed, even when his comings and goings have no nefarious end. I don't mean by this that the tongue of London is not a very active member; the tongue of London would indeed be worthy of a chapter by itself. But the eyes which at least in some measure feed its activity are fortunately for the common advantage soUcited at any moment by a thousand different objects. If the place is big, everything it contains is certainly not so; but this may at least be said — that if small questions play a part there, they play it without illusions about its importance. There are too many questions, small or great ; and each day, as it arrives, leads its chil- dren, hke a kind of mendicant mother, by the hand. Therefore perhaps the most general characteristic is the absence of insistence. Habits and inclinations flourish and fall, but intensity is never one of them. The spirit of the great city is not analytic, and, as 10 ENGLISH HOURS they come up, subjects rarely receive at its hands a treatment drearily earnest or tastelessly thorough. There are not many — of those of which London disposes with the assurance begotten of its large experience — that would n't lend themselves to a tenderer manipulation elsewhere. It takes a very great affair, a turn of the Irish screw or a divorce case lasting many days, to be fully threshed out. The mind of Mayfair, when it aspires to show what it really can do, lives in the hope of a new divorce case, and an indulgent providence — London is positively in certain ways the spoiled child of the world — abundantly recognises this particular apti- tude and humours the whim. The compensation is that material does arise; that there is a great variety, if not morbid subtlety; and that the whole of the procession of events and topics passes across your stage. For the moment I am speaking of the inspiration there may be in the sense of far frontiers; the London-lover loses himself in this swelling consciousness, delights in the idea that the town which encloses him is after all only a paved country, a state by itself. This is his condition of mind quite as much if he be an adoptive as if he be a matter-of-course son. I am by no means sure even that he need be of Anglo-Saxon race and have inherited the birthright of EngHsh speech; though, on the other hand, I make no doubt that LONDON ir these advantages minister greatly to closeness of allegiance. The great city spreads her dusky mantle over innumerable races and creeds, and I believe there is scarcely a known form of worship that has not some temple there (have I not attended at the Church of Humanity, in Lamb's Conduit, in com- pany with an American lady, a vague old gentle- man, and several seamstresses ?) or any communion of men that has not some club or guild. London is indeed an epitome of the round world, and just as it is a commonplace to say that there is nothing one can't "get" there, so it is equally true that there is nothing one may not study at first hand. One doesn't test these truths every day, but they form part of the air one breathes (and wel- come, says the London-hater, — for there be such perverse reasoners, — to the pestilent compound). They colour the thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the world ; they mingle with the troubled light to which the straight, ungarnished aperture in one's dull, undistinctive house- front affords a passage and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the day and season of the year, the emanations of industries and the 12 ENGLISH HOURS reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset — as you never see any source of radiance, you can't in the least tell — all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremoveable canopy. They form the undertone of the deep, perpetual voice of the place. One remembers them when one's loyalty is on the defensive; when it is a question of introducing as many striking features as possible into the list of fine reasons one has sometimes to draw up, that eloquent catalogue with which one confronts the hostile indictment — the array of other reasons which may easily be as long as one's arm. Accord- ing to these other reasons it plausibly and conclu- sively stands that, as a place to be happy in, London will never do. I don't say it is necessary to meet so absurd an allegation except for one's personal com- placency. If indifference, in so gorged an organism, is still livelier than curiosity, you may avail your- self of your own share in it simply to feel that since such and such a person does n't care for real rich- ness, so much the worse for such and such a person. But once in a while the best believer recognises the impulse to set his religion in order, to sweep the tem- ple of his thoughts and trim the sacred lamp. It is at such hours as this that he reflects with elation that the British capital is the particular spot in the world which communicates the greatest sense of life. LONDON 13 m The reader will perceive that I do not shrink even from the extreme concession of speaking of our capital as British, and this in a shameless connection with the question of loyalty on the part of an adopt- ive son. For I hasten to explain that if half the source of one's interest in it comes from feeling that it is the property and even the home of the human race, — Hawthorne, that best of Americans, says so somewhere, and places it in this sense side by side with Rome, — one's appreciation of it is really a large sympathy, a comprehensive love of human- ity. For the sake of such a charity as this one may stretch one's allegiance; and the most alien of the cockneyfied, though he may bristle with every pro- test at the intimation that England has set its stamp upon him, is free to admit with conscious pride that he has submitted to Londonisation. It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capi- tal of the human race happens to be British. Surely every other people would have it theirs if they could. Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an interesting field of enquiry ; but as they have not yet let it slip, the writer of these lines professes without scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste. For, after all, if the sense of life is greatest there, it is a sense of the life of people of 14 ENGLISH HOURS our consecrated English speech. It is the head- quarters of that strangely elastic tongue; and I make this remark with a full sense of the terrible way in which the idiom is misused by the populace in general, than whom it has been given to few races to impart to conversation less of the charm of tone. For a man of letters who endeavours to culti- vate, however modestly, the medium of Shakespeare and Milton, of Hawthorne and Emerson, who cherishes the notion of what it has achieved and what it may even yet achieve, London must ever have a great illustrative and suggestive value, and indeed a kind of sanctity. It is the single place in which most readers, most possible lovers, are gath- ered together; it is the most inclusive public and the largest social incarnation of the language, of the tradition. Such a personage may well let it go for this, and leave the German and the Greek to speak for themselves, to express the grounds of their pre- dilection, presumably very diflferent. When a social product is so vast and various, it may be approached on a thousand different sides, and liked and disliked for a thousand different reasons. The reasons of Piccadilly are not those of Camden Town, nor are the curiosities and dis- couragements of Kilbum the same as those of Westminster and Lambeth. The reasons of Pic- cadilly — I mean the friendly ones — are those of LONDON 15 which, as a general thing, the rooted visitor remains most conscious; but it must be confessed that even these, for the most part, do not he upon the surface. The absence of style, or rather of the intention of style, is certainly the most general characteristic of the face of London. To cross to Paris under this impression is to find one's self surrounded with far other standards. There everything reminds you that the idea of beautiful and stately arrangement has never been out of fashion, that the art of com- position has always been at work or at play. Avenues and squares, gardens and quays, have been distrib- uted for effect, and to-day the splendid city reaps the accumulation of all this ingenuity. The result is not in every quarter interesting, and there is a tiresome monotony of the "fine" and the symmetrical, above all, of the deathly passion for making things "to match." On the other hand the whole air of the place is architectural. On the banks of the Thames it is a tremendous chapter of accidents — the Lon- don-lover has to confess to the existence of miles upon miles of the dreariest, stodgiest commonness. Thousands of acres are covered by low black houses of the cheapest construction, without orna- ment, without grace, without character or even identity. In fact there are many, even in the best quarters, in all the region of Mayfair and Belgra- via, of so paltry and inconvenient, especially of so i6 ENGLISH HOURS diminutive a type (those that are let in lodgings — such poor lodgings as they make — may serve as an example), that you wonder what pecuharly limited domestic need they were constructed to meet. The great misfortune of London to the eye (it is true that this remark appHes much less to the City), is the want of elevation. There is no architectural impression without a certain degree of height, and the London street-vista has none of that sort of pride. All the same, if there be not the intention, there is at least the accident, of style, which, if one looks at it in a friendly way, appears to proceed from three sources. One of these is simply the general greatness, and the manner in which that makes a difference for the better in any particular spot ; so that, though you may often perceive yourself to be in a shabby corner, it never occurs to you that this is the end of it. Another is the atmosphere, with its magnificent mystifications, which flatters and super- fuses, makes everything brown, rich, dim, vague, magnifies distances and minimises details, con- firms the inference of vastness by suggesting that, as the great city makes everything, it makes its own system of weather and its own optical laws. The last is the congregation of the parks, which con- stitute an ornament not elsewhere to be matched, and give the place a superiority that none of its ENTRANXF. TO S r. JAMKS'S I'ARK Duke of York's column LONDON 17 uglinesses overcome. They spread themselves with such a luxury of space in the centre of the town that they form a part of the impression of any walk, of almost any view, and, with an audacity altogether their own, make a pastoral landscape under the smoky sky. There is no mood of the rich London climate that is not becoming to them — I have seen them look delightfully romantic, hke parks in novels, in the wettest winter — and there is scarcely a mood of the appreciative resident to which they have not something to say. The high things of London, which here and there peep over them, only make the spaces vaster by reminding you that you are, after all, not in Kent or Yorkshire; and these things, whatever they be — rows of "eligible" dwellings, towers of churches, domes of institutions — take such an effective grey-blue tint that a clever water-colourist would seem to have put them in for pictorial reasons. The view from the bridge over the Serpentine has an extraordinary nobleness, and it has often seemed to me that the Londoner, twitted with his low standard, may point to it with every confidence. In all the town-scenery of Europe there can be few things so fine; the only reproach it is open to is that it begs the question by seeming — in spite of its being the pride of five miUions of people — not to belong to a town at all. The towers of Notre Dame^ i8 ENGLISH HOURS as they rise in Paris from the island that divides the Seine, present themselves no more impressively than those of Westminster as you see them looking doubly far beyond the shining stretch of Hyde Park water. Equally delectable is the large river-like manner in which the Serpentine opens away be- tween its wooded shores. Just after you have crossed the bridge (whose very banisters, old and orna- mental, of yellowish-brown stone, I am particularly fond of), you enjoy on your left, through the gate of Kensington Gardens as you go towards Bayswater, an altogether enchanting vista — a foot-path over the grass, which loses itself beneath the scattered oaks and elms exactly as if the place were a " chase." There could be nothing less like London in general than this particular morsel, and yet it takes London, of all cities, to give you such an impression of the country. It takes London to put you in the way of a purely rustic walk from Netting Hill to Whitehall. You may traverse this immense distance — a most com- prehensive diagonal — altogether on soft, fine turf, amid the song of birds, the bleat of lambs, the ripple of ponds, the rustle of admirable trees. Frequently have I wished that, for the sake of such a daily luxury and of exercise made romantic, I were a LONDON 19 Government clerk living, in snug domestic con- ditions, in a Pembridge villa, — let me suppose, — and having my matutinal desk in Westminster. I should turn into Kensington Gardens at their northwest limit, and I should have my choice of a hundred pleasant paths to the gates of Hyde Park. In Hyde Park I should follow the water-side, or the Row, or any other fancy of the occasion ; liking best, perhaps, after all, the Row in its morning mood, with the mist hanging over the dark-red course, and the scattered early riders taking an identity as the soundless gallop brings them nearer. I am free to admit that in the Season, at the con- ventional hours, the Row becomes a weariness (save perhaps just for a glimpse once a year, to remind one's self how much it is like Du Maurier) ; the preoccupied citizen eschews it and leaves it for the most part to the gaping barbarian. I speak of it now from the point of view of the pedestrian ; but for the rider as well it is at its best when he passes either too early or too late. Then, if he be not bent on comparing it to its disadvantage with the bluer and boskier alleys of the Bois de Boulogne, it will not be spoiled by the fact that, with its surface that looks like tan, its barriers like those of the ring on which the clown stands to hold up the hoop to the young lady, its empty benches and chairs, its occa- sional orange-peel, its mounted policemen patrolling 20 ENGLISH HOURS at intervals like expectant supernumeraries, it offers points of real contact with a circus whose lamps are out. The sky that bends over it is fre- quently not a bad imitation of the dingy tent of such an establishment. The ghosts of past caval- cades seem to haunt the foggy arena, and some- how they are better company than the mashers and elongated beauties of current seasons. It is not without interest to remember that most of the salient figures of English society during the present century — and English society means, or rather has hitherto meant, in a large degree, English his- tory — have bobbed in the saddle between Apsley House and Queen's Gate. You may call the roll if you care to, and the air will be thick with dumb voices and dead names, like that of some Roman amphitheatre. It is doubtless a signal proof of being a London- lover quand meme that one should undertake an apology for so bungled an attempt at a great pubhc place as Hyde Park Corner. It is certain that the improvements and embellishments recently enacted there have only served to call further attention to the poverty of the elements and to the fact that this poverty is terribly illustrative of general conditions. The place is the beating heart of the great West End, yet its main features are a shabby, stuccoed hospital, the low park-gates, in their neat but unim- LONDON 21 posing frame, the drawing-room windows of Apsley House and of the commonplace frontages on the little terrace beside it; to which must be added, of course, the only item in the whole prospect that is in the least monumental — the arch spanning the private road beside the gardens of Buckingham Palace. This structure is now bereaved of the rue- ful effigy which used to surmount it — the Iron Duke in the guise of a tin soldier — and has not been enriched by the transaction as much as might have been expected.' There is a fine view of Pic- cadilly and Knightsbridge, and of the noble man- sions, as the house-agents call them, of Grosvenor Place, together with a sense of generous space be- yond the vulgar Httle railing of the Green Park; but, except for the impression that there would be room for something better, there is nothing in all this that speaks to the imagination: almost as much as the grimy desert of Trafalgar Square the prospect conveys the idea of an opportunity wasted. None the less has it on a fine day in spring an expressiveness of which I shall not pretend to explain the source further than by saying that the flood of hfe and luxury is immeasurably great there. The edifices are mean, but the social stream itself I The monument in the middle of the square, ^^^th Sir Edgar Boehm's four fine soldiers, had not been set up when these words were written. 