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Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre reproduit en un seul clich6, il est filmd d partir de I'angle sup6rieur gauche, de gauche d droite. et de haut en bas. en prenant le nombre d'images n^cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants illustrent la m^thode. y errata id to It ie pelure, pon d 1 2 3 32X 1 2 3 4 5 6 A 7 A TRIP TO ENGLAND BY GOLDWIN SMITH REPRINTED BY REQUEST FROM ''THE WEEK.'- TORONTO C. BLACKETT ROBINSON. i88S. i ! Si V i ;V TRIP TO ENGLAND. A... » , T seems useful in visiting a country to have not only a guide to places and routes, but a framework for observations and recol- lections. Otherwise the effect produced on the retina of the mind is apt to be like that produced by a whirl of successive sights on the retina of the eye. This is particularly the case when the objects of interest are of so many di^erent kinds as they are in England. To furnish such a frt^ nework is the limited aim of this paper, which is an expansion of a lecture delivered to friends. The voyage to England is now easy enough, barring that curious little malady which still defies medical science to trace its cause and is so capri- cious in its range, often taking the strong and leaving the weak. There is nothing to be said about the voyage. Only as we career over those wild waters in a vast floating hotel at the rate of five hundred miles a day let us pay a tribute to the brave hearts which first crossed them in mere boats without charts or science of navigation. In the marvellous strides which of late years humanity has taken nothing is more marvellous or more momentous than the unification of the world by the extinction of distance. Already we have made one harvest : we are fast making one mind and one heart for the world. As an old country, England perhaps is naturally regarded first from the historical point of view, and especially by us of whose history she is the scene, whose monuments and the graves of whose ancestors she holds in her keeping. It is an advantage which Canadians have over Americans that they have not broken with their history and cast off the influences, »e f . i ! I 2 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. at once exalting and sobering, which the record of a long and grand fore- time exerts upon the mind of a community. An American has no history Viofore the Revolution, which took place at the end of the last centu.y. In his parlance, '* Revolutionary " denotes that which is most ancient : it is to the American the equivalent for '* Norman." He says that the " Revolutionary " so and so was his ancestor, as an English nobleman would say that his ancestors came in with the Conquest. Looking at the subject historically, we have the England of the ancient Britons, Roman England, Saxon England, the England of the Middle Ages, the England of the Tudors, the England of the Stuarts, the England of Anne and the Goorges, all represented by their monuments. Of the primitive habits of the Britons we have monuments in hut circles of British villages still to be seen on Exmoor, where the wild stag finds a shelter, and on wolds and downs, near Whitby or Marlborough, where the traces of the primeval world have not yet been effaced by the plough. Of their wild tribal wars we have monuments in the numerous earthworks, once forts or places of refuge for the tribe, which crown many a hill and of which perhaps the largest and most striking is the triple rampart of '• Maiden Castle " on a hill near Dorchester. Of their dark and bloody superstition and of the blind submissiveness to priestly power still characteristic of the race, we have a monument in Abury, with its avenues of huge stones and the great circular earthwork from which, if the antiquaries are right, a dense ring of awe-struck worshippers gazed, per- haps by night, on the mystic forms of the priests moving among the sacri- ficial fires ; and another in Stonehenge, which seems almost certainly to have been a temple, and which though it may somewhat disappoint in size will not disappoint in weirdness, if you see it, as it should be seen, on a dark evening when it stands amidst a number of other primeval relics on the lonely expanse of Salisbury Plain. Of the taste and skill in decoration wherewith the Celtic race was more largely gifted than with any faculty or quality which helps to form the solid basis of civilization, we have proofs in the golden torques and other ornaments, found in barrows, of which the Celtic museum at Dublin displays a glittering array. Sepulchral bar- rows also abound, and are memorials at once of loyal reverence for chieftainship and of the early craving for posthumous fame. The interest of Celtic monuments and antiquities belongs not merely to the past. '11 CI t i4a UISTOUK.'AL HHITAIN. 8 rand fore- no history t centu.y. • ancient : 8 that the nobleman of the J of the larts, the lurnenta. ut circles iW staff borough, d by the umerous 'n many e triple 3ir dark y power with its hich, if ed, per- e sacri- .inly to in size 1, on a lies on •ration ilty or proofs which 1 bar- e for erest past. They are the records of a race which still lives, with much of its original character, both political and religious, in those parts of the two islands where the Celt found refugij in natural fastnesses from the sword of the Saxon con(iiiefor — in the hill country of Dtjvonshiro and Cornwall, in the Welsh mountains and the Highlands of Scotland, but above all in Ireland, where the weaker race was sheltered by the sea. The history of Englan I from one point of view may be regarded as a long ell'ort to impart the political s(!ntiments and institutions of the Anglo-Saxon to the nunnants of the Celtic population. In Cornwall and Devonshire and in the Highlands of Scotland this, thanks to the co-operation of Protestantism with Consti- tutionalirn, has been in large measure achieved : in Wales the work is less complete, the Welsh in the more mountainous districts retaining with the language much of the original character of their race. The Irish question, which is mainly on^ of race, is in all its perplexity still before us. Of the Roman Empire Britain was the remotest Western Province, the last won and the tirst lost, the one which imbibed least of the Roman civilization. The monuments of Roman occupation are proportionate in scale, and will not bear comparison with Verona, Aries, or Treves ; yet they wear the majestic impress of the Empire, which built as if it were eternal. Between the Solway and the Tyne are seen the massive remains of the great Roman wall, the western wing of a line of defences which guarded civilization against the inroads of barbarism from the Solway to the Euphrates. In different parts of the country may still be traced the Roman roads, which run straight and regardless of obstacles as the march of Roman ambition itself, and which extending over the whole of the world under Roman sway first united the nations by universal lines of communication. Many too of the Roman camps remain, distinguished by their regular form, as the camps of discipline, from the irregular earth- works of the Britons, and fancy may people them with the forms of the legionaries resting after their long march, or in the case of the standing camps (castra stativa), drilling and messing in their permanent quarters. At Richborough (Rutupise), which was the favourite landing-place, the Roman remains are very imposing. But the English Pompeii is Silchester (Callera ibrobatum), three miles from the Mortimer station of the railway between Reading and Basingstoke. The walls of the city have defied time and the destroyer : they stand almost intact ; but the city having been A TRIP TO ENGLAND. r J ? I probably Rtormed and burned by the barbarians, of the houses the base- ments alone remain, vith the hypocausts, or furnaces, which warmed the rooms, and which must have been sorely needed by the Italian under British skies. The lines of the streets, with the plan of the judgment-hall (prietorium) are plainly visible. Outside the. walls is the amphitheatre, in which no doubt the gay Roman otHcer, condemned to these remote and unfestive quarters, tried to indemnify himself for his loss of the Colosseum. The remains of villas with their tessolated pavements are found in different parts of England, proving that the country had been thoroughly subdued and that the Roman magnate could enjoy country life in safety. Inscrip- tions, coins, weapons, sepulchral urns, pottery, abound in the museums. In the museum at York is a touching antiquity — a tress of a Roman lady's hair. Of coins, 1 40,000 have been found at Richborough. Great quanti- ties are sometimes turned up by the spade or plough. The Roman retiring before barbarian invasion perhaps buried his hoard, thinking to come back for it, but came back no more. We look with interest on all the memorials of a race, which in so many ways, and above all as the founder of law, has stamped its image on humanity. But Britain, unlike Italy, France, and Spain, retained nothing of the Roman Province except its ruins. Her character and institutions, as well as her language, were those of a fresh race. The crypt of Ripon Minster was pronounced by that great antiquary, the late Mr. Henry Parker, the Church of the Saxon Apostle Wilfrid, and the earliest monument of Christianity in those parts. There are two church towers, in Saxon style, at Lincoln. There is Saxon work at West- minster, at Dover, and elsewhere. But the Saxon was not a great builder even of churches ; happily (or himself he was not at all a builder of castles. He thought not of magnificence but of comfort. Such art as he cultivated was rather that of the goldsmith or the embroiderer. Beautifully chased drinking cups and miracles of the needle were the trophies which William took to Normandy after the Conquest. Of Saxon tombs, burial urns, and weapons, however, there is good store. In the Ashmclean Museum, at Oxford, there is a gem which was found on the Isle of Athelney, where Alfred took refuge ; it bears the name of Alfred, and may have belonged to the hero. But the most important monument of the Anglo-Saxons is really the White Horse, cut in a chalk down of Berkshire, about the t t| tl cl t i 1 EN(JLAND IN THK .MIJ>I)LK AUIiS. 