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The Tiber and the Thames. 
 
THE TIBER 
 
 AXD 
 
 THE THAMES 
 
 Their Associations, Past and Present. 
 
 WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 V 
 
 W„ 
 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, bj 
 
 J. 1?. 1 IPPINCOTT & CO . 
 In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, .-.: Washington. 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 OF CONGRESS 
 
 WASHINGTON 
 
 
 ?C 
 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 
 i 
 
 TWO PAPERS. — I. 
 
 
 NEAR THE SOURCE OF "HE TIBER. 
 
 ECCE TIBERIM !" cried the Ro- 
 man legions when they first be- 
 held the Scottish Tay. What power of 
 association could have made them see 
 in the clear and shallow stream the like- 
 ness of their tawny Tiber, with his full- 
 flowing waters sweeping down to the sea ? 
 Perhaps those soldiers under whose mail- 
 ed and rugged, breasts lay so tender a 
 thought of home came from the norther- 
 ly region among the Apennines, where 
 a little bubbling mountain-brook is the 
 first form in which the storied Tiber 
 greets the light of day. One who has 
 made a pilgrimage from its mouth to its 
 source thus describes the spot : "An old 
 man undertook to be our guide. By the 
 side of the little stream, which here con- 
 stitutes the first vein of the Tiber, we 
 penetrated the wood. It was an im- 
 mense beech-forest. . . . The trees were 
 almost all great gnarled veterans who 
 had borne the snows of many winters : 
 
 now they stood basking above their 
 blackened shadows in the blazing sun- 
 shine. The little stream tumbled from 
 ledge to ledge of splintered rock, some- 
 times creeping into a hazel thicket, green 
 with long ferns and soft moss, and then 
 leaping once more merrily into the sun- 
 light. Presently it split into numerous 
 little rills. We followed the longest of 
 these. It led us to a carpet of smooth 
 green turf amidst an opening in the trees; 
 and there, bubbling out of the green sod, 
 embroidered with white strawberry-blos- 
 soms, the delicate blue of the crane'sbill 
 and dwarf willow-herb, a copious little 
 stream arose. Here the old man paused, 
 and resting upon his staff, raised his age- 
 dimmed eyes, and pointing to the gush- 
 ing water, said, 'E questo si chiama il 
 Tevere a Roma /' (' And this is called 
 the Tiber at Rome!') . . . We followed 
 the stream from the spot where it issued 
 out of the beech-forest, over barren spurs 
 
 5 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 of the mountains crested with fringes of 
 dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate 
 valley, shut in by dim and misty blue 
 peaks. Then we entered the portals of 
 a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees 
 everywhere around us and impenetrable 
 foliage above our heads, the deep silence 
 only broken by fitful songs of birds. To 
 this succeeded a blank district of barren 
 shale cleft into great gullies by many a 
 wintry torrent. Presently we found our- 
 selves at an enormous height above the 
 river, on the ledge of a precipice which 
 shot down almost perpendicularly on one 
 side to the bed of the stream. ... A lit- 
 tle past this place we came upon a very 
 singular and picturesque spot. It was 
 an elevated rock shut within a deep dim 
 gorge, about which the river twisted, al- 
 most running round it. Upon this rock 
 were built a few gloomy-looking houses 
 and a quaint, old-world mill. It was 
 reached from the hither side by a wide- 
 ly-spanning one-arched bridge. It was 
 called Val Savignone."* Beyond this, 
 
 at a small village called Balsciano, the 
 hills begin to subside into gentler slopes, 
 which gradually merge in the plain at 
 the little town of Pieve San Stefano. 
 
 Thus far the infant stream has no his- 
 tory : its legends and chronicles do not 
 begin so early. But a few miles farther, 
 on a tiny branch called the Singerna, are 
 the vestiges of what was once a place of 
 some importance — Caprese, where Mi- 
 chael Angelo was born exactly four hun- 
 dred years ago. His father was for a 
 twelvemonth governor of this place and 
 Chiusi, five miles off (not Lars Porsen- 
 na's Clusium, which is to the south, but 
 Clusium Novum), and brought his wife 
 with him to inhabit the pahxzzo commu- 
 nale. During his regency the painter 
 of the "Last Judgment," the sculptor of 
 "Night and Morning," the architect of 
 St. Peter's cupola, first saw the light. 
 Here the history of the Tiber begins— 
 here men first mingled blood with its 
 unsullied waves. On another little trib- 
 utary is Anghiara, where in 1440 a terri- 
 
 CAPRESE. 
 
 ble battle was fought between the Milan- 
 ese troops, under command of the gal- 
 
 * The Pilgrimage cf ike Tiber, by Wm, Davies. 
 
 lant free-lance Piccinino, and the Floren- 
 tines, led by Giovanni Paolo (commonly 
 called Giampaolo) Orsini ; and a little 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 LAKE THRASIMENE. 
 
 farther, on the main stream, Citta di Cas- 
 tello recalls the story of a long siege 
 which it valiantly sustained against Brac- 
 cio da Montone, surnamed Fortebraccio 
 (Strongarm), another renowned soldier 
 of fortune of the fifteenth century. 
 
 As the widening flood winds on through 
 the beautiful plain, a broad sheet of water 
 on the right spreads for miles to the foot 
 of the mountains, whose jutting spurs 
 form many a bay, cove and estuary. It 
 was in the small hours of a night of misty 
 moonlight that our eyes, stretched wide 
 with the new wonder of beholding classic 
 ground, first caught sight of this smooth 
 expanse gleaming pallidly amid the dark, 
 blurred outlines of the landscape and 
 trees. The monotonous noise and mo- 
 tion of the train had put our fellow-trav- 
 elers to sleep, and when it gradually 
 ceased they did not stir. There was no 
 bustle at the little station where we stop- 
 ped ; a few drowsy figures stole silently 
 by in the dim light, like ghosts on the 
 spectral shore of Acheron ; the whole 
 scene was strangely unreal, phantasmal. 
 "What can it be ?" we asked each other 
 under our breaths. "There is but one 
 thing that it can be — Lake Thrasimene." 
 And so it was. Often since, both by 
 
 starlight and daylight, we have seen that 
 watery sheet of fatal memories, but it nev- 
 er wore the same shadowy yet impressive 
 aspect as on our first night-journey from 
 Florence to Rome. 
 
 Not far from here one leaves the train 
 for Perugia, seated high on a bluff amid 
 walls and towers. We had been told a 
 good deal of the terrors of the way — how 
 so steep was the approach that at a cer- 
 tain point horses give out and carriages 
 must be dragged up by oxen. It was 
 with some surprise, therefore, that we 
 saw ordinary hotel omnibuses and car- 
 riages waiting at the station. But we did 
 not allow ourselves to feel any false se- 
 curity : by and by we knew the tug must 
 come. We set off by a wide, winding 
 road, uphill undoubtedly, but smooth and 
 easy : however, this was only the begin- 
 ning; and as it grew steeper and steeper, 
 we waited in trepidation for the moment 
 when the heavy beasts should be hitch- 
 ed on to haul us up the acclivity. We 
 crawled up safely and slowly between 
 orchards of olive trees, which will grow 
 wherever a goat can set its foot : beneath 
 us the great fertile vale of Umbria spread 
 like a lake, the encircling mountains, 
 which had looked like a close chain from 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 below, unlinking themselves to reveal 
 gorges and glimpses of other valleys. 
 Thus by successive zigzags we mounted 
 the broad turnpike-road, now directly 
 under the fortifications, now farther off, 
 until we saw them close above us, with 
 the old citadel and the new palace. And 
 now surely the worst had come, but the 
 carriage turned a sharp corner, showing 
 two more zigzags, forming a long acute 
 angle which carried us smoothly to the 
 rocky plateau on which the city stands, 
 and we bowled in through the old gate- 
 way at a round trot, with the usual crack- 
 ing of whips and rattling and jingling of 
 harness which announces the arrival of 
 travelers at minor places on the Conti- 
 nent. 
 
 We were not comfortable at Perugia — 
 and let no one think to be so until there 
 is a new hotel on a new principle — but 
 it is a place where one can afford to fore- 
 go creature comforts. Of all the towns 
 on the Tiber, so rich in heirlooms of an- 
 tiquity and art, none can boast such va- 
 rious wealth as this. The moment one 
 leaves the centre of the town, which is 
 built on a table of rock, the narrow streets 
 plunge down on every side like danger- 
 ous broken flights of stairs : they disap- 
 pear under deep cavernous arches, so that 
 if you are below they seem to lead straight 
 up through the darkness to the soft blue 
 heaven, while from above they seem to 
 go straight down into deep cellars, but 
 cellars full of slanting sunshine. And 
 whether you look up or down, there is 
 always a picture in the dark frame against 
 the bright background — a woman in a 
 scarlet kerchief with a water-vessel of 
 antique form, or a ragged brown boy 
 leading a ragged brown donkey, or a 
 soldier in gay uniform striking a light 
 for his pipe. As soon as you leave the 
 live part of the town, with the few little 
 caffes and shops, and the esplanades 
 whence the thrice-lovely landscape un- 
 folds beneath your gaze, you wander 
 among quiet little paved piazzas with a 
 bit of daisied grass in their midst, sur- 
 rounded by great silent buildings, whence 
 through some opening you descry a street 
 which is a ravine, and the opposite cliff 
 rising high above you piled close with 
 
 gray houses overhung with shrubs and 
 creepers, and little gardens in their crev- 
 ices like weeds between the stones of a 
 wall ; or you come out upon a secluded 
 gallery with tall, deserted-looking man- 
 sions on one hand — except that at some 
 sunny window there is always to be seen 
 a girl's head beside a pot of carnations 
 or nasturtiums — and on the other a para- 
 pet over which you lean to see the town 
 scrambling up the hillside, while a great 
 breadth of valley and hill and snow- 
 covered mountain stretches away below. 
 Then what historical associations, strag- 
 gling away across three thousand years 
 to when Perugia was one of the thirty 
 cities of Etruria, and kept her independ- 
 ence through every vicissitude until Au- 
 gustus starved her out in 40 B. c. ! Por- 
 tions of the wall, huge smooth blocks of 
 travertine stone, are the work of the van- 
 ished Etruscans, and fragments of sev- 
 eral gateways, with Roman alterations. 
 One is perfect, imbedded in the outer 
 wall of the castle : it has a round-headed 
 arch, with six pilasters, in the intervals 
 of which are three half-length human 
 figures and two horses' heads. On the 
 southern slope of the hill, three miles 
 beyond the walls, a number of Etruscan 
 tombs were accidentally discovered by a 
 peasant a few years ago. The outer en- 
 trance alone had suffered, buried under 
 the rubbish of two millenniums : the 
 burial-place of the Volumnii has been 
 restored externally after ancient Etrus- 
 can models, but within it has been left 
 untouched. Descending a long flight of 
 stone steps, which led into the heart of 
 the hill, we passed through a low door 
 formerly closed by a single slab of trav- 
 ertine, too ponderous for modern hinges. 
 At first we could distinguish nothing 
 in the darkness, but by the uncertain 
 flaring of two candles, which the guide 
 waved about incessantly, we saw a cham- 
 ber hewn in the rock, with a roof in im- 
 itation of beams and rafters, all of solid 
 tufa stone. A low stone seat against the 
 wall on each hand and a small hanging 
 lamp were all the furniture of this apart- 
 ment, awful in its emptiness and mys- 
 tery. On every side there were dark 
 openings into cells whence came gleams 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 of white, indefinite forms: a great Gor- 
 gon's head gazed at us from the ceiling, 
 and from the walls in every direction 
 
 started the crested heads and necks of 
 sculptured serpents. We entered one by 
 one the nine small grotto-like compart- 
 
 ments which surround the central cavern : 
 the white shapes turned out to be cinerary 
 urns, enclosing the ashes of the three 
 thousand years dead Volumnii. Urns, 
 
 as we understand the word, they are not, 
 but large caskets, some of them alabas- 
 ter, on whose lids recline male figures 
 draped and garlanded as for a feast : the 
 
FOl l OWING THE TIBER, 
 
 faces rtiffei so much in feature and ex- 
 pre ision thai one i an hardly doubt their 
 being likenesses; the figures, it erect, 
 would be nearly two feet in height. The 
 sides oi these -little sarcophagi are cov- 
 ered with bassi-rilitvii many ol them 
 finely executed ; the subje< ts are i om 
 bats .ind that favorite theme the boai 
 hunt "i Kalydon; there was one which 
 represented the sacrifice of a child. The 
 Medusa's head, as it is thought to be, 
 recurs constantly, treated with extraordi 
 nary power : we were divided among our- 
 selves whethei it was Medusa or an Erin 
 nys with winged head. The sphinx ap 
 pears several times; there are four on the 
 corners ol an alabastei urn in the shape 
 ot .1 temple, exquisite in form and fea 
 tures, and exceedingly delicate in work 
 manship, Bulls' heads, with garlands 
 drooping between them, a well known 
 ornament ol antique altars, are among 
 the de< orations. But fai the most beauti 
 (ul objects were the little hanging figures, 
 which seemed to have been lamps ol .1 
 green bronse color, though we won- as- 
 sured that they are tt$ m cotta ; they are 
 male figures oi exquisite grace and beau 
 tv, with a lightness and airiness common 
 K given to Mercury; but these had large 
 angel pinions on the shoulders, and none 
 on the lu-.ui or feet. There was not .1 
 icholai in the party, so we all returned 
 unenlightened, but profoundly interested 
 and impressed, and with that delightful 
 sense ol stimulated curiosity which is 
 worth more than all Eurekas, With the 
 ex< eption ol a fev> weapons and trinkets, 
 which we saw at the museum, this is all 
 that remains of the might} Etruscans, 
 save the shapes ol the common red pot- 
 ter) which is spread out wholesale in 
 the open space opposite the cathedral on 
 market days the most graceful and use- 
 ful which could be devised, and which 
 have not changed their model since eai 
 
 licr days than the OCCUpantS Oi those 
 
 tonih> could remember, 
 
 rhe Conquering Roman has left his 
 
 sign-manual everywhere, but one is so 
 
 used to him in Italj th.u the scantier 
 
 records ol latei ages interest us more 
 here. Lake ever} othei old Italian town. 
 Perugia had u.s great family, the Bagli- 
 
 oni, who lorded it over the place, some- 
 times harshly and cruelly enough, some- 
 times generously and splendidly — pro- 
 
 te< tors of popular rights and patrons ol 
 
 art and Letters. Their mediaeval history 
 is full of picturesque incident and dra- 
 matic catastrophe : it would make a most 
 
 romantic volume, hut a thick, one. At 
 length the PerUgianS, master and men, 
 
 grew too turbulent, and Pope Paul ill. 
 
 put them down, a\\o[ sat upon them, SO 
 
 to speak, by building the citadel. 
 
 Hut time would tail us to tell of the 
 
 Baglioni, or Pope Paul the Borghese, or 
 Fortebraccio, the chivalric condottiert 
 who led the Perugians to wai against 
 then neighbors of Todi, or even the still 
 burning memories of the sack ol Perugia 
 by command ot" the present pope. We 
 cm no longer turn our thoughts from 
 the treasures of an which make Perugia 
 rich above all cities of the Tiber, save 
 
 Rome alone. We cannot tarry before 
 
 the cathedral, noble despite its incom- 
 pleteness and the unsightly alterations 
 ot later times, and full of line paintings 
 and matchless wood carvnn; and wrought 
 metal and piocious sculptures; noi he 
 toie the PalailO t/ommunalc. another 
 
 grand Gothic wreck, equally dignified 
 
 and degraded ; nor even beside the great 
 
 fountain erected si\ hundred wars ago 
 by Nicolo and Giovanni o\.\ Pisa, the 
 chiefs and founders of the Tuscan school 
 
 ot' sculpture ; nor beneath the statue of 
 Pope Julius 111., which Hawthorne has 
 made known to all ; for there are a score 
 ot churches and palaces, each with its 
 priceless Peruglno, and drawings and 
 designs by his pupil Raphael in his love- 
 ly "tii st manner," which has so much oi 
 the Eden-like innocence oi his master; 
 and the Ac.nlcmv oi Fine Aits, where 
 
 one may study the LTmbrian school at 
 
 leisure; and last, but not least, the Sala 
 
 del Cambio, or Hall o\ Exchange, where 
 Perugino may be seen in his glory, it 
 
 is not a hall oi imposing sic. SO that 
 nothing interferes with the impression 
 oi the frescoes which gate upon you 
 from every side as you enter. Or no; 
 
 they do not gate upon you noi return 
 
 n out glance, but look sweetly and se- 
 renely forth, as if with eyes never bent 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 i i 
 
 TODI. 
 
 on earthly things. The right-hand wall 
 is dedicated to the sibyls and prophets, 
 the left to the greatest sages and heroes 
 of antiquity. There is something capri- 
 cious or else enigmatical in the mode of 
 presenting many of them — the dress, at- 
 titude and general appearance often sug- 
 gest a very different person from the one 
 intended — but the grace and loveliness 
 of some, the dignity and elevation of 
 others, the expression of wisdom in this 
 face, of celestial courage in that, the calm 
 and purity and beauty of all, give them 
 an indescribable charm and potency. At 
 the end of the room facing the door are 
 the "Nativity" and "Transfiguration," 
 the latter, infinitely beautiful and relig- 
 ious, full of quiet concentrated feeling. 
 We were none of us critics : none of us 
 had got beyond the stage when the sen- 
 timent of a work of art is what most af- 
 fects our enjoyment of it; and we all 
 confessed how much more impressive to 
 us was this Transfiguration, with its three 
 quiet spectators, than the world-famous 
 one at the Vatican. Although there are 
 masterpieces of Perugino's in nearly 
 every great European collection, I can- 
 not but think one must go to Perugia to 
 appreciate fully the limpid clearness, the 
 
 pensive, tranquil suavity, which reigns 
 throughout his pictures in the counte- 
 nances, the landscape, the atmosphere. 
 We found it hard to rob Perugia even 
 of a day for a pilgrimage to the tomb of 
 Saint Francis at Assisi, yet could not 
 leave the neighborhood without making 
 it. We took the morning-train for the 
 little excursion, meaning to drive back, 
 and crossed the Tiber for the first time 
 on the downward journey at Ponte San 
 Giovanni. We got out at the station of 
 Santa Maria degli Angeli, so named from 
 the immense church built over the cell 
 where Saint Francis lived and died and 
 the little chapel where he prayed. The 
 Porzionuncula it was called, or "little 
 share," being all that he deemed needful 
 for man's abode on earth, and more than 
 needful. It was hither that he came in 
 the heyday of youth, forsaking the house 
 of his wealthy father, the love of his 
 mother, a life of pleasure with his gay 
 companions, and dedicated himself to 
 poverty and preaching the word of God. 
 One of our party had said that she con- 
 sidered Saint Francis the author of much 
 evil, and as having done irreparable 
 harm to the Italian people in sanctifying 
 dirt and idleness. But apostles are not 
 
12 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 to be judged by the abuse of their doc- 
 trine ; and although it cannot be denied 
 that Saint Francis encouraged beggary 
 by forbidding his followers to possess 
 aught of their own, he enjoined that 
 they should labor with their hands for 
 several hours daily. And to me it seem- 
 ed as if out of Palestine there could be no 
 spot of greater significance and sacred- 
 ness to any Christian than this, where in 
 a sanguinary and licentious 
 age a young man suddenly 
 broke all the bonds of self, and 
 taught in his own person hu- 
 mility, renunciation and broth- 
 erly love as they had hardly 
 been taught since his Master's 
 death. The sternness of his 
 personal self-denial is only 
 equaled by his sweetness to- 
 ward all living things: not 
 men alone, but animals, birds, 
 Ashes, the frogs, the crickets, 
 shared his love, and were call- 
 ed brother and sister by him. 
 The great and instantaneous 
 movement which he produced in his own 
 time was no short-lived blaze of fanat- 
 icism, for its results have lasted from the 
 twelfth century to our own ; and although 
 we may well believe that the day is past 
 for serving Christ by going barefoot and 
 living on alms, the spirit of Saint Fran- 
 cis's doctrine, charity, purity, self-abne- 
 gation, might do as much for modern 
 men as for those of six hundred years 
 ago. Believing all this, we were not 
 sorry that our uncompromising friend 
 had stayed behind, and it was in a rev- 
 erent mood that we left the little stone 
 chamber — which shrinks to lowlier pro- 
 portions by contrast with the enormous 
 dome above it — and turned to climb the 
 long hill which leads to the magnificent 
 monument which enthusiasm raised over 
 him who in life had coveted so humble 
 a home. 
 
 The cliff on which Assist stands rises 
 abruptly on the side toward the Tiber : 
 long lines of triple arches, which look as 
 if hewn in the living stone, stretch along 
 its face, one above another, like galleries, 
 the great mass of the church and con- 
 vent, with its towers and gables and spire- 
 
 like cypress trees, crowning all. It is 
 this marriage of the building to the rock, 
 these lower arcades which rise halfway 
 between the valley and the plateau seek- 
 ing the help of the solid crag to sustain 
 the upper ones and the vast superimposed 
 structure, that makes the distant sight 
 of Assisi so striking, and almost over- 
 whelms you with a sense of its greatness 
 as the winding road brings you close be- 
 
 CHURCH AND CONVENT OF SAINT FRANCIS, AT ASSISI. 
 
 low on your way up to the town. It is a 
 triple church. The uppermost one, be- 
 gun two years after the saint's death, has 
 a magnificent Gothic west front and high 
 steps leading from the piazza, and a rich 
 side-portal with a still higher flight lead- 
 ing from a court on a lower level. As 
 we entered, the early afternoon sun was 
 streaming in through the immense rose- 
 window and flooding the vast nave, illu- 
 mining the blue star-studded vault of the 
 lofty roof and the grand, simple frescoes 
 of Cimabue and Giotto on the walls. 
 Thence we descended to the second 
 church, in whose darkness our vision 
 groped, half blind from the sudden 
 change ; but gradually through the dusk 
 we began to discern low vaults stretch- 
 ing heavily across pillars which look like 
 stunted giants, so short are they and so 
 tremendously thick-set, the high altar 
 enclosed by an elaborate grating, the 
 little side-chapels like so many black 
 cells, and through the gloom a twinkle 
 and glimmer of gold and color and motes 
 floating in furtive sunbeams that had 
 strayed in through the superb stained 
 glass of the infrequent windows. The 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 13 
 
 frescoes of Giotto and his school enrich 
 every spandril and interspace with their 
 simple, serious forms — no other such 
 place to study the art of that early day 
 — but a Virgin enthroned among saints 
 by Lo Spagna, a disciple of Perugino's, 
 made a pure light in the obscurity : it 
 had all the master's golden transparency, 
 like clear shining after the rain. From 
 this most solemn and venerable place 
 we went down to the lowest church, the 
 real sepulchre : it was darker than the 
 one we had left, totally dark it seemed 
 to me, and contracted, although — it is in 
 the form of a Greek cross — each arm is 
 sixty feet : in fact, it is only a crypt of 
 unusual size ; and although here were 
 the saint's bones in an urn of bronze, we 
 were conscious of a weakening of the 
 impression made by the place we had 
 just left. No doubt it is because the 
 crypt is of this century, while the other 
 two churches are of the thirteenth. 
 
 There are other things to be seen at 
 Assisi ; and after dining at the little Al- 
 bergo del Leone, which, like every part 
 of the town except the churches, is re- 
 markably clean, my companion set out 
 to climb up to the castle, and I wandered 
 back to the great church. As I sat idly 
 on the steps a monk accosted me, and 
 finding that I had not seen the convent, 
 carried me through labyrinthine corri- 
 dors and galleries, down long flights of 
 subterranean stone steps, one after an- 
 other, until I thought we could not be 
 far from the centre of the earth, when he 
 suddenly turned aside into a vast cloister 
 with high arched openings and led me 
 to one of them. Oh, the beauty, the 
 glory, the wonder of the sight ! We 
 were halfway down the mountain-side, 
 hanging between the blue heaven and 
 the billowy Umbrian plain, with its ver- 
 dure and its azure fusing into tints of 
 dreamy softness as they vanished in the 
 deep violet shadows of thick -crowding 
 mountains, on whose surfaces and gorges 
 lay changing colors of the superbest in- 
 tensity. Poplars and willows showed 
 silvery among the tender green of other 
 deciduous trees in their fresh spring fo- 
 liage and the deep velvet of the immor- 
 tal cypresses and the blossoming shrubs, 
 
 which looked like little puffs of pink and 
 white cloud resting on the bosom of the 
 valley. A small, clear mountain-stream 
 wound round the headland to join the 
 Tiber, which divides the landscape with 
 its bare, pebbly bed. It was almost the 
 same view that one has from twenty 
 places in Perugia, but coming out upon 
 it as from the bowels of the earth, framed 
 in its huge stone arch, it was like open- 
 ing a window from this world into Para- 
 dise. 
 
 Slowly and lingeringly I left the cloi- 
 ster, and panted up the many steps back 
 to the piazza to await my companion and 
 the carriage which was to take us back to 
 Perugia. The former was already there, 
 and in a few minutes a small omnibus 
 came clattering down the stony street, 
 and stopping beside us the driver inform- 
 ed us that he had come for us. Our sur- 
 prise and wrath broke forth. Hours be- 
 fore we had bespoken a little open car- 
 riage, and it was this heavy, jarring, jolt- 
 ing vehicle which they had sent to drive 
 us ten miles across the hills. The driver 
 declared, with truly Italian volubility and 
 command of language and gesture, that 
 there was no other means of conveyance 
 to be had ; that it was excellent, swift, 
 admirable ; that it was what the signori 
 always went from Assisi to Perugia in ; 
 that, in fine, we had engaged it, and must 
 take it. My companion hesitated, but I 
 had the advantage here, being the one 
 who could speak Italian ; so I prompt- 
 ly replied that we would not go in the 
 omnibus under any circumstances. The 
 whole story was then repeated with more 
 adjectives and superlatives, and gestures 
 of a form and pathos to make the fortune 
 of a tragic actor. I repeated my refusal. 
 He began a third time : I sat down on 
 the steps, rested my head on my hand 
 and looked at the carvings of the portal. 
 This drove him to frenzy : so long as you 
 answer an Italian he gets the better of 
 you ; entrench yourself in silence and he 
 is impotent. The driver's impotence first 
 exploded in fury and threats : at least we 
 should pay for the omnibus, for his time, 
 for his trouble ; yes, pay the whole way 
 to Perugia and back, and his buoii" j/nino 
 besides. All the beggars who haunt the 
 
14 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 sanctuary of their patron had gathered 
 about us, and from playing Greek chorus 
 now began to give us advice: "Yes, we 
 would do well to go : the only carriage in 
 Assisi, and excellent, admirable !" The 
 numbers of these vagrants, their offici- 
 ousness, their fluency, were bewildering. 
 " But what are we to do ?" asked my anx- 
 ious companion. "Why, if it comes to 
 the worst, walk down to the station and 
 take the night-train back." He walked 
 away whistling, and I composed myself 
 to a visage of stone and turned my eyes 
 to the sculptures once more. Suddenly 
 the driver stopped short : there was a 
 minute's pause, and then I heard a voice 
 in the softest accents asking for some- 
 thing to buy a drink. I turned round — 
 beside me stood the driver hat in hand : 
 " Yes, the signora is right, quite right : I 
 go, but she will give me something to get 
 a drink?" I nearly laughed, but, biting 
 my lips, I said firmly, "A drink? Yes, 
 if it be poison." The effect was astound- 
 ing : the man uttered an ejaculation, 
 crossed himself, mounted his box and 
 drove oft"; the beggars shrank away, 
 stood aloof and exchanged awestruck 
 whispers; only a few liquid-eyed little 
 ragamuffins continued to turn somersets 
 and stand on their heads undismayed. 
 