22 ENGLISH HOURS is monumental, and to an observer not purely stolid there is more excitement and suggestion than I can give a reason for in the long, distributed waves of traffic, with the steady policemen marking their rhythm, which roll together and apart for so many hours. Then the great, dim city becomes bright and kind, the pall of smoke turns into a veil of haze carelessly worn, the air is coloured and almost scented by the presence of the biggest society in the world, and most of the things that meet the eye — or per- haps I should say more of them, for the most in Lon- don is, no doubt, ever the realm of the dingy — present themselves as "well appointed." Every- thing shines more or less, from the window-panes to the dog-collars. So it all looks, with its myriad variations and quaHfications, to one who surveys it over the apron of a hansom, while that vehicle of vantage, better than any box at the opera, spurts and slackens with the current. It is not in a hansom, however, that we have figured our punctual young man, whom we must not desert as he fares to the southeast, and who has only to cross Hyde Park Comer to find his way all grassy again. I have a weakness for the convenient, famihar, treeless, or almost treeless, expanse of the Green Park and the friendly part it plays as a kind of encouragement to Piccadilly. I am so fond of Piccadilly that I am grateful to any one or anything IN 1 UK (,Kt.l N i Ai LONDON 23 that does it a service, and nothing is more worthy of appreciation than the southward look it is per- mitted to enjoy just after it passes Devonshire House — a sweep of horizon which it would be difficult to match among other haunts of men, and thanks to which, of a summer's day, you may spy, beyond the browsed pastures of the foreground and middle distance, beyond the cold chimneys of Buckingham Palace and the towers of Westminster and the swarming river-side and all the southern parishes, the hard modem twinkle of the roof of the Crystal Palace. If the Green Park is familiar, there is still less of the exclusive in its pendant, as one may call it, — for it literally hangs from the other, down the hill, — the remnant of the former garden of the queer, shabby old palace whose black, inelegant face stares up St. James's Street. This popular resort has a great deal of character, but I am free to confess that much of its character comes from its nearness to the Westminster slums. It is a park of intimacy, and perhaps the most democratic corner of London, in spite of its being in the royal and mihtary quarter and close to all kinds of stateliness. There are few hours of the day when a thousand smutty children are not sprawling over it, and the unemployed lie thick on the grass and cover the benches with a brotherhood of greasy corduroys. If 24 ENGLISH HOURS the London parks are the drawing-rooms and clubs of the poor, — that is of those poor (I admit it cuts down the number) who live near enough to them to reach them, — these particular grass-plots and alleys may be said to constitute the very salon of the slums. I know not why, being such a region of greatness, — great towers, great names, great memories ; at the foot of the Abbey, the Parliament, the fine frag- ment of Whitehall, with the quarters of the sover- eign right and left, — but the edge of Westminster evokes as many associations of misery as of empire. The neighbourhood has been much purified of late, but it still contains a collection of specimens — though it is far from unique in this — of the low, black element. The air always seems to me heavy and thick, and here more than elsewhere one hears old England — the panting, smoke-stained Titan of Matthew Arnold's fine poem — draw her deep breath with effort. In fact one is nearer to her heroic lungs, if those organs are figured by the great pin- nacled and fretted talking-house on the edge of the river. But this same dense and conscious air plays such everlasting tricks to the eye that the Foreign Office, as you see it from the bridge, often looks romantic, and the sheet of water it overhangs poetic — suggests an Indian palace bathing its feet in the Ganges. If our pedestrian achieves such a compari- son as this he has nothing left but to go on to his LONDON 25 work — which he will find close at hand. He will have come the whole way from the far northwest on the green — which is what was to be demonstrated. I feel as if I were taking a tone almost of boast- fulness, and no doubt the best way to consider the matter is simply to say — without going into the treachery of reasons — that, for one's self, one likes this part or the other. Yet this course would not be unattended with danger, inasmuch as at the end of a few such professions we might find ourselves committed to a tolerance of much that is deplorable. London is so clumsy and so brutal, and has gathered together so many of the darkest sides of life, that it is almost ridiculous to talk of her as a lover talks of his mistress, and almost frivolous to appear to ignore her disfigurements and cruelties. She is hke a mighty ogress who devours human flesh; but to me it is a mitigating circumstance — though it may not seem so to every one — that the ogress herself is human. It is not in wantonness that she fills her maw, but to keep herself alive and do her tremen- dous work. She has no time for fine discriminations, but after all she is as good-natured as she is huge, and the more you stand up to her, as the phrase is, the better she takes the joke of it. It is mainly when 26 ENGLISH HOURS you fall on your face before her that she gobbles you up. She heeds little what she takes, so long as she has her stint, and the smallest push to the right or the left will divert her wavering bulk from one form of prey to another. It is not to be denied that the heart tends to grow hard in her company; but she is a capital antidote to the morbid, and to Hve with her successfully is an education of the temper, a consecration of one's private philosophy. She gives one a surface for which in a rough world one can never be too thankful. She may take away reputations, but she forms character. She teaches her victims not to "mind," and the great danger for them is perhaps that they shall learn the lesson too well. It is sometimes a wonder to ascertain what they do mind, the best seasoned of her children. Many of them assist, without winking, at the most un- fathomable dramas, and the common speech of others denotes a familiarity with the horrible. It is her theory that she both produces and appreciates the exquisite; but if you catch her in flagrant repu- diation of both responsibilities and confront her with the shortcoming, she gives you a look, with a shrug of her colossal shoulders, which establishes a private relation with you for evermore. She seems to say: " Do you really take me so seriously as that, you dear, devoted, voluntary dupe, and don't you LONDON 27 know what an immeasurable humbug I am?" You reply that you shall know it henceforth; but your tone is good-natured, with a touch of the cynicism that she herself has taught you; for you are aware that if she makes herself out better than she is, she also makes herself out much worse. She is im- mensely democratic, and that, no doubt, is part of the manner in which she is salutary to the individ- ual; she teaches him his "place" by an incompar- able discipline, but deprives him of complaint by letting him see that she has exactly the same lash for every other back. When he has swallowed the lesson he may enjoy the rude but unfailing justice by which, under her eye, reputations and positions elsewhere esteemed great are reduced to the rela- tive. There are so many reputations, so many posi- tions, that supereminence breaks down, and it is difficult to be so rare that London can't match you. It is a part of her good-nature and one of her clumsy coquetries to pretend sometimes that she has n't your equivalent, as when she takes it into he^ head to hunt the lion or form a ring round a celebrity. But this artifice is so very transparent that the lion must be very candid or the celebrity very obscure to be taken by it. The business is altogether subjective, as the philosophers say, and the great city is primarily looking after herself. Celebrities are convenient — they are one of the things that 28 ENGLISH HOURS people are asked to "meet" — and lion-cutlets, put upon ice, will nourish a family through periods of dearth. This is what I mean by calling London demo- cratic. You may be in it, of course, without being of it ; but from the moment you are of it — and on this point your own sense will soon enough enlighten you — you belong to a body in which a general equality prevails. However exalted, however able, however rich, however renowned you may be, there are too many people at least as much so for your own idiosyncracies to count. I think it is only by being beautiful that you may really prevail very much; for the loveliness of woman it has long been notice- able that London will go most out of her way. It is when she hunts that particular lion that she becomes most dangerous ; then there are really mo- ments when you would believe, for all the world, that she is thinking of what she can give, not of what she can get. Lovely ladies, before this, have paid for believing it, and will continue to pay in days to come. On the whole the people who are least deceived are perhaps those who have permitted themselves to believe, in their own interest, that poverty is not a disgrace. It is certainly not con- sidered so in London, and indeed you can scarcely say where — in virtue of dijffusion — it would more naturally be exempt. The possession of money is, LONDON 29 of course, immensely an advantage, but that is a very different thing from a disqualification in the lack of it. Good-natured in so many things in spite of her cynical tongue, and easy-going in spite of her tre- mendous pace, there is nothing in which the large indulgence of the town is more shown than in the hberal way she looks at obligations of hospitality and the margin she allows in these and cognate matters. She wants above all to be amused; she keeps her books loosely, does n't stand on small questions of a chop for a chop, and if there be any chance of people's proving a diversion, does n't know or remember or care whether they have " called." She forgets even if she herself have called. In matters of ceremony she takes and gives a long rope, wasting no time in phrases and circumvalla- tions. It is no doubt incontestable that one result of her inability to stand upon trifles and consider details is that she has been obliged in some ways to lower rather portentously the standard of her man- ners. She cultivates the abrupt — for even when she asks you to dine a month ahead the invitation goes off like the crack of a pistol — and approaches her ends not exactly par quatre chemins. She does n't pretend to attach importance to the lesson conveyed in Matthew Arnold's poem of "The Sick King in Bokhara," that, " Though we snatch what we desire, We may not snatch it eagerly." 30 ENGLISH HOURS London snatches it more than eagerly if that be the only way she can get it. Good manners are a suc- cession of details, and I don't mean to say that she does n't attend to them when she has time. She has it, however, but seldom — que voulez-vous ? Perhaps the matter of note-writing is as good an example as another of what certain of the elder traditions inevitably have become in her hands. She Hves by notes — they are her very heart-beats; but those that bear her signatures are as disjointed as the ravings of deHrium, and have nothing but a postage-stamp in common with the epistolary art. VI If she does n't go into particulars it may seem a very presumptuous act to have attempted to do so on her behalf, and the reader will doubtless think I have been punished by having egregiously failed in my enumeration. Indeed nothing could well be more difificult than to add up the items — the col- umn would be altogether too long. One may have dreamed of turning the glow — if glow it be — of one's lantern on each successive facet of the jewel; but, after all, it may be success enough if a confu- sion of brightness be the result. One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the LONDON 31 whole. It is immeasurable — its embracing arms never meet. Rather it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is it most important to speak ? Inevitably there must be a choice, and I know of none more scientific than simply to leave out what we may have to apologise for. The uglinesses, the "rookeries," the brutalities, the night-aspect of many of the streets, the gin-shops and the hour when they are cleared out before closing — there are many elements of this kind which have to be counted out before a genial summary can be made. And yet I should not go so far as to say that it is a condition of such geniality to close one's eyes upon the immense misery; on the contrar}% I think it is partly because we are irremediably conscious of that dark gulf that the most general appeal of the great city remains exactly what it is, the largest chapter of human accidents. I have no idea of what the future evolution of the strangely mingled mon- ster may be; whether the poor will improve away the rich, or the rich will expropriate the poor, or they will all continue to dwell together on their present imperfect terms of intercourse. Certain it is, at any rate, that the impression of suffering is a part of the general vibration; it is one of the things that mingle with all the others to make the sound that is supremely dear to the consistent London-lover — the rumble of the tremendous human mill. This is 