98 the base- »varmed tho iJan under gment-hall theatre, in eraote and ^oloaseum. n different y subdued In scrip, mnseums. »ian lady's at quanti- n retiring omo back nemorials ■ law, has *nce, and 18. Her lose of a itiquary, fn'd, and are two t West- builder castles. Itivated chased ^^illiam 18, and um, at where longed ons is It the' " cleaning " of which we have been told by Thomas Hughes. This is the trophy of a great victory gained by the Saxon over the Dane, by Chris- tianity over heathendouj, by the n oral civilization bound up with Chris- tianity over the moral barbarism uf its pagan enemies. It deserves homa<;e more than any Arc do Triomphe. At Pevensey is the beach on which the Norman Conqueror landed. The custle on the cliff of Hastings marks the spot where he first planted his standard. From that place it is easy to trace his lino of march till he saw Harold witii the English army facing him on the fatal hill of Senlac. The battle-fiekl is as well marked as that of Waterloo, and fancy can recall the charges of tbe Norman cavalry up the hillside against the solid formation and the shield wall of the Saxon precursors of our British infantry. The ruins of I'attle Abbey, the religious trophy of the Conqueror, are still .seen, ■' and the site of the high altar exactly marks the spot where tho fatal arrow ,« entering Harold's brain slew not only a king, but a kingdom, and marred the destiny of a race. Wo arc on the scene of one of the great catas- trophes of history. Had that arrow missed its mark, Anglo-Saxon institu- tions would have developed in their integrity, the Anglo-Saxon tongue would have perfected itself in its purity, Anglo-Norman aristocracy would never have been, or have left ity evil traces on society, the Tata! connection of England and France, and tho numerous French wars of the Plantagenets would have been blotted out of the book of fate. England now becomes for four centuries and a half a member of Coth- olio and feudal Europe, a partaker in Crusades and a tilting-ground of chivalry. The informing spirit of this period and the basis of its peculiar morality is the Catholic religion, having its centre in the Papacy, which triumphed over national independence with the Norman, by whom its sacred banner was borne at Hastings. Of media3val piety we have glorious monuments in the cathedrals and the great churches. Nothing so wonderful or beautiful has ever been built by man as these fanes of mediieval religion which still, surviving the faith and the civilization which reared them, soar above the din and smoke of modern life into purity and stillness. In religious impressiveness they far excel all the works of heathen art and all the classical temples of the Renaissance. Even in point of architectural skill they stand unrivalled, though they are the creations of an age before mechanical science. Their groined roofs appeal- still to 6 A Till I' TO KN(»I,AND. bufflo imitation. But wo do not fully comprehond tho marvnl, unloss we imagine tho cathedrals rising, as they did, out of towns which wore then little hotter than collections of hovels, with but small accumulation of wealth, and without what wo now d»'om the appliances of civilized life. Never did man's spiritual aspinitions soar so high above the realities of his worldly lot as when he built the cathedrals. But we must not look at the cathedrals or at the churches as a group without distinguishing the periods to which thoy severally belong and the momories of which they recall. There are four periods, marked by the successive! phases of tho Gothic style : the Normiin, which should rather be callod Romanesque than Gothic, with its round arch ; the Early English, with its pointed arch and windows without muUions ; the Decorated, with its mullinna and in- crease of ornament ; the Perpendicular, the linos of which correspond to its name, while the ornament, by its tondency to excess and wtjakness, denotes a period of decay. We see these styles often blondod togrbury is that strange memorial of the priestly ambition of the Middle Ag(?sand of the great conflict between Church and State, the shrine of Thomas li Beck«^t. In (Jant<}rl)ury is the tomb of the Black Prince, and ovnr it hangs the armour that speaks of Cre(;y and Poictiers. VVin- clif'ster also is full of history, and though it is wanting in sublimity of h'-ight, as the English cathedrals are generally cumpiired with their more Hoaring rasters in France, thern is somt^thing about it peculiarly impressive. In height and grandeur the palm is borne off by York ; in beauty and poetry by Lincoln. Norman Durham, " half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scot," is profoundly imposing from its massivenesH, which Heems enduring as the foundations of the earth, as well as from its com- manding situation. Ely is also a glorious pile, while its site has historical interest as the scene of the last stand made by the Saxon against the Nor- nian',Conqueror. Wells is lovely in itself, and it stands on a broad expanse of lawn surrounded by old ecclesiastical buildings which escaped the de- stroyer, and present a picture of old cathedral life. Wells and Salisbury are perhaps the two best specituens of the cathedral close, that haven of religious calm amidst this bustling world, in which a man tired of business and contentious life might delight, especially if he has a taste for books, to tind tranquillity, with quiet companionship, in his old age. Take your stand on the Close of Salisbury or Wells on a summer aftornoon when the congregation is tiling leisurely out from the service and the sounds are still heard from the cathedral, and you will experience a sensation not to be experienced in the New World. In thinking of the cathedrals we must not forget the old parish churiihes, legacies most of them of the Catholic Middle Ages, often very fine, and always speaking pleasantly to the heart, especially when they fill the air with the music of their Sabbath chimes or of their wedding bells. But among these, since the revival of Anglicanism, the Land of the restorer, or rather of the rebuilder, has been so busy that in some districts it is easier to find churches in an ancient style than an ancient church. It was no doubt right, from the point of view of religious feeling as well as iiv^^ that of taste, to remove the high-backed pews, the galleries which ruit ■ i J 8 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. \ I : I ^ the form of the church, the hideous monuments which defaced the chancel ; but these things, which an Englishman who has passed sixty remembers so well, had associations of which the work of Gilbert Scott or Butterfield, however correct as a reproduction of mediseval Gothic, is devoid. Perhaps no better representation of the old parish churca is to be fouad than the church of Iffley, which is close to Oxford, and is exceedingly interesting as a specimen of the Norman style. Iffley Churchyard, in which stands a yew tree that may have seen the Norman times, is also a good specimen of the peace of death which an old English churchyard presents, perhaps in a pleasanter, at all events in a more religious guise than these cemeteries of ours, with their posthumous rivalries of vanity in columns, pyramids, and obelisks, and their somewhat ghastly attempts to make the grave look pretty. In Iffley churchyard, as well a^ in any other, you may find a local habitation for thc^ thoughts of Gray's Elegy. The cathedral and the parish church belong to the present as well as to the past. Indeed, they have been recently exerting a peculiar influence over the present, for there can be no doubt that the spell of their beauty and their adaptation, as places of Catholic devotion, to the Ritualistic rather than to the Protestant form of worship have had a great effect in producing the Neo-Catholic reaction of the last half century. Creations of the relisious genius of the Middle Ages, they have been potent mission- aries of the mediaeval faith. But there is a part of MedisBval Catholicism which belongs entirely to the past, and the monuments of which present themselves only in the form of ruins. Asceticism and Monasticism were discarded by the Reformation. Nothing but the wrecks remain of the vast and beautiful abodes in which they dwelt. Of the monastic ruins the most perfect and interesting is Fountains Abbey, near Ripon, and on the estate of Lord Ripon, who, as a convert himself to Roman Catholicism, has exem- plified the lingering influence of what Macaulay calls •' an august and fascinating superstition." In romantic loveliness of situation the first place is claimed by Tintern on the Wye, the second by Rievaux or Bolton, both of which are in Yorkshire, a great land of monastic remains. The name of Tintern is dear and familiar to many who have never seen the ruin, but who well know the lines wnich inshrine the poetic philosophy of Wordsworth. The ruins of Glastonbury are also most interesting, not only on account of the grandeur which the fragments of the church bespeak, 1 ! npM '6 chance] ; lembers so ^utterfield, Perhaps than the 'resting as stands a "enofthe haps in a leteries of raids, and fave look id a local ^ell as to influence r beauty itualistio efiect in *tions of naisaion- fioJicism present 11 were he vast le most ' estate exem- pt and first 'olton, The a the hy of only leak, THE MONASTERIES. 9 ;^' and the sumptuous hospitality represented by the abbot's kitchen, but because, as the great master of all this lore, Professor Freeman, says ; *' The church of Glastonbury, founded by the Briton, honoured and enriched by the Englishman, is the one great religious foundation which lived through the storm of English Conquest, and in which Briton and Englishmen have au equal share." Here we are in the realm of Arthur, and may read with enhanced enjoyment the Idi/Is of the King. It is impossible not to be touched by these ruirs, or to forbear the protest of the heart against the ruthless destroyers d so much loveliness. But there is nothing except the architectural beautj to regret. The monasteries had done their appointed work during the iron times of feudalism and private war as places of refuge for the gentler spirits, as homes of such culture as there was, and centres of civilization. But the various orders to which they belonged, Benedictine, Cistercian, Franciscan, or Dominican, denote successive attempts to rise to an angelic life, each soon followed by the collapse of the wings of abstinence and contemplation on which the mortal strove to soar above his mortal state. At the time of the Reformation the spiritual character even of the least corrupt of the monastic houses had probably waxed very faint, while in some, it cannot be doubted, not only idleness and self-indulgence but the grossest vice had made their abode. Even the work of copying books and missal-painting, by which they had done good service to literature and minor art, was being superseded by printing. As a class, these houses had become the strongholds cf reaction- ary superstition, the ramparts of intolerance, and the great obstacles to the progress of humanity. They still offered hospitality to the wayfarer. They still fed the poor at their gates, und as we look upon the ruined portal arch we may see the weary traveller dismount and the bedesmen gather beside it. Their hospitality and their charity preserved their popularity in districts where, as in the north, inns were few, and in a time when public charity did not exist ; and the great northern insurrection, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, in which the abbots of Yorkshire monasteries took part, was probably as much a social movement against the destruction of the monasteries as a religious movement against doctrinal innovation. The nunneries seem, as might have been expected, to have preserved their purity and usefulness better than the monastic houses of a sex of which the passions were stronger and less easily tamed by monastic rule. Some [ ■l i 10 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. of them were still doing good service in the education of women. We may think of this as we stand among the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford, which possess a further interest as having witnessed the last days of Henry the Second's fair Rosamond, the legend of the labyrinth notwith- standing. With the ruins of Dominican and Franciscan Monasteries is connected the memory of the vast development at once of Asceticism, of Papal power, and of crusading orthodoxy, in the thirteenth century. The Dominican churches are in their form specially adapted for preaching, which was one of the great functions of the order, the other being, unhappily, the administration of the Inquisition. Attached to the Cathe- dral of Peterborough is a Benedictine cloister, which recalls to us very vividly the daily life of a monk, while the cathedral itself stands first perhaps among the cathedrals of the second class. At Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, in a romantic dell, is the