 Half an hour elapsed : the sun was 
 beginning to descend, when the sound 
 of wheels was again heard, and a light 
 wagon with four places and a brisk lit- 
 tle horse came rattling down the street. 
 A pleasant-looking fellow jumped down, 
 took oft" his hat and said he had come 
 to drive us to Perugia. We jumped up 
 joyfully, but I asked the price. "Fifty 
 francs" — a sum about equivalent to fifty 
 dollars in those regions. I smiled and 
 shook my head : he eagerly assured me 
 that this included his buori mano and 
 the cost of the oxen which we should be 
 obliged to hire to drag us up some of 
 the hills. I shook my head again : he 
 shrugged and turned as if to go. My 
 unhappy fellow-traveler started forward : 
 " Give him whatever he asks and let us 
 get away." I sat down again on the 
 steps, saying in Italian, as if in soliloquy, 
 that we should have to go by the train, 
 after all. Then the new-comer cheer- 
 fully came back: "Well, signora, what- 
 ever you please to give." I named half 
 his price — an exorbitant sum, as I well 
 knew — and in a moment more we were 
 skimming along over the hard, smooth 
 mountain-roads : we heard no more of 
 those mythical beasts the oxen, and in 
 two hours were safe in Perugia. 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 CONCLUDING PAPER. 
 
 o 
 
 TEMPLE OF THE CLITUMNUS. 
 
 NE branch of the little river which I nus. the delight of philosophers and 
 encompasses Assisi is the Clitum- | poets in the Augustan age. Near its 
 
 '5 
 
i6 
 
 EO//Oir/Xu THE TIFER. 
 
 source stands ■ beautiful little temple 
 to the divinity of the stream. Although 
 the ancients resorted hithei foi the love 
 
 [HE PAl LS 01 VKKM. 
 
 liness of the spot, they did not bathe in 
 the springs, .1 gentle superstition hold- 
 ing u sacrilege for the human bo< 
 lave itsolt in a stream neai 
 
 They came by the Via Klaminia, the old 
 high-road from Rome to Florence, which 
 crosses the modern railroad hard by, 
 Following its course, which takes a more 
 direct line than the devious riber, past 
 Spoleto on us woody castellated height, 
 the traveler reaches Terni on the tumul- 
 tuous Nar, the wildest and mosl rebel- 
 lions of .ill the tributaries, it was to 
 save the surrounding country from its 
 outbreaks that the channel was made by 
 the Romans b. c. 171, the first oi several 
 experiments which resulted in these cas- 
 cades, winch have been more sung and 
 oftener painted than any other in the 
 world, The beauty of Terni is so hack- 
 neved that enthusiasm over it becomes 
 cockney, yet the beauty o( hackneyed 
 things is as eternal as the veritj of tru- 
 isms, and no more loses its charm than 
 the other its point. But one must not 
 talk about it. The foaming torrent rages 
 along between us rocky walls until span- 
 ned by the bridge of Augustus at Narni. 
 
 a magnificent viaduct sixty feet high, 
 thrown from ridge to ridge across the 
 
 ravine tor the passage of the Klammian 
 Way a wreck now. for two of the arches 
 have fallen, but through the last there is 
 a glimpse of the rugged hillsides with 
 their thick forests and the turbulent wa- 
 ters rushing through the chasm. Higher 
 still is Narni, looking over her embattled 
 walls. It is one oi the most striking po- 
 sitions on the w ay from Florence to Rome, 
 and the nest halt' hour, through savage 
 gorges and black tunnels, ever 1\ 
 the tormented waters ot" the Nar until 
 they meet the Tiber, swollen by the trib- 
 utes ot' the PagUa and Chiana, is singu- 
 larly tine. 
 
 Where the Paglia and Chiana tlow to- 
 gether, at the issue ot' the charming Val 
 di Chiana. stands Orvieto on its steep 
 and sudden lock, ctowncd with one of 
 the triumphs ot" Italian Gothic, the gh> 
 i cathedral. Alter toiling up the 
 ladder-like paths which lead from the 
 plain to the summit ot' the bluff, and 
 passing through the grand mediaeval 
 gateway along the slanting streets, where 
 even the peasants dismount and walk 
 beside their donkeys, seeing nothing 
 in the whole small compass ot" the 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 >7 
 
 walls save what speaks of the narrowest 
 and humblest life in the most remote of 
 hill-fastnesses, a few deserted and dilap- 
 idated palaces alone telling of a period 
 of importance long past, nothing can 
 describe the effect of coming out of this 
 indigence and insignificance upon the 
 silent, solitary piazza where the incom- 
 parable cathedral rears its front, covered 
 from base to pinnacle with the richest 
 sculpture and most brilliant mosaic. The 
 volcanic mass on which the town is built 
 is over seven hundred feet high, and 
 nearly half as much in circumference: 
 it would be a fitting pedestal for this 
 gorgeous duomo if it stood there alone. 
 But it is almost wedged in among the 
 crooked streets, a few paces of grass- 
 grown stones allowing less than space 
 enough to embrace the whole result of 
 proportion and color: one cannot go far 
 enough off to escape details. An ac- 
 count of those details would require a 
 volume, and one has already been writ- 
 ten which leaves no more to be said;* 
 yet fain would we take the reader with 
 us into that noble nave, where the "glo- 
 rious company of the apostles 1 ' stands 
 colossal in marble beside the pillars 
 whose sculptured capitals are like leafy 
 
 • Travel and Art Miufy hi Italy, \>y C. E. Nouton. 
 
 2 
 
 branches blown by the wind; where the 
 light conies rich and mellow through 
 stained glass and scmilucent alabaster, 
 like Indian-summer sunshine in autumn 
 woods; where Kra Angclico's and lie- 
 nozzo Gozzoli's angelic host smile upon 
 us with ineffable mildness from above the 
 struggle and strife of Luca Signorelli's 
 "Last Judgment," the great forerunner 
 of Michael Angelo's. It added greatly 
 to the impressivencss that there was never 
 a single human being in the cathedral : 
 except one afternoon at vespers we had 
 it all to ourselves. There is little else to 
 sec in the place, although it is highly 
 picturesque and the inhabitants wear a 
 more complete costume than any other 
 I saw in Italy — the women, bright bod- 
 ices, striped skirts and red stockings; 
 the men, jaunty jackets and breeches, 
 peaked hats and splendid sashes. 
 
 The discomfort of Perugia was luxury 
 to what we found at Orvieto, and it was 
 no longer May but December, when it is 
 nearly as cold north of Rome as with us ; 
 and Romewasdrawinguswith hermighty 
 magnet. So, one wintry morning, soon 
 after daybreak, we set out in a close car- 
 riage with four horses, wrapped as if we 
 were going in a sleigh, with a scaldino 
 (or little brazier) under our feet, for the 
 
[8 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 nearest railway station on our route, a 
 nine hours' drive. Our way lay through 
 the snow -covered hills and their leaf- 
 
 less forest, and long after we had left Or- 
 vieto behind again ami again a rise in the 
 road would bring it full in sight on its 
 
 base of tufa, girt by its walls, the Gothic I light, such as painters throw before the 
 lines of the cathedral sharp against the chariot of Phoebus, refracted against the 
 clear, brightening sky. At our last look ! pure aether, spread like a halo round the 
 the sun was not up, but broad shafts of I threefold pinnacles : a moment more and 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 •9 
 
 Orvieto was hidden behind a higher hill, 
 not to be seen again. All day we drove 
 among the snow-bound hills and woods, 
 past the Lake of Bolscna in its forbid- 
 ding beauty; past small valleys full of 
 naked fruit trees and shivering olives, 
 which must be nooks of loveliness in 
 spring; past defiant little towns aloft on 
 their islands of tufa, like Bagnorea with 
 its single slender bell-tower; past Mon- 
 tefiascone with its good old story about 
 Cardinal Fugger and the native wine. 
 We stopped to lunch at Viterbo, a town 
 more closely connected with the history 
 of the Papacy than any except Rome 
 itself, and full of legends and romantic 
 associations: it is dirty and dilapidated, 
 and has great need of all its memories. 
 Being but eight miles from Montefias- 
 cone, we called for a bottle of the fatal 
 Est, which we had tasted once at Augs- 
 burg, where the host of the Three Moors 
 has it in his cellar, in honor perhaps of 
 the departed Fugger family, whose pal- 
 ace has become his hotel : there we had 
 found it delicious — a wine as sweet as 
 cordial, with a soul of fire and a pene- 
 trating but delicate flavor of its own — 
 how different from the thin, sour stuff 
 they brought us in the long -necked, 
 straw- covered flask, nothing to attest 
 its relationship to the generous juice 
 at the Three Moors except the singular, 
 unique flavor! After this little disap- 
 pointment we left Viterbo, and drove on 
 through the same sort of scenery, which 
 seemed to grow more and more beautiful 
 in the rosy light of the sinking sun. But 
 it is hard to tell, for nothing makes a 
 journey so beautiful as to know that 
 Rome is the goal. As the last rays were 
 flushing the hill-tops we came in sight 
 of Orte, with its irregular lines of build- 
 ing clinging to the sides of its precipitous 
 cliff in such eyrie-wise that it is difficult 
 to say what is house and what is rock, 
 and whether the arched passages with 
 which it is pierced are masonry or natural 
 grottoes ; and there was the Tiber — al- 
 ready the yellow Tiber — winding through 
 the valley as far as eye could follow. 
 Here we waited for the train, which was 
 ten minutes late, and tried to make up 
 for lost time by leaving our luggage, all 
 
 duly marked and ready, standing on the 
 track. We soon began to greet familiar 
 sites as we flitted by : the last we made 
 
 THE T1UEK, KKOM ORTE. 
 
 out plainly was Borghetto, a handful of 
 houses, with a ruined castle keeping watch 
 on a hill hard by : then twilight gather- 
 ed, and we strained our eyes in vain for 
 
FOLLOWING TLIE TLB EL'. 
 
 the earliest glimpse of Mount Soracte, \ Romano, the outposts of our excursions, 
 and night came down before we could i the farm-towers we knew by name, the 
 descry the first landmarks of the Agio ! farthest fragments of the aqueducts. 
 
 But it was not so obscure that we could 
 not discern the Tiber between his low 
 banks showing us the way, the lights 
 quivering in the Anio as the train rush- 
 
 ed over the bridge ; and when at length 
 we saw against the clear night-sky a 
 great dark barrier stretching right and 
 left, we knew that the walls of Rome 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 21 
 
 were once more before us : in a moment 
 we had glided through with slackening 
 speed, and her embrace enfolded us 
 
 The Tiber, winding as it oes like a 
 great artery through the heart of Rome, 
 is seldom long either out of sight or 
 mind. One constantly comes upon it 
 
 in the most unexpected manner, for 
 there is no river front to the city. There 
 is a wide open space on the Ripetta — a 
 
 street which runs from the Piazza del 
 Popolo, at the head of the foreign quar- 
 ter, to remoter parts — where a broad 
 
roil OWING THE TIBER. 
 
 THE CASTLE OF ST. AISGELO. 
 
 flight of marble steps descends to the 
 level of the flood, and a ferry crosses to 
 the opposite bank : looking over at the 
 trees and fields, it is like the open coun- 
 try, yet beyond are St. Peter's and the 
 Vatican, and the whole of what is known 
 as the Leonine City. But one cannot 
 follow the Tiber through the streets of 
 Rome as one may the Seine in Paris: in 
 the thickly-built quarters the houses back 
 upon the stream and its yellow waves 
 wash their foundations, working wrath 
 and woe from time to time, as those who 
 were there in the winter of 1870 will rec- 
 ollect. Sometimes it is lost to sight for 
 half a mile together, unless one catches 
 a glimpse of it through the carriage-way 
 of a palace. From the wharf of the Ri- 
 petta it disappears until you come upon 
 it again at the bridge of St. Angelo, the 
 JEWan bridge of ancient Rome, which 
 is the most direct passage from the fash- 
 ionable and foreign quarter to the Tras- 
 tevere. It must be confessed that the idle 
 sense of mere pleasure generally super- 
 sedes recollection and association after 
 one's first astonishment to find one's self 
 among the historic places subsides; yet 
 how often, as our horses' hoofs rang on 
 the slippery stones, my thoughts went 
 suddenly back to the scene when Saint 
 
 Gregory passed over, chanting litanies, 
 at the head of the whole populace, who 
 formed one vast penitential procession, 
 and saw the avenging angel alight on 
 the mausoleum of Adrian and sheath his 
 sword in sign that the plague was stayed; 
 or to that terrible day when the ferocious 
 mercenaries of the Constable de Bour- 
 bon and the wretched inhabitants giv- 
 en over to sack and slaughter swarmed 
 across together, butchering and butcher- 
 ed, while the troops in the castle hurled 
 down what was left of its classic statues 
 upon the heads of friend and foe, and 
 the Tiber was turned to blood ! 
 
 From the bridge of St. Angelo the river 
 is lost again for a long distance, although 
 one can make one's way to it at various 
 points — where at low water the submerged 
 piers of the Pons Triumphalis are to be 
 seen, where the Ponte Sisto leads to the 
 foot of the Janiculum Hill, and on the 
 opposite bank the orange-groves of the 
 Farnesina palace hang their golden fruit 
 and dusky foliage over the long garden- 
 wall upon the river — until we come to 
 the Ponte Quatro Capi (Bridge of the 
 Four Heads) and the island of the Tiber. 
 This is said to have been formed in the 
 kingly period by the accumulation of a 
 harvest cast into the stream a little way 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 - 
 
 -3 
 
 ISLAND OK THE TIBER. 
 
 above, which the current could not sweep 
 away : it made a nucleus for alluvial de- 
 posit, and the island gradually arose. 
 Several hundred years afterward it was 
 built into the form of a ship, as bridges 
 and wharves are built, with a temple in 
 the midst, and a tall obelisk set up in 
 guise of its mast. In mediaeval days a 
 church replaced the heathen fane, and 
 now it stands between its two bridges, a 
 huddle of houses, terraces and gardens, 
 whence one looks down on the fine mass 
 of the Ponte Rotto (Broken Bridge), whose 
 shattered arches pause in mid -stream, 
 and across to the low arch of the Cloaca 
 Maxima and the exquisite little circular 
 temple of Vesta. From here down, the 
 river is in full view from either side until 
 it passes beyond the walls near the Monte 
 Testaccio — on one side the Ripa Grande 
 (Great Bank or Wharf), a long series of 
 quays, on the other the Marmorata or 
 marble landing, where the ships from 
 the quarries unload. Here, on each side, 
 all sorts of small craft lie moored, not 
 betokening a very extensive commerce 
 from their size and shape, but quaint 
 and oddly rigged, making a very good 
 tore- or back-ground, according as one 
 looks at the picture. The Marmorata is 
 at the foot of the Aventine, the most 
 
 lonely and unvisited of the Seven Hills. 
 From among the vegetable-gardens and 
 cypress-groves which clothe its long flank 
 rise large, formless piles, whose founda- 
 tions are as old as the Eternal City, and 
 whose superstructures are the wreck of 
 temples of the kingly and republican pe- 
 riods, and palaces and villas of impe- 
 rial times,* and haughty feudal abodes, 
 only to be distinguished from one an- 
 other by the antiquary amid their indis- 
 criminate ruin and the tangle of wild- 
 briers and fern, ivy and trailers with 
 which thev are overgrown. On the sum- 
 
 CUPOLA OP ST. PR IKK S 
 
^4 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 THE PINCIO, FROM THE VII. I .A BORGHESE. 
 
 mit no trace of ancient Rome is to be 
 seen. There are no dwellings of men 
 on this deserted ground : a few small 
 and very early Christian churches have 
 replaced the temples which once stood 
 here, to be in their turn neglected and 
 forsaken : they stand forlornly apart, 
 .separated by vineyards and high blank 
 •vails. On the brow of the hill is the 
 esplanade of a modern fort, and within 
 ts quiet precincts are the church and 
 priory of the Knights of Malta — nothing 
 but a chapel and small villa as abandon- 
 ed as the rest. After toiling up a steep 
 and narrow lane between two walls, our 
 carriage stopped at a solid wooden gate- 
 way, and the coachman told us to get 
 out and look through the keyhole. We 
 were aghast, but he insisted, laughing 
 and nodding ; so we pocketed our pride 
 and peeped. Through an overarching 
 vista of dark foliage was seen, white and 
 golden in a blaze of sunshine, the cupola 
 of St. Peter's, which is at the farthest end 
 of the city, two miles at the least as the 
 crow flies. When the gate was opened 
 we entered a sweet little garden full of 
 violets, traversed by an alley of old ilex 
 trees, through which appeared the noble 
 dome, and which led from the gate to a 
 terrace overhanging the Tiber — I will not 
 venture to guess how far below — more 
 like two than one hundred feet ; perhaps 
 still farther. On the edge of the terrace 
 was an arbor, and here we sank down 
 enchanted, to drink in the view of the 
 city, which spread out under our eyes as 
 
 we had never seen it from any other 
 point. But the custodino's wife urged 
 us to come into the Priorato and see the 
 view from the upper story. We follow- 
 ed her, reluctant to leave the sunshine 
 and soft air, up a stiff winding staircase, 
 through large, dark, chilly, long-closed 
 apartments, until we reached the top, 
 where there was a great square room oc- 
 cupying the whole floor. She flung open 
 the windows, and never did such a pan- 
 orama meet my eyes. There were win- 
 dows on every side: to the north, one 
 looked across the city to St. Peter's, the 
 Vatican, the Castle of St. Angelo, the 
 Tiber with its great bends and many 
 bridges, and to lonely, far-away Soracte ; 
 westward, on the other side of the river, 
 rose the Janiculum with its close-wedged 
 houses, grade on grade, and on its sum- 
 mit the church of San Pietro in Montorio 
 and the flashing cataract of the Acqua 
 Paola fountain, the stone-pines of the 
 Villa Doha cresting the ridge above ; 
 eastward, the Palatine, a world of ruins 
 in a world of gardens, lay between us 
 and the Coliseum, and over them and 
 the wall, the aqueducts, the plain, the eye 
 ranged to the snow-capped Sabine Hills, 
 on whose many-colored declivities tiny 
 white towns were dotted like browsing 
 sheep ; southward, we gazed down upon 
 the Pyramid of Cestius, upon the beautiful 
 Protestant cemetery with its white monu- 
 ments and dark cypresses where lie Shel- 
 ley and Keats, upon the stately Porta San 
 Paolo, a great mediaeval gateway flanked 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 =5 
 
 with towers, and beyond, the Campagna, 
 purple, violet, ultramarine, oceanic, roll- 
 ing out toward the Alban Hills, which 
 glittered with snow, rising sharply like 
 island-peaks and sloping down like prom- 
 ontories into the plain ; and over all the 
 sun and sky and shadows of Italy. 
 
 The prospect from the Priorato sur- 
 passes anything in Rome — even the won- 
 derful view from the Janiculum, even the 
 enchanting outlook from the Pincian Hill. 
 But the last was at our very doors : we 
 could go thither in the morning to watch 
 the white mist curl up from the valleys 
 and hang about the mountain-brows, and 
 at noon, when even in January the cool 
 avenues and splashing fountains were 
 grateful, and at sunset, when the city lay 
 before us steeped in splendor. That was 
 the view of our daily walks — the beloved 
 view of which one thinks most often and 
 fondly in remembering Rome. 
 
 But it is in riding that one grows to feel 
 most familiar with the Tiber and all his 
 Roman children, whether it be strolling 
 somewhat sulkily in a line with his banks 
 by the Via Flaminia or the Via Cassia, 
 impatient to get away from their stones 
 and dust to the soft, springing turf; or 
 hailing him from afar as a guide after 
 losing one's self in the endless undula- 
 tions of the open country ; or cantering 
 over daffodil - sheeted meadows beside 
 the Anio at the foot of the grassy heights 
 on which Antcmnae stood ; or threading 
 one's way doubtfully among the ravines 
 which intersect the course of the little 
 C rem era as one 
 goes to Veii. The 
 last is a most beau- 
 tiful and interest- 
 ing expedition, for, 
 what with the dis- 
 tance — more than 
 twelve miles — and 
 the difficulty of 
 finding the way, it 
 is quite an enter- 
 prise. As one turns 
 his horse's head 
 away from the riv- 
 er, off the high- 
 road, to the high 
 grassy flats, the 
 
 whole Campagna seems to lie before one 
 like a vast table-land, with nothing be- 
 tween one's self and Soracte as he lifts 
 his heavy shoulder from the plain— not 
 half hidden by intervening mountains, 
 as from some points of view, but majes- 
 tic and isolated, thirty miles away to the 
 north. But here, as in every other part 
 of the Campagna, one cannot go far with- 
 out finding hillocks and hollows, long 
 steep slopes and sudden little dells, and, 
 stranger still, unsuspected tracts of wood- 
 land, for the general effect of the Roman 
 landscape is quite treeless. So there is 
 a few miles' gallop across the trackless 
 turf, sometimes asking the way of a soli- 
 tary shepherd, who looms up against the 
 sky like a tower, sometimes following it 
 by faint landmarks, few and far between, 
 of which we have been told, and hard to 
 find in that waste, until we pass a curi- 
 ous little patriarchal abode shaped like 
 a wigwam, where, in the midst of these 
 wide pastures dwells a herdsman sur- 
 rounded by his family, his cattle, his dogs, 
 his goats and his fowls — the beautiful 
 animals of the Campagna, long-haired, 
 soft-eyed, rich-colored, like the human 
 children of the soil. Then we strike the 
 Cremera, and exploring begins among 
 its rocky gullies, up and down which 
 the spirited, sure-footed horses scramble 
 like chamois. Thick woods of cork-oak 
 clothe their sides, and copses of a decid- 
 uous tree which I never saw in its summer 
 dress of green, but which keeps its dead 
 leaves all through the winter, a full suit 
 
26 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 VK1I, FROM T1IK CAMPAGNA. 
 
 of soft, pale brown contrasting with the 
 dark evergreens. Among these woods 
 grow all the wild-flowers of the long Ro- 
 man spring from January to May — flow- 
 ers that I never saw in bloom at the 
 same time anywhere else. On banks 
 overcanopied by faded boughs nodded 
 myriads of snowdrops ; farther on we 
 held our horses' heads well up as they 
 slipped, almost sitting, down the damp 
 rocky clefts of a gorge whose sides were 
 purple with violets, mingling their de- 
 licious odor, the sweetest and most sen- 
 timental of perfumes, with the fresh, ge-. 
 ranium-like scent of the cyclamen, which 
 here and there flung back its delicate 
 pinkish petals like one amazed: then 
 came acres of anemones — not our pale 
 wind -shaken flower, but brave asters 
 of half a dozen superb kinds. Up and 
 down these passes we forced our way 
 through interlacing branches, which 
 drooped too low, until we had crossed 
 the ridges on either side the Cremera, 
 and gained the valley at the head of 
 which is Isola Farnese, the rock-fort- 
 ress supposed to occupy the site of the 
 citadel of Etruscan Vcii. It is not really 
 an island, in spite of its name; only a 
 bold peninsula, round whose base two 
 rivulets flow and nearly meet. It is call- 
 
 ed a village, and so it is, with quite a 
 population, but the great courtyard of 
 the fifteenth-century castle contains them 
 all, and the huts, pig-pens, kennels and 
 coops which they seem to inhabit in- 
 discriminately. Except where the bluff 
 overlooks the valley, everything is closed 
 and shut in by rocks and gorges, through 
 one of which a lovely waterfall drips 
 from a covert of boughs and shrubbery 
 and wreathing ferns and creepers into a 
 little stream, which with musical clam- 
 or rushes at a picturesque old mill : 
 through another the road from the 
 castle passes through a narrow issue to 
 the outer world. And this stranded and 
 shipwrecked fortress in the midst of so 
 wild a scene is all that exists to mark 
 where Veii stood, the powerful city which 
 kept Rome at bay for ten years, and fell 
 at length by stratagem ! Its site was for- 
 gotten for nearly two thousand years, but 
 in this century the discovery of some 
 tombs revealed the secret. 
 
 The scenery differs entirely on different 
 sides of Rome. Here there is not a ruin, 
 not a vestige, except a few low heaps of 
 stone- or brickwork hidden by weeds : 
 on the other, toward Tivoli, much of the 
 beauty is due to the work of man — the 
 stately remnants of ancient aqueduct, 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 27 
 
 temple and tomb ; the tall square towers 
 of feudal barons, round which cluster 
 low farm-buildings scarcely less old and 
 solid ; the vast, gloomy grottoes of Cer- 
 bara, whi< h look like the underground 
 palace of a bygone race, but which are 
 the tufa-quarries of classic times ; the 
 ruined baths of Zenobia, where the rush- 
 ing milky waters of the Aquae Albulae 
 fill the air with sulphurous fumes ; and, 
 as a climax, the Villa of Hadrian, less 
 a country-place than a who'e region, a 
 town -in -country, with palace, temples, 
 circus, theatres, baths amidst a tract of 
 garden and pleasure-ground ten miles in 
 circumference. Even when one is famil- 
 iar with the enormous height and bulk 
 of the Coliseum or the Baths of Cara- 
 calla, the extent of the ruins of Hadrian's 
 Villa is overwhelming. Numerous frag- 
 ments are still standing, graceful and 
 elegant, but a vast many more are buried 
 deep under turf and violets and fern: 
 large cypresses and ilexes have struck 
 root among their stones, and they form 
 artificial hills and vales and great wide 
 plateaus covered with herbage and shrub- 
 bery, hardly to be distinguished from the 
 natural accidents of the land. The soli- 
 tude is as immense as the space. After 
 
 leaving our carriage we wandered about 
 for hours, sometimes lying in the sun- 
 shine at the edge of a great grassy ter- 
 race which commands the Campagna 
 and the Agro Romano — beyond whose 
 limits we had come — to where, like a 
 little bell, St. Peter's dome hung faint 
 and blue upon the horizon ; sometimes 
 exploring the innumerable porticoes and 
 galleries, and replacing in fancy the Ve- 
 nus de Medici, the Dancing Faun, and 
 all the other shapes of beauty which 
 once occupied these ravished pedestals 
 and niches; sometimes rambling about 
 the flowery fields, and up and down 
 among the hillocks and dells, meeting 
 no one, until at length, when complete- 
 ly bewildered and lost, we fell in with a 
 rustic belonging to the estate, who guided 
 us back. We left the place with the 
 sense of having been in a separate realm, 
 another country, belonging to another 
 age. The whole of that visit to Tivoli 
 was like a dream. The sun was sinking 
 when we left the precincts of the villa, 
 and twilight stole upon us, wrapping all 
 the landscape on which we looked back 
 in softer folds of shade, and resolving its 
 features into large, calm masses, as the 
 horses labored up the narrow, stony road 
 
2S 
 
 FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 CASTLE AT OSTIA. 
 
 into a mysterious wood of gigantic olives, 
 gnarled, twisted and rent as no other tree 
 could be and live. The scene was wild 
 and weird in the dying light, and it grew 
 almost savage as we wound upward 
 among the robber-haunted hills. Night 
 had fallen before we reached the moun- 
 tain-town. Our coachman dashed through 
 the dark slits of streets, where it seemed 
 as if our wheels must strike the houses 
 on each side, cracking his whip and 
 jingling the bells of the harness. Under 
 black archways sat groups of peasants, 
 their swart visages lit up from below by 
 the glow of a brazier, while a flaring torch 
 stuck through a ring overhead threw 
 fierce lights and shadows across the 
 scene. Sharp cries and shouts like mal- 
 edictions rose as we passed, and as we 
 turned into the little square on which the 
 inn stands we wondered in what sort of 
 den we should have to lodge. We fol- 
 lowed our host of the little Albergo dclla 
 Regnia up the steep stone staircase with 
 many misgivings : he flung open a door, 
 and we beheld a carpeted room, all fur- 
 nished and hung with pink chintz cov- 
 ered with cupids and garlands. There 
 were sofas, low arm-chairs, a writing- 
 table with appurtenances, a tea-table with 
 
 snowy linen and a hissing brass tea-ket- 
 tle. Opening from this were two little 
 white nests of bed-rooms, with tin bath- 
 tubs and an abundance of towels. We 
 could not believe our eyes : here were 
 English comfort and French taste. Were 
 we in May Fair or the Rue de Rivoli ? 
 Or was it a fairy-tale ? 
 