32 ENGLISH HOURS the note which, in all its modulations, haunts and fascinates and inspires him. And whether or no he may succeed in keeping the misery out of the picture, he will freely confess that the latter is not spoiled for him by some of its duskiest shades. We are far from liking London well enough till we hke its defects: the dense darkness of much of its win- ter, the soot on the chimney-pots and everywhere else, the early lamplight, the brown blur of the houses, the splashing of hansoms in Oxford Street or the Strand on December afternoons. There is still something that recalls to me the enchantment of children — the anticipation of Christmas, the delight of a holiday walk — in the way the shop-fronts shine into the fog. It makes each of them seem a little world of light and warmth, and I can still waste time in looking at them with dirty Bloomsbury on one side and dirtier Soho on the other. There are winter efifects, not intrinsically sweet, it would appear, which somehow, in absence, touch the chords of memory and even the fount of tears; as for instance the front of the British Museum on a black afternoon, or the portico, when the weather is vile, of one of the big square clubs in Pall Mall. I can give no adequate account of the subtle poetry of such reminiscences; it depends upon associations of which we have often lost the thread. The wide colonnade of the Museum, its LONDON 33 symmetrical wings, the high iron fence in its granite setting, the sense of the misty halls within, where all the treasures he — these things loom patiently through atmospheric layers which instead of mak- ing them dreary impart to them something of a cheer of red lights in a storm. I think the romance of a winter afternoon in London arises partly from the fact that, when it is not altogether smothered, the general lamphght takes this hue of hospitahty. Such is the colour of the interior glow of the clubs in Pall Mall, which I positively hke best when the fog loiters upon their monumental staircases. In saying just now that these retreats may easily be, for the exile, part of the phantasmagoria of homesickness, I by no means alluded simply to their solemn outsides. If they are still more solemn within, that does not make them any less dear, in retrospect at least, to a visitor much bent upon Uking his London to the end. What is the solemnity but a tribute to your nerves, and the stillness but a refined proof of the intensity of Ufe ? To produce such results as these the balance of many tastes must be struck, and that is only possible in a very high civilisation. If I seem to intimate that this last abstract term must be the cheer of him who has lonely possession of a foggy library, without even the excitement of watching for some one to put down the magazine he wants, I am wilUng to let the 34 ENGLISH HOURS supposition pass, for the appreciation of a London club at one of the empty seasons is nothing but the strong expression of a preference for the great city — by no means so unsociable as it may superficially appear — at periods of relative abandonment. The London year is studded with hoHdays, blessed little islands of comparative leisure — intervals of ab- sence for good society. Then the wonderful English faculty for "going out of town for a httle change" comes into illimitable play, and famihes transport their nurseries and their bath-tubs to those rural scenes which form the real substratum of the na- tional life. Such moments as these are the paradise of the genuine London-lover, for he then finds him- self face to face with the object of his passion; he can give himself up to an intercourse which at other times is obstructed by his rivals. Then every one he knows is out of town, and the exhilarating sense ' of the presence of every one he does n't know be- comes by so much the deeper. This is why I pronounce his satisfaction not an unsociable, but a positively afifectionate emotion. It is the mood in which he most measures the im- mense humanity of the place and in which its limits recede farthest into a dimness peopled with possible illustrations. For his acquaintance, however num- erous it may be, is finite; whereas the other, the unvisited London, is infinite. It is one of his pleas- LONDON 35 ures to think of the experiments and excursions he may make in it, even when these adventures don't particularly come off. The friendly fog seems to protect and enrich them — to add both to the mys- tery and security, so that it is most in the winter months that the imagination weaves such delights. They reach their climax perhaps during the strictly social desolation of Christmas week, when the country-houses are crowded at the expense of the capital. Then it is that I am most haunted with the London of Dickens, feel most as if it were still recoverable, still exhahng its queerness in patches perceptible to the appreciative. Then the big fires blaze in the lone twihght of the clubs, and the new books on the tables say, "Now at last you have time to read me," and the afternoon tea and toast, and the torpid old gentleman who wakes up from a doze to order potash-water, appear to make the assurance good. It is not a small matter either, to a man of letters, that this is the best time for writing, and that during the lamplit days the white page he tries to blacken becomes, on his table, in the circle of the lamp, with the screen of the climate folding him in, more vivid and absorbent. Those to whom it is forbidden to sit up to work in the small hours may, between November and March, enjoy a semblance of this luxury in the morning. The weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight and muffles the pos- 36 ENGLISH HOURS sible interruptions. It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image. VII Of course it is too much to say that all the satis- faction of life in London comes from literally living there, for it is not a paradox that a great deal of it con- sists in getting away. It is almost easier to leave it than not to, and much of its richness and interest proceeds from its ramifications, the fact that all England is in a suburban relation to it. Such an affair it is in comparison to get away from Paris or to get into it. London melts by wide, ugly zones into the green country, and becomes pretty insidi- ously, inadvertently — without stopping to change. It is the spoiHng perhaps of the country, but it is the making of the insatiable town, and if one is a helpless and shameless cockney that is all one is obhged to look at. Anything is excusable which enlarges one's civic consciousness. It ministers immensely to that of the London-lover that, thanks to the tremendous system of coming and going, to the active, hospitable habits of the people, to the elaboration of the railway-service, the frequency and rapidity of trains, and last, though not least, to the fact that much of the loveliest scenery in England lies within a radius of fifty miles — thanks LONDON 37 to all this he has the rural picturesque at his door and may cultivate unhmited vagueness as to the line of division between centre and circumference. It is perfectly open to him to consider the remainder of the United Kingdom, or the British empire in general, or even, if he be an American, the total of the English-speaking territories of the globe, as the mere margin, the fitted girdle. Is it for this reason — because I like to think how great we all are together in the hght of heaven and the face of the rest of the world, with the bond of our glorious tongue, in which we labour to'* write articles and books for each other's candid perusal, how great we all are and how great is the great city which we may unite fraternally to regard as the capital of our race — is it for this that I have a singular kindness for the London railway- stations, that I like them aesthetically, that they interest and fascinate me, and that I view them with compla- cency even when I wish neither to depart nor to arrive? They remind me of all our reciprocities and activities, our energies and curiosities, and our being all distinguished together from other people by our great common stamp of perpetual motion, our passion for seas and deserts and the other side of the globe, the secret of the impression of strength — I don't say of social roundness and finish — that we produce in any collection of Anglo-Saxon types. 38 ENGLISH HOURS If in the beloved foggy season I delight in the spec- tacle of Paddington, Euston, or Waterloo, — I con- fess I prefer the grave northern stations, — I am prepared to defend myself against the charge of puerihty; for what I seek and what I find in these vulgar scenes is at bottom simply so much evidence of our larger way of looking at hfe. The exhibition of variety of type is in general one of the bribes by which London induces you to condone her abomina- tions, and the railway-platform is a kind of com- pendium of that variety. I think that nowhere so much as in London do people wear — to the eye of observation — definite signs of the sort of people they may be. If you hke above all things to know the sort, you hail this fact with joy; you recognise that if the English are immensely distinct from other people, they are also socially — and that brings with it, in England, a train of moral and intellectual consequences — extremely distinct from each other. You may see them all together, with the rich colour- ing of their differences, in the fine flare of one of Mr. W. H. Smith's bookstalls — a feature not to be omitted in any enumeration of the charms of Paddington and Euston. It is a focus of warmth and hght in the vast smoky cavern ; it gives the idea that literature is a thing of splendour, of a dazzling essence, of infinite gas-lit red and gold. A glamour hangs over the glittering booth, and a tantalising LONDON 39 air of clever new things. How brilliant must the books all be, how veracious and courteous the fresh, pure journals! Of a Saturday afternoon, as you wait in your corner of the compartment for the starting of the train, the window makes a frame for the glowing picture. I say of a Saturday afternoon, because that is the most characteristic time — it speaks most of the constant circulation and in par- ticular of the quick jump, by express, just before dinner, for the Sunday, into the hall of the country- house and the forms of closer friendliness, the pro- longed talks, the famiUarising walks which London excludes. There is the emptiness of summer as well, when you may have the town to yourself, and I would discourse of it — counting the summer from the first of August — were it not that I fear to seem ungracious in insisting so much on the negative phases. In truth they become positive in another manner, and I have an endearing recollection of certain happy accidents attached to the only period when London life may be said to admit of accident. It is the most luxurious existence in the world, but of that especial luxury — the unexpected, the ex- temporized — it has in general too little. In a very tight crowd you can't scratch your leg, and in London the social pressure is so great that it is dif- ficult to deflect from the perpendicular or to move 40 ENGLISH HOURS otherwise than with the mass. There is too httle of the loose change of time ; every half-hour has its preappointed use, written down month by month in a httle book. As I intimated, however, the pages of this volume exhibit from August to November an attractive blankness; they represent the season during which you may taste of that highest kind of inspiration, the inspiration of the moment. This is doubtless what a gentleman had in mind who once said to me, in regard to the vast resources of London and its having something for every taste, "Oh, yes; when you are bored or want a httle change you can take the boat down to Blackwall." I have never had occasion yet to resort to this par- ticular remedy. Perhaps it's a proof that I have never been bored. Why Blackwall ? I indeed asked myself at the time; nor have I yet ascertained what distractions the mysterious name represents. My interlocutor probably used it generically, as a free, comprehensive allusion to the charms of the river at large. Here the London-lover goes with him all the way, and indeed the Thames is altogether such a wonderful affair that he feels he has distributed his picture very clumsily not to have put it in the very forefront. Take it up or take it down, it is equally an adjunct of London life, an expression of London manners. From Westminster to the sea its uses are com- ST. PAUL'S, FROM THE WATER LONDON 41 mercial, but none the less pictorial for that; while in the other direction — taking it properly a httle further up — they are personal, social, athletic, idyllic. In its recreative character it is absolutely unique. I know of no other classic stream that is so splashed about for the mere fun of it. There is something almost droll and at the same time almost touching in the way that on the smallest pretext of holiday or fine weather the mighty population takes to the boats. They bump each other in the narrow, charming channel ; between Oxford and Richmond they make an uninterrupted procession. Nothing is more suggestive of the personal energy of the peo- ple and their eagerness to take, in the way of exer- cise and adventure, whatever they can get. I hasten to add that what they get on the Thames is exqui- site, in spite of the smallness of the scale and the contrast between the numbers and the space. In a word, if the river is the busiest suburb of London, it is also by far the prettiest. That term applies to it less of course from the bridges down, but it is only because in this part of its career it deserves a larger praise. To be consistent, I like it best when it is all dyed and disfigured with the town, and you look from bridge to bridge — they seem wonder- fully big and dim — over the brown, greasy current, the barges and the penny-steamers, the black, sor- did, heterogeneous shores. This prospect, of which 42 ENGLISH HOURS so many of the elements are ignoble, etches itself to the eye of the lover of " bits " with a power that is worthy perhaps of a better cause. The way that with her magnificent opportunity London has neglected to achieve a river-front is of course the best possible proof that she has rarely, in the past, been in the architectural mood which at present shows somewhat inexpensive signs of setthng upon her. Here and there a fine fragment apologises for the failure which it does n't remedy. Somerset House stands up higher perhaps than anything else on its granite pedestal, and the palace of Westminster recHnes — it can hardly be said to stand — on the big parliamentary bench of its ter- race. The Embankment, which is admirable if not particularly interesting, does what it can, and the mannered houses of Chelsea stare across at Batter- sea Park like eighteenth-century ladies surveying a horrid wilderness. On the other hand, the Char- ing Cross railway-station, placed where it is, is a national crime; Milbank prison is a worse act of violence than any it was erected to punish, and the water-side generally a shameless renunciation of effect. We acknowledge, however, that its very cynicism is expressive; so that if one were to choose again — short of there being a London Louvre — between the usual English irresponsibility in such matters and some particular flight of conscience, one 1 UK Tt-RRACK, KICHMO.NU LONDON 43 would perhaps do as well to let the case stand. We know what it is, the stretch from Chelsea