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VOL. 2276.
PORTRAITS OF PLACES by HENRY JAMES.

IN ONE VOLUME.

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COLLECTION OF
BRITISH AUTHORS
TAUCHNITZ EDITION.
VOL. 2276.
POETEAITS OE PLACES EY HENEY JAMES.
IN ONE TOLTJME.

TAUCHNITZ EDITION.

By the same Author,

THE AMERICAN . . . .
THE EnROPEANS 
DAISY MILLER, ETC. . . .
RODERICK HUDSON . . .
THE MADONNA OP THE FUTURE,
EUGENE PICKERING, ETC.
CONFIDENCE . . . .
WASHINGTON SQUARE .
THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY . .
FOREIGN PARTS 
FRENCH POETS AND NOVELISTS
THE SIEGE OF LONDON, ETC.

2 vols.
1 vol.
1 vol.
2 vols.
1 vol.
1 vol.
1 vol.
2 vols.
3 vols.
1 vol.
1 vol.
1 vol.

PORTRAITS OF
PLACES.

HENRY JAMES,
AUTHOR OF "daisy MILLER," '*THE AMERICAN," ETC.

AUTHORIZED EDIT! ON.

LEIPZIG
BERNHARD TAUCHNITZ
1884.

The present Edition of "Portraits of Places" is the
only one authorized for the Continent of Europe by
HENRY JAMES.
Paris, Feb. 14th, 1884.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER L
— IL
— IIL
— IV.
— V.
— VI.
— VIL
— VIII.
— IX.
— X.
— XL
— XIL
— XIIL
— XIV.

Venice Italy revisited
Occasional Paris . . . .
Rheims and Laon : A little Tour
Chartres ...
Rouen 
Etretat 
From Normandy to the Pyrenees
An English Easter
London at Midsummer .
Two Excursions
In Warwickshire .
Abbeys and Castles ....
English Vignettes

Page 9
46 81
lOI124 134 143152
185
211228246268 285

PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

I.
VENICE.

It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am
not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretend
ing to add anything to it. Venice has been painted
and described many thousands of times, and of all the
cities of the world it is the easiest to visit without going
there. Open the first book and you will find a rhapsody
about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and you
will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it.
There is nothing more to be said about it. Every one
has been there, and every one has brought back a col
lection of photographs. There is as little mystery about
the Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare; and
the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the postman's
ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of familiar
things, and I believe that, for the true Venice-lover,
Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to
be said about it certainly, but the old is better than
any novelty. It would be a sad day, indeed, when

IO portraits of places.
there should be something new to say. I write these
lines with the full consciousness of having no informa
tion whatever to ofifer. I do not pretend to enlighten
the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his
memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified
who is himself in love with his topic.
I.
Mr. Ruskin has given it up, that is very true; but
it is only after extracting half a life-time of pleasure
and an immeasurable quantity of fame from it. We
all may do the same, after it has served our turn,
which it probably will not cease to do for many a year
to come. Meantime, it is Mr. Ruskin who, beyond any
one, helps us to enjoy. He has, indeed, lately pro
duced several aids to depression in the shape of cer
tain little humorous — ill-humorous — pamphlets (the
series of St. Mark's Rest), which embody his latest re
flections on the subject of Venice and describe the
latest atrocities that have' been perpetrated there.
These latter are numerous and deeply to be deplored;
but to admit that they have spoiled Venice would be
to admit that Venice may be spoiled — an admission
pregnant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortu
nately, one reacts against the Ruskinian contagion, and
one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of
demoralised prose. This queer, late-coming prose of
Mr. Ruskin (including the revised and condensed issue
of the Stones of Venice, only one little volume of which
has appeared or, perhaps, will ever appear) is all to
be read, though much of it seems to be addressed to
children of tender age. It is pitched in the nursery-
key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry

VENICE. 1 1
governess. It is, however, all suggestive, and much of
it is delightfully just. There is an inconceivable want
of form in it, though the author has spent his life in
laying down the principles of form, and scolding people
for departing from them; but it throbs and flashes
with the love of his subject — a love disconcerted and
abjured, but which has still some of the force of in
spiration. Among the many strange things that have
befallen Venice, she has had the good fortune to be
come the object of a passion to a man of splendid
genius, who has made her his own, and, in doing so,
has made her the world's. There is no better reading
at Venice, therefore, as I say, than Ruskin, for every
true Venice-lover can separate the wheat from the chafif.
The narrow theological spirit, the moralism d, tout pro-
pos, the queer provincialities and pruderies, are mere
wild weeds in a mountain of flowers. One may doubt
less be very happy in Venice without reading at all —
without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous
thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is very
little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city in which
there must be almost as much happiness as misery.
The misery of Venice stands there for all the world
to see; it is part of the spectacle — a thorough-going
devotee of local colour might consistently say it is
part of the pleasure. The Venetian people have little
to call their own — little more than the bare privilege
of leading their lives in the most beautiful of towns.
Their habitations are decayed; their taxes heavy; their
pockets light; their opportunities few. One receives
an impression, however, that life presents itself to them
with attractions not accounted for in this meagre train
of advantages, and that they are on better terms with

12 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
it than many people who have made a better bargain.
They lie in the sunshine; they dabble in the sea; they
wear bright rags; they fall into attitudes and harmonies;
they assist at an eternal conversazione. It is not easy
to say that one would have them other than they are,
and it certainly would make an immense difference
should they be better fed. The number of persons in
Venice who evidently never have enough to eat is
painfully large; but it would be more painful if we
did not equally perceive that the rich Venetian tem
perament may bloom upon a dog's allowance. Nature
has been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and con
versation and beautiful views form the greater part of
its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a suc
cessful American; but to make a happy Venetian takes
only a handful of quick sensibility. The Italian people
have, at once, the good and evil fortune to be con
scious of few wants; so that if the civilisation of a
society is measured by the number of its needs, as
seems to be the common opinion to-day, it is to be
feared that the children of the lagoon would make but
a poor figure in a set of comparative tables. Not their
misery, doubtless, but the way they elude their misery,
is what pleases the sentimental tourist, who is gratified
by the sight of a beautiful race that lives by the aid
of its imagination. The way to enjoy Venice is to
follow the example of these people and make the most
of simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the
place are simple; this may be maintained even under
the imputation of ingenious paradox. There is no
simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian — unless
it be looking at a fine Tintoret, or strolling into St.
Mark's — it is abominable, the way one falls into the

VENICE.

13

habit — and resting one's light-wearied eyes upon the
windowless gloom; or than floating in a gondola, or
hanging over a balcony, or taking one's cofifee at
Florian's. It is of these superficial pastimes that a
Venetian day is composed, and the pleasure of the
matter is in the emotions to which they minister.
These, fortunately, are of the finest; otherwise, Venice
would be insufferably dull. Reading Ruskin is good;
reading the old records is, perhaps, better; but the
best thing of all is simply staying on. The only way
to care for Venice as she deserves it, is to give her a
chance to touch you often — to linger and remain and
retum. II.
The danger is that you will not linger enough —
a danger of which the author of these lines had known
something. It is possible to dislike Venice, and to
entertain the sentiment in a responsible and intelligent
manner. There are travellers who think the place
odious, and those who are not of this opinion often
find themselves wishing that the others were only more
numerous. The sentimental tourist's only quarrel with
his Venice is that he has too many competitors there.
He likes to be alone; to be original; to have (to him
self, at least) the air of making discoveries. The
Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little
wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and
creaking, and you march through the institution with
a herd of fellow-gazers. There is nothing left to dis
cover or describe, and originality of attitude is com
pletely impossible. This is often very annoying; you
can only turn your back on your impertinent play-

14 PORTRAITS or PLACES.
fellow and curse his want of delicacy. But this is not
the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the
world. The fault of Venice is that, though it is easy
to admire it, it is not so easy to live in it. After you
have been there a week, and the bloom of novelty has
rubbed off, you wonder whether you can accommodate
yourself to the peculiar conditions. Your old habits
become impracticable, and you find yourself obliged
to form new ones of an undesirable and unprofitable
character. You are tired of your gondola (or you
think you are), and you have seen all the principal
pictures and heard the names of the palaces announced
a dozen times by your gondolier, who brings them out
almost as impressively as if he were an English butler
bawling titles into a drawing-room. You have walked
several hundred times round the Piazza, and bought
several bushels of photographs. You have visited the
antiquity-mongers whose horrible sign-boards dishonour
some of the grandest vistas in the Grand Canal; you
have tried the opera and found it very bad; you have
bathed at the Lido and found the water flat. You
have begun to have a shipboard-feeling — to regard
the Piazza as an enormous saloon and the Riva degli
Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. You are obstructed
and encaged; your desire for space is unsatisfied; you
miss your usual exercise. You try to take a walk, and
you fail, and meantime, as I say, you have come to
regard your gondola as a sort of magnified baby's
cradle. You have no desire to be rocked to sleep,
though you are sufficiently kept awake by the irrita
tion produced, as you gaze across the shallow lagoon,
by the attitude of the perpetual gondolier, with his
turned-out toes, his protruded chin, his absurdly un-

VENICE.

15

scientific stroke. The canals have a horrible smell,
and the everlasting Piazza, where you have looked
repeatedly at every article in every shop-window and
found them all rubbish, where the young Venetians
who sell bead-bracelets and "panoramas" are per
petually thrusting their wares at you, where the same
tightly-buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same
black weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the
same caff is — the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself
into a sort of magnificent tread-mill. This is the state
of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice
all very well for a week; and if in such a state of
mind you take your departure, you act with fatal
rashness. The loss is your own, moreover; it is not —
with all deference to your personal attractions — that
of your companions who remain behind; for though
there are some disagreeable things in Venice, there is
nothing so disagreeable as the visitors. The condi
tions are peculiar, but your intolerance of them eva
porates before it has had time to become a prejudice.
When you have called for the bill to go, pay it and
remain, and you will find on the morrow that you are
deeply attached to Venice. It is by living there from
day to day that you feel the fulness of its charm; that
you invite its exquisite influence to sink into your
spirit. The place is as changeable as a nervous
woman, and you know it only when you know all the
aspects of its beauty. It has high spirits or low, it is
pale or red, gray or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan,
according to the weather or the hour. It is always
interesting and almost always sad; but it has a thou
sand occasional graces and is always liable to happy
accidents. You become extraordinarily fond of these

1 6 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
things; you count upon them; they make part of your
life. Tenderly fond you become; there is something
indefinable in those depths of personal acquaintance
that gradually establish themselves. The place seems
to personify itself, to become human and sentient, and
conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace
it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally, a soft sense
of possession grows up, and your visit becomes a per
petual love-affair. It is very true that if you go there,
like the author of these lines, about the middle of
March, a certain amount of disappointment is possible.
He had not been there for several years, and in the
interval the beautiful and helpless city had suffered
an increase of injury. The barbarians are in full pos-
sessioii, and you tremble for what they may do. You
are reminded, from the moment of your arrival, that
Venice scarcely exists any more as a city at all; that
it exists only as a battered peep-show and bazaar.
There was a multitude of Germans encamped, in the
Piazza, and they filled the Ducal Palace and the
Academy with their presence. The English and
Americans came a little later. They came in good
time, with a great many French, who were discreet
enough to make very long repasts at the Cafiffe Quadri,
during which they were out of the way. The months
of April and May of the year 1881 were not, as a
general thing, a favourable season for visiting the'
Ducal Palace and the' Academy. The valet-de-place
had marked them for his own, and held triumphant
possession of them. He celebrates his triumphs in a
terrible brassy voice, which resounds all over the
place, and has, whatever language he be speaking, the
accent of some other idiom. During all the spring

VENICE. 1 7
months in Venice these gentry abound in the great
resorts, and they lead their helpless captives through
churches and galleries in dense irresponsible groups.
They infest the Piazza; they pursue you along the
Riva; they hang about the bridges and the doors of
the caffis. In saying just now that I was disappointed
at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that
assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. Mark's.
The condition of this ancient sanctuary is surely a
great scandal. The pedlars and commissioners ply
their trade — often a very unclean one — at the very
door of the temple; they follow you across the
threshold, into the sacred dusk, and pull your sleeve,
and hiss into your ear, scuffling with each other for
customers. There is a great deal of dishonour 'about
St. Mark's altogether, and if Venice, as I say, has be
come a great bazaar, this exquisite edifice is now the
biggest booth. III.
It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had
not, somehow, a great spirit of solemnity within it,
the traveller would soon have little warrant for regard
ing it as a religious affair. The restoration of the outer
walls, which has lately been so much attacked and
defended, is certainly a great shock. Of the necessity
of the work only an expert is, I suppose, in a position
to judge; but there is no doubt that, if a necessity it
be, it is one that is deeply to be regretted. To no
more distressing necessity have people of taste lately
had to resign themselves. Wherever the hand of the
restorer has been laid all semblance of beauty has
vanished; which is a sad fact, considering that the
Portraits of Places. ^

1 8 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
external loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less
impressive only than that of the still comparatively
uninjured interior. I know not what is the measure of
necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed to be
a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, that!
admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble, which,
to the eye of the traveller emerging from the narrow
streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the farther!
end of it with a sort of dazzling, silvery presence — to-j
day this lovely vision is in a way to be completely re
formed and, indeed, well-nigh abolished. The old'
softness and mellowness of colour — the work of the
quiet centuries and of the breath of the salt sea — is]
giving way to large crude patches of new material,!
whicli have the effect of a monstrous malady ratheri
than of a restoration to health. They look like blotches!
of red and white paint and dishonourable smears of
chalk on the cheeks of a noble matron. The face to-|
ward the Piazzetta is in especial the newest-looking
thing conceivable — as new as a new pair of boots, or
as the morning's paper. We do not profess, howeverl
to undertake a scientific quarrel with these changesj
we admit that our complaint is a purely sentimental
one. The march of industry in united Italy muslf
doubtless be looked at as a whole, and one must
endeavour to believe that it is through innumerablf
lapses of taste that this deeply interesting country is
groping her way to her place among the nations. For
the present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases
of the process are more visible than the result to ar
rive at which it seems necessary that, as she was oi
old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she shouli
to-day burn everything that she has adored. It ia

VENICE. 1 9
doubtless, too soon to judge her, and there are mo
ments when one is willing to forgive her even the
restoration of St. Mark's. Inside, as well, there has
been a considerable attempt to make the place more
tidy; but the general effect, as yet, has not seriously
suffered. What I chiefly remember is the straightening
out of that dark and rugged old pavement — those
deep undulations of primitive mosaic, in which the
wondering tourist was thought to perceive an intended
resemblance to the waves of the ocean. Whether in
tended or not, the analogy was an image the more in
a treasure-house of images; but from a considerable
portion of the church it has now disappeared. Through
out the greater part, indeed, the pavement remains as
recent generations have known it — dark, rich, cracked,
uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened
malachite, and polished by the knees of innumerable
worshippers; but in other large sections the idea
imitated by the restorers is that of the ocean in a dead
calm, and the model they have taken, the floor of a
London club-house or of a New York hotel. I think
no Venetian and scarcely any Italian cares much for
such differences; and when, a year ago, people in Eng
land were writing to the Times about the whole busi
ness, and holding meetings to protest against it, the
dear children of the lagoon (so far as they heard, or
heeded, the rumour) thought them partly busy-bodies
and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubtless were, but
they took a good deal of disinterested trouble. It never
occurs to the Venetian mind of to-day that such trouble
may be worth taking; the Venetian mind vainly en
deavours to conceive a state of existence in which
personal questions are so insipid that people have to
2'

20 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
look for grievances in the wrongs of brick and marble, |
I must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had|
the pretension of giving a description of it, or as if
the reader desired one. The reader has been too wellf
served already. It is surely the best-described build-j
ing in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open
Theophile Gautier's Italia, and you will see. These
writers take it very seriously, and it is only becaus^
there is another way of taking it that I venture to
speak of it; the way that offers itself after you have
been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is
hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the^
pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friend
liness, and a desire for something cool and dark,
There are moments, after all, when the church is com
paratively quiet and empty, when you may sit then
with an easy consciousness of its beauty. From tb
moment, of course, that you go into any Italian church]
for any purpose but to say your prayers or look at the
ladies, you rank yourself among the trooping barbarian!
I just spoke of; you treat the place like an orifice in
the peep-show. Still, it is almost a spiritual functioij
— or, at the worst, an amorous one — to feed one's eyes
on the moulten colour that drops from the hollow vaul^
and thickens the air with its richness. It is all sd
quiet and sad and faded; and yet it is all so brilliant
and living. The strange figures in the mosaic pic
tures, bending with the curve of niche and vault, stari
down through the glowing dimness; and the burnishe^
gold that stands behind them catches the light on its-
little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes nothing of its
character to the beauty of proportion or perspective;
there is nothing grandly balanced or far-arching; there

VENICE. 2 1
are no long lines nor triumphs of the perpendicular.
The church arches indeed; but it arches like a dusky
cavern. Beauty of surface, of tone, of detail, of things
near enough to touch and kneel upon and lean against
— it is from this the effect proceeds. In this sort of
beauty the place is incredibly rich, and you may so
there every day and find afresh some lurking pibtottal
nook. It is a treasury of bits, as the painters sky;
and there are usually three or four painters, with -lAieif
easels set up in uncertain equilibrium on the 'undulat
ing floor. It is not easy to catch the real compl«xt6n
of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at pdftriiiture
are apt to look either lurid or livid. But ifyoti tJtn-
not paint the old loose-looking marble slabs, me'-gifeat
panels of basalt and jasper, the crucifixes j-'^of' which
the lonely anguish looks deeper in the vertical light,
the tabernacles whose open doors disclose S'id'i'iWc By
zantine image, spotted with dull, crooked geiSs^^r.f you
cannot paint these things you can, at least, "g¥bir' fbnd
ofthem. You grow fond even of the old'''b'eb'6hes -,pf
red marble, partly worn away by the breec^hl^bf manj;\
generations, and attached to the base of thosfe wide
pilasters, of which the precious plating, delightful in
its faded brownness, with a faint gray bloom upon it,
bulges and yawns a little with honourable age.

IV.
Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the city
of the Doges having been reduced to earning its living
as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there was a
great deal of entertainment to be got from lodging on
the Riva degli Schiavoni and looking out at the far-

22 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
shimmering lagoon. There was entertainment indeed-'
in simply getting into the place and observing the
queer incidents of a Venetian installation. A great
many persons contribute indirectly to this undertaking,,
and it is surprising how they spring out at you during
your novitiate to remind, you that they are bound up
mysterious-'nlanner with the constitution of
^le^estaSiishment. It was an interesting pro-
instance, to trace the subtle connection exist- 1
^en the niece of the landlady and the occu-j
,the fourth floor. Superficially, it was not
Jl^le, as the young lady in question was a
the Fenice theatre — or, when that was
ihe Rossini — and might have been supposed,
prbed by her professional duties. It proved
Issary, however, that she should hover about
Bes in a velvet jacket and a pair of black
with one little white button; as also, that
apply a thick coating of powder to her'
^^ had a charming oval and a sweet, weakj
like that of most of the Venetian maidens,;
•who, as a general thing (it was not a peculiarity of
the landlady's niece), are fond of besmearing them
selves with flour. It soon became plain that it is notj
only the many-twinkling lagoon that you behold from'
a habitation on the Riva; you see a little of everything!
Venetian. Straight across, before my windows, rose
the great pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which,i
for an ugly Palladian church, has a success beyond
all reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of
the immense detached Campanile, tipped with a tall
gold angel. I know not whether it is because San
Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, and because it has

VENICE. 23
a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork; but for
many persons the whole place has a kind of suffusion
of rosiness. If we were asked what is the leading
colour at Venice we should say pink, and yet, after
all, we cannot remember that this elegant tint occurs
very often. It is a faint, shimmering, airy, watery
pink; the bright sea-light seems to flush with it, and
the pale whitish-green of lagoon and canal to drink it
in. There is, indeed, in Venice a great deal of very
evident brickwork, which is never fresh or loud in
colour, but always burnt out, as it were, always ex
quisitely mild. There are certain little mental pictures
that rise before the sentimental tourist at the simple
mention, written or spoken, of the places he has loved.
When I hear, when I see, the magical name I have
written above these pages, it is not of the great Square
that I think, with its strange basilica and its high
arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal,
with the stately steps and the well-poised dome of the
Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the sweet
Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. Mark's. I
simply see a narrow canal in the heart of the city — a
patch of green water and a surface of pink wall. The
gondola moves slowly; it gives a great, smooth swerve,
passes under a bridge, and the gondolier's cry, carried
over the quiet water, makes a kind of splash in the
stillness. A girl is passing over the little bridge, which
has an arch like a camel's back, with an old shawl on
her head, which makes her loo^ charming; you see
her against the sky as you float beneath. The pink of
the old wall seems to fill the whole place; it sinks
even into the opaque water. Behind the wall is a
garden, out of which the long arm of a white June

24 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
rose — the roses of Venice are splendid — has flung it-'
self by way of spontaneous ornament. On the other
side of this small water-way is a great shabby fajade
of Gothic windows and balconies — balconies on which
dirty clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-
looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy'
watersteps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a
queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting. It is
poor work, however, talking about the colour of things ,
in Venice. The sentimental tourist is perpetually'
looking at it from his window, when he is not floating'
about with that delightful sense of being for tlie mo
ment a part of it, which any gentleman in a gondola
is free to entertain. Venetian windows and balconies
are a dreadful lure, and while you rest your elbows
on these cushioned ledges the precious hours fly away.
But, in truth, Venice is not, in fair weather, a place
for concentration of mind. The effort required for
sitting down to a writing-table is heroic, and the
brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy
of your milieu. All nature beckons you forth, and
murmurs to you sophistically that such hours should be'
devoted to collecting impressions. Afterward, in ugly,
places, at unprivileged times, you can convert your
impressions into prose. Fortunately for the present
proser, the weather was not always fine; the first month
was wet and windy, and it was better to look at the
lagoon from an open casement than to respond to the
advances of persuasive gondoliers. Even then, how-'
ever, there was a constant entertainment in the view.
It was all cold colour, and the steel-gray floor of the-
lagoon was stroked the wrong way by the wind. Then-
there were charming cool intervals, when the churches

VENICE. 25
the houses, the anchored fishing-boats, the whole
gently-curving line ofthe Riva, seemed to be washed
with a pearly white. Later it all turned warm — warm
to the eye as well as to other senses. After the
middle of May the whole place was in a glow. The
sea took on a thousand shades, but they were only in
finite variations of blue, and those rosy walls I just
spoke of began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every
patch of colour, every yard of weather-stained stucco,
every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky above
a calle, began to shine and sparkle — began, as the
painters say, to "compose.'' The lagoon was streaked
with odd currents, which played across it like huge,
smooth finger-marks. The gondolas multiplied and
spotted it all over; every gondola and every gondolier
looking, at a distance, precisely like every other.
There is something strange and fascinating in this
mysterious impersonality of the gondola. It has an
identity when you are in it, but, thanks to their all
being ofthe same size, shape, and colour, and ofthe
same deportment and gait, it has none, or as little as
possible, as you see it pass before you. From my
windows on the Riva there was al-vvays the same
silhouette — the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its
head and throwing it back a little, moving yet seem
ing not to move, with the grotesquely-graceful figure
on the poop. This figure inclines, as may be, more
to the graceful or to the grotesque — standing in the
"second position" ofthe dancing-master, but indulging,
from the waist upward, in a freedom of movement
which that functionary would deprecate. One may
say, as a general thing, that there is something rather
awkward in the movement of even the most graceful

26 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
gondolier, and something graceful in the movement of
the most awkward. In the graceful men of course the
grace predominates, and nothing can be finer than the
large firm way in which, from their point of vantage,
they throw themselves over their tremendous oar. It
has the boldness of a plunging bird, and the regularity
of a pendulum. Sometimes, as you see this move
ment in profile, in a gondola that passes you — as you
recline on your own low cushions, the arching body
of the gondolier lifted up against the sky — it has a
kind of nobleness which suggests an image on a Greek
frieze. The gondolier at Venice is your very good
friend — if you choose him happily — and on the quality
of the personage depends a good deal of your impres
sions. He is a part of your daily life, your double,
your shadow, your complement. Most people, I think,
either like their gondolier or hate him; and if they like
him, like him very much. In this case they take an
interest in him after his departure; wish him to be sure
of employment, speak of him as the gem of gondoliers,
and tell their friends to be certain to "secure" him.
There is usually no difficulty in securing him; there
is nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. They
are, for the most part, excellent fellows, and the senti
mental tourist must always have a kindness for them.
More than the rest ofthe population, of course, they
are the children of Venice; they are associated with
its idiosyncrasy, with its essence, with its silence, with
its melancholy. When I say they are associated with
its silence, I should immediately add that they are as
sociated also with its sound. Among themselves they
are an extraordinarily talkative company. They chat
ter at the traghetii, where they always have some sharp

VENICE. 2 7
point under discussion; they bawl across the canals;
they bespeak your commands as you approach; they
defy each other from afar. If you happen to have a
traghetto under your window, you are well aware that
they are a vocal race. I should go even farther than
I went just now, and say that the voice of the gon
dolier is, in fact, the sound of Venice. There is
scarcely any other, and that, indeed, is part of the in
terest of the place. There is no noise there save dis
tinctly human noise; no rumbling, no vague uproar,
no rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is all articulate,
personal sound. One may say, inde.ed, that Venice
is, emphatically, the city of conversation; people talk
all over the place, because there is nothing to interfere
with their being heard. Among the populace it is a
kind of family party. The still water carries the voice,
and good Venetians exchange confidences at a dis
tance of half a mile. It saves a world of trouble, and
they don't like trouble. Their delightful garrulous
language helps them to make Venetian life a long
conversazione. This language, with its soft elisions, its
odd transpositions, its kindly contempt for consonants
and other disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly
human and accommodating. If your gondolier had
no other merit, he would have the merit that he
speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit, even —
some people perhaps would say especially — when you
don't understand what he says. But he adds to it
other graces which make him an agreeable feature in
your life. The price he sets on his services is touch-
ingly small, and he has a happy art of being ob
sequious, without being, or, at least, without seeming,
abject. For occasional liberalities he evinces an almost

28 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
lyrical gratitude. In short, he has delightfully good
manners, a merit which he shares, for the most part,
with Venetians at large. One grows very fond of these
people , and the reason of one's fondness is the frank
ness and sweetness of their address. That of the
Italian people, in general, has much to recommend it;
but in the Venetian manner there is something
peculiarly ingratiating. One feels that the race is old,
that it has a long and rich civilisation in its blood,
and that if it has not been blessed by fortune, it has
at least been polished by time. It has not a genius
for morality, and indeed makes few pretensions in
that direction. It scruples not to represent the false
as the true, and is liable to confusion in the attribu
tion of property. It is peculiarly susceptible to the
tender sentiment, which it cultivates with a graceful
disregard of the more rigid formalities. I am not sure
that it is very brave, and was not struck with its being
very industrious. But it has an unfailing sense of the
amenities of life; the poorest Venetian is a natural
man of the world. He is better company than persons
of his class are apt to be among the nations of in
dustry and virtue — where people are also, sometimes,
perceived to lie and steal. He has a great desire to
please and to be pleased.

V.
In this latter point the cold-blooded stranger be
gins at last to imitate him; he begins to lead a life
that is, before all things, good-humoured: unless, in
deed, he allow himself, like Mr. Ruskin, to be put out
of his good-humour by Titian and Tiepolo. , The

VENICE. 29
hours he spends among the pictures are his best hours
in Venice, and I am ashamed of myself to have written
so much of common things when I might have been
making festoons of the names of the masters. But,
when we have covered our page with such festoons,
what more is left to say? When one has said Car-
paccio and Bellini, the Tintoret and the Veronese, one
has struck a note that must be left to resound at will.
Ever)rthing has been said about the mighty painters,
and it is of little importance to record that one
traveller the more has found them to his taste. "Went
this morning to the Academy; was very much pleased
with Titian's 'Assumption.'" That honest phrase has
doubtless been written in many a traveller's diary, and
was not indiscreet on the part of its author. But it
appeals little to the general reader, and we must,
moreover, not expose our deepest feelings. Since I
have mentioned Titian's "Assumption," I must say that
there are some people who have been less pleased
with it than the gentleman we have just imagined.
It is one of the possible disappointments of Venice,
and you may, if you like, take advantage of your
privilege of not caring for it. It imparts a look of
great richness to the side of the beautiful room of the
Academy on which it hangs; but the same room con
tains two or three works less known to fame which are
equally capable of inspiring a passion. "The 'An
nunciation' struck me as coarse and superficial": that
was once written in a simple-minded traveller's note
book. At Venice, strange to say, Titian is altogether
a disappointment; the city of his adoption is far from
containing the best of him. Madrid, Paris, London,
Florence, Dresden, Munich — these are the homes of

30 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
his greatness. There are other painters who have but
a single home, and the greatest of these is the Tin
toret. Close beside him sit Carpaccio and Bellini,
who make with him the dazzling Venetian trio. The
Veronese may be seen and measured in other places;
he is most splendid in Venice, but he shines in Paris
and in Dresden. You may walk out of the noon-day
dusk of Trafalgar Square in November, and in one of
the chambers of the National Gallery see the family
of Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the
feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young
Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture sends
a glow into the cold London twilight. You may sit
before it for an hour, and dream you are floating to
the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where a certain
old beggar, with one of the handsomest heads in the
world — he has sat to a hundred painters for Doges,
and for personages more sacred — has a prescriptive
right to pretend to pull your gondola to the steps and
to hold out a greasy, immemorial cap. But you must
go to Venice, in fact, to see the other masters, who
form part of your life while you are there, and illu
minate your view of the universe. It is difficult to
express one's relation to them; for the whole Venetian
art-world is so near, so familiar, so much an extension
and adjunct of the actual world, that it seems almost
invidious to say one owes more to one of them than
to another. Nowhere (not even in Holland, where the
correspondence between the real aspects and the little
polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite) do
art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, so con
sanguineous. All the splendour of light and colour
all the Venetian air and the Venetian history, are on

VENICE. 3 1
the walls and ceilings of the palaces; and all the
genius of the masters, all the images and visions they
have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the sun
beams and dance upon the waves. That is the per
petual interest of the place — that you live in a certain
sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You don't go
into the churches and galleries by way of a change
from the streets; you go into them because they offer
you an exquisite reproduction of the things that sur
round you. All Venice was both model and painter,
and life was so pictorial that art could not help be
coming so. With all diminutions life is pictorial still,
and this fact gives an extraordinary freshness to one's
perception of the great Venetian works. You judge
of them not as a- connoisseur, but as a man of the
world, and you enjoy them because they are so social
and so actual. Perhaps, of all works of art that are
equally great, they demand least reflection on the part
of the spectator — they make least of a mystery of be
ing enjoyed. Reflection only confirms your admiration,
but it is almost ashamed to show its head. These
things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense
that we feel there is reason as well in such an address.
But it is hard, as I say, to express all this, and it is
painful as well to attempt it — painful, because in the
memory of vanished hours so filled with beauty the
sense of present loss is overwhelming. Exquisite
hours, enveloped in light and silence, to have known
them once is to have always a terrible standard of
enjoyment. Certain lovely mornings of May and June
come back with an ineffaceable fairness. Venice is
not smothered in flowers at this season, in the manner
of Florence and Rome; but the sea and sky them-

32 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
selves seem to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits
at the wave-washed steps, and if you are wise you will
take your place beside a discriminating companion.
Such a companion, in Venice, should, of course, be of
the sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent
woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelligent,!
and it makes no woman's perceptions less keen to be'.;
aware that she cannot help looking graceful as she'
glides over the waves. The handsome Pasquale, with
uplifted oar, awaits your command, knowing, in a
general way, from observation of your habits, that your
intention is to go to see a picture or two. It perhaps
does not immensely matter what picture you choose:
the whole affair is so charming. It is charming to
wander through the light and shade of intricate canals,
with perpetual architecture above you and perpetual;
fluidity beneath. It is charming to disembark at the
polished steps of a little empty campo — a sunny,
shabby square, with an old well in the middle, an old
church on one side, and tall Venetian windows looking
down. Sometimes the windows are tenantless; some-.
times a lady in a faded dressing-gown is leaning!
vaguely on the sill. There is always an old man hold-,
ing out his hat for coppers; there are always three or
four small boys dodging possible umbrella-pokes while'
they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to the
door of the church.

VENICE. ^^

VI.

The churches of Venice are rich in pictures , and
many a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating
gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble
work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin
roses of a scantily-visited altar; some of them, indeed,
are hidden behind the altar, in a darkness that can
never be explored. The facilities offered you for ap
proaching the picture, in such cases, are a kind of
mockery of your irritated desire. You stand on tip-toe
on a three-legged stool, you climb a rickety ladder,
you almost mount upon the shoulders of the custode.
You do everything but see the picture. You see just
enough to perceive that it is beautiful. You catch a
glimpse of a divine head, of a fig-tree against a mellow
sky; but the rest is impenetrabe mystery. You renounce
all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent
Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora; and
bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity that dwells
in the works of this master, you renounce it with chagrin
and pain. Behind the high altar, in that church, there
hangs a Baptism of Christ, by Cima, which, I believe,
has been more or less repainted. You can make the
thing out in spots; you can see that it has a fulness
of perfection. But you turn away from it with a stiff
neck, and promise yourself consolation in the Academy
and at the Madonna dell' Orto, where two noble pic
tures, by the same hand — pictures as clear as a sum
mer twilight — present themselves in better circum
stances. It may be said, as a general thing, that you
never see the Tintoret. You admire him, you adore
Porfraits of Places. 3

34 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
him, you think him the greatest of painters, but, in the
great majority of cases, you don't see him. This is
partly his own fault; so many of his works have turned
to blackness and are positively rotting in their firames. -
At the Scuola di San Rocca, where there are acres of
the Tintoret, there is scarcely an)?thing at all adequately
visible save the immense "Crucifixion" in the upper
story. It is true that in looking at this huge composi
tion you look at many pictures; it has not only a mul
titude of figures, but a wealth of episodes; and you
pass from one of these to the other as if you were
"doing" a gallery. Surely, no single picture in the
world contains more of human life; there is everything
in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is one
of the greatest things of art; it is always interesting.
There are pictures by the Tintoret which contain
touches more exquisite, revelations of beauty more
radiant, but there is no other vision of so intense a
reality and execution so splendid. The interest, the
impressiveness, of that whole corner of Venice, how
ever melancholy the effect of its gorgeous and ill-
lighted chambers, gives a strange importance to a
visit to the Scuola. Nothing that all travellers go to
see appears to suffer less from the incursions of tra
vellers. It is one of the loneliest booths of the bazaar;^
and the author of these lines has always had the good
fortune, which he wishes to every other traveller, of
having it to himself I think most visitors find the
place rather alarming and wicked-looking. They walk
about a while among the fitful figures that gleam here
and there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with
which the painter has hung all the walls, and theni
depressed and bewildered by the portentous solemnity

VENICE. 35
of these objects, by strange glimpses of unnatural
scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps on the
vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure, and find
themselves again, with a sense of release from danger,
and of the genius loci having been a sort of mad
white-washer, who worked with a bad mixture, in the
bright light of the campo, among the beggars, the
orange-vendors, and the passing gondolas. Solemn,
indeed, is the place, solemn and strangely suggestive,
for the simple reason that we shall scarcely find four
walls elsewhere that inclose within a like area an
equal quantity of genius. The air is thick with it, and
dense and difficult to breathe; for it was genius that
was not happy, inasmuch as it lacked the art to fix
itself for ever. It is not immortality that we breathe
at the Scuola di San Rocco, but conscious, reluctant
mortality. Fortunately, however, we have the Ducal
Palace, where everything is so brilliant and splendid
that the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite of him
self into the concert. This deeply original building is,
of course, the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morn
ing's stroll there is a wonderful illumination. Cunningly
select your hour — half the enjoyment of Venice is a
question of dodging — and go at about one o'clock,
when the tourists have gone to lunch and the echoes
of the charming chambers have gone to sleep among
the sunbeams. There is no brighter place in Venice;
by which I mean that, on the whole, there is none
half so bright. The reflected sunshine plays up through
the great windows from the glittering lagoon, and
shimmers and twinkles over gilded walls and ceilings.
All the history of Venice, all its splendid, stately past,
glows around you in a strong sea-light. Every one
3'

36 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
here is magnificent, but the great Veronese is the most
magnificent of all. He swims before you in a silver
cloud; he thrones in an eternal morning. The deep
blue sky burns behind him, streaked across with milky
bars; the white colonnades sustain the richest canopies,
under which the first gentlemen and ladies in the
world both render homage and receive it. Their
glorious garments rustle in the air of the sea, and
their sun-lighted faces are the very complexion of
Venice. The mixture of pride and piety, of politics
and religion, of art and patriotism, gives a magnificent
dignity to every scene. Never was a painter more
nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight
in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and
feeling it through the medium of perpetual success.
He revels in the gold-framed ovals of the ceilings,
with the fluttering movement of an embroidered banner
that tosses itself into the blue. He was the happiest
of painters, and he produced the happiest picture in
the world. The "Rape of Europa" surely deserves
this title; it is impossible to look at it without aching
with envy. Nowhere else in art is such a temperament
revealed; never did inclination and opportunity com
bine to express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers
and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining
sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement,
desire — all this is the brightest vision that ever des
cended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the artist
who could entertain such a vision; happy the artist
who could paint it as the "Rape of Europa" is painted.
The Tintoret's visions were not so bright as that; but
he had several that were radiant enough. In the room
that contains the "Rape of Europa" are several smaller

VENICE. 37
canvases by the greatly more complex genius of the
Scuola di San Rocco, which are almost simple in their
loveliness, almost happy in their simplicity. They have
kept their brightness through the centuries, and they
shine with their neighbours in those golden rooms.
There is a piece of painting in one of them which is
one of the sweetest things in Venice, and which re
minds one afresh of those wild flowers of execution
that bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark
corners of all the Tintoret's work. "Pallas chasing
away Mars" is, I believe, the name that is given to
the picture; and it represents in fact a young woman
of noble appearance administering a gentle push to a
fine young man in armour, as if to tell him to keep
his distance. It is of the gentleness of this push that
I speak, the charming way in which she puts out her
arm, with a single bracelet on it, and rests her young
hand, with its rosy fingers parted, upon his dark
breastplate. She bends her enchanting head with the
effort — a head which has all the strange fairness that
the Tintoret always sees in women — and the soft, liv
ing, flesh-like glow of all these members, over which
the brush has scarcely paused in its course, is as
pretty an example of genius as all Venice can show.
But why speak of the Tintoret when I can say nothing
of the great "Paradise," which unfolds its somewhat
smoky splendour, and the wonder of its multitudinous
circles, in one of the other chambers? If it were not
one of the first pictures in the world, it would be
about the biggest, and it must be confessed that at
first the spectator gets from it chiefly an impression of
quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really
wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent

38 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
composition, and that some of the details of this com
position are supremely beautiful. It is impossible,
however, in a retrospect of Venice, to specify one's
happiest hours, though, as one looks backward, certain
ineffaceable moments start here and there into vivid
ness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the
sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have
been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms
the treasure of that apartment?

VII.
Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and
we know of no work of art more complete. The pic
ture is in three compartments: the Virgin sits in the
central division with her child; two venerable saints,
standing close together, occupy each of the others. It
is impossible to imagine anything more finished or
more ripe. It is one of those things that sum up the
genius of a painter, the experience of a life, the teach
ing of a school. It seems painted with molten gems,
which have only been clarified by time, and it is as
solemn as it is gorgeous, and as simple as it is deep.
John Bellini is, more or less, everywhere in Venice,
and wherever he is, he is almost certain to be first —
first, I mean, in his own line; he paints little else than
the Madonna and the saints; he has not Carpaccio's
care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's nor
that of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures,
however, where several figures are clustered together,
have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane.
There is one of them on the dark side of the room at

VENICE. 39
the Academy, containing Titian's "Assumption," which,
if we could only see it — its position is an inconceiv
able scandal — would evidently be one of the mightiest
of so-called sacred pictures. So, too, is the Madonna
of San Zaccaria, hung in a cold, dim, dreary place,
ever so much too high, but so mild and serene, and so
grandly disposed and accompanied, that the proper
attitude for even the most critical amateur, as he looks
at it, seems to be the bended knee. There is another
noble John Bellini, one of the very few in which there
is no Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo — a St.
Jerome, in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks,
with a landscape of extraordinary purity behind him.
The absence of the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it
an interesting surprise among the works of the painter,
and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it has
brilliant beauty, and the St. Jerome is a delightful old
personage. The same church contains another great
picture, for which he must find a shrine apart in his
memory; one of the most interesting thirigs he will
have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing appeals
more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies
which occupy the foreground of a smallish canvas of
Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the high altar of
San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Venetian
by birth, but few of his productions are to be seen in
his native place; few, indeed, are to be seen anywhere.
The picture represents the patron-saint of the church,
accompanied by other saints, and by the wordly
votaries I have mentioned. These ladies stand to
gether on the left, holding in their hands little white
caskets; two of them are in profile, but the foremost
turns her face to the spectator. This face and figure

40 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
are almost unique among the beautiful things of
Venice, and they leave the susceptible observer with.
the impression of having made, or rather having
missed, a strange, a dangerous, but a most valuable,
acquaintance. The lady, who is superbly handsome,
is the typical Venetian of the sixteenth century, and
she remains in the mind as the perfect flower of that
society. Never was there a greater air of breeding, a
deeper expression of tranquil superiority. She walks
like a goddess — as if she trod, without sinking, the
waves of the Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a
more perfect expression of the aristocratic spirit,
either in its pride or in its benignity. This mag
nificent creature is so strong and secure that she is
gentle, and so quiet that, in comparison, all minor as
sumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm.
But for all this, there are depths of possible disorder
in her light-coloured eye. I had meant, however, to
say nothing about her, for it is not right to speak of
Sebastian when one has not found room for Carpaccio.
These visions come to one, and one can neither hold
them nor brush them aside. Memories of Carpaccio,
the magnificent, the delightful — it is not for want of
such visitations, but only for want of space, that I have
not said of him what I would. There is little enough
need of it for Carpaccio's sake, his fame being
brighter to-day — thanks to the generous lamp Mr.
Ruskin has held up to it — than it has ever been.
Yet there is something ridiculous in talking of Venice
without making him, almost, the refrain. He and the
Tintoret are the two great realists, and it is hard to
say which is the more human, the more various. The
Tintoret had the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio,

VENICE. 4 1
who had the advantage of more newness and more re
sponsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and
there he quite touches it, as in the enchanting picture,
at the Academy, of St. Ursula asleep in her little .
white bed, in her high, clean room, where the angel
visits her at dawn; or in the noble St. Jerome in his
study, at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni. This latter work
is a pearl of sentiment, and I may add, without being
fantastic, a ruby of colour. It unites the most masterly
finish with a kind of universal largeness of feeling,
and he who has it well in his memory will never hear
the name of Carpaccio without a throb of almost
personal affection. This, indeed, is the feeling that
descends upon you in that wonderful little chapel of
St. George of the Slaves, where this most personal and
sociable of artists has expressed all the sweetness of
his imagination. The place is small and incom
modious, the pictures are out of sight and ill-lighted,
the custodian is rapacious, the visitors are mutually
intolerable, but the shabby little chapel is a palace of
art. Mr. Ruskin has written a pamphlet about it
which is a real aid to enjoyment, though I cannot but
think the generous artist, with his keen senses and his
just feeling, would have suffered at hearing his eulogist
declare that one of his other productions — in the
Museo Civico in Palazzo Correr, a delightful portrait
of two Venetian ladies, with pet animals — is the
"finest picture in the world." It has no need of that
to be thought admirable; and what more can a
painter desire?

42 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

VIIL

May in Yenice is better than April, but June is
best of all. Then the days are hot, but not too hot,
and the nights are more beautiful than the days. Then
Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, and more
golden than ever as the day descends. It seems to
expand and evaporate, to multiply all its reflections
and iridescences. , Then the life of its people and the
strangeness of its constitution become a perpetual
comedy, or, at least, a perpetual drama. Then the
gondola is your sole habitation, and you spend days
between sea and sky. You go to the Lido, though the
Lido has been spoiled. When I was first in Venice,
in 1869, it was a very natural place, and there was
only a rough lane across the little island from the
landing-place to the beach. There was a bathing-place
in those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad,
but where, in the warm evenings, your dinner did not
much matter as you sat letting it cool upon the wooden
terrace that stretched out into the sea. To-day the
Lido is a part of united Italy, and has been made the
victim of villainous improvements. A little cockney
village has sprung up on its rural bosom, and a third-
rate boulevard leads from Santa Elisabetta to the
Adriatic. There are bitumen walls and gas-lamps,
lodging-houses, shops, and a teatro diurno. The bathing-
establishment is bigger than before, and the restaurant
as well; but it is a compensation, perhaps, that the
cuisine is no better. Such as it is, however, you will
not scorn occasionally to partake of it on the breezy
platform under which bathers dart and splash, and

VENICE. 43
which looks out to where the fishing-boats, with sails
of orange and crimson, wander along the darkening
horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and
beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the
cockney village. The return to Venice in the sunset
is classical and indispensable, and those who, at that
glowing hour, have floated toward the towers that rise
out of the lagoon, will not easily part with the impres
sion. But you indulge in larger excursions — you go to
Burano and Torcello, to Malamocco and Chioggia.
Torcello, like the Lido, has been improved; the deeply
interesting little cathedral of the eighth century, which
stood there on the edge of the sea, as touching in its
ruin, with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics,
as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed
ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made
cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange and
suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. It will
still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day on the
lagoon, especially as you will disembark at Burano and
admire the wonderful fisher-folk, whose good looks —
and bad manners, I am sorry to say — can scarcely be
exaggerated. Burano is celebrated for the beauty of
its women and the rapacity of its children, and it is a
fact that though some of the ladies are rather bold
about it, every one of them shows you a handsome
face. The children assail you for coppers, and, in
their desire to be satisfied, pursue your gondola into
the sea. Chioggia is a larger Burano, and you carry
away from either place a half-sad, half-cynical, but al
together pictorial impression; the impression of bright-
coloured hovels, of bathing in stagnant canals, of young

44 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
girls with faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible
expression, with splendid heads of hair and com
plexions smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls
that hang like old Greek draperies, and little wooden
shoes that click as they go up and down the steps of
the convex bridges; of brown-cheeked matrons -with
lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive throats en
cased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your own
with a certain traditional defiance. The men through
out the islands of Venice are almost as handsome as
the women; I have never seen so many good-looking
fellows. At Burano and Chioggia they sit mending
their nets, or lounge at the street corners, where con
versation is always high-pitched, or clamour to you to
take a boat; and everywhere they decorate the scene
with their splendid colour — cheeks and throats as richly
brown as the sails of their fishing-smacks — their sea-
faded tatters which are always a "costume" — their soft
Venetian jargon, and the gallantry with which they
wear their hats — an article that nowhere sits so well
as on a mass of dense Venetian curls. If you are
happy, you will find yourself, after a June day in
Venice (about ten o'clock), on a balcony that over
hangs the Grand Canal, with your elbows on the broad
ledge, a cigarette in your teeth, and a little good com
pany beside you. The gondolas pass beneath, the
watery surface gleams here and there from their lamps,
some of which are coloured lanterns that move mysteri
ously in the darkness. There are some evenings in
June when there are too many gondolas, too many
lanterns, too many serenades in front of the hotels.
The serenading (in particular) is overdone; but on

VENICE. 45
such a balcony as I speak of you needn't suffer from
it, for in the apartment behind you — an accessible
refuge — there is more good company, there are more
cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there
presently.