monument of another and still more intense kind of Asceticism in the form of a hermitage, which deserves a visit. The spot has the additional attraction of being the scene of the story of Eugene Aram. Aram's erudite defence turned upon the point that a hermit, after his lonely life of mortification, was buried alone in his cell, so that the body alleged to be that of the murdered Clarke might in reality be that of the hermit. There is another hermitage at Wark- worth, near the ruins of the great castle. Those cells claim at least the tribute due to an experiment in perfection, however misdirected and abortive. Among the religious memorials of the Middle Ages are also to be num- bered the crosses to which the eye of mediseval piety was turned in the churchyard or the market place and by the wayside. Hardly any of them fc-^oaped ruthless mutilation when the tempest of popular wrath burst forth against an ancient faith which had degenerated into a hollow superstition. But a special homage is due to the " Eleanor's Crosses," of which the two best preserved will be found at Waltham and Northampton, and which are monuments raised to conjugal love, in the best period of Catholicism, by the noblest of kings and men. Feudalism, like Monasticiam, is a thing of the past, though it has left its traces on law and social organization. Its abodes, like those of Monastic- ism, are ruins. One here and there, like a knight exchanging his armour for the weeds of peace when war was over, has been softened and developed ! I i i •m ..'A^j«:lbJK^*Ki'bsai:3iML<:'<^^e^;i:j:yduA£jp^M We may ^oerj, near 'e last daj's p^ notwith- pasteries is cefcicism, of ^^^y- The preaching, [^er being, the Cathe- 'O us very tands first orough, in stiJI more deserves ne of the the point alone in ■ke might at Wark- least the 'ted and be num- d in the of them ■St forth "stition. he two lich are sm, by left its lastic- rmour sloped FEUDALISM AND ITS CASTLES. U into a palace or a mansion, as in the case of Warwick, the abode of the "Last of the Barons," of Alnwick, the fortress of the Percies, and that of the great keep of Windsor itself. In every part of the land, on heights and commanding points, shattered ruins mark the seat from which feudal lordship once looked down in its might and pride upon a land of serfs. Even the loftiness of the situation and the more bracing air must have helped to nourish in the Norman chief the sense of superiority to the peasants or burghers whose habitations cowered below. In their day these fortresses, the more important of them at least, were creations of military architecture, equal perhaps in its way to the ecclesiastical architecture which created the cathedrals. Owing his power, his security, his import- ance to the strength of his castle, and every day surveying it, the lord would be always occupying himself in perfecting his defences. To under- stand what a castle was, and how it was attacked and defended, it is necessary to read some work on military architecture, like that of VioUot Le Due, and thus to enable ourselves to restore in fancy not only the stone structure of which the fragments are before us, but the wooden platforms upon which the defenders fought. " Destroyed by Cromwell " is the usual epitaph of an English castle. But generally speaking, gunpowder and social progress were the combined powers before which the massy walls of the feudal Jericho fell down. Sometimes the castle ruins stand mute records of the past in the midst of some thriving city, and the castle hill, converted into a pleasure ground, forms the eveninfj lounge of the burghers whose forefathers its frowning battlements overawed. Evil memories haunt those dungeons, now laid open to the light of day, in which the captives of feudalism once pined. Berkeley rang with the shrieks of an agonizing king. Pomfret, too, saw a dethroned monarch meet the usual fate of the dethroned, and afterwards saw the hapless enemies of Richard III. pass to the tragic death which in the time of the Wars of the Rosks had become almost the common lot of nobility and ambition. With the very name of castle is connected the dreadful memory of the feudal anarchy in the time of King Stephen, when castles were multiplied, and each of them became the den and torture-house of some Front-de-Boeuf, with his band of marauding mercenaries, so that the cry of the people was that Christ and the saints slept. This is the dark side of the history which the ruins of castles recall. On the other hand, it should be remembered ii 12 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. H i. I that the lord of the feudal castle did after his fashion the necessary service of an iron time. If he oppressed the dwellers beneath his ramparts, he alao protected them against other oppressors. In the days before regular and centralized administration local lordship was in fact, in the rural districts at least, about the only possible instrument of social and political organization. By it alone could the rough justice of the times be meted out, or the forces of the community called forth for national or local defence. The life of a lord then was not one of sybaritism, but of very hard work. If he was good, as a certain proportion of the lords no doubt were, the tie between him and his vassals, though repugnant to the ideas of modern democracy, was not necessarily hateful or degrading : it has supplied congenial food for poetry and romance. Under a weak king like Stephen the castles were strongholds of anarchy, and Stephen's strong successor, when he demolished a great number of them, packed ofi the mercenaries who had manned them, and strictly enforced the law against unlicensed fortification, must have been blessed by all his people. But against a king who was too strong and aimed at absolute power the baronage was the rude champion and trustee of liberty. Had the royal mercenaries been able to sweep the kingdom without resistance, not law and order but the untempered sway of a despot's will would h^- e been the result. Nor ought it to be forgotten that rude and coarse as life in these castles was, in them took place a very happy change in the relations between the sexes and the character of domestic life. In the cities of antiquity the men lived together in public, while the women were shut up at home almost as in a harem. But in the castle the sexes lived constantly together, and the lord must have learned to find his daily happiness in the company of his lady. Thither, too, came the troubadour with his lays and the trouvere with his tales, thrice welcome when there was no newspaper, no salon, no theatre, and refined the minds of the inmates of the castle while they beguiled the weary hour. In the architecture of the castles, as in that of the cathedrals, there are successive phases which mark the changing times. A stern Norman keep, such as that of Rochester, recalls the days in which the conquered Saxon looked up with fear and hatred to the hold of the Conqueror. Gradually, as times grew milder, the Norman keep was softened through a series of modifications into the fortified mansion, such as Bodiam, in Sussex, built vVT"^"75v^^... i-i*'vyfei>': « Issary service ramparts, he \fore regular *he rural ^nd political P be meted lal or local >ut of verj ps no doubt *^e ideas "^S-- it has • ^ing like n's strong ed off the ^ against pie. But o^'^er the <^he royal I not law been the in these relations cities of shut up istantly 3 in the »ys and spaper, castle re are keep, ^axon aally, es of built OLD riTY WALLS. 13 by one of the couipanions-in-arms of Edward III., out of his winnings in the French wars. At last w:'■■ it: n A TRIP TO ENGLAND. softer and more refined. At many of th<} -windows in the dark old quad- rangle there are boxes of flowers, and from many rooms tlie sound of the piano is heard. It is perhaps at Oxford or Cambridge in the suramnr term, when the boat races and the cricket matches are going on, that English athleticism can best be seen. A gay and animating sight is a boat race, while a cricket match is apt to be tedious to the uninitiated. Athleticisia, in its present prominence, not to say its present extravagance, is a recent development, and finds a philosophical justification in the recently recognized importance of the physical basis of humanity. We have yet to see whether it will develop health as well as muscle, and force of character as well as force of body. Instead of increased force of character there has been of late in public life rather an ominous exhibition of levity and fatalism. After all, games and exercises carried beyond a certain measure, though they may not injure the body like some other indulgences, are but dissipations to the mind. Not to be omitted in taking even a birds'-eye view of England are the Public Schools. To define a Public School would perhaps be difficult. If you make size or importance the test, you cannot exclude Rugby or Chel- tenham. If you make antiquity the test, you can hardly include Harrow. But the three schools which play in the Public School cricket matches are, Eton, Winchester, and Harrow. Harrow has practically taken the place of Westminster, which was long the most famous of the group, and in the last century sent forth a long line of worthies, but has recently been depressed by the disadvantage of a situation less healthy than historic. It is at the Public School matches that the singular feeling connected with these institutions is displayed in its utmost intensity, and to attend one of them should therefore, if possible, be a part of the programme. Nowhere else in the world, probably, can a great crowd of the governing classes be seen in a state of wild excitement over a boys' game. The chief claim of Winches'^er to be one of the privileged three is perhaps antiquity, in which it excels all the rest, having been the school founded by the great mediaeval restorer of education, William of Wykehara, beneath the shadow of his own most venerable cathedral, to supply scholars to the college which he founded at Oxford. Eton and Harrow, but especially Eton, are the schools of the aristocracy, and their peculiar character is in fact that of THE GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS. 23 •'>?. 'I the class to which the boys belong. They are the special training-places of the English "gentleman." The strong point of the English gentleman is not hard work, nor is hard work the strong point of Eton or Harrow, though the system of instruction has been greatly improved of late, and it can no longer be said, as it might have been said fifty years ago, that the only things to be learned at Eton are a little Latin and Greek and a great deal of cricket and rowing. The strong points are the union of freedom with discipline and the generous character of the soc'al law which the boys uphold among themselves. Harrow is close to London, but there is nothing in the way of antiquities to see. Eton is within half-an-hour's run of London by rail, and may be taken in a day with Windsor ; and at Eton there is a great deal in the way of antiquities, as well as in that of educa- tional peculiarities, to be seen. The ancient quadrangle, with the great, gray chapel rising over it, and the statue of the Plantagenet founder in its centre, the green expanse of the playground shaded by stately elms stretch- ing beside it, and the castle palace of the English kings looking down on it from the other side of the Thames, is of all places of education about the most historic ; and history is worth something :n a place of education. The equipments of the great school room would hardly satisfy a school board in these days of progress ; but on its rough panels are to be seen names carved by boyish hands which afterwards became illustrious in the annals of England. Those who think of education only will go to Rugby, and pay their devotions at the shrine of Dr. Arnold. Of the British Monarchy the official and diplomatic seat is St. James', a dingy and shabby pile of brick, which by its meanness, compared with the Tuileries and Versailles, aptly symbolizes the relation of the power which built it to that of the Monarchy of Louis XEV. The power which built St. James' has however, by reason of its very feebleness, managed to prolong its existence ; while the power which built the Tuileries and Yer- sailles, having by its despotism provoked the revolutionary storm, has been laid with all its grandeurs in the dust. At St. James' are still held the Levees, But those rooms having been found too small for the prodigiously increasing crowd of ladies, foreign and colonial, who pant, by passing under the eye of Royalty, to obtain the baptism of fashion, the Drawing-Rooms are now held in Buckingham Palace. •' Exclusiveness " was pronounced by a Canadian professor of etiquette to be the characteristic charm of the i.