to Wap- ping, but we know not what it might be. It does n't prevent my being always more or less thrilled, of a summer afternoon, by the journey on a penny- steamer to Greenwich. vm But why do I talk of Greenwich and remind my- self of one of the unexecuted vignettes with which it had been my plan that these desultory and, I fear, somewhat incoherent remarks should be studded? They will present to the reader no vignettes but those which the artist who has kindly consented to associate himself with my vagaries may be so good as to bestow upon them. Why should I speak of Hampstead, as the question of summer afternoons just threatened to lead me to do after I should have exhausted the subject of Greenwich, which I may not even touch ? Why should I be so arbitrary when I have cheated myself out of the space privately in- tended for a series of vivid and ingenious sketches of the particular physiognomy of the respective quarters of the town ? I had dreamed of doing them all, with their idiosyncrasies and the signs by which you shall know them. It is my pleasure to have learned these signs — a deeply interesting branch 44 ENGLISH HOURS of observation — but I must renounce the display of my lore. I have not the conscience to talk about Hamp- stead, and what a pleasant thing it is to ascend the long hill which overhangs, as it were, St. John's Wood and begins at the Swiss Cottage — you must mount from there, it must be confessed, as you can — and pick up a friend at a house of friendship on the top, and stroll with him on the rusty Heath, and skirt the garden walls of the old square Georg- ian houses which survive from the time when, near as it is to-day to London, the place was a kind of provincial centre, with Joanna Baillie for its muse, and take the way by the Three Spaniards — I would never miss that — and look down at the smoky city or across at the Scotch firs and the red sunset. It would never do to make a tangent in that direction when I have left Kensington unsung and Blooms- bury unattempted, and have said never a word about the mighty eastward region — the queer corners, the dark secrets, the rich survivals and mementoes of the City. I particularly regret having sacrificed Kensington, the once-delightful, the Thackerayan, with its literary vestiges, its quiet, pompous red palace, its square of Queen Anne, its house of Lady Castlewood, its Greyhound tavern, where Henry Esmond lodged. But I can reconcile myself to this when I reflect LONDON 45 that I have also sacrificed the Season, which doubt- less, from an elegant point of view, ought to have been the central niorceau in the panorama. I have noted that the London-lover loves everything in the place, but I have not cut myself off from saying that his sympathy has degrees, or from remarking that the sentiment of the author of these pages has never gone all the way with the dense movement of the British carnival. That is really the word for the period from Easter to midsummer; it is a fine, decorous, expensive, Protestant carnival, in which the masks are not of velvet or silk, but of wonderful deceptive flesh and blood, the material of the most beautiful complexions in the world. Holding that the great interest of London is the sense the place gives us of multitudinous life, it is doubtless an inconsequence not to care most for the phase of greatest intensity. But there is life and life, and the rush and crush of these weeks of fashion is after all but a tolerably mechanical expression of human forces. Nobody would deny that it is a more univer- sal, brilliant, spectacular one than can be seen any- where else; and it is not a defect that these forces often take the form of women extremely beautiful. I risk the declaration that the London season brings together year by year an unequalled collection of handsome persons. I say nothing of the ugly ones; beauty has at the best been allotted to a small minor- 46 ENGLISH HOURS ity, and it is never, at the most, anywhere, but a question of the number by which that minority is least insignificant. There are moments when one can abnost forgive the foUies of June for the sake of the smile which the sceptical old city puts on for the time and which, as I noted in an earlier passage of this disquisition, fairly breaks into laughter where she is tickled by the vortex of Hyde Park Corner. Most perhaps does she seem to smile at the end of the summer days, when the light lingers and lingers, though the shadows lengthen and the mists redden and the belated riders, with dinners to dress for, hurry away from the trampled arena of the Park. The popula- tion at that hour surges mainly westward and sees the dust of the day's long racket turned into a dull golden haze. There is something that has doubtless often, at this particular moment, touched the fancy even of the bored and the biases in such an emana- tion of hospitality, of waiting dinners, of the festal idea, of the whole spectacle of the West End pre- paring herself for an evening six parties deep. The scale on which she entertains is stupendous, and her invitations and "reminders" are as thick as the leaves of the forest. For half an hour, from eight to nine, every pair of wheels presents the portrait of a diner-out. To consider only the ratthng hansoms, the white neck- LONDON 47 ties and "dressed" heads which greet you from over the apron in a quick, interminable succession, conveys the over^'hehning impression of a comph- cated world. Who are they all, and where are they all going, and whence have they come, and what smoking kitchens and gaping portals and marshalled flunkies are prepared to receive them, from the southernmost limits of a loosely interpreted, an almost transpontine Belgravia, to the hyperborean confines of St. John's Wood ? There are broughams standing at every door, and carpets laid down for the footfall of the issuing if not the entering reveller. The pavements are empty now, in the fading light, in the big sallow squares and the stuccoed streets of gentility, save for the groups of small children holding others that are smaller — Ameliar-Ann in- trusted with Sarah Jane — who collect, wherever the strip of carpet lies, to see the fine ladies pass from the carriage or the house. The West End is dotted with these pathetic little gazing groups ; it is the party of the poor — their Season and way of dining out, and a happy illustration of "the sympathy that pre- vails between classes." The watchers, I should add, are by no means all children, but the lean mature aiso, and I am sure these wayside joys are one of the reasons of an inconvenience much deplored — the tendency of the country poor to fliock to London. They who dine only occasionally or never at all 48 ENGLISH HOURS have plenty of time to contemplate those with whom the custom has more amplitude. However, it was not my intention to conclude these remarks in a melancholy strain, and goodness knows that the diners are a prodigious company. It is as moralistic as I shall venture to be if I drop a very soft sigh on the paper as I confirm that truth. Are they all illu- minated spirits and is their conversation the ripest in the world ? This is not to be expected, nor should I ever suppose it to be desired that an agreeable society should fail to offer frequent opportunity for intellectual rest. Such a shortcoming is not one of the sins of the London world in general, nor would it be just to complain of that world, on any side, on grounds of deficiency. It is not what Lon- don fails to do that strikes the observer, but the general fact that she does everything in excess. Excess is her highest reproach, and it is her incur- able misfortune that there is really too much of her. She overwhelms you by quantity and number — she ends by making human life, by making civil- isation, appear cheap to you. Wherever you go, to parties, exhibitions, concerts, "private views," meetings, solitudes, there are already more people than enough on the field. How it makes you under- stand the high walls with which so much of English life is surrounded, and the priceless blessing of a park in the country, where there is nothing animated LONDON 49 but rabbits and pheasants and, for the worst, the importunate nightingales! And as the monster grows and grows for ever, she departs more and more — it must be acknowledged — from the ideal of a convenient society, a society in which intimacy is possible, in which the associated meet often and sound and select and measure and inspire each other, and relations and combinations have time to form themselves. The substitute for this, in London, is the momentary concussion of a million of atoms. It is the difference between seeing a great deal of a few and seeing a Uttle of every one. "When did you come — are you 'going on?'" and it is over; there is no time even for the answer. This may seem a perfidious arraignment, and I should not make it were I not prepared, or rather were I not eager, to add two quahfications. One of these is that, cum- brously vast as the place may be, I would not have had it smaller by a hair's-breadth or have missed one of the fine and fruitful impatiences with which it inspires you and which are at bottom a heartier tribute, I think, than any great city receives. The other is that out of its richness and its inexhaustible good- humour it behes the next hour any generaUsa- tion you may have been so simple as to make about it. 1888. BROWNING IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY THE lovers of a great poet are the people in the world who are most to be forgiven a little wanton fancy about him, for they have before them, in his genius and work, an irresistible example of the application of the imaginative method to a thousand subjects. Certainly, therefore, there are many confirmed admirers of Robert Browning to whom it will not have failed to occur that the con- signment of his ashes to the great temple of fame of the Enghsh race was exactly one of those occasions 52 ENGLISH HOURS in which his own analytic spirit would have rejoiced and his irrepressible faculty for looking at human events in all sorts of slanting coloured Hghts have found a signal opportunity. If he had been taken with it as a subject, if it had moved him to the con- fused yet comprehensive utterance of which he was the great professor, we can immediately guess at some of the sparks he would have scraped from it, guess how splendidly, in the case, the pictorial sense would have intertwined itself with the metaphysical. For such an occasion would have lacked, for the author of "The Ring and the Book," none of the complexity and convertibility that were dear to him. Passion and ingenuity, irony and solemnity, the impressive and the unexpected, would each have forced their way through; in a word the author would have been sure to take the special, circum- stantial view (the inveterate mark of all his specu- lation) even of so foregone a conclusion as that England should pay her greatest honour to one of her greatest poets. As they stood in the Abbey, at any rate, on Tuesday last, those of his admirers and mourners who were disposed to profit by his warrant for enquiring curiously may well have let their fancy range, with its muffled step, in the direction which his fancy would probably not have shrunk from following, even perhaps to the dim corners where humour and the whimsical lurk. BROWNING IN THE ABBEY 53 Only, we hasten to add, it would have taken Robert Browning himself to render the multifold impression. One part of it on such occasion is of course irresistible — the sense that these honours are the greatest that a generous nation has to confer and that the emotion that accompanies them is one of the high moments of a nation's life. The attitude of the public, of the multitude, at such hours, is a great expansion, a great openness to ideas of aspiration and achievement; the pride of possession and of bestowal, especially in the case of a career so com- plete as Mr. Browning's, is so present as to make regret a minor matter. We possess a great man most when we begin to look at him through the glass plate of death ; and it is a simple truth, though containing an apparent contradiction, that the Abbey never takes us so benignantly as when we have a valued voice to commit to silence there. For the silence is articulate after all, and in worthy in^ stances the preservation great. It is the other side of the question that would pull most the strings of irresponsible reflection — all those conceivable pos- tulates and hypotheses of the poetic and satiric mind to which we owe the picture of how the bishop ordered his tomb in St. Praxed's. Macaulay's "temple of silence and reconciliation" — and none the less perhaps because he himself is now a presence 54 ENGLISH HOURS there — strikes us, as we stand in it, not only as local but as social, a sort of corporate company; so thick, under its high arches, its dim transepts and chapels, is the population of its historic names and figures. They are a company in possession, with a high standard of distinction, of immortality, as it were; for there is something serenely inex- pugnable even in the position of the interlopers. As they look out, in the rich dusk, from the cold eyes of statues and the careful identity of tablets, they seem, with their converging faces, to scrutinise decorously the claims of each new recumbent glory, to ask each other how he is to be judged as an accession. How difficult to banish the idea that Robert Browning would have enjoyed prefiguring and playing with the mystifications, the reserva- tions, even perhaps the slight buzz of scandal, in the Poets' Corner, to which his own obsequies might give rise! Would not his great relish, in so charac- teristic an interview with his crucible, have been his perception of the bewildering modernness, to much of the society, of the new candidate for a niche? That is the interest and the fascination, from what may be termed the inside point of view, of Mr. Browning's having received, in this direction of becoming a classic, the only official assistance that is ever conferred upon English writers. It is as classics on one ground and another — some THE ABBEY, FROM VICTORIA STREET BROWNING IN THE ABBEY 55 members of it perhaps on that of not being anything else — that the numerous assembly in the Abbey holds together, and it is as a tremendous and in- comparable modern that the author of "Men and Women" takes his place in it. He introduces to his predecessors a kind of contemporar)' individualism which surely for many a year they had not been reminded of with any such force. The tradition of the poetic character as something high, detached, and simple, which may be assumed to have pre- vailed among them for a good while, is one that Browning has broken at every turn; so that we can imagine his new associates to stand about him, till they have got used to him, with rather a sense of failing measures. A good many oddities and a good many great writers have been entombed in the Abbey ; but none of the odd ones have been so great and none of the great ones so odd. There are plenty of poets whose right to the title may be contested, but there is no poetic head of equal power — crowned and recrowned by almost importunate hands — from which so many people would withhold the distinctive wreath. All this will give the marble phantoms at the base of the great pillars, and the definite personalities of the honorary slabs some- thing to puzzle out until, by the quick operation of time, the mere fact of his lying there