 The fairy-tale went on next day, when, 
 after wending our way through the dirty, 
 crooked little streets, we crossed a court- 
 yard and descended a long subterranean 
 stairway to emerge on a magnificent ter- 
 race with a heavy marble balustrade, 
 whence flights of steps led down to low- 
 er grades, amid statues, urns, vases, foun- 
 tains, reservoirs, camellias in bloom min- 
 gled with laurel and myrtle and laurus- 
 tinums covered with creamy flowers, cy- 
 presses tall as cathedral spires, ilex av- 
 enues, and broad straight walks between 
 huge walls of box : the whole space was 
 filled with the song of nightingales, the 
 tinkle of falling water, with whiffs of aro- 
 matic shrubs and the breath of hidden 
 roses and violets: — a princely garden, a 
 royal pleasaunce, but in exquisite disor- 
 der and neglect ; the shrubbery too thick 
 and straggling, the flowers straying be- 
 yond their rightful boundaries, the statues 
 
FOLLOWING THE TIBER. 
 
 29 
 
 stained and moss-grown, the balusters 
 entangled in clinging luxuriance, the 
 fountains dripping through fern and 
 maiden-hair— Nature supreme, as one 
 always sees her in this land of Art. It 
 was the Villa d'Este, famous these three 
 hundred years for its fountains and cy- 
 presses. Nor did the wonder cease when 
 we forsook this enchanting spot for the 
 mountain - road which overhangs the 
 great ravine. Opposite, backed by moun- 
 tains, rose the crags topped by the clus- 
 tering town and all its towers, arches, 
 niches, battlements, bridges, long lines 
 of classic ruins, and on the edge of the 
 abyss the perfect little temple of the 
 Sibyl ; rushing down from everywhere 
 the waterfalls, one great column plung- 
 ing at the head of the gorge, and count- 
 less frolic streams, the cascatelle, leaping 
 and dancing from rock to rock through 
 mist and rainbow and extravagance of 
 emerald moss and herbage, down among 
 sea-green, silvery olives, finally sliding 
 away, between softer foliage and verdure, 
 through the valley into the plain — the im- 
 mense azure plain, with its grand sym- 
 phonic harmonies of form and color. O 
 land of dreams fulfilled, of satisfied long- 
 ing ! when across these thousands of miles 
 I recall your entrancing charm, your un- 
 imaginable beauty, I sometimes wonder 
 if you were not a dream, if you have any 
 place in this real existence, this lower 
 earth : are you still delighting other eyes 
 with the rapture of your loveliness, or 
 were you only an illusion, a vision, which 
 vanishes like the glow of sunset or "gold- 
 en exhalations of the dawn " ? 
 
 The Campagna has one more aspect, 
 different from all the rest, where the Ti- 
 ber, weary with his long wanderings, 
 rolls lazily to the sea. It is a dreary 
 waste of swamp and sandhill and scrub 
 growth, but with a forlorn beauty of its 
 own, and the beauty of color, never ab- 
 sent in Italy. The tall, coarse grass and 
 
 reeds pass through a series of vivid tones, 
 culminating in tawny gold and deep 
 orange, against which the silver-fretted 
 violet blue-green of the Mediterranean 
 assumes a magical splendor. Small, 
 
 HEAD OF THE 1 RAJAN CANAL, NEAK OSTIA. 
 
 shaggy buffaloes with ferocious eyes, and 
 sometimes a peasant as wild-looking as 
 they, are the only inhabitants of this wil- 
 derness. The machicolated towers ©>f 
 Castel Fusano among its grand stone- 
 pines stand up from the marshes, and 
 farther seaward another castle with a 
 single pine; but they only enhance the 
 surrounding loneliness. Ostia, the an- 
 cient port, which sea and river have both 
 deserted, is now a city of the dead, a 
 Pompeii above ground, whose avenues 
 of tombs lead to streets of human dwell- 
 ings more desolate still. It is no longer 
 by Ostia, nor even by the Tiber, that 
 one can reach the sea : the way was 
 choked by sand and silt seventeen cen- 
 turies ago, and Trajan caused the canal 
 to be made which bears his name ; and 
 this is still the outlet from Rome to the 
 Mediterranean, while the river expires 
 among the pestilential marshes. 
 
Up the Thames 
 
UP THE THAMES 
 
 FIRST PAPER. 
 
 ^-v^a 
 
 $$55?r4- ^>i?0S*$S^* ' 
 
 OLD WESTMINSTER BRIDGE. 
 
 TO the westward drift alike fashion, 
 history and empire. The west end 
 of cities corresponds to the west end of 
 chronology. It is the forward end, the 
 eventful end — the end of gayety, change, 
 life, movement. The eastern end — for 
 3 
 
 even this spherical perch of ours must 
 have a beginning somewhere — is that 
 which melts into the stagnant past, as 
 into, say, the yellow blankness of the 
 Babylonian plains and the swamps of 
 Siam or the Isle of Dogs. 
 
 33 
 
34 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 So the cxcursionizing visitor in Lon- 
 don, having performed the melancholy 
 duty of groping through the cobwebs 
 and fungi of the great wine-vaults and 
 the other wonders of the dock - region — 
 Dore's illustrations of which are scarce 
 surpassed in unearthly gloom by those 
 of his Wandering Jew — is not apt to do 
 
 HATTERSEA RED HOUSE. 
 
 more in that direction than take a hasty 
 glance at Greenwich, where the pension- 
 ers used to be, and the telescopes and 
 the whitebait still are. Beyond and be- 
 low that all is blank ; for, though a jaunt 
 to Margate is a thing of joy to thousands 
 of Londoners, "nobody" lives there or 
 ever did. Our knowledge of, or interest 
 in, the place we owe almost exclusively 
 to the Rev. Sydney's account of the "re- 
 ligious hoy that sets off every week for 
 Margate," and Elia'smore sympathizing 
 sketch of a trip thither by a more rapid 
 and less saintly conveyance. The es- 
 tuary of the Thames is almost as poor a 
 cover for the explorer to draw as the es- 
 tuary of the Delaware. So he gives the 
 wind to the herring country over the way, 
 and turns his nose up stream. Above 
 Westminster Bridge, starting from the 
 Houses of Parliament, he looks for the 
 haunts of the hard fighters and hard 
 thinkers, past and present, of England, 
 and for her most characteristic charms 
 of landscape, natural and artificial. 
 
 Our starting-point, though above the 
 limits of the city proper, is five, six or 
 seven — no one can tell exactly how many 
 — miles below the western edge of the 
 metropolis. The ancient city, with three 
 
 hundred thousand inhabitants more than 
 two centuries ago, and hardly a hundred 
 thousand to-day, is but the dingy nucleus 
 of a vast nebula of brick, that differs 
 from a comet in constantly expanding 
 and never contracting. As a sample of 
 its progress, the opening, in the ten years 
 from 1 86 1 to 1 871, of six hundred and 
 thirty-five miles of new streets will 
 serve. Nine or ten thousand houses 
 are annually erected — twice as 
 many as are in the same time add- 
 ed to the most rapidly- growing 
 American city. About four mil- 
 lions of souls occupy an area of 
 one hundred and thirty-one square 
 miles, this being still but a corner 
 of the space — five hundred and 
 seventy-six — included within the 
 beats of the metropolitan police. 
 London has thus gathered to itself 
 not only home provinces, but out- 
 lying colonies. More populous 
 than Rome ever was, her commis- 
 sariat gives her none of the worry that 
 so complicated the politics of her pro- 
 totype. Seventy miles of beeves, ten 
 abreast, stalk calmly every year into her 
 capacious maw. And it cries out for 
 more, and will not be appeased with 
 anything short of a corresponding trib- 
 ute of sheep, pigs, poultry, etc. by way 
 of entremets. Statistics like these pass 
 from the arithmetical into the poetic, and 
 approach the sublime. Hecatombs do 
 capital duty in the old epics, but what 
 are hecatombs to such nations of live- 
 stock as these ? An army, said Napo- 
 leon or Wellington, or both, travels on 
 its belly. London equals in numbers 
 and exceeds in consumption forty armies 
 larger than either of these generals had 
 at Waterloo. Fancy the commensurate 
 receptacle ! The mass oppresses the 
 imagination. Let us get from under it. 
 
 Making a day's excursion from a place 
 which, at the travel-rate of half a century 
 ago, it takes something like a day's jour- 
 ney to traverse, seems akin to the idea 
 of taking a week's trip from the United 
 States, since it is easy to run across the 
 United States in a week. A great part 
 of the time is consumed in attaining the 
 point proper of departure. The most 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 35 
 
 CHELSEA, FROM THE RIVER. 
 
 determined sight-seer is apt to be blase 
 before reaching the rural part of his tour, 
 to such a degree has the earth-hunger of 
 Britain's capital, typical in that attribute, 
 as in many others, of Britain itself, swal- 
 lowed the adjacent territory. Village af- 
 ter village and parish upon parish has 
 been absorbed. We find them in every 
 stage of assimilation, digested into wards 
 or crude as districts. 
 
 A century or two ago, according to the 
 doggerel of the time, when the lord may- 
 or and aldermen set out on their annual 
 hunting excursion, their route lay "from 
 Cheapside down by Fenchurch street, 
 and so to Aldgate Pump," and soon 
 found themselves, despite the tardy lo- 
 comotion of their fat Flemish horses, 
 among the fields. From where we set 
 forth, two miles up the river, we may, 
 the eye following the current, mark where 
 the magnificent Thames Embankment 
 carries elegance, atmosphere and health 
 into the noisome tide-marshes that skirt- 
 ed their haunts. 
 
 On Westminster Bridge, the second of 
 the name constructed within a century 
 and a quarter, we stand, as on the Bridge 
 of Sighs, " a palace and a prison on each 
 hand." The Houses of Parliament, ex- 
 celling in cost and elaboration most pal- 
 aces, look down upon one of Mr. Bull's 
 
 recently abandoned pets, the Millbank 
 Penitentiary, situated on the same (or 
 north) side of the Thames. Over the 
 way, Lambeth, the ancient residence 
 of the archbishops of Canterbury, is both 
 palace and prison. Replete with mem- 
 ories of Cardinal Pole, Laud, Juxon, Til- 
 lotson and their successors, that part of 
 its irregular facade which is first sought 
 
 SIR THOMAS MORE'S MONUMENT. 
 
36 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 CHELSEA CHURCH. 
 
 by the eye of the stranger is the Lollards' 
 Tower, wherein the followers of Wycliffe 
 tasted the first fruits on English soil of 
 religious persecution. 
 
 Vauxhall Gardens have passed away 
 with Sir Roger de Coverley, and the su- 
 perior taste which improved them out 
 of existence manifested itself in a fash- 
 ionable pigeon-shooting resort dubbed 
 the Red House. 
 
 Glancing to the northern shore again, 
 Chelsea Hospital comes into view, a 
 present which England owes, as she does 
 her Indian empire, her American colo- 
 nies, her navy, St. Paul's, the best of her 
 art-treasures, and so many other acquisi- 
 tions of power and culture, to the ma- 
 
 
 SIR HANS SLOANE'S MONUMENT. 
 
 ligned Stuarts. The story that Nell 
 Gwynne has the credit of having sug- 
 gested the creation of this national retreat 
 for the broken soldier is far from having 
 gained universal acceptance. Yet the 
 existence of the tradition is as compli- 
 mentary to her as would be its truth. It 
 proves what a character for that charity 
 which covereth a multitude of sins the 
 active benevolence of the gay comedienne 
 had earned among the people. The Han- 
 overian ladies who came "for all your 
 goots " have never been accused of any 
 such freak. 
 
 The shadows of the famous dead be- 
 gin to thicken around us with the bend- 
 ing trees — of great men, not as they 
 mingled in the turmoil of court and 
 council, but as they strolled in their gar- 
 dens, labored in the study, or went, like 
 common people, through the daily round 
 of domestic life. Within a very circum- 
 scribed space lay the abodes of Pym, 
 Shaftesbury, Locke, Addison, Steele, 
 Swift and Atterbury. The extinct ham- 
 let of Little Chelsea was thus gilded by 
 the greater lights of the Augustan age 
 of British literature. Swift for a time 
 had for his next neighbor over the way 
 his intriguing brother of the cloth, and 
 got on with him much more smoothly 
 and pleasantly than was his wont with 
 others. Had they agreed better they 
 would doubtless have been worse friends. 
 
 Far back of this circle, in point of time, 
 flourished on the same spot the author 
 of Utopia, Sir Thomas More, handed 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 37 
 
 X I 
 
 n£3Sss»SE 
 
 sacs** --—-—_ 
 
 BATfERSEA IiRIDGE, 
 
 down to us by that enigma among phi- 
 losophers and divines, Erasmus, as every 
 way a model man. Other accounts go 
 to justify this character. To himself, his 
 long and placid life must have appeared 
 a perfect success, and he may well have 
 deemed himself to be lapsing dreamily 
 into the bliss of his imaginary republic 
 until rudely awakened by the axe of the 
 tyrant whom in the epitaph of his own 
 composition in the heyday of his pros- 
 perity he styles the "best of princes." 
 Readers of this inscription, which stands 
 in faultless Latin on his monument in 
 Chelsea church, may note, after the pas- 
 sage which proclaims the writer and de- 
 ceased a stern foe to thieves and mur- 
 derers, a blank space which was origin- 
 ally filled with "heretics," the identical 
 class of malefactors for belonging to 
 which he was himself, within three years, 
 brought to the block by the best of 
 princes. A keen helmsman it must have 
 taken to steer in the wake of bluff Harry. 
 The Vicar of Bray was right in claiming 
 to be the only consistent man of his day. 
 
 A different style of philosopher, one 
 of our modern evangelists of the prac- 
 tical, Sir Hans Sloane, unites with More 
 in illustrating Chelsea. His works have 
 not followed him, but still speak in mon- 
 uments which cannot lie — in the dispen- 
 sary system for the relief of the poor, 
 in broad and beautiful Botanic Gardens, 
 and in the British Museum, whereof his 
 bequest was the nucleus. 
 
 The West End, as we follow the river, 
 has become the south end, and that in its 
 
 most aggravated shape we have on the 
 south bank. The majesty of the past 
 gives place to the might of modern Eng- 
 land in the very unsavory guise of the 
 pariahs of the factory tribe. From mon- 
 umental chimneys gin, vitriol and soap 
 insult the welkin with their surplus fumes. 
 It may be a question whether the most 
 elegant of English political writers, the 
 site of whose villa and the resting-place 
 of whose remains is among them, would 
 altogether enjoy such evidences of the 
 prosperity of the kingdom whose welfare 
 he pursued through paths so tortuous and 
 yet illumined by so much genius. He 
 — and certainly his friend Pope — might 
 scorn such " meaner things." The states- 
 man and the poet would have been loath 
 to accept the soapboiler as a colaborei 
 
 MONUMENT TO EOLINGUROKE. 
 
38 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 ' UX 
 
 in the cause of national elevation, al- 
 though manufactures are at once the 
 source and the expression of wealth, the 
 familiar ally of statesmanship and poesy. 
 "The first king was a fortunate soldier," 
 and his workshop, the battlefield, is less 
 pleasant to look upon than the foulest 
 of factories. 
 
 All this, however, does not lessen our 
 anxiety to leave behind these homes of 
 progress and get into the unprogressive 
 country. It is not easy to keep out of 
 the way of growing London. It almost 
 visibly follows us up the river. In fact, 
 as we skim the currentless surface of the 
 placid and canal-like stream, where gar- 
 den and grove more and more exclude 
 
 BOWLING-GREEN 1 1« >USE. 
 
 the town, it has stolen a march upon us 
 — flanked us, so to speak, on the right 
 or north, and taken a short cut across a 
 semicircular bend of the Thames, miles 
 in advance to Hammersmith and beyond. 
 Two miles' sail from the metropolis will 
 thus bring us back into the midst of it. 
 But till then we shall enjoy the suburb- 
 and-villa sensation supplied by the sce- 
 nery near Putney and Fulham. 
 
 Abundance of celebrities here beset 
 us. The chief of them in modern eyes 
 are Gibbon, who was born, and the 
 younger Pitt, who died, at Putney. It 
 was not among these tranquil folds and 
 meadows that "the lord of irony, that 
 master -spell," formed the plan of his 
 great history. Concep- 
 tions of war and revo- 
 lution seem here wholly 
 forced and unnatural 
 ideas. At first thought, 
 they would appear 
 equally so amid the 
 ruins of the Coliseum, 
 where, as he tells us, 
 the design first occur- 
 red to him. But there 
 the remains of the em- 
 pire whose epitaph he 
 was to write lay broad 
 and clear around him. 
 
 ' 
 
 nt 
 
 Kl 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 39 
 
 To disentangle from the obscure and in- 
 volved records of twelve centuries of bar- 
 barism the reasons why so much and so 
 little of it survive, was a task that one is 
 surprised should have been left to a wan- 
 derer from the British Islands. It is a 
 task thoroughly performed by him. His 
 work has not been mentionably improved 
 by any of the corrections and expansions 
 that have been essayed : the author's 
 edition remains the best. It may be 
 pronounced not merely the only history 
 of the vast period it covers, but the only 
 compendious and perspicuous history of 
 any considerable portion of it. It stands 
 out in European literature from a host 
 of monographs, chronicles and memoirs, 
 many of them more brilliant and exhaust- 
 ive, like one of Raphael's canvases in a 
 
 gallery of Flemish cabinet pictures. Gib- 
 bon and Clarendon may almost be term- 
 ed the only English historians. Hume and 
 Robertson were Scotch ; Macaulay's frag- 
 ment is a clever partisan pamphlet, not a 
 history ; Froude, the fashion of the hour, 
 is already on the wane, as befits a chron- 
 icler whose passion is for paradox rather 
 than for truth. In one or another respect 
 each of these is Gibbon's superior in style. 
 His method of expression is rhetorical 
 and involved to the last degree. And 
 yet it does not tire the reader. Discov- 
 ering the sense soon ceases to be an 
 effort, with such unfailing regularity does 
 the meaning distill, drop by drop, from 
 those convoluted sentences. The calm, 
 clear, idiomatic flow of Hume, and the 
 direct, precise, engine-like beat of Mac- 
 
 aulay, are both technically preferable ; 
 but the former would have put us to 
 sleep before we got through a long reign 
 of the Lower Empire, and the vigorous 
 invective of the latter, pelting as with 
 rock-crystal the ample material before 
 him, would have palled upon us ere los- 
 ing sight of the Antonines. 
 
 Pitt, the "great young minister," a 
 maker and not a writer of history, died 
 at the Bowling-green House on January 
 23, 1806, of an attack of Austerlitz. The 
 courier who brought him the news of 
 that battle brought him his death-war- 
 rant : a French bullet could not have 
 been more fatal. Napoleon had his re- 
 venge for the disasters of the future. Pitt 
 might have outlived him and died any- 
 thing but an old man, but the satisfaction 
 
 of witnessing Moscow and Waterloo was 
 denied him. It would have been in his 
 eyes the happy and natural close of the 
 great drama, only the first two or three 
 acts of which it was his to witness. It is 
 impossible to repress a feeling of sym- 
 pathy with the earnest and patriotic 
 statesman, galled, baffled and beaten, 
 compelled, while racked with bodily suf- 
 fering, to face some of the mightiest foes 
 at home and abroad that publicist had 
 ever to encounter — the eloquence of Fox 
 and Sheridan and the sword of Napoleon 
 — laying down the chief power of the 
 realm to die heartbroken in these se- 
 cluded shades. 
 
 Less secluded are they now than sev- 
 enty years ago. Attracted by the com- 
 paratively elevated situation and fine air 
 
40 
 
 LT THE THAMES. 
 
 g 
 
 HORTICULTURAL GARDENS, CHISW1CK. 
 
 of Putney Heath, many residents have 
 sought it. It is now covered with villas, 
 each boasting its own private demesne, 
 if only large enough to accommodate a 
 tree and some shrubs. It does not take 
 a great mass of verdure to conceal a 
 smallish house that stands back from the 
 road, or to give to the whole row, square, 
 crescent, terrace or walk a rural and re- 
 tired effect. A passion for planting is 
 common to the English everywhere, and 
 especially does it manifest itself where 
 all the conditions are so favorable as on 
 the upper Thames. Trees are the nat- 
 ural fringe of rivers in all countries. The 
 watercourses of our great Western plains 
 are mapped out by the only arboreal 
 efforts Nature there seems capable of 
 making. The streams of England, nat- 
 urally a forest country, must always have 
 been peculiarly rich in this decoration ; 
 and had they not been the people would 
 have made them so. The long stone 
 quay is backed by its bordering grove, 
 and towns and houses that throng down 
 to the water are content, or rather prefer, 
 to view it through such peepholes as the 
 leaves may vouchsafe them. And then 
 the turf, the glory of Britain, that show- 
 er and shears, Heaven and man, vie in 
 cherishing ! 
 
 The basin of the Thames is nearly 
 as fiat as the bottom of the ancient sea 
 through which the chalk and clay that 
 
 underlie it were slowly sifted down. 
 Neither rocky cliff, breezy down, nor 
 soaring mount has part in its scenery. 
 What variety of outline the horizon seen 
 from the river possesses is due to grove 
 or facade. But all the variety these can 
 give is there. The stream itself, so bar- 
 ren in some of the ingredients of the 
 picturesque, is as agreeably astonishing 
 in the use it makes of what it has. The 
 tide running to Teddington, twelve miles 
 above London, and lock and dam nav- 
 igation taking possession above that vil- 
 lage, there is little current but that caused 
 by the tide. The Thames, in other words, 
 where not an estuary is a canal — we had 
 almost said moat. It has neither rapids 
 nor rocky islets. It labors under the 
 fearfully depoetizing drawback of a tow- 
 path. Racing shells, miraculously slim 
 and crank, traverse with safety its rough- 
 est bends. From Putney, where we now 
 are, to Mortlake, four miles above, is the 
 aquatic Newmarket of England, where 
 the young thoroughbreds of Oxford and 
 Cambridge yearly measure their mettle. 
 Tufted islets — or "aits," as the local 
 vernacular has it — varied in size and 
 shape, divide the stream. Long reaches, 
 with spire or palace faint and pearly 
 in the distance, alternate with sweeping 
 curves scolloped with billowy masses of 
 foliage that bastion broad re-entering 
 angles of tesselated lawn and meadow. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 41 
 
 Willow and elm, the most graceful of 
 trees, luxuriant as such a habitat can 
 make them, send streaks and masses 
 of richest shadow beneath and beyond 
 them. "Schools" of water-lilies star the 
 clumps of reflected shade or blend with 
 catches of sunlight brighter than them- 
 selves. Vistas of water among the 
 aits, and of velvet-green among 
 the meadows, lead off here and 
 there. Now we thread a bridge, 
 modern and smart, or mediaeval 
 and mossy, with a jumble of peak- 
 ed arches diverse each from the 
 other in shape and proportion. 
 The cumbrous piers of these vet- 
 erans repeat themselves in reflec- 
 tion, substance and shadow cut 
 apart by multiform ripples and 
 swirls, that shift and start and 
 interlace and pass hand in hand 
 finally into the glassy sheet be- 
 low, as they did when the Norman ma- 
 sons set them first in motion. They built 
 to last, those "Middle- Aged " artisans. 
 Prodigal of material, and not given to 
 venturesome experiments on the capa- 
 cities of the arch, like those who design- 
 ed the flat elliptical spans of Waterloo 
 Bridge, their rule was to make security 
 more secure. They multiplied spans, 
 made them high and sharp, and set 
 them up on piers and starlings that oc- 
 cupied — and occupy yet where they have 
 not been removed as impediments to the 
 march of improvement — the greater part 
 of the width of the river. From that por- 
 tion of its course now under notice these 
 old bridges have pretty well disappeared. 
 Old London Bridge, the most consider- 
 able of them, and an exaggeration of 
 their most fantastic traits, gave place to 
 its elegant successor half a century ago, 
 after having sustained the rush of waters 
 below and of a crowd of humanity, res- 
 ident and locomotive, above, for five or 
 six centuries. As we ascend the stream 
 into regions less harried by the inexor- 
 able invader, Progress, they grow more 
 and more common. They enhance the 
 difference in the character of the sce- 
 nery. Chronology and landscape march 
 together. As we are borne into the coun- 
 try, we are led back, pari passu, into the 
 
 past. It is taking a rustic tour into the 
 Dark Ages by steam. 
 
 Not that the absurd little steamers 
 which infest these waters — the equation 
 of hull, cabin, paddle-box and pipe re- 
 duced to its lowest terms of a horizontal 
 line and a vertical ditto erected on the cen- 
 
 '^\S--. 
 
 CHISWICK HOUSE. 
 
 tre — can penetrate far into the antique. 
 Their field grows narrower year by year 
 with the wash of the expanding city. 
 These boats will always be the gondo- 
 las of London's Grand Canal, and all 
 the more assuredly when the water-front 
 shall have been transformed by the com- 
 pletion of the long line of quay and es- 
 planade now in progress ; but, as with 
 their less prosaic congeners of Venice, 
 their operations outside of the city limits 
 will be restricted. 
 
 It is in perfect keeping that the charms 
 of the lush and mellow landscape that 
 unrolls itself on either hand should be 
 those of peace. Nearly two centuries 
 and a half have passed since it was dis- 
 turbed by battle. The fact helps us to 
 realize the unspeakable blessing Eng- 
 land's unassailablity by land is to her. 
 Not only are her liberty and prosperity 
 enabled to expand and establish them- 
 selves without fear of disturbance from 
 external forces, but they receive an im- 
 pulse from the mere recognition of this 
 fact derived from observation of the for- 
 tunes of her neighbors under the con- 
 trary condition. Her domestic politics, 
 unlike those of the continental nations, 
 are controlled only by domestic interests. 
 The result is a practical and common- 
 sense treatment of them, such as a mer- 
 
*3 
 
 L'P THE THAMES. 
 
 CHISWICK llor.sK 
 
 chant makes of his imlividu.il affairs in 
 the seclusion of his counting-house. The 
 nation boutigutkre thus carries "shop" 
 into her Parliament. Could a ditch im- 
 passable to Von Moltke be drawn around 
 poor France from Dunkirk to Nice, and 
 kept impregnable even for a few decades, 
 
 the world would witness a notable change 
 in the steadiness o( her institutions and 
 her industry. It is not a question purely 
 
 
 IhHiAKll! s TOMB. 
 
 ol tare, as we have usually been taught 
 to consider it. Circumstance makes 
 
 iaee, and 1 aee cannot rise wholly above 
 circumstance. The Jutes and Saxons 
 in their native seat are not distinguished 
 above the other peoples of Christendom 
 for intelligent and effective devotion to 
 tree institutions. Many continental fam- 
 ilies are more so. The Welsh and Scots, 
 largely sharing the Celtic blood which is 
 alleged to enfeeble the French, are in no 
 way inferior to their English brethren in 
 this regard, 
 
 Peace at home tells, in three words, the 
 main story of English freedom and might. 
 B6ranger, lifting up his voice from the 
 ruins of the First Empire, sings — 
 
 J'ai \u la r.tix descendre sur la terre, 
 Semanl de I'or, »les Reurs el des i-i>is. 
 