-tfl i- iv'il 24 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. Queen's Drawina;- Rooms. But instead of being exclusive, a Drawing-Roon> will soon become a mob. Though the political sceptre has departed from British Royalty the social sceptre has not. Conscious apparently of its loss of political power, Royalty has of late retired into private residences, where the enthusiastic worshipper or the enterprising reporter can only reconnoitre it through the telescope. Here it leads a domestic life, goes picnicking, and records its picnics together with family occurrences in its diary. Even in death it seems inclined to separate itself from the monarchs who wore a real crown. It has its private mausoleum at Frogmore, apart from the tombs of the Kings in St. George's Chapel and at Westminster. The Hanoverians, moreover, have always remained a German family, with German habits, tastes, and friendships, as well as German connections. The modern town residence of Royalty, Buckingham Palace, is large with- out being magnificent and devoid of interest of any kind, historical or architectural. The edifice belongs to the Regency, and the Regent liked low ceilings. He who wants to see State apartments without stateliness may see them here. It is to the ancient seats of the Monarchy that the interest belongs. First among these must be named the Tower, built originally by the Conqueror to curb London, afterwards the fortress- palace of his descendants, and in the end the State prison, from which a long procession of the ill-starred great went forth to lay their heads on the block on Tower Hill ; while State murders, like those of Henry VI. and the two young sons of Edward IV., were done in the dark chambers of the Tower itself. Everybody knows Macaulay's passage on the graves in the chapel. The Bastille has been razed, the Tower has become a show, and in their respective fates they typify the contrast between French revolution and British progress. Of Westminster, the chief historic seat of the Monarchy in former days, nothing remains but that glorious hall, the name of which is more associated with justice than with Royalty, and the banqueting house at Whitehall, with its window of tragic memory. But of all the Royal palaces the noblest, the only one indeed worthy of the name, is Windsor, built in the times when the Kings of England were Kings indeed. It may well challenge compari- son with Versailles, so far as a creation of the Plantagenets can be com- pared with a creation of Louis XIV. It is disappointing to find how much of Windsor is the work of the restorer, and of a restorer who :si' WINDSOR CASTLE. 25 wrought before a real knowledge of mediseval architecture had been recovered. Still nothing can spoil the effect of such a pile on such a site^ The Round Tover has been raised, but still it is the Round Tower. The glory of St. George's Chapel is unimpaired, and above the stalls may be read the names of the first Knights of the Garter, the comrades in arms of Edward ITI. and the Black Prince. These heroic adventurers are now rather curiously represented by a set of elderly gentlemen in purple velvet cloaks and white satin tights, who chiefly prize the Garter, as one of them avowed, because it is the only thing nowadays that is not given by merit. In St. George's Hall, modernized though it is, imagination may assemble again the victors of Crecy and Poictiers, with their brave Queen and her ladies, holding festivals which were ennobled by the recollection of glorious toils. Long afterwards it was that the body of the illustrious successor of Edward was borne across the courts of Windsor amidst the falling snow,, and beneath the fierce glances of a revolutionary soldiery, without funeral pomp or requiem, to its nameless grave. Around the Castle still stretches the great Park, and not many years ago a leafle?s trunk in it was shown as Heme the Hunter's Oak. Between Windsor and Staines lies Runny- mede, where the camps of John and his Barons once faced each other, where it was decided that the British Monarchy should not bo despotic but constitutional, and in the rude but vigorous form of the great Charter the first of European constitutions was framed. Eltham, not far from London, was another seat of the Plantagenets and retains traces of its grandeur. Its memories are sad, since it saw the degraded dotage of Edward III. Hampton Court claims a visit. One of its quadrangles and its magnificent hall are the monuments of Wolsey's soaring ambition ; but with these is combined the little Versailles of Louis the Fourteenth's arch-enemy, William the Third, and the gardens laid out by Dutch William's taste, and now, in summer, gorgeous with such beds of flowers as Dutch William never beheld. Here Cromwell used to rest on the Sunday after his week of overwhelming care, and here, in quieter times^ the last sovereign of Charles' house, " Great Anne," used '• sometimes counsel to take and sometimes tea." The chestnuts in the neighbouring park of Bushey are the glory of English trees. Kensington and Kew, minor seats of Royalty, have their reminiscences and their anecdotes of the Court of George III. and Charlotte. m. 26 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. Si^ii ( X'* ') ♦' The British infantry," said the French General Foy, ** is the best ; fortunately there is very little of it." Of the cavalry there is still less. Sea-girt Britain owed the preservation of her political lilierties in no small measure to the absence of any necessity for a great standing army. Even now, when instead of being girt by any sea her members are scattered over the globe, and five-sixths of the population of her Empire are in Asia, her -standing army is a mere " thin red line " compared with the hosts of the great military Powers. Seventy thousand BriMsh soldiers hold India, with its two hundred and fifty millions of people. Of the Duke of Wellington's seventy thousand at Waterloo, not thirty thousand were British, and it is doubtful whether England has ever put more than thirty thousand men of her own on any fiel'': of battle. The stranger, therefore will see little of the military manifestations of power, or of the pride, pomp, and circum- stance of war. In St. James' Park he may see, and if he cares for the Old Flag, he will see not without proud and pensive emotion, the march of the Guards. Thirty years ago, had he been standing on that ispot, he might have seen the Guards march in with the majestic simplicity which marks the triumph of the true soldier, their uniforms and bearskins weather-stained by Crimean storms, and their colours torn with the shot of Alma and Inkerman. He may also see the array of Cuirassiers, supi rb and glittering, but a relic of the past ; for, since the improvement of the rifle, the Cuirassier, whose armour would be pierced like pasteboard, has become almost as useless as an elephant. These corps are also memorials of the times in which the army was an appanage of the aristocracy, who amused their youth with soldiering, went through no professional training, and as leaders of the troops in the field were, as Carlyle says, " valiant cocked hats upon a pole." Valiant the cocked hat, beyond question, was, as many a hillside stained with blood, and with the blood of the Guards not least, proved ; and as even Fontenoy, though a lost field, could bear witness. But Lord Cardwell and Lord Wolseley changed all this The British army is now, like the armies of the Continent, professional : it will henceforth bring science as well as valour into the field. Those who would see it manoeuvre must go to Aldershot. To Aldershot the visitor must go to see the regular army ; but by going to the Volunteer Review at Easter, wherever it may be held, or even to one of the district reviews, he may see the military spirit combined with i I THE ARMY Ar.D NAVY. 27 the patriotism of the country. What the volunteers are actually worth as a force in case of war it must be left to the professional soldier to deter- mine. They are good stuff, at all events, for an army, and some of the corps are well drilled. But the Volunteer movement may be safely pro- nounced the most wholesome that there has been in England for many a yi^ar. More than anything else on the social or political horizon it gives reason for hope that the destinies of the country will be determined in the last resort by the spirit which has made it great. The other and the stronger arm of England is to be seen at Portsmouth and Plymouth, unless you should be lucky enough to come in for a display of its full might at a naval review. But the British navy no longer appears in the guise of the great sailing ships which fifty years ago we used to see moving in their majesty and beauty over the waters of Plymouth Sound or of Spithead. The very name sailor is now, as regards the navy, almost an anachronism. Old Admiral Farrauut, when desired by his Government to transfer his flag from a wooden ship to a ironclad, replied, that he did not want to go to what the Revised Version calls Hades in a tea-kettle. To Hades in a tea-kettle, in case of a naval war, many a British seaman would now go. These wonderful machines, the latest offspring of the science of destruction, are fraught with fai more terrible thunders than the ships of Rodney and Nelson ; but the grandeur and romance of the navy are gone. What will be the result of a collision be- tween two of these monsters, with their armour, their colossal guns, and their torpedoes, who can undertake to say ? It is difficult to believe that the old qualities of the British tar, his aptitude for close fighting and for boarding, would preserve their ascendancy unimpaired. It is difficult also to believe that in these days of steam it would be as easy as once it was to guard the shores of the island against the sudden descent of an enemy. But these are the dread secrets of the future. Some of the men-of-w?.r of former days may still be seen laid up at the war ports ; and, no doubt, while her timbers can hold together, the Victors/ will be preserved, and we shall be allowed to see the spot on which Nelson fell. But the best memorial of the old British navy, perhaps, is Turner's picture of the Fighting Temeraire. Still Great Britain is an island. The maritime tastes of her people are strong ; and though steam yachts are coming in, at Cowes and on South- ki 28 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. ,i : M ■ '!:|t'p It ft ;;-i: ampton Water the beauty of the sailing vessel, though not