among the classified and protected makes even Robert 56 ENGLISH HOURS Browning lose a portion of the bristling surface of his actuality. For the rest, judging from the outside and with his contemporaries, we of the public can only feel that his very modernness — by which we mean the all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work, per- meated with accumulations and playing with know- ledge — achieves a kind of conquest, or at least of extension, of the rigid pale. We cannot enter here upon any account either of that or of any other ele- ment of his genius, though surely no literary figure of our day seems to sit more unconsciously for the painter. The very imperfections of this original are fascinating, for they never present themselves as weaknesses; they are boldnesses and overgrowths, rich roughnesses and humours, and the patient critic need not despair of digging to the primary soil from which so many disparities and contradictions spring. He may finally even put his finger on some explana- tion of the great mystery, the imperfect conquest of the poetic form by a genius in which the poetic passion had such volume and range. He may successfully say how it was that a poet without a lyre — for that is practically Browning's deficiency: he had the scroll, but not often the sounding strings — was nevertheless, in his best hours, wonderfully rich in the magic of his art, a magnificent master of poetic emotion. He will justify on behalf of a multi- BROWNING IN THE ABBEY 57 tude of devotees the great position assigned to a writer of verse of which the nature or the fortune has been (in proportion to its value and quantity) to be treated rarely as quotable. He will do all this and a great deal more besides; but we need not wait for it to feel that something of our latest sympathies, our latest and most restless selves, passed the other day into the high part — the show-part, to speak vulgarly — of our literature. To speak of Mr. Browning only as he was in the last twenty years of his Ufe, how quick such an imagination as his would have been to recognise all the latent or mys- tical suitabilities that, in the last resort, might link to the great Valhalla by the Thames a figure that had become so conspicuously a figure of London! He had grown to be intimately and inveterately of the London world ; he was so familiar and recurrent, so responsive to all its solicitations, that, given the endless incarnations he stands for to-day, he would have been missed from the congregation of worthies whose memorials are the special pride of the Lon- doner. Just as his great sign to those who knew him was that he was a force of health, of tempera- ment, of tone, so what he takes into the Abbey is an immense expression of life — of life rendered with large liberty and free experiment, with an unpre- judiced intellectual eagerness to put himself in other people's place, to participate in compUcations 58 ENGLISH HOURS and consequences; a restlessness of psychological research that might well alarm any pale company for their formal orthodoxies. But the illustrious whom he rejoins may be re- assured, as they will not faU to discover: in so far as they are representative it will clear itself up that, in spite of a surface unsuggestive of marble and a reckless individualism of form, he is quite as repre- sentative as any of them. For the great value of Browning is that at bottom, in all the deep spiritual and human essentials, he is unmistakably in the great tradition — is, with all his Italianisms and cosmopolitanisms, all his victimisation by societies organised to talk about him, a magnificent exam- ple of the best and least dilettantish EngHsh spirit. That constitutes indeed the main chance for his eventual critic, who will have to solve the refreshing problem of how, if subtleties be not what the Eng- lish spirit most delights in, the author of, for in- stance, "Any Wife to Any Husband" made them his perpetual pasture, and yet remained typically of his race. He was indeed a wonderful mixture of the universal and the alembicated. But he played with the curious and the special, they never sub- merged him, and it was a sign of his robustness that he could play to the end. His voice sounds loudest, and also clearest, for the things that, as a race, we like best — the fascination of faith, the BROWNING IN THE ABBEY 59 acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of the great human passion. If Browning had spoken for us in no other way, he ought to have been made sure of, tamed and chained as a classic, on account of the extraordinary beauty of his treatment of the special relation between man and woman. It is a complete and splendid picture of the matter, which somehow places it at the same time in the region of conduct and responsibility. But when we talk of Robert Browning's speaking "for us," we go to the end of our privilege, we say all. With a sense of security, perhaps even a certain complacency, we leave our sophisticated modern conscience, and perhaps even our heterogeneous modern vocabulary, in his charge among the illustrious. There will possibly be mo- ments in which these things will seem to us to have widened the allowance, made the high abode more comfortable, for some of those who are yet to enter it. 1890. CHESTER IF the Atlantic voyage be counted, as it certainly may, even wiih the ocean in a fairly good humour, an emphatic zero in the sum of one's better experience, the American traveller arriving at this venerable town finds himself transported, without a sensible gradation, from the edge of the new world to the very heart of the old. It is almost a misfortune perhaps that Chester lies so close to the threshold of England; for it is so rare and complete a specimen of an antique town that the later-coming wonders of its sisters in renown, — of Shrewsbury, Coventry, and York — suffer a trifle by comparison, and the 62 ENGLISH HOURS tourist's appetite for the picturesque just loses its finer edge. Yet the first impressions of an observant American in England — of our old friend the sen- timental tourist — stir up within him such a cloud of sensibility that while the charm is still unbroken he may perhaps as well dispose mentally of the greater as of the less. I have been playing at first impressions for the second time, and have won the game against a cynical adversary. I have been stroll- ing and restrolling along the ancient wall — so per- fect in its antiquity — which locks this dense little city in its stony circle, with a certain friend who has been treating me to a bitter lament on the decay of his relish for the picturesque. "I have turned the corner of youth," is his ceaseless plaint; "I sus- pected it, but now I know it — now that my heart beats but once where it beat a dozen times before, and that where I found sermons in stones and pic- tures in meadows, delicious revelations and inti- mations ineffable, I find nothing but the hard, heavy prose of British civihsation." But httle by little I have grown used to my friend's sad monody, and indeed feel half indebted to it as a warning against cheap infatuations. I defied him, at any rate, to argue successfully against the effect of the brave little walls of Chester. There could be no better example of that phe- nomenon so dehghtfully frequent in England — an CHESTER 63 ancient property or institution lovingly readopted and consecrated to some modern amenity. The good Cestrians may boast of their walls without a shadow of that mental reservation on grounds of modern ease which is so often the tax paid by the romantic; and I can easily imagine that, though most modern towTis contrive to get on comfortably without this stony girdle, these people should have come to regard theirs as a prime necessity. For through it, surely, they may know their city more intimately than their unbuckled neighbours — sur- vey it, feel it, rejoice in it as many times a day as they please. The civic consciousness, sunning itself thus on the city's rim and glancing at the little swarm- ing towered and gabled town within, and then at the blue undulations of the near Welsh border, may easily deepen to delicious complacency. The wall enfolds the place in a continuous ring, which, pass- ing through innumerable picturesque vicissitudes, often threatens to snap, but never fairly breaks the link; so that, starting at any point, an hour's easy stroll will bring you back to your station. I have quite lost my heart to this charming creation, and there are so many things to be said about it that I hardly know where to begin. The great fact, I sup- pose, is that it contains a Roman substructure, rests for much of its course on foundations laid by that race of master-builders. But in spite of this sturdy 64 ENGLISH HOURS origin, much of which is buried in the well-trodden soil of the ages, it is the gentlest and least offensive of ramparts; it completes its long irregular curve without a frown or menace in all its disembattled stretch. The earthy deposit of time has indeed in some places climbed so high about its base that it amounts to no more than a causeway of modest dimensions. It has everywhere, however, a rugged outer parapet and a broad hollow flagging, wide enough for two strollers abreast. Thus equipped, it wanders through its adventurous circuit; now sloping, now bending, now broadening into a ter- race, now narrowing into an alley, now swelling into an arch, now dipping into steps, now passing some thorn-screened garden, and now reminding you that it was once a more serious matter than all this by the extrusion of a rugged, ivy-smothered tower. Its final hoary humility is enhanced, to your mind, by the freedom with which you may ap- proach it from any point in the town. Every few steps, as you go, you see some little court or alley boring toward it through the close-pressed houses. It is full of that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen, which, to American eyes, accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles, is the striking feature of European street scenery. An American strolling in the Chester CHESTER HIGH STREET CHESTER 65 streets finds a perfect feast of crookedness — of those random comers, projections, and recesses, odd domestic interspaces charmingly saved or lost, those innumerable architectural surprises and ca- prices and fantasies which lead to such refreshing exercise a vision benumbed by brown-stone fronts. An American is born to the idea that on his walks abroad it is perpetual level wall ahead of him, and such a revelation as he finds here of infim'te accident and infinite effect gives a wholly novel zest to the use of his eyes. It produces too the reflection — a superficial and fallacious one perhaps — that amid all this cunning chiaroscuro of its mise en scene life must have more of a certain homely entertainment. It is at least no fallacy to say that childhood — or the later memory of childhood — must borrow from such a background a kind of anecdotical wealth. We all know how in the retrospect of later moods the incidents of early youth "compose," visibly, each as an individual picture, with a magic for which the greatest painters have no corresponding art. There is a vivid reflection of this magic in some of the early pages of Dickens's "Copperfield" and of George Eliot's "Mill on the Floss," the writers having had the happiness of growing up among old, old things. Two or three of the phases of this rambling wall belong especially to the class of things fondly remembered. In one place it skirts the edge 66 ENGLISH HOURS of the cathedral graveyard and sweeps beneath the great square tower and behind the sacred east win- dow of the choir. Of the cathedral there is more to say; but just the spot I speak of is the best standpoint for feeling how fine an influence in the architectural line — where theoretically, at least, influences are great — is the massive tower of an English abbey, dominating the homes of men; and for watching the eddying flight of swallows make vaster still to the eye the high calm fields of stonework. At an- other point two battered and crumbling towers, decaying in their winding-sheets of ivy, make a pro- digiously designed diversion. One inserted in the body of the wall and the other connected with it by a short, crumbling ridge of masonry, they contribute to a positive jumble of local colour. A shaded mall wanders at the foot of the rampart ; beside this passes a narrow canal, with locks and barges and burly watermen in smocks and breeches; while the vener- able pair of towers, with their old red sandstone sides peeping through the gaps in their green man- tles, rest on the soft grass of one of those odd frag- ments of public garden, a crooked strip of ground turned to social account, which one meets at every turn, apparently, in England — a tribute to the needs of the "masses." Stat magni nominis umbra. The quotation is doubly pertinent here, for this httle CHESTER 67 garden-strip is adorned with mossy fragments of Roman stonework, bits of pavement, altars, baths, disinterred in the local soil. England is the land of small economies, and the present rarely fails to find good use for the odds and ends of the past. These two hoary shells of masonry are therefore converted into "museums," receptacles for the dustiest and shabbiest of tawdry back-parlour curiosities. Here preside a couple of those grotesque creatures, d la Dickens, whom one finds squeezed into every cranny of English civilisation, scraping a thin subsistence like mites in a mouldy cheese. Next after its wall — possibly even before it — Chester values its Rows, an architectural idiosyn- crasy which must be seen to be appreciated. They are a sort of gothic edition of the blessed arcades and porticoes of Italy, and consist, roughly speak- ing, of a running public passage tunnelled through the second story of the houses. The low basement is thus directly on the drive-way, to which a flight of steps descends, at frequent intervals, from this superincumbent verandah. The upper portion of the houses projects to the outer line of the gallery, where they are propped with pillars and posts and parapets. The shop-fronts face along the arcade and admit you to Uttle caverns of traffic, more or less dusky according to their opportunities for illumi- nation in the rear. If the romantic be measured 68 ENGLISH HOURS by its hostility to our modem notions of conven- ience, Chester is probably the most romantic city in the world. This arrangement is endlessly rich in opportunities for amusing effect, but the full charm of the architecture of which it is so essential a part must be observed from the street below. Chester is still an antique town, and mediaeval England sits bravely under her gables. Every third house is a "specimen" — gabled and latticed, timbered and .carved, and wearing its years more or less lightly. These ancient dwellings present every shade and degree of historical colour and expression. Some are dark with neglect and deformity, and the hori- zontal slit admitting hght into the lurking Row seems to collapse on its dislocated props Hke a pair of toothless old jaws. Others stand there square- shouldered and sturdy, with their beams painted and straightened, their plaster whitewashed, their carvings polished, and the low casement covering the breadth of the frontage adorned with curtains and flower-pots. It is noticeable that the actual townsfolk have bravely accepted the situation be- queathed by the past, and the large number of rich and intelligent restorations of