 1 air eiait o.ihno. ct du Dieu do la Guerre 
 Kilo ctoutV.iit les fbudres assoupis. 
 
 With him it was an aspiration for peace. 
 From the banks ot" the Thames, tin- 
 smirched of blood and smoke and bloom- 
 ing with everything that war can destroy, 
 his aspiration would have been to peace, 
 pervading in divinest aura the lovely 
 scene. 
 
 A realixation of this peculiar blessing 
 is general among Englishmen. The tre- 
 mendous lesson o\ the Conquest, eight 
 hundred years old, is fresh with them 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 43 
 
 yet. Thierry maintains that that invasion, 
 in the existing domination of the Nor- 
 man nobles in both houses of the na- 
 tional legislature, and in their more and 
 more absolute monopoly of the land, 
 still weighs upon them. Be that as it 
 may, the nobles arc at least an infinitesi- 
 mally small numerical minority, compel- 
 led not only to govern under a whole- 
 some sense of that truth, but to recruit 
 their numbers from the subject masses 
 cooped up with them in the island and 
 constituting the whole of its military and 
 industrial strength. The commonalty 
 have endured much for the sake of the 
 tranquillity the palpable fruits of which 
 surround them. And they will endure 
 more, if necessary, as is evidenced by 
 the slow progress and frequent backsets 
 of liberalism, and the utter contempt 
 into which republicanism has fallen. 
 More reforms are to come, and will be 
 exacted if not conceded freely ; but war 
 to procure or to prevent them is the in- 
 terest of neither the rulers nor the ruled. 
 The faint whiff of villainous saltpetre 
 that floats from the direction of Charles 
 I.'s capital at Oxford along the skirmish- 
 lines of Rupert and Essex as far down 
 as Turnham Green is dilute with the 
 breath of a dozen score of English 
 springs. Yonder old elm may have 
 closed around the pikehead of a Puritan 
 or a Cavalier bullet, but it has smother- 
 ed the disreputable intruder in two or 
 three hundred tough and sturdy rings. 
 The wall over which it hangs may have 
 
 been similarly scarred without equal fac- 
 ulty of healing by the first, or any, in- 
 tention, but the hand of man has come 
 to its relief, and difficult indeed is it now 
 to find trace here of the melee when wood 
 and water rang to the charge-shout — 
 
 For God, for the laws, for the Church, for the cause ! 
 For Charles, king of England., and Rupert of the 
 Rhine I 
 
 Wide and splendid gardens, filled with 
 the botanic spoil of all the latitudes, over- 
 spread the field of forgotten combat. So- 
 cieties, commoners, and peers compete 
 along the Thames, as in other parts of 
 the island, in this charming strife. The 
 duke of Devonshire, the owner of famous 
 Chats worth, possesses a country-box call- 
 ed Chiswick House, less noted for any 
 association with the Cavendishes than as 
 having witnessed the last hours of C. J. 
 Eox and George Canning. Fox's death- 
 bed, like his death -hour and his tomb, 
 was very close to that of his great rival. 
 
 Drop upon Fox's grave the tear, 
 'Twill trickle to his rival's bier. 
 
 You may read their epitaphs without 
 turning on your heel, although a truth- 
 ful one will not be written for either 
 until we stand in the midst of such a 
 quarter of a century as that wound up 
 at Waterloo. All was exceptional then 
 — acts and motives alike. The globe's 
 polity, like its crust, is built of sediment- 
 ary layers, filtered in calm, shot through 
 by rare volcanic veins. When the sub- 
 terranean fires shall break out again we 
 may understand these men and their 
 
 BARN ELMS HOUSE. 
 
44 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 KEW PALACE. 
 
 contemporaries on both sides of the 
 Channel. Exactly who and what was 
 wrong may come clear when everything 
 is once more muddle. Our mental optics 
 must be adjusted to the turbid medium 
 in which they moved. We cannot now 
 determine how far the country for which 
 both labored is the better or worse for 
 their having lived. If at all the worse, 
 wonderful indeed would have been her 
 present exaltation, for it is difficult to 
 conceive a finer spectacle of national 
 thrift and ease. Certainly, there is much 
 misery among the poor, rural and oppi- 
 dan, throughout the kingdom, reduced 
 as it has been of late years, and the in- 
 equality in the distribution of property 
 is greater than in any other Christian 
 country ; but nothing of this is obtrusive 
 to the voyager on the Thames. The 
 lower classes appear under the not par- 
 ticularly repulsive guise of gardeners, 
 bargemen, drivers, park - keepers, etc. 
 There are palaces, but none of them 
 overshadowing save Windsor and Hamp- 
 ton Court. Though the towns do not al- 
 ways put their best foot foremost and dip 
 it in the water, their slums rarely offend 
 the eye. At this part of the river's course 
 they are in great part new and bright, 
 thanks to the growth of the great city. 
 The rotund and genial clumps of trees 
 
 that compose so much of the view shel- 
 ter rich and poor alike, and the velvet 
 sward is pressed as freely by brogan as by 
 slipper. The wearers of both may chant 
 as they cross it, "Merrily hent the foot- 
 path way, and merrily hent the stile-a." 
 
 Water, the universal detergent, is at 
 war with the squalid ; and nowhere more 
 thoroughly can it perform that office, with 
 shower, dew and river always flush. It en- 
 sures to the scenery that first requirement 
 of English taste, an air of respectability. 
 
 Chiswick churchyard accommodates, 
 like most other churchyards, an odd 
 jumble of sleepers. The earl of Macart- 
 ney, the modern introducer of the Flow- 
 ery Land to its forgotten and forgetting 
 acquaintance of old, Europe ; Charles 
 II. 's duchess of Cleveland ; Mary, the 
 daughter of Oliver Cromwell ; Cary, the 
 translator of Dante ; Kent, the architect; 
 and, chief of all, Kent's tormentor, Ho- 
 garth, — are among its occupants. Ho- 
 garth's well-known epitaph, by Garrick, 
 we may quote : 
 
 Farewell, great painter of mankind, 
 
 Who reached the noblest point of art, 
 Whose pictured morals charm the mind, 
 
 And through the eye correct the heart I 
 If genius fire thee, reader, stay; 
 
 If Nature move thee, drop a tear; 
 If neither touch thee, turn away, 
 
 For Hogarth's honored dust lies here. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 45 
 
 In his latter years the father of British 
 caricature owned a cottage near by, where 
 he spent his summers in retouching his 
 plates and preparing them for posterity. 
 He still retained his Leicester Fields res- 
 idence, for he could have no other real 
 home than old London. It is curious to 
 speculate on what might have been his 
 position in art had he brought himself 
 to shake the cockney dust from his feet 
 and seek true aesthetic training in Italy. 
 One year, or three, or five, spent at Rome 
 or Florence would not have sufficed to 
 replace his inborn devotion to the gro- 
 tesque with something higher, not to say 
 the upper walks of design. Wilkie, who 
 has been styled his moonlight, cannot be 
 said to have been improved by a similar 
 step, the works executed after his return 
 being inferior to his earlier efforts. Ho- 
 garth, too, might have been spoiled for 
 the field he holds without challenge, and 
 spent the rest of his career in cultivating 
 one more elevated, but unsuited to his 
 genius. It may be as well, therefore, that 
 the hand of the gendarme was laid on 
 his shoulder at Calais gate. The French- 
 man proved an "angel unawares." He 
 saved England an illustrator she values 
 more highly than she would have done 
 a manufacturerof Madonnas and Ajaxes. 
 When the outraged Briton was whirled 
 
 round on the deck of the little packet, 
 and his nose violently pointed in the di- 
 rection of the white cliffs, neither he nor 
 his unpleasant manipulator was aware 
 of the highly beneficial character of the 
 proceeding to the party most concerned. 
 Hogarth would not have admitted re- 
 lationship to the Rosvlandsons, Cruik- 
 shanks, Brownes and Leeches who rep- 
 resent satirical art in the England of the 
 nineteenth century. He would have but 
 distantly recognized even Gilray, who 
 belongs as much to the end of his own 
 as to the beginning of our century, and 
 whose works are of a higher stamp than 
 those of the sketchers we have named. 
 He claimed to be a character painter, re- 
 mitting to a lower class altogether those 
 wielders of the satiric pencil who dealt 
 in the farce of " caricatura," as he termed 
 it. He drew a distinction between high 
 comedy and farce, and sometimes aspired 
 to a position for himself in melodrama. 
 Marriage a la Mode he claimed to belong 
 to such a class, not without some coun- 
 tenance from independent critics. He is 
 needed now to administer a little whole- 
 some regimen to British artists. How he 
 would have lashed the Pre-Raphaelites ! 
 Into what nightmares he would have ex- 
 aggerated some of the whimsies of Tur- 
 ner, as truly a master as himself! Pos- 
 
 SION HOUSE. 
 
 sibly the coming man has already arrived, 
 and has caught inspiration from the ap- 
 propriately square, solid, broad-bottom- 
 ed monument that looks out over the 
 
 fast-swelling hurly-burly of new London 
 from Chiswick burying-ground. 
 
 Barn Elms, on our left, was the home, 
 in their respective periods, of Secretary 
 
4 6 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 Walsingham and of Cowley. That the 
 latter did not select, in this choice of an 
 abode, "so healthful a situation as he 
 might have done," we are assisted in 
 conceding by a glance at the tendency 
 to swampiness which yet afflicts the spot. 
 One account given of the circumstances 
 
 BOAT-HOUSE, SION HOUSE. 
 
 of his demise requires no heavy draft on 
 the aid of malaria. He missed his way 
 on returning from a "wet night" at the 
 house of a friend, and passed what 
 remained of the small hours under a 
 hedge. A timely quotation to him then 
 would have come from his own Elegy 
 upon Anacreon : 
 
 Thou pretendest, traitorous Wine! 
 To be the Muses' friend and mine : 
 With love and wit thou dost begin 
 False fires, alas ! to draw us in ; 
 Which, if our course we by them keep, 
 Misguide to madness or to sleep. 
 Sleep were well : thous't learnt a way 
 To death itself now to betray. 
 
 A weakness of this description, com- 
 bined with his well-tried loyalty, was 
 calculated to win him a friend in the 
 Merry Monarch. Charles's eulogy was, 
 that "Mr. Cowley hath not left a better 
 man behind him in England." The 
 judgment of Charles's subjects was, that 
 he was the first of living English poets, 
 Milton to the contrary notwithstanding. 
 They placed him, accordingly, in West- 
 minster Abbey, by the side of Chaucer 
 and Spenser, while his rival, blind and 
 in disgrace, with the bookseller's five 
 pounds for the copyright of Paradise 
 Lost in one pocket and — unhappily for 
 his weight with the literati of the Resto- 
 
 ration — a thousand from Cromwell in 
 the other for pelting Monsieur Saumaise 
 with bad Latin, was sinking into an ob- 
 scure grave at St. Giles's. 
 
 Mortlake, at the western extremity of 
 what may be dubbed University Row, 
 cherishes the bones of another brace of 
 votaries of imagination. 
 Partridge, the astrologer 
 and maker of almanacs, 
 has a double claim to 
 immortality — first, as 
 Swift's victim in The 
 Taller ; and second, as 
 having distinguished 
 himself among the tribe 
 of lying prophets by 
 blundering into a pre- 
 diction that came true 
 — of snow in hot July. 
 SS=: The other was no less 
 
 a personage than Dr. 
 Dee, familiar to readers 
 of Kenilworth. Good Queen Bess lux- 
 uriated, like potentates of more recent 
 date, in a kitchen cabinet, and Dr. Dee 
 was a member. In his counsels Eliza- 
 beth apparently trusted as implicitly as in 
 those of her legitimate ministers. She 
 often sought his retreat, as Saul did that of 
 the Witch of Endor, for supernatural en- 
 lightenment. Unfortunately, the journals 
 of these seances are not preserved. Dee's 
 show-stone, a bit of obsidian, in which he 
 pretended to mirror future events, was 
 in Horace Walpole's collection at Straw- 
 berry Hill. How such matters were view- 
 ed in those times is evidenced by the 
 facts that the learned Casaubon publish- 
 ed a folio of Dee's reports of interviews 
 with spirits; that Dee was made chancel- 
 or of St. Paul's ; and that he was employ- 
 ed to ascertain by necromancy what day 
 would be most auspicious for Elizabeth's 
 coronation. Still, let us remember that 
 Cagliostro's triumphal march across Eu- 
 rope dates back but a century ; that Cum- 
 ming's prophecies constitute a standard 
 authority with many most excellent and 
 intelligent persons ; that Spiritualism, de- 
 spite the most crushing reverses, num- 
 bers many able votaries on both sides 
 of the Atlantic ; and that futurity is a 
 show as regularly advertised in the news- 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 47 
 
 papers of one of our cities as the theatre 
 or the ward- meeting. 
 
 Very vivid is the contrast that awaits 
 us at the coming curve, between the un- 
 lovely town of Brentford, the" lang toun" 
 of South, as Kirkcaldy is of North, Brit- 
 ain, on the right, and the horticultural 
 marvels of Kew on the 
 left. Brentford, how- 
 ever, is, as we have said 
 is the case with other 
 weak points of the 
 Thames, screened 
 from the reprobation 
 of the navigator by the 
 friendly trees of a large 
 island. If you feel a 
 personal interest in 
 studying the field of 
 two battles, fought, 
 one eight hundred and 
 sixty years ago, be- 
 tween the Saxons and 
 Danes — "kites and 
 crows," as Hume held 
 them — and the other 
 two hundred and forty 
 years since, between 
 the Roundheads and 
 the Cavaliers, you will 
 pull up at Brentford. 
 If you lack time or 
 taste for that diversion, 
 you will "choose the better part" and go 
 to Kew, one of the lions of the river. In 
 front stands the old red brick palace, the 
 favorite country home of George III. — 
 our George, so sadly berated by Mr. Jef- 
 ferson and Dr. Wolcott, but a perfectly 
 sincere and conscientious man, a bow- 
 shot in all good points beyond either 
 of his namesakes. It is to his queen, 
 worthy and unbeauteous Charlotte, that 
 London and its guests owe the founda- 
 tion of the matchless Botanic Gardens. 
 Their glories are inventoried in the guide- 
 books : two hundred and forty acres of 
 park and seventy-five of garden ; acres 
 of space and miles of walk under glass ; 
 the great palm-house, tall enough for 
 most of the members of that giant fam- 
 ily to erect themselves in and enjoy the 
 largest liberty ; the Chinese pagoda, one 
 hundred and sixty -three feet high; the 
 
 entire vegetable world in microcosm, 
 ordered, trimmed and labeled with as 
 much of business precision as though, 
 instead of being the manufacture of Na- 
 ture, they were so many bales of Man- 
 chester goods ticketed for exportation to 
 some other planet ; — a collection and dis- 
 
 ISLEWORTH CHURCH. 
 
 play, in short, not unworthy of an empire 
 whose drum-beat, etc. 
 
 Conspicuous on the opposite side of 
 the Thames, midway of the linked sweet- 
 ness of Kew, stands storied Sion, a seat 
 of the dukes of Northumberland. Origin- 
 ally a wealthy nunnery, it was seized — 
 and of course disestablished and held 
 as his own — by the Eighth Harry. It 
 served him as a prison for one of his 
 wives, Katharine Howard, and a few 
 years later furnished a night's rest to his 
 own remains on their way to Windsor. 
 His daughter, on what still flourishes 
 of whose repute in the uncongenial soil 
 of Protestant England Mr. Tennyson is 
 testing the blackness of his ink, revived 
 the nunnery. It had reverted to the 
 Crown on the attainder of the duke of 
 Northumberland, who had been granted 
 it on the attainder of the Protector Som- 
 
48 
 
 IT THE THAMES. 
 
 ji, f ^mo '\ 
 
 RICHMOND BRIDGE. 
 
 erset, to whom Edward VI. had presented 
 it. From Sion House, Lady Jane Grey 
 stepped to a throne and a scaffold. Its 
 associations with the misfortunes of roy- 
 alty do not end here. In it the children 
 of Charles I. were held in custody by 
 the Parliament, and it witnessed an in- 
 terview between them and their unfor- 
 tunate parent, procured by special inter- 
 cession as a special favor. The Smith- 
 sons, representatives of the Percies, and 
 fixed in the esteem of our people by the 
 Institution at Washington, are in undis- 
 turbed and exclusive possession now — 
 too exclusive, think some tourists, who 
 desire to explore the house, and find dif- 
 ficulty in procuring the permission usual- 
 ly accorded at other aristocratic seats. 
 Yet it is easy to surfeit of sight-seeing 
 without grieving over a failure to pene- 
 trate the walls of Sion. 
 
 A little above, Isleworth, the home 
 of Lord Baltimore, the original grantee 
 of Maryland, helps to sentinel Kew. 
 The church-tower, if decapitated, would 
 somewhat resemble that of Jamestown. 
 Like the latter, it is of brick. The simil- 
 itude is not the less apt to suggest itself 
 
 that beyond it, as we ascend the river, 
 lies Richmond. 
 
 Having thus achieved our "on-to-Rich- 
 mond " movement, we are admonished 
 that justice to our objective point and to 
 its more interesting neighbors, Twick- 
 enham, the home of Pope and Walpole, 
 the Great Park, and other attractions, re- 
 quires another article. We have reach- 
 ed the head of steam-navigation, and 
 lost the last whiff of salt water. We for- 
 get that Britain is "shrined in the sea," 
 and begin to cultivate a continental sen- 
 sation. The voice, the movement and 
 the savor of ocean have all disappeared. 
 If aught suggestive of it linger, we find it 
 in the moisture that veils the bluest sky, 
 lends such delicate gradations to the aeri- 
 al perspective, adds a richer green to tree 
 and turf, and seems to give rotundity to 
 the contours of both animate and inani- 
 mate Nature. That this excess of vapor is 
 comparatively unattended by chill is due, 
 we suppose, to the great ocean stream sent 
 over by America, with her climate of ex- 
 tremes, to make that of Britain one of 
 moderation and equality 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 SECOND PAPER. 
 
 VI EW OF RICHMOND HILL. 
 
 ARRIVED at Richmond, a spot 
 which divides with Hampton Court 
 and Windsor the sovereignty of rural 
 Thames, the correct thing is to climb 
 Richmond Hill, an eminence which se- 
 cures a distinction over both the rival 
 attractions in at least one respect — that 
 of breadth of prospect. That so slight 
 an elevation should do so illustrates the 
 extreme flatness of the country. The 
 4 
 
 rise above the plain is not so great as 
 that which commands a less noted but 
 not less beautiful view at our Ameri- 
 can Richmond — a scene which stands 
 credited with having determined the 
 name of the latter city. The winding 
 river, broken by islets, and the immense 
 expanse of level woodland, are the lead- 
 ing features of both pictures. Ours has 
 less advantage of association. It has 
 49 
 
5° 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 RICHMOND CHURCH. 
 
 no Windsor and no minor palaces. The 
 town in the foreground, though boasting 
 a far more picturesque site, is less pic- 
 turesquely built, finely as the lath-and- 
 plaster Capitol stands out against the 
 eastern sky. But the James, as a piece 
 of running water, unquestionably excels 
 the Thames. It is, in the lower and more 
 placid part of its course, much like the 
 Thames, while it possesses in the so-called 
 falls which foam and sparkle in a thou- 
 sand rapids and cascades among nearly 
 as many birch- and elm-clad rocks and 
 islets at the spectator's feet, an element 
 wholly wanting in the other. Gazing upon 
 the Virginian scene, Claude and Salvator 
 would have opened their sketch -boxes 
 and sat down to work side by side. The 
 English would have kept the former, and 
 sent the Neapolitan away. 
 
 Let us borrow from Thomson — "Oh, 
 Jamie Tamson, Jamie Tamson, oh !" — 
 who sleeps in the odd little church be- 
 low, and whose pen is most successful 
 in the Claude style, what we need in the 
 way of description of a scene so olten 
 limned with both instruments: 
 
 Here let us sweep 
 The boundless landscape ; now the raptured eye 
 Exulting swift to huge Augusta send, 
 Now to the sister hills that skirt her plain : 
 To lofty Harrow now, and now to where 
 Imperial Windsor lifts her lofty brow. 
 # * * * 
 
 Here let us trace the matchless vale of Thames, 
 Far winding up to where the Muses haunt — 
 To Twickenham bowers ; to royal Hampton's pile : 
 To Claremont's terraced heights and Esher's groves. 
 Enchanting vale! beyond whate'er the Muse 
 Has of Achaia or Hesperia sung. 
 
 Another minstrel from 
 Tweedside tried his hand 
 upon it in The Heart of 
 Midlothian . He stops 
 Jeanie and the duke, not- 
 withstanding the life-and- 
 death importance of their 
 errand, to mark where "the 
 Thames, here turreted with 
 villas and there garlanded 
 with forests, moved on 
 slowly and placidly, like 
 the mighty monarch of the 
 scene to whom all its oth- 
 er beauties were but acces- 
 sories." It is but a limited 
 monarchy, of the mild 
 British constitutional type, that can be 
 attributed to a sluggish stream of a hun- 
 dred yards in width, majestic as it may 
 have appeared to the poet of "Tweed's 
 fair river, broad and deep." In this case, 
 stateliness and dignity attach rather to 
 the land than to the water, if only be- 
 cause there is more of it. Magnitude is 
 essential to them. Kings must not be 
 little, as Louis XIV. taught us by his 
 robes and padding and periwigs. It is 
 an odd sort of sovereign, moreover, that 
 occupies the lowest place in the presence- 
 chamber, and is dominated by all his 
 surroundings. 
 
 One visit will not do for the scene be- 
 fore us. He who desires to test its mul- 
 tiformity must see it again and again. 
 The English sky has a vast variety of 
 cloud-effect, which repeats itself in "mov- 
 ing accidents," as artists term them, "by 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 51 
 
 flood and field." When 
 the sky is not entirely 
 overcast, the ever -va- 
 rying catches of light 
 and shade on so broad 
 a surface forbid its pre- 
 senting exactly the 
 same appearance for 
 more than a few mo- 
 ments together. The 
 white buildings scat- 
 tered over it assist this 
 kaleidoscopic move- 
 ment. As we gaze upon 
 a smooth patch of un- 
 broken shadow some 
 miles off, it is suddenly and sharply 
 flecked, thanks to a drift of the cloud 
 above it, by a bright light, and another 
 and another, till a whole town or range 
 of villas, before unseen, brightens the 
 distance. Onward sweeps the cloud, 
 followed by its fellows, and these new 
 objects fade into nothingness, while oth- 
 ers beyond them, or it may be nearer, 
 flash into view. The water aids this in- 
 cessant change in the general and par- 
 ticular distribution of light and shade by 
 its reflection. It deepens shadow and 
 intensifies light. It is never sombre, 
 however dull may be the visage of the 
 land. Somewhere, edging an island or 
 
 «K 
 
 thomson's garden. 
 
 shooting out from a point, it will furn- 
 ish a bit of glitter, all the more effective 
 because of the gloomy setting that de- 
 mands it and supplies its foil. 
 
 Singular as is the predominance, in 
 this view, of copse and grove, over the 
 signs of habitation and industry belong- 
 ing to the heart of so densely peopled a 
 kingdom, art has not failed of its share 
 in decorating the foreground. Villa and 
 terrace cluster along the slope ; for this 
 has always been a favorite retreat of the 
 Londoners, whether they came for a day 
 or for a decade. Turning from the riv- 
 er, we lapse again under the sovereignty 
 of turf and leaf as we enter the gateway 
 
 VIF.W FROM RICHMOND HILL. 
 
53 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 
 r^^^^mm^ 
 
 GATK, RICHMOND GREAT PARK. 
 
 of the Great Park. This must have been 
 a second surprise to our countryman, 
 whose disappointment with the front 
 view vented itself in the remark: "Why, 
 this country wants clearing!" 
 
 Here we are within the precincts of 
 royalty. The Park, some eight miles in 
 circuit, belongs to the Crown ; as part of 
 it, with the old palace of Sheen, has 
 done since Henry I., and the rest since 
 Charles I., who purchased and enclosed 
 it at great cost to his purse and popular- 
 ity, of neither of which had he much to 
 spare. The gay groups of holiday folks 
 who throng the walks suggest, instead, 
 that it is the property of the people. The 
 phrases are becoming synonymous. The 
 grounds attached to the royal palaces, in 
 this as in other parts of England, are 
 
 EDWARD III. 
 
 more enjoyed by the masses than by the 
 sovereign. The queen abandons them 
 all for her new boxes, with their scant 
 and simple demesnes, at Balmoral and 
 Osborne. Two centuries and more have 
 elapsed since any of her predecessors 
 lived at Richmond, and the chances are 
 against its becoming the abode of her 
 successors. It is too historical to be a 
 home. Kings and queens, like common 
 people, like to set up their own house- 
 hold gods and construct a lair for them- 
 selves. They do not like, even in the 
 matter of a dwelling-place, to wholly 
 sink their personality and become a mere 
 dynastic expression. This fancy for set- 
 ting up for themselves has been espe- 
 cially strong among the Hanoverians. 
 George III. liked to bury himself at Kew 
 or among his pigs and sheep on the 
 farms into which he converted part of 
 Windsor Park. His hopeful son estab- 
 lished himself at Carlton House, with 
 the occasional relaxation of the Chinese 
 monstrosity at Brighton. The present 
 prince of Wales has domiciled himself 
 at several places. His favorite resi- 
 dence, Sandringham, is a new purchase. 
 Should he retain his liking for it, it may 
 rank in future story with Woodstock or 
 Sheen. 
 
 Sheen or Shene, with a variety of oth- 
 er spellings, was anciently the name of 
 Richmond. Sheen Palace was occupied 
 by the first three Edwards : the hero of 
 Crecy there closed his eyes on the glory 
 of this world in the leafy month of June, 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 53 
 
 RICHMOND GREAT PARK. 
 
 when the England whose language un- 
 der him first breathed the atmosphere 
 of a court, and who singles him out as 
 her favorite among the Plantagenets, 
 was looking her loveliest. Through the 
 window came to the dying warrior the 
 murmur of the same river and the breath 
 of the same groves we now look upon. 
 Far in the west the new towers of Wind- 
 sor, built by him, broke, as now, the flat 
 horizon. The mass of leafage that match- 
 ed it in the distant east may have bent 
 above Chaucer's pilgrims on their merry 
 
 return from Canterbury with sins newly 
 shriven and an ample stock of indul- 
 gences to cover a new supply in the fu- 
 ture. If the tales with which they be- 
 guiled their penitential way to the sacred 
 shrine were of the character given us by 
 their poetic chronicler, gay indeed must 
 have been those which, pious duty dis- 
 charged and conscience disburdened, 
 cheered their homeward ride. 
 
 Henry VII. gave the place its present 
 name in honor of Richmond in York- 
 shire, from which he derived his title. 
 
 ORLEANS HOUSE. 
 