46 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

n.
ITALY REVISITED. 1877. I.
I WAITED in Paris until after the elections for the
new Chamber (they took place on the 14 th of October);
for only after one had learned that the celebrated at
tempt of Marshal MacMahon and his ministers to drive
the French nation to the polls like a flock of huddling
sheep, each with the white ticket of an official can
didate round his neck, had not achieved the success
which the energy of the process might have promised
— only then was it possible to draw a long breath and
deprive the republican party of such support as might
have been conveyed in one's sympathetic presence.
Seriously speaking, too, the weather had been en
chanting, and there were Italian sensations to be en
countered without leaving the banks of the Seine. Day
after day the air was filled with golden light, and even
those chalkish vistas of the Parisian beaux quartiers
assumed the iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn-
weather in Europe is often such a very sorry affair that
a fair-minded American will have it on his conscience
to call attention to a rainless and radiant October.
The echoes of the electoral strife kept me com
pany for a while after starting upon that abbreviated

ITALY REVISITED. 47
journey to Turin, which, as you leave Paris at night,
in a train unprovided with encouragements to slumber,
is a singular mixture of the odious and the charming.
The charming, however, I think, prevails; for the dark
half of the journey is, in fact, the least interesting.
The morning light ushers you into the romantic gorges
of the Jura, and after a big bowl of cafi au lait at
Culoz you may compose yourself comfortably for the
climax of your spectacle. The day before leaving
Paris I met a French friend who had just returned
from a visit to a Tuscan country-seat, where he had
been watching the vintage. "Italy," he said, "is more
lovely than words can tell, and France, steeped in this
electoral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden."
That part of the bear-garden through which you travel
as you approach the Mont-Cenis seemed to me that
day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, thanks to
the absence of rain, had been vivid and crisp, and the
vines that swung their low garlands between the mul
berries, in the neighbourhood of Chambery, looked
like long festoons of coral and amber. The frontier
station of Modane, on the farther side of the Mont-
Cenis tunnel, is a very ill-regulated place; but even
the most irritable of tourists, meeting it on his way
southward, will be disposed to consider it good-
naturedly. There is far too much bustling and scram
bling, and the facilities afiforded you for the obligatory
process of ripping open your luggage before the officers
of the Italian custom-house are much scantier than
should be; but, for myself, there is something that de
precates irritation in the shabby green and gray uni
forms of all the Italian officials who stand loafing about
and watching the northern invaders scramble back into

48 PORTRAITS or PLACES.
marching order. Wearing an administrative uniform
does not necessarily spoil a man's temper, as in France
one is sometimes led to believe; for these excellent
under-paid Italians carry theirs as lightly as possible,
and their answers to your inquiries do not in the least
bristle with rapiers, buttons, and cockades. After leav
ing Modane you slide straight downhill into the Italy
of your desire; and there is something very impressive
in the way the road edges along those great precipices
which stand shoulder to shoulder, in a long perpen
dicular file, until they finally admit you to a distant
glimpse of the ancient capital of Piedmont.
Turin is not a city to make, in vulgar parlance,
a fuss about, and I pay an extravagant tribute to sub
jective emotion in speaking of it as ancient. But if
the place is not so peninsular as Florence and Rome,,
at least it is more so than New York and Paris; and
while the traveller walks about the great arcades and
looks at the fourth-rate shop windows, he does not
scruple to cultivate a shameless optimism. Relatively
speaking, Turin is diverting; but there is, after all, no
reason in a large collection of shabbily-stuccoed houses,
disposed in a rigidly rectangular manner, for passing
a day of deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am
afraid, is the old superstition of Italy — that property,
in the very look of the written word, the evocation of
a myriad images, that makes any lover of the arts
take Italian satisfactions upon easier terms than any
other. Italy is an idea to conjure with, and we play,
tricks upon our credulity even with such inferior ap
paratus as is offered to our hand at Turin. I walked
about all the morning under the tall porticoes, think
ing it sufficient entertainment to take note of the soft,

ITALY REVISITED. 49
warm air, of that colouring of things in Italy that is
at once broken and harmonious, and of the comings and
goings, the physiognomy and manners, of the excellent
Turinese. I had opened the old book again; the old
charm was in the style; I was in a more delightful
world. I saw nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious;
but the appreciative traveller finds a vividness in name
less details. And I must add that on the threshold of
Italy he tastes of one solid and perfectly definable
pleasure, in finding himself among the traditions of
the grand style in architecture. It must be said that
we have still to come to Italy to see great houses. (I
am speaking more particularly of town-architecture.) In
northern cities there are beautiful houses, picturesque
and curious houses; sculptured gables that hang over
the street, charming bay-windows, hooded doorways,
elegant proportions, and a profusion of delicate orna
ment; but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo
has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh at
Italian "palaces," at their peeling paint, their nudity,
their dreariness; but they have the great palatial
quality — elevation and extent. They make smaller
houses seem beggarly; they round their great arches
and interspace their huge windows with a noble in
difference to the cost of materials. These grand pro
portions — the colossal basements, the doorways that
seem meant for cathedrals, the far-away cornices —
impart by contrast a humble and bourgeois expression
to those less exalted dwellings in which the air of
grandeur depends largely upon the help of the up
holsterer. At Turin my first feeling was really one of
shame for the architectural manners of our northern
lands. I have heard people who know the Italians
Portraits of Places. 4

50 PORTRAITS OF PLAGES.
well say that at bottom they despise all the rest of
mankind and regard them as barbarians. I doubt of
it, for the Italians strike me as having less national
vanity than any other people in Europe; but if the
charge had its truth there would be some ground for
the feeling in the fact that they live in palaces.
An impression which, on coming back to Italy, I
find even stronger than when it was first received is
that of the contrast between the fecundity of the great
artistic period and the vulgarity of the Italian genius
of to-day. The first few hours spent on Italian soil
are sufficient to renew it, and the phenomenon- that I
allude to is surely one of the most singular in human
history. That the people who but three hundred years
ago had the best taste in the world should now have
the worst; that having produced the noblest, loveliest;
costliest works, they should now be given up to the
manufacture of objects at once ugly and paltry; that
the race of which Michael Angelo and Raphael,
Leonardo and Titian were characteristic should have
no other title to distinction than third-rate genre
pictures and catchpenny statues — all this is a frequent
perplexity to the observer of actual Italian life. The
flower of art in these latter years has ceased to- bloom
very powerfully anywhere; but nowhere does it seem
so drooping and withered as in the shadow of the
immortal embodiments of the old Italian genius. You
go into a church or a gallery and feast your fancy
upon a splendid picture or an exquisite piece of
sculpture, and on issuing from the door that has ad
mitted you to the beautiful past you are confronted
with spmething that has all the effect of a very bad
joke. The aspect of your lodging (the carpets, the

ITALY REVISITED. 5 1,
curtains, the upholstery in general, with their crude
and violent colouring and their vulgar material), the
third-rate look of the shops, the extreme bad taste of
the dress of the women, the cheapness and baseness
of every attempt at decoration in the caf6s and rail
way stations, the hopeless frivolity of everything that
pretends to be a work of art — all this modern crudity
rtms, riot over the relics of the great period.
We can do a thing for the first time but once; it
is but once for all that we can have a pleasure in its
freshness. This is a law which is not on the whole, I
think, to be regretted, for we sometimes learn to know
things better by not enjoying them too much. It is
certain, however, at the same time, that a traveller
who has worked off the primal fermentation of his
relish for this inexhaustibly interesting country has by
no means entirely drained the cup. After thinking of
Italy as historical and artistic, it will do him no great
harm to think of her, for a while, as modern, an idea
supposed (as a general thing correctly) to be fatally at
variance with the Byronic, the Ruskinian, the artistic,
poetic, aesthetic manner of considering this fascinating
penmsula. He may grant — I don't say it is absolutely
necessary. — that modern Italy is ugly, prosaic, provok-
ingly out of relation to the diary and the album; it is
nevertheless true that, at the point things have come
to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself I had
not been many hours in the country before I became
conscious of this circumstance; and I may add that,
the first irritation past, I found myself able to accept
it. ' And if we think of it, nothing is more easy to
understand than a certain displeasure on the part of
the young Italy of to-day at being looked at by all
4'

52 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
the world as a kind of soluble pigment. Young Italy,
preoccupied with its economical and political future,
must be heartily tired of being admired for its eye
lashes and its pose. In one of Thackeray's novels
there is mention of a young artist who sent to the
Royal Academy a picture representing "A Contadino
dancing with a Trasteverina at the door of a Locanda,
to the music of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude and
with these conventional accessories that the world has
hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy, and I do
not wonder that, if the youth has any spirit, he should
at last begin to resent our insufferable esthetic patronage.
He has established a line of tram-cars in Rome, from
the Porta del Popolo to the Ponte Molle, and it is on
one of these democratic vehicles that I seem to see
him taking his triumphant course down the vista of
the future. I will not pretend to rejoice with him any
more than I really do; I will not pretend, as the
sentimental tourists say about it all, as if it were the
setting of an intaglio or the border of a Roman scarf,
to "like" it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently
destined to be; I see a new Italy in the future which
in many important respects will equal, if not surpass,
the most enterprising sections of our native land. Per
haps by that time Chicago and San Francisco will
have acquired a pose, and their sons and daughters
will dance at the doors of locande. However this may
be, a vivid impression of an accomplished schism be
tween the old Italy and the new is, as the French say,
le plus clair of a new visit to this ever-suggestive part
of the world. The old Italy has become more and
more of a museum, preserved and perpetuated in the
midst of the new, but without any further relation to

ITALY REVISITED. 53
it — it must be admitted, indeed, that such a relation
is considerable — than that of the stock on his shelves
to the shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the South to the
showman who stands before his booth. More than
once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian cities,
there seems to pass before our eyes a vision of the
coming years. It represents to our satisfaction an Italy
united and prosperous, but altogether commercial.) The
Italy, indeed, that we sentimentalise and romance about
was an ardently mercantile country; though I suppose
it loved not its ledgers less, but its frescoes and altar-
pieces more. Scattered through this brilliantly eco
nomical community — this country of a thousand ports
— we see a large number of beautiful buildings, in
which an endless series of dusky pictures are darken
ing, dampening, fading, failing, through the years. At
the doors of the beautiful buildings are little turn
stiles, at which there sit a great many men in uniform,
to whom the visitor pays a ten-penny fee. Inside, in
the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the art of Italy
lies buried, as in a thousand mausoleums. It is well
taken care of; it is constantly copied; sometimes it is
"restored" — as in the case of that beautiful boy-figure
of Andrea del Sarto, at Florence, which may 'be seen
at the gallery of the Uffizi , with its honoura'ble duski
ness quite peeled off and heaven knows what raw,
bleeding cuticle laid bare. ,' One evening lately, in
Florence, in the soft twilight, I took a stroll among
those encircling hills on which the massive villas are
mingled with the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived
where three roads met at a wayside shrine, in which,
before some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a
little votive lamp glimmered through the evening air.

54 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
The hour, the lovely evening, the place, the twinkling
taper, the sentiment of the observer, the thought that
some one had been rescued here from an assassin, or
from some other peril, and had set up a little grateful
altar in consequence , in the yellow-plastered wall of a
tangled podere; all this led me to approach the shrine
with a reverent, an emotional step. I drew near it,
but after a few steps I paused. I became conscious
of an incongruous odour; it seemed to me that the
evening air was charged with a perfume which, al
though to a certain extent familiar, had not hitherto
associated itself with rustic frescoes and wayside altars.
I gently interrogated the atmosphere, and the opera
tion left me no doubts. The odour was that of
petroleum; the votive taper was nourished with the
national fluid of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst
out laughing, and a picturesque contadino, wending
his homeward way in the dusk, stared at me as if I
were an iconoclast. If he noticed the petroleum, it
was only, I imagine, to sniff it gratefully; but to me
the thing served as a symbol of the Italy of the future.
There is a horse-car from the Porta del Popolo to the
Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with
kerosene.

II.
If it is very well to come to Turin first, it is still
better to go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is the
queerest place in the world, and even a second visit
helps you little to straighten it out. In the wonder-
. ful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, burrowing

ITALY REVISITED. 55
Genoese alleys the traveller is really up to his neck
in the old Italian sketchability. Genoa is, I believe,
a port of great capacity, and the bequest of the late
Duke of Galliera, who left four millions of dollars for
the purpose of improving and enlarging it, will doubt
less do much toward converting it into one of the
great commercial stations of Europe. But as, after
leaving my hotel the afternoon I arrived, I wandered
for a long time at hazard through the tortuous byways
of the city, I said to myself, not without an accent of
private triumph, that here was something it would be
almost impossible to modernise. I had found my
hotel, in the first place, extremely entertaining — the
Croce di Malta, as it was called, established in a
gigantic palace on the edge of the swarming and not
over-clean harbour. It was the biggest house I had
ever entered, and the basement alone would have con
tained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an
American gentleman in the vestibule who (as he had
indeed a perfect right to be) was annoyed by its
troublesome dimensions — one was a quarter of an
hour ascending out of the basement — and desired to
know whether it was a "fair sample" of the Genoese
inns. It appeared to be an excellent specimen of
Genoese architecture generally; so far as I observed,
there were few houses perceptibly smaller than this
Titanic tavern. I lunched in a dusky ballroom, whose
ceiling was vaulted, frescoed and gilded with the fatal
facility of a couple of centuries ago, and which looked
out upon another ancient house-front, equally huge
and equally battered, from which it was separated
only by a little wedge of dusky space (one of the prin
cipal streets, I believe, of Genoa), out of the bottom of

56 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
which the Genoese populace sent up to the windows
— I had to crane out very far to see it- — a perpetual
clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issuing forth,
presently, into this crevice of a street, I found an
abundance of that soft local colour for the love of
which one revisits Italy. It offered itself, indeed, in a
variety of tints, some of which were not remarkable
for their freshness or purity. But their combined
effect was highly pictorial, and the picture was a very-
rich and various representation of southern low-life.
Genoa is the crookedest and most incoherent of cities;
tossed about on the sides and crests of a dozen hills,
it is seamed with gullies and ravines that bristle with
those innumerable palaces for which we have heard
from our earliest years that the place is celebrated.
These great edifices, with their mottled and faded
complexions, lift their big ornamental cornices to a
tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain in
describably forlorn and desolate fashion, overtopping
each other, they seem to reflect the twinkle and glitter
of the warm Mediterranean. Down about the base
ments, in the little dim, close alleys, the people are
for ever moving to and fro, or standing in their
cavernous doorways and their dusky, crowded shops,
calling, chattering, laughing, scrambling, living their
lives in the conversational Italian fashion. For a long
time I had not received such an impression of the
human agglomeration. I had not for a long time
seen people elbowing each other so closely, or swarm
ing so thickly out of populous hives. CK traveller is
very often disposed to ask himself whether it has been
worth while to leave his home— whatever his home
may have been — only to see new forms of human suf-

ITALY REVISITED. 57
fering, only to be reminded that toil and privation,
hunger and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion
of the great majority of his fellow-men. To travel is,
as it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle;
and there is something heartless in stepping forth
into the streets of a foreign town to feast upon novelty
when the novelty consists simply of the slightly dif
ferent costume in which hunger and labour present
themselves. These reflections were forced upon me
as I strolled about in those crepuscular, stale-smelling
alleys of Genoa; but after a time they ceased to bear
me company. The reason of this , I think, is because
(at least to foreign eyes) the sum of Italian misery is,
on the whole , less than the sum of the Italian know
ledge of life. That people should thank you, with a
smile of striking sweetness, for the gift of twopence is
a proof, certainly, of an extreme and constant destitu
tion; but (keeping in mind the sweetness) it is also a
proof of an enviable ability not to be depressed by
circumstances. I know that this may possibly be
great nonsense; that half the time that we are ad
miring the brightness of the Italian smile the romantic
natives may be, in reality, in a sullen frenzy of im
patience and pain. Our observation in any foreign
land is extremely superficial, and our remarks are
happily not addressed to the inhabitants themselves,
who would be sure to exclaim upon the impudence of
the fancy-picture. The other day I visited a very
picturesque old city upon a mountain-top, where, in
the course of my wanderings, I arrived at an old dis
used gate in the ancient town-wall. The gate had
not been absolutely forfeited; but the recent comple
tion of a modem road down the mountain led most

58 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
vehicles away to another egress. The grass-grown
pavement, which wound into the plain by a hundred
graceful twists and plunges, was now given up to
ragged contadini and their donkeys, and to such way
farers as were not alarmed at the disrepair into which
it had fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall old
gateway admiring the scene, looking to right and
left at the wonderful walls ofthe little town, perched
on the edge of a shaggy precipice; at the circling
mountains over against them; at the road dipping
downward about the chestnuts and olives. There was
no one within sight but a young man, who was slowly
trudging upward, with his coat slung over his shoulder
and his hat upon his ear, like a cavalier in an opera.
Like an operatic performer, too, he was singing as he
came; the spectacle, generally, was operatic, and as
his vocal flourishes reached my ear I said to myself
that in Italy accident was always picturesque, and
that such a figure had been exactly what was wanted
to set off the landscape. It suggested in a high de
gree that knowledge of life for which I just now com
mended the Italians. I was turning back, under the
old gateway, into the town, when the young man over
took me, and, suspending his song, asked me if I could
favour him with a match to light the hoarded remnant
of a cigar. This request led, as I walked back to
the inn, to my having some conversation with him.
He was a native of the ancient city, and answered
freely all my inquiries as to its manners and customs
and the state of public opinion there. But the point
of my anecdote is that he presently proved to be a
brooding young radical and communist, filled with
hatred of the present Italian government, raging with

ITALY REVISITED. 59
discontent and crude political passion, professing a
ridiculous hope that Italy would soon have, as France
had had, her "'89,'' and declaring that he, for his part,
would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads
of the king and the royal family. He was an un
happy, underfed, unemployed young man, who took a
hard, grim view of everything, and was operatic only
quite in spite of himself. This made it very absurd
of me to have looked at him simply as a graceful '
ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little figure
in the middle distance. "Damn the prospect, damn
the middle distance!" would have been all his phi
losophy. Yet, but for the accident of my having
a little talk with him, I should have made him
do service, in memory, as an example of sensuous
optimism !
I am bound to say, however, that I believe that a
great deal of the sensuous optimism that I noticed in
the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded
arcades along the port was very real. Here every one
was magnificently sunburnt, and there were plenty of
those queer types, mahogany-coloured, bare-chested
mariners, with earrings and crimson girdles, that make
a southern seaport entertaining. But it is not fair to
speak as if at Genoa there were nothing but low-life
to be seen, for the place is the residence of some of
the grandest people in the world. Nor are all the
palaces ranged upon dusky alleys; the handsomest and
most impressive form a splendid series on each side
of a couple of very proper streets, in which there is
plenty of room for a coach-and-four to approach the
big doorways. Many of these doorways are open, re
vealing great marble staircases, with couchant lions for

6o PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
balustrades, and ceremonious courts surrounded by
walls of sun-softened yellow. One of the palaces is
coloured a goodly red, and contains, in particular, the
grand people I just now spoke of They live, indeed,
in the third story; but here they have suites of wonder
ful painted and gilded chambers, in which there are
many foreshortened frescoes in the vaulted ceilings,
and the walls are embossed with the most florid
mouldings. These distinguished tenants bear the
name of Vandyke, though they are members of the
noble family of Brignole-Sale, one of whose children
(the Duchess of Galliera) has lately given proof of
nobleness in presenting the gallery of the Red Palace
to the city of Genoa.

III.
On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly
with a view of accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage,
which I, in fact, achieved, in the most agreeable con
ditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters
of the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-
plated frigates riding at anchor in front of the town.
The streets were filled with lads in blue flannel, who
were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the
harbour, and in the evening — there was a brilliant
moon — the little breakwater which stretched out into
the Mediterranean offered a promenade to the naval
functionaries. But this fact is, from the tourist's point
of view, of little account, for since it has become
prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled
with long, dull stretches of dead wall and great raw

ITALY REVISITED, 6 1
expanses of artificial land. It wears that look of
monstrous, of more than Occidental, newness which
distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian
state. Nor did I find any great compensation in an
immense new inn, which has lately been deposited by
the edge of the sea, in anticipation of a passeggiata
which is to come that way some five years hence, the
region being in the meantime of the most primitive
formation. The inn was filled with grave English
people, who looked respectable and bored, and there
was of course a Church of England service in the
gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it the drive to
Porto Venere that chiefly pleased me — a drive among
vines and olives — over the hills and beside the sea, to
a queer little crumbling village on a headland, as
sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it
bears. There is a ruined church near the village,
which occupies the site (according to tradition) of an
ancient temple of Venus; and if Venus ever revisits
her desecrated shrines she must sometimes pause a
moment in that sunny stillness, and listen to the
murmur of the tideless sea at the base of the narrow
promontory. If Venus sometimes comes there, Apollo
surely does as much; for close to the temple is a gate
way, surmounted by an inscription in Italian and
English, which admits you to a curious (and it must
be confessed rather cockneyfied) cave among the rocks.
It was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron,
swimmer and poet, "defied the waves of the Ligurian
sea." The fact is interesting, though not supremely
so; for Byron was always defying something, and if a
slab had been put up wherever this performance
came off, these commemorative tablets would be, in

62 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
niany parts of Europe, as thick as milestones. No;
the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged
a boat there of a lovely October afternoon, and had
myself rowed across the gulf — it took about an hour
and a half— to the little bay of Lerici, which opens
out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky
gray-green hills close it in, and on either side of the
entrance, perched upon a bold headland, a wonderful
old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The
place is classic for all English travellers, for in the
middle of the curving shore is the now desolate little
villa in which Shelley spent the last months of his short
life. He was living at Lerici when he started on that
short southern cruise from which he never returned.
The house he occupied is strangely shabby, and as
sad as you may choose to find it. It stands directly
upon the beach, with scarred and battered walls, and
a loggia of several arches opening upon a little terrace
with a rugged parapet, which, when the wind blows,
must be drenched with the salt spray. The place is
very lonely — all overwearied with sun and breeze and
brine — very close to nature, as it was Shelley's passion
to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the
terrace, of a warm evening, far from England, in the
early years of the century. In that place, and with
his genius, he would, as a matter of course, have heard
in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the lyric
movement could translate. It is a place where an
English-speaking traveller may very honestly be senti
mental and feel moved, himself, to lyric utterance. But
I must content myself with saying in halting prose that
I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sym
pathetic, as they have it here, than that perfect autumn

ITALY REVISITED. 63
afternoon; the half-hour's station on the little battered
terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly pic
turesque old castle that hangs above Lerici; the medi
tative lounge, in the fading light, on the vine- decked
platform that looked out toward the sunset and the
darkening mountains, and, far below, upon the quiet
sea, beyond which the pale-faced villa stared up at
the brightening moon. '

IV.
I had never known Florence more charming than I
found her for a week in that brilliant October. She
sat in the sunshine beside her yellow river like the
little treasure-city that she has always seemed, without
commerce, without other industry than the manufacture
of mosaic paper-weights and alabaster Cupids, without
actuality, or energy, or earnestness, or any of those
rugged virtues which in most cases are deemed indis
pensable for civic robustness; with nothing but the
little unaugmented stock of her medieval memories,
her tender-coloured mountains, her churches and
palaces, pictures and statues. There were very few
¦Strangers; one's detested fellow sight-seer was in
frequent; the native population itself seemed scanty;
the sound of wheels in the streets was but occasional;
by eight o'clock at night, apparently, every one had
gone to bed, and the wandering tourist, still wander
ing, had the place to himself — had the thick shadow-
masses of the great palaces, and the shafts of moon
light striking the polygonal paving-stones, and the
¦empty -bridges, and the silvered yellow of the Arno,

64 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and the stillness broken only by a homeward step, ac
companied by a snatch of song from a warm Italian
voice. My room at the inn looked out on the river,
and was flooded all day with sunshine. There was an
absurd orange-coloured paper on the walls; the Arno,
of a hue not altogether different, flowed beneath; and
on the other side of it rose a line of sallow houses, of
extreme antiquity, crumbling and mouldering, bulging
and protruding over the stream. (I seem to speak of
their fronts; but what I saw was their shabby backs,
which were exposed to the cheerful flicker of the river,
while the fronts stood for ever in the deep, damp
shadow of a narrow mediaeval street.) All this bright
ness and yellowness was a perpetual delight; it was a
part of that indefinably charming colour which Florence
always seems to wear as you look up and down at it
from the river, from the bridges and quays. This is a
kind of grave brilliancy — a harmony of high tints —
which I know not how to describe. There are yellow
walls and green blinds and red roofs, and intervals of
brilliant brown and natural-looking blue; but the pic
ture is not spotty nor gaudy, thanks to the colours
being distributed in large and comfortable masses, and
to its being washed over, as it were, by some happy
softness of sunshine. The river-front of Florence is,
in short, a delightful composition. Part of its charm
comes, of course, from the generous aspect of those
high-based Tuscan palaces which a renewal of acquain
tance with them has again commended to me as the
most dignified dwellings in the world. Nothing can
be . finer than that look of giving up the whole im
mense ground-floor to simple purposes of vestibule and
staircase, of court and high-arched entrance; as if this

ITALY REVISITED. 65
were all but a massive pedestal for the real habitation,
and people were not properly housed unless, to begin
with, they should be lifted fifty feet above the pave
ment. The great blocks of the basement; the great
intervals, horizontally and vertically, from window to
window (telling of the height and breadth of the rooms
within); the armorial shield hung forward at one of
the angles; the wide-brimmed roof, overshadowing the
narrow street; the rich old browns and yellows of the
¦walls — these definite elements are put together with
admirable art.
Take one of these noble structures out of its
oblique situation in the town; call it no longer a
palace, but a villa; set it down upon a terrace, on one
of the hills that encircle Florence, with a row of high-
waisted cypresses beside it, a grassy court-yard, and a
view of the Florentine towers and the valley of the
Arao, and you will think it perhaps even more worthy
of your esteem. It was a Sunday noon, and brilliantly
warm, when I arrived in Florence; and after I had
looked from my windows a while at that quietly-
basking river-front I have spoken of, I took my way
across one of the bridges and then out of one of the
gates— that immensely tall Roman Gate, in which the
space from the top of the arch to the cornice (except
that there is scarcely a cornice, it is all a plain, mas
sive piece of wall) is as great (or seems to be) as that
from the ground to the former point. Then I climbed
a steep and winding way — much of it a little dull, if
one likes, being bounded by mottled, mossy garden-
walls — ^to a villa on a hill-top, where I found various
things that touched me with almost too fine a point.
Seeing them again, often, for a week, both by sunlight
Portraits of Places. 5

66 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and moonshine, I never quite learned not to covet
them; not to feel that not being a part of them was
somehow to miss an exquisite chance. What a tran
quil, contented life it seemed, with romantic beauty
as a part of its daily texture ! — the sunny terrace, with
its tangled podere "beneath it; the bright gray olives
against the bright blue sky; the long, serene, horizontal
lines of other villas, flanked by their upward cypresses,
disposed upon the neighbouring hills; the richest little
city in the world in a softly-scooped hollow at one's
feet, and beyond it the most appealing of views, the
most majestic, yet the most familiar. Within the villa
was a great love of art and a painting-room full of
successful work, so that if human life there seemed
very tranquil, the tranquillity meant simply content
ment and devoted occupation. A beautiful occupation
in that beautiful position, what could possibly be
better? That is what I spoke just now of en-yying —
a way of life that is not afraid of a little isolation and
tolerably quiet days. When such a life presents itself
in a dull or an ugly place, we esteem it, we admire
it, but we do not feel it to be the ideal of good for
tune. When, however, the people who lead it move
as figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their
walks and contemplations are like a turning of the
leaves of history, we seem to have before us an
admirable case of virtue made easy; meaning here by
virtue, contentment and concentration, the love of
privacy and study. One need not be exacting if one'
lives among local conditions that are of theraselves
constantly suggestive. It is true, indeed, that I might,
after a certain time, grow weary of a regular afternoon
stroll among the Florentine lanes; of sitting on low

ITALY REVISITED. 67
parapets, in intervals of flower-topped wall, and look
ing across at Fiesole, or down the rich-hued valley of
the Arno; of pausing at the open gates of villas and
wondering at the height of cypresses and the depth
of loggias; of walking home in the fading light and
noting on a dozen westward-looking surfaces the glow
of the opposite sunset. But for a week or so all this
was delightful. The villas are innumerable, and if one
is a stranger half the talk is about villas. This one
has a story; that one has another; they all look as if
they had stories. Most of them are offered to rent
(many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low;
you may have a tower and a garden, a chapel and an
expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred dollars a
year. In imagination, you hire three or four; you
take possession, and settle, and live there. About the
finest there is something very grave and stately; about
two or three of the best there is something even
solemn and tragic. From what does this latter im
pression come? You gather it as you stand there
in the early dusk, looking at the long, pale-brown
fajade, the enormous windows, the iron cages fastened
upon the lower ones. Part of the brooding expression
of these great houses comes, even when they have not
fallen into decay, from their look of having outlived
their original use. Their extraordinary largeness and
massiveness are a satire upon their present fate. They
were not built with such a thickness of wall and depth
of embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and super
fluity of stone, simply to afford an economical winter
residence to English and American families. I know
not whether it was the appearance of these stony old
villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious of a change
5*

68 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of manners, that threw a tinge of melancholy over the
general prospect; certain it is that, having always found
this plaintive note in the view of Florence, it seemed
to me now particularly distinct. "Lovely, lovely, but
it makes me blue," the fanciful stranger could not
but murmur to himself as, in the late afternoon, he
looked at the landscape from over one of the low
parapets, and then, with his hands in his pockets,
turned away indoors to candles and dinner.

Below, in the city, in wandering about in the
streets and churches and museums, it was impossible
not to have a good deal of the same feeling; but here
the impression was more easy to analyse. It came
from a sense of the perfect separateness of all the
great productions of the Renaissance from the present
and the future of the place, from the actual life and
manners, the native ideal. I have already spoken of
the way in which the great aggregation of beautiful
works of art in the Italian cities strikes the visitor
nowadays (so far as present Italy is concerned) as the
mere stock-in-trade of an impecunious but thrifty
people. It is this metaphysical desertedness and lone
liness of the great works of architecture and sculpture
that deposits a certain weight upon the heart; when
we see a great tradition broken we feel something of
ithe pain with which we hear a stifled cry. But regret
is one thing and resentment is another. Seeing one
morning, in a shop-window, the series of Moi-nings in
Florence, published a few years since by Mr. Ruskin,

ITALY REVISITED. 6g
I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing
little books, some passages of which I remembered
formerly to have read. I could not turn over many
pages without observing that the "separateness" of the
new and old which I just mentioned had produced in
their author the liveliest irritation. With the more
acute phases of this sentiment it was difficult to sym
pathise, for the simple reason, it seems to me, that it
savours of arrogance to demand of any people, as a
right of one's own, that they shall be artistic. "Be
artistic yourselves!" is the very natural reply that
young Italy has at hand for English critics and censors.
When a people produces beautiful statues and pictures
it gives us something more than is set down in the
bond, and we must thank it for its generosity; and
when it stops producing them or caring for them we
may cease thanking, but we hardly have a right to
begin and abuse it. The wreck of Florence, says Mr.
Ruskin, "is now too ghastly and heart-breaking to any
human soul that remembers the days of old;" and
these desperate words are an allusion to the fact that
the little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot
of Giotto's Tower, with the grand Baptistery on the
other side, is now the resort of a number of hackney-
coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless lament
able, and it would be a hundred times more agreeable
to see among people who have been made the heirs
of so priceless a work of art as the sublime campanile
some such feeling about it as would keep it free even
from the danger of defilement. A cab-stand is a very
ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto's Tower should have
nothing in common with such conveniences. But there
. is more than one way of taking such things, and a

70 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
quiet traveller, who has been walking about for a week
with his mind full of the sweetness and suggestiveness
of a hundred Florentine places, may feel at last, in
looking into Mr. Ruskin's little tracts that, discord for
discord, there is not much to choose between the im
portunity of the author's personal ill-humour and the
incongruity of horse-pails and bundles of hay. And
one may say this without being at all a partisan of
the doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations.
For my own part, I believe there are few things in this
line that the new Italian spirit is not capable of, and
not many, indeed, that we are not destined to see.
Pictures and buildings will not be completely destroyed,
because in that case foreigners with full pockets would
cease to visit the country, and the turn-stiles at the
doors of the old palaces and convents, with the little
patented slit for absorbing your half-franc, would grow
quite rusty, and creak with disuse. But it is safe to
say that the new Italy, growing into an old Italy again,
will continue to take her elbow-room wherever she
finds it.
I am almost ashamed to say what I did with Mr.
Ruskin's little books. I put them into my pocket and
betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. There I sat
down, and after I had looked about for a while at the
beautiful church, I drew them forth one by one, and
read the greater part of them. Occupying one's self
with light literature in a great religious edifice is per
haps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those
rude dealings which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores; but a
traveller has to make the most of odd moments, and I
was waiting for a friend in whose company I was to
go and look at Giotto's beautiful frescoes in the cloister

ITALY REVISITED. 7 1
of the church. My friend was a long time coming, so
that I had an hour with Mr. Ruskin, whom I called
just now a light Hit ir at eur, because in these little
Mornings in Florence he is for ever making his readers
laugh. I remembered, of course, where I was; and, ,
in spite of my latent hilarity, I felt that I had rarely
got such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the
good old city of Florence; but I now learned from
Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity.
I should have gone about with an imprecation on my
lips, I should have worn a face three yards long. I
had taken great pleasure in certain frescoes by Ghir-
landaio, in the choir of that very church; but it ap
peared from one of the little books that these frescoes
were as naught. I had rauch adraired Santa Croce,
and I had thought the Duorao a very noble affair; but
I had now the raost positive assurance I knew nothing
about it. After a while, if it was only ill-humour that
was needed for doing honour to the city of the Medici,
I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it
was Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with, and e
not the stupid Brunelleschi and the vulgar Ghirlandaio^
Indeed, I lost patience altogether, and asked myself /
by what right this informal votary of form pretended
to run riot through a quiet traveller's relish for the
noblest of pleasures — his wholesome enjoyment of the
loveliest of cities. The little books seemed invidious
and insane, and it was only when I reraerabered that '
I had been under no obligation to buy thera that I
checked myself in repenting of having done so. Then,
at last, my friend arrived, and we passed together out
of the cliurch, and through the first cloister beside
it, into a smaller enclosure, where we stood a while to

72 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
look at the tomb of the Marchesa Strozzi-Ridolfi, upon
which the great Giotto has painted" four superb little
pictures. It was easy to see the pictures were superb;
but I drew forth one of my little books again, for I
had observed that Mr. Ruskin spoke of them. Here
upon I recovered ray tolerance; for what could be
better in this case, I asked myself, than Mr. Ruskin's
remarks? They are, in fact, excellent and charming,
and full of appreciation of the deep and simple beauty
of the great painter's work. I read them aloud to my
companion; but my companion was rather, as the
phrase is, "put off" by them. One ofthe frescoes (it
is a picture of the "birth of the Virgin) contains a
figure coraing through a door. "Of ornament," I quote,
" there is only the entirely simple outline of the vase
which the servant carries; of colour two or three
masses of sober red and pure white, with brown and
gray. That is all," Mr. Ruskin continues. "And if
you are pleased with this you can see Florence. But
if not, by all means amuse yourself there, ifyou find
it amusing, as long as you like ; you can never see it."
You can never see it. This seemed to my friend in
sufferable, and I had to shuffle away the book again,
so that we might look at the fresco with the unruffled
geniality it deserves. We agreed afterwards, when in
a more convenient place I read aloud a good many
more passages from Mr. Ruskin's tracts, that there are
a great many ways of seeing Florence, as there are of
seeing most beautiful and interesting things, and that
it is very dry and pedantic to say that the happy
vision depends upon our squaring our toes with a
certain particular chalk-mark. We see Florence
wherever and whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying

ITALY REVISITED. 73
it we find a great many raore pretexts than Mr. Ruskin
seems inclined to allow. My friend and I agreed also,
however, that the little books were an excellent pur
chase, on account of the great charm and felicity of
much of their incidental criticism; to say nothing, as
I hinted just now, of their being extremely amusing.
Nothing, in fact, is more comical than the familiar .
asperity of the author's style and the pedagogic fashion
in which he pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about,
jerking their heads toward this, rapping their knuckles
for that, sending thera to stand in corners, and giving
them Scripture texts to copy. But it is neither the
felicities nor the aberrations of detail, in Mr. Ruskin's
writings, that are the main affair for most readers; it
is the general tone that, as I have said, puts them off
or draws them on. For many persons he will never
bear the test of being read in this rich old Italy, where
art, so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, '
joyous, irresponsible. If the reader is in daily con
tact with those beautiful Florentine works which do
still, in a way, force themselves into notice through
the vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it
will seem to him that Mr. Ruskin's little books are
pitched in the strangest falsetto key. "One raay read
a hundred pages of this sort of thing,'' said my friend,
"without ever dreaming that he is talking about art.
You can say nothing worse about it than that." And
that is very true. Art is the one corner of human life ;
in which we may take our ease. To justify our pre- 1
sence there the only thing that is deraanded of us is
that we shall have a passion for representation. In
other places our passions are conditioned and embar
rassed; we are allowed to have only so many as are

74 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
consistent with those of our neighbours; with their
convenience and well-being, with their convictions
and prejudices, their rules and regulations. Art means
¦ an, escape frora all this. Wherever her brilliant stan-
dai'd' Hoats the need for apologies and exonerations is
over; there it is enough simply that we please or that
we are pleased. There the tree is judged only by its
fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to pluck
them. One raay read a great many pages of Mr. Ruskin
without getting a hint of this delightful truth; a hint
of the not unimportant fact that art, after all, is
made for us, and not we for art. This idea of the
value of a work of art being the amount of illusion it
yields is conspicuous by its absence. And as for Mr.
Ruskin's world of art being a place where we may
take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who enters
it with any such disposition. Instead of a garden of
delight, he finds a sort of assize-court, in perpetual
session. Instead of a place in which human respon
sibilities are lightened and suspended, he finds a region
governed by a kind of Draconic legislation. His re
sponsibilities, indeed, are tenfold increased; the gulf
between truth and error is for ever yawning at his
feet; the pains and penalties of this same error are
advertised, in apocalyptic terminology, upon a thousand
sign-posts; and the poor wanderer soon begins to look
back with infinite longing to the lost paradise of the
artless. There can be no greater want of tact in dealing
with those things with which men attempt to ornament
life than to be perpetually talking about "error." A
truce to all rigidities is the law of the place; the only
thing that is absolute there is sensible charm. The

ITALY REVISITED. 75
grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself; she feels
that this is not her province. Differences here are not
iniquity and righteousness; they are simply variations
of temperament and of point of view. We are not
under theological government.

VL
It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, to
wander frora one corner of Florence to another, paying
one's respects again to remembered masterpieces. It
was pleasant also to find that memory had played no
tricks, and that the beautiful things of an earlier year
were as beautiful as ever. To enumerate these beauti
ful things would take a great deal of space; for I
never had been more struck with the mere quantity
of brilliant Florentine work. Even giving up the Duomo
and Santa Croce to Mr. Ruskin as very ill-arranged
edifices, the list of the Florentine treasures is almost
inexhaustible. Those long outer galleries of the Uffizi
had never seemed to me more delectable; sometimes >
there were not more than two or three figures stand
ing there, Baedeker in hand, to break the charming i
perspective. One side of this upstairs-portico, it will
be remembered, is entirely composed of glass; a con
tinuity of old-fashioned windows draped with white
curtains of rather primitive fashion, which hang there
till they acquire a perceptible "tone." The light,
passing through them, is softly filtered and diffused;
it rests mildly upon the old marbles — chiefly antique
Roman busts — which stand in the narrow intervals of
the casements. It is projected upon the numerous

76 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
pictures that cover the opposite wall, and that are not
by any means, as a general thing, the gems of the
great collection; it imparts a faded brightness to the
old ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden
ceiling, and it makes a great soft shining upon the
marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you
see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists
almost reflected. I don't know why I should find all
this very pleasant, but, in fact, I have seldom gone
into the Uffizi without walking the length of this third-
story cloister, between the (for the most part) third-
rate pictures and the faded cotton curtain. Why is it
that in Italy we see a charm in things in regard to
which in other countries we always take vulgarity for
(granted? If in the city of New York a great museum
of the arts were to be provided, by way of decoration,
with a species of verandah inclosed on one side by a
series of small-paned windows, draped in dirty linen,
and furnished on the other with an array of pictorial
feebleness, the place being surmounted by a thinly-
painted wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer
heat, of winter cold, of frequent leakage, those ama
teurs who had had the advantage of foreign travel
would be at small pains to conceal their contempt.
Contemptible or respectable, to the judicial mind, this
quaint old loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty
chambers where I found as great a number of ancient
favourites. I do not know that I had a warmer greet
ing for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, that
most touching of painters who is not one of the first.
But it was on the other side of the Arno that I found
him in force, in those dusky drawing-rooms of the Pitti
Palace, to which you take your way along the tortuous

ITALY REVISITED. 77
tunnel that wanders through the houses of Florence,
and is supported by the little goldsmiths' booths on
the Ponte Vecchio. In the rich, insufficient light of
these beautiful rooms, where, to look at the pictures,
you sit in damask chairs and rest your elbows on
tables of malachite, Andrea del Sarto becomes pecu
liarly effective. Before long you feel a real affection
for him. But the great pleasure, after all, was to re
visit the earlier masters, in those specimens of them
chiefly that bloom so unfadingly on the big, plain
walls of the Academy. Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi,
Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi are the sweetest and
best of all painters; as I sat for an hour in their cora
pany, in the cold great hall of the institution I have
mentioned — there are shabby rafters above and an
immense expanse of brick tiles below, and many bad
pictures as well as good ones — it seemed to me more
than ever that if one really had to choose one could
not do better than choose here. You raay sit very
quietly and comfortably at the Academy, in this big
first room — at the upper end, especially, on the left —
because more than many other places it savours of
old Florence. More for instance, in reality, than the
Bargello, though the Bargello makes great pretensions.
Beautiful and picturesque as the Bargello is, it smells
too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as
still lurks in its furbished and renovated chambers, it
speaks even more distinctly of the ill-mannered young
kingdom that has (as unavoidably as you please) lifted
down a hundred delicate works of sculpture from the
convent-walls where their pious authors placed them.
If the early Tuscan painters are exquisite, I can think
of no praise generous enough for the sculptors of the

78 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
same period, Donatello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo
Civitale and Mino da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my
memory of them, seemed to me to leave absolutely
nothing to be desired in the way of purity of inspira
tion and grace of invention. The Bargello is full of
early Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which
have come from suppressed convents; and even if the
visitor be an ardent liberal, he is uncomfortably con
scious of the rather brutal process by which it has
been collected. One can hardly en^vy young Italy the
number of disagreeable things she has had to do.
The railway journey from Florence to Rome has
been altered both for the better and for the worse;
for the better, in that it has been shortened by a couple
of hours; for the worse, inasmuch as, when about half
the distance has been traversed, the train deflects to
the west, and leaves the beautiful old cities of Assisi,
Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of old, it was pos
sible to visit these places, in a raanner, from the win
dow of the train; even if you did not stop, as you
probably could not, every time you passed, the pic
turesque fashion in which, like a loosened belt on an
aged and shrunken person, their old red walls held
thera easily together was something well worth noting.
Now, however, by way of compensation, the express-
train to Rome stops at Orvieto, and in consequence . . .
In consequence what? What is the consequence of an
express train stopping at Orvieto? As I glibly wrote
that sentence I suddenly paused, with a sense of the
queer stuff I was uttering. That an express train
would graze the base of the horrid purple mountain
from the apex of which this dark old Catholic city
uplifts the glittering front of its cathedral — that raight

ITALY REVISITED.

79

have been foretold by a keen observer of contempo
rary manners. But that it would really have the gross
ness to stop there, this is a fact over which, as he
records it, a sentimental chronicler may well make
what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop
at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough
to let you out. The same phenomenon takes place on
the following day, when, having visited the city, you
get in again. I availed rayself of both of these occa
sions, having formerly neglected to drive to Orvieto in
a post-chaise. And really, the railway-station being in
the plain, and the town on the summit of an extra
ordinary hill, you have time to forget all about the
triumphs of steam, while you wind upwards to the city-
gate. The position of Orvieto is superb; it is worthy
of the "middle distance" of a last-century landscape.
But, as every one knows, the beautiful cathedral is
the proper attraction of the place, which, indeed, save
for this fine monument, and for its craggy and crum
bling ramparts, is a meanly arranged and, as Italian
cities go, not particularly impressive little town. I
spent a beautiful Sunday there, and I looked at the
charming church. I looked at it a great deal — a great
deal considering that on the whole I found it inferior
to its fame. Intensely brilliant, however, is the densely
carved front; densely covered with the freshest-looking
mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured
portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the large,
exceedingly bright pictures above thera flashed and
twinkled in the splendid weather. Very beautiful
and interesting are the theological frescoes of Luca
Signorelli, though I have seen pictures that struck rae
as more attaching. Very enchanting, finally, are the

80 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of pink and
azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon the ceil
ing of the great chapel, along with a noble sitting
figure — raore expressive of movement than most of the
creations of this pictorial peace-maker — of Christ in
judgraent. But the interest of the cathedral of Orvieto
is raainly not the visible result, but the historical pro
cess that lies behind it; those three hundred years of
devoted popular labour of which an Araerican scholar
has written an adrairable account.*
* Charles Eliot Norton : Study a7zd Travel in Italy.