the old facades makes an effective jumble of their piety and their policy. These elaborate and ingenious repairs attest a highly informed consciousness of the pictorial value of the city. I indeed suspect much of this revived inno- 1 HK ROWS. ( HtSTKk CHESTER 69 cence of having recovered a freshness that never can have been, of having been restored with usurious interest. About the genuine antiques there would be properly a great deal to say, for they are really a theme for the philosopher; but the theme is too heavy for my pen, and I can give them but the pass- ing tribute of a sigh. They are cruelly quaint, dread- fully expressive. Fix one of them with your gaze and it seems fairly to reek with mortahty. Every stain and crevice seems to syllable some human record — a record of lives airless and unlighted. I have been trying hard to fancy them animated by the children of "Merry England," but I am quite unable to think of them save as peopled by the vic- tims of dismal old-world pains and fears. Human life, surely, packed away behind those impenetrable lattices of lead and bottle-glass, just above which the black outer beam marks the suffocating near- ness of the ceiling, can have expanded into scant freedom and bloomed into small sweetness. Nothing has struck me more in my strolls along the Rows than the fact that the most zealous ob- servation can keep but uneven pace with the fine differences in national manners. Some of the most sensible of these differences are yet so subtle and indefinable that one must give up the attempt to express them, though the omission leave but a rough sketch. As you pass with the busthng current from 70 ENGLISH HOURS shop to shop you feel local custom and tradition — another tone of things — pressing on you from every side. The tone of things is somehow heavier than with us; manners and modes are more absolute and positive; they seem to swarm and to thicken the atmosphere about you. Morally and physically it is a denser air than ours. We seem loosely hung together at home as compared with the EngHsh, every man of whom is a tight fit in his place. It is not an inferential but a palpable fact that England is a crowded country. There is stillness and space — grassy, oak-studded space — at Eaton Hall, where the Marquis of Westminster dwells (or I believe can afford to humour his notion of not d welHng) , but there is a crowd and a hubbub in Chester. Wherever you go the population has overflowed. You stroll on the walls at eventide and you hardly find elbow-room. You haunt the cathedral shades and a dozen saunter- ing mortals temper your solitude. You glance up an alley or side street and discover populous windows and doorsteps. You roll along country roads and find countless humble pedestrians dotting the green waysides. The English landscape is always a " land- scape with figures." And everywhere you go you are accompanied by a vague consciousness of the British child hovering about your knees and coat- skirts, naked, grimy, and portentous. You reflect with a sort of physical relief on Australia, Canada, CHESTER 71 India. Where there are many men, of course, there are many needs; which helps to justify to the philo- sophic stranger the vast number and the irresistible coquetry of the httle shops which adorn these low- browed Rows. The shop-fronts have always seemed to me the most elegant things in England; and I waste more time than I should care to confess to in covetous contemplation of the vast, clear panes be- hind which the nether integuments of gentlemen are daintily suspended from glittering brass rods. The manners of the dealers in these comfortable wares seldom fail to confirm your agreeable impression. You are thanked with effusion for expending two- pence — a fact of deep significance to the truly ana- lytic mind, and which always seems to me a vague reverberation from certain of Miss Edgeworth's novels, perused in childhood. When you think of the small profits, the small jealousies, the long wait- ing and the narrow margin for evil days implied by this redundancy of shops and shopmen, you hear afresh the steady rumble of that deep keynote of Enghsh manners, overscored so often, and with such sweet beguilement, by finer harmonics, but never extinguished — the economic struggle for existence. The Rows are as " scenic " as one could wish, and it is a pity that before the birth of their mod- em consciousness there was no English Balzac to 72 ENGLISH HOURS introduce them into a realistic romance with a psy- chological commentary. But the cathedral is better still, modestly as it stands on the roll of English abbeys. It is of moderate dimensions and rather meagre in form and ornament ; but to an American it expresses and answers for the type, producing thereby the proper vibrations. Among these is a certain irresistible regret that so much of its hoary substance should give place to the fine, fresh-coloured masonry with which Mr. Gilbert Scott, ruthless renovator, is so intelligently investing it. The red sandstone of the primitive structure, darkened and devoured by time, survives at many points in frown- ing mockery of the imputed need of tinkering. The great tower, however, — completely restored, — rises high enough to seem to belong, as cathedral towers should, to the far-off air that vibrates with the chimes and the swallows, and to square serenely, east and west and south and north, its embossed and fluted sides. English cathedrals, within, are apt at first to look pale and naked; but after a while, if the pro- portions be fair and the spaces largely distributed, when you perceive the light beating softly down from the cold clerestory and your eye measures caressingly the tallness of columns and the hoUow- ness of arches, and lingers on the old genteel in- scriptions of mural marbles and brasses ; and, above all, when you become conscious of that sweet, cool CHESTER LATHEDKAI,, \VE>1 FROM CHESTER 73 mustiness in the air which seems to haunt these places as the very cHmate of Episcopacy, you may grow to feel that they are less the empty shells of a departed faith than the abodes of a faith which may still affirm a presence and awaken echoes. Catholi- cism has gone, but Anglicanism has the next best music. So at least it seemed to me, a Sunday or two since, as I sat in the choir at Chester awaiting a dis- course from Canon Kingslcy. The Anglican service had never seemed to my profane sense so much an affair of magnificent intonations and cadences — of pompous effects of resonance and melody. The vast oaken architecture of the stalls among which we nestled — somewhat stiffly and with a due ap- prehension of wounded ribs and knees — climbing vainly against the dizzier reach of the columns ; the beautiful English voices of certain officiating canons, the little rosy "king's scholars" sitting ranged be- neath the pulpit, in white-winged surplices, which made their heads, above the pew-edges, look like rows of sleepy cherubs: every element in the scene gave it a great spectacular beauty. They suggested too what is suggested in England at every turn, that conservatism here has all the charm and leaves dissent and democracy and other vulgar variations nothing but their bald logic. Conservatism has the cathedrals, the colleges, the castles, the gardens, the traditions, the associations, the fine names, the 74 ENGLISH HOURS better manners, the poetry; Dissent has the dusky brick chapels in provincial by-streets, the names out of Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the h, and the poor mens sibi conscia recti. Differences which in other countries are slight and varying, almost meta- physical, as one may say, are marked in England by a gulf. Nowhere else does the degree of one's respectability involve such solid consequences, and I am sure I don't wonder that the sacramental word which with us (and, in such correlatives as they pos- sess, more or less among the continental races) is pronounced lightly and facetiously and as a quota- tion from the Philistines, is uttered here with a per- fectly grave face. To have the courage of one's mere convictions is in short to have a prodigious deal of courage, and I think one must need as much to be a Dissenter as one needs patience not to be a duke. Perhaps the Dissenters (to limit the question to them) manage to stay out of the church by letting it all hang on the sermon. Canon Kingsley's discourse was one more example of the familiar truth — not without its significance to minds zealous for the good old fashion of "making an effort," — that there is an odd link between large forms and small emana- tions. The sermon, beneath that triply consecrated vault, should have had a builded majesty. It had not; and I confess that a tender memory of ancient obhgations to the author of "Westward Ho!" and CHESTER 75 " Hypatia " forbids my saying more of it. An Ameri- can, I think, is not incapable of taking a secret satis- faction in an incongruity of this kind. He finds with reHef that even mortals reared as in the ring of a perpetual circus arc only mortals. His constant sense of the beautiful scenic properties of English life is apt to beget a habit of melancholy reference to the dead-blank wall which forms the background of our own life-drama; and from doubting in this fantastic humour whether we have even that modest value in the scale of beauty that he has sometimes fondly hoped, he lapses into a moody scepticism as to our place in the scale of "importance," and finds himself wondering vaguely whether this be not a richer race as well as a lovelier land. That of course will never do; so that when after being escorted down the beautiful choir in what, from the Ameri- can point of view, is an almost gorgeous ecclesias- tical march, by the Dean in a white robe trimmed with scarlet and black- robed sacristans carrying silver wands, the officiating canon mounts into a splendid canopied and pinnacled pulpit of gothic stonework and proves — not an "acting" Jeremy Taylor, our poor sentimental tourist begins to hold up his head again and to reflect that so far as we have opportunities we mostly rise to them. I am not sure indeed that in the excess of his reaction he is not tempted to accuse his English neighbours 76 ENGLISH HOURS of being impenetrable and uninspired, to affirm that they do not half discern their good fortune, and that it takes passionate pilgrims, vague aliens, and other disinherited persons to appreciate the "points" of this admirable country. 1872. LICHFIELD AND WARWICK TO write at Oxford of anything but Oxford re- quires, on the part of the sentimental tourist, no small power of mental abstraction. Yet I have it at heart to pay to three or four other scenes re- cently visited the debt of an enjoyment hardly less profound than my rehsh for this scholastic paradise. First among these is the cathedral city of Lichfield — the city, I say, because Lichfield has a character of its own apart from its great ecclesiastical feature. In the centre of its little market-place — dullest and 78 ENGLISH HOURS sleepiest of provincial market-places — rises a huge effigy of Dr. Johnson, the genius loci, who was constructed, humanly, with very nearly as large an architecture as the great abbey. The Doctor's statue, which is of some inexpensive composite painted a shiny brown, and of no great merit of design, fills out the vacant dulness of the Uttle square in much the same way as his massive personaHty occupies — with just a margin for Garrick — the record of his native town. In one of the volumes of Croker's "Boswell" is a steel plate of the old Johnsonian birth-house, by the aid of a vague recollection of which I detected the dwelhng beneath its modern- ised frontage. It bears no mural inscription and, save for a hint of antiquity in the receding basement, with pillars supporting the floor above, seems in no especial harmony with Johnson's time or fame. Lich- field in general appeared to me indeed to have little to say about her great son beyond the fact that the smallness and the sameness and the dulness, amid which it is so easy to fancy a great intellectual appe- tite turning sick with inanition, may help to explain the Doctor's subsequent almost ferocious fondness for London. I walked about the silent streets, trying to repeople them with wigs and short-clothes, and, while I fingered near the cathedral, endeavoured to guess the message of its gothic graces to Johnson's ponderous classicism. But I achieved but a colour- LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 79 less picture at the best, and the most vivid image in my mind's eye was that of the London coach facing towards Temple Bar with the young author of " Ras- selas" scowhng near-sightedly from the cheapest seat. With him goes the interest of Lichfield town. The place is stale without being really antique. It is as if that prodigious temperament had absorbed and appropriated its original vitality. If every dull provincial town, however, formed but a girdle of quietude to a cathedral as rich as that of Lichfield, one would thank it for letting one alone. Lichfield cathedral is great among churches, and bravely performs the prime duty of objects of its order — that of seeming for the time (to minds unsophisticated by architectural culture) the finest, on the whole, of all such objects. This one is rather oddly placed, on the slope of a hill, the particular spot having been chosen, I believe, because sancti- fied by the sufferings of certain primitive martyrs; but it is fine to see how its upper portions surmount any crookedness of posture and its great towers over- take in mid-air the conditions of perfect symmetry. The close is extraordinarily attractive ; a long sheet of water expands behind it and, besides leading the eye ofif into a sweet green landscape, renders the inestimable service of reflecting the three spires as they rise above the great trees which mask the Palace and the Deanery. These august abodes edge 8o ENGLISH HOURS the northern side of the slope, and behind their huge gate-posts and close-wrought gates the atmo- sphere of the Georgian era seems to abide. Before them stretches a row of huge elms, which must have been old when Johnson was young; and between these and the long-buttressed wall of the cathedral, you may stroll to and fro among as pleasant a mix- ture of influences (I imagine) as any in England. You can stand back here, too, from the west front further than in many cases, and examine at your ease its lavish decoration. You are perhaps a trifle too much at your ease, for you soon discover what a more cursory glance might not betray, that the immense facade has been covered with stucco and paint, that an effigy of Charles II, in wig and plumes and trunk-hose, of almost gothic grotesque- ness, surmounts the middle window; that the various other statues of saints and kings have but recently climbed into their niches; and that the whole ex- panse is in short an imposture. All this was done some fifty years ago, in the taste of that day as to restoration, and yet it but partially mitigates the impressiveness of the high facade, with its brace of spires, and the great embossed and image-fretted surface, to which the lowness of the portals (the too frequent reproach of English abbeys) seems to give a loftier reach. Passing beneath one of these low portals, however, I found myself gazing down as LICHFIELD CATHKORAL LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 8i noble a church vista as any you need desire. The cathedral is of magnificent length, and the screen between