54 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 DUKE OF BUCCLEUCH'S VILLA. 
 
 seized the limbs of 
 the old. But the 
 nearest approach 
 possible then to this 
 achievement existed 
 only in the imag- 
 ination of Mr. Bur- 
 bage's partner in the 
 Globe Theatre. That 
 very practical busi- 
 ness-man was exer- 
 cising his mind on 
 the invention of 
 the still popular 
 despatch-machine 
 called Ariel, which 
 promised to 
 
 — drink the air before 
 me, and return 
 Or e'er your pulse twice 
 beat. 
 
 It witnessed his closing hours, as also 
 those of the last of his dynasty. It was 
 down Richmond Hill that "Cousin Gary" 
 dashed on his long gallop to Scotland to 
 tell James VI. that the halls which had 
 received the body of his ancestor, James 
 IV., a slain enemy of England, brought 
 from Flodden wrapped in lead and toss- 
 ed unburied into a lumber-room, were 
 his. In our day Cary would have sim- 
 ply stepped into the telegraph-office, and 
 at the cost of a shilling placed the in- 
 formation in the hands of the new in- 
 cumbent before the rigor mortis had 
 
 The first of the Stuarts did not greatly 
 affect Richmond, perhaps because he did 
 not like treading too closely in the foot- 
 steps of the murderer of his mother, and 
 perhaps because of other associations with 
 the place. Elizabeth herself had been 
 a prisoner at Richmond for a short time 
 in her sister's reign. It served a similar 
 purpose for Charles I. in 1647. All this 
 helps to explain the fancy of monarchs 
 for setting up new establishments. The 
 old ones, in the course of time, accumu- 
 late such an unpleasant stock of reminis- 
 cences. Memento moris lurk under the 
 
 MARBLE HILL, TWICKENHAM. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 55 
 
 archways and glare out from ivy-clad 
 casements. The Tuileries have earned 
 the disgust of three French dynasties ; 
 and no British sovereign will ever carry 
 a good appetite into Inigo Jones's ban- 
 queting-room at Whitehall, beautiful as 
 it is. 
 
 A further reminder of the misfortunes 
 of royalty is furnished by a glance across 
 the river. A stately mansion on the 
 shore opposite Richmond was the re- 
 treat, during part of his exile, of the 
 "citizen king," as Louis Philippe delight- 
 ed to style himself; and also, by another 
 shuffle of Fortune's cards, since 1848 that 
 of one of his sons. He left behind him 
 an excellent repute, as did Charles X. at 
 Holyrood, Louis le Bien-aime at Hart- 
 well, and the latest, not last probably, 
 of the migratory Louises at Chiselhurst. 
 It may be doubted if any of them was 
 ever so happy as in England, allowing 
 them their full share of the Frenchman's 
 proverbial contempt for a home any- 
 where outside of France. The sense 
 of repose and security could not fail to 
 be the keenest of luxuries to the occu- 
 pant of so shaky a throne. Nowhere in 
 the broad British asylum could that sense 
 be more complete and refreshing than 
 here under the sleepy trees by the sleepy 
 river; everything in the remotest degree 
 suggestive of war, tumult and revolution 
 smothered out ; the whole strength of the 
 British empire interposed against peril 
 from the fevered Continent, and the 
 peace of centuries inwoven into the 
 
 ways of the people and the air of their 
 abodes. In the time of Louis Philippe 
 that prophecy of the first Darwin — the 
 father who looked to the future, and not 
 the son who reads the past — which har- 
 nesses steam to " the slow barge " had not 
 come to pass. That snail like craft, de- 
 pendent on the tow-rope and such cap- 
 fuls of wind as the groves allowed to 
 filter through, monopolized the river. 
 Even the very moderate commotion due 
 to the passage of a small steamboat was 
 wanting. And that is again disappear- 
 ing. The wrinkles it drew upon the 
 calm and venerable face — venerable in 
 an old age the most hale and green im- 
 aginable — of Father Thames, are fading 
 away, and he smiles up from his leafy 
 couch into the face of king or common- 
 er, Frenchman, Briton or American, with 
 a freshness that is a sovereign balm for 
 inward bruises of heart and mind. These 
 Bourbons and Bonapartes all grew fat 
 in England. Whatever else she may 
 grudge the "blarsted foreigners," she is 
 lavish to them of adipose tissue. The 
 fat of the land will always find its way 
 to their ribs, as the eglantine will to the 
 cheeks. The ever- watchful pickets thrown 
 by the nerves to the whole circuit of the 
 body physical in our climate find them- 
 selves speedily driven in on landing upon 
 British soil. Its assembled forces no long- 
 er sleep upon their arms. 
 
 Let us trust that the enforced migra- 
 tions of Gallic rulers are all over, and that 
 the Septennate of Marshal MacMahon 
 
 TWICKENHAM CHURCH. 
 
56 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 WIMBLEDON COMMON. 
 
 may end, after the scriptural rule, in ju- 
 bilee. Should it fall out otherwise, how- 
 ever, the long tiers of villas that terrace 
 the green slopes of Richmond and Twick- 
 enham are ample to accommodate gen- 
 erations of exiles. Good company awaits 
 them, too ; for fashion takes the locality 
 under its wing, and the peerage is not 
 unrepresented among what we should 
 call the settlers The "bauld Buccleuch," 
 head of the rieving clan Scott, still makes 
 occasional raids across the Border upon 
 the beef of the Sassenachs, with the dif- 
 ference that he now brings knife and 
 fork along instead of hurrying his sir- 
 loin northward on four legs at full trot. 
 
 Orleans House, we should add, was 
 not indebted for its first introduction to 
 royalty to Mr. William Smith, as Louis 
 Philippe named himself on his final es- 
 cape from Paris, having borrowed the 
 idea of adopting that widely known sur- 
 name possibly from Buckingham and the 
 prince of Wales (afterward Charles I.) 
 on their visit, also incognito, to the same 
 city in 1623. Queen Anne, when sim- 
 ple princessof Denmark, and on hergood 
 behavior to secure the honor of rising to 
 a higher title after the demise of Dutch 
 William, made it her residence. On an 
 ait in front, sacred now to bourgeois pic- 
 
 nics, and named Eel-pie Island from the 
 viand to which, in deference to their 
 tastes, it is consecrated, the last hope of 
 the Protestant Stuarts, her son, the little 
 duke of Gloucester, was wont to drill his 
 young playmates in mimic war. But the 
 Fates had other use for him. Hence the 
 four Georges, Queen Victoria and — Ar- 
 thur II. (?) Years after, when Mrs. Mash- 
 am's and the duchess of Marlborough's 
 handmaiden had followed her boy, Caro- 
 line, queen of the Second George, was 
 entertained by Mr. Secretary Johnstone, 
 the then proprietor of Orleans House. 
 Her visit is memorable only as having 
 caused the addition of the semi-octag- 
 onal excrescence seen in the engraving. 
 That it was not repeated may be ac- 
 counted for by the circumstance that 
 Marble Hill, the next house, was built 
 by her loving spouse for the countess of 
 Suffolk. The reader will recall the death- 
 bed scene, the request to marry again, 
 and George's impassioned protestation, 
 through blinding tears, "Non.j'aurai des 
 mattresses /" Capital fun those " wee wee 
 German lairdies" have purveyed, unwit- 
 tingly, for the wits of their days, from 
 Swift down through Wilkes and Wal- 
 pole to Tom Moore. The Hanoverian 
 line may thus be said to form the ver- 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 57 
 
 tebral column of a century of 
 squibs, or rather the wood- 
 en pole around which they 
 twine (not very lovingly) and 
 shoot. It was a queer family. 
 Its little peculiarity, notorious 
 through its whole career on 
 English soil down to our day, 
 of being perpetually at war 
 with itself, was alone ample 
 material for satire. Lord 
 Granville, one of its minis- 
 ters, said, "It always has 
 quarreled, and always will 
 quarrel, from generation to 
 generation." The princes of 
 Wales have always been in 
 opposition. Prior to George 
 III., who was prompted to a 
 neat touch in his first address 
 to his Parliament in declar- 
 ing himself "entirely Eng- 
 lish," and even in that furn- 
 ishing new food for lampoons, 
 the weaning of it from Ger- 
 many, in speech, habits or 
 residence, was not much 
 more than a pretence. The difficulty of 
 extracting the king from the delights of 
 his Hanoverian hermitage, once there, 
 was a perpetual worry to Lords and 
 Commons. The vernacular of his sub- 
 jects was as foreign as Sanskrit to the 
 First George, and nearly as much so 
 to the Second. The former commu- 
 nicated with his prime minister, Wal- 
 pole, in Latin — royal Latin, a shade 
 better than dog Latin, and not so good 
 as law Latin. Carteret had the ad- 
 vantage of his chief. As Macaulay 
 says, he "dismayed his colleagues by 
 the volubility with which he addressed 
 His Majesty in German. They listen- 
 ed with envy and terror to the myste- 
 rious gutturals, which might possibly 
 convey suggestions very little in unison 
 with their wishes." 
 
 Horace Walpole, whose castle of 
 cards, as fantastic and almost as un- 
 substantial as his Castle of Otranto, 
 lies about a mile above Twickenham, 
 has sent down to us many gossipy 
 items in reference to Richmond and 
 its neighborhood. His father enjoyed, 
 
 WIMBLEDON HOUSE. 
 
 among his long list of other profitable 
 and pleasant sinecures, the rangership 
 of the Great Park. The office was nom- 
 inally held by his son, but the statesman 
 made it his resort on Saturdays and Sun- 
 days. His relaxation from business con- 
 
 kean's tomb. 
 
58 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 pope's villa — 1744. 
 
 sisted, he said, in doing more business 
 than he could in town on those days. 
 He and George found time, however, 
 to do a good deal of shooting over the 
 twenty-three hundred acres which com- 
 pose the enclosure, and after that to dine 
 tete-a-tete. Her Grace of Suffolk, fear- 
 ful of the effect of post-prandial punch 
 on the royal head, and consequent dis- 
 closure to the astute minister of more 
 than he might otherwise know, placed 
 some German spies around the board to 
 
 check the elector's 
 potations. The plan 
 failed, the indignant 
 monarch putting 
 them to flight with a 
 tremendous volley of 
 the most sulphurous 
 oaths and epithets 
 the High Dutch vo- 
 cabulary can boast. 
 Blucher might have 
 envied his accom- 
 plishments in that 
 line. 
 
 Let us traverse the 
 range of these old 
 sportsmen to the 
 south-eastern end 
 of the park. The 
 descendants of 
 the bucks whose 
 haunches furnished 
 the chief dish at 
 their — in several 
 senses — rude feasts troop across our 
 woodland path or gaze at us from their 
 beds of fern. Little cottagers, quite as 
 shy, or little Londoners at play, quite 
 the reverse, help to people the glades. 
 What should we more naturally hit upon, 
 under the greenwood tree in these depths 
 of merry England, than Robin Hood 
 Gate ? It points us, in a short walk, to 
 Robin Hood Farm on the edge of Wim- 
 bledon Common. There is nothing here 
 of the bold forester but the name ; and 
 that we find in other parts of England, 
 for he represented the popular and anti- 
 privilege party in the dim days ere party 
 
 pope's tomb. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 59 
 
 or constitutional government was invent- 
 ed. Some stretch of the fancy may bring 
 him back in the flesh on match-days, 
 when the modern successor of his trusty 
 yew is displaying its powers in the hands, 
 perchance, of keen -eyed and stalwart 
 yeomen from over-sea forests undream- 
 ed of by him. "Teams " take the place 
 of the bands of merry Sherwood, and 
 the distance marked off for their aim is 
 fifty score instead of six score, the ulti- 
 matum of the long bow. This he would, 
 after a bit of the conservative hesitation 
 of the Englishman, admire; and he would 
 mourn that he and Friar Tuck had lived 
 too soon. Less adjustment of his per- 
 ceptions and sympathies would suffice 
 to place him quite at home among the 
 modern throng upon the ground. Al- 
 lowing for the change of dress, absurd 
 enough, from the lithe jerkin and hood 
 to the stiff hat and tight coat, he would 
 detect, in the voices that spoke from and 
 the forms imprisoned in the new garb, 
 the rugged Saxons of old, deep of speech, 
 deep also of thew and bone, rough and 
 blunt in play and talk. He might won- 
 der whence came the thousands that 
 dotted the breezy swells of the common, 
 and the long lines of equipages, each 
 more elegant than the most sumptuous 
 litter of Cceur de Lion's court ; but he 
 
 would trace some triumph of his politics 
 in the nearer fraternizing of Giles on 
 foot and Fitz on wheels or horseback, 
 implied in friendly rivalry at the butts 
 of peer and commoner. The queen's 
 son-in-law. a Redshank from the savage 
 fastnesses of Argyll, figuring among the 
 contestants, with lesser lights of his class 
 around him, would seem a realization of 
 his dreams. 
 
 The common, too, is yielding to the 
 march of progress. Long beleaguered 
 by rank on rank of villas, they are gath- 
 ering it to themselves. As we write gangs 
 of navvies are leveling the embankment 
 of " Caesar's Camp " on its southern edge, 
 a circular entrenchment of six hundred 
 feet in diameter, the two opposite en- 
 trances, perfect till to-day, traversed by a 
 farm-lane, through which Hodge, Buck 
 and Bright, three well-matched cronies, 
 lumber along in the track of the legions. 
 The new Rome is not to be gainsaid. 
 Her irresistible march sweeps away her 
 own pagani — pace Hodge, who is unques- 
 tionably orthodox, and thinks with Mr. 
 Gladstone, if he ever thinks at all, the 
 Anglican Church "worth preserving" if 
 only to provide him a Sunday's snooze 
 below the curate as he 
 
 Heers un a-bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock 
 ower his yead. 
 
 
 LADY HOWE'S VILLA, MISCALLED POPE'S — 1 842. 
 
6o 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 :--v'f ■' 
 
 Wimbledon House offers its park, beau- 
 tiful exceedingly, for an eastward stroll 
 toward London if we wish to go back. 
 But such is not our present plan. Stand- 
 ing on Charles I.'s "musk-milion ground, 
 trenched, manured and very well order- 
 ed for the growth of musk-milions " — 
 wherein, all undreaming of his fate, a 
 few days before he was brought to trial 
 by Bradshawe & Co., he gave directions 
 for the planting of some choice Spanish 
 seed — we listen, unseduced, to the siren 
 strains of the South-western steam-whis- 
 tle, that shrills across lake and grove from 
 the station below, and turn back by a 
 more southerly route than that which 
 brought us hither. How smoothly and 
 unconsciously the miles roll off under 
 our feet in this cool air and on these cool 
 pathways ! An American, all unused to 
 walk on the English scale, forgets him- 
 self, and is surprised to see how distance 
 disappears. This time we cross the park 
 toward Ham, passing the knoll where 
 Henry is said to have waited impa- 
 tiently to hear the gun that announced 
 his summary divorce from Anne Boleyn, 
 and to have sprung instantly into the 
 saddle to announce his happiness to her 
 destined successor. The bend of the 
 
 river which we now cross may be called 
 Poet's Corner. Thomson's resting-place 
 at Richmond we have mentioned. Ed- 
 mund Kean, the powerful interpreter of 
 poets, if not one himself, sleeps by his 
 side; the thunders of the pit, whereof he 
 had his full share, all forgotten. This 
 nook was the haunt also of Collins, who 
 composed at Richmond some of his best 
 productions. Unless on the principle of 
 Christopher North, who, if called on to de- 
 scribe the loveliest of landscapes, would, 
 he said, have carried his writing-desk 
 into the deepest cellar of the Canongate, 
 it is not very apparent how this slumber- 
 ous river-side could have supplied in- 
 spiration for a stirring "Ode to the Pas- 
 sions." 
 
 Over Twickenham hovers a mightier 
 shade than these. " Close by those 
 meads for ever crowned with flowers," 
 and quite as close to the river, once stood 
 Pope's house. It was destroyed by Lady 
 Howe, purchaser of the place, early in 
 this century. This fair Erostratus comes 
 in for a vast amount of inverted bene- 
 diction from pilgrims to the shrine of 
 the author of the Rape of the Lock ; and 
 the poet himself, could he have look- 
 ed into futurity, would probably, after 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 61 
 
 TEDDING'! ON CHURCH. 
 
 the example of Shakespeare, have be- 
 queathed some maledictions to the dese- 
 crator. But it stands to reason that she 
 had a perfect right to build a house on 
 her own property to suit herself. What, 
 else, were the use of being a true-born 
 Briton, with her house for a castle, and 
 a right, of course, to model it as she 
 thought best for defence or any other 
 purpose ? She did not greatly improve 
 the style of the structure, it is true, but 
 that also was her own concern. She has 
 the undisputed merit, moreover, of pre- 
 serving the famous grotto in tolerable 
 condition. Pope's account of this struc- 
 ture, fashionable in his day, will be as 
 much as the reader wants of it: "From 
 the river Thames you see through my arch 
 up a walk of the wilderness to a kind of 
 open temple, wholly composed of shells 
 
 in the rustic manner, and from that dis- 
 tance under the temple, passing sudden- 
 ly and vanishing, as through a perspec- 
 tive glass. When you shut the door of 
 this grotto it becomes in the instant, from 
 a luminous room, a camera obscura, on 
 the walls of which all the objects of the 
 river, hills, woods and boats are forming 
 a moving picture in their visible radia- 
 tions," etc. 
 
 The rheumatics seize us as we think 
 upon it. Was it not damp enough above 
 ground for the shivering little atomy, 
 that he must needs have a subaqueous 
 burrow, like a water-rat, and invite his 
 guests to 
 
 Where Thames' translucent wave 
 Shines, a broad mirror, through the shady cave, 
 Where lingering drops from mineral roofs distill, 
 And pointed crystals break the sparkling rill ? 
 
 HANWELL CHURCH. 
 
62 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 HARROW CHURCH. 
 
 Pliny's description of his villa seems to 
 us more excellent fooling than this. And 
 yet it was true taste once in the eyes of 
 a writer a leading trait of whose verse, 
 in selection of words and imagery, is 
 exquisite taste. He had the aid, too, in 
 his decorations, of the glass of fashion 
 to the kingdom, the prince of Wales, 
 who presented him with sundry urns and 
 vases. 
 
 The most interesting fact connected 
 with this seat, aside from the fame of its 
 creator and of the friends who visited it 
 — Swift, Bolingbroke, Gay, Arbuthnot, 
 etc. — is that, like Abbotsford, it was built 
 by the pen. Abbotsford, the child of 
 mediaeval romances, was erected, natu- 
 rally enough, in the Gothic style. Pope's 
 villa, the fruit of his profits in "tradu- 
 cing" Homer, bears, or bore, as fitly the 
 Periclean imprint. The blind old bard, 
 weakened as he was in Pope's heroics, 
 was yet, "all his original brightness not 
 yet lost," strong enough to build for him 
 a better house than is likely ever to have 
 sheltered his own hoary head. Pope 
 coined him into broad British sovereigns, 
 
 and among Anglo-Sax- 
 on readers, as a mass, 
 he is current under 
 Pope's mint - mark to 
 this day. W h e n we 
 quote the Iliad, we usu- 
 ally quote Pope. A host 
 of other translations 
 since, some of them su- 
 perior in accuracy both 
 of language and spirit, 
 have failed to supplant 
 his. Only a poet can 
 translate a poet, and in 
 such a translator we par- 
 don liberties that would 
 be scouted in others. 
 He is sure to give us 
 something fine, if not 
 precisely what was bar- 
 gained for. The others 
 irritate us by the very 
 exactness which he 
 could afford to neglect, 
 and which is their only 
 merit. Pope's Homer, 
 washed and dressed up 
 to the requirements of our civilization, 
 has outlived the blunt semi - savage 
 chalked in hard outline for us by his 
 competitors. 
 
 From Richmond Hill we take in at 
 one view the lairs of the greatest English 
 poet of the eighteenth century and the 
 chief of the nineteenth. Bluish-gray in 
 the north — blue it would be in our atmo- 
 sphere — rise the towers of Harrow-on- 
 the-Hill. As we have now reached the 
 upper level of the Thames, the first weir 
 and lock occurring at Teddington, a short 
 distance above where we stand, we may 
 as well branch off through the rural part 
 of Middlesex and follow the valley of 
 the Brent, by Hanwell, with its neat 
 church, to Harrow, lounge in the play- 
 ground of Byron, Peel and some other 
 notable boys, and regain our original 
 starting-point by the great North-western 
 Railway, the world's wonder among iron 
 roads, with its two thousand locomotives, 
 its forty thousand wagons and coaches, 
 and its revenue larger than that of the 
 British empire a hundred years ago. 
 Master John Lyon, when in 1592 he 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 63 
 
 endowed the school, show- 
 ed admirable judgment in 
 his selection of a site. It 
 occupies the highest ground 
 in Middlesex. From its 
 belfry we look down upon 
 the "huge dun canopy" of 
 St. Paul's in the east, and 
 imagine, through the mist, 
 fog or smoke that usually 
 forms a secondary canopy 
 to the city beneath it, Lon- 
 don. Over wood and hill, 
 to the south-west, the view 
 stretches to Windsor; the 
 battlements of intellectual 
 confronting those of feudal 
 and monarchical power — 
 siegeworks raised against 
 the stronghold of despotism 
 at long range, and working 
 through a long leaguer, but 
 triumphant at last. 
 
 The church dates, in part 
 at least, from long before 
 the school. They show 
 you, in the base of the tow- 
 er and the columns between 
 the nave and the aisles, 
 masonry attributed to Lan- 
 franc in the time of the 
 Conqueror. Near by, on the summit of 
 the hill, you find a curious achievement 
 of Nature a good deal older still in an 
 unfailing well from which Saxon swine- 
 herds may have drunk when the Falaise 
 
 IK i**4r 
 
 . «■ 
 
 HARROW SCHOOL. 
 
 tanner's daughter was in maiden medita- 
 tion fancy free. It was a fair Castaly 
 for Childe Harold, yet supplemental to 
 those among "the highest hills that rise 
 above the source of Dee." To them he 
 
 
 HARROW SCHOOL CHAPEL. 
 
64 
 
 CF THE THAMES. 
 
 "BYRON'S [X>MB." 
 
 himself traces the Muse's half- Hedged 
 Autterings that ripened into so broad a 
 flight : 
 
 The infant rapture still survived the boy, 
 And 1 och-na-Gair with [da looked o'er Troy. 
 
 He was then a child of but eight years. 
 Hut for the lucky snatch o( an attend- 
 ant, he would, on one of his boyish 
 scrambles above the Linn of Dee, have 
 tumbled into the torrent and left Ten- 
 nyson unchallenged. Three more de- 
 cades were allotted to the line of the By- 
 rons. The glory o\ eight hundred years 
 was to be crowded into that closing span. 
 The place, with a slight reservation in 
 behalf of his school- and form-fellow Peel, 
 belongs to Byron. He is the second 
 founder of the ancient seminary. Mote 
 than that — as he would, we fear, were he 
 alive, be amused to learn — he has, after 
 a fashion, reconsecrated the church. The 
 charm about that edifice lies no longer 
 in crypt and column coeval with the 
 Conquest, nor even in the edifying min- 
 istrations of the duly presented rector, 
 but in a rusty old tombstone over some 
 
 forgotten dead which 
 the poet so much af- 
 fected as a seat that 
 his playmates dubbed 
 it Byron's tomb. From 
 it Windsor Castle is in 
 full view, and consti- 
 tuted, conceivably, the 
 core of his b o y i s h 
 meditations, It is still 
 
 open as a resting place 
 
 -. to any sym pathetic 
 tourists who choose 
 this mode of absorbing 
 the afflatus. It does 
 not appear, however, 
 that any verse much 
 superior to the Hours 
 of Idleness has ever 
 resulted from the pro- 
 cess. We, at least, are 
 content to stop with — 
 
 Oft when oppressed with s.ut, 
 foreboding gloom, 
 
 f sat reclined upon our I'.ivor- 
 
 ite tomb ; 
 
 and, neither silting 
 nor reclining, much 
 less both at once, we wind up our dawd- 
 ling with catching a rl\ and utilizing its 
 wings to reach the station in time to 
 catch the next train from Mugby — <ilias 
 Rugby — Junction, another educational 
 centre of note, known to more as a rail- 
 road-crossing than as a school, since 
 everybody travels and everybody reads 
 Dickens, while the readers of Arnold 
 and Tom Brown are comparatively a 
 select few. 
 
 Ere we are well settled in our seat we are 
 whizzing past Hanipstcad Heath, with its 
 beautiful spread of down, grove, cottage 
 and villa, and "slowing" into the — in its 
 way — equally sublime station-building at 
 Euston Square. Here, if our sight-see- 
 ing enthusiasm be proof to the chaos of 
 cabs and cabmen, porters, unprotected 
 females and male travelers, and passers 
 who plunge forward with that singleness 
 of purpose and devotion to Number One 
 characteristic of the bold Briton in a 
 crowd and elsewhere, we may protect 
 our flanks with arms akimbo, and, un- 
 disturbed bv the wreck of luggage and 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 65 
 
 the crash of cabs, look up at the Statue 
 of honesi 1 1 phen »on, the apostle 
 
 of the rail and Watt of the locomotive. 
 It is as much above the general run of 
 
 railroad statuary as the facade of the 
 building is above that of railroad archi- 
 te< ture. He was a sculpturesque old fel- 
 low, with a career "of the same." The 
 tubular boiler is a better study for the 
 chisel than the detached condenser or 
 the spinning-jenny; or Peel senior's pars- 
 ley pattern, which made the fortune of 
 tin. house, sent Robert to Harrow and 
 set ured the overthrow of the Corn laws. 
 I Lad we been consulted as to the design, 
 we should have proposed for a bas-relief 
 on each side of the pedestal the smash- 
 ed cow and the floored M. R, distin- 
 guished in George's chief recorded joke 
 —that of the classic "coo." Not that it 
 was his only joke, by any means, for he 
 came fully up to the Yorkshire standard 
 in point of "wut," and was generally 
 able to give more formidable antagonists 
 than the average run of British legisla- 
 tors at least as good as he got. 
 
 Here we are, back in the heart of the 
 metropolis, only a mile and a half from 
 Waterloo Rridge. We have time left us to- 
 day to hunt up some other seeable things. 
 To begin, let us employ the next half 
 minute in getting out of London. How ? 
 
 Do we move east, west, north, south, or 
 in the air? Neither, We step into 
 
 middle of the street and dive. ' >'ir first 
 ition in moving toward Orcus is, 
 naturally enough, a sulphurous smell. 
 Our next is a very comfortable railroad- 
 car; and our third, a few seconds behind 
 the heels of its predecessor, a rapid move- 
 ment, attended by tin- Hades like music 
 of shriek, rattle and groan familiar to all 
 who have passed through a tunnel. We 
 are traveling on another marvelous rail- 
 way, eighteen miles underground, but 
 really endless, since it forms an ellipti- 
 cal circuit around the central part of 
 the metropolis. It bears the appropriate 
 name of the Metropolitan Railway, 
 four millions of dollar-, [>':r mile or eighty 
 an inch ; carried forty-four millions of 
 passengers in 1874, an d twenty-four mil- 
 lions in the first six months of 1875 '< 
 runs one hundred and ninety-five trains 
 of its own and eight hundred and forty- 
 nine for the different open-air roads which 
 lead to all parts of the kingdom, each 
 "swinging round the circle " in fifty-five 
 minutes, and stopping at some or all of 
 twenty-two stations ; and otf'.-rs the sta- 
 tistically-inclined inquirer many other 
 equally stunning figures. Such is the 
 parent of rapid transit in London. Young 
 as it is, it has a large family already, mul- 
 
 KKNSINOION PALACE. 
 