the majesty of the lineof- battle ship under canvas, is yet to be seen. The immense debt of England to her sailors is not unworthily repre- sented by Greenwich Hospital, which is also a 6t monument of William and Mary. A monument it now is and nothing more. The veterans are no longer to be seen grouped in its courts on a summer day and talking about their battles and voyages. The rules of the institution galled them, ana they preferred to take their pensions, with homes of their own, though on the humblest scale. In describing almost any other land than England, notably in describing France, we should go first to its capital, as the centre of its life. But in England the centre of life is not in the capital, but in the country; hitherto at least this has been the case, though now, in England as elsewhere, there is an ominous set of population from the country to the city. Hitherto country society has been the best society, ownership of land in the country has been the great object of ambition, the country has been the chief seat of political power, and for that as well as for the social reason land has borne a fancy price. Every lawyer, physician, and man of business has looked forward after making his fortune in the city to ending his life in a country house ; every city mechanic has kept, if he could, some plant or bird to remind him of the country. A charm attaches in all our minds to the idea of English country life. The organization of that life, widely different from anything which exists on this continent, may be surveyed, in a certain sense, from the train. Everywhere in the rural districts as you shoot along your eye catches the tower or spire of the parish church, with the rectory adjoining, the hall of the squire, the homestead of the tenant farmer, and the labourer's cottage. The little dissenting chapel, which, steals away a few religious rustics from the parish church, and represents social as well as religious antagonism to the " squirearchy and hierarchy," hardly anywhere obtrudes itself on the view. The parish is the Unit ; it is thoroughly a unit so far as the common people are concerned, not only of rural administration but of society and gossip. Every one of its denizens knows everything about all the rest, and usually none of them knows much about the world outside. Any one who wished to lie hid could not choose a worse hiding-place than one of these apparently sequestered communities, in which not only no strange man but no strange dog could well escape ENGLISH COUNTRY LIFE. 29 notice for twenty-four hours. The parish is the unit, and the parish church is still the centre. Even those who go to the meeting-house to hear the Methodist preacher go to the church for christenings, marriages, and burials. The farmer, though no theologian, is a Churchman by habit ; he likes to meet his fellow-farmers at church on Sunday and to gossip with them after and before service ; not to do so seems to him unsocial. The clergyman is the parish almoner; by him or his wife, a personage who, if she is good and active, is second only to him in importance, charitable and philanthropic organizations are headed. When he plays his part well he is the general frier d and adviser, and his parsonage is the centre of the village civilization. Herbert's country parson is realized in his hfe. But the king of the little realm is the master of the hall, which is seen stand- ing in the lordly seclusion of its park. " The stately homes of England," is a phrase full of poetry to our ears, and the life of the dwellers in such homes, as fancy presents it, is the object of our envious admiration. Life in a home of beauty, with family portraits and memories, fair gardens, and ancestral trees, with useful and important occupations such as offer them- selves to the conscientious squire, yet without any of the dust and sweat of the vulgar working world, ought to be not only pleasant bub poetic ; and the '* Sumner Place " of Tennyson's Talking Oak, no doubt, has its charming counterpart in reality. But all depends on the voluntary per- formance of social duties, without which life in the loveliest and most historic of manor houses is merely sybaritism, aggravated by contrast with the opportunities and surroundings ; and unfortunately the voluntary per- formance of duty of any kind is not the thing to which human nature in any of us is most inclined. Not one man in a hundred, probably, will undergo real labour of an unambitious kind without the spur of need or ambition. The country gentlemen of England are seldom dissolute, the healthiness of their sports in itself is an antidote to filthy sensuality ; but many of them are sportsmen and nothing more. Their temper and the temper of all those around them is apt to be tried by a long frouo which suspends fox-hunting ; and they too often close a useless life by a peevish or morose old age. We have heard of one who, after riding all his life after the fox, ended his days alone in a great mansion with no solace when he was bedridden, but hearing his huntsman call over the hounds at his bedside ; and of another, who being paralyzed on one side could find no w. '':/''lJ it'r ii:: J h\ 30 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. M diversion for his declining years but preserving rabbits, which eat up no small portion of the produce of his estate, and going out to shoot them in a cart, seated on a .ausic-stool by turning on which he could manage to get his shot. Till lately, however, the squire at all events lived in his country- house among his tenants and people j even Squire Western did this and he thus retained his local influence and a certain amount of local popularity. But now the squire, infected by the general restlessness and thirst of plea- sure, has taken to living much in London or in the pleasure cities of the Continent. The tie between him and the village has thus been loosened, and in many cases entirely broken. The first Diike of Wellington, when- ever he could be spared from the Horse Guards and the House of Lords, used to come down to Strathfieldsaye, do his duty as a country gentleman, show hospitality to his neighbours, and go among his people ; his successor came down now and then to a battue, bringing his party with him from town. And now another blow, and one of the most fatal kind, is about to be struck at squirearchy by political reform. Hitherto the old feudal connection between land and local government has been so far retained that the chief landowners, as justices of the peace, have administered rural justice aad collectively managed the affairs of the county in Quarter Sessions. The justice, no doubt, has sometimes been very rural, especially in the case of the poacher, but the management has been good, and it has been entirely free from corruption. Government by the people would be the best if it were really government by the people ; unfortunately what it really is too often and tends everywhere to be, is government by the Boss. Quarter Sessions, however, are now, in deference to the tendencies of the age, to be replaced by elective councils, from which the small local poli- tician is pretty sure to oust the squire, who, thus left without local dignity or occupation, will have nothing but field sports to draw him to his country seat. Even of field sports the end may be near. Game-preserving will die unlamented by anybody but the game-preserver, for slaughtering barn-door pheasants is sorry work, imprisoning peasants for poaching is sorrier work still, and the temptation to poach is a serious source of rustic demoraliza- tion. Fox-hunting is manly as well as exciting, and overworked states- men or men of business say that they find it the best of all refreshments for the wearied brain ; but it is in great peril of being killed by high- FARMER JOHN BULL. .SI pressure farming, which will not allow crops to be ridden over or fences to be broken, combined with the growth of democratic sentiment. The farmer who rode with the hounds was a farmer sitting at an easy rent and with time as well as a horse to spare. So if any one cares to see a "meet" in front of a manor-house, with the gentlemen of the county in scarlet on their hunters, he had better lose no time. In seeing the meet^ he will see the country club ; for this is the great social as well as the great sporting gathering, and the gentleman in an English county who does not hunt must find his life somewhat lonely and dull. Rents have fallen immensely in consequence of the agricultural depres- sion, caused by the influx of American and Indian grain into the British market ; nor is there any prospect of better times. Mortgage debts are heavy, and the allowances to widows and younger brothers, which the system of primogeniture entails, have still to be paid. Thus the situation of the squire, and of the social structure which he crowns, is perilous. Will he bravely face it 1 Will he cut down his luxuries, learn agriculture,, become his own bailiff, give up game-preserving, and renounce idleness and pleasure-hunting, for a life of labour and duty 1 If he does, agricultural depression may prove to him a blessing in disguise. But it is too likely that instead of this, he will shut up the Hall and go away to the city, or perhaps to the Continent, there to live in reduced sybaritism on the remnant of his rents. The Hall will then either stand vacant, like the chateau after the Revolution, or pass, as not a few of them have already passed, with its ancestral portraits and memories, into the hands of the rich trader or the Jew, perhaps of the AmGrican millionaire, who finds better service and more enjoyment of wealth in the leas democratic world. A change is evidently at hand, for land can no longer support the three orders of agriculture, landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. If the Estab- lished Church is abolished, as in all likelihood it will be, and the rector departs as well as the squire, the revolution in the rural society of England will be complete. The bodily form of the British tenant farmer is known to us all from a hundred caricatures. It is he in fact who figures as John Bull. He is not very refined or highly educated ; sometimes perhaps he is not so well educBocd as the labourer who has been taught in the village school, for in thia respect, as possibly in some others, he rather falls between the stool ■^■-1 m 32 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. of genteel independence and that of dependence on the care of the State. Tennyson's Lincolnshire fanner is the portrait of the class as it exists or existed in Tennyson's boyhood in a county which, when it rebelled against Henry VIII., was graciously designated by His Majesty as *• the beastliest county in the whole kingdom ;" but the portrait only requires softening to make it pretty generally true. The British farmer is strongly conser- vative, in all senses, and if left to himself unimproving. Left to himself he would still be ploughing with four horses to his plough. To make him yield to the exigeacy of the time and give up his immemorial trade of wheat- growing for other kinds of production is very hard. Being so tenacious of old habit, he does not make the best of settlers in a new country. Nevertheless, he has managed to make the soil of his island, though not the most fertile, bear the largest harvests in the world. Ho is a man withal of solid worth. Politically he adheres to his landlord, who is also his social chief and his officer in the yeomanry. Between him and the labourer the social gulf has for some time past been widening. They have entirely ceased to sit at the same board, while the farmer's