nave and choir has been removed, so that from stem to stern, as one may say, of the great ves- sel of the church, it is all a mighty avenue of multi- tudinous slender columns, terminating in what seems a great screen of ruby and sapphire and topaz — one of the finest east windows in England. The cathedral is narrow in proportion to its length; it is the long-drawn aisle of the poet in perfection, and there is something grandly elegant in the unity of effect produced by this unobstructed perspective. The charm is increased by a singular architectural fantasy. Standing in the centre of the doorway, you perceive that the eastern wall does not directly face you, and that from the beginning of the choir the receding aisle deflects slightly to the left, in reported suggestion of the droop of the Saviour's head on the cross. Here again Mr. Gilbert Scott has lately laboured to no small purpose of wwdoing, it would appear — undoing the misdeeds of the last century. This extraordinary period expended an incalculable amount of imagination in proving that it had none. Universal whitewash was the least of its offences. But this has been scraped away and the solid stone- work left to speak for itself, the delicate capitals and cornices disencrusted and discreetly rechiselled and the whole temple aesthetically rededicated. Its most 82 ENGLISH HOURS beautiful feature, happily, has needed no repair, for its perfect beauty has been its safeguard. The great choir window of Lichfield is the noblest glasswork before the spell of which one's soul has become simple. I remember nowhere colours so chaste and grave, and yet so rich and true, or a cluster of de- signs so piously decorative and yet so vivified. Such a window as this seems to me the most sacred orna- ment of a great church; to be, not like vault and screen and altar, the dim contingent promise to the spirit, but the very redemption of the whole vow. This Lichfield glass is not the less interesting for being visibly of foreign origin. Exceeding so ob- viously as it does the range of English genius in this line, it indicates at least the heavenly treasure stored up in continental churches. It dates from the early sixteenth century, and was transferred hither sixty years ago from a decayed Belgian abbey. This, however, is not all of Lichfield. You have not seen it till you have strolled and restroUed along the dose on every side, and watched the three spires constantly change their relation as you move and pause. Nothing can well be finer than the combina- tion of the two lesser ones soaring equally in front with the third riding tremendously the magnificently sustained line of the roof. At a certain distance against the sky this long ridge seems something in- finite and the great spire to sit astride of it Hke a giant THK THREE SPIRKS OF I.RHFIEI.D LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 83 mounted on a mastodon. Your sense of the huge mass of the building is deepened by the fact that though the central steeple is of double the ele- vation of the others, you see it, from some points, borne back in a perspective which drops it to half their stature and lifts them into immensity. But it vi^ould take long to tell all that one sees and fan- cies and thinks in a lingering walk about so great a church as this. To walk in quest of any object that one has more or less tenderly dreamed of, to find your way, to steal upon it softly, to see at last, if it be church or castle, the tower-tops peeping above elms or beeches — to push forward with a rush, and emerge and pause and draw that first long breath which is the com- promise between so many sensations: this is a pleas- ure left to the tourist even after the broad glare of photography has dissipated so many of the sweet mysteries of travel; even in a season when he is fatally apt to meet a dozen fellow pilgrims returning from the shrine, each as big a fool, so to speak, as he ever was, or to overtake a dozen more telegraph- ing their impressions down the line as they arrive. Such a pleasure I lately enjoyed quite in its perfec- tion, in a walk to Haddon Hall, along a meadow- path by the Wye, in this interminable English twi- light which I am never weary of admiring watch in hand. Haddon Hall lies among Derbyshire hills, in a 84 ENGLISH HOURS region infested, I was about to write, by Americans. But I achieved my own sly pilgrimage in perfect soli- tude; and as I descried the grey walls among the rook-haunted elms I felt not like a dusty tourist, but like a successful adventurer. I have certainly had, as a dusty tourist, few more charming moments than some — such as any one, I suppose, is free to have — that I passed on a little ruined grey bridge which spans, with its single narrow arch, a trickhng stream at the base of the eminence from which those walls and trees look down. The twilight deepened, the ragged battlements and the low, broad oriels glanced duskily from the foliage, the rooks wheeled and clamoured in the glowing sky; and if there had been a ghost on the premises I certainly ought to have seen it. In fact I did see it, as we see ghosts nowadays. I felt the incommunicable spirit of the scene with the last, the right intensity. The old hfe, the old manners, the old figures seemed present again. The great coup de theatre of the young woman who shows you the Hall — it is rather languidly done on her part — is to point out a little dusky door opening from a turret to a back terrace as the aperture through which Dorothy Vernon eloped with Lord John Manners. I was ignorant of this episode, for I was not to enter the place till the mor- row, and I am still unversed in the history of the actors. But as I stood in the luminous dusk weaving LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 85 the romance of the spot, I recognised the inevit- ability of a Dorothy Vernon and quite understood a Lord John. It was of course on just such an evening that the romantic event came off, and by listening with the proper credulity I might surely hear on the flags of the castle-court ghostly footfalls and feel in their movement the old heartbeats. The only foot- fall I can conscientiously swear to, however, is the far from spectral tread of the damsel who led me through the mansion in the prosier light of the next morning. Haddon Hall, I beheve, is one of the sights in which it is the fashion to be '* disappointed ; " a fact explained in a great measure by the absence of a formal approach to the house, which shows its low, grey front to every trudger on the high-road. But the charm of the spot is so much less that of grandeur than that of melancholy, that it is rather deepened than diminished by this attitude of ob- vious survival and decay. And for that matter, when you have entered the steep little outer court through the huge thickness of the low gateway, the present seems effectually walled out and the past walled in, even as a dead man in a sepulchre. It is very dead, of a fine June morning, the genius of Haddon Hall; and the silent courts and chambers, with their hues of ashen grey and faded brown, seem as time- bleached as the dry bones of any mouldering mor- tality. The comparison is odd, but Haddon Hall 86 ENGLISH HOURS reminded me perversely of some of the larger houses at Pompeii. The private life of the past is revealed in each case with very much the same distinctness and on a scale small enough not to stagger the imagination. This old dweUing indeed has so little of the mass and expanse of the classic feudal castle that it almost suggests one of those miniature models of great buildings which lurk in dusty comers of museums. But it is large enough to be delectably complete and to contain an infinite store of the poetry of grass-grown courts looked into by wide, jutting windows and climbed out of by crooked stone stairways mounting against the walls to little high- placed doors. The "tone" of Haddon Hall, of all its walls and towers and stonework, is the grey of unpolished silver, and the reader who has been in England need hardly be reminded of the sweet ac- cord — to eye and mind alike — existing between all stony surfaces covered with the pale corrosions of time and the deep Hving green of the strong ivy which seems to feed on their slow decay. Of this effect and of a hundred others — from those that belong to low-browed, stone-paved empty rooms where life was warm and atmospheres thick, to those one may note where the dark tower stairway emerges at last, on a level with the highest beech-tops, against the cracked and sun-baked parapet which flaunted the castle standard over the castle woods — of every LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 87 form of sad desuetude and picturesque decay Had- don Hall contains some delightful example. Its fin- est point is undoubtedly a certain court from which a stately flight of steps ascends to the terrace where that daughter of the Vernons whom I have men- tioned took such happy thought for our requiring, as the phrase is, a reference. These steps, with the terrace, its balustrade topped with great ivy-muffled knobs of stone and its high background of massed woods, form the ideal mise en scene for portions of Shakespeare's comedies. " It 's exactly Elizabethan," said my companion. Here the Countess Olivia may have listened to the fantastic Malvolio, or Beatrix, superbest of flirts, have come to summon Benedick to dinner. The glories of Chatsworth, which Hes but a few miles from Haddon, serve as a marked offset to its more dehcate merits, just as they are supposed to gain, I beheve, in the tourist's eyes, by contrast with its charming, its almost Itahan shabbiness. But the glories of Chatsworth, incontestable as they are, were so effectually eclipsed to my mind, a couple of days later, that in future, when I think of an English mansion, I shall think only of Warwick, and when I think of an English park, only of Blenheim. Your run by train through the gentle Warwickshire land does much to prepare you for the great spectacle of the castle, which seems hardly more than a sort of 88 ENGLISH HOURS massive symbol and synthesis of the broad prosper- ity and peace and leisure diffused over this great pastoral expanse. The Warwickshire meadows are to common Enghsh scenery what this is to that of the rest of the world. For mile upon mile you can see nothing but broad sloping pastures of velvet turf, overbrowsed by sheep of the most fantastic shaggi- ness and garnished with hedges out of the traihng luxury of whose verdure great ivy-tangled oaks and elms arise with a kind of architectural regularity. The landscape indeed sins by excess of nutritive suggestion; it savours of larder and manger; it is too ovine, too bovine, it is almost asinine; and if you were to believe what you see before you this rugged globe would be a sort of boneless ball cov- ered with some such plush-like integument as might be figured by the down on the cheek of a peach. But a great thought keeps you company as you go and gives character to the scenery. War^vickshire — you say it over and over — was Shakespeare's country. Those who think that a great genius is something supremely ripe and healthy and human may find comfort in the fact. It helps greatly to enliven my own vague conception of Shakespeare's temperament, with which I find it no great shock to be obliged to associate ideas of mutton and beef. There is something as final, as disillusioned of the romantic horrors of rock and forest, as deeply at- LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 89 tuned to human needs in the Warwickshire pastures as there is in the underlying moraHty of the poet. With human needs in general Warwick Castle may be in no great accord, but few places are more gratifying to the sentimental tourist. It is the only great residence he may have coveted as a home. The fire that we heard so much of last winter in America appears to have consumed but an inconsiderable and easily spared portion of the house, and the great towers rise over the great trees and the town with the same grand air as before. Picturesquely, Warwick gains from not being sequestered, after the common fashion, in acres of park. The village street winds about the garden walls, though its hum expires be- fore it has had time to scale them. There can be no better example of the way in which stone walls, if they do not of necessity make a prison, may on oc- casions make a palace, than the prodigious privacy maintained thus about a mansion whose windows and towers form the main feature of a bustling town. At Warwick the past joins hands so stoutly with the present that you can hardly say where one begins and the other ends, and you rather miss the various crannies and gaps of what I just now called the Italian shabbiness of Haddon. There is a Caesar's tower and a Guy's tower and half a dozen more, but they are so well-conditioned in their ponderous anti- quity that you are at loss whether to consider them 90 ENGLISH HOURS parts of an old house revived or of a new house pic- turesquely superannuated. Such as they are, how- ever, plunging into the grassed and gravelled courts from which their battlements look really feudal, and into gardens large enough for all delight and too small, as they should be, to be amazing; and with ranges between them of great apartments at whose hugely recessed windows you may turn from Van- dyck and Rembrandt to glance down the cliff-like pile into the Avon, washing the base like a lordly moat, with its bridge, and its trees and its memo- ries, they mark the very model of a great hereditary dwelling — one which amply satisfies the imagina- tion without irritating the democratic conscience. The pictures at Warwick reminded me afresh of an old conclusion on this matter; that the best fortune for good pictures is not to be crowded into pubhc collections — not even into the relative privacy of Salons Carres and Tribunes — but to hang in largely- spaced half-dozens on the walls of fine houses. Here the historical atmosphere, as one may call it, is almost a compensation for the often imperfect hght. If this be true of most pictures it is especially so of the works of Vandyck, whom you think of, wherever you may find him, as having, with that thorough good-breeding which is the stamp of his manner, taken account in his painting of the local conditions and predestined his picture to just the LICHFIELD AND WARWICK 91 spot where it hangs. This is in fact an illusion as regards the Vandycks at Warwick, for none of them represent members of the house. The very finest perhaps after the great melancholy, picturesque Charles I — death, or at least the presentiment of death on the pale horse — is a portrait from the Brignole palace at Genoa; a beautiful noble matron in black, with her Uttle son and heir. The last Vandycks I had seen were the noble company this lady had left behind her in the Genoese palace, and as I looked at her I thought of her mighty change of circumstance. Here she sits in the mild hght of midmost England ; there you could almost fancy her bhnking in the great glare sent up from the Medi- terranean. Intensity for intensity — intensity of sit- uation constituted — I hardly know which to choose. Oxford, 1872. 