OCCASIONAL PARIS.

in,
OCCASIONAL PARIS.
1877.
It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of com
paring one race with another, and weighing in opposed
groups the manners and customs of neighbouring
countries; but it is certain that as we move about the
world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is
especially the case if we happen to be infected with
the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite — that uncomfort
able consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at
home in none. To be a cosmopolite is not, I think,
an ideal; the ideal should be to be a concentrated
patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an accident, but one
must make the best of it. If you have lived about, as
the phrase is, you have lost that sense of the absolute
ness and the sanctity of the habits of your fellow-
patriots which once made you so happy in the midst
of them. You have seen that there are a great raany
patria in the world, and that each of these is filled
with excellent people for whom the local idiosyncrasies
are the only thing that is not rather barbarous. There
comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it
may be found, grows to seera to you about as pro
vincial as another; and then I suppose it may be said
of you that you have become a cosmopolite. ) You
Portraits of Places. ^

82 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
have formed the habit of coraparing, of looking for
points of difference and of resemblance, for present
and absent advantages, for the virtues that go with
certain defects, and the defects that go with certain
virtues. If this is poor work corapared with the active
practice, in the sphere to which a discriminating Pro
vidence has assigned you, of the duties of a tax-payer,
an elector, a juryman or a diner-out, there is never
theless something to be said for it. It is good to
think well of mankind, and this, on the whole, a
cosmopolite does. If you limit your generalisations to
the sphere I mentioned just now, there is a danger
that your occasional fits of pessimisra raay be too
sweeping. When you are out of humour the whole
country suffers, because at such moments one is never
discriminating, and it costs you very little bad logic
to lump your fellow-citizens together. But if you are
living about, as I say, certain differences impose them
selves. The worst you can say of the human race is,
for instance, that the Germans are a detestable people.
They do not represent the human race for you, as in
your native town your fellow-citizens do, and your un
flattering judgment has a flattering reverse. If the
Germans are detestable, you are mentally saying, there
are those admirable French, or those charming Ameri
cans, or those interesting English. (Of course it is
simply by accident that I couple the German name
here with the unfavourable adjective. The epithets
may be transposed at will.) Nothing can well be more
different frora anything else than the English frora the
French, so that, if you are acquainted with both nations,
it raay be said that on any special point your agree
able impression of the one implies a censorious at-

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 83
titude toward the other, and vice versd. This has
rather a shocking sound; it makes the cosmopolite ap
pear invidious and narrow-minded. But I hasten to
add that there seems no real reason why even the
most delicate conscience should take alarm. The
consequence of the cosmopolite spirit is to initiate you
into the merits of all peoples; to convince you that
national virtues are numerous, though they may be
very different, and to make downright preference really
very hard. I have, for instance, every disposition to
think better of the English race than of any other ex
cept my own. There are things which make it natural
I should; there are inducements, provocations, tempta
tions, almost bribes. There have been moments when
I have almost bumed my ships behind me, and de
clared that, as it simplified matters greatly to pin
one's faith to a chosen people, I would henceforth
cease to trouble my head about the lights and shades
of the foreign character. I ara convinced that if I had
taken this reckless engageraent, I should greatly have
regretted it. You may find a roora very corafortable
to sit in with the window open, and not like it at all
when the window has been shut. If one were to give
up the privilege of comparing the English with other
'people, one would very soon, in a moment of reaction,
make once for all (and most unjustly) such a cora
parison as would leave the English nowhere. Corapare
then, I say, as often as the occasion presents itself
The result as regards any particular people, and as
regards the human race at large, may be pronounced
agreeable, and the process is both instructive and
entertaining. So the author of these observations finds it on re
s'

84 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
turning to Paris after living for upwards of a year in
London. He finds hiraself comparing, and the results
of comparison are several disjointed reflections, of
which it may be profitable to make a note. Certainly
Paris is a very old story, and London is a still older
one; and there is no great reason why a journey across
the channel and back should quicken one's perspica
city to an unprecendented degree. I therefore will
not pretend to have been looking at Paris with new
eyes, or to have gathered on the banks of the Seine a
harvest of extraordinary impressions. I will only pre
tend that a good many old impressions have recovered
their freshness, and that there is a sort of renovated
entertainment in looking at the most brilliant city in
the world with eyes attuned to a different pitch.
Never, in fact, have those qualities of brightness and
gaiety that are half the stock-in-trade of the city by
the Seine seemed to rae more uncontestable. The
autumn is but half over, and Paris is, in common
parlance, empty. The private houses are closed, the
lions have returned to the jungle, the Champs Elysees
are not at all "mondains." But I have never seen
Paris more Parisian, in the pleasantest sense of the
word; better humoured, raore open- windowed , more
naturally entertaining. A radiant September helps the
case; but doubtless the matter is, as I hinted above,
in a large degree "subjective." For when one comes
to the point there is nothing very particular just now
for Paris to mb her hands about. The Exhibition of
1878 is looming up as large as a mighty mass of
buildings on the Trocaddro can make it. These build
ings are very magnificent and fantastical; they hang
over the Seine, in their sudden imraensity and glitter-

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 85
ing newness, like a palace in a fairy-tale. But the
trouble is that most people appear to regard the Ex
hibition as in fact a fairy-tale. They speak of the
wonderful structures on the Champ de Mars and the
Trocadero as a predestined monument to the folly of
a group of gentlemen destitute of a sense of the op
portune. The moment certainly does not seem very
well chosen for inviting the world to come to Paris to
amuse itself The world is too much occupied with
graver cares — with reciprocal cannonading and chop
ping, with cutting of throats and burning of homes,
with murder of infants and mutilation of mothers,
with warding off famine and civil war, with lamenting
the failure of its resources, the dulness of trade, the
emptiness of its pockets. Rorae is burning altogether
too fast for even its raost irresponsible spirits to find
any great satisfaction in fiddling. But even if there is
(as there very well raay be) a certain scepticisra at
headquarters as to the accoraplishment of this grace
ful design, there is no apparent hesitation, and every
thing is going forward as rapidly as if mankind were
breathless with expectation. That familiar figure, the
Parisian ouvrier, with his white, chalky blouse, his at
tenuated person, his clever face, is more familiar than
ever, and I suppose, finding plenty of work to his
hand, is for time in a comparatively rational state of
mind. He swarms in thousands, not only in the region
of the Exhibition, but along the great thoroughfare —
the Avenue de I'Opera — which has just been opened
in the interior of Paris.
This is an extremely Parisian creation, and as it
is really a great convenience — it will save a great
many steps and twists and turns — I suppose it should

86 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
be spoken of with gratitude and adrairation. But I
confess that to my sense it belongs primarily to that
order of benefits which during the twenty years of the
Empire gradually deprived the streets of Paris of nine-
tenths of their ancient individuality. The deadly
monotony of the Paris that M. Haussmann called into
being — its huge, blank, pompous, featureless sameness
— sometimes comes over the wandering stranger with
a force that leads hira to devote the author of these
miles of architectural commonplace to execration. The
new street is quite on the imperial system; it must
make the late Napoleon III. smile with beatific satis
faction as he looks down upon it from the Bonapartist
corner of Paradise. It stretches straight away from the
pompous facade of the Opera to the doors of the
Theatre Frangais, and it raust be admitted that there
is something fine in the vista that is closed at one end
by the great sculptured and gilded mass of the former
building. But it smells of the modern asphalt; it is
lined with great white houses that are adorned with
machine-raade arabesques, and each of which is so
exact a copy of all the rest that even the little white
porcelain nuraber on a blue ground, with looks exactly
like all the other nurabers, hardly constitutes an iden
tity. Presently there will be a long succession of mil
liners' and chocolate-makers' shops in the basement of
this homogeneous row, and the pretty bonnets and
bonbonniferes in the shining windows will have their
ribbons knotted with a chic that you must come to
Paris to see. Then there will be little glazed sentry-
boxes at regular intervals along the curbstone, in which
churlish old woraen will sit selling half a dozen copies
of each of the newspapers; and over the hardened

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 87
bitumen the young Parisian of our day will constantly
circulate, looking rather pallid and wearing very large
shirt-cuffs. And the new avenue will be a great suc
cess, for it will place in symmetrical coraraunication
two of the most important establishments in France —
the temple of French music and the temple of French
comedy. I said just now that no two things could well be
more unlike than England and France; and though
the remark is not original, I uttered it with the spon
taneity that it must have on the lips of a traveller
who, having left either country, has just disembarked
in the other. It is of course by this tirae a very trite
observation, but it will continue to be made so long
as Boulogne remains the sarae lively antithesis of
Folkestone. An American, conscious of the family-
likeness diffused over his own huge continent, never
quite unlearns his surprise at finding that so little of
either of these two almost contiguous towns has
rubbed off upon the other. He is surprised at certain
English people feeling so far away frora France, and
at all French people feeling so far away frora England.
I travelled frora Boulogne the other day in the same
railway-carriage with a couple of amiable and in
genuous young Britons, who had come over to spend
ten days in Paris. It was their first landing in France;
they had never yet quitted their native island; and in
the course of a little conversation that I had with
them I was struck with the scantiness of their informa
tion in regard to French manners and customs. They
were very intelligent lads; they were apparently fresh
frora a university; but in respect to the interesting
country they were about to enter, their rainds were al-

88 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
most a blank. If the conductor, appearing at the car
riage door to ask for our tickets, had had the leg of a
frog sticking out of his pocket, I think their only very
definite preconception would have been confirmed. I
parted with them at the Paris station, and I have no
doubt that they very soon began to raake precious dis
coveries; and I have alluded to thera not in the least
to throw ridicule upon their "insularity" — which in
deed, being accorapanied with great modesty, I thought
a very pretty spectacle — but because having become,
since my last visit to France, a little insular myself, I
was more conscious of the emotions that attend on an
arrival. The brightness always seeras to begin while you
are still out in the channel, when you fairly begin to
see the French coast. You pass into a region of in-
tenser light — a zone of clearness and colour. These
properties brighten and deepen as you approach the
land, and when you fairly stand upon that good Bou-
lognese quay, araong the blue and red douaniers and
soldiers, the sraall ugly men in cerulean blouses, the
charming fishwives, with their folded kerchiefs and
their crisp cap-frills, their short striped petticoats, their
tightly-drawn stockings, and their little clicking sabots
- — when you look about you at the smokeless air, at
the pink and yellow houses, at the white-fronted cafe,
close at hand, with its bright blue letters, its mirrors
and raarble-topped tables, its white-aproned, alert, un
dignified waiter, grasping a huge coffee-pot by a long
handle — when you perceive all these things you feel
the additional savour that foreignness gives to the pic
turesque; or feel rather, I should say, that simple for
eignness may itself make the picturesque; for certainly

OCCASIONAL PARIS. «9
the elements in the picture I have just sketched are
not especially exquisite. No matter; you are amused,
and your amusement continues — being sensibly stimu
lated by a visit to the buffet at the railway station,
which is better than the refreshment-room at Folke
stone. It is a pleasure to have people offering you
soup again, of their own raoveraent; it is a pleasure to
find a little pint of Bordeaux standing naturally before
your plate; it is a pleasure to have a napkin; it is a
pleasure, above all, to take up one ofthe good long
sticks of French bread — as bread is called the staff of
life, the French bake it literally in the shape of staves
— and break off a loose, crisp, crusty morsel.
There are impressions, certainly, that imperil your
good-humour. No honest Anglo-Saxon can like a
French railway-station; and I was on the point of add
ing that no honest Anglo-Saxon can like a French
railway-official. But I will not go so far as that; for
after all I cannot remeraber any great harm that such
a functionary has ever done rae — except in locking rae
up as a raalefactor. It is necessary to say, however,
that the honest Anglo-Saxon, in a French railway-
station, is in a state of chronic irritation — an irritation
arising from his sense of the injurious effect upon the
genial French nature of the possession of an adminis
trative uniform. I believe that the consciousness of
brass buttons on his coat and stripes on his trousers
has spoiled many a modest and amiable Frenchman,
and the sight of these aggressive insignia always stirs
within me a moral protest. I repeat that my aversion
to them is partly theoretic, for I have found, as a
general thing, that an inquiry civilly made extracts a
civil answer from even the most official-looking per-

90 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
sonage. But I have also found that such a personage's
measure of the civility due to him is inordinately
large; if he places himself in any degree at your ser
vice, it is apparently frora the sense that true greatness
can afford to unbend. You are constantly reminded
that you must not presume. In England these intima
tions never proceed from one's "inferiors." In France
the "administration" is the first thing that touches
you; in a little while you get used to it, but you feel
somehow that, in the process, you have lost the flower
of your self-respect. Of course you are under some
obligation to it. It has taken you off the steamer at
Folkestone; raade you tell your narae to a gentleraan
with a sword, stationed at the farther end of the plank
— not a drawn sword, it is true, but still, at the best,
a very nasty weapon; marshalled you into the railway-
station; assigned you to a carriage — I was going to
say to a seat; transported you to Paris, marshalled you
again out of the traiii, and under a sort of military
surveillance, into an enclosure containing a number of
human sheep-pens , in one of which it has imprisoned
you for sorae half-hour. I ara always on the point, in
these places, of asking one of ray gaolers if I may not
be allowed to walk about on parole. The administra
tion at any rate has finally taken you out ofyour pen,
and, through the medium of a functionary who "in
scribes" you in a little book, transferred you to a cab
selected by a logic of its own. In doing all this it has
certainly done a great deal for you; but somehow its
good offices have raade you feel sorabre and resentful.
The other day, on arriving from London, while I was
waiting for my luggage, I saw several of the porters
who convey travellers' impedimenta to the cab come

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 9 1
up and deliver over the coin they had just received
for this service to a functionary posted ad hoc in a
corner, and armed with a little book in which he
noted down these remittances. The pourboires are
apparently thrown into a common fund and divided
among the guild of porters. The system is doubtless
an excellent one, excellently carried out; but the sight
of the poor round-shouldered man of burdens dropping
his coin into the hand of the official arithmetician was
to my fancy but another reminder that the individual,
as an individual, loses by all that the administration
assumes. After living a while in England you observe the
individual in Paris with quickened attention; and I
think it must be said that at first he makes an in
different figure. You are struck with the race being
physically and personally a poorer one than that great
family of largely-modelled, fresh-coloured people you
have left upon the other side of the channel. I re
member that in going to England a year ago and dis
embarking of a dismal, sleety Sunday evening at
Folkestone, the first thing that struck rae was the good
looks of the railway porters — their broad shoulders,
their big brown beards, their well-cut features. In
like manner, landing lately at Boulogne of a brilliant
Sunday morning, it was impossible not to think the
little men in numbered caps who were gesticulating
and chattering in one's path, rather ugly fellows. In
arriving from other countries one is struck with a cer
tain want of dignity in the French face. I do not
know, however, whether this is anything worse than
the fact that the French face is expressive; for it may
be said that, in a certain sense, to express anything is

92 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
to coraproraise with one's dignity, which likes to be
understood without taking trouble. As regards the
lower classes, at any rate, the impression I speak of
always passes away; you perceive that the good looks
of the French working-people are to be found in their
look of intelligence. These people, in Paris, strike me
afresh as the cleverest, the most perceptive, and in
tellectually speaking, the most human of their kind.
The Paris ouvrier, with his democratic blouse, his ex
pressive, demonstrative, agreeable eye, his meagre
limbs, his irregular, pointed features, his sallow com
plexion, his face at once fatigued and aniraated, his
light, nervous organisation, is a figure that I always
encounter again with pleasure. In sorae cases he looks
depraved and perverted, but at his worst he looks re
fined; he is full of vivacity of perception, of soraething
that one can appeal to.
It takes some courage to say this, perhaps, after
reading L! Assommoir ; but in M. Emile Zola's extra
ordinary novel one must make the part, as the French
say, of the horrible uncleanness of the author's imagina
tion. L' Assommoir , I have been told, has had great
success in the lower walks of Parisian life; and if
this fact is not creditable to the delicacy of M. Zola's
humble readers, it proves a good deal in favour of
their intelligence. With all its grossness the book in
question is essentially a literary performance; you
must be tolerably clever to appreciate it. It is highly
appreciated, I believe, by the young ladies who live
in the region of the Latin Quarter — those young
ladies who thirty years ago were called grisettes, and
now are called I don't know what. They know long
passages by heart; they repeat thera with infinite

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 93
gusto. "Ce louchon d' Augustine" — the horrible little
girl with a squint, who is always playing nasty tricks
and dodging slaps and projectiles in Gervaise's shop,
is their particular favourite; and it must be admitted
that "ce louchon d' Augustine" is, as regards reality,
a wonderful creation.
If Parisians, both small and great, have more of
the intellectual starap than the people one sees in
London, it is striking, on the other hand, that the
people of the better sort in Paris look very much less
"respectable." I did not know till I came back to
Paris how used I had grown to the English cachet;
but I iramediately found rayself missing it. You miss
it in the men rauch more than in the women; for
the well-to-do Frenchwoman of the lower orders, as
one sees her in public, in the streets and in shops, is
always a delightfully comfortable and creditable per
son. I must confess to the highest admiration for
her, an admiration that increases with acquaintance.
She, at least, is essentially respectable; the neatness,
compactness, and sobriety of her dress, the decision
of her movement and accent suggest the civic and
domestic virtues — order, thrift, frugality, the raoral
necessity of making a good appearance. It is, I
think, an old story that to the stranger in France the
women seem greatly superior to the men. Their
superiority, in fact, appears to be conceded; for
wherever you tum you meet thera in the forefront of
action. You meet thera, indeed, too often; you pro
nounce them at tiraes obtrusive. It is annoying when
you go to order your boots or your shirts, to have to
make known your desires to even the most neat-
waisted female attendant; for the limitations to the

94 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
feminine intellect are, though few in number, distinct,
and women are not able to understand certain mascu
line needs. Mr. Worth makes ladies' dresses; but I
am sure there will never be a fashionable tailoress.
There, are, however, points at which, from the com
mercial point of view, feminine assistance is invaluable.
For insisting upon the merits of an article that has
failed to satisfy you, talking you over, and making
you take it; for defending a disputed bill, for paying
the necessary compliments or supplying the necessary
impertinence — for all these things the neat-waisted
sex has peculiar and precious faculties. In the com
mercial class in Paris the man always appeals to the
woman; the woman always steps forward. The woman
always proposes the conditions of a bargain. Go
about and look for furnished rooras, you always en
counter a concierge and his wife. When you ask the
price of the rooms, the woman takes the words out of
her husband's mouth, if indeed he have not first turned
to her with a questioning look. She takes you in hand;
she proposes conditions; she thinks of things he would
not have thought of.
What I meant just now by my allusion to the ab
sence of the "respectable" in the appearance of the
Parisian population was that the men do not look like
gentlemen, as so raany Englishmen do. The average
Frenchman that one encounters in public is of so
different a type from the average Englishman that
you can easily believe that to the end of time the
two will not understand each other. The Frenchman
has always, coraparatively speaking, a Bohemian, em
pirical look; the expression ofhis face, its colouring,
its movement, have not been toned down to the neutral

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 95
complexion of that breeding for which in English
speech we reserve the epithet of "good." He is at
once raore artificial and more natural; the former
where the Englishman is positive, the latter where the
Englishman is negative. He takes off his hat with a
flourish to a friend, but the Englishman never bows.
He ties a knot in the end of a napkin and thrusts it
into his shirt-collar, so that, as he sits at breakfast, the
napkin raay serve the office of a pinafore. Such an
operation as that seems to the Englishman as naif as
the flourishing of one's hat is pretentious.
I soraetiraes go to breakfast at a cafe on the Boule
vard, which I forraerly used to frequent with con
siderable regularity. Coming back there the other
day, I found exactly the same group of habitues at
their little tables, and I mentally exclaimed as I looked
at them over my newspaper, upon their unlikeness
to the gentlemen who confront you in the same at
titude at a London club. Who are they? what are
they? On these points I have no information; but
the stranger's imagination does not seem to see a
majestic, social order massing itself behind thera as it
usually does in London. He goes so far as to suspect
that what is behind them is not adapted for exhibi
tion; whereas your Englishmen, whatever may be the
defects of their personal character, or the irregularities
of their conduct, are pressed upon frora the rear by
an immense body of private proprieties and comforts,
of domestic conventions and theological observances.
But it is agreeable all the same to come back to a
cafe of which you have forraerly been an habitue.
Adolphe or Edouard, in his long white apron and his
large patent-leather slippers, has a perfect recollection

96 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of "les habitudes de Monsieur." He remembers the
table you preferred, the wine you drank, the news
paper you read. He greets you with the friendliest
of smiles, and remarks that it is a long time since he
has had the pleasure of seeing Monsieur. There is
something in this simple reraark very touching to a
heart that has suff'ered from that incorruptible dumb
ness of the British domestic. But in Paris such a
heart finds consolation at every step; it is reminded
of that most classic quality of the French nature — its
sociability; a sociability which operates here as it
never does in England, from below upward. Your
waiter utters a greeting because, after all, something
human within him prompts him; his instinct bids him
say something, and his taste recomraends that it be
agreeable. The obvious reflection is that a waiter
must not say too much, even for the sake of being
human. But in France the people always like to
make the little extra reraark, to throw in something
above the siraply necessary. I stop before a little
man who is selling newspapers at a street-corner, and
ask hira for the Journal des Dibats. His answer de
serves to be literally given: "Je ne I'ai plus, Monsieur;
mais je pourrai vous donner quelque chose a peu pr6s
dans le meme genre — la Ripublique Franqaise." Even
a person of his hurable condition must have had a
lurking sense of the comicality of offering anything as
an equivalent for the "genre" of the venerable, classic,
academic Dibats, But my friend could not bear to
give me a naked, monosyllabic refusal.
There are two things that the returning observer
is likely to do with as little delay as possible. One
is to dine at some cabaret of which he retains a

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 97
friendly memory; another is to betake hiraself to the
Theatre Frangais. It is early in the season; there are
no new pieces; but I have taken great pleasure in
seeing some of the old ones. I lost no time in going
to see Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt in Andromaque,
Andromaque is not a novelty, but Mademoiselle Sarah
Bernhardt has a perennial freshness. The play has
been revived, to enable her to represent not the great
part, the injured and passionate Hermione, but that
of the doleful, funereal widow of Hector. This part
is a poor one; it is narrow and monotonous, and
offers few brilliant opportunities. But the actress
knows how to make opportunities, and she has here
a very sufficient one for crossing her thin white arms
over her nebulous black robes, and sighing forth in
silver accents her dolorous rhymes. Her rendering
of the part is one more proof of her singular intel
ligence — of the fineness of her artistic nature. As
there is not a great deal to be done with it in the
way of declamation, she has made the most of its
plastic side. She understands the art of motion and
attitude as no one else does, and her extraordinary
personal grace never fails her. Her Andromaque has
postures of the most poetic picturesqueness — some
thing that suggests the brokea stem and drooping
head of a flower that had been rudely plucked. She
bends over her classic confidant like the figure of
Bereavement on a bas-relief, and she has a marvellous
manner of lifting and throwing back her delicate
arms, locking them together, and passing them behind
her hanging head.
The Demi-Monde of M. Dumas fils is not a novelty
either; but I quite agree with M. Francisque Sarcey
Portraits of Places. 7

g8 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
that it is on the whole, in forra, the first comedy of
our day. I have seen it several times, but I never
see it without being forcibly struck with its merits.
For the drama of our tirae it must always remain
the model. The interest of the story, the quiet art
with which it is unfolded, the naturalness and sober
ness of the means that are used, and by which great
effects are produced, the brilliancy and richness of
the dialogue — all these things make it a singularly
perfect and interesting work. Of course it is admirably
well played at the Theatre Franjais. Madame d'Ange
was originally a part of too great amplitude for Made
moiselle Croizette; but she is gradually filling it out
and taking possession of it; she begins to give a sense
of the "calme infernal," which George Sand some
where mentions as the leading attribute of the cha
racter. As for Delaunay, he does nothing better,
more vividly and gallantly, than Olivier de Jalin.
When I say gallantry I say it with qualification; for
what a very queer fellow is this same M. de Jalin!
In seeing the Demi-Monde again I was raore than
ever struck with the oddity of its morality and with
the way that the ideal of fine conduct differs in dif
ferent nations. The Demi-Monde is the history of the
eager, the almost heroic, effort of a clever and superior
woman, who has been guilty of what the French call
"faults," to pass from the irregular and equivocal
circle to which these faults have consigned her into
what is distinctively termed "good society." The only
way in which the passage can be effected is by her
marrying an honourable man; and to induce an
honourable man to marry her, she must suppress the
more discreditable facts of her career. Taking her

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 99
for an honest woman, Raymond de Nanjac falls in
love with her, and honestly proposes to make her his
wife. But Raymond de Nanjac has contracted an in
timate friendship with Olivier de Jalin, and the action
of the play is raore especially De Jalin's attempt — a
successful one — to rescue his friend from the ignominy
of a union with Suzanne d'Ange. Jalin knows a great
deal about her, for the simple reason that he has
been her lover. Their relations have been most har
monious , but from the moment that Suzanne sets
her cap at Nanjac, Olivier declares war. Suzanne
struggles hard to keep possession of her suitor, who
is very much in love with her, and Olivier spares no
pains to detach him. It is the means that Olivier
uses that excite the wonderment of the Anglo-Saxon
spectator. He takes the ground that in such a cause
all means are fair, and when, at the climax of the
play, he tells a thumping lie in order to make Ma
dame d'Ange compromise herself, expose herself, he
is pronounced by the author "le plus honnete homme
que je connaisse." Madame d'Ange, as I have said,
is a superior woman; the interest of the play is in
her being a superior woman. Olivier has been her
lover; he himself is one of the reasons why she may
not marry Nanjac; he has given her a push along the
downward path. But it is curious how little this is
held by the author to disqualify him from fighting the
battle in which she is so much the weaker combatant.
An English-speaking audience is more "moral" than
a French, more easily scandalised; and yet it is a
singular fact that if the Demi-Monde were represented
before an English-speaking audience, its sympathies
would certainly not go with M. de Jalin. It would
r

100 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
pronounce him rather a coward. Is it because such
an audience, although it has not nearly such a pretty
collection of pedestals to place under the feet of the
charming sex, has, after, all, in default of this degree
of gallantry, a tenderness more fundaraental? Ma-
darae d'Ange has stained herself, and it is doubtless
not at all proper that such ladies should be led to
the altar by honourable young men. The point is not
that the English-speaking audience would be disposed
to condone Madame d'Ange's irregularities, but that
it would remain perfectly cold before the spectacle of
her ex-lover's masterly campaign against her, and quite
fail to think it positively admirable, or to regard the
fib by which he finally clenches his victory as a
proof of exceptional honesty. The ideal of our own
audience would be expressed in sorae such words as,
"I say, that's not fair game. Can't you let the poor
woman alone?" i

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. IGI

IV.
RHEIMS AND LAON:
A LITTLE TOUR.
1877.
It was a very little tour, but the charra of the
three or four old towns and raonuraents that it
embraced, the beauty of the brilliant October, the
pleasure of reminding one's self how rauch of the
interest, strength and dignity of France is to be found
outside of that huge pretentious caravansary called
Paris (a reminder often needed), these things deserve
to be noted. I went down to Rheims to see the
famous cathedral, and to reach Rheims I travelled
through the early morning hours along the charming
valley of the Marne. The Marne is a pretty little
green river, the vegetation upon whose banks, other
wise unadorned, had begun to blush with the early
frosts in a manner that suggested the autumnal tints
of American scenery. The trees and bushes were
scarlet and orange; the light was splendid and a trifle
harsh; I could have fancied rayself imraersed in an
American "fall," if at intervals some gray old large-
towered church had not lifted a sculptured front above
a railway-station, to dispel the fond illusion. One of
these church-fronts (I saw it only from the train) is
particularly impressive; the little cathedral of Meaux,

102 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of which the great Bossuet was bishop, and along
whose frigid nave he set his eloquence rolling with
an impetus which it has not wholly lost to this day.
It was entertaining, moreover, to enter the country of
champagne; for Rheims is in the ancient province
whose later farae is syllabled the world over in
popping corks. A land of vineyards is not usually
accounted sketchable; but the country about Epernay
seemed to me to have a charm of its own. It stretched
away in soft undulations that were pricked all over
with little stakes muffled in leaves. The efifect at a
distance was that of vast surfaces, long, subdued
billows, of pincushion; and yet it was very pretty.
The deep blue sky was over the scene; the undulations
were half in sun and half in shade; and here and
there, among their myriad bristles, were groups of
vintagers, who, though they are in reality, doubtless,
a prosaic and mercenary body of labourers, yet as
sumed, to a fancy that glanced at them in the cursory
manner permitted by the passage of the train, the ap
pearance of joyous and disinterested votaries of Bacchus.
The blouses of the men, the white caps of the women,
were gleaming in the sunshine; they moved about
crookedly among the tiny vine-poles. I thought them
full of a charming suggestiveness. Of all the delight
ful gifts of France to the world, this was one of the
most agreeable — the keen, living liquid in which the
finest flower of sociability is usually dipped. It came
frora these sunny places; this little maze of curling-
sticks supplied the world with half the world's gaiety.
I call it little only in relation to the immense nuraber
of bottles with gilded necks in which this gaiety is
annually stored up. The acreage of the champagne

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. I03
seemed to rae, in fact, large; the bristling slopes went
rolling away to new horizons in a manner that was
positively reassuring. Making the handsomest al
lowance for the wine manufactured from baser ele
ments, it was apparent that this big corner of a province
represents a very large number of bottles.
As you draw near to Rheims the vineyards be
come sparser, and finally disappear, a fact not to be
regretted, for there is something incongruous in the
juxtaposition of champagne and gothic architecture.
It may be said, too, that for the proper appreciation
of a structure like the cathedral of Rheims you have
need of all your head. As, after my arrival, I sat in
my window at the inn, gazing up at the great fajade,
I found soraething dizzying in the mere climbing and
soaring of one's astonished vision; and later, when I
came to wander about in the upper regions of the
church, and to peep down through the rugged lace-
work of the towers at the little streets and the small
spots of public places, I found myself musing upon
the beauty of soberness. My window at the Lion d'Or
was like a proscenium-box at the play; to admire the
cathedral at my leisure I had only to perch myself in
the casement with a good opera-glass. I sat there for
a long tirae watching the great architectural drama.
A drama I may call it, for no church-front that I
have seen is more animated, more richly figured. The
density of the sculptures, the iramense scale of the
images, detract, perhaps, at first, in a certain sense,
from the impressiveness of the cathedral of Rheims;
the absence of large surfaces, of ascending lines, de
ceives you as to the elevation of the front, and the
dimensions of some of the upper statues bring them

I04 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
unduly near the eye. But little by little you perceive
that this great figured, and storied screen has a mass
proportionate to its detail, and that it is the grandest
part of a structure which, as a whole, is one of the
noblest works of man's hands. Most people reraember
to have seen sorae print or some photograph of this
heavily-charged fajade of Rheims, which is usually
put forward as the great example of the union of the
purity and the possible richness of gothic. I must
first have seen some such print in my earliest years,
for I have always thought of Rheims as the typical
gothic cathedral. I had vague associations with it; it
seemed to me that I had already stood there in the
little overwhelmed place. One's literary associations
with Rheims are indeed very vivid and impressive;
they begin with the picture of the steel-clad Maid
passing under the deeply-sculptured portal, with a
banner in her hand which she has no need to lower,
and while she stands amid the incense and the chants,
the glitter of arms and the glow of coloured lights,
asking leave of the young king whom she had crowned
to turn away and tend her flocks. And after that
there is the sense of all the kings of France having
travelled down to Rheims in their splendour to be
consecrated; the great groups on the front of the
church must have looked down on groups almost as
stately — groups full of colour and movement — as
sembled in the square. (The square of Rheims, it
raust be confessed, is rather shabby. It is singular
that the august cereraony of the sacre should not have
left its mark upon the disposition of the houses,
should not have kept them at a respectful distance.
Louis XIV., smoothing his plumage before he entered

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. IO5
the church, can hardly have had space to swing the
train of his coronation-robe.) But when in driving
into the town I reached the small precinct, such as it
is, and saw the cathedral lift its spireless towers above
the long rows of its carven saints, the huge wheel of
its window, the three caverns of its portals, with the
high acute pediments above each arch, and the sides
abutting outward like the beginning of a pyramid;
when I looked at all this I felt that I had carried it
in ray mind from my earliest years, and that the
stately vision had been implanted there by sorae for
gotten glirapse of an old-fashioned water-colour sketch,
in which the sky was washed in with expressive
splashes, the reraoter parts of the church tinted with
a fascinating blueness, and the foundations represented
as encurabered with little gabled and cross-timbered
houses, inhabited by women in red petticoats and
curious caps.
I shall not attempt any regular enumeration of
the great details of the fagade of Rheims; I cannot
profess even to have fully apprehended them. They
are a glorious company, and here and there, on its
high-hung pedestal, one of the figures detaches itself
with peculiar effectiveness. Over the central portal
sits the Virgin Mary, meekly submitting her head to
the ponderous crown which her Son prepares to place
upon it; the attitude and movement of Christ are full
of a kind of splendid politeness. The three great
doorways are in themselves a museum of imagery, dis
posed in each case in five close tiers, the statues in
each of the tiers packed perpendicularly against their
comrades. The efifect of tiiese great hollowed and
chiselled recesses is extremely striking; they are a

I06 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
proper vestibule to the dusky richness of the interior.
The cathedral of Rheims, more fortunate than many
of its companions, appears not to have suffered from
the iconoclasts of the Revolution; I noticed no absent
heads nor broken noses. It is very true that these
members may have had adventures to which they
do not, as it were, allude. But, like many of its com
panions, it is so pressed upon by neighbouring houses
that it is not easy to get a general view of the sides
and the rear. You may walk round it, and note your
walk as a long one; you may observe that the choir
of the church travels back almost into another quarter
of the city; you raay see the far-spreading mass lose
itself for a while in parasitic obstructions, and then
emerge again with all its buttresses flying; but you
miss that wide margin of space and light which
should enable it to present itself as a consistent
picture. Pictures have their frames, and poems have
their margins; a great work of art, such as a gothic
cathedral, should at least have elbow-room. You may,
however, stroll beneath the walls of Rheims, along
a narrow, dark street, and look up at the mighty
structure and see its higher parts foreshortened into
all kinds of delusive proportions. There is a grand
entertainment in the view of the church which you
obtain from the farthermost point to which you may
recede from it in the rear, keeping it still within sight.
I have never seen a cathedral so magnificently but
tressed. The buttresses of Rheims are all double;
they have a tremendous spring, and are supported
upon pedestals surmounted by immense crocketed
canopies containing statues of wide-winged angels. A
great balustrade of gothic arches connects these

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. I07
canopies one with another, and along this balustrade
are perched strange figures of sitting beasts, unicorns
and mermaids, griffins and monstrous owls. Huge,
terrible gargoyles hang far over into the street, and
doubtless some of them have a detail which I after
wards noticed at Laon. The gargoyle represents a
grotesque beast — a creature partaking at once of the
.shape of a bird, a fish, and a quadruped. At Laon,
on either side of the main entrance, a long-bellied
monster cranes forth into the air with the head of a
hippopotamus; and under its belly crouches a little
man, hardly less grotesque, making up a rueful
grimace and playing some ineffectual trick upon his
terrible corapanion. One of these little figures has
plunged a sword, up to the hilt, into the belly of the
monster above him, so that when he draws it forth
there will be a leak in the great stone gutter; an
other has suspended himself to a rope that is knotted
round the neck of the gargoyle, and is trying in the
same manner to interrupt its functions by pulling the
cord as tight as possible. There was sure to be a
spirit of life in an architectural conception that could
range from the combination of clustering towers and
opposing fronts to this infinitely minute play of huraour.
There is no great play of humour in the interior
of Rheims, but there is a great deal of beauty and
solemnity. This interior is a spectacle that excites
the sensibility, as our forefathers used to say; but it
is not an easy matter to describe. It is no description
of it to say that it is four hundred and sixty-six feet
in length, and that the roof is one hundred and twenty-
four feet above the pavement; nor is there any very
vivid portraiture in the statement that if there is no

I08 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
coloured glass in the lower windows, there is, per
contra, a great deal of the most gorgeous and most
ancient in the upper ones. The long sweep of the
nave, from the threshold to the point where the
coloured light-shafts of the choir lose themselves in
the gray distance, is a triumph of perpendicular per
spective. The white light in the lower part of Rheims
really contributes to the picturesqueness of the interior.
It raakes the gloom above look richer still, and throws
that part of the roof which rests upon the gigantic
piers of the transepts into mysterious remoteness. I
wandered about for a long time; I sat first in one
place and then in another; I attached myself to that
raost fascinating part of every great church, the angle
at which the nave and transept divide. It was the
better to observe this interesting point, I think, that I
passed into the side gate of the choir — the gate that
stood ajar in the tall gilded railing. I sat down on a
stool near the threshold; I leaned back against the
side of one of the stalls; the church was empty, and I
lost rayself in the large perfection of the place. I lost
myself, but the beadle found me; he stood before me,
and with a silent, imperious gesture, motioned me to
depart. I risked an argumentative glance, whereupon
he signified his displeasure, repeated his gesture, and
pointed to an old gentleman with a red cape, who
had corae into the choir softly, without my seeing
him, and had seated himself in one of the stalls.
This old gentleman seemed plunged in pious thoughts;
I was not, after all, very near him, and he did not
look as if I disturbed him. A canon is at any time,
I iraagine, a more merciful man than a beadle. But
of course I obeyed the beadle, and eliminated rayself

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. lOQ
from this peculiarly sacred precinct. I found another
chair, and I fell to admiring the cathedral again. But
this time I think it was with a difference — a difference
which may serve as an excuse for the triviality of my
anecdote. Sundry other old gentlemen in red capes
emerged firom the sacristy and went into the choir;
presently, when there were half a dozen, they began
to chant, and I perceived that the impending vespers
had been the reason of my expulsion. This was
highly proper, and I forgave the beadle; but I was
not so happy as before, for my thoughts had passed
out of the architectural channel into — what shall I
say? — into the political. Here they found nothing so
sweet to feed upon. It was the 5th of October; ten
days later the elections for the new Chamber were to
take place — the Chamber which was to replace the
Assembly dissolved on the i6th of May by Marshal
MacMahon, on a charge of "latent" radicalism.
Stranger though one was, it was impossible not to be
much interested in the triumph of the republican
cause; it was irapossible not to syrapathise with this
suprerae effort of a brilliant and generous people to
learn the lesson of national self-control and self-govern
ment. It was irapossible by the same token, not to
have noted and detested the alacrity with which the
Catholic party had rallied to the reactionary cause,
and the unction with which the clergy had converted
itself into the go-betweens of Bonapartisra. The clergy
was giving daily evidence of its devotion to arbitrary
rule and to every iniquity that shelters itself behind
the mask of "authority." These had been frequent
and irritating reflections; they lurked in the folds of
one's morning paper. They came back to me in the

IIO PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
midst of that tranquil grandeur of Rheims, as I
listened to the droning of the old gentleraen in the
red capes. Some of the canons, it was painful to
observe, had not been punctual; they came hurrying
out of the sacristy after the service had begun. They
looked like amiable and venerable men; their chanting
and droning, as it spread itself under the great arches,
was not disagreeable to listen to; I could certainly
bear them no grudge. But their presence there was
distracting and vexatious; it had spoiled my enjoy
ment of their church, in which I doubtless had no
business. It had set me thinking of the activity and-
vivacity of the great organisation to which they be
longed, and of all the odious things it would have
done before the 1 5th of October. To what base uses
do we come at last! It was this same organisation
that had erected the magnificent structure around and
above me, and which had then seemed an image of
generosity and benignant power. Such an edifice'
might at times make one feel tenderly sentimental
toward the Catholic church — make one remember how
raany of the great achievements of the past we owe
to her. To lapse gently into this state of mind seems
indeed always, while one strolls about a great cathedral,
a proper recognition of its hospitality; but now I had
lapsed gently out of it, and it was one of the ex
asperating elements of the situation that I felt, in a^
manner, called upon to decide how far such a lapse
was unbecoming. I found myself even extending the
question a little, and picturing to myself that conflict
which must often occur at such a moment as the
present — which is actually going on, doubtless, in
many thousands of minds — between the actively, prac-'

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. Ill
tically liberal instinct and what one may call the
historic, esthetic sense, the sense upon which old
cathedrals lay a certain palpable obligation. How far
should a lover of old cathedrals let his hands be tied
by the sanctity of their traditions? How far should
he let his iraagination bribe him, as it were, from
action? This of course is a question for each raan to
answer for himself; but as I sat listening to the drowsy
old canons of Rheims, I was visited, I scarcely know
why, by a kind of revelation of the anti-catholic pas
sion, as it must burn to-day in the breasts of certain
radicals. I felt that such persons raust be intent upon
war to the death; how that must seem the most sacred
of all duties. Can anything, in the line of action, for
a votary of the radical creed, be more sacred? I asked
myself; and can any instruments be too trenchant? I
raised my eyes again to the dusky splendour of the
upper aisles and measured their enchanting per
spective, and it was with a sense of doing them full
justice that I gave ray fictive liberal my good wishes.
This little operation restored ray equanimity, so
that I climbed several hundred steps and wandered
lightly over the roof of the cathedral. Climbing into
cathedral-towers and gaping at the size of the statues
that look small from the street has always seemed to
me a rather brutal pastime; it is not the proper way
to treat a beautiful building; it is like holding one's
nose so close to a picture that one sees only the grain
of the canvas. But when once I had emerged into
the upper wildemess of Rheims the discourse of a
very urbane and appreciative old bell-ringer, whom I
found lurking behind some gigantic excrescence, gave
an esthetic complexion to what would otherwise have

I 1 2 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
been a rather vulgar feat of gymnastics. It was very
well to see what a great cathedral is made of, and in
these high places of the imraensity of Rheiras I found
the matter very impressively illustrated. I wandered
for half an hour over endless expanses of roof, along
the edge of sculptured abysses, through hugely-timbered
attics and chambers that were in themselves as high
as churches. I stood knee-high to strange images, of
unsuspected proportions, and I followed the topmost
staircase of one of the towers, which curls upward
like the groove of a corkscrew, and gives you at the
summit a hint of how a sailor feels at the masthead.
The ascent was worth making to learn the fulness of
beauty of the church, the solidity and perfection, the
mightiness of arch and buttress, the latent ingenuity
of detail. At the angles of the balustrade which orna
ments the roof of the choir are perched a series of
huge sitting eagles, which from below, as you look up
at them, produce a great effect. They are iraraense,
grira-looking birds, and the sculptor has given to each
of them a pair of very neatly carved human legs,
terminating in talons. Why did he give them human
legs? Why did he indulge in this ridiculous conceit?
I am unable to say, but the conceit afiforded me plea
sure. It seemed to tell of an imagination always at
play, fond of the unexpected and delighting in its
labour. Apart from its cathedral Rheims is not an interest
ing city. It has a prosperous, modern, mercantile air.
The streets look as if at one tirae M. Haussmann, in
person, raay have taken a good deal of exercise in
them; they prove, however, that a French provincial
town may be a wonderfully fresh, clean, comfortable-

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. II3
looking place. Very different is the aspect of the
ancient city of Laon, to which you raay, by the as
sistance of the railway, transfer yourself from Rheims
in a little more than an hour. Laon is full of history,
and the place, as you approach it, reminds you of a
quaint woodcut in the text of an ancient folio. Out
of the raidst of a srailing plain rises a goodly
mountain, and on the top of the mountain is perched
the old feudal commune, frora the centre of which
springs, with infinite majesty, the many-towered cathe
dral. At Laon you are in the raidst of old France;
it is one of the raost interesting chapters of the
past. Ever since reading in the pages of M. Thierry
the story of the fierce struggle for municipal in
dependence waged by this ardent little city against
its feudal and ecclesiastical lords, I had had the con
viction that Laon was worthy of a visit. All the more
so that her two hundred years of civic fermentation
had been vainly spent, and that in the early part of
the fourteenth century she had been disfranchised.
without appeal. M. Thierry's readers will remember
the really thrilling interest of the story which he has
selected as the most coraplete and typical among those
of which the records of the medieval coraraunities are
full; the coraplications and fluctuations of the action,
its brilliant episodes, its sorabre, tragic dinoHment.
I did not visit Laon with the Lettres sur I'Histoire de
France in my pocket, nor had I any other historic
texts for reference; but a vague notion of the vigorous
manner in which for a couple of centuries the stubborn
little town, had attested its individuality supplied my
observations with an harmonious background. Nothing
can well be raore picturesque than the position of this
Portraits of Places. ^

114 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
interesting city. The tourist who has leamed his trade
can tell a "good" place at a glance. The moment
Laon becarae visible from the window of the train I
perceived that Laon was good. And then I had the
word for it of an extremely intelligent young officer of
artillery, who shared my railway-carriage in coming
from Rheims, and who spoke with an authority
borrowed from three years of garrison-life on that
windy hill-top. He affirmed that the only recreation
it afforded was a walk round the ramparts which en
circle the town; people went down the hill as little as
possible — it was such a dreadful bore to come up
again. But he declared, nevertheless, that, as an in
telligent traveller, I should be enchanted with the
place; that the cathedral was magnificent, the view of
the surrounding country a perpetual entertainment,
and the little town full of originality. After I had
spent a day there I thought of this pleasant young
officer and his familiar walk upon the city -wall; he
gave a point to my inevitable reflections upon the
degree to which at the present hour, in France, the
front of the stage is occupied by the army. Inevitable
reflections, I say, because the net result of any little
tour that one may make just now is a vivid sense of
red trousers and cropped heads. Wherever you go
you come upon a military quarter, you stumble upon
a group of young citizens in uniform. It is always a
pretty spectacle; they enliven the scene; they touch it
here and there with an effusion of colour. But this is
not the whole of the matter, and when you have ad
mitted that it is pictorial to be always sous les armes,
you fall to wondering whether it is not very expensive.
A raillion of defenders take up a good deal of room,

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. II5
even for defenders. It raust be very uncomfortable to
be always defending. How do the young raen bear
it; how does France bear it; how long will she be able
to keep it up? Every young Frenchman, on reaching
maturity, has to give up five years of his life to this
bristling Minotaur of railitary service. It is hard for
a nation of shameless civilians to understand how life
is arranged among people who corae into the world
¦with this heavy mortgage upon the freshest years of
their strength; it seems like drinking the wine of life
from a vessel with a great leak in the bottom. Is such
a regime inspiring, or is it demoralising? Is the effect
of it to quicken the sentiment of patriotism, the sense
of the dangers to which one's country is exposed and
of what one owes to the common cause, or to take the
edge frora all arabition that is not purely railitary, to
force young men to say that there is no use trying,
that nothing is worth beginning, and that a young
fellow condemned to pay such a tax as that has a
right to refund himself in any way that is open to
him? Reminded as one is at every step of the im
mensity of the military burden of France, the most
interesting point seems to rae not its economical but
its moral bearing. Its efifect upon the finances of the
country may be accurately computed; its effect upon
the character of the young generation is more of a
mystery. As the analytic tourist wanders of an autumn
,:, aftemoon upon the planted rampart of an ancient town
and meets young soldiers strolling in couples or lean
ing against the parapet and looking off at the quiet
country, he is apt to take the more genial view of the
dreadful trade of arms. He is disposed to say that it
teaches its votaries something that is worth knowing

1 1 6 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and yet is not learned in several other trades — the
hardware, say, or the dry-goods business. Five years
is a good deal to ask of a young life as a sacrifice;
but the sacrifice is in some ways a gain. Certainly,
apart from the question of material defence, it may be
said that no European nation, at present, can afford,
morally, not to pass her young men, the hope of the
country, through the military mill. It does for them
something indispensable; it toughens, hardens, solidi
fies them; gives them an ideal of honour, of some
other possibility in life than raaking a fortune. A
country in which the other trades I spoke of have it
all their own way appears, in coraparison, less educated.
So I raused, as I strolled in the afternoon along the
charraing old city-wall at Laon; and if my meditations
seem pretentious or fallacious, I must say in justice
that I had been a good while coming to them. I had
done a great many things first. I had climbed up the
long straight staircase which has been dropped like a
scaling-ladder frora one of the town-gates to the bottom
of the hill. Laon still has her gates as she still has
her wall, and one of these, the old Porte d'Ardon, is a
really precious relic of mediaeval architecture. I had
repaired to the sign of the Hure — a portrait of this
inhospitable beast is swung from the front of the inn
— and bespoken a lodging; I had spent a long time
in the cathedral, in it and before it, beside it, behind
it; I had walked all over the town, from the citadel,
at one end of the lofty plateau on which it stands, to
the artillery-barracks and the charraing old church of
St. Martin at the other. The cathedral of Laon has
not the elaborate grandeur of that of Rheiras; but it is
a very noble and beautiful church. Nothing can b§