wife plays the piano, reads novels, and bears herself as a great lady towards the wife of the labourer. The antagonism was strongly accentuated by the " Revolt of the Field " under Joseph Arch. The farmer, however, met the revolt with a firmness from which a salutary lesson might have been drawn by public men whose nerves have been shattered by demagogism so that they have learned to regard every outcry as the voice of fate. A great change has come within two generations over the outward vesture of English country life. The old style of farming, with its primitive implements and antiquated ways, with its line of mowers and haymakers in the summer field, with the sound of its flail in the frosty air, and with many other sights and sounds which linger in the memory of one who was a boy in England half a century ago, has been passing away ; the new agriculture with machinery has been taking its place. Gone too, or fast going, is the clay cottage, with the thatched roof, which was the -characteristic abode of Hodge, the farm labourer, and the undermost in the three grades of the agricultural hierarchy. Improving and philan- thropic landlordism has now generally substituted the brick house, with slated roof, more civilized than the thatched cottage though not so pictu- resque, nor perhaps so comfortable, for the thatch was much warmer than n '<»; Tin-; KNOLISH LAHOURKIJ. tlie slate in winter and much cooler in summer. A corresponding change has been taking place in Hodge's lot. It was much need'jd. Within thoee picturesque cottages, even when they were covered with roses, too often dwelt not only penury but misery, together with the grossest ignorance, the uncleanness, physical and moral, which is the consequence of over- crowding, and the hardening of the heave which must ensue when parent and child cannot both be fed. The Union Workhouse, which with its grim hideousness deforms the rural landscape, was too often the symbol of Hodge's condition as well as the miserable haven of his toil-worn and rheumatic age. But now his wages have been raised, his dwelling and his habits have been improved, and the State has put him to school ; while the railroad has opened to him the labour market of the whole country, whereas, before, he was conHned to that of his parish, and was practically like the serf of old, bound to the soil, and forced to take whatever wages the farmer of his parish chose to give him. At last, in the grand Dutch auction of Party, political power has been thrust upon him, and he has suddenly become arbiter of the destinies not only of England but of two hundred and fifty millions of India, and of the destinies of other lands and peoples of which he never heard. It need hardly be said that he votes in total darkness, following as well as he can the voice which promises him '* three acres and a cow." Before the last general election those who knew him best were utterly unable to divine what he would do, though they thought that having failed to get the promised three acres and a cow from one party he would most likely try the other, as in fact he did. In his own sphere he deserves the highest respect. No man has done so hard a day's work as an English labourer ; no man has stood so indomitably as a soldier on the bloodstained hillside. I;" he has too much frequented the village ale-house, in his home he has been generally true and kind to " his old woman," as she has been to " her old man," and there has been a touching dignity in his resignation to his hard lot and in the mournful complacency with which he has looked forward to "a decent burial." He has, for the most part, kept out of the workhouse when he could. The mansions of the squires are not the only mansions which meet the traveller's eye. Almost on every pleasant spot, especially near London, you see handsome dwellings, many of them newly built, the offspring of the wealth which aince the installation of Free Trade has been advancing 'i \ M 34 A TUIP TO ENCJLAND. '* by leaps and boundH." Not a few of those are very large and magnifi- cent. The architecture of those recently built challenges attention and generally marks the reversion of taste to the old English style. But the general aspect is rather that of luxury than that of statelint^ss, in which these mansions of the now aristocracy of woalth certainly fall below those of the Tudor ago. The details may be studied and correct, but the mass is not imposing and the front is seldom tine. Even Eaton, the newly-built palace of the Duke of Westminster, though vast and sumptuous, lacks a ;grand fac^ade. People who lived in England half a century ago remember the old -country town, as it is depicted in Miss Mitford's IMfoi'd Regis, with its remuivut of timbered and gabled hou-ies and its unnvstored church. They remember the quiet that reigned in its streets, except on market day, or at tlie time of the annual fair, which, with its wandering mer- chants and showmen, told of the commercial habits of the Middle Ages. They remember the equipages of the county magnates drawn up at the prini'ipal haberdashery store. They remembur the Tory and mod.irately corrupt town council, the orthodox and somewhat drowsy parson, the banker or man of business going placidly on with his one post a day and no telegraph or telephone, the old-fashioned phy.sician driving about in his chariot to give his patient the satisfciction of '* dying regularly by the Faculty," thn retired admiral whose fast frigate had made his fortune in the great war, the retired general who had served under Wellington, the retired East Indian, the dowager who dwelt in a solid-looking mansion, surrounded by shade trees, in the outskirts. Those people hardly ever left home j they knew repose, which is now a lost art ; the workers among them enjoyed their holiday in leisure, not in travelling as far as they could by rail. They were very social too, though not in the most intellectual way. The same town now has become a railroad centre ; it has trebled its size ; its old buildings have been pulled down ; its crooked streets have been made straight by local improvement ; its churches have been restored past recognition ; it throbs and whizzes with progress j its society is no longer stationary and quiet, but emigrating and restless ; and next door neighbours know nothing of each other. Not all our material improve- ments are, at least in their present stage, equally improvements of our social state ; nor have all the " leaps and bounds " of English wealth been i THE COUNTIIV ToVVN. 35 leapH and bounds of happinf^ss. In houu^ of thn old towns in very rural diHtricts which coaiuu'roc has pusstvl l»y, the ancifuit tranquillity roi;»n8, few new houaeH are built, and p««oph' still know their neighbours. But those sanctuaries of dull happiness are mere accidents. Perhaps there will some day be a subsidence after the f >rment of invention and progress, a less eager and unsatisfied race will enter into the herita;^i> of thtise labours, and the art of repose will be recovered. If the old life of the rural parish and the country town in England is doomt'd, its departure will put an cud to not a fow tics and relations which had their value and their charius so long as people did tlicir duty. So thought the writer of these pages as from the top of a cathedral he looked down over the little town, witlj old mansions on its outskirts, to the country, witii its halls and farm houses and cottages lieyond, and saw in a tield beneath him the volunteers drilling under the command of the local gentltnnen. But change is the law, and the future no doubt has better things in store. Only let us reuunnber that movement is not pro- gress, unless it tends to happiness. England has no Alps, no Rocky Mountains, no Xiai^ara, no very grand or romantic scenery. The English lakes are charming in their quiet way ; perhaps the quietest of them, such as Grasmere, charm more than those which, by their bolder scenery, make higlier claims on our admiration. The mountain district of North Wales well repays a visit : Snowdon, though its height is not Alpine, is in form a genuine mountain, and the road from Barmouth to Dolgelly, under Oader Idris, is about the most beautiful thing in the island. If the excursion is extended to Scotland when the purple heather is in bloom, hills and lakes will be seen which in brilliancy of colouring at least vie with any lakes and hills in the world. For the English lakes Wordsworth has given us not only a poetic but a spiritual handbook, while we see the Sootch Highlands in the company of Walter Scott, who imparts a sense of enjoyment as fresh as Highland air. Killarney is famed above all its rivals, Scotch or English, and almost the \vhole of the coast of Ireland is as tine as the interior is unattractive. The island has been compared to an ugly picture set in a beautiful frame. Beautiful above all is the western coast of Ireland, with its purple mountains and the long inlets, into which the Atlantic rolls. The coast scenery of Cornwall and Devonshire, too, is very lovely, while ics 36 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. interest is enhanced by quaint old villages, such as Clovelly and Pol- perro, perched on rocky eyries or nestling in deep *' combes," with which are linked memories of maritime adventure, of daring warfare with the Armada, of buccaneering forays on the Spanish Main, or of the hardly less daring though less honourable feats of the smugglers in later days. From those shores, too, sailed the adventurers who explored the New World and linked it to the Old. The rocky amphitheatres of the nortli- eastern coast are magnificent when the waves of the German Ocean climb them in a storm. But the characteristic beauty of England, the beauty in which she has no rival, is of a kind of which mention is fit- tingly made after a description of her rural society and lite. It is the beauty of a land which combines the highest cultivation with sylvan greenness, of an ancient land and a land of lovely homes. The eastern counties are flat and tame. But elsewhere the country is rolling, and from every rising ground the eye ranges over a landscape of extraordi- nary richness and extraordinary finish. The finish, which is the product of immense wealth laid out on a small area, is perhaps more striking than anything else to the stranger who comes from a raw land of promise. Trees being left in the hedgerows as well as in the parks and pleasure grounds and in the copses, which serve as covers for game, the general appear- ance is that of woodland, though every rood of the land is under the highest tillage. Gray church towers, hamlets, mansions, homesteads, cottages, showing themselves everywhere, fill the landscape with human interest. There is many a more picturesque, there is no lovelier, land than Old England, and a gteat body of essentially English poetry from Cowper to Tennyson attests at once the unique character and the potency of the cbarm. The sweetest season is spring, when the landscape is most intensely green, when the May is in bloom in all the hedges, and the air is full of its fragrance, when the meadows ar full of cowslips, the banks of prim- roses and violets, the woods of the wild hyacinth. Then you feel the joy- ous spirit that breathes through certain idyllic passages of Shakespeare. To appreciate English sceneiy a carriage tour is indispensable, for the rail- roads do not follow the lines of beauty. After seeing Stratford-on-Avon, Coventry and Warwick, you may take a carriage to Banbury, passing by Compton Vineyard, one of the most curious of the ancient manor houses, and making your way to Edgehill, where the first encounter took place THE ENGLISH CLIMATE. 