'rr NORTH DEVON FOR those fanciful observers to whom broad England means chiefly the perfection of the rural picturesque, Devonshire means the perfection of England. I, at least, had so complacently taken for granted here all the characteristic graces of Enghsh scenery, had built so boldly on their rank orthodoxy, that before we fairly crossed the border I had begun to look impatiently from the carriage window for the veritable landscape in water-colours. Devonshire meets you promptly in all its purity, for the course of ten minutes you have been able to 94 ENGLISH HOURS glance down the green vista of a dozen Devonshire lanes. On huge embankments of moss and turf, smothered in wild flowers and embroidered with the finest lacework of trailing ground- ivy, rise solid walls of flowering thorn and ghstening holly and golden broom, and more strong, homely shrubs than I can name, and toss their blooming tangle to a sky which seems to look down between them, in places, from but a dozen inches of blue. They are oversown with lovely little flowers with names as dehcate as their petals of gold and silver and azure — bird's-eye and king's-finger and wandering-sailor — and their soil, a superb dark red, turns in spots so nearly to crimson that you almost fancy it some fantastic compound purchased at the chemist's and scattered there for ornament. The mingled reflection of this rich-hued earth and the dim green Hght which filters through the hedge is a masterpiece of produced beauty. A Devonshire cottage is no less striking an outcome of the ages and the seasons and the manners. Crushed beneath its burden of thatch, coated with a rough white stucco of a tone to dehght a painter, nesthng in deep fohage and garnished at doorstep and wayside with various forms of chubby infancy, it seems to have been stationed there for no more obvi- ous purpose than to keep a promise to your fancy, though it covers, I suppose, not a little of the sordid side of hfe which the fancy likes to slur over. A Dr.VONSHIRF. l.ANF, NORTH DEVON 95 I rolled [;ast lanes and cottages to Exeter, where I had counted upon the cathedral. When one has fairly tast(.-d (A the j>leasure of cathedral-hunting the a[j|)ro;i.f h to each new possible jjrize of the chase gives a jjcculiarly agreeable zest to the curiosity. You are making a collection of great impressioas, and I think the procc-ss is in no case s<-> delightful as a[jpl)<:d trj rathedraLs. Going from one fine picture to another is certainly good; but the fine pictures of the world are terribly numerous, and they have a troublesome way of crowding and jostling each fjlher in the memory. The number of cathedrals is small, and the mass and presence of each specimen great, so that as they rise in the mind in individual majesty they dwarf all the commoner impressions of calculated effeci:. They form indeed but. a gallery of vaster jjictures; for when time has dulled the recollection of details you retain a single broad image of the vast grey edifice, with its head and shoulders, its vessel and its towers, its tone of colour, its still green precinct. All this is especially true perhaps of one's sense of English sacred pilc-s, which are almost alone in possessing, as pictures, a spacious and harmonious setting. The cathedral stands supreme, but the close makes, always, the scene. Exeter is not one of the grandest, but, in com- mon with great and small, it has certain points in favour of which local learning discriminates. Exe- 96 ENGLISH HOURS ter indeed does itself injustice by a low, dark front, which not only diminishes the apparent altitude of the nave, but conceals, as you look eastward, two noble Norman towers. The front, however, which has a gloomy impressiveness, is redeemed by two fine features: a magnificent rose- window, whose vast stone ribs (enclosing some very pallid last- century glass) are disposed with the most charming intricacy; and a long sculptured screen — a sort of stony band of images — which traverses the fafade from side to side. The little broken-visaged effigies of saints and kings and bishops, niched in tiers along this hoary wall, are prodigiously black and quaint and primitive in expression; and as you look at them with whatever contemplative tender- ness your trade of hard-working tourist may have left at your disposal, you fancy that they are brood- ingly conscious of their names, histories, and mis- fortunes; that, sensitive victims of time, they feel the loss of their noses, their toes, and their crowns; and that, when the long June twilight turns at last to a deeper grey and the quiet of the close to a deeper stillness, they begin to peer sidewise out of their narrow recesses and to converse in some strange form of early English, as rigid, yet as candid, as their features and postures, moaning, like a com- pany of ancient paupers round a hospital fire, over their aches and infirmities and losses and the sadness NORTH DEVON 97 of being so terribly old. The vast square transeptal towers of the church seem to me to have the same sort of personal melancholy. Nothing in all archi- tecture expresses better, to my imagination, the sad- ness of survival, the resignation of dogged material continuance, than a broad expanse of Norman stonework, roughly adorned with its low relief of short columns and round arches and almost bar- barous hatchet-work, and hfted high into that mild Enghsh light which accords so well with its dull- grey surface. The especial secret of the impressive- ness of such a Norman tower I cannot pretend to have discovered. It lies largely in the look of having been proudly and sturdily built — as if the masons had been urged by a trumpet-blast, and the stones squared by a battle-axe — contrasted with this mere idleness of antiquity and passive lapse into quaint- ness. A Greek temple preserves a kind of fresh immortality in its concentrated refinement, and a gothic cathedral in its adventurous exuberance; but a Norman tower stands up like some simple strong man in his might, bending a melancholy brow upon an age which demands that strength shall be cunning. The North Devon coast, whither it was my design on coming to Exeter to proceed, has the primary merit of being, as yet, virgin soil as to railways. I went accordingly from Barnstable to Ilfracombe on 98 ENGLISH HOURS the top of a coach, in the fashion of elder days ; and, thanks to my position, I managed to enjoy the land- scape in spite of the two worthy aboriginals before me who were reading aloud together, with a natural glee which might have passed for fiendish malice, the "Daily Telegraph's" painfully vivid account of the defeat of the Atalanta crew. It seemed to me, I remember, a sort of pledge and token of the in- vincibihty of English muscle that a newspaper record of its prowess should have power to divert my com- panions' eyes from the bosky flanks of Devonshire combes. The little watering-place of Ilfracombe is seated at the lower verge of one of these seaward- plunging valleys, between a couple of magnificent headlands which hold it in a hollow slope and offer it securely to the caress of the Bristol Channel. It is a very finished little specimen of its genus, and I think that during my short stay there I expended as much attention on its manners and customs and its social physiognomy as on its cliffs and beach and great coast- view. My chief conclusion perhaps, from all these things, was that the terrible "sum- mer-question" which works annual anguish in so many American households would rage less hope- lessly if we had a few Ilfracombes scattered along our Atlantic coast; and furthermore that the Eng- lish are masters of the art of not losing sight of ease and convenience in the pursuit of the pastoral life — THE NORMAN TOWERS OF EXETER NORTH DEVON 99 unlike our own people, who, when seeking rural be- guilemcnt, are apt but to find a new rudeness added to nature. It is just possible that at Ilfracombe ease and convenience weigh down the scale; so very substantial are they, so very officious and business- Uke. On the left of the town (to give an example) one of the great cliffs I have mentioned rises in a couple of massive peaks and presents to the sea an almost vertical face, all muffled in tufts of golden broom and mighty fern. You have not walked fifty yards away from the hotel before you encounter half a dozen httle sign-boards, directing your steps to a path up the cliflF. You follow their indications and you arrive at a little gate-house, with photo- graphs and various local gimcracks exposed for sale. A most respectable person appears, demands a penny and, on receiving it, admits you with great civihty to commune with nature. You detect, how- ever, various little influences hostile to perfect com- munion. You are greeted by another sign-board threatening legal pursuit if you attempt to evade the payment of the sacramental penny. The path, winding in a hundred ramifications over the cHfi", is fastidiously solid and neat, and furnished at inter- vals of a dozen yards with excellent benches, in- scribed by knife and pencil with the names of such visitors as do not happen to have been the elderly maiden ladies who now chiefly occupy them. All L«rc. loo ENGLISH HOURS this is prosaic, and you have to subtract it in a lump from the total impression before the sense of the beguilement of nature becomes distinct. Your subtraction made, a great deal assuredly remains; quite enough, I found, to give me an ample day's refreshment; for English scenery, like most other EngHsh commodities, resists and rewards familiar use. The cliffs are superb, the play of light and shade upon them is a perpetual study, and the air a particular mixture of the breath of the hills and moors and the breath of the sea. I was very glad, at the end of my chmb, to have a good bench to sit upon — as one must think twice in England before measuring one's length on the grassy earth; and to be able, thanks to the smooth foot-path, to get back to the hotel in a quarter of an hour. But it occurred to me that if I were an Englishman of the period, and, after ten months of a busy London Ufe, my fancy were turning to a holiday, to rest and change and obhvion of the ponderous social burden, it might find rather less inspiration than needful in a vision of the little paths of Ilfracombe, of the sign- boards and the penny-fee and the soUtude tempered by old ladies and sheep. I wondered whether change perfect enough to be salutary does not imply something more pathless, more idle, more unre- claimed from that deep-bosomed nature to which the overwrought mind reverts with passionate long- NORTH DEVON loi ing; something after all attainable at a moderate distance from New York and Boston. I must add that I cannot find in my heart to object, even on grounds the most aesthetic, to the very beautiful and excellent inn at Ilfracombe, where such of my readers as are perchance actually wresthng with the question of "where to go" may be interested to learn that they may live en pension^ very well in- deed, at a cost of ten shillings a day. I have paid the American hotel-clerk a much heavier tax on a much Ughter entertainment. I made the acquaint- ance at this estabhshment of that strange fruit of time the insular table d'hote, but I confess that, faithful to the habit of a tourist open to the arriere- pensee, I have retained a more vivid impression of the talk and the faces than of our joints and side- dishes, I noticed here what I have often noticed before (the truth perhaps has never been duly re- cognised), that no people profit so eagerly as the English by the suspension of a common social law. A table d'hote, being something abnormal and experimental, as it were, resulted apparently in a complete reversal of the supposed national charac- teristics. Conversation was universal — uproarious almost; old legends and ironies about the insular morgue seemed to see their ground crumble away. What social, what psychologic earthquake, in our own time, had occurred ? 102 ENGLISH HOURS These are meagre memories, however, compared with those which cluster about that place of pleasant- ness which is locally known as Lynton. I am afraid I may seem a mere professional gusher when I declare how common almost any term appears to me applied to Lynton with descriptive intent. The little village is perched on the side of one of the great mountain-cHffs with which this whole coast is adorned, and on the edge of a lovely gorge through which a broad hill- torrent foams and tumbles from the great moors whose heather-crested waves rise purple along the inland sky. Below it, close beside the beach where the Httle torrent meets the sea, is the sister village of Lynmouth. Here — as I stood on the bridge that spans the stream and looked at the stony backs and foundations and overclambering garden verdure of certain little grey old houses which plunge their feet into it, and then up at the tender green of scrub-oak and fern, at the colour of gorse and broom and bracken chmbing the sides of the hills and leaving them bare-crowned to the sun Hke miniature mountains — I read an unnatural blue- ness into the northern sea, and the village below put on the grace of one of the hundred hamlets of the Riviera. The httle Castle Hotel at Lynton is a spot so consecrated to supreme repose — to sitting with a book in the terrace-garden, among blooming plants of aristocratic magnitude and rarity, and NORTH DEVON 103 watching the finest piece of colour in all nature, the glowing red and green of the great cliffs beyond the little harbour-mouth, as they shift and change and melt, the livelong day, from shade to shade and ineffable tone to tone — that I feel as if in helping it to publicity I were doing it rather a disfavour than a service. It is in fact a very deep and sure retreat, and I have never known one where purchased hos- pitaHty wore a more disinterested smile. Lynton is of course a capital centre for excursions, but two or three of which I had time to make. None is more beautiful than a simple walk along the running face of the chffs to a singular rocky eminence whose curious abutments and pinnacles of stone have inevitably caused it to be named the Castle. It has a fantastic resemblance to some hoary feudal ruin, with crumbhng towers and gaping chambers tenanted by wild sea-birds. The late afternoon light had a way, at this season, of Hngering on until within a couple of hours of midnight ; and I remem- ber among the charmed moments of Enghsh travel none of a more vividly poetical tinge than a couple of evenings spent on the summit of this all but legend- ary pile in company with the slow-coming dark- ness and the short, sharp cry of the sea-mews. There are places whose very aspect is a story or a song. This jagged and pinnacled coast- wall, with the rock-strewn valley behind it, the sullen calmness IC4 EXGLISH HOURS of ihe unbroken tide at the dreadful base of the dies ^^ where they di\'ide into low sea-caves, making pillars and pedestals for the fantastic imager)' of their summits), prompted one to wanton reminis- cence and outbreak, to a recall of some drawing of Gustave Donf's (of his good time), which was a di\ination of the place and made one look for his signature under a stone, or, better stiU, to respouting, for sympathy and nehef , some idyUic Tennysonian line that had haunted one's destitute past and that seemed to speak of the conditions in spite of being false to them geographically. The last stage in my \-isit to North Devon was the long drive along the beautiful remnant of coast and through the rich pastoml sceneiy of Somerset. The whole broad spectacle that one dreams of viewing in a foreign land to the homely music of a postboy's whip I beheld on this admirable drive — breezy highlands clad in the warm blue-brown of heather- tufts as if in mantles of rust}* velvet, little bays and coves curving gently to the doors of clustere