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. II7
finer than its position; it would set off any church to
stand on such a hill-crest. Laon has also a facade of
many sculptures, which, however, has suffered greater
violence than that of Rheims, and is now being care
fully and delicately restored. Whole figures and bas-
reliefs have lately been replaced by exact imitations
in that fresh white French stone which looks at first
like a superior sort of plaster. They were far gone,
and I suppose the restorer's hand was imperiously
called for. I do not know that it has been too freely
used. But half the charm of Laon is the magnificent
colouring of brownish, weather-battered gray which it
owes to the great exposure of its position, and it will
be many a year before thfe chalky scars and patches
will be wrought into dusky harmony with the rest of
the edifice. Fortunately, however, they promise not to
be very numerous; the principal restorations have taken
place inside. I know not what all this labour costs;
but I was interested in learning from the old bell-
ringer at Rheiras that the sum voted by the Chamber
for furbishing up his own church was two millions of
francs, to be expended during ten years. That is
what it is to have "national monuments" to keep up.
One is apt to think of the fourteenth century as a
rather ill- appointed and comfortless period; but the
fact that at the present time the raere repair of one of
its buildings costs forty thousand dollars a year would
indicate that the original builders had a great deal of
money to spend. The cathedral of Laon was intended
to be a wonderful cluster of towers, but only two of
these ornaments^the couple above the west front —
have been carried to a great altitude; the pedestals of
the rest, however, detach theraselves with much vigour,

Il8 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and contribute to the coraplicated and soraewhat fan
tastic look which the church wears at a distance, and
which makes its great effectiveness. The finished
towers are adrairably light and graceful; with the sky
shining through their large interstices they suggest an
imitation of timber in masonry. They have one very
quaint feature. Frora their topmost portions, at each
angle, certain carven heads of oxen peep forward with
a startling naturalness — a tribute to the patient, power
ful beasts who dragged the material of the building
up the long zig-zags of the raountain. We perhaps
treat our durab creatures better to-day than was done
five hundred years ago; but I doubt whether a raodern
architect, in settling his accounts, would have "re
membered," as they say, the oxen.
The whole precinct of the cathedral of Laon is
picturesque. There is a charming Palais de Justice
beside it, separated from it by a pleasant, homely
garden, in which, as you walk about, you have an
excellent view of the towering back and sides of the
great church. The Palais de Justice, which is an
ancient building, has a fine old gothic arcade, and on
the other side, directly upon the city-wall, a picturesque,
irregular rear, with a row of painted windows, through
which, from the salle d' audience, the judge on the bench
and the prisoner in the dock may enjoy a prospect,
admonitory, inspiring, or depressing, as the case may
be, of the expanded country. This great sea-like plain
that lies beneath the town on all sides constitutes, for
Laon, a striking resemblance to those Italian cities —
Siena, Volterra, Perugia — which the traveller remem
bers so fondly as a dark silhouette lifted high against
a glowing sunset. There is something Italian, too, in

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. II9
the mingling of rock and rampart in the old founda
tions of the town, and in the' generous verdure in
which these are muffled. At one end of the hill-top
the plateau becomes a narrow ridge; the slope makes
a deep indentation, which contributes to the effect of
a thoroughly Italian picture. A line of crooked little
red-roofed houses stands on the edge of this indenta
tion, with their feet in the tangled verdure that blooms
in it; and above them rises a large, florid, deserted-
looking church, which you may be sure has a little
empty, grass-grown, out-of-the-way place before it.
Almost opposite, on another spur of the hill, the gray
walls of a suppressed convent peep from among the
trees. I might have been at Perugia.
There came in the evening to the inn of the Hure
a very worthy raan who had vehicles to hire. The
Hure was decidedly a provincial hostelry, and I com
pared it mentally with certain English establishments
of a like degree, of which I had lately had observa
tion. In England I should have had a waiter in an
old evening-suit and a white cravat, who would have
treated me to cold meat and bread and cheese. There
would have been a musty little inn-parlour and pro
bably a very good fire in the grate, and the festally-
attired waiter would have been my sole entertainer.
At Laon I was in perpetual intercourse with the land
lord and his wife, and a large body of easy-going,
confidential domestics. Our intercourse was carried
on in an old darksome stone kitchen, with shining
copper vessels hanging all over the walls, in which I
was free to wander about and take down my key in
one place and rummage out my candlestick in an
other, while the domestics sat at table eating pot-au-

120 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
feu. The landlord cooked the dinner; he wore a
white cap and apron; he brought in the first dish at
the table d'hdte. Of course there was a table d'h6te,
with several laraps and a long array of little dessert-
dishes, for the benefit of two coramercial travellers,
who tucked their napkins into their necks, and the
writer of these lines. Every country has its raanners.
In England the benefits — whatever they are — repre
sented by the evening dress of the waiter would have
been most apparent; in France one was more sensible
of the blessings of which the white cap and apron of
the host were a symbol. In England, certainly, one
is treated more as a gentleman. It is too often for
gotten, however, that even a gentleman partakes of
nourishment. But I am forgetting my dispenser of
vehicles, concerning whom, however, and whose large
red cheeks and crimson cravat, I have left myself room
to say no more than that they were witnesses of a
bargain that I should be driven early on the morrow
morning, in an "Americaine," to the Chateau de
Coucy. The Americaine proved to be a vehicle of
which I should not have been eager to claim the
credit for my native land; but with the aid of a ragged
but resolute little horse, and a driver so susceptible as
regards his beast's appearance that, referring to the
exclamation of dismay with which I had greeted it,
he turned to me at the end of each successive kilo
metre with a rancorous "Now, do you say he can't
go?" — with these accessories, I say, it conveyed me
raore than twenty railes. It was entertaining to wind
down the hillside from Laon in the early morning of
a splendid autumn day; to dip into the glistening
plain, all void of hedges and fences, and sprinkled

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. 121
with light and dew; to jog along the straight white
roads, between the tall, thin poplars; to rattle through
the half-waked villages and past the orchards heavy
with sour-looking crimson apples. The Chateau de
Coucy is a well-known monument; it is one of the
most considerable ruins in France, and it is in some
respects the most extraordinary. As you come from
Laon a turn in the road suddenly, at last, reveals it
to you. It is still at a distance; you will not reach it
for half an hour; but its huge white donjon stands up
like some gigantic lighthouse at sea. Coucy is alto
gether on a grand scale, but this colossal, shining
cylinder is a wonder of bigness. As M. VioUet-le-Duc
says, it seems to have been built by giants for a race
of giants. The very quaint little town of Coucy-le-
Chateau nestles at the foot of this strange, half-sub
stantial, half-spectral structure; it was, together with a
goodly part of the neighbouring country, the feudal
appanage of those terrible lords who erected the pre
sent indestructible edifice, and whose "boastful motto"
(I quote from Murray) was
"Roi je ne suis,
Prince ni comte aussi;
Je suis le Sire de Coucy.''
Coucy is a sleepy little borough, still girdled with its
ancient wall, entered by its old gateways, and sup
ported on the verdurous flanks of a hill-top. I inter
viewed the host of the Golden Apple in his kitchen;
I breakfasted- — ma foi, fort bien, as they would say in
the indigenous tongue — in his parlour; and then I
visited the chateau, which is at five minutes' walk.
This very interesting ruin is the property of the state,
and the state is represented by a very civil and in-

122 PORTRAITS OF PLACES,
telligent woman, who divests the trade of custodian of
almost all its grossness. Any feudal ruin is a charm
ing affair, and Coucy has much of the sweet melan
choly of its class. There are four great towers, con
nected by a massive curtain and enclosing the tre
mendous donjon of which I just now spoke. All this
is very crumbling and silvery; the enclosure is a tangle
of wild verdure, and the pigeons perch upon the in
accessible battlements exactly where the sketcher
would wish thera. But the place lacked, to my sense,
the peculiar softness and venerableness, the ivied
mellowness, of a great English ruin. At Coucy there
is no ivy to speak of; the climate has not caressed
and embroidered the rugged masses of stone. This is
what I meant by speaking of the famous donjon as
spectral; the term is an odd one to apply to an edi
fice whose walls are thirty-four feet thick. Its vast,
pale surface has not a speck nor a stain, not a cling
ing weed nor a creeping plant. It looks like a tower
of ivory. I took my way from Coucy to the ancient town of
Soissons, where I found another cathedral, from which,
I think, I extracted all the entertainment it could
legitimately yield. There is little other to be had at
Soissons, in spite of the suggestiveness of its name,
which is redolent of history and local colour. The
truth is, I suppose, that Soissons looks so new, pre
cisely because she is so old. She is in her second
youth; she has renewed herself The old city was
worn out; it could no longer serve; it has been suc
ceeded by another. The new one is a quiet, rather
aristocratic-looking little ville de province — a collection
of well-conditioned, sober- faced abodes of gentility,

RHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. 1 23
with high-walled gardens behind them and very care
fully closed portes-coch^res in front. Occasionally a
porte-cochfere opens; an elderly lady in black emerges
and paces discreetly away. An old gentleraan has
come to the door with her. He is comfortably cor
pulent; he wears gold spectacles and embroidered
slippers. He looks up and down the dull street, and
sees nothing at all; then he retires, closing the porte-
cochere very softly and firmly. But he has stood there
long enough to give an observant stranger the im
pression of a cautious provincial bourgeoisie that has
a solid fortune well invested, and that marries its
daughters only d bon escient. This latter ceremony,
however, whenever it occurs, probably takes place in
the cathedral, and though resting on a prosaic founda
tion must borrow a certain grace frora that charraing
building. The cathedral of Soissons has a statueless
front and only a single tower; but it is full of a cer
tain natural elegance.

124 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

V.
CHARTRES. 1876.
The spring, in Paris, since it has fairly begun, has
been enchanting. The sun and the moon have been
blazing in emulation, and the difference between the
blue sky of day and of night has been as slight as
possible. There are no clouds in the sky, but there
are little thin green clouds, little puffs of raw, tender
verdure, entangled among the branches of the trees.
All the world is in the streets; the chairs and tables
which have stood erapty all winter before the doors of
the caf6s are at a premium; the theatres have become
intolerably close; the puppet-shows in the Champs
Elysees are the only form of dramatic entertainment
which seems consistent with the season. By way of
doing honour, at a small cost, to this ethereal mildness,
I went out the other day to the ancient town of Chartres,
where I spent several hours, which I cannot consent to
pass over as if nothing had happened. It is the ex
perience of the writer of these lines, who likes nothing
so much as moving about to see the world, that if one
has been for a longer time than usual resident and
stationary, there is a kind of overgrown entertainment
in taking the train, even for a suburban goal; and that

CHARTRES. 1 25
if one takes it on a charming April day, when there
is a sense, almost an odour, of change in the air, the
innocent pleasure is as nearly as possible complete.
My accessibility to emotions of this kind amounts to
an infirmity, and the effect of it was to send me down
to Chartres in a shamelessly optimistic state of mind.
I was so prepared to be entertained and pleased with
everything that it is only a mercy that the cathedral
happens really to be a fine building.- If it had not
been, I should still have admired it inordinately, at
the risk of falling into heaven knows what esthetic
heresy. But I am almost ashamed to say how soon
my entertainment began. It began, I think, with ray
hailing a little open carriage on the Boulevard and
causing myself to be driven to the Gare de I'Ouest —
far away across the river, up the Rue Bonaparte, of
art-student memories, and along the big, straight Rue
de Rennes to the Boulevard Montparnasse. Of course,
at this rate, by the time I reached Chartres — the jour
ney is of a couple of hours — I had alraost drained the
cup of pleasure. But it was replenished at the station,
at the "buffet, from the pungent bottle of wine I drank
with my breakfast. Here, by the way, is another ex
cellent excuse for being delighted with any day's ex
cursion in France — that wherever you are, you may
breakfast to your taste. There may, indeed, if the
station is very small, be no buffet; but if there is a
buffet, you may be sure that civilisation — in the per
sons of a sympathetic young woman in a well-made
black dress, and a rapid, zealous, grateful waiter — pre
sides at it. It was quite the least, as the French say,
that after my breakfast I should have thought the
cathedral, as I saw it from the top of the steep hill

126 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
on which the town stands, rising high above the
clustered houses and seeming to make of their red-
roofed agglomeration a mere pedestal for its iraraense
beauty, promised remarkably well. You see it so as
you emerge from the station, and then, as you climb
slowly into town, you lose sight of it. You perceive
Chartres to be a rather shabby little ville de province,
with a few sunny, empty open places, and crooked
shady streets, in which two or three times you lose
your way, until at last, after more than once catching
a glimpse, high above sorae slit between the houses,
of the clear gray towers shining against the blue sky,
you push forward again, risk another short cut, turn
another interposing corner, and stand before the goal
of your pilgriraage.
I spent a long time looking at this raonuraent. I
revolved around it, like a moth around a candle; I
went away and I came back; I chose twenty different
standpoints; I observed it during the different hours
of the day, and saw it in the moonlight as well as the
sunshine. I gained, in a word, a certain sense of
farailiarity with it; and yet I despair of giving any
coherent account of it. Like most French cathedrals,
it rises straight out of the street, and is destitute of
that setting of turf and trees and deaneries and
canonries which contribute so largely to the impres
siveness of the great English churches. Thirty years
ago a row of old houses was glued to its base and
made their back walls of its sculptured sides. These
have been plucked away, and, relatively speaking, the
church is fairly isolated. But the little square that
surrounds it is deplorably narrow, and you flatten your
back against the opposite houses in the vain attempt

CHARTRES. 1 27
to stand off and survey the towers. The proper way
to look at them would be to go up in a balloon and
hang poised, face to face with them, in the blue air.
There is, however, perhaps an advantage in being
forced to stand so directly under them, for this posi
tion gives you an overwhelming impression of their
height. I have seen, I suppose, churches as beautiful
as this one, but I do not remember ever to have been
so fascinated by superpositions and vertical effects.
The endless upward reach of the great west front, the
clear, silvery tone of its surface, the way three or four
magnificent features are made to occupy its serene
expanse, its simplicity, majesty, and dignity — these
things crowd upon one's sense with a force that makes
the act of vision seera for the raoraent alraost all of
life. The impressions produced by architecture lend
themselves as little to interpretation by another medium
as those produced by music. Certainly there is an in
expressible harmony in the fajade of Chartres.
The doors are rather low, as those of the English
cathedrals are apt to be, but (standing three together)
are set in a deep framework of sculpture — rows of
arching grooves, filled with admirable little images,
standing with their heels on each other's heads. The
church, as it now exists, except the northern tower,
dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and
these closely-packed figures are full of the grotesque-
ness of the period. Above the triple portals is a vast
round-topped window, in three divisions, ofthe grandest
dimensions and the stateliest effect. Above this win
dow is a circular aperture, of huge circumference, with
a double row of sculptured spokes radiating frora its
centre and looking on its lofty field of stone, as

128 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
expansive and symbolic as if it were the wheel of
Time itself Higher still is a little gallery with a
delicate balustrade, supported on a beautiful cornice
and stretching across the front from tower to tower;
and above this is a range of niched statues of
kings — fifteen, I believe, in number. Above the
statues is a gable, with an image of the Virgin
and Child on its front, and another of .Christ on its
apex. In the relation of all these parts there is such
a high felicity that while on the one side the eye rests
on a great many large blanks there is no approach on
the other to poverty. The little gallery that I have
spoken of, beneath the statues of the kings, had for
me a peculiar charra. Useless, at its treraendous alti
tude, for other purposes, it seeraed intended for the
little images to step down and walk about upon. When
the great fajade begins to glow in the late afternoon
light, you can imagine them strolling up and down
their long balcony in couples, pausing with their
elbows on the balustrade, resting their stony chins in
their hands, and looking out, with their little blank
eyes, on the great view of the old French monarchy
they once ruled, and which now has passed away.
The two great towers of the cathedral are among the
noblest of their kind. They rise in solid simplicity to
a height as great as the eye often troubles itself to
travel, and then suddenly they begin to execute a
magnificent series of feats in architectural gymnastics.
This is especially true of the northern spire, which is
a late creation, dating from the sixteenth century.
The other is relatively quiet; but its companion is a
sort of tapering bouquet of sculptured stone. Statues
and buttresses, gargoyles, arabesques and crockets pile

CHARTRES. 1 29
themselves in successive stages, until the eye loses the
sense of everything but a sort of architectural lace-
work. The pride of Chartres, after its front, is the
two portals of its transepts— great dusky porches, in
three divisions, covered with more images than I have
time to talk about. Wherever you look, along the
sides of the church, a time-worn image is niched or
perched. The face of each flying buttress is garnished
with one, with the features quite melted away.
The inside of the cathedral corresponds in vastness
and grandeur to the outside — it is the perfection of
gothic in its prime. But I looked at it rapidly, the
place was so intolerably cold. It seeraed to answer
one's query of what becomes of the winter when the
spring chases it away. The winter hereabouts has
sought an asylum in Chartres cathedral, where it has
found plenty of room and may reside in a state of ex
cellent preservation until it can safely venture abroad
again. I supposed I had been in cold churches before,
but the delusion had been an injustice to the tem
perature of Chartres. The nave was full of the little
padded chairs of the local bourgeoisie, whose faith, I
hope for their corafort, is of the good old red-hot cora-
plexion. In a higher temperature I should have done
more justice to the magnificent old glass of the windows
— which glowed through the icy dusk like the purple
and orange of a winter sunset — and to the iraraense
sculptured external casing of the choir. This latter is
an extraordinary piece of work. It is a high gothic
screen, shutting in the choir, and covered with elaborate
bas-reliefs of the sixteenth and seventeeth centuries,
representing scenes from the life of Christ and of the
Virgin. Some of the figures are admirable, and the
Portraits of Places. 9

130 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
effect of the whole great semicircular wall, chiselled
like a silver bowl, is superb. There is also a crypt of
high antiquity and, I believe, great interest, to be seen;
but my teeth chattered a respectful negative to the
sacristan who offered to guide me to it. It was so
agreeable to stand in the warra outer air again, that I
spent the rest of the day in it.
Athough, besides its cathedral, Chartres has no
very rare architectural treasures, the place is pictorial,
in a shabby, third-rate, poverty-stricken degree, and
my observations were not unremunerative. There is a
little church of Saint-Aignan, of the sixteenth century,
with an elegant, decayed fajade, and a small tower
beside it, lower than its own roof, to which it is joined,
in unequal twinship, by a single long buttress. Stand
ing there with its crumbling Renaissance doorway, in
a kind of grass-grown alcove, it reminded me of cer
tain monuments that the tourist encounters in small
Italian towns. Most of the streets of Chartres are
crooked lanes, winding over the face of the steep hill,
the summit of the hill being occupied by half a
dozen little open squares, which seem like reservoirs
of the dulness and stillness that flow through the place.
In the midst of one of thera rises an old dirty brick
obelisk, commemorating the glories of the young General
Marceau, of the first Republic — "Soldier at i6, general
at 2;^,, he died at 27." Such memorials, when one
comes upon thera unexpectedly, produce in the mind
a series of circular waves of feeling, like a splash in a
quiet pond. Chartres gives us an impression of ex
treme antiquity, but it is an antiquity that has gone
down in the world. I saw very few of those stately
little hotels, with pilastered fronts, which look so well

CHARTRES. I 3 1
in the silent streets of provincial towns. The houses
are mostly low, small, and of sordid aspect, and though
many of them have overhanging upper stories, and
steep, battered gables, they are rather wanting in cha
racter. I was struck, as an American always is in
small French and English towns, with the immense
number of shops, and their brilliant appearance, which
seems so out of proportion to any visible body of con
sumers. At Chartres the shopkeepers must all feed
upon each other, for, whoever buys, the whole popula
tion sells. This population appeared to consist mainly
of several hundred brown old peasant women, in the
seventies and eighties, with their faces cross-hatched
with wrinkles and their quaint white coifs drawn tightly
over their weather-blasted eye-brows. Labour-stricken
grandams, all the world over, are the opposite of lovely,
for the toil that wrestles for its daily bread, morsel by
morsel, is not beautifying; but I thought I had never
seen the possibilities of feraale ugliness so variously
embodied as in the crones of Chartres. Sorae of thera
were leading sraall children by the hand — little red-
cheeked girls, in the close black caps and black pina
fores of humble French infancy — a costurae which
makes French children always look like orphans. Others
were guiding along the flinty lanes the steps of small
donkeys, some of them fastened into little carts, some
with well-laden backs. These were the only quadrupeds
I perceived at Chartres. Neither horse nor carriage
did I behold, save at the station the omnibuses of the
rival inns — the "Grand Monarque" and the "Due de
Chartres" — which glare at each other across the Grande
Place. A friend of mine told me that a few years ago,
9'

132 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
passing through Chartres, he went by night to call
upon a gentleman who lived there. During his visit it
carae on to rain violently, and when the hour for his
departure arrived the rain had made the streets im
passable. There was no vehicle to be had, and my
friend was resigning himself to a soaking. "You can
be taken of course in the sedan-chair," said his host
with dignity. The sedan-chair was produced, a couple
of serving-men grasped the handles, my friend stepped
into it, and went swinging back — through the last cen
tury — to the "Grand Monarque." This little anecdote,
I imagine, still paints Chartres socially.
Before dinner I took a walk on the planted pro
menade which encircles the town — the Tour-de-ville it
is called — rauch of which is extremely picturesque.
Chartres has lost her walls as a whole, but here and
there they survive, and play a desultory part in hold
ing the town together. In one place the rarapart is
really raagnificent — smooth, strong and lofty, curtained
with ivy, and supporting on its surarait an old convent
and its garden. Only one of the city-gates reraains —
a narrow arch of the fourteenth century, flanked by
two adrairable round towers, and preceded by a fosse.
If you stoop a little, as you stand outside, the arch of
this hoary old gate makes a capital setting for the
picture of the interior of the town, and, on the inner
hill-top, against the sky, the large gray mass of the
cathedral. The ditch is full, and to right and to left
it flows along the base of the mouldering wall, through
which the shabby backs of houses extrade, and which
is garnished with little wooden galleries, lavatories of
the town's soiled linen. These little galleries are filled

CHARTRES. 1 33
with washerwomen, who crane over and dip their many-
coloured rags into the yellow stream. The old patched
and interrupted wall, the ditch with its weedy edges,
the spots of colour, the white-capped laundresses in
their little wooden cages — one lingers to look at it all.

134 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

VI.
ROUEN. 1876.
It is quite in the nature of things that a Parisian
correspondence should have flagged during the last
few weeks; for even the most brilliant of capitals, when
the summer has fairly begun to be summer, affords
few topics to the chronicler. To a chronicle of small
beer such a correspondence almost literally finds itself
reduced. The correspondent consumes a goodly number
of those magnified thimblefuls of this fluid, known in
Paris as "bocks,'' and from the shadiest corner of the
coolest cafe he can discover watches the softened
bitumen grow more largely interspaced. There is little
to do or to see, and therefore little to write about.
There is in fact only one thing to do, namely, to get
out of Paris. The lively imagination of the correspon
dent anticipates his departure and takes flight to one
of the innuraerable watering-places whose charms at
this season are set forth in large yellow and pink
placards on all the empty walls. They order this
matter, like so many others, much better in France.
Here you have not, as in America, to hunt up the
"summer retreat" about which you desire information
in a dense alphabetical list in the columns of a news-

ROUEN. 135
paper; you are familiar with its merits for weeks be
fore you start — you have seen them half a dozen times
a day emblazoned on the line of your customary walk,
over the hand and seal of the company that runs, as
we should say in America, the Casino. If you are de
tained in Paris, however, after luckier mortals have
departed — your reflections upon the fate of the luck
less mortals who do not depart at all are quite another
question, demanding another chapter — it does not per
haps make you much happier to peruse these lyrical
advertisements, which seem to flutter with the breezes
of Houlgate and Etretat. You must take your con
solation where you can find it, and it must be added
that of all great cities Paris is the most tolerable in
hot weather. It is true that the asphalt liquifies, and
it is true that the brilliant limestone of which the city
is built reflects the sun with uncomfortable fierceness.
It is also true that of a summer evening you pay a
penalty for living in the best-lighted capital in the
world. The inordinate amount of gas in the streets
makes the atmosphere hot and thick, so that even under
the dim constellations you feel of a July night as if
you were in a big music-hall. If you look down at
such a time upon the central portions of Paris frora a
high window in areraoter quarter, you see them wrapped
in a lurid haze, of the devil's own brewing. But, on
the other hand, there are a hundred facilities for re
maining out of doors. You are not obliged to sit on a
"stoop" or on a curb-stone, as in New- York. The
Boulevards are a long chain of caf^s, each one with its
little promontory of chairs and tables projecting into
the sea of asphalt. These promontories are doubtless
not exactly islands of the blessed, peopled though some

136 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of them raay be with sirens addicted to beer, but they
may help you to pass a hot evening. Then you may
dine in the Champs Elysees,- at a table spread under
the trees, beside an ivied wall, and almost believe you
are in the country. This illusion, imperfect as it is, is
a luxury, and must be paid for accordingly; the dinner
is not so good as at a restaurant on the Boulevard,
and is considerably dearer, and there is after all not
much difference in sitting with one's feet in dusty
gravel or on a sanded floor. But the whole situation
is more idyllic. I indulged in a cheap idyl the other
day by taking the penny steamer down the Seine to
Auteuil (a very short sail), and dining at what is called
in Parisian parlance a guinguette on the bank of the
streara. It was a very humble style of entertainment, but
the most ambitious pursuit of pleasure can do no more
than succeed, and this was a success. The Seine at
Auteuil is wide, and is spanned by a stately viaduct of
two tiers of arches, which stands up against the sky in
a picturesque and monumental manner. Your table is
spread under a trellis which scratches your head —
spread chiefly with fried fish — and an old man who
looks like a political exile comes and stands before it
and sings a doleful ditty on the respect due to white
hairs. You testify by the bestowal of copper coin the
esteem with which his own inspire you, and he is
speedily replaced by a lad with one arm, who treats
you to something livelier:
"A la bonne heure; parlez-moi de 5a!"
You eventually return to Paris on the top of a tram-car.
It is a very different affair to go out and dine at the
Bois de Boulogne, at the charraing restaurant which

ROUEN. 137
is near the cascade and the Longchamp race-course.
Here are no ballad-singers, but stately trees majestically
grouped and making long evening shadows on a lawn,
and irreproachable tables, and carriages rolling up
behind high-stepping horses and depositing all sorts
of ladies. The drive back through the wood at night
is most charming, and the coolness of the air ex
treme, however hot you may still be certain to find
the city.
The best thing, therefore, is not to go back. I
¦write these lines at an inn at Havre, before a window
which frames the picture of the seaward path of the
transatlantic steamers. One of the great black ships
is at this moment painted on the canvas, very near,
and beginning its outward journey. I watch it to the
right-hand ledge of the window, which is as far as so
poor a sailor need be expected to follow it. The hotel
at Havre is called, for mysterious reasons, "Frascati"
- — reasons which I give up the attempt to fathom, so
undiscoverable are its points of analogy with the
lovely village of the same name which nestles among
the olives of the Roraan hills. The locality has its
charms, however. It is very agreeable, for instance,
at the end of a hot journey, to sit down to dinner in
a great open cage, hung over the Atlantic, and, while
the sea-breeze cools your wine, watch the swiftly-
moving ships pass before you like the figures on the
field of a magic lantern. It is pleasant also to open
your eyes in the early dawn, before the light is intense,
and without moving your head oni,the pillow, enjoy
the sarae clear vision of the ocean highway. In the
vague dusk, with their rapid gliding, the passing
vessels look like the ghosts of wrecked ships. Most

138 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
seaports are picturesque, and Havre is not the least
so; but my enjoyment has been not of my goal, but of
my journey.
My head is full of the twenty-four hours I have
just passed at Rouen, and of the charraing sail down
the Seine to Honfleur. Rouen is a city of very ancient
renown, and yet I confess I was not prepared to find
a little town of so much expression. The traveller
who treads the Rouen streets at the present day sees
but the shadow of their former characteristics; for the
besom of M. Haussmann has swept through the city,
and a train of "embellishments" has followed in its
track. The streets have been widened and straight
ened, and the old houses — gems of mediaeval domestic
architecture — ^which forraed the peculiar treasure of
the place, have been more than decimated. A great
deal remains, however, and American eyes are quick
to make discoveries. The cathedral, the churches, the
Palais de Justice, are alone a splendid group of monu
ments, and a stroll through the streets reveals a col
lection of brown and sculptured facades, of quaintly-
timbered gables, of curious turrets and casements, of
doorways which still may be called rich. Every now
and then a considerable stretch of duskiness and
crookedness delights the sentimental tourist who is to
pass but a couple of nights at Rouen, and who does
not care if his favourite adjective happen to imply
another element which also is spelled with a p. It is
nothing to him that the picturesque is pestiferous. It
is everything to him that the great front of the cathe
dral is magnificently battered, heavy, impressive. It
has been defaced immensely, and is now hardly more
than a collection of erapty niches. I do not mean, of

ROUEN. 139
course, tliat the wanton tourist rejoices in the absence
of the statues which once filled them, but up to the
present raoraent, at least, he is not sorry that the
fajade has not been restored. It consists of a sort of
screen, pierced in the centre with a huge wheel-
window, crowned with a pyramid of chiselled needles
and spires, flanked with two turrets capped with tall
empty canopies, and covered, generally, with sculptures
— friezes, statues, excrescences. On each side of it
rises a great tower; one a rugged mass of early Nor
man work, with little ornament save its hatcheted
closed arches, and its great naked base, as huge and
white as the bottora of a chalk-cliff; the other a speci
men of sixteenth century gothic, extremely flamboyant
and confounding to the eye. The sides of the cathe
dral are as yet more or less imbedded in certain black
and dwarfish old houses, but if you pass around them
by a long detour, you arrive at two superb lateral
porches. The so-called Portail des Libraires, in
especial, on the northern side, is a magnificent affair,
sculptured from summit to base (it is now restored),
and preceded by a long fore-court, in which the guild
of booksellers used to hold its musty traffic. From
here you see the immense central tower, perched above
the junction of the transepts and the nave, and
crowned with a gigantic iron spire, lately erected to
replace one which was destroyed by lightning in the
early part of the century. This gaunt pyramid has the
drawback, to American eyes, of resembling too much
the tall fire-towers which are seen in transatlantic
cities, and its dimensions are such that, viewed frora
a distance, it fairly raakes little Rouen look top-heavy.
Behind the choir, within, is a beautiful lady-chapel.

I40 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and in this chapel are two enchanting works of art.
The larger and more striking of these is the tomb of
the two Cardinals d'Amboise, uncle and nephew — the
elder, if I raistake not, minister of Louis XII. It con
sists of a shallow, oblong recess in the wall, lined with
gilded and fretted marble, and corniced with delicate
little statues. Within the recess the figures of the two
cardinals are kneeling, with folded hands and ruggedly
earnest faces, their long robes spread out behind them
with magnificent amplitude. They are full of life,
dignity, and piety; they look like portraits of Holbein
transferred into marble. The base of the monument
is composed of a series of admirable little images
representing the cardinal and other virtues, and the
efifect of the whole work is wonderfully grave and rich.
The discreet traveller will never miss an opportunity
to come into a great church at eventide — ^the hour
when his fellow-travellers, less discreet, are lingering
over the table d'hote, when the painted windows glow
with a deeper splendour, when the long wand of the
beadle, slowly tapping the pavement, or the shuffle of
the old sacristan, has a ghostly resonance along the
empty nave, and three or four work-weary woraen,
before a dusky chapel, are mumbling for the remission
of unimagina"ble sins. At this hour, at Rouen, the
torab of the Duke of Breze, husband of Diana of
Poitiers, placed opposite to the raonuraent I have just
described, seemed to me the most beautiful thing in
the world. It is presumably the work of the delightful
Jean Goujon, and it bears the stamp of his graceful
and inventive talent. The deceased is lying on his
back, almost naked, with a part of his shroud bound
in a knot about his head — a realistic but not a repul-

ROUEN. 141
sive image of death. At his head kneels the amiable
Diana, in sober garments, all decency and devotion;
at his feet stands the Virgin, a charming young woraan
with a charming child. Above, on another tier, the
subject of the monument is represented in the fulness
of life, dressed as for a tournament, bestriding a high-
stepping war-horse, riding forth like a Roland or a
Galahad. The architecture of the tomb is exceedingly
graceful and the subordinate figures admirable, but
the image of the dead Duke is altogether a master
piece. The other evening, in the solemn stillness and
the fading light of the great cathedral, it seemed irre
sistibly human and touching. The spectator felt a sort
of impulse to smooth out the shroud and straighten
the helpless hands.
The second church of Rouen, Saint-Ouen, the
beautiful and harmonious, has no monuments of this
value, but it offers within a higher interest than the
Cathedral. Without, it looks like an English abbey,
scraped and restored, disencumbered of huddling
neighbours and surrounded on three sides by a beauti
ful garden. Seen to this excellent advantage it is one
of the noblest of churches; but within, it is one of the
most fascinating. My taste in architecture greatly
resembles ray opinions in fruit; the particular raelon
or pear or peach that I ara eating appears to me to
place either peaches, pears, or melons, beyond all
other succulent things. In the same way, in a fine
building the present irapression is the one that con
vinces me most. This is deplorable levity; yet I risk
the affirmation d propos of Saint-Ouen. I can imagine
no happier combination of lightness and majesty. Its
proportions bring tears to the eyes. I have left my-

142 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
self space only to recomraend the sail down the Seine
from Rouen to the mouth of the stream; but I recom
mend it in the highest terms. The heat was extreme
and the little steamer raost primitive, but the river is
as entertaining as one could wish. It makes an infinite
number of bends and comers and angles, rounded off
by a charraing vegetation. Abrupt and rocky hills go
with it all the way — hills with cornfields lying in their
hollows and deep woods crowning their tops. Out of
the woodland peep old manors, and beneath, between
the hills and the stream, are high-thatched farmsteads,
lying deep in their meadows and orchards, cottages
pallisaded with hollyhocks, gray old Norman churches
and villas flanked with big horse-chestnuts. It is a
land of peace and plenty, and remarkable to Anglo-
Saxon eyes for the English-looking details of its
scenery. I noticed a hundred places where one might
have been in Kent as well as in Normandy. In fact it
is alraost better than Kent, for Kent has no Seine. At
the last the river becoraes unraistakably an arm of the
sea, and as a river, therefore, less interesting. But
crooked little Honfleur, with its miniature port, clinging
to the side of a cliff as luxuriant as one of the head
lands of the Mediterranean, gratifies in a high degree
the tourist with a propensity for sketching.

ETRETAT. 1 43

VII.
ETRETAT. 1876.
The coast of Normandy and Picardy, from Trou
ville to Boulogne, is a chain of stations balniaires, each
with its particular claim to patronage. The grounds
of the claim are in some cases not especially obvious;
but they are generally found to reside in the fact that
if one's spirits, on arriving, are low, so also are the
prices. There are the places that are dear and
brilliant, like Trouville and Dieppe, and places that
are cheap and dreary, like Fecamp and Cabourg.
Then there are the places that are both cheap and
pleasant. This delightful combination of qualities
may be found at the modest plage from which I write
these lines. At Etretat you raay enjoy sorae of the
finest cliff-scenery it has been my fortune to behold,
and you may breakfast and dine at the principal hotel
for the sum of five and a half francs a day. You raay
engage a room in the town over the butcher's, the
baker's, the cobbler's, at a rate that will depend upon
your talent for driving a bargain, but that in no case
will be exorbitant. Add to this that there are no
other opportunities at Etretat to spend money. You
¦wear old clothes, you walk about in canvas shoes, you

144 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
deck your head with a fisherman's cap (when made
of white flannel these articles may be extolled for
^their coolness, convenience, and picturesqueness), you
lie on the pebbly strand most of the day, watching
the cliffs, the waves, and the bathers; in the evening
you converse with your acquaintance on the terrace of
the Casino, and you keep monkish hours. Though
Etretat enjoys great and deserved popularity, I see no
symptoms of the decline of these simple fashions — no
menace of the invasion of luxury. A little more
luxury, indeed, might be imported without doing any
harra; though after all we soon leam that it is an
idle enough prejudice that has hitherto prevented us
frora keeping our soap in a sugar-dish and regarding
a small rock, placed against a door, as an efficient
substitute for a key. From a Parisian point of view,
Etretat is certainly primitive, but it would be affecta
tion on the part of an American to pretend that he
was not agreeably surprised to find a " summer resort,"
in which he had been warned that he would have to
rough it, so elaborately appointed and organised.
Etretat may be primitive, but Etretat is French, and
therefore Etretat is "administered."
Like raost of the French watering-places, the place
has a liraited past. Twenty years ago it was but a
cluster of fishing-huts. A group of artists and literary
people were its first colonists, and Alphonse Karr be
came the mouthpiece of their enthusiasm. In vulgar
phrase, he wrote up Etretat, and he lives in legend,
at the present hour, as the genius loci. The main
street is named after him; the gable of the chief inn
— the classic H6tel Blanquet- — is adorned with a co
loured medallion representing his cropped head and

ETRETAT. 1 45
long beard; the shops are stocked with his photo
graphs and with pictures of his villa. Like the ma
gician who has evoked the spirit, he has made his
bow and retired; but the artistic fraternity, his dis
ciples, still haunt the place, and it enjoys also the
favour of theatrical people, three or four of whom,
having retired upon their laurels, possess villas here.
From my open window, as I write these lines, I look
out beyond a little cluster of clean housetops at the
long green flank of the down, as it slopes to the vil
lage from the summit of the clifif To the right is the
top of an old storm-twisted grove of oaks, in the heart
of which stands a brown old farmhouse; then comes
the sharp, even outline of the down, with its side
spotted with little flat bushes and wrinkled with wind
ing paths, along which here and there I see a bright
figure moving; on the left, above the edge of the cliff,
stands a bleak little chapel, dedicated to our Lady of
the fishing-folk. Just here a provoking chimney starts
up and cuts off my view of the downward plunge of
the cliff, showing me, with a bar of blue ocean beyond,
but a glimpse of its white cheek — its fantastic profile
is to the left. But there is not far to go to see without
impediments. Three minutes' walk along the Rue
Alphonse Karr, where every house is a shop, and
every shop has lodgers above it, who scramble bedward
by a ladder and trap-door, brings you to the little
pebbly bay where the cliffs are perpendicular and the
foreign life of Etretat goes forward. At one end are
the small fishing-smacks, with their green sides and
their black sails, resting crookedly upon the stones; at
the other is the Casino, and the two or three tiers of
bathing-houses on the slope of the beach in front of
Portraits of Places. 'O

146 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
it. This beach may be said to be Etretat. It is so
steep and stony as to make circulation impossible;
one's only course is to plant a camp-chair among the
stones or to look for a soft spot in the pebbles, and
to abide in the position so chosen. And yet it is the
spot in Etretat raost sacred to tranquil pleasure.
The French do not treat their beaches as we do
ours — as places for a glance, a dip, or a trot, places
animated simply during the balneary hours, and
wrapped in natural desolation for the rest of the
twenty- four. They love them, they adore them, they
take possession of them, they live upon them. The
people here sit upon the beach from morning' to night;
whole farailies corae early and establish theraselves,
with umbrellas and rugs, books and work. The ladies
get sunburnt and don't mind it; the gentlemen smoke
interminably; the children roll over on the pointed
pebbles and stare at the sun like young eagles. (The
children's lot I rather commiserate; they have no
wooden spades and pails; they have no sand to delve
and grub in; they can dig no trenches and canals, nor
see the creeping tide flood them.) The great occupa
tion and amusement is the bathing, which has many
entertaining features (I allude to it as a spectacle),
especially for strangers who keep an eye upon national
idiosyncrasies. The French take their bathing very
seriously; supplemented by opera-boufife in the even
ing at the Casino, it is their most preferred form of
communion with nature. The spectators and the
bathers commingle in graceful promiscuity; it is the
freedom of the golden age. The whole beach becomes
a large family party, in which the sweetest familiarities
prevail. There is more or less costume, but the

ETRETAT.

147

minimum rather than the maximum is found the more
comfortable. Bathers come out of their dressing-houses
wrapped in short white sheets, which they deposit on
the stones, taking an air-bath for some minutes before
entering the water. Like everything in France, the
bathing is excellently managed, and you feel the firm
hand of a paternal and overlooking government the
moment you issue from your hut. The Government
will on no consideration consent to your being rash.
There are six or eight worthy old sons of Neptune on
the beach — perfect amphibious creatures, — who, if you
are a new-comer, immediately accost you and demand
pledges that you know how to swim. If you do not,
they give you much excellent advice, and keep an
eye on you while you are in the water. They are
moreover obliged to render you any service you may
demand^ — to pour buckets of water over your head, to
fetch your bathing-sheet and your slippers, to carry
your wife and children into the sea, to dip them,
cheer them, sustain them, to teach them how to swim
and how to dive, to hover about, in short, like minister
ing and trickling angels. At a short distance from the
shore are two boats, freighted with sundry other
marine divinities, who remain there perpetually, taking
it as a personal offence if you venture out too far.
The French themselves have every pretext for
venturing, being in general excellent swimmers. Every
one swims, and swims indefatigably — raen, woraen,
and children. I have been especially struck with the
prowess of the ladies, who take the neatest possible
headers from the two long plunging-boards which are
rigged in the water upon high wheels. As you recline
upon the beach you may observe Mademoiselle X.
10*

148 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
issue from her cabin — Mademoiselle X., the actress of
the Palais Royal Theatre, whom you have seen and
applauded behind the footlights. She wears a bathing-
dress in which, as regards the trousers, even what I
have called the minimum has been appreciably scanted;
but - she trips down , surveying her liberated limbs.
"C'est convenable, j'espire, hein?" says Mademoiselle,
and trots up the spring-board which projects over the
waves with one end uppermost, like a great see-saw.
She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial
dive, executing on the way the most graceful of
somersaults. This performance the star of the Palais
Royal repeats during the ensuing hour, at intervals of
five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie tossing little
stones into the water, to consider the curious and
delicate question why a lady raay go so far as to put
herself into a single scant clinging garraent and take
a straight leap, head downward, before three hundred
spectators, without violation of propriety — and why
impropriety should begin only when she turns over in
the air in such a way that for five seconds her head
is upwards. The logic of the raatter is mysterious;
white and black are divided by a hair. But the fact
remains that virtue is on one side of the hair and
vice on the other. There are some days here so still
and radiant, however, that it seems as if vice itself,
steeped in such an air and such a sea, might be di
luted into innocence. The sea is as blue as melted
sapphires, and the rugged white faces of the border
ing cliffs make a silver frame for the picture. Every
one is idle, amused, good-natured; the bathers take to
the water as easily as mermen and mermaids. The
bathingmen in the two bateaux de surveillance have in

ETRETAT.

149

their charge a freight of rosy children, more or less
chubbily naked, and they have nailed a gay streamer
and a mde nosegay to their low mastheads. The
swimmers dip and rise, circling round the boats and
playing with the children. Every now and then they
grasp the sides of the boats and cling to thera in a
dozen harmonious attitudes, making one fancy that
Eugtee Delacroix's great picture of Dante and Virgil
on the Styx, with the damned trying to scramble into
Charon's bark, has been repainted as a scene on one
of the strearas of Paradise. The swiramers are not
the damned, but the blessed, and the demonstrative
French babies are the cherubs.
The Casino at Etretat is a modest but respectable
establishment, with a sufficiently capacious terrace, di
rectly upon the beach, a cafe, a billiard-roora, a ball
room — which may also be used as a theatre, a read
ing-room, and a salon de conversation. It is in very
good taste, without any attempt at gilding or mirrors;
the ballroom, in fact, is quite a master-piece, with its
charra of effect produced simply by unpainted woods
and happy proportions. Three evenings in the week
a blond young man in a white necktie plays waltzes
on a grand piano; but the effect is not that of an
American "hop," owing to the young ladies of France
not being permitted to dance in public places. They
may only sit wistfully beside their mammas. Imagine
a "hop" at which sweet seventeen is condemned to
immobility. The burden of the gaiety is sustained by
three or four rosy English maidens and as many of
their American sisters. On the other evenings a weak
little operatic troupe gives light specimens of the lyric
drama, the privilege of enjoying which is covered by

150 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
your subscription to the Casino. The French hurry in
joyously (four times a week in July and August!) at
the sound of the bell, but I can give no report of the
perforraances. Sometimes I look through the lighted
windows and see, on the diminutive stage, a short-
skirted young woraan with one hand on her heart and
the other persuasively extended. Through the hot un
pleasant air coraes a little ghost of a roulade. I tum
away and walk on the terrace and listen to the ocean
vocalising to the stars.
But there are (by daylight) other walks at Etretat
than the terrace, and no account of the place is com
plete without some commemoration of the admirable
cliffs. They are the finest I have seen; their fantastic
needles and buttresses, at either end of the little bay,
give to careless Etretat an extreme distinction. In
spite of there being no sands, a persistent admirer of
nature will walk a long distance upon the tiresome
sea-margin of pebbles for the sake of being under
thera and visiting sorae of their quiet caves and em
browned recesses, varnished by the ocean into splendid
tones. Seen in this way frora directly below, they
look stupendous; they hold up their heads with atti
tudes quite Alpine. They are marvellously white and
straight and smooth; they have the tint and something
of the surface of time-yellowed marble, and here and
there, at their sumraits, they break into quaint little
pinnacles and turrets. But to be on the top of them
is even better; here you may walk over miles of grassy,
breezy down, with the woods, contorted and sea-stunted,
of old farmsteads on your land-side (the farmhouses
here have all a charming way of being buried in a
wood, like the castle of the Sleeping Beauty), com-

ETRETAT. 1 5 I
ing every little while upon a weather -blackened
old shepherd and his flock (their conversation — the
shepherds' — is delightful), or on some little seaward-
plunging valley, holding in its green hollow a diminu
tive agricultural village, curtained round from the sea-
winds by a dense stockade of trees. So you may go
southward or northward, without irapediment, to Havre
or to Dieppe.

152 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

vm.
FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES.
1876.
The other day, before the first fire of winter, when
the deepening dusk had compelled me to close my
book and wheel my chair closer, I indulged in a re
trospect. The objects of it were not far distant, and
yet they were already interfused with the mellow tints
of the past. In the crackling flame the last remnant
of the sumraer appeared to shrink up and vanish. But
the flicker of its destruction made a sort of fantastic
imagery, and in the midst of the winter fire the sum
mer sunshine seemed to glow. It lit up a series of
visible raeraories.