37 between Charles and the Parliamentary Army, and where a clump of trees waves over the grave of many an Englishman who died for England's right. The way leads along the edge of the great central plateau of Eng- land, from which you look down upon as rich a champaign as a painter ever drew. From Banbury you may take the train to Oxford and Blen- heim, or you may take the train to Henley, and from Henley go down the Thames in a boat to Windsor The tract of river scene from Henley to Maideahead, just above Windsor, is about the best in England, and the view of Windsor as you approach it on the water is the finest. The land- scape on which you look down from the singular ridge of Malvern is not less rich than that on which you look down from Edgehill, and at Malvern you have the view both ways. But anywhere in the rural districts, except in the eastern counties, you are sure of finding a landscape which delights the heart. Look on the picture while you may. When democratic agrarianism shall have passed its equalizing plough over all those parks and groves, there may be an improvement in material conditions, but the landscape will enchant no more. Her perpetual greenness England owes to her much maligned climate. The rain falls not in a three days' storm or a watsr-spout, but in frequent showers throughout the year. On the Western coast, which receives the clouds from the Atlantic, the climate is wet. But the rainfall elsewhere is not extraordinary. England is in the latitude of Labrador. She owes the comparative mildness of her climate to the Gulf Stream and other oceanic influences, the range of which is limited, oo that there are in fact several climates in the island. In the south, tender evergreens flourish and the fig ripens. In the south-west, on the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the Gulf Stream warms the air, the myrtle flourishes and flowers are seen at Chinstmas. In the North, on the other hand, the winter i^ very sharp, and the Flora is much more limited. Americans, who cannot bear to think that there is anything bad in their country with- out comforting themselves with the reflection that there is something worse in England, generally, on a disagreeable day, salute you with the remark, •' This is something li!; e English weather ! " They can show no weather finer than an English summer evening drawn out into a long twilight. The London fogs are hideous and dangerous, but they are not the climate of England ; they are the coal-smoke of five millions of people. 38 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. From the praises of English scenery and of the outward aspect of Eng lish life must be emphatically excepted the manufacturing districts. Than these, perhaps, earth hardly holds anything less attractive. It is easy to understand that to the soul of the Ruskinite the sight must be torture, though the Ruskinite wears the cloth, uses the hardware, and, when he travels, is drawn by engines made here over rails produced by these forges. The heart of the hideousness is the Black Country of Staffordshire, round Wolverhampton, where not only is the scene by day ** black " in the highest degree and in every sense of the term, but the night flares with dismal tires, while the clank of the forges completes the resemblance to Pandemonium. The dark realm extends with varying shades of darkness over a great part of the North Midland counties. Once these were pleasant dales, down which coursed bright streams. The streams, in fact, by the water power which they afforded, first drew manufactures to the district. Here and there in the outskirts of a manufactiiring town an old manor house will still be found standing as a witness to the days of clear skies, fresh air, and untainted waters. Where, in those days, the hunter ranged and the falcon flew, the populatioi is now so dense that the whole district seems one vast city. Behold the greatest marvels which earth has to show in the way of machinery, mechanical skill, and industrial organization. Pay the homage due to the mighty power of production and gratefully acknowledge the vast addition which it has made to human wealth and comfort. Embrace in your view the possibilities of a future economy of labour, such as may, in the times to come, bring the toilers increase of leisure, enjoyment, and civilization. Judge for yourself at the same time from the aspect of the people and their habitations whether a great extension of factory life on its present footing is an unmixed blessing to a nation, and whether on the whole those nations are not the happiest for which the manufacturing is done by others. The employment of women in factories and the effect of this upon the women themselves, the health of offspring, and the home are especially worthy of attention. Whether life is worth living is a question which seems likely to present itself with no ordinary force to one who toils in a cotton mill or foundry, and dwells in one of those dismal rows of dingy cottages beneath a constant pall of smoke. The ordinary workman sees at all events the completed work of his own hands and may have more or less of satisfaction in its completion. If it INDUSTRIAL ENGLAND. 39 is well done he may have real joy in its excellence. A factory hand sees nothing but that particular part of the process which forms the unvarying work of his own day ; he is little more than a human hammer or spindle, and ranks not with the artisan, much less with the artist, but with the almost automatic machine. He may well be pardoned if his tastes are not high, and if he indemnifies himself after his dull toil by spending his wages in animal indulgence. The scene can hardly be viewed with entire satisfaction by any one but a millionaire whose wealth is advancing by leaps and bounds. The separation of the class of employers from that of the employed is a bad feature in the social organization of these communities. The millionaire no longer lives besides his mill ; naturally enough, he prefers purer air : the day's business over, he drives off to his villa in the suburbs and his hands can know him only as a master. If they walk out into the suburbs on Sunday they see his mansion, tell each other that it is the produce of their labour of which they have been defrauded, and become ripe for Socialism and strikes. A noble attempt was made by the late Sir Titus Salt to organize factory life on a happier footing, to render it brighter, healthier, cleaner, and to place within the reach of the people the means of culture and enjoyment, Saltaire, near Bradford, his model manufacturing community, is well worth a visit. On the whole, the benevolence which created and sustains it seems to be rewarded, though here, as at Pullman, the American counterpart of Saltaire, there are di£:culties to contend with in the somewhat stiff"- necked independence of the people, by which the patience of philanthropy is apt to be sorely tried. In the time of Charles I. when manufactures were only in the germ, and when feudal relations and sentiments still lingered in the north, these districts were the special seat of Loyal ism. They are now the special seat of Radicalism. National sentiment is not strong among the factory hands. They think more of the Trade Union than of the country. The region is politically not so much a part of Old England, as of the world's labour market. Whatever influence it may be destined to exert on the future development of humanity, it has little connection with the historic greatness of the nation. The chief danger to the greatness of the nation in truth arises from the influence of the factory hands in alliance with other ultra-democratic and unpatriotic elements of the electorate. Muni- cipal spirit is however strong, and municipal organization is carried to a III >''fl 40 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. high perfection. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain's Birmingham is a model muni- cipality in its way, though its way is rather that of the *' authoritative Radical " than that of Liberals and Reformers of the old school who had *' liberty and property " for their watchword. So much wealth could hardly fail, where there was any feeling for 'beauty or local pride, to embody itself in some forms of magnificence. The new City Hall and other public buildings in the great manufacturing cities of the North of England vie in sumptuousness at least with the edifices of Ghent and Antwerp, though the atmosphere laden with smoke is a cruel drawback to architectural beauty. Nor are the great warehouses of Manchester, which is the chief centre of distribution, without an austere grandeur of their own. The mansions of the chiefs of these vast armies of industry in the outskirts of the cities are often very handsome, and their owners are not seldom munificent patrons of art. Manchester is famous not only for her bales but for Art Exhibitions. It is with less n ixed feelings that the visitor's attention is called to the wonders of the Liverpool docks, and of the mercantile marine of England. In all the world of labour there is nothing sounder, stronger, braver than the British seaman. It is to be feared that few lives in the world of labour are harder than is his upon the wintry seas. He is the very sinew of the country as well as the greatest producer of its wealth, and his quali- ties are a main source of what is noblest in the national character. Unliappily, while all the factory hands vote, the seamen cannot vote; thus the least national and patriotic part of the people exercises its full influence in determining the destinies of the country, while the most national and patriotic exercises no influence at all. Fancy mail coaches still run. But the genuine mail coach lives now only in old prints, or in those pen-pictures of Dickens, which are the most admirable descriptions of everything that met the eyes of Sam Weller fifty years ago, while in their contrast with all that now exists they mark the rapidity of change, for the subjects of some of them belong as com- pletely to the past as the coats and cravats of the Regency. The outside of a mail coach was pleasant enough on a fine day ; it was not so pleasant in rain, with the umbrella of the passenger on the seat behind you dripping down your back, or when you had to sit upright all night afraid of sleeping lest you should fall ofi". Moreover you were very liable to be upset, in RAILWAV TRAVEL. 