66 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 KENSINGTON CHURCH. 
 
 tiplying, as we write, to such an extent 
 that arithmetic fails us. Its progeny wan- 
 der down to Greenwich, pop through the 
 Thames Tunnel, and meander among 
 and under the great docks in the most 
 bewildering way. 
 
 But our destination is in the opposite 
 quarter. We push westward, under the 
 middle of the Marylebone road, its pon- 
 derous traffic rolling over our heads. 
 Skirting Tyburnia, with its unpleasant 
 memories of Jack Sheppard and other 
 unfortunate heroes of his kidney, we 
 emerge from our subterranean whirl at 
 Kensington Gardens, the western ampli- 
 fication of Hyde Park. 
 
 The old structure, resembling a board- 
 ing-school or a hospital, and which would 
 improve the beautifully planted park by 
 its absence, began its history as a palace 
 under William III., the genial and self- 
 sacrificing Hollander so dear to Whig 
 historians. It has probably finished its 
 caneer in that capacity under Victoria, 
 who was born there, and who has remit- 
 ted it, like Hampton Court and the old 
 
 Palais Royal of Paris, to a class of oc- 
 cupants it will be hard to rummage out 
 unless the rookery is set fire to. 
 
 It is afternoon, and a Guards' band is 
 playing across the avenue to the left. 
 The crowd is drifting toward them. Let 
 us push a little farther west, past the not 
 particularly interesting village church of 
 Kensington, and follow in the footsteps 
 of most of the literary and political ce- 
 lebrities of the nineteenth century to the 
 most picturesque and (in strictly modern 
 history) most noted of the old country- 
 houses that London has swallowed up. 
 This is Holland House, the home of 
 Addison, the two Foxes, and, more fresh- 
 ly familiar to our day than either, the 
 last Lord Holland and his wife. If the 
 lady kept her lions in order by much 
 the same "heroic" method of discipline 
 adopted by keepers of a menagerie, ab- 
 ruptly silencing Macaulay when his long 
 fits of talk, and snubbing Rogers when 
 his short fits of cynicism, began to bore, 
 her quiet and amiable spouse was always 
 prompt to apply balm to their wounds. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 6? 
 
 He was the chief of British Maecenases. 
 The series of ana begotten of his sym- 
 posia — of the list of guests at which, in- 
 vited or uninvited, he used to say he 
 was never advised until after they had 
 met — would make a fair library. 
 
 The hour, as we turn eastward, speaks 
 of evening. The summer sun, in a latitude 
 five degrees north of Quebec and a day 
 of eighteen hours, contradicts it. We may 
 pass in from what only the other day was 
 the country toward what is but technical- 
 ly the City, and is reverting in sparseness 
 
 of population to the country character 
 and find, on the way, the life of London 
 streets as stirring as, and more gay than, 
 at high noon. The heavier and slower 
 features of it have died out. Drays, 
 wagons and 'buses leave the road clearer. 
 We see farther and see more. No longer 
 blockaded to a block, the whole length 
 of the street opens before us. Daylight 
 brightens into gaslight, and we realize 
 that for to-day we are no longer out of 
 town. 
 
U P T ll E T H A M is 
 
 PHIRD PAPER 
 
 
 <aggH|rilte->S 
 
 
 HAMPTON COURT -WEST FRONT, 
 
 TO pan our movement shall be up 
 the rhames by rail, starting on the 
 south side ©1 the rivei to reach an ob- 
 jective point on the north bank. s>i 
 ted is the stream, and so much more 
 crooked are the different systems of rail- 
 ways, with theii competing branches 
 crossing each other and making the most 
 audacious inroads on each other's terri- 
 tory, that the direction in which we are 
 6S 
 
 traveling at any given moment, or the 
 station from which we start, is a verj 
 poor index to the quarter for which we 
 are bound, The railways, to say noth- 
 ing of the river, that wanders at its own 
 sweel will, as water commonly does in a 
 country offering it no obstructions, are 
 quite defiant of their geographical names, 
 [he Great Western runs north, west and 
 
 south - oast ; the South - western strikes 
 
UP THE THAMES, 
 
 69 
 
 HAMPTON COURT I.OOKINC UP I HI KIVI 
 
 south, south-east and north wesl j while 
 the Chatham .mil 1 )over distributes itself 
 over most of the region south east of 
 London, closing its circuit by .1 line along 
 the coast of the Channel thai completes 
 .1 triangle. Wecan go almost anywhere 
 by any road, it is necessary, however, 
 in this as in other mundane proi eedings, 
 to make a selection. We must have a 
 will before we find a way. Let our way, 
 then, be to Watei loo station on the South- 
 western rail. 
 
 1 1 all an hour's run lands us at Hamp- 
 ton Court, with a number of fellow-pas- 
 sengers i" keep us < ompany il we want 
 them, and in fact whether we want them 
 
 Or not. Those who travel into or out of 
 a city of tour millions must lay their ac- 
 
 count with being ever in a crowd. Our 
 
 consolation is, that in the city the crowd 
 is so (onstant and so wholly Strange to 
 
 us as to defeat its effect, and create the 
 feeling of solitude we have so often been 
 told oi ; while outside ol it, at the pat ks 
 and Bhow plat es, the amplitude of space, 
 densitj and variety ol plantations, and 
 multiplicity oi carefully designed turns, 
 nooks and retreats, are such that retire- 
 ment "i a more genuine 1 harat tei is with- 
 in easy reach. The crowd, we know, is 
 
 abOUt us, but it does not elbOW US, and 
 
 we nerd hardly see it. The current oi 
 humanity, springing from one 01 a dozen 
 
 trains or Steamboats, dribbles away, s( 
 
 alter Leaving its parent source, into a mul- 
 titude of little divergent channels, like 
 
 irrigating water, and covcis the suil.ne 
 
 without intei fcrent e. 
 
 It would be a curious statistical inquiry 
 how many visitors Hampton Court has 
 lost since the Cartoons were removed in 
 
 [865 to the South Kensington Museum. 
 
 Actually, of course, the whole numbei 
 has iiu reased, is m< reasing, and is not 
 
 going to be diminished. The query is, 
 llow many moie there would he now 
 were those eminent hits of pasteboard — 
 
 slit up for the guidance oi piece-work at 
 
 a I lemish loom, tossed alter the weaveis 
 had done with them into a luinhei loom, 
 
 then alter a century's neglect disinterred 
 
 by the taste of Kuhens and Charles L, 
 
 brought to England, then pooi frayed 
 and laded fragments glued together and 
 
 made the chief decoration Of a royal pal- 
 ace- — still in the place assigned them by 
 
 the munificence and judgment of Charles? 
 For our part— and we may speak for most 
 Americans when we heard, thought oi 
 
 lead ol I lampion Court, we thoiijdil ol 
 
 the Cartoons. Engravings oi them were 
 
 plenty niueh moi e so ilia n ol the palace 
 
 itself. Numbers of domestic 1 onnoisseurs 
 
 know Raphael principally as the p.unh i 
 ol the ( ai toons. 
 
 A few who have not heard oi them have 
 heard oi Wolsey. The pursj old 1 at 
 
 din.il fin nr. ins the sin viving one oi the 
 two main props of Hampton's glory. An 
 oddly-assorted pan, indeed- thedelicate 
 
 Italian painter, without a thought OUtside 
 ol lus ail, and the bluff English place- 
 
7o 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 man, avid of nothing but honors and 
 wealth. And the association of either of 
 them with the spot is comparatively so 
 slight. Wolsey held the ground for a few 
 years, only by lease, built a mere fraction 
 of the present edifice, and disappeared 
 from the scene within half a generation. 
 What it boasts, or boasted, of the other 
 belongs to the least noted of his works — 
 half a dozen sketches meant for stuff-pat- 
 terns, and never intended to be preserved 
 as pictures. Pictures they are, neverthe- 
 less, and all the more valuable and sur- 
 prising as manifesting such easy com- 
 mand of hand and faculty, such a matter- 
 of-course employment of the utmost re- 
 sources of art on a production designed 
 to have no continuing existence except 
 as finished, rendered and given to the 
 world by a "base mechanical," with no 
 sense of art at all. 
 
 Royalty, and the great generally, avail- 
 ed themselves of their opportunities to 
 select the finest locations and stake out the 
 best claims along these shores. Of ele- 
 vation there is small choice, a level sur- 
 face prevailing. What there is has been 
 generally availed of for park or palace, 
 with manifest advantage to the landscape. 
 The curves of the river are similarly uti- 
 
 lized. Kew and Hampton occupy penin- 
 sulas so formed. The latter, with Bushy 
 Park, an appendage, fills a water-washed 
 triangle of some two miles on each side. 
 The southern angle is opposite Thames 
 Ditton, a noted resort for brethren of the 
 angle, with an ancient inn as popular, 
 though not as stylish and costly, as the 
 Star and Garter at Richmond. The town 
 and palace of Hampton lie about half- 
 way up the western side of the demesne. 
 The view up and down the river from 
 Hampton Bridge is one of the crack 
 spectacles of the neighborhood. Satis- 
 fied with it, we pass through the princi- 
 pal street, with the Green in view to our 
 left and Bushy Park beyond it, to the 
 main entrance. This is part of the orig- 
 inal palace as built by the cardinal. It 
 leads into the first court. This, with the 
 second or Middle Quadrangle, may all 
 be ascribed to him, with some changes 
 made by Henry VIII. and Christopher 
 Wren. The colonnade of coupled Ionic 
 pillars which runs across it on the south 
 or right-hand side as you enter was de- 
 signed by Wren. It is out of keeping 
 with its Gothic surroundings. Standing 
 beneath it, you see on the opposite side 
 of the square Wolsey's Hall. It looks 
 
 ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL, 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 71 
 
 MIDDLE QUADRANGLE, HAMPTON COURT. 
 
 like a church. The towers on either side 
 of the gateway between the courts bear 
 some relics of the old faith in the shape 
 of terra-cotta medallions, portraits of the 
 Roman emperors. These decorations 
 were a present to the cardinal from Leo X. 
 The oriel windows by their side bear con- 
 tributions in a different taste from Henry 
 VIII. They are the escutcheons of that 
 monarch. The two popes, English and 
 Italian, are well met. Our engravings 
 give a good idea of the style of these 
 parts of the edifice. The first or outer 
 square is somewhat larger than the mid- 
 dle one, which is a hundred and thirty- 
 three feet across from north to south, and 
 ninety-one in the opposite direction, or 
 in a line with the longest side of the 
 whole palace. 
 
 A stairway beneath the arch leads to 
 the great hall, one hundred and six feet 
 by forty. This having been well furbish- 
 ed recently, its aspect is probably little in- 
 ferior in splendor to that which it wore in 
 its first days. The open-timber roof, gay 
 banners, stained windows and groups of 
 armor bring mediaeval magnificence very 
 freshiy before us. The ciphers and arms 
 of Henry and his wife, Jane Seymour, 
 are emblazoned on one of the windows, 
 indicating the date of 1 536 or 1 537. Be- 
 low them were graciously left Wolsey's 
 imprint — his arms, with a cardinal's hat 
 on each side, and the inscription, "The 
 
 Lord Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal legat de 
 Latere, archbishop of Yorke and chan- 
 cellor of Englande." The tapestry of 
 the hall illustrates sundry passages in 
 the life of Abraham. A Flemish pupil 
 of Raphael is credited with their execu- 
 tion or design. 
 
 This hall witnessed, certainly in the 
 reign of George I., and according to tradi- 
 tion in that of Elizabeth, the mimic repro- 
 duction of the great drama with which it 
 is associated. It is even said that Shake- 
 speare took part here in his own play, 
 King Henry VIII., or the Fall of Wol- 
 sey. In 1558 the hall was resplendent 
 with one thousand lamps, Philip and 
 Mary holding their Christmas feast. The 
 princess Elizabeth was a guest. The 
 next morning she was compliant or po- 
 litic enough to hear matins in the queen's 
 closet. 
 
 The Withdrawing Room opens from the 
 hall. It is remarkable for its carved and 
 illuminated ceiling of oak. Over the chim- 
 ney is a portrait of Wolsey in profile on 
 wood, not the least interesting of a long 
 list of pictures which are a leading at- 
 traction of the place. These are assem- 
 bled, with few exceptions, in the third 
 quadrangle, built in 1690. Into this we 
 next pass. It takes the place of three of 
 the five original courts, said to have been 
 fully equal to the two which remain. 
 
 The modern or Eastern Quadrangle 
 
72 
 
 LP THE THAMES. 
 
 is a hundred and ten by a 
 hundred and seventeen feet. 
 It is encircled by a colonnade 
 like that in the middle square, 
 and has nothing remarkable, 
 architecturally, about it. In 
 the public rooms that sur- 
 round us there are, according 
 to the catalogue, over a thou- 
 sand pictures. Leonardo da 
 Vinci, Paul Veronese, Titian. 
 Giulio Romano, Murillo and 
 a host of lesser names o( the 
 Italian and Spanish schools, 
 with still more of the Flem- 
 ish, are represented. To 
 most visitors, who may see 
 elsewhere finer works by 
 these masters, the chief at- 
 traction of the walls is the 
 series of original portraits by 
 Holbein, Vandyck, l.ely and 
 Kneller. The two full-lengths 
 of Charles I. by Vandyck, on 
 foot and on horseback, both 
 widely known by engravings, 
 are the gems of this depart- 
 ment, as a Vandyck will al- 
 ways be of any group of 
 portraits. 
 
 Days may be profitably and delight- 
 fully spent in studying this fine collec- 
 tion. The first men and women oi' Eng- 
 land for three centuries handed down to 
 us by the first artists she could command 
 form a spectacle in which Americans can 
 take a sort of home interest. Nearly all 
 date before 1776, and we have a rightful 
 share in them. Each head and each 
 picture is a study. We have art and his- 
 tory together. Familiar as we may be 
 with the events with which the persons 
 represented are associated, it is impos- 
 sible to gaze upon their lineaments, set 
 in the accessories of their day by the 
 ablest hands guided by eyes that saw- 
 below the surface, and not feel that we 
 have new readings oi Uritish annals. 
 
 Among the most ancient heads is a 
 medallion of Henry VII. by Torregiano, 
 the peppery and gifted Florentine who 
 executed the marvelous chapel in West- 
 minster Abbey and broke the nose of 
 Michael Angelo. English art — or rather 
 
 ARCHWAY IN HAMPTON COURT. 
 
 ait in England — may be said to date from 
 him. He could not create a school of 
 artists in the island — the material did not 
 exist — but the few productions he left 
 there stood out so sharply from anything 
 
 WOLSEY. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 73 
 
 PORTICO LEADING TO GARDENS. 
 
 around them that the possessors of the 
 wealth that was then beginning to accu- 
 mulate employed it in drawing from the 
 Continent additional treasures from the 
 newly-found world of beauty. The riches 
 of England have grown apace, and her 
 collectors have used them liberally, if 
 not always wisely, until her galleries, 
 in time, have come to be sought by the 
 connoisseurs, and even the artists, of the 
 Continent. 
 
 The last picture-gallery we traverse is 
 the only one at Hampton Court special- 
 ly built for its purpose ; and it is empty. 
 This is the room erected by Sir Christo- 
 pher Wren for the reception of the Car- 
 toons. It leads us to the corridor that 
 opens on the garden-front. We leave 
 behind us, in addition to the state apart- 
 ments, a great many others which are 
 
 peopled by other in- 
 habitants than the 
 big spiders, said to 
 be found nowhere 
 else, known as car- 
 dinals. The old 
 palace is not kept 
 wholly for show, but 
 is made useful in 
 the political econo- 
 my of the kingdom 
 by furnishing a re- 
 treat to impecuni- 
 ous members of the 
 oligarchy. Certain 
 families of distress- 
 ed aristocrats are 
 harbored here — 
 clearly a more wholesome arrangement 
 than letting them take their chance in the 
 world and bring discredit on their class. 
 Emerging on the great gardens, forty 
 four acres in extent, we find ourselves on 
 broad walks laid out with mathematical 
 regularity, and edged by noble masses 
 of yew, holly, horse-chestnut, etc. almost 
 as rectangular and circular. We are here 
 struck with the great advantage derived 
 in landscape gardening from the rich va- 
 riety of large evergreens possible in the 
 climate of Britain. The holly, unknown 
 as an outdoor plant in this country north 
 of Philadelphia, is at home in the north 
 of Scotland, eighteen degrees nearer the 
 pole. We are more fortunate with the 
 Conifers, many of the finest of which 
 family are perfectly hardy here. But we 
 miss the deodar cedar, the redwood and 
 
 CENTRE AVENUE. 
 
"4 
 
 IT THE THAMES. 
 
 W ash i ngto nia 
 of California, and 
 the cedar of Leb- 
 anon. These, 
 unless perhaps 
 the last, cannot 
 be depended on 
 much n orth of 
 the latitude of the 
 Magnolia gran- 
 T h e y 
 thrive all over 
 England, with 
 others almost as 
 beautiful, and as 
 delicate north of 
 
 the Delaware. Of the laurel tribe, also 
 hardy in England, our Northern States 
 have but a few weakly representatives. 
 So with the Rhododcndra. 
 
 When, tired of even so charming a 
 scene of arboreal luxury, we knock at 
 the Flower-Pot gate to the left of the pal- 
 ace, and are admitted into 
 the private garden, we make 
 the acquaintance of another 
 stately stranger we have had 
 the honor at home of meet- 
 ing only under glass. This is 
 the great vine, ninety years 
 or a hundred old, of the 
 Black Hamburg variety. It 
 does not cover as much 
 space as the Carolina Scup- 
 pernong — the native variety 
 that so surprised and de- 
 lighted Raleigh's Roanoke 
 Island settlers in i 5S5 — often 
 does. But its bunches, some- 
 times two or three thousand 
 in number, are much larger 
 than the Scuppernong's little 
 clumps of two or three. They 
 weigh something like a pound 
 each, and are thought worthy 
 of being reserved for Victo- 
 ria's dessert. Her own fam- 
 ily vine has burgeoned so 
 broadly that three thousand 
 po mils. o\ grapes would not 
 be a particularly large dish 
 for a Christmas dinner for 
 the united Guelphs. 
 
 We must not forget the 
 
 HAMPTON COURT — GARDEN FRONT. 
 
 Labyrinth, "a mighty maze, but not with- 
 out a plan," that has bewildered genera- 
 tions of young and old children since the 
 time of its creator, William of Orange. 
 It is a feature of the Dutch style of land- 
 scape gardening imprinted by him upon 
 the Hampton grounds. He failed to im- 
 
 GATE TO PRIVATE GARDEN. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 75 
 
 BUSHY PARK. 
 
 press a like stamp upon that chaos of 
 queer, shapeless and contradictory means 
 to beneficent ends.the British constitution. 
 Hampton Court, notwithstanding the 
 naming of the third quadrangle the Foun- 
 tain Court, and the prominence given to 
 a fountain in the design of the principal 
 grounds, is not rich in waterworks. Na- 
 ture has done a good deal for it in that 
 way, the Thames embracing it on two 
 sides and the lowness of the flat site 
 placing water within easy reach every- 
 where. This superabundance of the ele- 
 ment did not content the magnificent 
 Wolsey. He was a man of great ideas, 
 and to secure a head for his jets he sought 
 an elevated spring at Combe Wood, more 
 than two miles distant. To bring this 
 supply he laid altogether not less than 
 eight miles of leaden pipe weighing twen- 
 ty-four pounds to the foot, and passing 
 under the bed of the Thames. Reduced 
 to our currency of to-day, these conduits 
 must have cost nearly half a million of 
 dollars. They do their work yet, the 
 gnawing tooth of old Edax rcrum not 
 having penetrated far below the surface 
 of the earth. Better hydraulic results 
 would now be attained at a consider- 
 ably reduced cost by a steam-engine and 
 stand-pipe. At the beginning of the six- 
 teenth century this motor was not even 
 in embryo, unless we accept the story of 
 
 Blasco de Garay's steamer that manoeu- 
 vred under the eye of Charles V. as fruit- 
 lessly as Fitch's and Fulton's before 
 Napoleon. Coal, its dusky pabulum, was 
 also practically a stranger on the upper 
 Thames. The ancient fire-dogs that were 
 wont to bear blazing billets hold their 
 places in the older part of the palace. 
 
 Crossing the Kingston road, which 
 runs across the peninsula and skirts 
 the northern boundary of Hampton Park, 
 we get into its continuation, Bushy Park. 
 This is larger than the chief enclosure, 
 but less pretentious. We cease to be 
 oppressed by the palace and its excess 
 of the artificial. The great avenues of 
 horse-chestnut, five in number, and run- 
 ning parallel with a length of rather more 
 than a mile and an aggregate breadth of 
 nearly two hundred yards, are formal 
 enough in design, but the mass of foliage 
 gives them the effect of a wood. They 
 lead nowhere in particular, and are flank- 
 ed by glades and copses in which the 
 genuinely rural prevails. Cottages gleam 
 through the trees. The lowing of kine, 
 the tinkling of the sheep-bell, the gabble 
 of poultry, lead you away from thoughts 
 of prince and city. Deer domesticated 
 here since long before the introduction 
 of the turkey or the guinea-hen bear 
 themselves with as quiet ease and free- 
 dom from fear as though they were the 
 
76 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 lords of the manor and held the black- 
 letter title-deeds for the delicious stretch 
 of sward over which they troop. Less 
 stately, but scarce more shy, indigenes 
 are the hares, lineal descendants of those 
 which gave sport to Oliver Cromwell. 
 When that grim Puritan succeeded to 
 the lordship of the saintly cardinal, he 
 was fain, when the Dutch, Scotch and 
 Irish indulged him with a brief chance 
 to doff his buff coat, to take relaxation 
 in coursing. We loiter by the margin of 
 the ponds he dug in the hare-warren, and 
 which were presented as nuisances by the 
 grand jury in 1662. The complaint was 
 that by turning the water of the " New 
 River" into them the said Oliver had 
 made the road from Hampton Wick bog- 
 gy and unsafe. Another misdemeanor 
 of the deceased was at the same time 
 and in like manner denounced. This 
 was the stopping up of the pathway 
 through the warren. The palings were 
 abated, and the path is open to all nine- 
 teenth-century comers, as it probably will 
 be to those of the twentieth, this being 
 a land of precedent, averse to change. 
 We may stride triumphantly across the 
 location of the Cromwellian barricades, 
 and not the less so, perhaps, for certain 
 other barricades which he helped to erect 
 in the path of privilege. 
 
 Directing our steps to the left, or west- 
 ward, we again reach the river at the 
 town of Hampton. It is possessed of 
 pretty water-views, but of little else of 
 note except the memory and the house 
 
 of Garrick. Hither the great actor, after 
 positively his last night on the stage, re- 
 tired, and settled the long contest for his 
 favor between the Muses of Tragedy and 
 Comedy by inexorably turning his back 
 on both. He did not cease to be the de- 
 light of polished society, thanks to his 
 geniality and to riterary and conversa- 
 tional powers capable of making him the 
 intimate of Johnson and Reynolds. More 
 fortunate in his temperament and temper 
 than his modern successor, Macready, he 
 never fretted that his profession made 
 him a vagabond by act of Parliament, 
 or that his adoption of it in place of the 
 law had prevented his becoming, by virtue 
 of the same formal and supreme stamp, 
 the equal of the Sampson Brasses plen- 
 tiful in his day as in ours among their 
 betters of that honorable vocation. His 
 self-respect was of tougher if not sound- 
 er grain. "Worth makes the man, and 
 want of it the fellow," was the motto sup- 
 plied him by his friend and neighbor, 
 Pope, but obeyed long before he saw it 
 in the poetic form. 
 
 Garrick's house is separated from its 
 bit of "grounds," which run down to the 
 water's edge, by the highway. It com- 
 municates with them by a tunnel, sug- 
 gested by Johnson. It was not a very 
 novel suggestion, but the excavation de- 
 serves notice as probably the one engi- 
 neering achievement of old Ursus major. 
 We may fancy the Titan of the pen and 
 the tea-table, in his snuffy habit as he 
 lived and as photographed by Boswell, 
 
 garrick's villa. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 77 
 
 RIVER SCKNE, THAMES DITTON. 
 
 Mrs. Thrale, Fanny Burney, and their epi- 
 tomizer Macaulay, diving under the turn- 
 pike and emerging among the osiers and 
 water-rats to offer his orisons at the shrine 
 of Shakespeare. For, in the fashion of 
 the day, Garrick erected a little brick 
 "temple," and placed therein a statue of 
 the man it was the study of his life to 
 interpret. The temple is there yet. The 
 statue, a fine one by Roubillac, now 
 adorns the hall of the British Museum, 
 a much better place for it. Garrick, and 
 not Shakespeare, is the genius loci. 
 
 This is but one, if the most striking, 
 of a long row of villas that overlook the 
 river, each with its comfortable-looking 
 and rotund trees and trim plat in front, 
 with sometimes a summer-house snug- 
 gling down to the ripples. These river- 
 side colonies, thrown out so rapidly by 
 the metropolis, have no colonial look. 
 We cannot associate the idea of a new 
 settlement with rich turf, graveled walks 
 and large trees devoid of the gaunt and 
 forlorn look suggestive of their fellows' 
 having been hewn away from their side. 
 The houses have some of the pertness, 
 rawness and obtrusiveness of youth, but 
 ;t is not the youth of the backwoods. 
 
 Bob and ?ir.ker are in their glory here- 
 abouts. Fishing-rods in the season and 
 good weather form an established part 
 of the scenery. From the banks of the 
 stream, from the islands and from box- 
 like boats called punts in the middle of 
 the water, their slender arches project. 
 
 It becomes a source of speculation how 
 the breed of fish is kept up. Seth Green 
 has never operated on the Thames. Were 
 he to take it under his wing, a sum in the 
 single rule of three points to the conclu- 
 sion that all London would take its seat 
 under these willows and extract ample 
 sustenance from the invisible herds. If 
 perch and dace can hold their own against 
 the existing pressure and escape extinc- 
 tion, how would they multiply with the 
 fostering aid of thespawning-box ! We 
 are not deep in the mysteries of the an- 
 gle, but we believe English waters do not 
 boast the catfish. They ought to acquire 
 him. He is almost as hard to extirpate 
 as the perch, would be quite at home in 
 these sluggish pools under the lily-pads, 
 and would harmonize admirably with the 
 eel in the pies and other gross prepara- 
 tions which delight the British palate. 
 He hath, moreover, a John Bull-like air 
 in his broad and burly shape, his smooth 
 and unscaly superficies and the noli-me- 
 tangere character of his dorsal fin. Pity 
 he was unknown to Izaak Walton ! 
 
 At this particular point the piscatory 
 effect is intensified by the dam just above 
 Hampton Bridge. Two parts of a river 
 are especially fine for fishing. One is 
 the part above the dam, and the other 
 the part below. These two divisions may 
 be said, indeed, in a large sense to cover 
 all the Thames. Moulsey Lock, while 
 favorable to fish and fishermen, is un- 
 favorable to dry land. Yet there is said 
 
78 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 to be no malaria. 
 Hampton Court has 
 proved a wholesome 
 residence to every oc- 
 cupant save its founder. 
 