One of the first was that of a perfect day on the
coast of Normandy — a warm, still Sunday in the early
part of August. From my pillow, on waking, I could
look at a strip of blue sea and a great cube of white
cliff I observed that the sea had never been so bril
liant, and that the cliff was shining as if it had been
painted in the night. I rose and came forth with the
sense that it was the finest day of summer, and that

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I 53
one ought to do soraething uncommon by way of keep
ing it. At Etretat it was uncommon to take a walk;
the custom of the country is to lie all day upon the
pebbly strand, watching, as we should say in America,
one's fellow-boarders. Your leisurely stroll, in a scanty
sheet, from your bathing-cabin into the water, and your
trickling progress from the water back into your cabin,
form, as a general thing, the sum total of your pe-
destrianism. For the rest you remain horizontal, con
templating the horizon. To mark the day with a
white stone, therefore, it was quite sufficient to stretch
my legs. So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which
shuts in the little bay on the right (as you lie on the
beach, head upward), and gained the bleak white
chapel of Notre Dame de la Garde, which a lady told
me she was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's
"little gray church on the windy shore." This is very
likely; but the little church to-day was not gray,
neither was the shore windy.
I had occasion, by the tirae I reached the summit,
to wish it had been. Deep, silent sunshine filled the
air, and the long grass of the downs stood up in the
light without a tremor. The downs at Etretat are
magnificent, and the way they stretched off toward
Dieppe, with their shining levels and their faintly-
shaded dells, was in itself an irresistible invitation.
On the land-side they have been somewhat narrowed
by cultivation; the woods, and farms, and grain-fields
here and there creep close enough to the edge of the
oliff almost to see the shifting of the tides at its base.
But cultivation in Normandy is itself picturesque, and
the pedestrian rarely needs resent its encroachments.
Neither walls nor hedges nor fences are anywhere vi-

154 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
sible; the whole land lies open to the breezes and to
his curious footsteps. This universal absence of bar
riers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that
really, in a little French province, you have more of
the feeling of being in a big country than on our own
huge continent, which bristles so incongruously with
defensive palings and dykes. Norman farmhouses, too,
with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making
all kinds of triangles upon the ancient plaster of their
walls, are very delightful things. Hereabouts they have
always a dark little wood close beside them; often a
cMnaie, as the terra is — 2. fantastic little grove of
tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, sorae night,
when the sea-blasts were howling their loudest and
their boughs were tossing most wildly, the tumult had
suddenly been stilled and they had stopped short,
each in the attitude into which the storra was twisting
it. The only thing the storm can do with thera now
is to blow them straight. The long, indented coast
line had never seemed to me so charming. It stretched
away into the light haze of the horizon, with such
lovely violet spots in its caves and hollows, and such
soft white gleams on its short headlands — such exqui
site gradations of distance and such capricious inter
ruptions of perspective — that one could only say that
the land was really trying to smile as intensely as the
' sea. The smile of the sea was a positive simper. Such
a glittering and twinkling, such a softness and blue
ness, such tiny little pin-points of foam, and such de
licate little wrinkles of waves — all this made the ocean
look like a flattered portrait.
The day I speak of was a Sunday, and there were
to be races at F6carap, ten miles away. The agreeable

FROM NORMANTiY TO THE PYRENEES. I 55
thing was, of course, to walk to Fecamp over the grassy
downs. I walked and walked, over the levels and the
dells, having land and ocean quite to myself Here
and there I raet a shepherd lying flat on his stomach
in the sun, while his sheep, in extreme dishabille
(shearing-time being recent), went huddling in front
of me as I approached. Far below, on the blue
ocean, like a fly on a table of lapis, crawled a little
steamer, carrying people from Etretat to the races. I
seemed to go much faster, yet the steamer got to
Fecamp before me. But I stopped to gossip with a
shepherd on a grassy hillside, ahd to admire certain
little villages which are niched in small, transverse,
seaward-sloping valleys. The shepherd told me that
he had been farm-servant to the same master for five-
and-thirty years — ever since the age of ten; and that
for thirty-five summers he had fed his flock upon
those downs. I don't know whether his sheep were
tired of their diet, but he professed himself very tired
of his life. I remarked that in fine weather it raust
be charraing, and he observed, with humility, that to
thirty-five summers there went a certain number of
rainy days.
The walk to Fecamp would be quite satisfactory
if it were not for the fonds. The fonds are the trans
verse valleys just mentioned — the channels, for the
most part, of small water-courses which discharge
themselves into the sea. The downs subside, pre
cipitately, to the level of the beach, and then slowly
lift their grassy shoulders on the other side of the
gully. As the cliffs are of immense height these in
dentations are profound, and drain off a little of the
exhilaration of the too elastic pedestrian. The first

156 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
fond Strikes him as delightfully picturesque, and he is
down the long slope on one side and up the gigantic
hump of the other before he has time to feel hot. But
the second is greeted with that tempered empressement
with which you bow in the street to an acquaintance
whom you have met half an hour before; the third is
a stale repetition; the fourth is decidedly one too
many, and the fifth is sensibly exasperating. The
fonds, in a word, are very tiresome. It was, if I re
member rightly, in the bottom of the last and widest
of the series that I discovered the little town of Yport.
Every little fishing-village on the Norman coast has,
within the last ten years, set up in business as a
watering-place; and, though one might fancy that
nature had condemned Yport to modest obscurity, it
is plain she has no idea of being out of the fashion.
But she is a miniature imitation of her rivals. She has
a meagre little wood behind her and an evil-smelling
beach, on which bathing is possible only at the high
est tide. At the scorching midday hour at which I
inspected her she seemed absolutely empty, and the
ocean, beyond acres of slippery seaweed, looked very
far away. She has ever)rthing that a properly ap
pointed station de bains should have, but everything is
on a Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like
a huge Nuremberg toy. There is a diminutive hotel,
in which, properly, the head-waiter should be a pigmy
and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it there is
a Casino on the smallest possible scale. Everything
about the Casino is so consistently microscopic, that it
seems a matter of course that the newspapers in the
reading-roora should be printed in the finest type. Of
course there is a reading-room, and a dancing-room,

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I 57
and a cafe, and a billiard-room, with a bagatelle-
board instead of a table, and a little terrace on which
you may walk up and down with very short steps. I
hope the prices are as tiny as everything else and I
suspect, indeed, that Yport honestly claims, not that
she is attractive, but that she is cheap.
I toiled up the perpendicular clifif again, and took
my way over the grass, for another hour, to Fecamp,
where I found the jpeculiarities of Yport directly re
versed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated
along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course,
with the classic Casino and the row of hotels. But
all this is on a very brave scale, though it is not
manifest that the bravery at Fecamp has won a victory;
and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as
irresistible. A pebbly beach of iraraense length,
fenced off frora the town by a grassy erabankment; a
Casino of a bald and unsociable aspect; a principal
inn, with an interminable brown fagade, suggestive
somehow of an asylum or an almshouse — such are the
most striking features of this particular watering-place.
There are magnificent cliffs on each side of the bay,
but, as the French say, without impropriety, it is the
devil to get to them. There was no one in the hotel,
Ul the Casino, or on the beach; the whole town being
in the act of climbing the farther cliff, to reach the
downs on which the races were to be held. The
green hillside was black with trudging spectators and
the long sky-line was fretted with them. When I say
there was no one at the inn, I forget the gentleman
at the door, who informed me positively that he would
give me no breakfast; he seemed to have stayed at
home from the races expressly to give himself this

158 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
pleasure. But I went farther and fared better, ob
taining a meal of homely succulence in an unfashionable
tavern, in a back street, where the wine was sound, the
cutlets were tender, and the serving-maid was rosy.
Then I walked along — for a mile, it seemed — through
a dreary, gray, grand' rue, where the sunshine was
hot, the odours were portentous, and the doorsteps
garnished with aged fishwives, retired from business,
whose plaited linen coifs gave a value, as the painters
say, to the brown umber of their cheeks. I inspected
the harbour and its goodly basin — with nothing in it
—and certain pink and blue houses which surround
it, and then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered
up the side of the cliff to the downs.
The races had already begun, and the ring of
spectators was dense. I picked out some of the
sraallest people, looked over their heads, and saw
several young farraers, in parti-coloured jackets and
very red in the face bouncing up and down on hand-
sorae cart-horses. Satiated at last with this diversion,
I turned away and wandered down the hill again;
and after strolling through the streets of Fecamp, and
gathering not a little of the wayside entertainment
that a seaport and fishing-town always yields, I re
paired to the Abbey-church, a monument of some im
portance, and almost as great an object of pride in the
town as the Casino. The Abbey of Fecamp was once
a very rich and powerful establishment, but nothing
remains of it now save its church and its trappistine.
The church, which is for the most part early gothic,
is very stately and interesting, and the trappistine, a
distilled liquor of the Chartreuse family, is much
prized by people who take a little glass after their

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1 59
coffee. By the tirae I had done with the Abbey the
townsfolk had slid en masse down the cliff again, the
yellow afternoon had corae, and the holiday-takers,
before the wine-shops, made long and lively shadows.
I hired a sort of two-wheeled gig, without a hood,
and drove back to Etretat in the rosy stage of even
ing. The gig dandled me up and down in a fashion
of which I had been unconscious since I left off baby-
clothes; but the drive, through the charraing Norman
country, over roads which lay among the peaceful
meadows like paths across a park, was altogether
delightful. The sunset gave a deeper mellowness to
the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of the
wayside villages the young men and maidens were
dancing like the figures in vignette-illustrations of
classic poets.

IL
It was another picked day — you see how freely I
pick them — when I went to breakfast at Saint-Jouin,
chez la belle Ernestine. The beautiful Ernestine is
as hospitable as she is fair, and to contemplate her
charras you have only to order breakfast. They shine
forth the raore brilliantly in proportion as your order
is liberal, and Ernestine is beautiful according as your
bill is large. In this case she coraes and smiles, really
very handsomely, round your table, and you feel some
hesitation in accusing so well-favoured a person of ex
tortion. She keeps an inn at the end of a lane which
diverges from the high road between Etretat and
Havre, and it is an indispensable feature of your
"station" at the former place that you choose some

l6o PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
fine morning and seek her hospitality. She has been
a celebrity these twenty years, and is no longer a
simple maiden in her flower; but twenty years, if they
have diminished her early bloora, have richly aug
mented her musie. This is a collection of all the
verses and sketches, the autographs, photographs, mono
graphs, trinkets, presented to the amiable hostess by
admiring tourists. It covers the walls of her sitting-
room and fills half a dozen big albums which you
look at while breakfast is being prepared just as if
you were awaiting dinner in genteel society. Most
Frenchmen of the day whom one has heard of appear
to have called at Saint-Jouin, and to have left their
homages. Each of them has turned a compliment with
pen or pencil, and you may see in a glass case on the
parlour wall what Alexandre Dumas fils thought of the
landlady's nose, and how several painters measured
her ankles.
Of course you must make this excursion in good
company, and I affirm that I was in the very best.
The company prefers, equally of course, to have its
breakfast in the orchard in front of the house; which,
if the repast is good, will make it seem better still,
and if it is poor, will carry off its poorness. Clever
innkeepers should always make their victims (in
tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I forget whether
Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically good or bad,
but I distinctly reraember enjoying it, and raaking
everything welcome. Everything, that is, save the
party at the other table — the Paris actresses and the
Araerican gentlemen. The combination of these two
classes of persons, individually so delightful, results in
certain phenomena which seem less in harmony with

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. l6l
appleboughs and summer breezes than with the gas-
lamps and thick perfumes of a cabinet particulier ; and
yet it was characteristic of this odd mixture of things
that Mademoiselle Ernestine, coming to chat with her
customers, should bear a beautiful infant on her arm,
and smile with artless pride on being assured of its
filial resemblance to herself She looked handsomer
than ever as she caressed this startling attribute of
presumptive spinsterhood.
Saint-Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest
cliffs in the world. One of ray companions, who had
laden the carriage with the impleraents of a painter,
went off into a sunny meadow to take the portrait of
a windmill, and I, choosing the better portion, wandered
through a little green valley with the other. Ten
minutes brought us to the edge of the cliffs, which at
this point of the coast are siraply sublime. I had sup
posed the white sea-walls of Etretat the finest thing
possible in this way, but the huge red porphyritic-
looking masses of Saint-Jouin have an even grander
character. I have rarely seen a landscape more
"plastic." They are strange, fantastic, out of keeping
with the country, and for some rather arbitrary reason
suggested to me a Spanish or even an African pro
spect. Certain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish
sierras raust have very much the same warrath of tone
and desolation of attitude. The great distinction of
the cliffs of Saint-Jouin is their extraordinary double-
ness. Falling to an iraraense depth, they encounter
a certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they pause
and play a dozen fantastic tricks, such as piling up
rocks into the likeness of needles and watch-towers;
then they plunge again, and in another splendid sweep
Portraits of Places, ' '

1 62 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
descend to the beach. There was something very im
pressive in the way their evil brows, looking as if they
were stained with blood and rust, were bent upon the
indifferent — the sleeping — sea.

III.
In a month of beautiful weather at Etretat, every
day was not an excursion, but every day seemed in
deed a picked day. For that matter, as I lay on the
beach watching the procession of the easy-going hours,
I took a good raany raental excursions. The one, per
haps, on which I oftenest embarked, was a comparison
between French manners, French habits, French types,
and those of my native land. These comparisons are
not invidious; I do not conclude against one party and
in favour of the other; as the French say, je constate
siraply. The French people about me were "spending
the summer," just as I had so often seen my fellow-
countrymen spend it, and it seemed to me, as it had
seemed to me at home, that this operation places men
and women under a sort of monstrous magnifying-glass.
The human figure has a higher relief in the country
than in town, and I know of no place where psycho
logical studies prosper so much as at the seaside. I
shall not pretend to relate my observations in the
order in which they occurred to rae (or indeed to re
late them in full at all); but I raay say that one of
the foremost was to this effect — that the summer- ques
tion, for every one, had been more easily settled than
it usually is in America. The solution of the problem
of >vhere to go had not been a thin-petalled rose.

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 163
plucked frora araong particularly sharp-pointed thorns.
People presented theraselves with a calraness and fresh
ness very different from the haggardness of aspect
which announces that the American citizen and his
family have "secured accommodations.'' This impres
sion, with me, rests perhaps on the fact that most
Frenchwomen turned of thirty — the average wives and
mothers — are so comfortably endowed with flesh. I
have never seen such richness of contour as araong the
mature baigneuses of Etretat. The lean and desiccated
person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often
converts the blooming American girl is not emulated
in France. A majestic plurapness flourished all around
me — the plumpness of triple chins and deeply dimpled
hands, I mused upon it, and I discovered that it was
the result of the best breakfasts and dinners in the
world. It was the corpulence of ladies who are
thoroughly well fed, and who never walk a step that
they can spare. The assiduity with which the women
of America measure the length of our democratic
pavements is doubtless a factor in their frequent ab
sence of redundancy of outline. As a "regular boarder"
at the Hotel Blanquet — pronounced by Anglo-Saxon
visitors Blanket — I found myself initiated into the
mysteries of the French dietary system. I assent to
the comraon tradition that the French are a temperate
people, so long as it is understood in this sense — that
they eat no raore than they want to. But their wants
are very comprehensive. Their capacity strikes me as
enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less regulated,
are certainly much more slender consumers.
The American breakfast has, I believe, long been
a subject of irony to the foreign observer; but the
n'

164 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
American breakfast is an ascetic meal compared with
the French dejeuner d-lafourchette. The latter, indeed,
is simply a dinner without soup; it differs neither
generically nor specifically from the evening-repast. If
it excludes soup, it includes eggs, prepared in a
hundred forms; and if it proscribes champagne, it
admits beer in foaming pitchers, so that the balance is
fairly preserved. I think that an Ainerican will often
suffer vicariously from the reflection that a French
faraily which sits down at half-past eleven to fish and
entrees and roasts, to asparagus and beans, to salad
and dessert, and cheese and cofifee, proposes to do ex
actly the sarae thing at half-past six. But we may be
sure at any rate that the dinner will be as good as
the breakfast, and that the breakfast has nothing to
fear frora prospective coraparison with the dinner; and
we may further reflect that in a country where the
pleasures of the table are thoroughly organised, it is
natural that they should be prolonged and reiterated.
Nothing is more noticeable among the French than
their superior intelligence iu dietary matters; every one
seems naturally a judge, a dilettante. They have
analysed tastes and savours to a finer point than we;
they are aware of differences and relations of which
we take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age
and of any condition (I have been quite as much struck
with it in the very young raen as in the old), as he
orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian re
staurant, and you will perceive that the operation is
much more solemn than it is apt to be in New York
or in London. Monsieur has, in a word, a certain
ideal for a particular repast, and it will make a dif
ference in his happiness whether the kidneys, for in-

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1 65
Stance, of a certain style, are chopped to the ultimate
or only to the penultimate smallness. His directions
and admonitions to the waiter are therefore minute
and exquisite, and eloquently accentuated by the pres
sure of thumb and fore-finger; and it must be added
that the imagination of the waiter is usually quite
worthy of the refined communion opened to it.
This subtler sense of quality is observable even
among those classes in which in other countries it is
generally forestalled by a depressing consciousness on
the subject of quantity. Observe your concierge and
his wife at their mid-day meal, as you pass up and
down stairs. They are not satisfying nature upon
green tea and potatoes; they are seated before a re
past which has been reasoned out, which, on its
modest scale, is served in courses, and has a begin
ning, a middle, an end. I will not say that the French
sense of corafort is confined to the philosophy of nutri
tion, but it is certainly here that it is most highly
evolved. French people must have a good dinner and
a good bed; but they are willing that the bed should
be stationed and the dinner be eaten in the most in
sufferable comers. Your porter and his wife dine with
a certain distinction, and sleep soft in their lodge; but
their lodge is in all probability a fetid black hole, five
feet square, in which, in England or in America,
people of their talents would never consent to live.
The French are willing to abide in the dark, to huddle
together, to forego privacy, to let bad smells grow
great araong thera. They have an accursed passion
for coquettish furniture; for cold, brittle chairs, for
tables with scalloped edges, for ottomans without
backs, for fireplaces muffled in plush and fringe. A

1 66 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
French bedroom is a bitter mockery — a ghastly attempt
to serve two raasters which succeeds in being agree
able to neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions,
constructed on the assumption that it is inelegant to
be known to wash or to sleep, and yet pervaded with
suggestions of uncleanness compared with which the
matutinal "tub," well en evidence, is a delightful symbol
of purity. This coraes of course frora that supreme
French quality, the source of half the charra of the
French mind as well as of all its dryness, the genius
for economy. It is wasting a room to let it be a bed
room alone; so it raust be tricked out ingeniously as a
sitting-room, and ends by being (in many cases) in
sufferable both by night and by day. But allowing all
weight to these latter reflections, it is still very possible
that the French have the better part. If you are well
fed, you can perhaps afford to be ill lodged; whereas
enjoyment of the most coraraodious apartraents is in-
corapatible with inanition and dyspepsia.
If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by these
possibly milder generalisations, I should have touched
lightly upon some of the social phenomena of which
the little beach at Etretat was the scene. I should
have narrated that the French, at the sea-side, are not
"sociable" as Americans affect to be in a sirailar situa
tion, and I should subjoin that at Etretat it was very
well on the whole that they should not have been.
The immeasurably greater simplicity of composition of
Araerican society raakes sociability with us a com
paratively untaxed virtue; but anything like an equal
exercise of it in France would be attended with alarm
ing drawbacks. Sociability (in the American sense of
the word) in any aristocratic country would indeed be

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1 67
very much like an attempt to establish visiting rela
tions between birds and fishes. At Etretat no making
of acquaintance was to be perceived; people went
about in compact, cohesive groups, of natural forma
tion, governed doubtless, internally, by humane regula
tions, but presenting to the world an impenetrable
defensive front. The groups usually formed a solid
phalanx around two or three young girls, compressed
into the centre, the preservation of whose innocence
was their chief solicitude. These groups were doubt
less wisely constituted, for with half a dozen cocottes,
in scarlet petticoats, scattered over the sunny, harmless-
looking beach, what were mammas and duennas to
do? I used to pity the young ladies at first, for this
perpetual application of the leading-string; but a little
reflection showed me that the French have ordered
this as well as they have ordered everything else. The
case is not nearly so hard as it would be with us, for
there is this immense difference between the lot of the
jeune fille and her Araerican sister, that the former
may as a general thing be said to be certain to marry.
"Alas, to marry badly," the Anglo-Saxon objector may
reply. But the objection is precipitate; for if French
marriages are almost always arranged, it must be added
that they are in the majority of cases arranged suc
cessfully. Therefore, if a jeune fille is for three or four
years tied with a very short rope and compelled to
browse exclusively upon the meagre herbage which
sprouts in the maternal shadow, she has at least the
comfort of reflecting that, according to the native phrase,
on s'occupe de la marier — that measures are being care
fully taken to promote her to a condition of unbounded
liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, marriage may

1 68 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
fail to mean, it at least means freedom and considera
tion. It does not mean, as it so often means in America,
being socially shelved — and it is not too much to say,
in certain circles, degraded; it raeans being socially
launched and consecrated. It means becoming that
exalted personage, a mire de famille. To be a mire
de famille is to occupy not simply (as is mostly the
case with us) a sentimental, but really an official posi
tion. The consideration, the authority, the domestic
pomp and circumstance allotted to a French mamma
are in striking contrast with the amiable tolerance
which in our own social order is so often the most
liberal measure that the female parent may venture to
expect at her children's hands, and which, on the part
of the young lady of eighteen who represents the family
in society, is not unfrequently tempered by a con
scientious severity. All this is worth waiting for, espe
cially if you have not to wait very long. Mademoiselle
is raarried certainly, and married early, and she is
sufficiently ,well inforraed to know, and to be sustained
by the knowledge, that the sentimental expansion which
may not take place at present will have an open field
after her marriage. That it should precede her mar
riage seems to her as unnatural as that she should put
on her shoes before her stockings. And besides all
this, to browse in the maternal shadow is not considered
in the least a hardship. A young French girl who is
bien ilevie — an expression which means so much — will
be sure to consider her mother's company the most
delightful in the world, and to think that the herbage
which sprouts about this lady's petticoats is peculiarly
tender and succulent. It may be fanciful, but it often
seems to me that the tone with which such a young

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1 69
girl says Ma mire has a peculiar intensity of meaning.
I am at least not wrong in affirming that in the accent
with which the mamma — especially if she be of the
well-rounded order alluded to above — speaks of Ma
fille there is a kind of sacerdotal dignity.

IV.
After this came two or three pictures of quite an
other complexion — pictures of which a long green
valley, almost in the centre of France, makes the general
setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms one delightful
picture, although the country which surrounds it is by
no means one of the regions that place themselves on
exhibition. It is the old territory of the Gatinais, which
has much history, but no renown of beauty. It is very
quiet, deliciously rural, immitigably French; the typical,
average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and
art — of art, of landscape-art, perhaps, especially.
"Wherever I look I seem to see one of the familiar pic
tures on a dealer's wall — a Lambinet, a Troyon, a
Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the
majority; the mood of the landscape usually expresses
itself in silvery lights and vivid greens. The history
of this part of France is the history of the monarchy,
and' its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic
tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local
patois. The peasants deliver theraselves with rather a
drawl, but their French is as consecutive as that of
GUendorf Each side of the long valley is a continuous ridge,
which offers it a high, wooded horizon, and through
the middle of it there flows a charraing stream, wan-

170 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
dering, winding and doubling, smothered here and
there in rushes, and spreading into lily-coated reaches,
beneath the clear shadow of tall, straight, light-leaved
trees. On each side of the stream the meadows stretch
away flat, clean, magnificent, lozenged across with rows
of lateral foliage, under which a cow-maiden sits on
the grass, hooting now and then, nasally, to the large-
uddered browsers in front of her. There are no hedges
nor palings nor walls; it is all a single estate. Occa
sionally in the meadows there rises a cluster of red-
roofed hovels — each a diminutive village. At other
points, at about half an hour's walk apart, are three
charming old houses. The chateaux are extremely
different, but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each
has its points. They are very intimate with each other,
so that these points may be amicably discussed. The
points in one case, however, are remarkably strong.
The little old castel I mention stands directly in the
attenuated river, on an island just great enough to
hold it, and the garden-flowers grow upon the farther
bank. This, of course, is a most delightful affair.
But I found something very agreeable in the aspect of
one of the others, when I raade it the goal of certain
of those walks before breakfast, which of cool raorn-
ings, in the late sumraer, do not fall into the category
of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if one did
not do a great raany things before breakfast, the work
of life would be but raeagrely perforraed.)
The dwelling in question stands on the top of the
long ridge which encloses the corafortable valley to the
south, being by its position quite in the midst of its"
appurtenant acres. It is not particularly "kept up,"
but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only help it

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I7I
to be familiar. A grassy plateau approaches it from
the edge of the hill, bordered on one side by a short
avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the other by a
dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the steep-
roofed, yellow-walled farm-buildings, and under cover
of the wood a stretch of beaten turf, where, on Sun
days and holidays, the farm-servants play at bowls.
Directly before the house is a little square garden, en
closed by a low parapet, which is interrupted by a
high gateway of mossy pillars and iron arabesques,
the whole of it muffled in creeping plants. The house,
with its yellow walls and russet roof, is ample and
substantial; it is a very proper gentilhommiire. In a
corner of the garden, at the angle of the parapet, rises
that classic emblera of rural gentility, the pigeonnier,
the old stone dove-cot. It is a great round tower, as
broad of base as a lighthouse, with its roof shaped
like an extinguisher, and a big hole in its upper por
tion, in and out of which a dove is always fluttering.
You see all this from the windows of the drawing-
room. Be sure that the drawing-room is panelled in
white and gray, with old rococo mouldings over the
doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway of the
garden, with its tangled creepers, makes a frame for
the picture that lies beyond the grassy esplanade
where the thistles have been suffered to grow round a
disused stone well, placed in odd remoteness from the
house (if, indeed, it be not a relic of an earlier habita
tion) : a picture of a wide green country, rising beyond
the unseen valley and stretching away to a far horizon
in deep blue lines of wood. Behind, through other
windows, you look out on the gardens proper. There
are places that take one's fancy by sorae accident of

172 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
expression, some mystery of accident. This one is
high and breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet
picturesque, extremely cheerful and a little melan
choly. It has what in the arts is called "style," and
so I have attempted to commemorate it.
Going to call on the peasants was as charming an
affair as a chapter in one of George Sand's rural
tales. I went one Sunday morning with my hostess,
who knew them well and enjoyed their most garrulous
confidence. I don't raean that they told her all their
secrets, but they told her a good many; if the French
peasant is a simpleton, he is a very shrewd simpleton.
At any rate, of a Sunday moming in August, when he
is stopping at home from work and has put on his
best jacket and trousers, and is loafing at the door of
his neighbour's cabin, he is a very charming person.
The peasantry in the region I speak of had admirably
good manners. The cure gave me a low account of
their morals, by which he meant, on the whole, I sus
pect, that they were moderate church-goers. But they
have the instinct of civility and a talent for conversa
tion; they know how to play the host and the enter
tainer. By "he," just now, I meant she quite as much;
it is rare that, in speaking superlatively of the French,
in any connection, one does not think of the women
even more than of the men. They constantly strike
the foreigner as a stronger expression of the qualities
of the race. On the occasion I speak of the first
room in the very humble cabins I successively visited
— in some cases, evidently, it was the only room — had
. been set into irreproachable order for the day. It had
usually a fine brownness of tone, generated by the
high chimney-place, with its swinging pots, the im-

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES, 1 73
portant bed, in its dusky niche, with its flowered cur
tains, the big-bellied earthenware in the cupboard, the
long-legged clock in the corner, the thick, quiet light
of the small, deeply-set window, the mixture, on all
things, of smoke-stain and the polish of horny hands.
Into the midst of this "la Rabillon" or "la ra^re
Leger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to be
seated, and, seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles
expressively and answers abundantly every inquiry
about her cow, her husband, her bees, her eggs, her
baby. The men linger half outside and half in, with
their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every
one smiles with that simple, clear-eyed sraile of the
gratified peasant; they talk rauch more like George
Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. And if
they receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed
us on our way with proportionate urbanity. I go to
six or eight little hovels, all of them dirty outside and
clean within; I am entertained everywhere with the
bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and good
manners of their occupants, and I finish my tour with
an esteem for my new acquaintance which is not
diminished by learning that several of them have
thirty or forty thousand francs carefully put away.
And yet, as I say, M. le Cure thinks they are in a
bad way, and he knows soraething about them. M. le
Cure, too, is not a dealer in scandal; there is some
thing delightfully quaint in the way in which he de
precates an un-Christian construction of his words.
There is more than one cure in the valley whose
charms I celebrate; but the worthy priest of whom I
speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. He has
been accused, I believe, of pretensions to illuminisme ;

174 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
but even in his most illuminated moments it can never
occur to him that he has been chronicled in an
Araerican magazine, and therefore it is not indiscreet
to say that he is the cure, not of Gy, but of the
village nearest to Gy. I write this sentence half for
the pleasure of putting down that briefest of viflage-
names and seeing how it looks in print. But it may
be elongated at will, and yet be only improved. If
you wish to be very specific, you may call it Gy-les-
Nonnains — Gy of the Little Nuns. I went with my
hostess, another morning, to call upon M. le Curd, who
himself opened his garden door to us (there was a
crooked little black cross perched upon it), and, lifting
his rusty calotte, stood there a moment in the sunshine,
smiling a greeting raore benignant than his words.
A rural presbyiire is not a very suraptuous dwell
ing, and M. le Cure's little drawing-room reminded me
of a Yankee parlour {minus the subscription-books
from Hartford on the centre-table) in some out-of-the-
way corner of New England. But he took us into his
very diminutive garden, and showed us an ornament
that would not have flourished in the shadow of a Yankee
parlour — a rude stone image of the Virgin, which he
had become possessed of I know not how, and for
which he was building a sort of niche in the wall.
The work was going on slowly, for he must take the
labour as he could get it; but he appealed to his
visitors, with a sraile of indulgent irony, for an assur
ance that his little structure would not make too bad
a figure. One of them told him that she would send
him some white flowers to set out round the statue;
whereupon he clasped his hands together over his
snuff-box and expressed cheerful views of the world

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I 75
we live in. A couple of days afterward he came to
breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his nevy
cassock and band. I found him in the billiard-room,
walking up and down alone and reading his breviary.
The combination of the locality, the personage and
the occupation, made me sraile; and I smiled again
when, after breakfast, I found him strolling about the
garden, puffing a cigarette. Of course he had an ex
cellent appetite; but there is soraething rather cruel in
those alternations of diet to which the French parish
priest is subjected. At horae he lives like a peasant
— a fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, in
asmuch as he has usually — or in raany cases — been
brought up to that life. But his fellow-peasants don't
breakfast at the chateau and gaze down the savoury
vistas opened by cutlets a la Soubise. They have not
the acute pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere
of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means
every day, or every week even, that M. le Cure break
fasts at the chateau; but there must nevertheless be a
certain uncomfortable crookedness in his position. He
lives like a labourer, yet he is treated like a gentle
man. The latter character must seem to him some
times to have rather a point of irony. But to the
ideal cure, of course, all characters are equal; he
thinks neither too ill of his bad breakfasts nor too
well of his good ones. I won't say that the excellent
man I speak of is the ideal cure, but I suspect he is
an approach to it; he has a grain of the epicurean to
an ounce of stoicism. In the garden-path, beside the
moat, while he puffed his cigarette, he told me how
he had held up his head to the Prussians; for, hard
as it seemed to believe it, that pastoral valley had

176 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
been occupied by ravaging Teutons. According to
this recital, he had spoken his mind civilly, but very
distinctly, to the group of officers who had made
themselves at home in his dwelling — had informed
them that it grieved hira profoundly that he was
obliged to raeet them standing there in his soutane,
and not out in the fields with a musket in his hands
and a dozen congenial spirits at his side. The scene
must have been dramatic. The first of the officers
got up frora table and asked for the privilege of shak
ing his hand. "M. le Cure," he said, "j'estirae haute-
inent votre caractfere."
Six miles away — or nearer, by a charming shaded
walk along a canal — was an ancient town with a
legend — a legend which, as a child, I read in my
lesson-book at school, marvelling at the woodcut above
it, in which a ferocious dog was tearing a strange
man to pieces, while the king and his courtiers sat
by as if they were at the circus. I allude to it chiefly
in order to mention the name of one of its promenades,
which is the stateliest, beyond all comparison, in the
world; the name, I mean, not the street. The latter
is called the Promenade des Belles Mani^res. Could
anything be finer than that? With what a sweep
gentlemen must once have taken off their hats there;
how ladies must once have curtsied, regardless of
gutters, and how people must have turned out their
toes as they walked!

V.
My next impressions were gathered on the margin
of a southern sea — if the Bay of Biscay indeed deserve

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I77
so sympathetic a name. We generally have a mental
image beforehand of a place on which we may intend
to project ourself, and I supposed I had a tolerably
vivid prevision of Biarritz. I don't know why, but I
had a singular sense of having been there; the name
always seemed to me expressive. I saw the way it
lay along its gleaming beach; I had taken in imagina
tion long walks toward Spain over the low cliffs, with
the blue sea always to my right and the blue Pyrenees
always before me. My only fear was that my raental
picture had not been brilliant enough; but this could
easily be touched up on the spot. In truth, however,
on the spot I was exclusively occupied in toning it
down. Biarritz seemed to be decidedly below its
reputation; I am at a loss to see how its reputation
was raade. There is a partial explanation that is
obvious enough. There is a low, square, bare brick
mansion seated on the sands, under shelter of a clifif;
it is one of the first objects to attract the attention of
an arriving stranger. It is not picturesque, it is not
romantic, and even in the days of its prosperity it
never can have been impressive. It is called the Villa
Eugenie, and it explains in a great raeasure, as I say,
the Biarritz which the arriving stranger, with sorae
dismay, perceives about hira. It has the aspect of one
of the "cottages" of Newport during the winter season,
but is surrounded by a vegetation much less dense
than the prodigies of arborescence now so frequent at
Newport. It was what the newspapers call the " favourite
resort" of the ex-Empress of the French, who might
have been seen at her imperial avocations with a good
glass, at any time, from the Casino. The Casino, I
hasten to add, has quite the air of an establishment
Portraits of Places. ^2

178 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
frequented by gentlemen who look at ladies' windows
with telescopes. There are Casinos and Casinos, and
that of Biarritz is, in the summary French phrase,
"impossible." Except for its view, it is moreover very
unattractive. Perched on the top of a clifif which has
just space enough to hold its immense brick founda
tions, it has no garden, no promenade, no shade, no
place of out-of-door reunion — the most indispensable
feature of a Casino. It turns its back to the Pyrenees
and to Spain, and looks out prettily enough over a
blue ocean to an arm of the low French coast.
Biarritz, for the rest, scrambles over two or three
steep hills, directly above the sea, in a promiscuous;
many-coloured, noisy fashion. It is a watering-place
pure and simple; every house has an expensive little
shop in the basement and a still raore expensive set
of rooms to let above stairs. The houses are blue
and pink and green; they stick to the hillsides as they
can, and being near Spain, you try to fancy they look
Spanish. You succeed, perhaps, even a little, and are
rewarded for your zeal by finding, when you cross the
border a few days afterward, that the houses at San
Sebastian look strikingly French. Biarritz is bright,
crowded, irregular, filled with many sounds, and not
without a certain second-rate pictorial quality; but it
struck me as common and cockneyfied, and my vision
travelled back to modest little Etretat, by its northern
sea, as to a very much more do-wny couch. The south
western coast of France has little of the exquisite
charm of the Mediterranean shore. It has of course
a southern expression which in itself is always delight
ful. You see a brilliant, yellow sun, with a pink-faced,
red-tiled house staring up at it. You can see here

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1 79
and there a trellis and an orange-tree, a peasant-
woman in a gold necklace, driving a donkey, a lame
beggar adorned with earrings, a glimpse of blue sea
between white garden-walls. But the superabundant
detail of the French Riviera is wanting; the softness,
luxuriousness, enchantment.
The most pictorial thing at Biarritz is the Basque
population, which overflows from the adjacent Spanish
provinces and swarms in the crooked streets. It
lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon the
curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and vociferates
continually a shrill, strange tongue, which has no dis
coverable affinity with any other. The Basques look
like hardier and thriftier Neapolitan lazzaroni; if the
superficial resemblance is striking, the diff'erence is
very much in their favour. Although those speciraens
which I observed at Biarritz appeared to enjoy an
excess of leisure, they had nothing of a shiftless or
beggarly air, and seemed as little disposed to ask
favours as to confer them. The roads leading into
Spain were dotted with them, and here they were
coming and going as if on important business — the
business of the abominable Don Carlos himself They
struck me as a very handsome race. The raen are
invariably clean-shaven; smooth chins seera a positively
religious observance. They wear little round maroon-
coloured caps, like those of sailor-boys, dark stuff
shirts, and curious white shoes, raade of strips of rope
laid together — an article of toilet which makes them
look like honorary merabers of base-ball clubs. They
sling their jackets cavalier- fashion, over one shoulder,
hold their heads very high, swing their arms very
bravely, step out very lightly, and, when you meet

l80 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
them in the country at eventide, charging down a
hillside in companies of half a dozen, make altogether
a most impressive appearance. With their smooth
chins and childish caps, they may be taken, in the
distance, for a lot of very naughty little boys; for they
have always a cigarette in their teeth.
The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for
driving over into Spain. Coraing speedily to a con
sciousness of this fact, I found a charm in sitting in
a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind
a coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers,
a jacket of scarlet and silver and a pair of yellow
breeches and jack-boots. If it has been the desire
of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the
land of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a
day's excursion from Biarritz is a matter to encourage
visions. Everything helping — the admirable scenery,
the charming day, the operatic coachman, the smooth-
rolling carriage — I am afraid I becarae more visionary
than it is decent to tell of You move toward the
magnificent undulations of the Pyrenees, as if you
were going to plunge straight into them; but in reality
you travel beneath thera and beside thera, pass be
tween their expiring spurs and the sea. It is on
proceeding beyond San Sebastian that you seriously
attack thera. But they are already extremely vivid —
none the less so that in this region they abound in
suggestions of the recent Carlist war. Their far-away
peaks and ridges are crowned with lonely Spanish
watch-towers, and their lower slopes are dotted with
demolished dwellings. It was hereabouts that the
fighting was most constant. But the healing powers
of nature are as remarkable as the destructive powers

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. l8l
of man, and the rich September landscape appeared
already to have forgotten the injuries of yesterday.
Everything seeraed to me a small foretaste of Spain; I
discovered an unreasonable amount of local colour. I
discovered it at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the last French
town, in a great bro'svn church, filled with galleries
and boxes, like a play-house — the altar and choir,
indeed, looked very much like a proscenium; at
Bohebie, on the Bidassoa, the small yellow stream
which divides France from Spain, and which at this
point offers to view the celebrated Isle of Pheasants, a
little bushy strip of earth adorned with a decayed
commemorative monument, on which, in the seven
teenth century, the affairs of Louis XIV. and the
Iberian monarch were discussed in ornamental con
ference; at Fuentarabia (glorious narae), a mouldering
relic of Spanish stateliness; at Hendaye, at Irun, at
Renteria, and finally at San Sebastian. At all of these
wayside towns the houses show marks of Alphonsist
bullets (the region was strongly Carlist); but to be
riddled and battered seems to carry out the meaning
of the pompous old escutcheons carven above the
doorways, some of them covering almost half the
house. It struck me, in fact, that the narrower and
shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, the
grander and more elaborate was this noble advertise
ment. But it represented knightly prowess, and piti
less time had taken up the challenge. I found it a
luxury to ramble through the narrow single street of
Irun and Renteria, between the strange -coloured
houses, the striped awnings, the universal balconies
and the heraldic doorways.
San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is set

1 82 . PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
down in the guide-books as the Biarritz or the Brighton
of Spain. It has of course a new quarter in the pro
vincial-elegant style (fresh stucco cafes, barber-shops,
and apartments to let), -looking out upon a planted
promenade and a charming bay, locked in fortified
heights, with a narrow portal to the ocean. I walked
about for two or three hours and devoted most of my
attention to the old quarter, the town proper, which
has a great frowning gate upon the harbour, through
which you look along a vista of gaudy house-fronts,
balconies, awnings, surmounted by a narrow strip of
sky. Here the local colour was richer, the manners
more na'if Here too was a church with a flamboyant
Jesuit fagade and an interior redolent of Spamsh
Catholicism. There was a life-sized effigy of the Vir
gin perched upon a table beside the great altar (she
appeared to have been walking abroad in a procession),
which I looked at with extreme interest. She seemed
to me a heroine, a solid Spanish person, as perfect a
reality as Don Quixote or Saint Theresa. She was
dressed in an extraordinary splendour of laces, bro
cades and jewels, her coiffure and complexion were of
the finest, and she evidently would answer to her name
if you should speak to her. Mustering up the stateliest
title I could think of, I addressed her as Dona Maria
of the Holy Office; whereupon she looked round the
great dusky, perfumed church, to see whether we were
alone, and then she dropped her fringed eyelids and
held out her hand to be kissed. She was the senti
ment of Spanish Catholicism; gloomy, yet bedizened,
emotional as a woman and mechanical as a doll. After
a moment I grew afraid of her, and went slinking away.
After this I didn't really recover my spirits until I

FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. I83
had the satisfaction of hearing myself addressed as
" Caballero." I was hailed with this epithet by a ragged
infant, with sickly eyes and a cigarette in his lips, who
invited rae to cast a copper into the sea, that he might
dive for it; and even with these limitations, the sensa
tion seemed worth the cost of my excursion. It ap
peared kinder, to my gratitude, to raake the infant
dive upon the paveraent.
A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, to
be present at a bull-fight; but I suppose my right to
'descant upon this entertainment should be raeasured
less by the gratification it afiforded rae than by the
question whether there is room in literature for another
chapter on this subject. I incline to think there is not;
the national pastime of Spain is the best-described
thing in the world. Besides, there are other reasons
for not describing it. It is extremely disgusting, and
one should not describe disgusting things — except
(according to the new school) in novels, where they
have not really occurred, and are invented on purpose.
Description apart, one has taken a certain sort of
pleasure in the bull-fight, and yet how is one to state
gracefully that one has taken pleasure in a disgusting
thing? It is a hard case. If you record your pleasure,
you seem to exaggerate it and to calumniate your
delicacy; and if you record nothing but your dis
pleasure, you feel as if you were wanting in suppleness.
Thus rauch I can say, at any rate, that as there had
been no bull-fights in that part of the country during
the Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man,
woman, and child of thera comes under this denomi
nation) returned to their precious pastime with peculiar
zest. The spectacle, therefore, had an unusual splen-

184 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
dour. Under these circumstances it is highly effective.
The weather was beautiful; the near mountains peeped
over the top of the vast open arena, as if they too
were curious; weary of disembowelled horses and
posturing espadas, the spectator (in the boxes) might
tum away and look through an unglazed window at
the empty town and the cloud-shadowed sea. But few
of the native spectators availed themselves of this
privilege. Beside me sat a blooming matron, in a
white lace mantilla, with three very juvenile daughters;
and if these ladies sometimes yawned they never
shuddered. For rayself, I confess that if I sometimes
shuddered I never yawned. A long list of bulls was
sacrificed, each of whom had pretensions to originality.
The banderillos, in their silk stockings and embroidered
satin costumes, skipped about with a great deal of at
titude; the espada folded his arras within six inches
of the bull's nose and stared hira out of countenance;
yet I thought the bull, in any case, a finer fellow than
any of his tormentors, and I thought his tormentors
finer fellows than the spectators. In truth, we were all,
for the time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull-fight
will, to a certain extent, bear looking at, but it will
not bear thinking of There was a more innocent effect
in what I saw afterward, when we all came away, in
the late afternoon, as the shadows were at their longest:
the bright-coloured southern crowd, spreading itself
over the grass, and the woraen, with mantillas and
fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling up and down
before the mountains and the sea.

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 1 85

IX.
AN ENGLISH EASTER.
1877.

It may be said of the English, as is said of the
council of war in Sheridan's farce of The Critic by
one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when they
do agree, their unanimity is wonderful. They differ
among themselves greatly just now as regards the
machinations of Russia, the derelictions of Turkey,
the raerits of the Reverend Arthur Tooth, the genius
of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many other matters;
but neither just now nor at any other tirae do they
fail to conform to those social observances on which
respectability has set her seal. England is a country
of curious anomalies, and this has much to do with
her being so interesting to foreign observers. The
English individual character is very positive, very in
dependent, very rauch made up according to its own
sentiment of things, very prone to startling eccentrici
ties; and yet at the same tirae it has beyond any other
this peculiar gift of squaring itself with fashion and
custom. In no other country, I iraagine, are so many
people to be found doing the same thing, in the same
way, at the same time — using the same slang, wearing

l86 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
the same hats and neckties, collecting the same china-
plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of
polo, admiring the same professional beauty. The
monotony of such a spectacle would soon become op
pressive if the foreign observer were not conscious of
this latent capacity in the performers for great freedom
of action; he finds a good deal of entertainment in
wondering how they reconcile the traditional insularity
of the individual with this perpetual tribute to usage.
Of course, in all civilised societies, the tribute to usage
is constantly paid; if it is less apparent in America
than elsewhere the reason is not, I think, because in
dividual independence is greater, but because usage
is raore sparsely established. Where custom can be
ascertained people certainly follow it; but for one
definite precedent in American life there are fifty in
English. I am very far from having discovered the
secret; I have not in the least learned what becomes
of that explosive personal force in the English cha
racter which is compressed and corked down by social
conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of the
manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the fer
menting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from my
vision. The most striking example, to foreign eyes, of
the power of custom in England is, of course, the
universal church-going. In the sight of the English
people getting up frora its tea and toast of a Sunday
morning and brushing its hat, and drawing on- its
gloves, and taking its wife on its arm, and making its
offspring march before, and so, for decency's, respecta
bility's, propriety's sake, taking its way to a place of
worship appointed by the State, in which it repeats
the formulas of a creed to which it attaches no posi-

AN ENGLISH EASTER. I87
tive sense, and listens to a sermon over the length of
which it explicitly haggles and grumbles — in this ex
hibition there is something very striking to a stranger,
something which he hardly knows whether to regard
as a great force or as a great infirmity. He inclines,
on the whole, to pronounce the spectacle sublime, be
cause it gives him the feeling that whenever it raay be
come necessary for a people trained in these manoeuvres
to move all together under a common direction, they
will have it in them to do so with tremendous weight
and cohesiveness. We hear a good deal about the
effect of the Prussian railitary system in consolidating
the German people and making them available for a
particular purpose; but I really think it not fanciful to
say that the military punctuality which characterises
the English observance of Sunday ought to be appre
ciated in the same fashion. A nation which has passed
through the mill will certainly have been stamped by
it. And here, as in the German railitary service, it is
really the whole nation. When I spoke just now of
paterfamilias and his entourage I did not mean to
limit the statement to him. The young unmarried men
go to church, the gay bachelors, the irresponsible
merabers of society. (That last epithet must be taken
with a grain of allowance. No one in England is
literally irresponsible; that perhaps is the shortest way
pf describing the nation. Every one is free and every
one is responsible. To say what it is people are re
sponsible to is of course a great extension ofthe ques
tion: briefly, to social expectation, to propriety, to
morality, to "position," to the classic English con
science, which is, after all, such a powerful factor.