41 which case, as the luggage piled on the coachtop was apt to fall upon you, the carnage among the outsiders was often considerable. The British rail- road, like every thing else in England, is finished to perfection, and on such a line as the Great Western, which bespeaks the lavish genius of Brunei, you travel at the greatest attainable speed with the most perfect safety. The service is altogether excellent, and democracy has not yet found its way into the manners of the guards and porters. As a set- off there is a good deal of feeing. In England generally indeed, you are too often called upon to grease the wheels of life in this way. The Canadian or Ame- rican will remark differences between the English railway fashions and ours. The carriages, instead of being long and undivided, so as to seat fifty or sixty people, are divided into bodies, the bodies in the first-class seating only six or eight, and those which seat eight being sometimes divided again into two compartments. The arrangement of the carriages may be in part a survival of the structure of the mail coach, but it has probably been also in part determined by the structure of society. Aris- tocracy delights in privacy and seclusion. " You would reduce a gentle- man " was the answer of one of that class, when asked to come into public life, " to the level of a king or a grocer." Among the gentry of former days it was against caste to travel in a public conveyance. Antipathy to such vulgarization entered largely into the hatred of railroads, expressed by that comic troubadour of aristocracy, Theodore Hook. There were persons of quality who lived far into the railroad days, yet never entered a railway carriage : they persisted in posting laboriously in their own carriages along the line of a railway. At first the fashion was to have your own carriage strapped on a truck behind the train ; a process which required you to be at the station an hour before the train started, while if the strapping was not tight, the consequence was a motion of the carriage which made you sick. A body or a compartment which you can engage for your own party is the last remnant of the cherished privacy. The absence of the system of checking baggage is to be accounted for partly by the multiplicity of branch lines, which would make the process very difficult ; but another cause probably is that members of the governing class travel with valets and maids who save them the trouble of looking after their baggage. Looking after baggage on an English railway is no inconsiderable item in those cares of travelling which, when recreation for the weary brain is Ml..! I 42 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. sought not in rest but in locomotion, sometimes worry almost as much as the cares of business. Your baggage is labelled with your destination. On some lines it is also labelled with the initial letter of your name, and on arrival at a terminus the pieces are distributed according to the letters : whence it came to pass that an ecclesiastical dignitary, whose name began with L, had to lodge a complaint before the Board against a porter, who when he asked for his baggage had told him to go to " Hell ! " There are sleeping cars on one or two of the longest trunk lines ; but in general there is no need of sleeping cars. The wealth and power of England lie in a very small compass. We have all heard of the American who when sojourning in the Island abstained from going out at night ** for fearing of fallinc off." "This is a great country, sir," cannot be said by an English- man, whatever his pride may whisper about the greatness of his nation. With the mail coach and the posting system has departed the Old English Inn, wherein a traveller in Johnson's time took his pleasure, and the comforts of which occupy a prominent place in the philosophy of life according to Dickens. About your only chance of enjoying that happiness, which consists in being welcomed after a cold journey by a smiling landlady and warming your slippered feet before a bright fire in a cosy private room, while your neatly dressed dinner is being set upon the table, depends upon your lighting upon one of those country inns to which sportsmen still resort for the hunting or fishing season. Hotels in the great cities of England are not what they are in the United States, where genius is devoted to hotel- keeping which might make a great statesman or general. People in England do not board in hotels. That undomestic habit is largely a consequence of the servant difficulty, which, in lands where no one likes to call anybody master or mistress, often makes housekeeping purgatorial. In England as well as here the difficulty exists, but not in so desperate a form. The old-fashioned English household, consisting of servants who attached themselves to the family for life, identified themselves with its interests, and felt a pride in its consequence, is now a memory of the past, or lingers as a reality only in some very sequestered country house with a very good master of the old school. Servants are educated : they write letters and correspond with the world without, which in more primitive days they did not, and they share the general restlessness by which society is pervaded. Moreover the migratory habits of the employers render the THE METROPOLIS. 43 maintenance of settled households very difficult, and therefore preclude strong attachments. But the democratic idea, which is the chief source of the trouble, and seems likely even to prove fatal in the end to the relation altogether, has not yet thorougLly penetrated the English kitchen and servants' hall. There is not the same strong preference for the " independence " of factory life, nor are things come to such a pass that your cook takes herself off without notice, perhaps on the morning of a dinner-party, and leaves you to get your dinner cooked as you may. Among the marvels of England may certainly be counted the vastneas and complexity of the railway system, which will be impressed upon your mind by standing on the platform, say at Clapham Junction, and watch- ing the multiplicity of trains rushing in different directions. Withal, the punctuality, regularity, and freedom from accidents are wonderful y and they depend, be it remembered, on the strict and faithful performance of duty by every man among many thousands, not taken from the class in which the sense of honour is supposed to have its peculiar seat, who are tried by exposure to the roughest weather, and to all the tempta- tions of intemperance which arise from fatigue and cold combined. A moment of inattention on the part of a weary pointsman or an extra glass of grog taken on a bitter winter's night would be followed by wreck and massacre. Carlyle, spinning along in perfecc safety at the rate of forty or even sixty miles an hour, among all those intersecting roads and through numberless possibilities of collision, might surely have inferred, if the mind of the arch-cynic had been open to a genial inference, that the Present was not so much more anarchical than the Past as the author of Fast and Present had assumed. In the railway army, at all events, a discipline prevails not inferior to that which prevailed in the army of Frederick, while the railway army is not recruited by crimping or held to its duty by the lash. There is anarchy now, no doubt, and there is roguery in trade and industry ; but there was at least as much of both in the days of Abbot Sampson as Abbot Sampson's own history proved. To turn to London. The huge city perhaps never impressed the imagination more than when approaching it by night on the top of a coach you saw its numberless lights flaring, as Tennyson says " like a dreary dawn." The most impressive approach is now by the river through the infinitude of docks, quays, and shipping. London is not a city, but a. hii t'y' I lit m f' 44 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. province of brick and stone. Hardly even from the top of St. Paul's or of th»! Monument can anything like a view of the city as a whole be obtained. It is indispensable, however, to make one or the other of those ascents when a clear day can be found, not so much because the view is tine, as because you will get a sensation of vastness and multitude not easily to be for- gotten. There is, or was not long ago, a point on the ridge which connects Hampstead with Highgate from which, as you looked over London to the Surrey Hills beyond, the modern Babylon presented something like the aspect of a city. The ancient Babylon may have vied with London in circumference, but the greater part of its area was occupied by open spaces ; the modern Babylon is a dense mass of humanity. London with its suburbs has five millions of inhabitants, and still it grows. It grows through the passion which seems to be seizing mankind everywhere, on this continent as well as in Europe, for emigration from the country into the town, not only as the centre of wealth and employment but as the centre of excitement, and, as the people fondly fancy, of enjoyment. It grows also by immigration from other countries : the immigration of Germans is large enough to oust the natives from many employments, especially clerkships, and is breeding jealousy on that account. Worst of all, London is said within a recent period to have received many thousands of Polish Jews. What municipal government can l^e expected to contend successfully against such an influx, added to all the distress and evil with which every ^ reat capital in itself abounds 1 The Empire and the commercial relations c'' England draw representatives of trading communities or subject races from all parts of the globe, and the faces and costumes of the Hindoo, the Parsi, the Lascar, and the ubiquitous Chinaman, mingle in the motley crowd with the merchants of Europe and America. The streets of London are, in this respect, to the modern what the great Place of Tyre must hav j oeen to the ancient world. But pile Carthage on Tyre, Venice on Carthage, Amsterdam on Venice, and you will not make the equal, or anything near the equal, of London. Here is the great mart of the world, to which the best and richest prodncts are brought from every land and clime, so that if you have put money in your purse you may command every object of utility or fancy which grows or is made anywhere without going beyond the circuit of the great cosmopolitan city. Parisian, German, Russian, Hindoo, Japanese, Chinese industry is as much at your service here, if LONDON A HUMAN HIVE. you have the all-compelling talisman in your pocket, as in Taris, BtTlin, St. Petersburg, Benares, Yokohama or Pekin. That London is the great distributing centre of the world is shown by the fleets of thr carrying trade of which the countless masts rise along her wharves and in her dock.". She is alsc the bank of the world. But we are reminded of the vicissitudes of com- merce and the precarious tenure by which its empire is held when we consider that the bank of the world in the middle of the last century was Amsterdam. The first and perhaps the greatest marvel of London is the commissariat. How can the ^ve millions be regularly supplied with food, and everything needful to life, even with such things as milk and those kinds of fruit which can hardly be left beyond a day ] Here again we see reason for excepting to the sweeping jeremiada of cynicism, and concluding that though there may be fraud and scamping in the industrial world, genuine production, faithful service, disciplined energy, and skill in organization cannot wholly have departed from the earth. London is not only well fed, but well supplied with water and well drained. Vast and densely peopled as it is, it is a healthy city. Yet the 'i.nit of practicable extension eeeras to be nearly reached. It becomes a question how the increasing multitude shall be supplied not only with food and water but with air. There is something very impressive in the ro;ir of the vast city. It is the sound of a Niagara of human life. It ceases not except during the hour or two before dawn, when the last carriages have rolled away from the balls and the market carts have hardly began to come in. Only in returning from a very late ball is the visitor likely to have a chance of seeing what Wordsworth saw from Westminster Bridge : Earth has not anythintf to show more fair : Dull would he be of soul who coulil pass by A sight so touching in its majesty : This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty jt the morning ; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky ; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill ; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep ! The river glideth at his own sweet will : Dear God ! the very houses seem asleep ; And all that mighty heart is lying still ! i n 46 A TRIP TO ENGLAND. ■!«•;; . I.' Evftrybo