 The angler's capital 
 is Thames Ditton, and 
 his capitol the Swan 
 Inn. Ditton is, like 
 many other pretty Eng- 
 lish villages, little and 
 old. It is mentioned ^^F 
 in Domesday Boke as &S 
 belonging to the bish- 
 op of Bayeux in Nor- 
 mandy, famous for the 
 historic piece of tapes- 
 try. Wadard, a gen- 
 tleman with a Saxon 
 name, held it of him, 
 probably for the quit - rent of an annual 
 eel-pie, although the consideration is not 
 stated. The clergy were, by reason of 
 their frequent meagre days and seasons, 
 great consumers of fish. The phosphor- 
 escent character of that diet may have 
 contributed, if we accept certain mod- 
 ern theories of animal chemistry as con- 
 nected in some as yet unexplained way 
 with psychology, to the intellectual pre- 
 dominance of that class of the popula- 
 tion in the Middle Ages. That occasion- 
 al fasting, whether voluntary and system- 
 atic as in the cloisters, or involuntary and 
 altogether the reverse of systematic in 
 Grub street, helps to clear the wits, with 
 or without the aid of phosphorus, is a 
 fixed fact. The stomach is apt to be a 
 stumbling - block to the brain. We are 
 not orone to associate prolonged and pro- 
 ductive mental effort with a fair round 
 belly with fat capon lined. It was not 
 the jolly clerics we read of in song, but 
 the lean ascetic brethren who were nu- 
 merous enough to balance them, that 
 garnered for us the treasures of ancient 
 literature and kept the mind of Christen- 
 dom alive, if only in a state of suspended 
 animation. It was something that they 
 prevented the mace of chivalry from ut- 
 terly braining humankind. 
 
 The Thames is hereabouts joined from 
 the south by a somewhat exceptional style 
 of river, characterized by Milton as "the 
 
 WOLSEV'S TOWER, ESHER. 
 
 sullen Mole, that runneth underneath," 
 and by Pope, in dutiful imitation, as "the 
 sullen Mole that hides his diving flood." 
 Both poets play on the word. In our 
 judgment, Milton's line is the better, 
 since moles do not dive and have no 
 flood — two false figures in one line from 
 the precise and finical Pope ! Thomson 
 contributes the epithet of "silent," which 
 will do well enough as far as it goes, 
 though devoid even of the average force 
 of Jamie. But, as we have intimated, it 
 is a queer river. Pouring into the Thames 
 by several mouths that deviate over quite 
 a delta, its channel two or three miles 
 above is destitute in dry seasons of 
 water. Its current disappears under an 
 elevation called White Hill, and does not 
 come again to light for almost two miles, 
 resembling therein several streams in 
 the United States, notably Lost River in 
 North-eastern Virginia, which has a sub- 
 terranean course of the same character 
 and about the same length, but has not 
 yet found its Milton or Pope, far superior 
 as it is to its English cousin in natural 
 beauty. 
 
 For this defect art and association am- 
 ply atone. On the southern side of the 
 Mole, not far from the underground por- 
 tion of its course — "the Swallow" as it 
 is called — stand the charming and storied 
 seats of Esher and Claremont. 
 
 Esher was an ancient residence of the 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 79 
 
 bishops of Winchester. Wolsey made 
 it for a time his retreat after being ousted 
 from Hampton Court. A retreat it was 
 to him in every sense. He dismissed his 
 servants and all state, and cultivated the 
 deepest despondency. His inexorable 
 master, however, looked down on him, 
 from his ravished towers hard by, un- 
 moved, and, as the sequel in a few years 
 proved, unsatisfied in his greed. Gar- 
 diner, bishop of Winchester, was called 
 upon for a contribution. He loyally sur- 
 rendered to the king the whole estate of 
 Esher, a splendid mansion with all ap- 
 purtenances and a park a mile in diam- 
 eter. Henry annexed Esher to Hamp- 
 ton Court, and continued his research for 
 new subjects of spoliation. His daugh- 
 ter Mary gave Esher back to the see of 
 Winchester. Elizabeth bought it and 
 bestowed it on Lord Howard of Effing- 
 ham, who well earned it by his services 
 against the Armada. Of the families 
 who subsequently owned the place, the 
 Pelhams are the most noted. Now it 
 has passed from their hands. That which 
 has alone been preserved of the palace 
 of Wolsey is an embattled gatehouse that 
 looks into the sluggish Mole, and joins it 
 mayhap in musing over "the days that 
 we have seen." 
 
 Claremont, its next neighbor, unites, 
 with equal or greater charms of land- 
 scape, in preaching the old story of the 
 
 decadence of the great. Lord Clive, the 
 Indian conqueror and speculator, built 
 the house from the designs of Capability 
 Browne at a cost of over a hundred thou- 
 sand pounds. His dwelling and his monu- 
 ment remain to represent Clive. After 
 him, two or three occupants removed, 
 came Leopold of Belgium, with his bride, 
 the Princess Charlotte, pet and hope of 
 the British nation. Their stay was more 
 transient still — a year only, when death 
 dissipated their dream and cleared the 
 way to the throne for Victoria. Leopold 
 continued to hold the property, and it 
 became a generation later the asylum 
 of Louis Philippe. To an ordinary mind 
 the miseries of any one condemned to 
 make this lovely spot his home are not 
 apt to present themselves as the acme of 
 despair. A sensation of relief and lull- 
 ing repose would be more reasonably ex- 
 pected, especially after so stormy a career 
 as that of Louis. The change from rest- 
 less and capricious Paris to dewy shades 
 and luxurious halls in the heart of change- 
 less and impregnable England ought, on 
 common principles, to have promoted 
 the content and prolonged the life of the 
 old king. Possibly it did, but if so, the 
 French had not many months' escape 
 from a second Orleans regency, for the 
 exile's experience of Claremont was brief. 
 We may wander over his lawns, and re- 
 shape to ourselves his reveries. Then 
 
 CLAREMONT. 
 
8o 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 we may forget the man who lost 
 an empire as we look up at the 
 cenotaph of him who conquered 
 one. Both brought grist to Miller 
 Bull, the fortunate and practical- 
 minded owner of such vast water- 
 privileges. His water-power 
 seems proof against all floods, 
 while the corn of all nations must 
 come to his door. Standing under 
 these drooping elms, by this lazy 
 stream, we hear none of the clat- 
 ter of the great mill, and we cease 
 to dream of affixing a period to 
 its noiseless and effective work. 
 
 If we are not tired of parks for to- 
 day, rive minutes by rail will car- 
 ry us west to Oatlands Park, with 
 its appended, and more or less de- 
 pendent, village of Walton-upon- 
 Thames. But a surfeit even of . ; 
 
 English country-houses and their 
 pleasances is a possible thing; 
 and nowhere are they more abundant 
 than within an hour's walk of our pres- 
 ent locality. So, taking Ashley Park, 
 Burwood Park, Pains Hill and many 
 others, as well as the Coway Stakes — 
 said by one school of antiquarians to 
 have been planted in the Thames by 
 Cassar, and by another to be the relics 
 of a fish -weir — Walton Church and 
 Bradshaw's house, for granted, we shall 
 turn to the east and finish the purlieus 
 of Hampton with a glance at the old 
 Saxon town of Kingston - on - Thames. 
 Probably an ardent Kingstonian would in- 
 dignantly disown the impression our three 
 words are apt to give of the place. It is 
 a rapidly - growing town, and " Egbert, 
 the first king of all England," who held 
 a council at " Kyningestun, famosa ilia 
 locus," in 838, would be at a loss to find 
 his way through its streets could he re- 
 visit it. It has the population of a Saxon 
 county. Viewed from the massive bridge, 
 with the church-tower rising above an 
 expanse of sightly buildings, it possesses 
 the least possible resemblance to the 
 cluster of wattled huts that may be pre- 
 sumed to have sheltered Egbert and his 
 peers. 
 
 A more solid memento of the Saxons 
 is preserved in the King's Stone. This 
 
 CL1VES MONUMENT. 
 
 has been of late years set up in the cen- 
 tre of the town, surrounded with an iron 
 railing, and made visible to all comers, 
 skeptical or otherwise. Tradition credits 
 it with having been that upon which the 
 kings of Wessex were crowned, as those 
 of Scotland down to Longshanks, and 
 after him the English, were on the red 
 sandstone palladium of Scone. From 
 the list of ante-Norman monarchs said 
 to have received the sceptre upon it 
 
 PRINCESS CHARLOTTE. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 hi 
 
 WALTON CHURCH. 
 
 the poetically inclined visitor will select 
 for chief interest Edwy, whose coronation 
 was celebrated in great state in his sev- 
 enteenth year. How he fell in love with 
 and married secretly his cousin 
 Elgiva ; how Saint Dunstan and 
 his equally saintly though not 
 regularly beatified ally.Odo, 
 archbishop of Canterbury, in- 
 dignant at a step taken against 
 their fulminations and protests, 
 and jealous of the fair queen, 
 tore her from his arms, burnt 
 with hot iron the bloom out of 
 her cheeks, and finally put her 
 to death with the most cruel 
 tortures ; and how her broken- 
 hearted boy-lord, dethroned and 
 hunted, died before reaching 
 twenty, — is a standing dish of 
 the pathetic. Unfortunately, 
 the story, handed down to us 
 with much detail, appears to be 
 true. We must not accept it, 
 however, as an average illus- 
 tration of life in that age of 
 England. The five hundred 
 years before the Conquest do 
 not equal, in the bloody cha- 
 racter of their annals, the like 
 period succeeding it. Barbar- 
 ous enough the Anglo-Saxons 
 
 were, but wanton 
 cruelty does not 
 seem to have been 
 one of their traits. 
 Toproduceitsome 
 access of religious 
 fury was usually 
 requisite. It was 
 on the church- 
 doors that the 
 skins of their Da- 
 nish invaders were 
 nailed. 
 
 Kingston has no 
 more Dunstans. 
 Alexandra would 
 be perfectly safe in 
 its market-place. 
 The rosy maidens 
 who pervade its 
 streets need not 
 envy her cheeks, 
 and the saints and archbishops who are 
 to officiate at her husband's induction as 
 head of the Anglican Church have thei v 
 anxieties at present directed to whollv 
 
 — * ?**Z-P~ —■ ^*- '-■■■ ■' 
 
 KINGSTON CHURCH. 
 
82 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 different quarters. They have foes with- 
 in and foes without, but none in the pal- 
 ace. 
 
 Kingston bids fair to revert, after a 
 sort, to the metropolitan position it boast- 
 ed once, but has lost for nine centuries. 
 The capital is coming to it, and will cov- 
 er the four remaining miles within a dec- 
 ade or two at the existing rate of progress. 
 Kingston may be assigned to the suburbs 
 already. It is much nearer London, in 
 point of time, than Union Square in New 
 York to the City Hall. A slip of country 
 not yet endowed with trottoirs and gas- 
 lamps intervenes. Call this park, as you 
 do the square miles of such territory al- 
 ready deep within the metropolis. 
 
 London's jurisdiction, as marked by 
 the Boundary Stone, extends much 
 farther up the river than we have as 
 yet gone. Nor are the swans her only 
 vicegerents. The myrmidons of Inspect- 
 or Bucket, foot and horse, supplement 
 those natatory representatives. So do 
 
 the municipalities encroach upon and 
 overspread the country, as it is eminent- 
 ly proper they should, seeing that to the 
 charters so long ago exacted, and so 
 long and so jealously guarded, by the 
 towns, so much of the liberty enjoyed 
 by English - speaking peoples is due. 
 Large cities may be under some circum- 
 stances, according to an often -quoted 
 saying, plague-spots on the body politic, 
 but their growth has generally been com- 
 mensurate with that of knowledge and 
 order, and indicative of anything but 
 a diseased condition of the national or- 
 ganism. 
 
 But here we are, under the shadow of 
 the departed Nine Elms and of the official 
 palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lun- 
 non to satisfy the proudest Cockney, in 
 less time than we have taken in getting 
 off that last commonplace on political 
 economy. Adam Smith and Jefferson 
 never undertook to meditate at thirty-five 
 miles an hour. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 CONCLUDING PAPER. 
 
 WINDSOR CASTLE, KROM ETON. 
 
 LET our demonstration to-day be on 
 the monarchical citadel of Eng- 
 land, the core and nucleus of her kingly 
 associations, her architectural eikon ba- 
 sili/ce, Windsor. To reach the famous 
 castle it will not do to lounge along the 
 river. We must cut loose from the sub- 
 urbs of the suburbs, and launch into a 
 more extended flight. Our destination 
 is nearly an hour distant by rail ; and 
 though it does not take us altogether out 
 of sight of the city, it leads us among 
 real farms and genuine villages, tilled 
 and inhabited as they have been since 
 the Plantagenets, instead of market-gar- 
 dens and villas. 
 
 We go to Paddington and try the 
 Great Western, the parent of the broad 
 gauges with no very numerous family, 
 Erie being one of its unfortunate chil- 
 dren. That six-foot infant is not up to 
 the horizontal stature of its seven-foot 
 progenitor, but has still sixteen inches 
 too many to fare well in the contest with 
 its little, active, and above all numerous, 
 foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch 
 
 "persuasion." The English and the 
 American giants can sympathize with 
 each other. Both have drained the bit- 
 ter cup that is tendered by a strong ma- 
 jority to a weak minority. Neither the 
 American nor the British constitution, 
 with their whole admirable array of 
 checks and balances, has shielded them 
 from this evil. In the battle of the 
 gauges both have gone to the wall, and 
 will stay there until they can muster 
 strength enough to reel over into the 
 ranks of their enemies. 
 
 This relative debility is, at the same 
 time, more apparent to the stockholders 
 than to their customers. The superstruc- 
 ture and "plant" of the Erie has lately 
 stood interested inspection from abroad 
 with great credit, and that of the Great 
 Western is unexceptionable. The vote 
 of travelers may be safely allotted to the 
 broad gauge. They have more elbow 
 room. The carriages attain the requisite 
 width without unpleasantly, not to say 
 dangerously, overhanging the centre of 
 gravity; and, other things equal, the 
 83 
 
s 4 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 movement is steadier. Nor is the finan- 
 cial aspect of the question apt to impress 
 gloomily the tourist as he enters the Pad- 
 ding-ton station and looks around at its 
 blaze of polychrome and richness of dec- 
 oration generally. As the coach doors 
 are slammed upon you, the guard steps 
 into his "van," the vast drivers, taller 
 than your head plus the regulation stove- 
 pipe, slowly begin their whirl, and you 
 roll majestically forth through a long 
 file of liveried servants of the company, 
 drawn up or in action on the platform, 
 the sensation of patronizing a poverty- 
 stricken corporation is by no means like- 
 ly to harass you. You cease to realize 
 that the Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur 
 Brunei, made a disastrous mistake in the 
 design of this splendid highway, and that, 
 as some will have it, it was his Moscow. 
 His error, if one there was, existed only 
 in the selection of the width of track. 
 Whatever the demerits of the design in 
 that one particular, the execution is in 
 all above praise. The road was his pet. 
 Once finished, it was his delight, as with 
 the breeder of a fine horse, to mount it 
 and try its mettle. Over and again would 
 he occupy the footboard between London 
 and Bristol, and rejoice as a strong man 
 in running his race at close to seventy 
 miles an hour. He and Stephenson 
 were capital types of the Gaul and Brit- 
 on, striving side by side on the same 
 field, as it will be good for the world that 
 they should ever do. 
 
 Combats of another character — in fact, 
 
 of two other characters — recur to our re- 
 flections as we find that we have shuffled 
 off the coil of bricks and mortar and are 
 rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More 
 fortunate than some who have been there 
 before us, we have no call to alight. 
 Calls to this ancient field of glory, whe- 
 ther symbolized by the gentlemanly pis- 
 tol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be 
 in vogue. Dueling and boxing are both 
 frowned down effectually, one by public 
 opinion and the other by the police. It 
 is only of late years that they finally suc- 
 cumbed to those twin discouragers ; but 
 it seems altogether improbable that the 
 ordeal by combat in either shape will 
 again come to the surface in a land 
 where tilting-spear and quarter-staff were 
 of old so rife. In France chivalry still 
 asserts, in a feeble way, the privilege of 
 winking and holding out its iron, and 
 refuses to be comforted with a suit for 
 damages. 
 
 Southall, a station or two beyond, sug- 
 gests sport of a less lethal character, 
 being an ancient meeting-place for the 
 queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may 
 have collected here some of his studies 
 of Cockney equestrianism. The sports- 
 men so dear to his pencil furnished him 
 wealth of opportunities on their annual 
 concourse at the cart's tail. The un- 
 loading of the animal, his gathering him- 
 self up for a leisurely canter across coun- 
 try, the various styles antl degrees of 
 horsemanship among his lumbering fol- 
 lowers, and the business-like replacing 
 
 HORTON CHURCH. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 85 
 
 ■Ms. <j$ 
 
 MILTON'S PEAR TREE. 
 
 of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled 
 away for another day's sport, served as 
 the most complete travesty imaginable 
 of the chase. It has the compensation 
 of placing a number of worthy men in the 
 saddle at least once in the year and com- 
 pelling them to do some rough riding. 
 The English have always made it their 
 boast that they are more at home on 
 horseback than any other European na- 
 tion, and they claim to have derived 
 much military advantage from it. Le- 
 ver's novels would lose many of their 
 best situations but for this national ac- 
 complishment and the astounding de- 
 velopment it reaches in his hands. 
 
 To the left lies the fine park of Os- 
 terley, once the seat of the greatest of 
 London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas 
 Gresham. An improvement proposed by 
 Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 
 1578, does not speak highly for her taste 
 in design. She remarked that in her 
 opinion the court in front of the house 
 would look better split up by a wall. 
 Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, 
 and surprised Her Majesty next morn- 
 ing by pointing out the wall which he 
 had erected during the night, sending to 
 London for masons and material for the 
 purpose. The conceit was a more pon- 
 derous one than that of Raleigh's cloak 
 — bricks and mortar versus velvet. 
 
 A greater than Gresham succeeded, 
 
 after the death of his widow, to the oc- 
 cupancy of Osterley — Chief-justice Coke. 
 His compliment to Elizabeth on the oc- 
 casion of a similar visit to the same 
 house took the more available and ac- 
 ceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred 
 pounds sterling in jewelry. She had 
 more than a woman's weakness for 
 finery, and Coke operated upon it very 
 successfully. His gems outlasted Gresh- 
 am's wall, which has long since disap- 
 peared with the court it disfigured. In 
 place of both stands a goodly Ionic por- 
 tico, through which one may pass to a 
 staircase that bears a representation by 
 Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Mot- 
 ley's hero, William the Silent. The gal- 
 lery offers a collection of other old pic- 
 tures. Should we, however, take time 
 for even a short stop in this vicinity, it 
 would probably be for the credit of say- 
 ing that we walked over Hounslow Heath 
 intact in purse and person. The gen- 
 tlemen of the road live only in the clas- 
 sic pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, 
 if we may include Sam Weller in such 
 worshipful company, that bard of "the 
 bold Turpz'n." Another class of high- 
 waymen had long before them been also 
 attracted by the fine manoeuvring facili- 
 ties of the heath, beginning with the army 
 of the Caesars and ending with that of 
 James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry 
 men were saints to Kirke and his lambs. 
 Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's 
 outlying manors, in his time the seat of 
 his friend Bathurst and the haunt of 
 Addison, Prior, Congreve and Gay, and 
 leave southward, toward the Thames, 
 Horton, the cradle of Milton. A mar- 
 ble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to 
 the memory of his mother, ob. 1637. At 
 Horton were composed, or inspired, Ly- 
 cidas, L Allegro, II Penseroso, Cotnus and 
 others of his nominally minor but real- 
 ly sweetest and most enjoyable poems. 
 In this retirement the Muse paid him 
 her earliest visits, before he had thrown 
 himself away on politics or Canaanitish 
 mythology. Peeping in upon his hand- 
 some young face in its golden setting of 
 blonde curls, 
 
 Through the sweetbrier or the vine. 
 Or the twisted eglantine, 
 
86 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 she wooed him to better work than re- 
 porting the debates of the archangels or 
 calling the roll of Tophet. Had he con- 
 fined himself to this tenderer field, the 
 world would have been the gainer. He 
 might not have " made the word Miltonic 
 mean sublime," but we can spare a little 
 of the sublime to get some more of the 
 beautiful. 
 
 To reach Milton, however, we have 
 run off of the track badly. His Eden is 
 no station on the Great Western. We 
 shall balance this southward divergence 
 with a corresponding one to the north 
 from Slough, the last station ere reach- 
 ing Windsor. We may give a go-by for 
 the moment to the halls of kings, do 
 homage to him who treated them sim- 
 ilarly, and point, in preference, to where, 
 
 in many a mouldering heap, 
 The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep. 
 
 They show Gray's tomb at Stoke Pogis 
 church, and his house, West End Cot- 
 tage, half a mile distant. The ingredi- 
 ents of his Elegy — actually the greatest, 
 but in his judgment among the least, of 
 his few works — exist all around. " The 
 rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower," 
 and "the yew tree's shade," the most 
 specific among the simple " properties " 
 of his little spectacle, are common to so 
 many places that there are several com- 
 petitors for the honor of having furnish- 
 ed them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds 
 and owls cannot, of course, at this late 
 day be identified. Gray could not have 
 done it himself. He drew from general 
 memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit 
 on his thumb-nail from chance-met ob- 
 jects as he went along. Had his con- 
 ception and rendering of the theme been 
 due to the direct impression upon his 
 mind of its several aspects and constitu- 
 ents, he would have more thoroughly ap- 
 preciated his work. He could not un- 
 derstand its popularity, any more than 
 Campbell could that of Ye Mariners of 
 England, which he pronounced "d — d 
 drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray used 
 to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," 
 that the Elegy "owed its popularity en- 
 tirely to the subject, and the public would 
 have received it as well had it been writ- 
 ten entirely in prose." Had it been writ- 
 
 ten in prose or in the inventory style 
 of poetry, it would have been forgotten 
 long ago, like so much else of that 
 kind. 
 
 Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which 
 gave a home to Burke and a title to the 
 wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to 
 a peerage that the haughty Israelite, 
 soured by a life of struggle against peers 
 and their prejudices, would deign to ac- 
 cept. We know it will be objected to 
 this remark that Disraeli is, and has 
 been for most of his career, associated 
 with Toryism. But that was part of his 
 game. A man of culture, thought and 
 fastidious taste, he would, had he been 
 of the sangre azul, have been the stead- 
 iest and sincerest of Conservatives. Priv- 
 ilege would have been his gospel. As it 
 is, it has only been his weapon, to use 
 in fighting for himself. "The time will 
 come when you shall listen to me," were 
 his words when he was first coughed 
 down. The time has come. The most 
 cynical of premiers, he governs England, 
 and he scorns to take a place among those 
 who ruled her before him. 
 
 Extending our divergence farther west 
 toward "Cliefden's proud alcove, the bow- 
 er of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we 
 find ourselves in a luxuriant rolling coun- 
 try, rural and slumberous. Cookham 
 parish, which we should traverse, claims 
 quite loudly American kinship on the 
 strength of its including an estate once 
 the property of Henry Washington, who 
 is alleged, without sufficient ground, to 
 have been a relative of the general. But 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 87 
 
 +H4F* 
 
 
 BEACONSFIELD CHURCH. 
 
 we are within the purlieus of Windsor. 
 The round tower has been looking down 
 upon us these many miles, and we can- 
 not but yield to its magnetism. 
 
 Eton, on the north bank, opposite 
 Windsor, and really a continuous town 
 with that which nestles close to the cas- 
 tle walls, is on our way from Slough. 
 The red-brick buildings of the school, 
 forming a fine foil to the lighter-colored 
 and more elegantly designed chapel, are 
 on our left, the principal front looking 
 over a garden toward the river and Wind- 
 sor Home Park beyond. We become 
 aware of a populace of boys, the file- 
 closers of England's nineteenth century 
 worthies, and her coming veterans of the 
 twentieth. We may contemplatively 
 view them in that light, but it has little 
 
 TOMB OF BURKE. 
 
 I place in their reflections. Their ruddy 
 faces and somewhat cumbrous forms 
 belong to the animal period of life that 
 links together boyhood, colthood and 
 calfhood. Education of the physique, 
 consisting chiefly in the indulgence and 
 employment of it in the mere demonstra- 
 tion of its superabundant vitality, is a 
 large part of the curriculum at English 
 schools. The playground and the study- 
 room form no unequal alliance. Rigid 
 as, in some respects, the discipline prop- 
 er of the school may be, it does not com- 
 pare with the severity of that maintained 
 by the older boys over the younger ones. 
 The code of the lesser, and almost inde- 
 pendent, republic of the dormitory and 
 the green is as clear in its terms as that 
 of the unlimited monarchy of the school- 
 room, and more potent in shaping the 
 character. The lads train themselves 
 for the battle of the world, with some 
 help from the masters. It is a sound 
 system on the whole, if based, to appear- 
 ance, rather too much on the principle 
 of the weaker to the wall. The tenden- 
 cy of the weaker inevitably is to the wall ; 
 and if he is to contend against it effective- 
 ly, it will be by finding out his weakness 
 and being made to feel it at the earliest 
 possible moment. 
 
 Not on land only, but on the river, 
 whereinto it so gradually blends, does 
 lush young England dissipate. Cricket 
 and football order into violent action 
 
88 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 both pairs of extremities, while the upper 
 pair and the organs of the thorax labor 
 profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its 
 three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny 
 Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead, 
 where Falstaff overflowed the buck-bas- 
 ket, belongs to the boys. In this space 
 it is split into an archipelago of aits. In 
 and out of the gleaming paths and ave- 
 nues of silvery water that wind between 
 them glide the little boats. The young 
 Britons take to the element like young 
 ducks. Many a "tall ammiral" has com- 
 menced his "march over the mountain 
 wave" among these water-lilies and 
 hedges of osier. 
 
 Shall we leave the boys at play, and, 
 renewing our youth, go ourselves to 
 school ? Entering the great gate of the 
 western of the two quadrangles, we are 
 welcomed by a bronze statue of the found- 
 er of the institution, Henry VI. He en- 
 dowed it in 1440. The first organization 
 comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten 
 priests, six choristers, twenty -five poor 
 grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor 
 infirm men to pray for the king." The 
 prayers of these invalids were sorely 
 needed by the unhappy scion of Lancas- 
 ter, but did him little good in a temporal 
 sense. The provost is always rector of 
 the parish. Laymen are non-eligible. 
 Thus it happens that the list does not in- 
 clude two names which would have illu- 
 
 minated it more than those of any of the 
 incumbents — Boyle the philosopher, "fa- 
 ther of chemistry and brother of the earl 
 of Cork," and Waller the poet. The 
 modern establishment consists of a pro- 
 vost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master, 
 under-master, assistants, seventy founda- 
 tion scholars, seven lay clerks and ten 
 choristers, with a cortege of " inferior 
 officers and servants" — a tolerably full 
 staff. The pay-students, as they would 
 be termed in this country, numbering 
 usually five to six hundred, do not live 
 in the college precincts, but at boarding- 
 houses in the town, whence their desig- 
 nation of oppidans, the seventy gowns- 
 men only having dormitories in the col- 
 lege. The roll of the alumni contains 
 such names as the first earl of Chatham, 
 Harley, earl of Oxford, Bolingbroke, Fox, 
 Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. 
 That is enough to say for Eton. The 
 beauties of the chapel, the treasures of 
 the library and the other shows of the 
 place become trivial by the side of the 
 record. 
 
 Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which 
 has but three or four arches, we pass to 
 the town of Windsor, which crouches, on 
 the river-side, close up to the embattled 
 walls of the castle — so closely that the 
 very irregular pile of buildings included 
 in the latter cannot at first glance be 
 well distinguished from the town. High 
 
 HEDSOR AND COOKHAM CHURCHES. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 80 
 
 ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL. 
 
 over all swells the round tower to a height 
 above the water of two hundred and 
 twenty feet — no excessive altitude, if we 
 deduct the eminence on which it stands, 
 yet enough, in this level country, to give 
 it a prospect of a score or two of miles 
 in all directions. The Conqueror fell in 
 love with the situation at first sight, and 
 gave a stolen monastery in exchange for 
 it. The home so won has provided a 
 shelter — at times very imperfect, indeed 
 — to British sovereigns for eight centu- 
 ries. From the modest erection of Wil- 
 liam it has been steadily growing — with 
 the growth of the empire, we were near 
 saying, but its chief enlargements occur- 
 red before the empire entered upon the 
 expansion of the past three centuries. It 
 is more closely associated with Edward 
 III. than with any other of the ancient 
 line. He was born at Windsor, and al- 
 most entirely rebuilt it, William of Wyke- 
 ham being superintending architect, with 
 "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at 
 Windsor, and two shillings when he went 
 elsewhere on the duties of his office," 
 three shillings a week being the pay of 
 his clerk. It becomes at once obvious 
 that the margin for "rings" was but slen- 
 der in those days. The labor question 
 gave not the least trouble. The law of 
 supply and demand was not consulted. 
 "Three hundred and sixty workmen 
 
 were impressed, to be employed on the 
 building at the king's wages ; some of 
 whom having clandestinely left Windsor 
 and engaged in other employments to 
 greater advantage, writs were issued pro- 
 hibiting all persons from employing them 
 on pain of forfeiting all their goods and 
 chattels." In presence of so simple and 
 effective a definition of the rights of the 
 workingman, strikes sink into nothing- 
 ness. And Magna Charta had been 
 signed a hundred and fifty years before ! 
 That document, however, in honor of 
 which the free and enlightened Briton 
 of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and 
 his voice, was only in the name and on 
 behalf of the barons. The English peo- 
 ple derived under it neither name, place 
 nor right. English liberty is only inci- 
 dental, a foundling of untraced parent- 
 age, a filiiis nullius. True, its growth 
 was indirectly fostered by aught that 
 checked the power of the monarch, and 
 the nobles builded more wisely than they 
 knew or intended when they brought 
 Lackland to book, or to parchment, at 
 Runnymede, not far down the river and 
 close to the edge of the royal park. The 
 memorable plain is still a meadow, kept 
 ever green and inviolate of the plough. 
 A pleasant row it is for the Eton young- 
 sters to this spot. On Magna Charta 
 island, opposite, they may take their rest 
 
9° 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 and their lunch, and refresh their minds 
 as well with the memories of the place. 
 The task of reform is by no means com- 
 plete. There is room and call for fur- 
 ther concessions in favor of the masses. 
 These embryo statesmen have work 
 blocked out for them in the future, and 
 this is a good place for them to adjust to 
 it the focus of their bright young optics. 
 The monarchical idea is certainly pre- 
 dominant in our present surroundings. 
 The Thames flows from the castle and 
 the school under two handsome erections 
 named the Victoria and Albert bridges ; 
 and when, turning our back upon Staines, 
 just below Runnymede, with its bound- 
 ary-stone marking the limit of the juris- 
 diction of plebeian London's fierce de- 
 mocracy, and inscribed " God preserve 
 the City of London, 1280," we strike 
 west into the Great Park, we soon come 
 plump on George III. a great deal larger 
 than life. The "best farmer that e'er 
 brushed dew from lawn" is clad in an- 
 tique costume with toga and buskins. 
 Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups 
 and with no bridle to speak of, the old 
 gentleman looks calmly into the distance 
 while his steed is in the act of stepping 
 over a perpendicular precipice. This 
 preposterous effort of the glyptic art has 
 the one merit of serving as a finger- 
 board. The old king points us to his 
 
 palace, three miles off, at the end of the 
 famous Long Walk. He did not him- 
 self care to live at the castle, but liked 
 to make his home at an obscure lodge 
 in the park, the same from which, on 
 his first attack of insanity, he set out in 
 charge of two of his household on that 
 melancholy ride to the retreat of Kew, 
 more convenient in those days for med- 
 ical attendance from London, and to 
 which he returned a few months later 
 restored for the time. Shortly after his 
 recovery he undertook to throw up one 
 of the windows of the lodge, but found 
 it nailed down. He asked 'the cause, 
 and was told, with inconsiderate blunt- 
 ness, that it had been done during his 
 illness to prevent his doing himself an 
 injury. The perfect calmness and silence 
 with which he received this explanation 
 was a sufficient evidence of his recovery. 
 Bidding the old man a final farewell, 
 we accept the direction of his brazen 
 hand and take up the line of march, 
 wherein all traveling America has pre- 
 ceded us, to the point wherefrom we 
 glanced off so suddenly in obedience to 
 the summons of Magna Charta. On 
 either hand, as we thread the Long 
 Walk, open glades that serve as so 
 many emerald-paved courts to the mon- 
 archs of the grove, some of them older 
 than the whole Norman dynasty, with 
 
 ETON COLLEGE, FROM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR. 
 
Ur THE THAMES 
 
 9* 
 
 STAINES CHURCH. 
 
 Saxon summers recorded in their hearts. 
 One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is 
 called after the Conqueror. Among 
 these we shall not find the most noted 
 of Windsor trees. It was in the Home 
 Park, on the farther or northern side of 
 the castle, that the fairies were used to 
 perform their 
 
 dance of custom round about the oak 
 
 Of Heme the hunter. 
 
 Whether the genuine oak was cut down 
 at the close of the last century, or was 
 preserved, carefully fenced in and label- 
 ed, in an utterly leafless and shattered 
 state, to our generation, is a moot point. 
 Certain it is that the most ardent Shake- 
 spearean must abandon the hope of se- 
 curing for a bookmark to his Merry 
 Wives of Windsor one of the leaves 
 that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck 
 twelve," over the head of fat Japk. He 
 has the satisfaction, however, of looking 
 up at the identical bell-tower of the six- 
 teenth century, and may make tryst with 
 his imagination to await its midnight 
 chime. Then he may cross the graceful 
 iron bridge — modern enough, unhappily 
 — to Datchet, and ascertain by actual 
 experiment whether the temperature of 
 
 the Thames has changed since the dump- 
 ing into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot." 
 
 Back at the castle, we must "do" it, 
 after the set fashion. Reminders meet 
 us at the threshold that it is in form a 
 real place of defence, contemplative of 
 wars and rumors of wars, and not a 
 mere dwelling by any means in original 
 design. A roadway, crooked and raked 
 by frowning embrasures, leads up from 
 the peaceful town to the particularly in- 
 hospitable-looking twin towers of Henry 
 VIII. 's gateway, in their turn command- 
 ed by the round tower on the right, in 
 full panoply of artificial scarp and ditch. 
 Sentinels in the scarlet livery that has 
 flamed on so many battlefields of all the 
 islands and continents assist in proving 
 that things did not always go so easy 
 with majesty as they do now. But two 
 centuries and more have elapsed since 
 there happened any justification for this 
 frown of stone, steel and feathers ; Ru- 
 pert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 
 having been Windsor's last taste of war, 
 its sternest office after that having been 
 the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here 
 spent his " sorrowful and last Christmas." 
 Once inside the gate, visions of peac? 
 
C)2 
 
 UP '/'///■: tiiames. 
 
 recur. The eye first 
 I. ills (iii the most 
 beautiful of all the 
 assembled struc- 
 tures, St. Geo 
 Chapel. It. with the 
 royal tomb - bouse, 
 the il e a 11 c i v .nwl 
 Winchestei tower, 
 occupies the lefi or 
 
 north sidi- of the low- 
 er or western ward. 
 In the real ol tin- 
 chapel of St. c teorge 
 are quartered in cozy 
 cloisters the canons 
 of tin' college nl that 
 ilk — not great guns 
 in any sense, but old 
 
 e< clesiastical artil- 
 
 le ry spiked after a 
 
 uu ue or less noisy youth and laid up in 
 varnished black for the rest of their 
 days. Watch and ward over these mod- 
 em equipments is kept by Julius Caesar's 
 tower, as one of the most ancient erec- 
 tions is of course called. Still farther to 
 
 our left as we enter are the quarters of 
 sundry other antiquated warriors, the 
 Military Knights of Windsor. These 
 are a few favored veterans, mostly de- 
 e.iveil officers of the army and navy, 
 who owe this shelter to royal favor and 
 
 an endowment. The Ivy tower, west of 
 the entrance, is followed in eastward suc- 
 cession by those oi the gateway, Salis- 
 bury, I "..liter and Bell towers. 
 
 The line exterior of St. George's is 
 
 more than matched by the carving and 
 
 blazonry of the interior. The groined 
 
 roof bears ihe devices of half a do/en 
 
 early kings, beginning with Edward the 
 Confessor. Along the choir stretch the 
 stalls of the sovereign and knights-com- 
 panions of the order o\ the Garter, each 
 hung with banner, mantle, sword and 
 
 helmet Better than these is the ham- 
 mered steel tomb o( Edward IV., by 
 Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. 
 
 In the vaults beneath rest the victim of 
 Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane 
 Seymour ami Charles 1. The account 
 o\ the appearance oi Charles' remains 
 
 when his tomb was examined in I S 1 3 by 
 
 
 >~^ VV 
 
 NORMAN OA'l'E AND ROUND TOWER, WINDSOR. 
 
 Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by sev- 
 11. il of the royal family, is worth quoting. 
 " The complexion of the face was dark 
 and discolored. The forehead and tem- 
 ples had lost little or nothing of their 
 muscular substance. The cartilage of 
 the nose was gone; but the left eye, in 
 the moment of first exposure, was open 
 and full, though it vanished almost im- 
 mediately, and the pointed beard so cha- 
 racteristic of tin- reign of King Charles 
 was perfect. The shape of the face was 
 a long oval ; many of the teeth remain- 
 ed ; and the left ear, in consequence of 
 the interposition of some unctuous mat- 
 ter between it and the cere-cloth, was 
 found entire. The hair was thick at the 
 back part of the head, and in appear- 
 ance nearly black. A portion of it, 
 which has since been cleaned and dried, 
 is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That 
 of the beard was a reddish-brown. On 
 the back part of the head it was not 
 more than an inch in length, and had 
 probably been cut so short for the con- 
 venience o( the executioner, or perhaps 
 by the piety o\ friends after death in 
 order to furnish memorials of the un- 
 happy king. On holding up the head 
 to determine the place of separation 
 from the bodv, the muscles of the neck 
 had evidently contracted themselves con- 
 siderably, and the fourth cervical verte- 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 93 
 
 herne's oak. 
 
 bra was found to be cut through its sub- 
 stance transversely, leaving the face of 
 the divided portions perfectly smooth 
 and even — an appearance which could 
 have been produced only by a heavy 
 blow inflicted with a very sharp instru- 
 ment, and which furnished the last proof 
 wanting to identify Charles I." 
 
 A highly-edifying spectacle this must 
 have been to the prince regent and his 
 brother Cumberland. The certainties 
 of the past and the possibilities of the 
 future were calculated to be highly sug- 
 gestive. A French sovereign had but 
 a few years before shared the fate of 
 Charles, and a cloud of other kings were 
 drifting about Europe with no very flat- 
 tering prospect of coming soon to an- 
 chor. Napoleon was showing his band- 
 ed foes a good double front in Germany 
 and Spain. His dethronement and the 
 restoration of the Bourbons were not as 
 yet contemplated. The Spanish succes- 
 sion was whittled down to a girl — that 
 is, by Salic law, to nothing at all. The 
 Hanoverian was in a similar condition, 
 or worse, none of the old sons of the 
 crazy old king having any legitimate 
 children. The prince regent himself 
 was highly unpopular with the mass 
 
 of his people ; and the classes 
 that formed his principal support 
 were more so, by reason of the 
 arrogance and exactions of the 
 landed interest, the high price of 
 grain and other heavy financial 
 burdens consequent on the war, 
 the arbitrary prosecutions and im- 
 prisonment of leaders of the peo- 
 ple, and the irregularities of his 
 private life. 
 
 But these sinister omens proved 
 illusory. Leigh Hunt, W rax all and 
 the rest made but ineffectual mar- 
 tyrs ; the Bourbons straggled back 
 into France and Spain, with such 
 results as we see ; George IV. wea- 
 thered, by no merit of his own, a 
 fresh series of storms at home ; the 
 clouds that lowered upon his house 
 were made glorious summer by the 
 advent of a fat little lady in 1819 
 — the fat old lady of 1875 ; an d we 
 step from the tomb of Charles in 
 St. George's Chapel to that where George 
 and William slumber undisturbed in the 
 tomb - house, elaborately decorated by 
 Wolsey. Wolsey's fixtures were sold by 
 the thrifty patriots of Cromwell's Parlia- 
 ment, and bought in by the republican 
 governor of the castle as "old brass." 
 George was able, too, to add another 
 story to the stature of the round tower 
 or keep that marks the middle ward of 
 the castle and looks down, on the rare 
 occasion of a sufficiently clear atmo- 
 sphere, on prosperous and no longer 
 disloyal London. This same keep has 
 quite a list of royal prisoners ; John of 
 France and David II. and James I. of 
 Scotland enjoyed a prolonged view of its 
 interior ; so did the young earl of Sur- 
 rey, a brother-poet, a century removed, 
 of James. 
 
 Leaving behind us the atmosphere of 
 shackles and dungeons, we emerge, 
 through the upper ward and the addi- 
 tions of Queen Bess, upon the ample 
 terrace, where nothing bounds us but the 
 horizon. Together, the north, east and 
 south terraces measure some two thou- 
 sand feet. The first looks upon Eton, 
 the lesser park of some five hundred 
 acres which fills a bend of the Thames 
 
94 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 and the country beyond for many miles. 
 The eastern platform, lying between the 
 queen's private apartments and an ex- 
 quisite private garden, is not always free 
 to visitors. The south terrace presents 
 to the eye the Great Park of thirty-eight 
 hundred acres, extending six miles, with 
 a width of from half a mile to two miles. 
 The equestrian statue at the end of the 
 Long Walk is a conspicuous object. The 
 prevailing mass of rolling woods is broken 
 by scattered buildings, glades and av- 
 enues, which take from it monotony and 
 give it life. Near the south end is an 
 artificial pond called Virginia Water, 
 edged with causeless arches and ruins that 
 never were anything but ruins, Chinese 
 temples and idle toys of various other 
 kinds, terrestrial and aquatic. The an- 
 cient trees, beeches and elms, of enor- 
 mous size, and often projected individ- 
 ually, are worth studying near or from 
 a distance. The elevation is not so great 
 as to bring out low-lying objects much 
 removed. We see the summits of hills, 
 each having its name, as St. Leon- 
 ard's, Cooper's, Highstanding, etc., and 
 glimpses of the river and of some coun- 
 try-seats. St. Anne's Hill was the 
 home of Fox ; at St. Leonard's dwelt the 
 father of his rival and rival of his father, 
 and at Binfield, Pope, of whom it is so 
 hard to conceive as having ever been 
 young, "lisped in numbers, for the num- 
 bers came," natural descriptions, ethical 
 reflections, vers de societe and all, for 
 
 around him here there was food for them 
 all. To descend from Pope in point of 
 both time and romance, the view includes 
 the scenes of Prince Albert's agricultural 
 experiments. Quite successful many of 
 them were. He was a thoroughly prac- 
 tical man — a circumstance which carried 
 him by several routes across ploughed 
 fields and through well - built streets, 
 straight to the hearts of the English peo- 
 ple. His memory is more warmly cher- 
 ished, and impressed upon the stranger 
 by more monuments, than that of any 
 other of the German strain. It might 
 have been less so had he succeeded in 
 the efforts he is*now known to have made 
 soon after his marriage to attain a higher 
 nominal rank. He possessed, through the 
 alliance of Leopold and Stockmar and 
 the devotion of Victoria, kingly power 
 without the name and the responsibility, 
 and with that he became content. He 
 used it cautiously and well when he em- 
 ployed it at all. His position was a try- 
 ing one, but he steered well through its 
 difficulties, and died as generally trusted 
 as he was at first universally watched. 
 The love-match of 1840 was every way 
 a success. 
 
 Another figure, more rugged and less 
 majestic, but not less respectable, will be 
 associated with Victoria in the memories, 
 if not the history proper, of her reign. 
 This is John Brown, the canny and im- 
 passive Scot, content, like the Rohans, to 
 be neither prince nor king, and, prouder 
 
 EAST FRONT, WINDSOR CASTLE. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 95 
 
 TFH 
 
 QUEEN ELIZABETH'S BUILDING, WINDSOR. 
 
 than they, satisfied honestly to discharge 
 the office of a flunkey without the very 
 smallest trace of the flunkey spirit. He 
 too has lived down envy and all un- 
 charitableness. Contemptuous and se- 
 rene amid the hootings of the mob and 
 the squibs of the newspapers, he carries, 
 as he has done for years, Her Majesty's 
 shawl and capacious India-rubbers, at- 
 tends her tramps through the Highlands 
 
 EARL OK SUKKEY. 
 
 and the Home Park, engineers her spe- 
 cial trains and looks after her personal 
 comfort even to the extent of ordering 
 her to wear "mair claes " in a Scotch 
 mist. The queen has embalmed him in 
 her books, and he will rank among the 
 heroes of royal authors as his namesake 
 and countryman the Cameronian, by fa- 
 vor of very similar moral qualities, does 
 with those of more democratic procliv- 
 ities. 
 
 We cannot apply literally to the view 
 from Windsor Thackeray's lines on " the 
 castle towers of Bareacres :" 
 
 I stood upon the donjon keep and viewed the country 
 
 o'er; 
 I saw the lands of Bareacres for fifty miles or more. 
 
 We scan what was once embraced in 
 Windsor Forest, where the Norman laid 
 his broad palm on a space a hundred 
 and twenty miles round, and, like the 
 lion in the fable of the hunting-party, in- 
 formed his subjects that that was his 
 share. The domain dwindled, as did 
 other royal appurtenances. Yet in 1807 
 the circuit was as much as seventy-seven 
 miles. In 1789 it embraced sixty thou- 
 sand acres. The process of contraction 
 has since been accelerated, and but little 
 remains outside of the Great and Little 
 Parks. Several villages of little note 
 stand upon it. Of these Wokingham 
 has the distinction of an ancient hostelry 
 yclept the Rose ; and the celebrity of the 
 
9 6 
 
 UP THE THAMES. 
 
 Rose is a beautiful daughter of the land- 
 lord of a century and a half ago. This 
 lady missed her proper fame by the blun- 
 der of a merry party of poets who one 
 evening encircled the mahogany of her 
 papa. It was as "fast" a festivity as 
 such names as Gay and Swift could make 
 it. Their combined efforts resulted in 
 the burlesque of Molly Mog. These 
 two and some others contributed each a 
 verse in honor of the fair waiter. But 
 they mistook her name, and the crown 
 fell upon the less charming brow of her 
 sister, whose cognomen was depraved 
 from Mary into Molly. Wiclif's Oak is 
 pointed out as a corner of the old forest, 
 a long way east of the park. Under its 
 still spreading branches that forerunner 
 of Luther is said to have preached. 
 Messrs. Moody and Sankey should have 
 sought inspiration under its shade. 
 
 In the vast assemblage of the arboreal 
 commonwealth that carpets the landscape 
 the centuries are represented one with 
 another. It is a leafy parliament that 
 has never been dissolved or prorogued. 
 One hoary member is coeval with the 
 Confessor. Another sheltered William 
 
 Rufus, tired from the chase. Under an- 
 other gathered recruits bound with Cceur 
 de Lion for the Holy Land. Against the 
 bole of this was set up a practicing butt 
 for the clothyard shafts that won Agin- 
 court, and beneath that bivouacked the 
 pickets of Cromwell. As we look down 
 upon their topmost leaves there floats, 
 high above our own level, " darkly paint- 
 ed on the crimson sky," a member, not 
 so old, of another commonwealth quite 
 as ancient that has flourished among 
 their branches from time immemorial. 
 There flaps the solitary heron to the 
 evening tryst of his tribe. Where is the 
 hawk ? Will he not rise from some fair 
 wrist among the gay troop we see canter- 
 ing across yonder glade? Only the ad- 
 dition of that little gray speck circling 
 into the blue is needed to round off our 
 illusion. But it comes not. In place of 
 it comes a spirt of steam from the rail- 
 way viaduct, and the whistle of an en- 
 gine. Froissart is five hundred years 
 dead again, and we turn to Bradshaw. 
 
 Yet we have a "view of an interior" 
 to contemplate before facing the lower 
 Thames. And first, as the day is fading, 
 
 WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM BISHOPSGATE. 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 97 
 
 LOCK A'l WINDSOR. 
 
 \vc seek the dimmest part. We dive 
 into the crypt of the bell-tower, or the 
 curfew-tower, that used to send far and 
 wide to many a Saxon cottage the hate- 
 ful warning that told of servitude. How 
 old the base of this tower is nobody 
 seems to know, nor how far back it has 
 served as a prison. The oldest initials 
 of state prisoners inscribed on its cells 
 date to 1600. The walls arc twelve feet 
 thick, and must have begotten a pleas- 
 ant feeling of perfect security in the 
 breasts of the involuntary inhabitants. 
 They did not know of a device contrived 
 for the security of their jailers, which has 
 but recently been discovered. This is a 
 subterranean and subaqueous passage, 
 alleged to lead under the river to Burn- 
 ham Abbey, three miles off. The visitor 
 will not be disposed to verify this state- 
 ment or to stay long in the comparative- 
 
 ly airy crypt. Damp 
 as the British climate 
 may be above ground, 
 it is more so below. 
 We emerge to the fine 
 range of state apart- 
 ments above, and sub- 
 mit to the rule of guide 
 and guide-book. 
 
 St. George's Hall, 
 the Waterloo gallery, 
 the council - chamber 
 and the Vandyck room 
 are the most attra< ti\ e, 
 all of them for the his- 
 torical portraits they 
 contain, and the first, 
 besides, for its merit 
 as an example of a 
 Gothic interior and its 
 associations with the 
 order of the Garter, 
 the knights of which 
 society are installed in 
 it. The specialty of the 
 Waterloo room is t la- 
 series of portraits ©f 
 the leaders, civil and 
 military, English and 
 continental, of the last 
 and successful league 
 against Napoleon. 
 They are nearly all by 
 Lawrence, and of course admirable in 
 their delineation of character. In that 
 essential of a good portrait none of the 
 English school have excelled Lawrence. 
 We may rely upon the truth to Nature 
 of each of the heads before us; for air 
 and expression accord with what history 
 tells us of the individuals, its verdict 
 eked out and assisted by instructive mi- 
 nutiae of lineament and meaning de- 
 tected, in the " off-guard" of private inter- 
 course, by the eye of a great painter and 
 a lifelong student of physiognomy. We 
 glance from the rugged Blucher to the 
 wily Metternich, and from the philosophic 
 Humboldt to the semi-savage Platoff. 
 The dandies George IV. and Alexander 
 are here, but Brummel is left out. The 
 gem of the collection is I'ius VII., Law- 
 rence's masterpiece, widely familial by 
 engravings. Raphael's Julius II. seems 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 to have been in the artist's mind, but 
 that work is not improved on, unless in 
 so far as the critical eye of our day may 
 delight in the more intricate tricks of 
 
 chiaroscuro and effect to which Law- 
 rence has recourse. " Brunswick's fated 
 chieftain " will interest the votaries of 
 C'hilde Harold. Could he have looked 
 
 forward to 1870, he would perhaps have 
 chosen a different side at Waterloo, as 
 his father might at Jena, and elected to 
 figure in oils at Versailles rather than at 
 Windsor. Incomparably more destruc- 
 
 tive to the small German princes have 
 been the Hohenzollerns than the Bona- 
 partes. 
 
 We torget these nineteenth -century 
 people in the council-chamber, wherein 
 
UP THE THAMES. 
 
 99 
 
 ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY. 
 
 reign Guido, Rembrandt, Claude, and 
 even Da Vinci. If Leonardo really ex- 
 ecuted all the canvases ascribed to him 
 in English collections, the common im- 
 pressions of his habits of painting but 
 little, and not often finishing that, do 
 him great injustice. Martin Luther is 
 here, by Holbein, and the countess of 
 Desmond, the merry old lady 
 
 Who lived to the age of twice threescore and ten, 
 And died of a fall from a cherry tree then, 
 
 is embalmed in the bloom of one hun- 
 dred and twenty and the gloom of Rem- 
 brandt. The two dozen pictures in this 
 room form nearly as odd an association 
 as any like number of portraits could do. 
 Guercino's Sibyl figures with a cottage 
 interior by Teniers, and Lely's Prince 
 Rupert looks down with lordly scorn on 
 Jonah pitched into the sea by the com- 
 bined efforts of the two Poussins. The 
 link between Berghem's cows and Del 
 Sarto's Holy Family was doubtless sup- 
 plied to the minds of the hanging com- 
 mittee by recollections of the manger. 
 Our thrifty Pennsylvania]!, West, is as- 
 signed the vestibule. Five of his "ten- 
 acre " pictures illustrate the wars of Ed- 
 ward III. and the Black Prince. The 
 king's closet and the queen's closet are 
 tilled mostly by the Flemings. Van- 
 dyck's room finally finishes the list. It 
 has, besides a portrait of himself and 
 several more of the first Charles and his 
 family in every pose, some such queer, 
 or worse than queer, commoners as Tom 
 
 Killigrew and Sir Kenelm Digby and 
 Venetia his hopeful spouse, so dear to 
 novelists of a certain school. 
 
 Vast sums have been expended on the 
 renovation and improvement of the castle 
 during the past half century. With Vic- 
 toria it has been more popular as a resi- 
 dence than with any of her predecessors 
 since the fourteenth century. What, 
 however, with its greater practical prox- 
 imity to London, due to railways, and 
 what with the queen's liking for solitude 
 since the death of her consort, the more 
 secluded homes of Osborne and Balmoral 
 have measurably superseded it in her af- 
 fections. Five hundred miles of distance 
 to the Dee preclude the possibility of the 
 dumping on her, by means of excursion 
 trains, of loyal cockneydom. She is as 
 thoroughly protected from that inunda- 
 tion in the Isle of Wight, the average Lon- 
 doner having a fixed horror of sea-sick- 
 ness. The running down, by her private 
 steamer, of a few more inquisitive yachts 
 in the Solent would be a hazardous experi- 
 ment, if temporarily effective in keeping 
 home invaders at bay. Holding as her 
 right and left bowers those two sanctu- 
 aries at the opposite ends of her island 
 realm, she can play a strong hand in the 
 way of personal independence, and cease 
 to feel that hers is a monarchy limited by 
 the rights of the masses. It is well for 
 the country that she should be left as 
 far as possible to consult her own com- 
 fort, ease and health at least as freely as 
 
I J' THE THAMES. 
 
 the humblest of her subjects. The con- 
 tinuance of her life is certainly a political 
 desideratum. It largely aids in main- 
 taining a wholesome balance between 
 conservatism and reform. So long as 
 she lives there will be no masculine will 
 to exaggerate the former or obstruct the 
 latter, as notably happened under George 
 III. and William IV. Her personal 
 bearing is also in her favor. Her popu- 
 larity, temporarily obscured a few years 
 ago, is becoming as great as ever. It 
 has never been weakened by any mis- 
 step in politics, and so long as that can 
 
 be said will be exposed to no serious 
 danger. 
 
 We are far from being at the end of 
 the upper Thames. Oxford, were there 
 no other namable place, is beyond us. 
 But we have explored the denser portion 
 — the nucleus of the nebula of historic 
 stars that stretches into the western sky 
 as seen from the metropolis. We lay 
 aside our little lorgnette. It has shown 
 us as much as we can map in these pages, 
 and that we have endeavored to do with 
 at least the merit of accuracy. 
 
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