1 88 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
With US there is infinitely less responsibility; but there
is also, I think, less freedom.)
The way in which the example of the more
luxurious classes imposes itself upon the less luxurious
raay of course be noticed in smaller matters than
church-going; in a great many matters which it may
seem trivial to mention. If one is bent upon observa
tion, nothing, however, is trivial. So I may cite" the
practice of banishing the servants from the room at
breakfast. It is the fashion, and accordingly, through
the length and breadth of England, every one who has
the slightest pretension to standing high enough to
feel the way the social breeze is blowing conforms to
it. It is awkward, unnatural, troublesome for those at
table, it involves a vast amount of leaning and stretch
ing, of waiting and perambulating, and it has just that
vice against which, in English history, all great move
ments have been made — it is arbitrary. But it
flourishes for all that, and all genteel people, looking
into each other's eyes with the desperation of gentility,
agree to endure it for gentility's sake. > My instance
raay seem feeble, and I speak honestly when I say I
might give others, forming part of an iramense body
of prescriptive usage, to which a society possessing in
the largest manner, both by temperament and educa
tion, the sense of the "inalienable" rights and com
forts of the individual, contrives to accommodate itself.']
I do not mean to say that usage in England is always
uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few
strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most
agreeable one) which consists in perceiving in the
rigidity of a tradition which has struck one at first as

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 1 89
mechanical, a reason existing in the historic "good
sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent,
though in saying so I do not raean to imply that even
superficially the presumption is against the usages of
English society. It is not, for instance, necessarily
against the custom of which I had it more especially
in mind to speak in -writing these lines. The stranger
in London is forewarned that at Easter all the world ,
goes out of town, and that if he have no mind to be
left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he,
too, had better make arrangements for a temporary
absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort of
unexpectedness in this prompt re-emigration of a body
of people who, but a week before, were apparently de
voting much energy to settling down for the season.
Half of them have but lately come back from the
country, where they have been spending the winter,
and they have just had tirae, it may be supposed, to
collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently,
however, the threads are dropped and society is dis
persed, as if it had taken a false start. It departs as
Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for
the following ten days. Where it goes is its own
affair; a good deal of it goes to Paris. Spending last
winter in that city, I remeraber how, when I woke up
on Easter Monday and looked out of ray window, I
found the street covered, overnight, with a sort of
snow-fall of diserabarked Britons. They made, for
other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's
customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall
at the Theitre Franfais, one's usual fiacre on the cab
stand, were very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I
believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of

190

PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

the usual proportions; and you may be sure that people
who did not cross the Channel were not without invita
tions to quiet old places in the country, where the
pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up the
dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-masses
to be freckled here and there with verdure. In Eng
land country-life is the obverse of the medal, town-life
the reverse, and when an occasion coraes for quitting
London there are few members of what the French
call the "easy class" who have not a collection of dull,
moist, verdant resorts to choose from. Dull I call
them, and I fancy not without reason, though at the
moment I speak of, their dulness must have been
mitigated by the unintermittent presence of the keenest
and liveliest of east winds. Even in mellow English
country homes Easter-tide is a period of rawness and
atmospheric acridity — the moment at which the frank
hostility of winter, which has at last to give up the
game, turns to peevishness and spite. This is what
makes it arbitrary, as I said just now, for "easy"
people to go forth to the wind-swept lawns and the
shivering parks. But nothing is more striking to an
American than the frequency of English holidays and
the large way in which occasions for "a little change"
are made use of All this speaks to Americans of
three things which they are accustoraed to see allotted
in scantier raeasure. The English have more time
than we, they have mor^ money, and they have a
much higher relish for active leisure. ^ Leisure, fortunej
and the love of sport — these things are iraplied in
English society at every tum. It was a very small
number of weeks before Easter that Parliament met;
and yet a ten days' recess was already, from the

AN ENGLISH EASTER. I9I
luxurious Parliamentary point of view, a necessity. A
short time hence we shall be having the Whitsuntide
holidays, which I am told are even more of a season
of revelry than Easter, and from this point to midr
summer, when everything stops, it is an easy journey.
The men of business and the professional men partake
in equal measure of these agreeable diversions, and I
was interested in hearing a lady whose husband was
an active member of the bar say that, though he was
leaving town with her for ten days, and though Easter
was a very nice "little break," they really amused
themselves more during the later festival, which would
come on toward the end of May. I thought this highly
probable, and admired so dramatic an interfusion of
work and play. If my phrase has a slightly ironical
sound, this is purely accidental. A large appetite for
holidays, the ability not only to take them but to know
what to do with them when taken, is the sign of a
robust people,, and judged, by this raeasure we Americans
are rather incompetent.' " Such holidays as we take are
taken very often in Europe, where it is sometimes
noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy on our
hands. Acknowledgment made of English industry,
however (our own stands in no need of compliments),
it must be added that for those same easy classes I
just spoke of-things are very easy indeed. The number
of persons obtainable for purely social purposes at all
times and seasons is infinitely greater than among
ourselves; and the ingenuity of the arrangements per
manently going forward to disembarrass them of their
superfluous leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped
branch of civilisation. The young men who are pre--
paring for the stem realities of life among the gray

192

PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

green cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their
terms but half the year; and the rosy little cricketers
of Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental
home for an embarrassing number of months. Happily
the parental home is apt to be an affair of gardens,
lawns, and parks. IL
Passion Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic
period; there is really an approach to sackcloth and
ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of the
theatres and music-halls are closed; the huge dusky
city seems to take on a still sadder colouring and a
sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. At such a
time, for a stranger, London is not cheerful. Arriving
there, during the past winter, about Christmas-time, I
encountered three British Sundays in a row — a spec
tacle to strike terror into the stoutest heart. A Sun
day and a "bank-holiday," if I remeraber aright, had
joined hands with a Christmas-day, and produced the
portentous phenomenon to which I allude. I betrayed,
I suppose, some apprehension of its oppressive cha
racter, for I remember being told in a consolatory way
that I needn't fear; it would not come round again for
another year. This information was given me on the
occasion of that surprising interruption of one's rela
tions with the laundress which is apparently charac-
terestic of the period. I was told that all the washer
women were intoxicated, and that, as it would take
them some time to revive, I must not count upon%
relay of "fresh- things.'? I shall not forget the impres
sion made upon me by this statement; I had just come

AN ENGLISH EASTER. I 93
from Paris and it almost sent me spinning back. One
of the incidental agriments of life in the latter city
had been the knock at ray door on Saturday evenings
of a charraing young woman with a large basket covered
with a snowy napkin on her arm, and on her head a
frilled and fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible
advertisement of her art. To say that my admirable
blanchisseuse was not in liquor is altogether too gross
a compliment; but I was always grateful to her for
her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talka
tive smile, for the way her charming cap was poised
upon her crisp, dense hair, and her well-made dress
was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with her;
I could talk with her; and as she talked she raoved
about and laid out her linen with a delightful modest
ease. Then her light step carried her off again, talk
ing, to the door, and with a brighter smile and an
"Adieu, monsieur!" she closed it behind her, leaving
one to think how stupid is prejudice and how poetic
a creature a washerwoman may be. London, in De
cember, was livid with sleet and fog, and against this
dismal background was offered me the vision of a
horrible old woman in a sraoky bonnet, lying prone in
a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind
of symbolic significance, and she almost frightened
me away.
I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not credit
able to my fortitude, because I found that the informa
tion given me was not strictly accurate, and that at
the end of three months I had another array of London
Sundays to face. On this occasion, however, nothing
occurred to suggest again the dreadful image I have
just sketched, though I devoted a good deal of tirae
Portraits of Places. ^3

194 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
to observing the manners of the lower orders. From
Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very
much en Evidence, and it was an excellent occasion for
getting an impression of the British populace. Gen
tility had retired to the background, and in the West
End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void
of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare;
but the "masses" were all abroad and making the
raost of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched
them at their gambols. The heavens were most un
favourable, but in an English "outing" there is always
a margin left for a drenching, and throughout the vast
smoky city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky, the
grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weather
proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the rail
way stations overflowed, and the Thames embankment
was covered. The "masses," I think, are usually an
entertaining spectacle, even when observed through the
distorting medium of London bad weather. There are
indeed few things in their way more impressive than
a dusky London holiday; it suggests a variety of re
flections. Even looked at superficially, the British
capital is one of the most interesting of cities, and it
is perhaps on such occasions as this that I have most
felt its interest. London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more
destitute than any European city of graceful and de
corative incident; and though on festal days, like those
I speak of, the populace is massed in large numbers
at certain points, many of "the streets are empty enough
of huraan life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic
want of charm. A Christmas-day or a Good Friday^
uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk along
the streets, having no fellow-pedestrians to look at,.

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 195
you look up at the bro^vn brick house-walls, corroded
with soot and fog, pierced with their straight stiff
window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, with
a little black line resembling a slice of curb-stone.
There is not an accessory, not a touch of architectural
fancy, not the narrowest concession to beauty. If I
were a foreigner it would make me rabid; being an
Anglo-Saxon I find in it what Thackeray found in
Baker Street — a delightful proof of English domestic
virtue, of the sanctity of the British home. There are
miles and railes of these edifying monuments, and it
would seem that a city made up of them should have
no claim to that larger effectiveness of which I just
now spoke. London, however, is not made up of thera;
there are architectural corabinations of a statelier kind,
and the impression moreover does not rest on details.
London is pictorial in spite of details — from its dark-
green, misty parks, the way the light comes down
leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling, and the
softness and richness of tone which objects put on in
such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to recede.
Nowhere is there such a play of light and shade, such
a struggle of sun and sraoke, such aerial gradations
and confusions. To eyes addicted to such contempla
tions this is a constant diversion, and yet this is only
part of it. What completes the effect of the place is
its appeal to the feelings, raade in so many ways, but
made above all by agglomerated imraensity. At any
given point London looks huge; even in narrow corners
you have a sense of its hugeness, and petty places ac
quire a certain interest frora their being parts of so
mighty a whole. Nowhere else is so rauch human life
gathered together, and nowhere does it press upon
13'

196 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
you with so many suggestions. These are not all of
an exhilarating kind; far frora it. But they are of
every possible kind, and that is the interest of London.
Those that were raost forcible during the showery
Easter season were certain of the raore perplexing and
depressing ones; but even with these was mingled a
brighter strain.
I walked down to Westminster Abbey on Good
Friday aftemoon — walked frora Piccadilly across the
Green Park and through that of St. Jaraes. The parks
were densely filled with the populace — the elder
people shuffling about the walks and the poor little
smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark damp
turf When I reached the Abbey I found a dense
group of people about the entrance, but I squeezed
ray way through them and succeeded in reaching the
threshold. Beyond this it was irapossible to advance,
and I may add that it was not desirable. I put my
nose into the church and promptly withdrew it. The
crowd was terribly compact, and beneath the gothic
arches the odour was not that of incense. I slowly
eliminated myself, with that very modified sense of
disappointment that one feels in London at being
crowded out of a place. This is a frequent disap
pointment, for you very soon find out that there are,
selfishly speaking, too many people. Human life is
cheap; your fellow-mortals are too numerous. Wher
ever you go you make the observation. Go to the
theatre, to a concert, to an exhibition, to a reception;
you always find that, before you arrive, there are
people enough in the field. You are a tight fit in
your place, wherever you find it; you have too many
companions and competitors. You feel yourself at

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 1 97
times in danger of thinking meanly of the human per
sonality; numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality,
and perpetual association is rather irritating. This is
the reason why the perfection of luxury in England is
to own a "park" — an artificial solitude. To get one's
self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak-
studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth,
at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort
which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But
I walked back through the profane pleasure-grounds
of London, in the midst of "superfluous herds," and I
found that entertainraent which I never fail to derive
from a great English assemblage. The English are,
to my eyes, so much the handsomest people in Europe
that it takes some effort of the imagination to believe
that the fact requires proof I never see a large num
ber of them without feeling this impression confirmed;
though I hasten to add that I have sometiraes felt it
to be rather shaken in the presence of a limited
group. I suspect that a great English crowd would
peld a larger percentage of handsome faces and
figures than any other. With regard to the upper
class I suppose this is generally granted; but I should
extend it to the whole people. Certainly, if the Eng
lish populace strike the observer by their good looks,
they must be very good-looking indeed. They are as
ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their
garments have that sooty-looking surface which has
nothing in common with some of the more romantic
forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of raisery — an
ugly and hopeless iraitation of respectable attire. This
is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled
bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands

198 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of
what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too
much to say that two-thirds of the London faces,
among the "masses," bear in some degree or other
the traces of alcoholic action. The proportion of
flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very
striking; and the ugliness ofthe sight is not diminished
by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured
were evidently meant to please. A very large allow
ance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the
distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degrada
tion which comes frora the sluras and purlieus of this
dusky Babylon— the pallid, stunted, raisbegotten, and
in every way miserable figures. These people swarm
in every London crowd, and I know of none in any
other place that suggest an equal degree of misery.
But when these abatements are made, the observer is
still liable to be struck by the frequency of well-
moulded faces and bodies well put together; of strong,
straight brows and handsome mouths and noses, of
rounded, finished chins and well-poised heads, of ad
rairable complexions and well-disposed limbs.
The capacity of an Englishwoman for being hand
some strikes rae as absolutely unlimited, and even if
(I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is most
freely exercised, yet among the daughters of the people
one sees a great many fine points. Among the men
fine points are strikingly numerous — especially among
the younger ones. Here the same distinction is to be
made — the gentlemen are certainly handsomer than
the vulgarians. But taking one young Englishman
with another, they are physically very well turned out.
Their features are finished, composed, as it were, more

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 1 99
harmoniously than those of many of their nearer and
remoter neighbours, and their figures are apt to be
both powerful and compact. They present to view
very much fewer accidental noses and inexpressive
mouths, fewer sloping shoulders and ill-planted heads
of hair, than their Araerican kinsraen. Speaking always
from the sidewalk, it may be said that as the spring
increases in London and the symptoms of the season
multiply, the beautiful young men who adorn the West
End pavements, and who advance before you in
couples, arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray-eyed, athletic,
slow-strolling, ambrosial, are among the raost brilliant
features of the brilliant period. I have it at heart to
add that if the English are handsomer than ourselves,
they are also very much uglier. Indeed I think that
all the European peoples are uglier than the Ameri
can; we are far from producing those magnificent types
of facial eccentricity which flourish among older civili
sations. American ugliness is on the side of physical
poverty and meanness; English on that of redundancy
and monstrosity. In America there are few grotesques;
in England there are many — and some of them have
a high pictorial value.

III.
The element of the grotesque was very noticeable
to me in the most striking collection of the shabbier
English types that I had seen since I came to London.
The occasion of my seeing them was the funeral of
Mr. George Odger, which befell some four or five
weeks before the Easter period. Mr. George Odger,
it will be reraerabered, was an English radical agitator

200 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of humble origin, who had distinguished himself by a
perverse desire to get into Parliament. He exercised,
I believe, the useful profession of shoemaker, and he
knocked in vain at the door that opens but to the
refined. But he was a useful and honourable man,
and his own people gave him an honourable burial. I
emerged accidentally into Piccadilly at the moment
they were so engaged, and the spectacle was one I
should have been sorry to raiss. The crowd was enorm
ous, but I managed to squeeze through it and to
get into a hansom cab that was drawn up beside the
pavement, and here I looked on as from a box at the
play. Though it was a funeral that was going on I
will not call it a tragedy; but it was a very serious
comedy. The day happened to be raagnificent — the
finest of the year. The funeral had been taken in
hand by the classes who are socially unrepresented in
Parliament, and it had the character of a great popular
"manifestation." The hearse was followed by very
few carriages, but the cortige of pedestrians stretched
away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gen
tility of Piccadilly, on a scale that was highly im
pressive. Here and there the line was broken by a
small brass band — apparently one of those bands of
itinerant Germans that play for coppers beneath lodging-
house windows; but for the rest it was compactly made
up of what the newspapers call the dregs of the popu
lation. It was the London rabble, the metropolitan
mob, men and women, boys and girls, the decent poor
and the indecent, who had scrambled into the ranks
as they gathered them up on their passage, and were
making a sort of solemn "lark" of it. Very solemn it
all was — perfectly proper and undemonstrative. They

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 20I
shuffled along in an interminable line, and as I looked
at them out of the front of my hansom I seeraed to
be having a sort of panoraraic view of the under side,
the -wrong side, of the London world. The procession
was filled with figures which seemed never to have
"shown out," as the English say, before; of strange,
pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in
the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe
them more minutely, but I found the whole affair
rather suggestive. My impression rose not simply
from the radical, or, as I raay say for the sake of
colour, the revolutionary, eraanation of this dingy con
course, lighted up by the ironical sky; but frora the
same causes that I had observed a short time before,
on the day the Queen went to open Parliament, when
in Trafalgar Square, looking straight down into West
minster and over the royal procession, were gathered
a group of banners and festoons inscribed in big star
ing letters with mottoes and sentiments which a sensi
tive police department might easily have found sedi
tious. They were mostly in allusion to the Tichborne
claimant, whose release from his dungeon they peremp
torily demanded, and whose cruel fate was taken as a
pretext for several sweeping reflections on the social
arrangements of the time and country. These imper
tinent standards were allowed to sun themselves as
freely as if they had been the manifestoes of the Irish
Giant or the Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I had lately
come from Paris, where the police-department is more
sensitive, and where revolutionary placards are not
observed to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place
de la Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on
both of the occasions I speak of with the admirable

202 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
English practice of letting people alone — ^with the
good sense and the good humour and even the good
taste of it. It was this that I found impressive, as I
watched the "manifestation" of Mr. Odger's underfed
partisans — the fact that the mighty mob could march
along and do its errand, while the excellent quiet
policemen stood by simply to see that the channel
was kept clear and corafortable.
When Easter Monday came it was obvious that
every one (save Mr. Odger's friends — three or four
million or so) had gone out of town. There was hardly
a pair of shutters in the West End that was not closed;
there was not a bell that it was any use to pull. The
weather was detestable, the rain incessant, and the
fact that all one's friends were away gave one plenty
of leisure to reflect that the country must be the re
verse of enlivening. But all one's friends had gone
thither (this is the unanimity I began by talking about),
and to restrict as much as possible the proportions of
that game of hide-and-seek of which, at the best, so
rauch of London social life consists, it seeraed wise
to bring within the liraits of the dull season any such
excursion as one raight have projected in commemora
tion of the first days of spring. After due cogitation
I paid a little visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking
Rochester by the way, and it was of this momentous
journey that I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to
give an account. But I have dallied so much by the
way that I have come alraost to my rope's end without
reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artis
tically, by relating that I put rayself in the humour
for remote adventure by going down the Thames on
a penny stearaboat to — the Tower. This was on the

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 203
Saturday before Easter, and the City was as silent as
the grave. The Tower was a raemory of my child
hood, and having a theory that from such raeraories
the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, I had
not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. But the
Tower is very good — much less cockneyfied than I
supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; very
gray and historical, with the look that vivifies — rather
lividly indeed — the past. I could not get into it, as
it had been closed for Passion Week, but I was con
sequently relieved from the obligation to march about
with a dozen fellow-starers in the train of a didactic
beef-eater, and I strolled at will through the courts
and the garden, sharing them only with the lounging
soldiers of the garrison, who seemed to connect the
place with iraportant events.

IV.
At Rochester I stopped for the sake of its castle,
which I espied from the railway-train, perched on a
grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There
were other reasons as well; the place has a small
cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens,
whose house of Gadshill was a couple of miles from
the to-wn. All this Kentish country, between London
and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens; he
is to a certain extent, for our o-wn time, the spirit of
the land. I found this to be quite the case at Ro
chester. I had occasion to go into a little shop kept
by a talkative old woman who had a photograph of
Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to ray asking
her whether the illustrious master of the house often

204 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
made his appearance in the town. "Oh, bless you,
sir," she said, "we every one of us knew hira to speak
to. He was in this very shop on the Tuesday with a
party of foreigners — as he was dead in his bed on
the Friday." (I should reraark that I probably do not
repeat the days of the week as she gave them.)^ "He
'ad on his black velvet suit, and it always made him
look so 'andsome. I said to my 'usband, 'I do think
Charles Dickens looks so nice in that black velvet
suit.' But he said he couldn't see as he looked any
way particular. He was in this very shop on the
Tuesday, with a party of foreigners.'' Rochester con
sists of little more than one long street, stretching
away from the castle and the river toward neighbour
ing Chatham, and edged with low brick houses, of
intensely provincial aspect, most of which have some
small, dull quaintness of gable or window. Nearly
opposite to the shop of the old lady with the dis
sentient husband is a little dwelling with an inscribed
slab set into its face, which raust often have provoked
a smile in the great master of laughter. The slab
relates that in the year 1579 Richard Watts here
established a charity which should furnish "six poor
travellers, not rogues or proctors," one night's lodging
and entertainment gratis, and four pence in the morn
ing to go on their way withal, and that in memory of
his "munificence" the stone has lately been renewed.
The inn at Rochester was poor, and I felt strongly
tempted to knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum,
under plea of being neither a rogue nor a proctor.
The poor traveller who avails himself of the testa
mentary four-pence may easily resume his journey as
far as Chatham without breaking his treasure. Is not

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 205
this the place where little Davy Copperfield slept under
a cannon on his journey from London to Dover to join
his aunt. Miss Trotwood? The two towns are really
but one, which forms an interminable crooked thorough
fare, lighted up in the dusk, as I measured it up and
down, with the red coats of the vespertinal soldier
quartered at the various barracks of Chatham.
The cathedral of Rochester is small and plain,
hidden away in rather an awkward comer, without a
verdant close to set it off It is dwarfed and effaced
by the great square Norman keep of the adjacent
castle. But within it is very charming, especially be
yond the detestable wall, the vice of almost all the
English cathedrals, which shuts in the choir and breaks
the sacred perspective ofthe aisle. Here, as at Canter
bury, you ascend a high range of steps, to pass through
the small door in this wall. When I speak slightingly,
by the way, of the outside of Rochester cathedral, I
intend ray faint praise in a relative sense. If we were
so happy as to possess this inferior edifice in America,
we should go barefoot to see it; but here it stands in
the great shadow of Canterbury, and that makes it
humble. I remember, however, an old priory gateway
which leads you to the church, out of the main street;
I remember a kind of haunted-looking deanery, if that
be the technical name, at the base of the eastern
walls; I remeraber a fluted tower that took the after
noon light and let the rooks and the swallows come
circling and clamouring around it. Better than these
things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of
the castle — a very noble and imposing ruin. The old
walled precinct has been converted into a little public
garden, with flowers and benches, and a pavilion for

206 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
a band, and the place was not empty, as such places
in England never are. The result is agreeable, but I
believe the process was barbarous, involving the de
struction and dispersion of raany interesting portions
of the ruin. I sat there for a long time, however,
looking in the fading light at what was left. This
rugged pile of Norman masonry will be left when a
great raany solid things have departed; it is a sort of
satire on destruction or decay. Its walls are fantas
tically thick; their great time-bleached expanses and
all their rounded roughnesses, their strange raixture
of softness and grimness, have an undefinable fascina
tion for the eye. English ruins always come out
peculiarly when the day begins to fail. Weather-
bleached, as I say they are, they turn even paler in
the twilight and grow consciously soleran and spectral.
I have seen many a mouldering castle, but I remember
in no single mass of ruin mpre of the helpless,, ampu
tated look. " '" ,' ¦'" "j" " ' ' ¦, f ¦• ¦',;
It is not the absence of a close that damages
Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and
trees, with a cultivated margin all round it, and is
placed in such a way that, as you pass out from under
the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its grand
feature — its extraordinary and magnificent length.
None of the English cathedrals seeras more beautifully
isolated, more shut up to itself It is a long walk,
beneath the walls, from the gateway of the close to
the farther end of the last chapel. Of all that there
is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll I can give
no detailed account; I can speak only of the general
impression. This is altogether delightful. None of
the rivals of Canterbury has a more coraplicated and.

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 207
elaborate architecture, a more perplexing intermixture
of periods, a raore charraing jumble of Norman arches
and English points and perpendiculars. What makes
the side-view superb, moreover, is the double transepts,
which produce a fine agglomeration of gables and
buttresses. It is as if two great churches had joined
forces toward the middle — one giving its nave and the
other its choir, and each keeping its own great cross-
aisles. Astride of the roof, between them, sits a huge
gothic tower, which is one of the latest portions of the
building, though it looks like one of the earliest, so
crumbled and blunted and suffused is it by time and
weather. Like the rest of the structure it has a magni
ficent colour — a sort of rich dull yellow, a something
that is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly
appreciable from the cloisters on the farther side of
the church — the side, I mean, away from the town
and the opon garden-sweep I spoke of; the side that
looks toward a damp old clerical house, lurking behind
a brown archway, through which you see young ladies
in Gainsborough hats playing something on a patch of
velvet turf; the side, in short, that is somehow inter
mingled with a green quadrangle — a quadrangle serv
ing as a playground to a King's School, and adorned
externally with a very precious and picturesque old
fragment of Norman staircase. This cloisters is not
"kept up;" it is very dusky and mouldy and dilapi
dated, and of course very sketchable. The old black
arches and capitals are various and handsome, and
in the centre are tumbled together a group of crooked
gravestones, themselves almost buried in the deep soft
grass. Out of the cloisters opens the chapter-house,
which is not kept up either, but which is none the less

208 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
a magnificent structure; a noble, lofty hall, with a
beautiful wooden roof, simply arched like that of a
tunnel, without columns or brackets. The place is
now given up to dust and echoes; but it looks more
like a banqueting-hall than a council-room of priests,
and as you sit on the old wooden bench, which, raised
on two or three steps, runs round the base of the four
walls, you may gaze up and make out the faint ghostly
traces of decorative paint and gold upon the brown
ceiling. A little patch of this has been restored, "to
give an idea." Frora one of the angles of the cloisters
you are recomraended by the verger to take a view of
the great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tre
mendous effect. You see it base itself upon the roof
as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, and
then pile itself away to a height which seems to make
the very swallows dizzy, as they drop frora the top-
raost shelf Within the cathedral you hear a great
deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, and the
great sensation of the place is to stand on the par
ticular spot where he was murdered and look down at
a small fragmentary slab which the verger points out
to you as a bit of the pavement that caught the blood-
drops of the struggle. It was late in the afternoon
when I first entered the church; there had been a
service in the choir, but that was well over, and I had
the place to myself The verger, who had some
pushing-about of the benches to attend to, turned me
into the locked gates and left me to wander through
the side-aisles of the choir and into the great chapel
beyond it. I say I had the place to myself; but it
would be more decent to affirm that I shared it, in
particular, with another gentleman. This personage

AN ENGLISH EASTER. 20g
was stretched upon a couch of stone, beneath a quaint
old canopy of wood; his hands were crossed upon his
breast, and his pointed toes rested upon a little griffin
or leopard. He was a very handsome fellow and the
image of a gallant knight. His narae was Edward
Plantagenet, and his sobriquet was the Black Prince.
"De la mort ne pensai-je mye," he says in the beautiful
inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his
image; and I too, as I stood there, lost the sense of
death in a momentary impression of personal nearness
to him. One had been farther off, after all, from
other famous knights. In this sarae chapel for many
a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
one of the richest and most potent in Christendom. /
The pavement which lay before it has kept its place,
but Henry VIII. swept away everything else in his
famous short cut to reform. Becket was originally
buried in the crypt of the church; his ashes lay there
for fifty years, and it was only little by little that his
martyrdom was, as the French say, "exploited." Then
he was transplanted into the Lady Chapel; every
grain of his dust became a priceless relic, and the
pavement was hollowed by the knees of pilgrims. It
was on this errand of course that Chaucer's story-tell
ing cavalcade came to Canterbury. I made my way
down into the crypt, which is a magnificent maze of
low, dark arches and pillars, and groped about till I
found the place where the frightened monks had first
shuffled the inanimate victim of Moreville and Fitzurse
out of the reach of further desecration. While I stood
there a violent thunderstorm broke over the cathedral;
great rumbling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping
through the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling
Portraits of Places. ^4

210 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
with the darkness which seemed to deepen and flash
in corners, and with the potent mouldy smell, made
' me feel as if I had descended into the very bowels of
history. I emerged again, but the rain had settled
down and spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to
my inn and sat in an uncomfortable chair by the
coffee-room fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable
Memorials of Canterbury , and wondering over the
musty appointraents and meagre resources of English
hostels. This establishment had entitled itself (in
compliment to the Black Prince, I suppose) the "Fleur-
de-Lis." The name was very pretty (I had been fool
ish enough to let it attract me to the inn), but the lily
was sadly deflowered.

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 2 I I

X.
LONDON AT MIDSUMMER.
1877.
I BELiE-YE it is supposed to require a good deal of
courage to confess that one has spent the month of
August in London; and I will therefore, taking the
bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to
this dishonourable weakness. I might attempt some
ingenious extenuation of it. I might say that my re
maining in to-wn had been the most unexpected ne
cessity or the merest inadvertence; I might pretend I
liked it — that I had done it, in fact, for the love of
the thing; I might claim that you don't really know
the charms of London until on one of the dog-days
you have imprinted your boot-sole in the slumbering
dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along the erapty vista of
the Drive, in Hyde Park, have beheld, for almost the
first time in England, a landscape without figures.
But little would remain of these specious apologies
save the naked fact that I had distinctly failed to
retire from the metropolis— either on the first of
August with the ladies and children, or on the thir
teenth with the merabers of Parliaraent, or on the
twelfth when the grouse-shooting began. (I am not
sure that I have got ray dates right to a day, but these
14*

2 12 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
were about the proper opportunities.) I have, in fact,
survived the departure of everything genteel, and the
three millions of persons who remained behind with
me have been witnesses of my shame.
I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having
lingered in town, I have found it a very odious or
painful experience. Being a stranger, I have not felt
it necessary to incarcerate myself during the day and
steal abroad only under cover of the darkness — a line
of conduct iraposed by public opinion, if I ara to trust
the social criticisra of the weekly papers (which I am
far frora doing), upon the native residents who allow
theraselves to be overtaken by the unfashionable
season. I have indeed always had a theory that few
things are pleasanter than during the hot weather to
have a great city, and a large house within it, quite to
one's self
The majestic conditions have not been combined
in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received
an impression that in London it would be rather dif
ficult for a person not having the coraraand of a good
deal of powerful raachinery to find them united.
English summer weather is rarely hot enough to
make it necessary to darken one's house and disrobe.
The present year has indeed in this respect been "ex
ceptional," as any year is, for that matter, that one
spends anywhere. But the manners of the people are,
to American eyes, a sufficient indication that at the
best (or the worst) even the highest flights of the
thermometer in the British Islands betray a broken
wing. People live with closed windows in August,
very much as they do in January, and there is to the
eye no appreciable difference in the character of their

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 213
apparel. A "bath" in England, for the most part all
the year round, means a little portable tin tub and a
sponge. Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are
not a more obvious ornament of the market at mid
summer than at Christmas. This matter of peaches
and melons, by the way, offers one of the best
examples of that fact to which a foreign commentator
on English manners finds himself constantly recurring,
and to which he grows at last almost asharaed of
alluding — the fact that the beauty and luxury of the
country — that elaborate system known and revered all
over the world as "English comfort" — is a liraited
and restricted, an essentially private, affair. I ara not
one of those irreverent strangers who talk of English
fruit as a rather audacious plaisanterie, though I could
see very well what was meant a short time since by
an anecdote related to rae in a tone of conteraptuous
generalisation by a couple of ray fellow-countryworaen.
They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and,
lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with
some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest pattern,
and they were waited upon by a functionary whose
grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed
and retired, and, after a long delay reappearing,
placed before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish
of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon in
vestigation that these acrid vegetables were the only
things of succulence that the establishment could
undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the
irony of the situation that the establishment was as
near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that
the heroines of my anecdote seeraed disposed to
generalise: this was sufficiently the case, I raean, to

214 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
give me a pretext for assuring them tha^ on a thousand
charming estates the raost beautiful peaches^ and
melons were at that raoraent ripening under glass^^My
auditors tossed their heads, of course, at the beautiful
estates and the glass; and indeed at their ascetic
hostelry close to Buckinghara Palace such a piece of
knowledge was but scantily consoling.
It is to a more public fund of entertainment that
the desultory stranger in any country chiefly appeals,
especially in summer weather; and as I have implied
that there is little encouragement in England to such
an appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should
not have found London, at this season, at least as un
congenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But one's liking
for London — a stranger's liking at least — is at the
best an anomalous and . illogical sentiment, of which
he may feel it hardly less difficult to give a cate
gorical account at one time than at another. I am
far from meaning by this that there are not in this
mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest,
entertainment, and delight: what I mean is, that for
one reason and another, with all its social resources,
the place lies heavy on the foreign consciousness. It
seems grim and dusky, fierce and unmerciful. And
yet the foreign consciousness accepts it at last with
an active satisfaction, and finds something warm and
comfortable, something that if removed would be
greatly raissed, in its treraendous pressure;- It must
be admitted, however, that, granting that every one is
out of town, your choice of pastimes is not em
barrassing. If it has been your fortune to spend a
certain amount of time in foreign cities, London will
seera to you but slenderly provided with innocent

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 215
diversions. This, indeed, brings us back simply to
that question of the absence of a "public fund" of
amusement to which reference was just now made.
You must give up the idea of going to sit somewhere
in the open air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of
music. You will find neither the seat, the ice, nor
the band; but, on the other hand, faithful to your
profession of observant foreigner, you may supply the
place of these delights by a little private meditation
upon the deep-lying causes of the English indifference
to thera. In such reflections nothing is idle — every
grain of testimony counts; and one need therefore not
be accused of jumping too suddenly from small things
to great if one traces a connection between the ab
sence of ices and music and the aristocratic constitu
tion of English society. This aristocratic constitution
of English society is the great and ever-present fact to
the mind of a stranger: there is hardly a detail of
English life that does not appear in some degree to
point to it. It is really only in a country in which a
good deal of democratic feeling prevails that people
of "refinement," as we say in America, will be willing
to sit at little round tables, on a pavement or a
gravel-walk, at the door of a cafe. The upper classes
are too refined, and the lower classes are too miserable.
One must hasten to add too, in justice, that the upper
classes are, as a general thing, quite too well furnished
with entertainraents of their own; they have those
special resources to which I alluded a moment since.
They are peiople, of fortune, and are naturally in
dependent of communistic pleasures. If you can sit
on a terrace in a high-walled garden and have your
cafi noir handed to you in Pompadour cups by

2l6 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
servants in powder and plush, you have hardly a
decent pretext for going to a public-house. In France
and Italy, in Germany and Spain, the count and
countess will sally fortli and encamp for the evening,
under a row of coloured lamps, upon the paving-
stones, but it is ten to one that the count and countess
live on a single floor, up several pair of stairs. They
are, however, I think, not appreciably affected by con
siderations which operate potently in England. An
Englishman who should propose to sit down at a
cafe-door would find hiraself reraembering that he is
exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social
inferiors. The danger is great, because his social
inferiors are so numerous; and I suspect that if we
could look straight into the English consciousness we
should be interested to find how serious a danger it
appears, and how good — given the texture of English
life — are some of his reasons for wishing not to ex
pose himself
The consideration of these reasons, however, would
lead us very far from the potential little tables for
ices in — where shall I say? — in Oxford Street; but,
after all, there is no reason why our iraagination
should hover about these articles of furniture. I am
afraid they would not strike us as happily situated.
In such matters everything hangs together, and I am
certain that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens
and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonise with the
scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-
palace right and left and a detachment of the London
rabble in an admiring semicircle — these, I confess,
strike me as some of the more obvious features of the
affair. Yet at the season of which I write, one's social

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 21 7
studies must at the least be studies of low life, for
wherever one may go for a stroll or to spend the sum
mer aftemoon, the unfashionable side of things is
uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the
rough characters who are lying on their faces in the
sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably
numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently
pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon
them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to
bestir itself on behalf of the recumbent British tramp.
You perceive araong them some rich possibilities.
Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their
purple necks and ear-tips, their knotted sticks and
little greasy hats, make them look like stage-villains
in a realistic melodraraa. I raay do thera great in
justice, but I always assurae that they have had a
taste of penal servitude — that they have paid the
penalty of staraping on some weaker human head with
those huge square heels that are turned up to the
summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough,
for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most ac
complished philanthropist, and it is their look of
having walked over half England, and of being con
foundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their
romantic attractiveness. These six square feet of
brown grass are their present sufficiency; but how
long will they sleep, whither will they go next, and
whence did they come last? You permit yourself to
wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere
else at all.
The month of August is so uncountenanced in
London that going a few days since to Greenwich,
that famous resort, I found it possible to get but half

2 1 8 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
a dinner. The celebrated hotel had put out its stoves'
and locked up its pantry. But for this discovery I
should have mentioned the little expedition to Green
wich as a charming relief to the monotony of a Lon
don August. Greenwich and Richmond are, classically,
the two suburban dining-places. I know not how it
may be' at this time with Richmond, but the Green
wich incident brings me back (I hope not once too
often) to the element of what has lately been called
"particularism" in English pleasures. It was in
obedience to a perfectly logical argument that the
Greenwich hotel had, as I say, locked up its pantry.
All well-bred people leave London after the first week
in August, ergo those who remain behind are not well-
bred, and cannot therefore rise to the conception of a
"fish dinner." Why, then, should we have anything
ready? I had other impressions, fortunately, of this
interesting suburb, and I hasten to declare that during
the period of good-breeding the dinner at Greenwich
is the most amusing of all dinners. It begins with
fish and it continues with fish: what it ends with — ex
cept songs and speeches and affectionate partings — I
hesitate to affirm. It is a kind of merraaid reversed;
for I do know, in a vague way', that the tail of the
creature is elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it
were not grossly indiscreet, I should [risk an allusion
to the particular banquet which was the occasion of
my becoming acquainted with the Greenwich cuisine.
I would affirm that it is very pleasant to sit in a com
pany of clever and distinguished men, before the
large windows that look out upon the broad brown
Thames. The ships swim by confidently, as if they
were part of the entertainment and put down in the

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 21^
bill; the light of the afternoon fades ever so slowly.
We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash them down
with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water.
"We partake of any number of those sauces with which,
according to the French adage, one could swallow
one's grandmother with a good conscience. To speak
of the particular merits of ray corapanions would in
deed be indiscreet, but there is nothing indelicate in
expressing a high appreciation of the frankness and
robustness of English conviviality. The stranger — the
American at least — who finds himself in the company
of a number of Englishmen assembled for a convivial
purpose becomes conscious of a certain indefinable
and delectable something which, for want of a better
name, he will call their superior richness of tempera
ment. He takes note of the liberal share of the in
dividual in the magnificent temperament of the people.
This seems to him one of the finest things in the
world, and his satisfaction will take a keener edge
from such an incident as the single one I may permit
myself to mention. It was one of those little incidents
which can occur only in an old society — a society in
which every one that a newly-arrived observer meets
strikes him as having in sorae degree or other a sort
of historic identity, being connected with sorae one or
something that he has heard of If they are not the
rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is
an old English song-writer whora we all know and
admire — whose songs are sung wherever the language
is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just
hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must
needs be his great-grandson. After dinner there are
songs, and the gentleraan trolls out one of his ancestral

220 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
ditties with the most charraing voice and the raost
finished art.
I have still other memories of Greenwich, where
there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of
whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is
perched. To do the thing completely, you must take
passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers
that ply upon the Thames, perform the journey by
water, and then, disembarking, take a stroll in the
park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an irre
sistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am
rather at a loss how to speak of the little voyage from
Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. It is in truth the
most prosaic possible forra of being afloat, and to be
recommended rather to the inquiring than to the fas
tidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the
blackness, the crowdedness, the intensely commercial
character of London. Few European cities have a
finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has
expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river
front. For miles and railes you see nothing but the
sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the
sooty fronts: in buildings so very expressionless it is
impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together
on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is for
tunately of too opaque a quality to reflect the dismal
image. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the uni
versal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered
with black barges; above the black housetops, from
among the far- stretching docks and basins, rises a
dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer
is dingy and gritty — it belches a sable cloud that
keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 221
shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed,
to the less brilliant classes, assurae an harmonious
grayness; and the whole picture, glazed over with the
glutinous London mist, becomes a masterly composi
tion. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of
lightness and brightness, and though it is ugly it is
not insignificant. Like so many of the aspects of
English civilisation that are untouched by elegance or
grace, it has the merit of expressing soraething very
serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted
river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses,
the frowsy people, the atmospheric impurities, become
richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so,
but all this sordid detail reminds rae of nothing less
than the wealth and power of the British erapire at
large; so that a kind of raetaphysical raagnificence
hovers over the scene, and supplies what raay be
literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the as
sociation, but I know that when I look off to the left at
the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely-
piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human
processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of
imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers ofthe bridges,
in especial, seem the very pillars of the British empire
aforesaid. It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive and
unprofitable reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks
it very fine to see the Greenwich observatory lifting
its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this
useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which
may at first seem unreasonable. The reason was,
simply, that I used to see it as a child, in woodcuts,
in school-geographies, and in the corners of large

222 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which
were suspended in unexpected places, in dark halls
and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that
my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and
these corners usually contained a print of a strange-
looking house, standing among trees upon a grassy
bank that swept down before it with the most engag
ing steepness. I used always to think that it must be
an immense pleasure to hurl one's self down this curv
ing precipice. Close at hand was usually something
being at such and such a number of degrees "east of
Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague
wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave
the place a mysterious iraportance, and seeraed to put
it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts
of geography — the countries of unintentional outline
and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet there
it stood the other day, the precise point frora which
the great globe is raeasured; there was the plain little
fagade, with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the
bank on which it would be so delightful not to be
able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old to
find that I was not even tempted to begin. There are
indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park,
which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque
fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and
footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a
character all its own. It is filled with magnificent
foreign-looking trees, of which I know nothing but that
they have a vain appearance of being chestnuts, planted
in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extra
ordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow
far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 223
there are deer as tarae as sleepy children; and from
the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the
widening Thames, and the moving ships, and the two
classic inns by the waterside, and the great pompous
buildings, designed by Inigo Jones, of the old Hospital,
which have been despoiled of their ancient pensioners
and converted into a kind of naval academy.
Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away
angle in the wall of the park, where a little postern
door stood ajar. I pushed the door open, and found
myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Blackheath
Common. One had often heard of Blackheath: well,
here it was — a great green, breezy place, where various
lads in corduroys were playing cricket. I always ad
mire an English common; it may be curtailed and
cockneyfied, as this one was — which had lamp-posts
stuck about on its turf and a fresh-painted banister all
around — but it is sure to be one of the places that re
mind you vividly that you are in England. Even if
the turf is too much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes,
an English greenness about it, and there is something
peculiarly insular in the way the high-piled, weather-
bearing clouds hang over it and drizzle down their
gray light. Still further to identify this spot, here was
the British soldier emerging from two or three of the
roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white gloves in
one hand and his foppish little cane in the other. He
wore the uniform of the artillery, and I asked him
where he had corae from. I learned that he had
walked over from Woolwich, and that this feat might
be accomplished in half an hour. Inspired again by
Vague associations, I proceeded to accomplish its equi
valent. I bent my steps to Woolwich, a place which

224 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
I knew, in a general way, to be a nursery of British
valour. At the end of my half hour I emerged upon
another common, where local colour was still more in
tense. The scene was very entertaining. The open
grassy expanse was immense, and, the evening being '
beautiful, it was dotted with strolling soldiers and
townsfolk. There were half a dozen cricket matches,
both civil and military. At one end of this peaceful
campus martius, which stretches over a hilltop, rises
an interminable facade — one of the fronts of the artil
lery barracks. It has a very honourable air, and raore
windows and doors, I imagine, than any building in
Britain. There is a great clean parade before it, and
there are many sentinels pacing in front of neatly-kept
places of ingress to officers' quarters. Ever}rthing it
looks out upon is railitary — the distinguished college
(where the poor young raan whom it would perhaps
be premature to call the last of the Bonapartes lately
studied the art of war) on one side; a sort of model
camp — a collection of the tidiest plank huts — on the
other; a hospital, on a well-ventilated site, at the re
moter end. And then in the town below there are a
great many raore railitary raatters^b arracks on an im
mense scale; a dockyard that presents an interminable
dead wall to the street; an arsenal which the gate
keeper (who refused to admit me) declared to be "five
miles" in circumference; and, lastly, grogshops enough
to inflarae the most craven spirit. These latter insti
tutions I glanced at on my way to the railway station
at the bottom of the hill; but before departing I had
spent half an hour in strolling about the coraraon in
vague consciousness of certain emotions that are called
into play (I speak but for myself) by almost any

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 22^
glimpse of the imperial machinery of this great coun
try. The glimpse may be of the slightest; it stirs a
peculiar sentiment. I know not what to call this sen
timent unless it be simply an admiration for the great
ness of England. The greatness of England; that is a
very off-hand phrase, and of course I don't pretend to
use it analytically. I use it sentimentally — as it sounds
in the ears of any American who finds in English his
tory the sacred source of his own national affection. I
think of the great part that England has played in
human affairs, the great space she has occupied, her
tremendous might, her far-stretching sway. That these
clumsily-general ideas should be suggested by the
sight of some infinitesimal fraction of the English ad
ministrative system may seera to indicate a cast of
fancy too hysterical; but if so, I raust plead guilty to
the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or less
set one thinking of the glory of this little island, which
has found in her bosom the raeans of so vast a domi
nion? This is more than I can say; and all I shall at
tempt to say is, that in the difficult days that are now
elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds his meditations
singularly quickened. It is the dramatic element in
English history that he has chiefly cared for, and he
finds hiraself wondering whether the draraatic epoch
is completely closed. It is a moment when all the
nations of Europe seem to be doing soraething, and
he waits to see what England, who has done so much,
will do. He has been meeting of late a good many of
his country-people — Americans who live on the Con
tinent and pretend to speak with assurance of con
tinental ways of feeling. These people have been
passing through London, and many of them are in
Portraits of Places. ^ 5

2 26 . PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
-that irritated condition of mind which appears to be
the portion of the American sojourner in the British
metropolis when he is not given up to the delights of
the historic sentiment. They have affirmed with em
phasis that the continental nations have ceased to care
a straw for what England thinks, that her traditional
prestige is completely extinct, and that the affairs of
Europe will be settled quite independently of the
power whose capital is on the Thames. England will
do nothing, will risk nothing; there is no cause bad
enough for her not to find a selfish interest in it-
there is no cause good enough for her to fight about
it. Poor old England is exploded; it is about tirae she
should haul in her nets. To all this the sympathetic
stranger replies that, in the first place, he doesn't be
lieve a word of it; and, in the second place, he doesn't
care a fig for it — care, that is, what the continental
nations think. If the greatness of England were really
waning, it would be to him as a personal grief; and
-as he strolls about the breezy common of Woolwich,
with all those mementoes of British dominion around
him, he is quite too keenly exhilarated to be distracted
hy such vapours.
He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that Eng
land would do something ^ something striking and
powerful, which should be at once characteristic and
unexpected. He asks himself what she can do, and
lie reraerabers that this greatness of England which
he so rauch adraires was formerly much exemplified
-in her "taking" something. Can't she "take" some-
-thing now? There is the Spectator, who wants her to
occupy Egypt: can't she occupy Egypt? The Spectator
iconsiders this her raoral duty — inquires even whether

LONDON- AT MIDSUMMER. 2 27
she has a right not to bestow the blessings of her
beneficent rule upon the down-trodden Fellaheen. I
found myself in company with an acute young French
man a day or two after this eloquent plea for a partial
annexation of the Nile had appeared in the most in
genious of journals. Some . allusion was made to it,
and my companion proceeded to pronounce it a fin
ished example of British hypocrisy. I don't know how
powerful a defence I made of it, but while I read it I
certainly had been carried away by it. I recalled it-
while I pursued my contemplations, but I recalled at
the same time that sadly prosaic speech of Mr. Glad
stone to which it had been a reply. Mr. Gladstone
had said that England had much more urgent duties
than the occupation of Egypt: she had to attend to
the great questions of  "What were the great ques
tions? Those of local taxation and the liquor-laws!
Local taxation and the liquor-laws ! The phrase, to my
ears, just then raade a painful discord. These were
not the things I had been thinking of; it was not as
she should bend anxiously over these doubtless inter
esting subjects that the sympathetic stranger would
seem to see England in his favourite posture — that, as
Macaulay says, of hurling defiance at her foes. Of
course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but Mr. Glad
stone was not a sympathetic stranger.

IS*

228 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

XI.
TWO EXCURSIONS. 1877. I.
They differed greatly from each other, but each
had an interest of its own. There seemed (ar regards
the first) a general consensus of opinion as to its
being a great pity that a stranger in England should
miss the Derby day. Every one assured me that this
was the great festival of the English people, and the
most characteristic of national holidays. So rauch,
since it had to do with horse-flesh, I could readily be
lieve. Had not the newspapers been filled for weeks
with recurrent dissertations upon the animals con
cemed in the ceremony? and was not the event,. to
the nation at large, only imperceptibly less momentous
than the other great question of the day — the fate of
empires and the reapportionment of the East? The
space allotted to sporting intelligence in a compact,
eclectic, "intellectual" journal like the Pall j^all
Gazette, had seemed to rae for some time past a
measure of the hold of such questions upon the Bitish
mind. These things, however, are very natural in a
country in which in "society" you are liable to make
the acquaintance of some such syllogism as the follow-

TWO EXCURSIONS. 229
ing. You are seated at dinner next a foreign lady,
who has on her other hand a native gentleman, by
whom she is being instracted in the art of getting the
right point-of-view for looking at English life. I profit
by their conversation, and I learn that this point-of-
view is apparently the saddle. "You see, English
life," says the gentleman, "is really English country
life. It's the country that is the basis of English so
ciety. And you see, country life is — well, it's the
hunting. It's the hunting that is at the bottom of it
all." In other words, "the hunting" is the basis of
English society. Duly initiated into this interpreta
tion of things, the Araerican observer is prepared for
the colossal proportions of the annual pilgriraage to
Epsom. This pilgrimage, however, I was assured,
though still well worth taking part in, is by no means
so characteristic as in former days. It is now per
formed in a large measure by rail, and the spectacle
on the road has lost its ancient brilliancy. The road
has been given up raore and more to the populace
and the strangers, and has ceased to be graced by
the presence of ladies. Nevertheless, as a man and
a stranger, I was strongly recommended to take it;
for the return from the Derby is still, with all its
abatements, a classic spectacle.
I mounted upon a four-horse coach, a charming
coach, with a yellow body, and handsome, clean-
flanked leaders; placing myself beside the coachman,
as I had been told this was the point of vantage.
The coach was one of the vehicles of the new fashion
— the fashion of public conveyances driven, for the
entertainment of theraselves and of the public, by
gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby day all the

230 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
coaches that start from the classic head-quarters — the
"White Horse," in Piccadilly — and stretch away from
London toward a dozen different and well-selected
goals, had been dedicated to the Epsom road. The
body of the vehicle is empty, as no one thinks of oc
cupying any but one of the thirteen places on the top.
On the Derby day, however, a properly laden coach
carries a corapany of hampers and champagne-baskets
in its inside places. I must add that on this occasion
my companion was by exception a professional whip,
who proved an entertaining cicerone. Other com
panions there were, perched in the twelve places be
hind me , whose social quality I raade less of a point
of testing — though in the course of the expedition
their various characteristics, under the influence of
champagne, expanded so freely as greatly to facilitate
the operation. We were a society of exotics — Spaniards,
Frenchmen, Gerraans. There were only two Britons,
and these, according to ray theory, were Australians —
an antipodal bride and groom, on a centripetal wed
ding-tour. The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of
London, is sufficiently pretty; but the part of it which
most took my fancy was a suburban district — the
classic neighbourhood of Clapham. The vision of
Clapham had been a part of the furniture of my
imagination — the vision of its respectable coraraon, its
evangelical society, and its goodly brick mansions of
the Georgian era. I now beheld these objects for the
first time, and I thought them very charming. This
epithet, indeed, scarcely applies to the evangelical so
ciety, which naturally, on the raorning of the Derby
day, and during the desecrating progress of the Epsom

TWO EXCURSIONS. 23!
revellers, was not much in the foreground. But all
around the verdant, if cockneyfied common, are ranged
commodious houses of a sober red complexion, from
under whose neoclassic pediments you expect to see
a mild-faced lady emerge — a lady in a cottage-bonnet
and mittens, distributing tracts frora a little satchel.
It would take an energetic piety, however, to stera
the current of heterogeneous vehicles which at about
this point takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears
them in its rumbling, rattling tide. The concourse
of wheeled conveyances of every possible order here
becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top of the
coach proportionately absorbing. You begin to per
ceive that the brilliancy of the road has in truth de
parted, and that well-appointed elegance is not the
prevailing characteristic. But when once you have
grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous.
You perceive that you are "in," as the phrase is, for
something vulgar, something colossally, unimaginably,
heroically vulgar; all that is necessary is to accept
this situation and look out for illustrations. Beside
you, before you, behind you, is the mighty London
populace, taking its ibats. You get for the first time
a notion of the London population at large. It has
piled itself into carts, into omnibuses, into every pos
sible and impossible species of "trap." A large pro
portion of it is of course on foot, trudging along the
perilous margin of the raiddle way, in such corafort as
may be gathered from fifteen miles' dodging of broken
shins. The smaller the vehicle, the more rat-like the
animal that drags it, the more numerous and pon
derous its huraan freight; and as every one is nursing
in his lap a parcel of provender as big as himself,

232 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
wrapped in ragged newspapers, it is not surprising
that roadside halts are frequent, and that the taverns
all the way to Epsom (it is wonderful how many there
are) are encompassed by dense groups of dusty pil
griras, indulging liberally in refreshment for man and
beast. And when I say man I must by no means be
understood to exclude woman. The female contingent
on the Derby day is not the least reraarkable part of
the London multitude. Every one is prepared for an
"outing," but the women are even more brilliantly
and resolutely prepared than the men; it is the best
possible chance to observe the various types of the
British feraale of the lower orders. The lady in ques
tion is usually not omaraental. She is useful, robust,
prolific, excellently fitted to play the somewhat arduous
part allotted to her in the great scheme of English
civilisation. But she has not those graces which
enable her to become easily and harmoniously festal.
On smaller holidays — or on siraple working-days — in
London crowds, I have often thought her handsome;
thought, that is, that she has handsome points, and
that it was not impossible to see how it is that she
helps to make the English race, on the whole, the
comeliest in the world. But at Epsom she is too
stout, too hot, too red, too thirsty, too boisterous, too
strangely accoutred. And yet I wish to do her justice;
so I must add that if there is soraething to which an
Araerican cannot refuse a tribute of admiration in the
gross plebeian jollity of the Derby day, it is not
evident why these lusty she-revellers should not get
part of the credit of it. The striking thing, the in
teresting thing, both on the outward drive and on the
return, was that the holiday was so frankly, heartily,

TWO EXCURSIONS. 233
good-humouredly taken. The people that of all peoples
is habitually the most governed by decencies, pro
prieties, rigidities of conduct, was, for one happy day,
unbuttoning its respectable straight-jacket and letting
its powerful, carnal, healthy temperament take the
air. In such a spectacle there was inevitably much
that was unlucky and unprofitable; these things came
uppermost chiefly on the retum, when demoralisation
was suprerae, when the teraperament in question had
quite taken what the French call the key of the fields,
and seemed in no mood to corae back and give an
account of itself For the rest, to be dressed with a
kind of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty and
violently flushed, to laugh perpetually at everything
and at nothing, thoroughly to enjoy, in short, a mo
mentous occasion — all this is not, in simple persons
of the more susceptible sex, an unpardonable crime.
The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and
disposed by nature herself in sympathetic prevision of
the sporting passion. It is something like the crater
of a volcano, without the mountain. The outer rim
is the course proper; the space within it is a vast,
shallow, grassy concavity in which vehicles are drawn
up and beasts tethered, and in which the greater part
of the multitude — the mountebanks, the betting-men,
and the myriad hangers-on of the scene — are con
gregated. The outer margin of the uplifted rim in
question is occupied by the grand stand, the small
stands, the paddock. The day was exceptionally
beautiful; the charming sky was spotted over with
little idle-looking, loafing, irresponsible clouds; the
Epsom Downs went swelling away as greenly as in a
coloured sporting-print, and the wooded uplands, in

234 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
the middle distance, looked as innocent and pastoral
as if they had never seen a policeman or a rowdy.
The crowd that spread itself over this iramense ex
panse was the richest representation of human life
that I have ever looked upon. One's first fate after
arriving, if one is perched upon a coach, is to see the
coach guided, by means best known to the coachman
himself, through the tremendous press of vehicles and
pedestrians, introduced into a precinct roped off and
guarded from intrusion save under payment of a fee,
and then drawn up alongside of the course, as nearly
as possible opposite the grand stand and the winning
post. Here you have only to stand up in your place —
on tiptoe, it is true, and with a good deal of stretch
ing — -to see the race fairly well. But I hasten to add
that seeing the race is indifferent entertainment. If I
might be Irish on the occasion of a frolic, I would say
that in the first place you do not see it at all, and in
the second place you perceive it to be not much
worth the seeing. It may be very fine in quality, but
in quantity it is inappreciable. The horses and their
jockeys first go dandling and camtering along the
course to the starting-point, looking as insubstantial
as sifted sunbeams. Then there is a long wait,, during
which, of the sixty thousand people present (my'ifigures
are imaginary) thirty thousand affirm positively that
they have started, and thirty thousand as positively
deny it. Then the whole sixty thousand are suddenly
resolved into unanimity by the sight of a dozen small
jockey-heads whizzing along a very distant sky-line.
In a shorter space of time than it takes me to write
it, the whole thing is before you, and for the instant
it is anything but beautiful. A dozen furiously re-

TWO EXCURSIONS. 235
volving arras — pink, green, orange, scarlet, white —
whacking the flanks of as many straining steeds; a
glimpse of this, and the spectacle is over. The
spectacle, however, is of course an infinitesimally sraall
part of the purpose of Epsom and the interest of the
Derby. The interest is in having money in the affair,
and doubtless those most interested do not trouble
themselves particularly to watch the race. They learn
soon enough whether they are, in the English phrase,
to the good or to the bad.
When the Derby stakes had been carried ofif by
a horse of which I confess I am barbarous enough to
have forgotten the name, I turned my back to the
running, for all the world as if I too were largely
"interested," and sought entertainment in looking at
the crowd. The crowd was very animated; that is
the most succinct description I can give of it. The
horses of course had been removed from the vehicles,
so that the pedestrians were free to surge against the
wheels and even to a certain extent to scale and
overrun^tlie carriages. This tendency became most
pronounced .when, as the mid-period of the day was
reached, the process of lunching began to unfold itself
and every coach-top to become the scene of a picnic.
From this moment, at the Derby, demoralisation be
gins. I was in a position to observe it, all around me,
in the most characteristic forras. The whole affair, as
regards the conventional rigidities I spoke of a while
since, becomes a real degringolade. The shabbier
pedestrians bustle about the vehicles, staring up at
the lucky mortals who are perched in a kind of tor-
mentingly near empyrean — a region in which dishes
of lobster-salad are passed about and cliampagne-corks

236 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
cleave the air like celestial meteors. There are nigger-
minstrels and beggars and mountebanks and spangled
persons on stilts, and gipsy matrons, as genuine as
possible, with glowing Oriental eyes and dropping
their h's; these last ofifer you for sixpence the promise
of everything genteel in life except the aspirate. On
a coach drawn up beside the one on which I had a
place, a party of opulent young men were passing
frora one stage of exhilaration to another with a punc
tuality which excited my admiration. They were
accompanied by two or three young ladies of the kind
that usually shares the choicest pleasures of youthful
British opulence — young ladies in whom nothing has
been neglected that can make a complexion Titianesque.
The whole party had been drinking deep, and one of
the young men, a pretty lad of twenty, had in an in
discreet moment staggered down as Isest he could to
the ground. Here his cups proved too many for him,
and he collapsed and rolled over. In plain English,
he was beastly drunk. It was the scene that followed
that arrested ray observation. His companions on the
top of the coach called do-wn to the people herding
under the wheels to pick hira up and put him away
inside. These people were the grimiest of the rabble,
and a couple of men who looked like coal-heavers out
of work undertook to handle this hapless youth. But
their task was difficult; it was impossible to imagine a
young man more drunk. He was a raere bag of liquor
— at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be lifted.
He lay in a helpless heap under the feet of the crowd
— the best intoxicated young man in England. His
extemporised chamberlains took him first in one way
and then in another; but he was like water in a sieve.

TWO EXCtmSIONS. 237
The crowd hustled over him; every one wanted to
see; he was pulled and shoved and fumbled. The
spectacle had a grotesque side, and this it was that
seemed to strike the fancy of the young man's com
rades. They had not done lunching, so they were
unable to bestow upon the incident the whole of that
consideration which its high comicality deserved. But
they did what they could. They looked down very
often, glass in hand, during the half-hour that it went
on, and they stinted neither their generous, joyous
laughter, nor their appreciative comments. Women are
said to have no sense of humour; but the Titianesque
young ladies did liberal justice to the pleasantry of
the scene. Toward the last, indeed, their attention
rather flagged; for even the best joke suffers by reitera
tion, and when you have seen a stupefied young man,
infinitely bedusted, slip out of the embrace of a couple
of clumsy paupers for the twentieth time, you raay
very properly suppose that you have arrived at the
farthest limits of the ludicrous.
After the great race had been run I quitted my
perch and spent the rest of the afternoon in wandering
about that grassy concave I have mentioned. It was
amusing and picturesque; it was like a huge Bohemian
encampment. Here also a great nuraber of carriages
were stationed, freighted in like manner with free
handed youths and young ladies with gilded tresses.
These young ladies were almost the only representa
tives of their sex with pretensions to elegance; they
were often pretty and always exhilarated. Gentlemen
in pairs, mounted on stools, habited in fantastic sport
ing garments, and offering bets to whomsoever listed,
were a conspicuous feature of the scene. It was

238 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
equally striking that they were not preaching in the'
desert and that they found plenty of patrons among
the baser sort. I returned to my place in time to
assist at the rather complicated operation of starting
for the drive back to London. Putting in horses and
getting vehicles into line seemed in the midst of the
general crush and entanglement a process not to be
facilitated eveii by the most liberal swearing on the
part of those engaged in it. But little by little we
came to the end of it; and as by this time a kind of
mellow cheerfulness pervaded the upper atmosphere
— the region of the perpendicular whip — even those
interruptions most trying to patience were somehow
made to minister to jollity. It was for people below
to not get trampled to death or crunched between
opposing wheel-hubs, if they could raanage it. Above,
the carnival of "chaff" had set in, and it deepened as
the lock of vehicles grew denser. As they were all
locked together (with a comfortable padding of pedes
trians at points of acutest contact), they contrived
somehow to move together; so that we gradually got
away and into the road. The four or five hours con
sumed on the road were simply as I say, a carnival
of "chaff," the profusely good-humoured savour of
which, on the whole, was certainly striking. The chaff
was not brilliant nor subtle nor especially graceful;
and here and there it was quite too tipsy to be even
articulate. But as an expression of that unbuttoning
of the popular straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile
gince, it had its wholesome and even innocent side.
It took, indeed, frequently an importunate physical
form; it sought emphasis in the use of pea-shooters
and water-squirts. At its best, too, it was extremely

TWO EXCURSIONS. 239
-low "and rowdyish. But a stranger even of the most
refined tastes might be glad to have a glimpse of this
popular revel, for it would make him feel that he was
learning something more about the English people.
It would give a meaning to the old words "merry
England." It would remind him that the natives of
that country are subject to some of the most frolicsome
•of the human passions, and that the decent, dusky
vistas of the London residential streets — those discreet
-creations of which Thackeray's "Baker Street" is the
type — are not a complete symbol of the complicated
race that erected them.

IL
It seemed to me such a piece of good fortune to
have been asked down to Oxford at Commemoration
by a gentleman implicated in the remarkable ceremony
which goes on under that name, who kindly offered
me the hospitality of his college, that I scarcely waited
even to thank him, I simply took the first train. I had
had a glimpse of Oxford in former years, but I had
never slept in a low-browed roora looking out on a
grassy quadrangle, opposite a raediaeval clock-tower.
¦This satisfaction was vouchsafed rae on the night of
my arrival; I was inducted into the rooms of an absent
undergraduate. I sat in his deep arm-chairs; I burned
his candles and read his books. I hereby thank him
as tenderly as possible. Before going to bed I took a
•turn through the streets and renewed in the silent
:.darkness that impression of the charm imparted to
,thera by the quiet college-fronts, which I had gathered
in former years. The college fronts were now quieter

240 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
than ever, the streets were empty, and the old scholastic
city was sleeping in the warm starlight. The under
graduates had retired in large numbers, encouraged in
this impulse by the collegiate authorities, who depre
cate their presence at Corameraoration. However many
young gownsmen may be sent away, there always re
main enough to make a noise. There can be no better
indication of the resources of Oxford in a spectacular
way than this fact that the first step toward preparing
an impressive ceremony is to get rid of the under
graduates. In the morning I breakfasted with a young American
who, in common with a number of his countrymen,
had come hither to seek stimulus for a finer quality of
study. I know not whether he would have reckoned
as such stiraulus the conversation of a couple of those
ingenuous youths of Britain whose society I always find
charraing; but it added, from ray own point of view,
to the local colour of the entertainraent. After this
was over I repaired, in corapany with a crowd of ladies
and elderly people, interspersed with gownsmen, to the
hoary rotunda of the Sheldonian theatre, which every
visitor to Oxford will remeraber, with its curious cinc
ture of clumsily-carven heads of warriors and sages
perched upon stone posts. The interior of this edifice
is the scene of the classic hooting, staraping, and cat
calling by which the undergraduates confer the last
consecration upon the distinguished gentlemen who
come up for the honorary degree of D.C.L. It is with
the design of attenuating as niuch as possible this in
congruous chorus, that the heads of colleges, on the
close of the term, a few days before Commemoration,
speed their too demonstrative disciples upon the home-

TWO EXCURSIONS. 24 1
ward way. As I have already hinted, however, the
contingent of irreverent lads was on this occasion quite
large enough to produce a very handsome specimen of
the traditional rumpus. This raade the scene a very
singular one. An Araerican of course, with his fond
ness for antiquity, his relish for picturesqueness, his
"emotional" attitude at historic shrines, takes Oxford
much more seriously than its customary denizens can
be expected to do. These people are not always upon
the high horse; they are not always in an acutely sen
tient condition. Nevertheless, there is a certain maxi
mum of disaccord with their beautiful circurastances
which the ecstatic Occidental vaguely expects them
not to transcend. No effort of the intellect before
hand would enable hira to imagine one of those silver-
gray temples of learning converted into a semblance
of the Bowery Theatre when the Bowery Theatre is
being trifled -with.
The Sheldonian edifice, like ever)rthing at Oxford,
is more or less monuraentah There is a double tier
of galleries,' with sculptured pulpits protruding from
them; there are full-length portraits of kings and
worthies; there is a general air of antiquity and
dignity, which, on the occasion of which I speak, was
enhanced by the presence of certain ancient scholars,
seated in crimson robes in high-backed chairs. Formerly,
I believe, the undergraduates were placed apart —
packed together in a corner of one of the galleries.
But now they are scattered araong the general specta
tors, a large number of whora are ladies. They muster
in especial force, however, on the floor of the theatre,
which has been cleared of its benches. Here the dense
mass is at last severed in twain by the entrance of the
Portraits of Places. *0

242 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
prospective D.C.L.'s walking in single file, clad in
crimson gowns, preceded by mace-bearers and accom
panied by the Regius professor of Civil Law, who
presents them individually to the Vice-Chancellor of
the university, in a Latin speech which is of course a
glowing eulogy. The five gentlemen to whom this
distinction had been offered in 1877 were not among
those whom fame has trumpeted most loudly; but
there was soraething very pretty in their standing in
their honourable robes, with heads modestly bent,
while the orator, equally brilliant in aspect, recited
their titles sonorously to the venerable dignitary in the
high-backed chair. Each of thera, when the little
speech is ended, ascends the steps leading to the
chair; the Vice-Chancellor bends forward and shakes
his hand, and the new D.C.L. goes and sits in the
blushing row of his fellow-doctors. The irapressive-
ness of all this is rauch diminished by the boisterous
conduct of the collegians, who superabound in extra
vagant applause, in impertinent interrogation, and in
lively disparagement of the orator's Latinity. Of the
scene that precedes the episode I have just described
I have given no account; vivid portrayal of it is not
easy. Like the return frora the Derby, it is a carnival
of "chaff"; and it is a singular fact that the scholastic
festival should have forcibly reminded me of the great
popular "lark." In each case it is the same race en
joying a certain definitely chartered license; in the
young votaries of a liberal education and the London
rabble on the Epsom road it is the same perfect good-
humour, the same muscular jocosity.
After the presentation of the doctors carae a series
of those collegiate exercises which have a generic re-

TWO EXCURSIONS. 243
semblance all the world over: a reading of Latin verses
and English essays, a spouting of prize poems and
Greek paraphrases. The prize poem alone was sorae
what attentively listened to; the other things were re
ceived with an infinite variety of critical ejaculation.
But after all, I reflected, as the cereraony drew to a
close, this discordant racket is more characteristic than
it seeras; it is at bottom only another expression of
the venerable and historic side of Oxford. It is
tolerated because it is traditional; it is possible be
cause it is classical. Looking at it in this light,
one might manage at last to find it impressive and
romantic. I was not obliged to find ingenious pretexts for
thinking well of another ceremony of which I was
witness after we adjourned from the Sheldonian theatre.
This was a lunch-party at the particular college in
which I should find it the highest privilege to reside.
I may not further specify it. Perhaps, indeed, I may
go so far as to say that the reason for my dreaming
of this privilege is that it is deemed by persons of a
reforming turn the best-appointed abuse in a nest of
abuses. A commission for the expurgation of the
universities has lately been appointed by Parliaraent
to look into it — a commission armed with a gigantic
broom, which is to sweep away all the fine old ivied
and cobwebbed improprieties. Pending these righteous
changes, one would like while one is about it — about,
that is, this business of admiring Oxford — to attach
one's self to the abuse, to bury one's nostrils in the
rose before it is plucked. At the college in question
there are no undergraduates. I found it agreeable to
' reflect that those gray-green cloisters had sent no dele-
i6»

244 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
gates to the slangy congregation I had just quitted.
This delightful spot exists for the satisfaction of a
small society of Fellows who, having no dreary in
struction to adrainister, no noisy hobbledehoys to
govern, no obligations but toward their own culture,
no care for learning as learning and truth as trath, are
presuraably the happiest and most charraing people in
the world. The party invited to lunch assembled first
in the library of the college, a cool, gray hall, of very
great length and height, with vast wall-spaces of rich-
looking book-titles and statues of noble scholars set in
the midst. Had the charming Fellows ever anything
more disagreeable to do than to finger these precious
volumes and then to stroll about together in the grassy
courts, in learned comradeship, discussing their pre
cious contents? Nothing, apparently, unless it were to
give a lunch at Commemoration in the dining-hall of
the college. When lunch was ready there was a very
pretty procession to go to it. Learned gentlemen in
crimson gowns, ladies in brilliant toilets, paired slowly
off and marched in a stately diagonal across the fine,
smooth lawn of the quadrangle, in a corner of which
they passed through a hospitable door. But here we
cross the threshold of privacy; I remained on the
farther side of it during the rest of the day. But I
brought back with me certain memories of which, if I
were not at the end of my space, I should attempt a
discreet adumbration: memories of a f^te champtoe in
the beautiful gardens of one of the other colleges —
charming lawns and spreading trees, music of Grenadier
Guards, ices in striped marquees, mild flirtation of
youthful gownsmen and bemuslined maidens; me
mories, too, of quiet dinner in coramon-room, a de-

TWO EXCURSIONS. 245
corous, excellent repast; old portraits on the walls and
great windows open upon the ancient court, where the
aftemoon light was fading in the stillness; superior
talk upon current topics, and over all the peculiar air
of Oxford — the air of liberty to care for intellectual
things, assured and secured by machinery which is in
itself a satisfaction to sense.

246 PORTRAITS OB' PLACES.

xn.
IN WARWICKSHIRE. 1877.
There is no better way for the stranger who wishes
to know something of England, to plunge in medias res,
than to spend a fortnight in Warwickshire. It is the
core and centre of the English world; midmost Eng
land, unmitigated England. The place has taught me
a great many English secrets; I have interviewed the
genius of pastoral Britain. Frora a charming lawn —
a lawn delicious to one's sentient boot-sole — I looked
without obstruction at a sombre, soft, romantic mass,
whose outline was blurred by raantling i-yy. It made
a perfect picture; and in the foreground the great trees
overarched their boughs from right and left, so as to
give it a majestic frame. This interesting object was
the castle of Kenilworth. It was within distance of
an easy walk, but one hardly thought of walking to it,
any more' than one would have thought of walking to
a purple-shadowed tower in the background of a
Berghem or a Claude. Here there were purple shadows,
and slowly-shifting lights, and a soft-hued, bosky coun
try in the middle distance.
Of course, however, I did walk over to the castle;
and of course the walk led me through leafy lanes,

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 247
and beside the hedgerows that raake a tangled screen
for lawn-like meadows. Of course too, I ara bound to
add, there was a row of ancient pedlars outside the
castle-wall, hawking twopenny paraphlets and photo
graphs. Of course, equally, at the foot of the grassy
mound on which the ruin stands, there were half a
dozen public houses; and, always of course, there were
half a dozen beery vagrants sprawling on the grass in
the moist sunshine. There was the usual respectable
young woman to open the castle-gate and to receive
the usual sixpenny fee. And there were the usual
squares of printed card-board, suspended upon vener
able surfaces, with further enumeration of twopence,
threepence, fourpence. I do not allude to these things
querulously, for Kenilworth is a very tame lion — a lion
that, in former years, I had stroked more than once.
I remember perfectly my first visit to this romantic
spot; how I chanced upon a picnic; how I stumbled
over beer-bottles; how the very echoes of the beautiful
ruin seemed to have dropped all their h's. That was
a sultry afternoon; I allowed my spirits to sink, and I
came away hanging my head. This was a beautiful
fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown philo
sophic, I had learned that, with regard to most ro
mantic sites in England, there is a sort of average
cockneyfication with which you raust make your ac
count. There are always people on the field before
you, and there is generally soraething being drunk on
the premises.
I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now speak
ing, that the average would be low; and indeed, for
the first five minutes I flattered myself that this was
the case. In the beautiful grassy court of the castle.

248 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
on my entrance, there were not more than eight or
ten fellow-intruders. There were a couple of old
ladies on a bench, eating something out of a news
paper; there was a dissenting minister, also on a bench,
reading the guide-book aloud to his wife and sister-in-
law; there were three or four children pushing each
other up and down the turfy hillocks. This was sweet
seclusion indeed; and I got a capital start with the
various noble square- windowed fragments ofthe stately
pile. They are extremely majestic, with their even,
pale-red colour, their deep-green drapery, their princely
vastness of scale. But presently the tranquil ruin be
gan to swarm like a startled hive. There were plenty
of people, if they chose to show themselves. They
emerged from crumbling doorways and gaping cham
bers, with the best conscience in the world; but I
know not, after all, why I should bear thera a grudge,
for they gave me a pretext for wandering about in
search of a quiet point of view. I cannot say that I
found my point of view, but in looking for it I saw
the castle, which is certainly an admirable ruin. And
when the respectable young woraan had let me out of
the gate again, and I had shaken my head at the civil-
spoken pedlars who form a little avenue for the arriv
ing and departing visitor, I found it in my good-nature
to linger a moment on the trodden, grassy slope, and
to think that in spite of the hawkers, the paupers, and
the beer-shops, there was still a good deal of old
England in the scene. I say in spite of these things,
but it may have been, in some degree, because of them.
"Who shall resolve into its component parts any im
pression of this richly complex English world, where
the present is always seen, as it were, in profile, and

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 249
the past presents a full face? At all events the solid
red castle rose behind me, towering above its sraall
old ladies and its investigating parsons; before me,
across the patch of comraon, was a row of ancient
cottages, black- tirabered, red-gabled, pictorial, which
evidently had a raemory of the castle in its better
days. A quaintish village straggled away on the right,
and on the left the dark, fat meadows were lighted up
with misty sun-spots and browsing sheep. I looked
about for the village stocks; I was ready to take the
modem vagrants for Shakespearean clowns; and I was
on the point of going into one of the ale-houses to ask
Mrs. Quickly for a cup of sack.
I began these remarks, however, with no intention
of talking about the celebrated curiosities in which
this region abounds, but with a design, rather, of noting
a few impressions of some of the shyer and more elusive
ornaments of the show. Stratford, of course, is a very
sacred place, but I prefer to say a word, for instance,
about a charming old rectory, a good many miles dis
tant, and to mention the pleasant picture it made of a
summer afternoon, during a domestic festival. These
are the happiest of a stranger's memories of English
life, and he feels that he need make no apology for
lifting the corner of the curtain. I drove through the
leafy lanes I spoke of just now, and peeped over the
hedges into fields where the yellow harvest stood wait
ing. In some places they were already shorn, and
while the light began to redden in the west and to
make a horizontal glow behind the dense wayside
foliage, the gleaners, here and there, came brushing
through gaps in the hedges with enormous sheaves upon
their shoulders. The rectory was an ancient, gabled

2 50 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
building, of pale red brick, with facings of white stone
and creepers that wrapped it up. It dates, I iraagine,
from the early Hanoverian time; and as it stood there
upon its cushiony lawn, among its ordered gardens,
cheek to cheek with its little Norman church, it seemed
to me the model of a quiet, spacious, easy English
horae. The cushiony lawn, as I have called it, stretched
away to the edge of a brook, and afiforded to a number
of very amiable people an opportunity of playing lawn-
tennis. There were half a dozen games going forward
at once, and at each of them a great many "nice girls,"
as they say in England, were distinguishing themselves.
These young ladies kept the ball going with an agility
worthy of the sisters and sweethearts of a race of
cricketers, and gave me a chance to adraire their
flexibility of figure and their freedom of action. When
they carae back to the house, after the games, flushed
a little and a little dishevelled, they might have passed
for the attendant nymphs of Diana, flocking in from
the chase. There had, indeed, been a chance for them
to wear the quiver, a target for archery being erected
on the lawn. I reraerabered George Eliot's Gwendolen,
and waited to see her step out of the rauslin groups;
but she was not forthcoming, and it was plain that if
lawn-tennis had been invented in Gwendolen's day,
this young lady would have captivated Mr. Grandcourt
by her exploits with the racket. She certainly would
have been a mistress of the game; and, if the sugges
tion is not too gross, the alertness that she would have
learned frora it raight have proved an inducement to
her boxing the ears of the insupportable Deronda.
After a while it grew too dark for lawn-tennis; but
while the twilight was still mildly brilliant I wandered

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 25 I
away, out of the grounds of the charming parsonage,
and turned into the little churchyard beside it. The
small weather-worn, rust-coloured church had an ap
pearance of high antiquity; there were some curious
Norman windows in the apse. Unfortunately I could
not get inside; I could only glance into the open door
across the interval of an old-timbered, heavy-hooded,
padlocked porch. But the sweetest evening stillness
hung over the place, and the sunset was red behind a
dark row of rook-haunted elms. The stillness seemed
the greater because three or four rustic children were
playing, with little soft cries, among the crooked, deep-
buried grave-stones. One poor little girl, who seemed
deformed, had climbed some steps that served as a
pedestal for a tall, mediseval-looking cross. She sat
perched there, staring at me through the gloaming.
This was the heart of England, unmistakably; it might
have been the very pivot of the wheel on which her
fortune revolves. One need not be a rabid Anglican
to be extremely sensible of the charm of an English
country church — and indeed of some of the features
of an English rural Sunday. In London there is a
certain flatness in the observance of this festival; but
in the country some of the ceremonies that accompany
it have an indefinable harmony with an ancient, pas
toral landscape. I made this reflection on an occasion
that is still very fresh in my memory. I said to my
self that the walk to church from a beautiful country-
house, of a lovely sumraer afternoon, may be the
prettiest possible adventure. The house stands perched
upon a pedestal of rock, and looks down from its
windows and terraces upon a shadier spot in the
wooded meadows, of which the blunted tip of a spire

252 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
explains the character. A little company of people,
whose costume denotes the highest pitch of civilisa
tion, winds down through the blooming gardens, passes
out of a couple of small gates, and reaches the foot
path in the fields. This is especially what takes the
fancy of the sympathetic stranger; the level, deep-
green meadows, studded here and there with a sturdy
oak; the denser grassiness of the footpath, the lily-
sheeted pool beside which it passes, the rustic stiles,
where he stops and looks back at the great house and
its wooded background. It is in the highest degree
probable that he has the privilege of walking with a
very pretty girl, and it is morally certain that he thinks
a pretty English girl the prettiest creature in the
world. He knows that she doesn't know how lovely is
this walk of theirs; she has been taking it — or taking
another quite as good — any time these twenty years.
But her quiet-eyed unsuspectingness only makes her
the more a part of his delicate entertainment. The
latter continues unbroken while they reach the little
churchyard, and pass up to the ancient porch, round
which the rosy rustics are standing decently and de
ferentially, to watch the arrival of the smarter con
tingent. This party takes its place in a great square
pew, as large as a small room, and with seats all
round, and while he listens to the respectable intonings
the sympathetic stranger reads over the inscriptions on
the mural tablets before him, all to the honour of the
earlier bearers of a name which is, for himself, a
symbol of hospitality.
When I came back to the parsonage the entertain
ment had been transferred to the interior, and I had
occasion to admire the maidenly vigour of those charm-

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 253
ing young girls who, after playing lawn-tennis all the
afternoon, were modestly expecting to dance all the
evening. And in regard to this it is not impertinent
to say that frora almost any group of English maidens
— though preferably from such as have passed their
lives in quiet country homes — an American observer
receives a delightful impression of something that he
can best describe as an intimate salubrity. He notices
face after face in which this rosy absence of a morbid
strain — this simple, natural, affectionate development
— amounts to positive beauty. If the young lady have
no other beauty, the look I speak of is a sufficient
charm; but when it is united, as it so often is, to real
perfection of feature and colour, the result is the most
delightful thing in nature. It makes the highest type
of English beauty, and to my sense there is nothing
so high as that. Not long since I heard a clever for
eigner indulge, in conversation with an English lady —
a very wise and liberal woman — in a little lightly
restrictive criticism of her countrywomen. "It is pos
sible," she answered, in regard to one of his objec
tions; "but such as they are, they are inexpressibly
dear to their husbands." This is doubtless true of
good wives all over the world; but I felt, as I listened
to these words of my friend, that there is often some
thing in an English girl-face which gives it an extra
touch oijustesse. Such as the woman is, she has here,
more than elsewhere, the look of being completely and
profoundly at the service of the man she loves. This
look, after one has been a while in England, comes to
seem so much a proper and indispensable part of a
"nice" face, that the absence of it appears a sign of
irritability or of shallowness. Depth of tenderness as

2 54 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
regairds a masculine counter-part — that is what it
means; and I confess that seems to me a very agree
able raeaning.
As for the prettiness, I cannot forbear, in the face
of a fresh rerainiscence, to give it another word. And
yet in regard to prettiness, what do words avail? This
was what I asked myself the other day as I looked at
a young girl who stood in an old oaken parlour, the
rugged panels of which made a background for her
lovely head, in simple conversation with a handsome
lad. I said to myself that the faces of English young
people had often a singular charm, but that this same
charm is too soft and shy a thing to talk about. The
face of this fair creature had a pure oval, and her
clear bro-wn eyes a quiet warmth. Her complexion
was as bright as a sunbeam after rain, and she smiled
in a way that made any other way of smiling than
that seem a shallow grimace — a mere creaking of the
facial rauscles. The young raan stood facing her,
slowly scratching his thigh and shifting from one foot
to the other. He was tall and very well made, and so
sun-burned that his fair hair was lighter than his com
plexion. He had honest, stupid blue eyes, and a
simple sraile that showed his handsorae teeth. He was
very well dressed. Presently I heard what they were
saying. "I suppose it's pretty big," said the beautiful
young girl. "Yes; it's pretty big," said the handsome
young man. "It's nicer when they are big," said his
interlocutress. The young man looked at her, and at
everything in general, with his slowly-apprehending
blue eye, and for some time no further remark was
made. "It draws ten feet of water," he at last went
on. "How much water is there?" said the young girl.

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 255
She spoke in a charming voice. "There aje thirty feet
of water," said the young man. "Oh, that's enough,"
rejoined the damsel. I had had an idea they were
flirting, and perhaps indeed that is the way it is done.
It was an ancient room and extremely delightful;
ev-er3rthing was polished over with the brownness of
centuries. The chimney-piece was carved a foot thick,
and the windows bore, in coloured glass, the quarter-
ings of ancestral couples. These had stopped two
hundred years before; there was nothing newer than
that date. Outside the windows was a deep, broad
¦ moat, which washed the base of gray walls — gray walls
spotted over with the most delicate yellow lichens.
In such a region as this mellow, conservative War
wickshire an appreciative American finds the small
things quite as suggestive as the great. Everything,
indeed, is suggestive, and impressions are constantly
melting into each other and doing their work before
he has had time to ask thera whence they came. He
cannot go into a cottage muffled in plants, to see a
genial gentlewoman and a "nice girl," without being
reminded forsooth of "The Small House at AUington."
Why of "The Small House at AUington?" There is a
larger house at which the ladies come up to dine; but
that is surely an insufficient reason. That the ladies
are charming — even that is not reason enough; for
there have been other nice girls in the world than
Lily Dale, and other mellow matrons than her mamma.
Reminded, however, he is — especially when he goes
out upon the lawn. Of course there is lawn-tennis,
and it seems all ready for Mr. Crosbie to come and
play. This is a small example of the way in which
in the presence of English life the imagination must

256 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
be constantly at play, on the part of members of a
race in whom it has necessarily been trained to do
extra service. In driving and walking, in looking and
listening, everything seemed to rae in some degree or
other characteristic of a rich, powerful, old-fashioned
society. One had no need of being told that this is a
conservative county; the fact seemed -written in the
hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind them. Of
course the owners of these things were conservative; of
course they were stubbornly unwilling to see the
harmonious edifice of Church and State the least bit
shaken. I had a feeling, as I went about, that I.
should find some very ancient and curious opinions
still comfortably domiciled in the fine old houses
whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared here
and there, at a distance, above their ornamental woods.
Self-coraplacent British Toryisra, viewed in this vague
and conjectural fashion — across the fields and behind
the oaks and beeches — is by no means a thing the
irresponsible stranger would wish away; it deepens the
local colour; it may be said to enhance the landscape.
I got a sort of constructive sense of its presence in the
picturesque old towns of Coventry and Warwick, which
appear to be filled with those institutions — chiefly of
an eleemosynary order — that Toryism takes a genial
comfort in. There are ancient charities in these places
— hospitals, almshouses, asylums, infant-schools — so
quaint and venerable that they almost make the exis
tence of poverty a delectable and satisfying thought.
In Coventry in especial, I believe, these pious founda
tions are so numerous as almost to place a premium
upon misery. Invidious reflections apart, however,
there are few things that speak more quaintly and

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 257
suggestively of the old England that an Araerican
loves than these clurasy little raonuraents of ancient
benevolence. Such an institution as Leicester's Hospital
at Warwick seeras indeed to exist priraarily for the
sake of its spectacular effect upon the Araerican
tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old soldiers
maintained in affluence there, constitute its principal
clientile. The Araerican tourist usually comes straight to
this quarter of England — chiefly for the purpose of
paying his respects to the birthplace of Shakespeare.
Being here, he coraes to Warwick to see the castle;
and being at Warwick, he comes to see the odd little
theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors
which lurks in the shadow of one of the old gate-
towers. Every one will remember Hawthorne's account
of the place, which has left no touch of charming
taste to be added to any reference to it. The hospital
struck me as a little museura kept up for the amuse
ment and confusion of those inquiring Occidentals
who are used to seeing charity more dryly and prac
tically administered. The old hospitallers — I am not
sure, after all, whether they are necessarily soldiers,
but some of them happen to be — are at once the
curiosities and the keepers. They sit on benches out
side of their door, at the receipt of custom, all neatly
bmshed and darned, and ready, like Mr. Cook, to
conduct you personally. They are only twelve in
number, but their picturesque dwelling, perched upon
the old city rampart, and full of dusky little courts,
cross-timbered gable-ends and deeply sunken lattices,
seems a wonderfully elaborate piece of machinery for
its humble purpose. Each of the old gentleraen raust
Portraits of Places. ^ 7

258 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
be provided with a wife or "housekeeper;" each of
them has a dusky parlour of his own; and they pass
their latter days in their scoured and polished little
refuge as softly and honourably as a corapany of re
tired lawgivers or pensioned soothsayers.
At Coventry I went to see a couple of old chari
ties of a similar pattern — places with black-timbered
fronts, little clean -swept courts and Elizabethan
windows. One of them was a romantic residence for
a handful of old women, who sat, each of them, in a
cosy little bower, in a sort of mediaeval darkness; the
other was a school for little boys of humble origin,
and this last establishment was charming. I found the
little boys playing at "top" in a gravelled court, in
front of the prettiest old building of tender-coloured
stucco and painted timber, ornamented with two de
licate little galleries and a fantastic porch. They were
dressed in small blue tunics and odd caps, like those
worn by sailors, but, if I reraember rightly, with little
yellow tags affixed to them. I was free, apparently,
to wander all over the establishraent; there was no
sign of pastor or raaster an)rwhere; nothing but the
little yellow-headed boys playing before the ancient
house, and practising most correctly the Warwickshire
accent. I went indoors and looked at a fine old oaken
staircase; I even ascended it, and walked along a
gallery and peeped into a dormitory at a row of very
short beds; and then I came down and sat for five
minutes on a bench hardly wider than the top raU of
a fence, in a little, cold, dim refectory, where there
was not a crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odour
of bygone repasts to be perceived. And yet I wondered
how it was that the sense of many generations of

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 259
boyish feeders seeraed to abide there. It came, I sup
pose, from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed
the expression, the clean-licked aspect of the place,
which wore the appearance of the faraous platter of
Jack Sprat and his wife.
Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has
a great deal to say to himself about this being Shake
speare's county — about these densely verdant meadows
and parks ha-ving been, to his musing eyes, the normal
landscape. In Shakespeare's day, doubtless, the coat
of nature was far from being so prettily trimmed as it
is now; but there is one place, nevertheless, which, as
he passes it in the summer twilight, the traveller does
his best to believe unaltered. I allude, of course, to
Charlecote park, whose venerable verdure seems a
survival from an earlier England, and whose innumer
able acres, stretching away, in the early evening, to
vaguely seen Tudor walls, lie there like the backward
years receding to the age of Elizabeth. It was, how
ever, no part of my design in these remarks to pause
before so thickly besieged a shrine as this; and if I
were to allude to Stratford, it would not be in con
nection with the fact that Shakespeare came into the
world there. It would be rather to speak of a delight
ful old house near the Avon which struck me as the
ideal horae for a Shakespearean scholar, or indeed for
any passionate lover of the poet. Here, with books,
and memories, and the recurring reflection that he
had taken his daily walk across the bridge, at which
you look from your windows straight down an avenue
of fine old trees, with an ever-closed gate at the end
of them and a carpet of turf stretched over the decent
drive — here, I say, with old bro-wn wainscotted cham-
i7»

26o PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
bers to live in, old polished doorsteps to lead you
from one to the other, deep window-seats to sit in,
with a play in your lap — here a person for whom the
cares of life should have resolved themselves into a
care for the greatest genius who has represented and
ornamented life, might find a very congruous asylum.
Or, speaking a little wider of the mark, the charming,
rambling, low-gabled, many-staired, rauch-panelled
raansion would be a very agreeable horae for any per
son of taste who should prefer an old house to a new.
I find I ara talking about it quite like an auctioneer;
but what I chiefly had at heart was to commeraorate
the fact that I had lunched there, and while I lunched
kept saying to myself that there is nothing in the
world so delightful as the happy accidents of old
English houses.
And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon,
I found it in me to say that a new house too may be
a very charraing affair. But I must add that the new
house I speak of had really such exceptional ad
vantages that it could not fairly be placed in the scale.
Besides, was it new after all? I suppose that it was,
and yet one's impression there was all of a kind of
silvery antiquity. The place stood upon a decent
Stratford street, frora which it looked usual enough;
but when, after sitting a while in a charming modem
drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly through an
open window upon a verandah, one found that the
horizon of the morning-call had been wonderfully
widened. I will not pretend to relate all that I saw
after I stepped ofif the verandah; suffice it that the
spire and chancel of the beautiful old church in which
Shakespeare is buried, with the Avon sweeping its

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 26 1
base, were one of the elements of the vision. Then
there were the smoothest la-wns in the world stretching
down to the edge of this lovely streara, and making,
where the water touched them, a line as even as the
rim of a champagne-glass — a verge near which you
inevitably lingered to see the spire and the chancel —
the church was close at hand — araong the well-grouped
trees, and look for their reflection in the river. The
place was a garden of delight; it was a stage set for
one of Shakespeare's coraedies — for Twelfth Night or
Much Ado. Just across the river was a level meadow,
which rivalled the lawn on which I stood, and this
meadow seeraed only the raore essentially a part of
the scene by reason of the volurainous sheep that were
grazing on it. These sheep were by no means mere
edible rautton; they were poetic, historic, romantic
sheep; they were there to be picturesque, and they
knew it. And yet, knowing as they were, I doubt
whether the wisest old ram of the flock could have
told me how to explain why it was that this happy
mixture of lawn and river and mirrored spire and
blooming garden seemed to rae for a quarter of an
hour the prettiest corner of England.
If Warwickshire is Shakespeare's county, I found
myself remembering that it is also George Eliot's. The
author of Adam Bede and Middlemarch has called the
rural background of those admirable fictions by another
name, but I believe it long ago ceased to be a secret
that her native Warwickshire had been in her intention.
The stranger who wanders over its velvety surface re
cognises at every tum the elements of George Eliot's
novels — especially when he carries himself back in
imagination to the Warwickshire of forty years ago.

262 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
He says to himself that it would be irapossible to con
ceive anything raore conservatively bucolic, raore re
spectably pastoral. It was in one of the old nestling
farrahouses, beyond a hundred hedgerows, that Hetty
Sorrel srailed into her railk-pans, as if she were looking
for a reflection of her pretty face; it was at the end of
one of the leafy-pillared avenues that poor Mrs. Casaubon
paced up and down in fervid disappointment. The
country suggests, in especial, both the social and the
natural scenery of Middlemarch. There must be many
a genially perverse old Mr. Brooke there yet, and
whether there are many Dorotheas or not, there must
be many a well-featured and well-acred young country
gentleman, of the pattem of Sir Jaraes Chettam, who,
as he rides along the leafy lanes, softly cudgels his
brain to know why a clever girl shouldn't wish to
marry hira. But I doubt whether there are many
Dorotheas, and I suspect that the Sir James Chettams
of the county are not often pushed to that intensity of
meditation. You feel, however, that George Eliot could
not have placed her heroine in a local medium better
fitted to throw her fine impatience into relief — a com
munity more likely to be startled and perplexed by a
questioning attitude on the part of a well-housed and
well-fed young gentlewoman.
Among the edifying days that I spent in these
neighbourhoods there is one in especial of which I
should like to give a detailed account. But I find on
consulting my memory that the details have melted
away into the single deep irapression of a perfect ripe
ness of civilisation. It was a long excursion, by rail
and by carriage, for the purpose of seeing three ex
tremely interesting old country-houses. Our errand led

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 263
US, in the first place, into Oxfordshire, through the
ancient market-town of Banbury, where of course we
made a point of looking out for the Cross referred to
in the famous nursery-rhyme. It stood there in the
most natural raanner — though I ara afraid it has been
"done up"^-with various antique gables around it,
from one of whose exiguous windows the young person
appealed to in the rhyme may have looked at the old
woman as she rode and heard the rausic of her bells.
The houses we went to see have not a national repu
tation; they are simply interwoven figures in the rich
pattern of the Midlands. They have, indeed, a local
renown, but they are not thought to be very ex
ceptionally curious or beautiful, and the stranger has
a feeling that his surprises and ecstasies are held to
betray a meagre bringing-up. Such places, to a War
wickshire mind of good habits, must appear to be the
piUars and props of a heaven-appointed order of things;
and accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles,
they are as a natural as the geology of the county or
the supply of mutton. But nothing could well give a
stranger a stronger impression of the wealth of Eng
land in such matters — of the interminable list of her
territorial homes — than this fact that the enchanting
old mansions I speak of should have but a limited
fame — should not be lions of the first magnitude. Of
one of them, the finest in the group, one of my cora
panions, who lived but twenty miles away, had never
even heard. Such a place was not thought a matter
to boast about. Its peers and its mates are scattered
all over the country; half of them are not even raen
tioned in the county guide-books. You stumble upon

264 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
them in a drive or a walk. You catch a glimpse of an
ivied front at the midmost point of a great estate, and
taking your way, by leave of a serious old woman at
a lodge-gate, along an overarching avenue, you find
yourself introduced to an edifice so human-looking in
its beauty, that it seeras for the occasion to reconcile
art and raorality.
To Broughton Castle, the first seen in this beauti
ful group, I raust do no raore than allude; but this is
not because I failed to think it, as I think every house
I see, the most delightful residence in England. It
lies rather low, and its woods and pastures slope down
to it; it has a deep, clear raoat all around it, spanned
by a bridge that passes under a charraing old gate-
tower, and nothing can be prettier than to see its
clustered walls of yellow-brown stone so sharply islanded,
while its gardens bloom on the other side of the water.
Like several other houses in this part of the country,
Broughton Castle played a part (on the Paliamentary
side) in the civil wars, and not the least interesting
features of its beautiful interior are the several me
mentoes of Cromwell's station there. It was within a
moderate drive of this place that in 1642 the battle
of Edgehill was fought — the first great battle of the
war — and gained by neither party. We went to see
the battlefield, where an ancient tower and an artificial
ruin (of all things in the world) have been erected for
the entertainment of convivial visitors. These orna
ments are perched upon the edge of a slope which
commands a view of the exact scene of the contest,
upwards of a mile away. I looked in the direction in
dicated, and saw misty meadows, a little greener per-

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 265
haps than usual, and colonnades of elms, a trifle denser.
After this we paid our respects to another old house
which is full of memories and suggestions of that raost
dramatic period of English history. But of Corapton
"Wyniates (the narae of this enchanting doraicile), I de
spair of giving any coherent or adequate account. It
belongs to the Marquis of Northampton, and it stands
empty all the year round. It sits on the grass at the
bottom of a wooded hollow, and the glades of a superb
old park go wandering upward, away frora it. When
I came out in front of the house frora a short and steep
but stately avenue, I said to rayself that here surely
we had arrived at the farthest liraits of what i-vy-
smothered brick-work and weather-beaten gables, con
scious old windows and clustered mossy roofs, can ac
complish for the eye. It is impossible to imagine a
more perfect picture. And its air of solitude and de
licate decay — of having been dropped into its grassy
hollow as an ancient jewel is deposited upon a cushion,
and being shut in from the world and back into the
past by its circling woods — all this highly increased
its impressiveness. The house is not large, as great
houses go, and it sits, as I have said, upon the grass,
without even a flagging or a footpath to conduct you
from the point where the avenue stops to the beauti
ful sculptured doorway which admits you into the sraall,
quaint, inner court. From this court you are at liberty
to pass through the crookedest series of oaken halls
and chambers, adorned with treasures of old wain-
scotting and elaborate doors and chimney-pieces. Out
side, you may walk all round the house on a grassy
bank, which is raised above the level on which it

266 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
stands, and find it from every point of view a more
charming composition. I should not omit to mention
that Compton Wyniates is supposed to have been in
Scott's eye when he described the dwelling of the old
royalist knight in Woodstock. In this case he siraply
transferred the house to the other side of the county.
He has indeed given several of the features of the place,
but he has not given what one raay call its colour. I
must add that if Sir Walter could not give the colour
of Corapton Wyniates, it is useless for any other -writer
to attempt it. It is a raatter for the brush and not for
the pen.
And what shaU I say of the colour of Wroxton
Abbey, which we visited last in order, and which in
the thickening twilight, as we approached its great
ivy-muffled face, made an ineffaceable impression on
ray fancy? Wroxton Abbey, as it stands, is a house
of about the same period as Corapton Wyniates — the
latter years, I suppose, of the sixteenth century. But
it is quite another affair. The place is inhabited, "kept
up," and full of the raost interesting and raost splendid
detail. Its happy occupants, however, were fortunately
not actually staying there (happy occupants, in England,
are almost always absent), and the house was exhibited
with a civility worthy of its merit. Everything that in
the material line can render life noble and charraing
has been gathered into it with a profusion which makes
the whole place a monument to past opportunity. As
I wandered from one rich room to another, looking at
these things, that ineffaceable impression upon my fancy
which I just mentioned was delightfully deepened. But
who can tell the pleasures of fancy when fancy takes

IN WARWICKSHIRE. 267
her ease in an old English country-house, while the
twilight darkens the corners of expressive rooms, and
the appreciative intruder, pausing at the window, turns
his glance from the observing portrait of a handsorae
ancestral face and sees the great soft billows of the
lawn melt away into the park?

268 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.

xm.
ABBEYS AND CASTLES.
1877.
It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in
England that the beauty and interest of the country
are private property, and that to get access to them
a key is always needed. The key raay be large or it
may be small, but it must be soraething that will turn
a lock. Of the things that contribute to the happiness
of an American observer in the country of parks and
castles, I can think of very few that do not come
under this definition of private property. When I
have mentioned the hedgerows and the churches I
have alraost exhausted the list. You can enjoy a
hedgerow from the public road, and I suppose that
even if you are a Dissenter you may enjoy a Norman
abbey from the street. If, therefore, one talk of any
thing beautiful in England, the presuraption will be
that it is private; and indeed such is my admiration
of this delightful country that I feel inclined to say
that if one talk of anything private the presumption
will be that it is beautiful. This is something of a
dilemma. If the observer permit hiraself to com
memorate charming impressions, he is in danger of
giving to the world the fruits of friendship and hos-

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 269
pitality. If, on the other hand, he withhold his im
pression, he lets soraething adtnirable slip away with
out having marked its passage, without having done it
proper honour. He ends by mingling discretion with
enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not treat
ing a country ill to talk of its treasures when the
mention of each has tacit reference to an act of
private courtesy.
The impressions I have in mind in writing these
lines were gathered in a part of England of which I
had not before had even a traveller's glimpse; but
as to which, after a day or two, I found rayself quite
ready to agree with a friend who lived there, and
who knew and loved it well, when he said very
fi-ankly, "I do believe it is the loveliest corner of the
world!" This was not a dictum to quarrel about,
and whUe I was in the neighbourhood I was quite of
his opinion. I felt that it would not take a great deal
to make me care for it very much as he cared for it;
I had a glimpse of the peculiar tenderness with which
such a country may be loved. It is a capital example
of the great characteristic of English scenery — -of
what I should call density of feature. There are no
waste details; everything in the landscape is something
particular — has a history, has played a part, has a
value to the imagination. It is a region of hills and
blue undulations, and, though none of the hills are
high, all of them are interesting — interesting as such
things are interesting in an old, small country, by a
kind of exquisite modulation, something suggesting
that outline and colouring have been retouched and
refined by the hand of time. Independently of its
castles and abbeys, the definite relics of the ages.

270 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
such a landscape seems historic. It has human rela
tions, and it is intimately conscious of thera. That
little speech about the loveliness of his county, or of
his own part of his county, was raade to rae by my
corapanion as we walked up the grassy slope of a hill,
or "edge," as it is called there, frora the crest of
which we seemed in an instant to look away over
most of the remainder of England. Certainly I should
have grown affectionate with regard to such a view as
that. The "edge" plunged down suddenly, as if the
corresponding slope on the other side had been ex
cavated, and one might follow the long ridge for the
space of an afternoon's walk with this vast, charraing
prospect before one's eyes. Looking across an English
county into the next "but one is a very pretty enter
tainraent, the county seeraing by no means so small as
might be supposed. How can a county seem sraall
in which, frora such a vantage-point as the one I
speak of, you see, as a darker patch across the lighter
green, the great estate of one of their lordships? Be
yond these are blue undulations of varying tone, and
then another bosky-looking spot, which constitutes, as
you are told, the residential urabrage of another peer.
And to right and left of these, in wooded expanses,
lie other domains of equal consequence. It was there
fore not the smallness but the vastness of the country
that struck me, and I was not at all in the mood of a
certain American who once, in my hearing, burst out
laughing at an English answer to ray inquiry as to
whether my interlocutor often saw Mr. B  . "Oh
no," the answer had been, "we never see hira: he
lives away ofif in the West." It was the western part
of his county our friend meant, and my American

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 27 I
humorist found matter for infinite jest in his meaning.
"I should as soon think of saying ray western hand
and my eastern," he declared.
I do not think, even, that my disposition to forra
a sentimental attachment for this delightful region —
for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses light
ing up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney-
tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland,
and, in the vague places of the horizon, of far away
towns and sites that one had always heard of — was
continued upon having "property" in the neighbour
hood, so that the little girls in the town should sud
denly drop curtsies to me in the street; though that
too would certainly have been pleasant. At the sarae
time, having a little property would without doubt
have made the sentiment stronger. People who wander
about the world without money in their pockets in
dulge in dreams — dreams of the things they would
buy if their pockets were complete. These dreams
are very apt to have relation to a good estate in any
neighbourhood in which the wanderer may happen to
find himself For myself, I have never been in a
country so unattractive that it did not seem a peculiar
felicity to be able to purchase the most considerable
house it contained. In New England and other por
tions of the United States I have coveted the large
mansion with Doric columns and a pediment of white-
painted timber; in Italy I have made imaginary pro-
fiosals for the yellow-walled villa with statues on the
roof In England I have rarely gone so far as to
fancy myself in treaty for the best house, but, failing
this, I have rarely faded to feel that ideal comfort for
the tirae would be to call one's self owner of what is

272 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
denominated here a "good" place. Is it that English
country life seems to possess such irresistible charras?
I have not always thought so; I have soraetiraes
suspected that it is dull; I have reraerabered that
there is a whole literature devoted to exposing it (that
of the English novel "of raanners"); and that its re
corded occupations and conversations occasionally
strike one as lacking a certain indispensable salt. But,
for all that, when, in the region to which I allude, my
companion spoke of this and that place being likely
sooner or later to come to the hammer, it seemed as
if nothing could be more delightful than to see the
haramer hanging upon one's own liberality. And this
in spite of the fact that the owners of the places in
question would part with thera because they could no
longer afford to keep thera up. I found it interesting
to learn, in so far as was possible, what sort of incorae
was iraplied by the possession of country-seats such as
are not in America a concomitant of even the largest
fortunes; and if in these revelations I sometiraes heard
of a very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was fre
quently surprised at the shortness of purse attributed
to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park.
Then, certainly, English country-life seemed to me the
raost advantageous thing in the world; on conditions
such as these one would gladly be dull; surrounded
by luxury of so moderate a cost one would joyfully
stagnate. There was one place in particular of which I said
to myself that if I had the money to buy it, I would
"move in" on the morrow. I saw this place, un
fortunately, to small advantage; I saw it in the rain.
But I ara rather glad that fine weather did not raeddle

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 273
with the affair, for I think that in this case the irrita
tion of envy might have made rae ill. It was a long,
wet Sunday, and the waters were deep. I had been
in the house all day, for the weather can best be de
scribed by my saying that it had been deemed to ex
onerate me from church-going. But in the afternoon,
the prospective interval between lunch and tea assum
ing formidable proportions, my host took me out to
walk, and in the course of our walk he led me into a
park which he described as "the paradise of a small
English country-gentleman." It was indeed a modern
Eden, and the trees might have been trees of know
ledge. They were of high antiquity and magnificent
girth and stature; they were strewn over the grassy
levels in extraordinary profusion, and scattered upon
and down the slopes in a fashion than which I have
seen nothing raore charming since I last looked at the
chestnuts on the Lake of Como. It appears that the
place was not very large, but I was unable to perceive
its limits. Shortly before we turned into the park the
rain had renewed itself, so that we were awkwardly
wet and rauddy; but, being near the house, ray com
panion proposed to -leave his card in a neighbourly
way. The house was most agreeable; it stood on a
kind of terrace, in the middle of a lawn and garden,
and the terrace overlooked one of the most copious
rivers in England, and across to those blue undula
tions of which I have already spoken. On the terrace
also was a piece of ornamental water, and there was
a small iron paling to divide the lawn from the park.
All this I beheld in the rain. My companion gave
his card to the butler, with the remark that we were
too much bespattered to come in, and we turned away
Portraits of Places. ^ °

274 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
to complete our circuit. As we turned away I became
acutely conscious of what I should have been tempted
to call the cruelty of this proceeding. My imagina
tion gauged the whole position. It was a Sunday
afternoon, and it was raining. The house was charm
ing, the terrace delightful, the oaks magnificent, the
view most interesting. But the whole thing was — not
to repeat the invidious epithet of which just now I
made too gross a use — the whole thing was quiet. In
the house was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-
room was — by which I meant must be — a lady, a
charming English lady. It seeraed to me that there
was nothing fatuous in believing that on this rainy
Sunday afternoon it would not please her to be told
that two gentlemen had walked across the country to
her door only to go through the ceremony of leaving
a card. Therefore, when, before we had gone raany
yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us, I felt how
just ray sentiment of the situation had been. Of course
we went back, and I carried my muddy boots into the
drawing-room — just the drawing-room I had iraagined
— where I found — I will not say just the lady I had
imagined, but a lady even more charming. Indeed,
there were two ladies, one of whom was staying in the
house. In whatever company you find yourself in
England, you may always be sure that some one pre
sent is "staying." I seldom hear this participle nowa
days without remembering an observation raade to me
in France by a lady who had seen much of English
manners. "Ah, that dreadful word staying! I think
we are so happy in France not to be able to translate
it — not to have any word that answers to it." The
large windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 275
away over the river to the blurred and blotted hills,
where the rain was drizzling and drifting. It was very
quiet, as I say; there was an air of large leisure. If
one wanted to do soraething here, there was evidently
plenty of time — and indeed of every other appliance
— to do it. The two ladies talked about "town:" that
is what people talk about in the country. If I were
disposed I raight represent them as talking about it
with a certain air of yearning. At all events, I asked
myself how it was possible that one should live in this
charming place and trouble one's head about what
was going on in London in July. Then we had ex
ceUent tea.
I returned to the habitation of my corapanion —
for I too was guilty of "staying" — through an old
Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly sculp
tured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of fancy
might see the ghosts of monks and the shadows of
abbots pass noiselessly to and fro. This aperture ad
mits you to a beautiful ambulatory of the thirteenth
century — a long stone gallery or cloister, repeated in
two stories, with the interstices of its traceries now
glazed, but with its long, low, narrow, charming vista
StiU perfect and picturesque — with its flags worn away
by monkish sandals, and with huge round-arched door
ways opening frora its inner side into great rooras
roofed like cathedrals. These rooms are furnished
with narrow windows, of almost defensive aspect, set
in embrasures three feet deep, and ornamented with
little grotesque mediaeval faces. To see one of the
small monkish masks grinning at you while you dress
and undress, or while you look up in the intervals of
inspiration from your letter writing, is a mere detail
i8*

276 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
in the entertainment of living in a ci-devant priory.
This entertainment is inexhaustible; for every step you
take in such a house confronts you in one way or
another with the remote past. You feast upon the
pictorial, you inhale the historic. Adjoining the house
is a beautiful ruin, part of the walls and windows and
bases of the piers of the magnificent church adminis
tered by the predecessor of your host, the abbot. These
relics are very desultory, but they are still abundant,
and they testify to the great scale and the stately
beauty of the abbey. You may lie upon the grass at
the base of an ivied fragment, measure the girth of
the great stumps of the central columns, half smothered
in soft creepers, and think how strange it is that in
this quiet hollow, in the midst of lonely hills, so ex
quisite and elaborate a work of art should have arisen.
It is but an hour's walk to another great ruin, which
has held together more completely. There the central
tower stands erect to half its altitude, and the round
arches and massive pillars of the nave make a perfect
vista on the unencumbered turf You get an impres
sion that when catholic England was in her prime,
great abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native
amateurs, even now, the region is called "wild," though
to American eyes it seeras almost suburban in its
smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless little rail
way running through the valley, and there is an ancient
little town at the abbey-gates — a town, indeed, with no
great din of vehicles, but with goodly brick houses,
with a dozen "publics," with tidy, whitewashed cottages,
and with little girls, as I have said, bobbing curtsies
in the street. But even now, if one had wound one's
way into the valley by the railroad, it would be rather

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 277
a surprise to find a small ornamental cathedral in a
spot on the whole so natural and pastoral. How im
pressive then must the beautiful church have been in
the days of its prosperity, when the pilgrim came
down to it from the grassy hillside and its bells raade
the stillness sensible! The abbey was in those days
a great affair; as my corapanion said, it sprawled all
over the place. As you walk away from it you think
you have got to the end of its geography, but you en
counter it still in the shape of a rugged outhouse en
riched with an early-English arch, or an ancient well,
hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. It is noticeable
that even if you are a traveller frora a land where
there are no early-English — and indeed few late-
English — arches, and where the well-covers are, at
their hoariest, of fresh-looking shingles, you grow used
with little delay to all this antiquity. Anything very
old seems extremely natural; there is nothing we ac
cept so implicitly as transmitted associations. It is
not too much to say that after spending twenty-four
hours in a house that is six hundred years old, you
seem yourself to have lived in it for six hundred years.
You seem yourself to have hollowed the flags with
your tread, and to have polished the oak with your
touch. You walk along the little stone gallery where
the monks used to pace, looking out of the gothic
window-places at their beautiful church, and you pause
at the big round, rugged doorway that admits you to
what is now the drawing-room. The massive step by
which you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked,
as it should be; the lintels are cracked and worn by
the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual
glance. You look up and down the miniature cloister

278 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
before you pass in; it seems wonderfully old and queer.
Then you tum into the drawing-room, where you find
raodern conversation and late publications and the
prospect of dinner. The new life and the old have
melted together; there is no dividing-line. In the
drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with
the broad end inward, like a small casemate. You
ask what it is, but people have forgotten. It is sorae
thing of the monks; it is a mere detail. After dinner
you are told that there is of course a ghost — a gray
friar who is seen in the dusky hours at the end of
passages. Sometimes the servants see him; they after
wards go surreptitiously to sleep in the village. Then,
when you take your chamber-candle and go wander
ing bedward by a short cut through empty rooms, you
are conscious of a peculiar sentiment toward the gray
friar which you hardly know whether to interpret as a
hope or a reluctance.
A friend of mine, an American, who knew this
country, had told me not to fail, while I was in, the
neighbourhood, to go to S  and two or three
other places. "Edward IV. and Elizabeth," he said,
"are stUl hanging about there." So admonished, I
made a point of going at least to S  , and I saw
quite what my friend raeant. Edward IV. and Eliza
beth, indeed, are still to be raet almost anywhere in
the county; as regards domestic architecture, few parts
of England are still more vividly old English. I have
rarely had, for a couple of hours, the sensation of
dropping back personally into the past in a higher
degree than while I lay on the grass beside the well
in the little sunny court of this small castle, and lazily
appreciated the still definite details of mediseval life.

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 279
The place is a capital example of what the French
call a small gentilhommiire of the thirteenth century.
It has a good deep moat, now filled with wild verdure,
and a curious gatehouse of a much later period — the
period when the defensive attitude had been wellnigh
abandoned. This gatehouse, which is not in the least
in the style of the habitation, but gabled and heavily
timbered, with quaint cross-beams protruding from
surfaces of coarse white plaster, is a very effective
anomaly in regard to the little gray fortress on the
other side of the court. I call this a fortress, but it is
a fortress which might easily have been taken, and it
must have assuraed its present shape at a time when
people had ceased to peer through narrow slits at pos
sible besiegers. There are slits in the outer walls for
such peering, but they are noticeably broad and not
particularly oblique, and might easily have been ap
plied to the uses of a peaceful parley. This is part of
the charm of the place; human life there must have
lost an earlier grimness; it was lived in by people who
were beginning to believe in good intentions. They
must have lived very much together; that is one of
the most obvious reflections in the court of a mediaeval
dwelling. The court was not always grassy and
empty, as it is now, with only a couple of gentleraen
in search of irapressions lying at their length, one of
whom has taken a wine-flask out of his pocket and
has coloured the clear water drawn for them out of
the weU in a couple of tumblers by a decent, rosy,
smiling, talking old woman, who has come bustling
out of the gatehouse, and who has a large, dropsical,
innocent husband standing about on crutches in the
sun, and making no sign when you ask after his health.

2 8o PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
This poor man has reached that ultimate depth of
human simplicity at which even a chance to talk
about one's ailments is not appreciated. But the civil
old woraan talks for every one, even for an artist who
has come out of one of the rooms, where I see hira
afterward reproducing its mouldering repose. The
rooms are all unoccupied and in a state of extreme
decay, though the castle is, as yet, far from being a
ruin. From one of the windows I see a young lady
sitting under a tree, across a meadow, with her knees
up, dipping something into her mouth. It is a camel's
hair paint-brush; the young lady is sketching. These
are the only besiegers to which the place is exposed
now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt
whether the young lady's aim is very good. We
wandered about the erapty interior, thinking it a pity
such things should fall to pieces. There is a beautiful
great hall — great, that is, for a sraall castle (it would
be extremely handsome in a modern house) — with tall,
ecclesiastical-looking windows, and a long staircase at
one end, climbing against the wall into a spacious
bedroom. You may still apprehend very well the
main lines of that simpler life; and it must be said
that, simpler though it was, it was apparently by no
means destitute of raany of our own conveniences.
The chamber at the top of the staircase ascending
from the hall is charming still, with its irregular
shape, its low-browed ceiling, its cupboards in the
walls, and its deep bay window formed of a series of
sraall lattices. You can fancy people stepping out
from it upon the platform of the staircase, whose
rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, and solid,
deeply- guttered hand-raU, stUl remain. They looked

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 201
down into the hall, where, I take it, there was always
a congregation of retainers, much lounging and wait
ing and passing to and fro, with a door open into the
court. The court, as I said just now, was not the
grassy, sesthetic spot which you may find it at present
of a summer's day; there were beasts tethered in it,
and hustling men-at-arms, and the earth was trampled
into puddles. But my lord or my lady, looking down
from the chamber-door, commanded the position and,
no doubt, issued their orders accordingly. The sight
of the groups on the floor beneath, the calling up and
do-wn, the oaken tables spread, and the brazier in the
middle — all this seemed present again; and it was not
difficult to pursue the historic vision through the rest
of the building — through the portion which connected
the great hall with the tower (here the confederate of
the sketching young lady without had set up the
peaceful three-legged engine of his craft); through the
dusky, roughly circular rooms of the tower itself, and
up the corkscrew staircase of the same to that most
charming part of every old castle, where visions raust
leap away off the battleraents to elude you — the bright,
dizzy platform at the tower-top, the place where the
castle-standard hung and the vigilant inmates surveyed
the, approaches. Here, always, you really overtake the
irapression of the place — here, in the sunny stillness,
it seems to pause, panting a little, and give itself up.
It was not only at Stokesay — I have -written the
name at last, and I will not efface it — that I lingered
a while on the summit of the keep to enjoy the cora
plete irapression so overtaken. I spent such another
half hour at Ludlow, which is a rauch grander and
more famous monument. Ludlow, however, is a ruin

282 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
— the most impressive and magnificent of ruins. The
charming old town and the admirable castle form a
capital object of pilgrimage. Ludlow is an excellent
example of a small English provincial town that has
not been soiled and disfigured by industry; it exhibits
no tall chimneys and smoke-streamers, with their atten
dant purlieus and sluras. The little city is perched
upon a hill near which the goodly Severn wanders,
and it has a remarkable air of civic dignity. Its
streets are wide and clean, empty and a little grass-
grown, and bordered with spacious, mildly-ornaraental
brick houses, which look as if there had been raore
going on in them in the first decade of the century
than there is in the present, but which can still,
nevertheless, hold up their heads and keep their
window-panes clear, their knockers brilliant and their
door steps whitened. The place seems to say that a
hundred years, and less, ago it was the centre of a
large provincial society, and that this society was very
"good" of its kind. It must have transported itself to
Ludlow for the season — in rumbling coaches and
hea-vy curricles — and there entertained itself in decent
emulation of that metropolis which a choice of railway
lines had not as yet placed within its iraraediate reach.
It had balls at the assembly rooms; it had Mrs. Sid
dons to play; it had Catalani to sing. Miss Burney's
and Miss Austen's heroines might perfectly well have
had their first love-affair there; a journey to Ludlow
would certainly have been a great event to Fanny
Price or Emma Woodhouse, or even to those more
exalted young ladies, Evelina and Cecilia. It is a
place on which a provincial "gentry" has left a sen
sible stamp. I have seldom seen so good a coUec-

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 283
tion of houses of the period between the elder
picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such
places, such houses, such relics and intimations,
always carry me back to the near antiquity of that
pre-Victorian England which it is still easy for a
stranger to picture with a certain vividness, thanks
to the partial survival of raany of its characteristics.
It is StiU easier for a stranger who has stayed a while
in England to forra an idea of the tone, the habits,
the aspect of English social life before its classic in
sularity had begun to wane, as all observers agree that
it did, about thirty years ago. It is true that the
mental operation in this matter reduces itself to fancy
ing some of the things which form what Mr. Matthew
Arnold would call the peculiar "notes" of England in
finitely exaggerated — the rigidly aristocratic constitu
tion of society, for instance; the unsesthetic temper of
the people; the private character of raost kinds of
comfort and entertainment. Let an old gentleman of
conservative tastes, who can reraember the century's
youth, talk to you at a club temporis acti — tell you
wherein it is that from his own point of view London,
as a residence for a gentleraan, has done nothing but
fall off for the last forty years. You will listen, of
course, with an air of decent sympathy, but privately
you will say to yourself how difficult a place of so
journ London must have been in those days for a
stranger — how little cosmopolitan, how bound in a
thousand ways, with narrowness of custom. What is
true of the metropolis at that time is of course doubly
trae of the provinces; and a genteel little city like the
one I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus

284 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
of insular propriety. Even then, however, the irritated
alien would have had the magnificent ruins of the
castle to dreara hiraself back into good humour in.
They would effectually have transported him beyond
all waning or waxing Philistinisms.

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 285

XIV.
ENGLISH VIGNETTES.
1879. L
Toward the last of April, in Monmouthshire, the
primroses were as big as your fist. I say "in Mon
mouthshire," because I believe that a certain grassy
mounting which I gave myself the pleasure of climbing,
and to which I took my way across the charming
country, through lanes where the hedges were perched
upon blooming banks, lay within the borders of this
ancient province. It was the festive Eastertide, and a
pretext for leaving London had not been wanting. Of
course it rained, — it rained a good deal, — for man
and the weather are usually at cross-purposes. But
there were intervals of light and warmth, and in Eng
land a couple of hours of fine weather, islanded in
moisture, assert their independence and leave an un-
compromised raeraory. These bright episodes were
even of longer duration; that whole raorning, for in
stance, on which, with a corapanion, I scrarabled up
the little Skirrid. One had a feeling that one was
very far from London; as, in fact, one was, after six
or seven hours in a smooth, swift English train. In
England this is a great remoteness; it seemed to justify

286 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
the half-reluctant confession which I heard constantly
raade, that the country was extremely "wUd." There
is wildness and wildness, I thought; and though I
had not been a great explorer, I compared this rough
district with several neighbourhoods in another part
of the world that passed for tarae. I went even so
far as to wish that some of its ruder features might
be transplanted to that relatively unregulated land
scape and commingled with its suburban savagery. I
went over the elements of this English prospect and
of human life in the midst of it, and wondered whether,
if I were to enumerate them and leave thera to be
added up by the dwellers beyond the sea, the total
would be set down as a wilderness. We were close
to the Welsh border, and a dozen little raountains in
the distance were peeping over each other's shoulders.
But nature was open to the charge of no worse dis
order than this. The Skirrid (I like to repeat the
narae) wore, it is true, at a distance, the aspect of a
magnified extinguisher; but when, after a bright,
breezy walk through lane and meadow, we had
scrambled over the last of the thickly-flowering hedges
which lay around its shoulders like loosened strings of
coral and began to ascend the grassy cone (very much
in the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar) it proved as
smooth-faced as a garden-mound. Hard by, on the
flanks of other hills, were troops of browsing sheep,
and the only thing in which there was any harshness
of suggestion was the strong, damp wind. But even
this had a good deal of softness in it, and ministered
to my sense of the agreeable in scenery by the way it
blew about the pearly morning mists that were airing
themselves upon neighbouring ridges, and kept shak-

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 287
ing the vaporous veil that fluttered down in the valley
over the picturesque little town of Abergavenny. A
breezy, grassy English hill-top, looking down on a
country full of suggestive names and ancient memories,
belongs (especially if you are exhilarated by a beauti
ful walk, and you have a flask in your pocket) deci
dedly to the category of smooth scenery. And so with
aU the rest of it.
On Sunday I stayed away from church, because I
leamed that the sacred edifice had a mediaeval chill,
and that if I should sit there for a couple of hours I
might inherit a lumbago three hundred years old. The
fact was formidable, but the idea was, in a certain
way, attractive; there was nothing crude in a rheuma
tism which descended from the Norman tiraes. Prac
tical considerations, however, determined me not to
expose myself to this venerable pain; so in the still
hours, when the roads and lanes were empty, I simply
walked to the churchyard and sat upon one of the
sun-warmed grave-stones. I say the roads were empty,
but they were peopled with the big primroses I just
now spoke of — primroses of the size of ripe apples,
and yet, in spite of their rank growth, of as pale and
tender a yellow as if their gold had been diluted with
silver. It was indeed a mixture of gold and silver,
for there was a wealth of the white wood-aneraone as
well, and these delicate flowers, each of so perfect a
coinage, were turabled along the green wayside as if
a prince had been scattering largesse. The outside
of an old English country-church in service-tirae is a
very pleasant place; and this is as near as I often
care to approach to the celebration of the Anglican
mysteries. A just sufficient sense of their august

288 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
character may be gathered from that vague sound of,
village-music which makes 'its way out into the still
ness, and frora the perusal of those portions of the
Prayer-Book which are inscribed upon mouldering
slabs and dislocated headstones. The church I speak
of was a beautiful specimen of its kind — intensely
aged, variously patched, but still solid and useful, and
with no touch of restoration. It was very big and
massive, and, hidden away in the fields, it had a kind
of lonely grandeur; there was nothing in particular
near it but its out-of-the-world little parsonage. It was
only one of ten thousand; I had seen a hundred such
before. But I watched the watery sunshine upon the
rugosities of its ancient masonry; I stood a while in
the shade of two or three spreading yews which
stretched their black arms over graves decorated for
Easter, according to the custora of that country, with
garlands of primrose and dog-violet; and I reflected
that in a wild region it was a blessing to have so quiet
a place of refuge as that.
Later, I chanced upon a couple of other asylums
which were raore spacious and no less tranquil. Both
of thera were old country-houses, and each in its way
charraing. One was a half-raodernised feudal dwelling,
lying in a wooded hollow — a large concavity filled
with a delightful old park. The house had a long gray
fajade and half a dozen towers, and the usual supply
of ivy and of clustered chiraneys relieved against a
background of rook-haunted elms. But the windows
were closed and the avenue was untrodden; the
house was the property of a lady who could not afford
to live in it in becoming state, and who had let, it,
furnished, to a rich young man "for the shootihg."

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 289
The rich young man occupied it but for three weeks
in the year, and for the rest of the time left it a prey
to the hungry gaze of the passing stranger, the would-
be redresser of aesthetic wrongs. It seemed a great
aesthetic -wrong that so charming a place should not
be a conscious, sentient home. But in England all
this is very comraon. It takes a great many plain
people to keep a gentleman going; it takes a great
deal of wasted sweetness to make up a property. It
is trae that, in the other case I speak of, the sweet
ness, which here was even greater, was less sensibly
squandered. If there was no one else in the house,
at least there were ghosts. It had a dark red front
and grim-looking gables; it was perched upon a sort
of terrace, quite high in the air, which was reached
by steep, crooked, mossy steps. Beneath these steps
was an ancient bit of garden, and frora the hither side
of the garden stretched a great expanse of turf Out
of the midst of the turf sprang a magnificent avenue
of Scotch firs — a. perfect iraitation of the Italian stone-
pine. It looked like the Villa Borghese transplanted
to the Welsh hills. The huge, sraooth stems, in their
double row, were crowned with dark parasols. In the
Scotch fir or the Italian pine there is always an
element of grotesqueness; the open umbrella in a
rainy country is not a poetical analogy, and the case
is not better if you compare the tree to a colossal
mushroom. But, without analogies, there was some
thing very striking in the effect of this enormous,
rigid vista, and in the grassy carpet of the avenue,
with the dusky, lonely, high-featured house looking
down upon it. There was something solemn and tragical;
the place was raade to the hand of a romancer, and he
Portraits of Places. '9

290 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
might have found his characters within; the leaden
lattices were open.

II.
The Isle of Wight is disappointing at first. I
wondered why it should be, and then I found the
reason in the influence of the detestable little railway.
There can be no doubt that a railway in the Isle of
Wight is a gross impertinence; it is in evident contra
vention to the natural style of the place. The place
is minutely, delicately picturesque, or it is nothing 'at
all. It is purely ornamental; it exists for the enter
tainment of tourists. It is separated by nature from
the dense railway-system of the less diminutive island,
and it is the corner of the world where a good car
riage-road is most in keeping. Never was there a
better place for sacrificing to prettiness; never was
there a better chance for not making a railway. But
now there are twenty trains a day, and the prettiness
is twenty times less. The island is so sraall that the
hideous embankments and tunnels are obtrusive; the
sight of them is as painful as it would be to see -a
pedlar's pack on the shoulders of a pretty woman.
This is your first impression as you travel (naturally
by the objectionable conveyance) from Ryde to Ventnor;
and the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly,
and stops at half a dozen little stations, where the
groups on the platform enable you to perceive that
the population consists almost exclusively of gentlemen
in costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for atten
tion to cravats and trousers (an immensely large class
in England), of old ladies of the species denoniinated

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 29 1
in France rentiires, of young ladies of the highly-
educated and sketching variety, this circumstance fails
to reconcUe you to the chartered cicatrix which forms
your course. At Ventnor, however, face to face with
the sea, and with the' blooming shoulder of the Under-
cliff close behind you, you lose sight to a certain ex
tent of the superfluities of civilisation. Not, indeed,
that Ventnor has not been diligently civilised. It is a
well-regulated little watering-place, and it has been
subjected to a due measure of cockneyfication. But
the glittering ocean remains, shimmering at moments
with blue and silver, and the large gorse-covered
downs rise superbly above it. Ventnor hangs upon
the side of a steep hill, and here and there it clings
and scrambles, it is propped and terraced, like one of
the bright-faced little towns that look down upon the
Mediterranean. To add to tbe Italian efifect, the houses
are aU denominated villas, though it must be added
that nothing is less like an Italian villa than an Eng
lish one. Those which ornament the successive ledges
at Ventnor are for the most part small semi-detached
boxes, predestined, even before they had fairly come
into the world, to the entertainment of lodgers. They
stand in serried rows all over the place, with the finest
names in the British Peerage painted upon their gate
posts. Their severe similarity of aspect, however, is
such that even the -difference between Plantagenet and
Percival, between Montgomery and Montmorency, is
hardly sufficient to enlighten the puzzled visitor. An
English watering-place is much more comfortable than
an American; in a Plantagenet villa the art of receiv
ing "summer guests" has usually been brought to a
higher perfection than in an American rural hotel.
19-

292 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
But what strikes an American, with regard to even so
charmingly-nestled a little town as Ventnor, is that it
is far less natural, less pastoral and bosky, than his
own fond image of a sumraer-retreat. There is too
much brick and mortar; there are too many smoking
chimneys and shops and public-houses; there are no
woods nor brooks, nor lonely headlands; there is none
of the virginal stillness of Nature. Instead of these
things, there is an esplanade, mostly paved with asphalt,
bordered with benches and little shops, and provided
with a German band. To be just to Ventnor, how
ever, I must hasten to add that once you get away
from the asphalt there is a great deal of vegetation.
The little village of Bonchurch, which closely adjoins
it, is buried in the most elaborate verdure, muffled in
the smoothest lawns and the densest shrubbery. Bon
church is simply delicious, and indeed in a raanner
quite absurd. It is like a model village in imitative
substances, kept in a big glass case; the turf might
be of green velvet and the foliage of cut paper. The
villagers are all happy gentlefolk, the cottages have
plate-glass windows, and the rose-trees on their walls
are tended by an under-gardener. Passing from Vent
nor through the elegant umbrage of Bonchurch, and
keeping along the coast toward Shanklin, you come to
the prettiest part of the Undercliff, or, in other words,
to the prettiest place in the world. The iramense
grassy cliffs which from the coast of the island raake
what the French would call a "false descent" to the
sea. At a certain point the descent is broken, and a
wide natural terrace, all overtangled with wild shrubs
and flowers, hangs there in raid-air, half-way above
the ocean. It is impossible to imagine anything more

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 293
charming than this long, blooming platforra, protected
from the north by huge green bluffs and plunging on
the other side into the murmuring tides. This de
lightful arrangement constitutes for a distance of sorae
fifteen miles the south shore of the Isle of Wight; but
the best of it, as I have said, is to be found in the
four or five miles that separate Ventnor from Shanklin.
Of a lovely afternoon in April these four or five miles
are an enchanting walk.
Of course you must first catch your lovely after
noon. I caught one; in fact, I caught two. On the
second I climbed up the downs, and perceived that it
was possible to put their gorse-covered stretches to
stUl other than pedestrian uses — to devote them to
sedentary pleasures. A long lounge in the lee of a
stone wall, the lingering, fading afternoon light, the
reddening sky, the band of blue sea above the level-
topped bunches of gors© — these things, enjoyed as an
undertone to the conversation of an amiable com
patriot, seemed indeed a very sufficient substitute for
that primitive stillness of the absence of which I ven
tured just now to complain.

III.
It was probably a mistake to stop at Portsmouth.
I had done so, however, in obedience to a familiar
theory that seaport-towns abound in local colour, in
curious types, in the quaint and the strange. But
these charms, it must be confessed, were signally
wanting to Portsmouth, along whose sordid streets I
stroUed for an hour, vainly glancing about rae for an
overhanging fagade or a group of Maltese sailors. I

294 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
was distressed to perceive that a famous seaport could
be at once untidy and prosaic. Portsmouth is dirty,
but it is also dull. It may be roughly divided into
the dock-yard and the public-houses. The dock-yard,
into which I was unable to penetrate, is a colossal en
closure, signalised externally by a grim brick wall, as
' featureless as an empty black-board. The dockyard
eats up the town, as it were, and there is nothing left
over but the gin-shops, which the town drinks up.
There is not even a crooked old quay of any con
sequence, with brightly patched houses looking out
upon a forest of masts. To begin with, there are no
masts; and then there are no polyglot sign-boards, no
overhanging upper stories, no outlandish parrots and
macaws perched in open lattices. I had another hour
or so before ray train departed, and it would have
gone hard with me if I had not bethought myself of
hiring a boat and being pulled about in the harbour.
Here a certain amount of entertainment was to be
found. There were great iron-clads, and white troop
ships that looked vague and spectral, like the floating
home of the Flying D.utchman, and small, devilish
vessels whose mission was to project the infernal tor
pedo. I coasted about these metallic islets; and then,
to eke out my entertainment, I boarded the Victory.
The Victory is an ancient frigate of enormous size,
which in the days of her glory carried I know not how
many hundred guns, but whose only function now is
to stand year after year in Portsmouth waters and ex
hibit herself to the festive cockney. Bank-holiday is
now her great date; once upon a time it was Tra
falgar. The Victory, in short, was Nelson's ship; it
was on her huge deck that he was struck and in her

ENGLISH -VIGNETTES. 295
deep bowels he breathed his last. The venerable ves
sel is provided with a corapany of ushers, like the
Tower of London or Westminster Abbey, and it is
hardly less solid and spacious than either of those
edifices. A good man in uniform did me the honours
of the ship with a terrible displacement of h's, and
there seemed something strange in the way it had
lapsed from its heroic part. It had carried two hun
dred guns and a mighty -warrior, and boomed against
the enemies of England; it had been the scene of one
of the most thrilling and touching events in English
history. Now, it was hardly more than a mere source
of income to the Portsmouth watermen — an objective
point for "Whitsuntide excursionists — a thing that a
foreign observer must allude to very casually, for fear
of seeming -vulgar, or even serious.

IV.
But I recouped myself, as they say in England, by
stopping afterwards at Chichester. In this dense and
various old England two places may be very near to
gether and yet strike a very different note. I knew in
a general way that there was a cathedral at Chichester;
indeed, I had seen its beautiful spire from the window
of the train. I had always regarded an afternoon in a
little cathedral-town as a high order of entertainment,
and a morning at Portsmouth had left me in the mood
for not missing such an exhibition. The spire of
Chichester at a little distance greatly resembles that
of Salisbury. It is on a sraaUer scale, but it tapers
upward with a delicate sliraness which, like that of its
famous rival, makes a picture of the level landscape

296 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
in which it stands. Unlike the spire of Salisbury,
however, it has not at present the charra of antiquity.
A few years ago the old steeple collapsed and tumbled
into the church, and the present structure is but a
modern facsimile. The cathedral is not of the highest
interest; it is rather plain and bare, and, except a
curious old detached- bell-tower which stands beside
it, has no particular element of unexpectedness. But
an English cathedral of restricted grandeur may yet
be a very charming affair; and I spent an hour or so
lounging around this highly respectable edifice, with
out the spell of contemplation being broken by satiety.
I approached it, from the station, by the usual quiet
red-brick street of the usual cathedral town — a street
of small, excellent shops, before which, here and there,
one of the vehicles of the neighbouring gentry was
drawn up beside the curbstone, while the grocer or
the bookseller, who had hurried out obsequiously,
was waiting upon the comfortable occupant. I went
into a bookseller's to buy a Chichester guide, which
I perceived in the window; I found the shopkeeper
talking to a young curate in a soft hat. The guide
seemed very desirable, though it appeared to have
been but scantily desired; it had been published in
the year 1841, and a very large reranant of the edi
tion, with a muslin back and a little white label and
paper-covered boards, was piled up on the counter.
It was dedicated, with terrible huraility, to the Duke
of Richmond, and ornamented with primitive wood
cuts and steel plates; the ink had turned brown and
the page musty; and the style itself — that of a pro
vincial antiquary of upwards of forty years ago pene
trated with the grandeur of the aristocracy — had grown

ENGLISH -VIGNETTES. 297
rather sallow and stale. Nothing could have been
more mellifluous and urbane than the young curate:
he was arranging to have the Times newspaper sent
him every morning for perusal. "So it will be a penny
if it is fetched away at noon?" he said, smiling very
sweetly and with the most gentlemanly voice possible;
"and it will be three halfpence if it is fetched away
at four o'clock?" At the top of the street, into which,
with my guide-book, I relapsed, was an old market-
cross, of the fifteenth century — a florid, romantic little
structure. It consists of a stone pavilion, with open
sides and a number of pinnacles and crockets and
buttresses, besides a goodly medallion of the high-
nosed visage of Charles I., which was placed above
one of the arches, at the Restoration, in corapensation
for the violent havoc wrought upon the little town by
the Parliaraentary soldiers, who had wrested the place
from the Royalists, and who amused themselves, in
their grim fashion, with infinite hacking and hewing
in the cathedral. Here, to the left, the cathedral dis
closes itself, lifting its sraart gray steeple out of a
pleasant garden. Opposite to the garden was the
Dolphin or the Dragon — in fine, the raost eligible inn.
I must confess that for a time it divided my attention
with the cathedral, in virtue of an ancient, musty
parlour on the second floor, with hunting-pictures
hung above haircloth sofas; of a red-faced waiter, in
evening dress; of a big round of cold beef and a
tankard of ale. The prettiest thing at Chichester is a
charming little three-sided cloister, attached to the
cathedral, where, as is usual in such places, you may
sit upon a gravestone amid the deep grass in the
middle, and raeasure the great central mass of the

298 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
church — the large gray sides, the high foundations of
the spire, the parting of the nave and transept. From
this point the greatness of a cathedral seems more
complex and impressive. You watch the big shadows
slowly change their relations; you listen to the cawing
of rooks and the twittering of swallows; you hear a
slow footstep echoing in the cloisters.

V.
If Oxford were not the finest thing in England.
Cambridge would certainly be. Cambridge was so,
for that matter, to my iraagination, for thirty-six hours.
To the barbaric mind, ambitious of culture, Oxford is
the usual iraage of the happy reconciliation between
research and acceptance. It typifies, to an American,
the union of science and sense — of aspiration and
ease. A German university gives a greater impression
of science, and an English country-house or an Italian
villa a greater impression of idle enjoyment; but in
these cases, on one side, knowledge is too ragged, and,
on the other, satisfaction is too trivial. Oxford lends
sweetness to labour and dignity to leisure. "When I
say Oxford, I mean Cambridge, for a barbarian is not
in the least obliged to know the difference, and it
suddenly strikes rae as being both very pedantic and
very good-natured in him to pretend to know it. What
institution is more majestic than Trinity College? what
can be more touching to an American than the hospi
tality of such an institution? The first quadrangle is
of immense extent, and the buildings that surround it,
with their long, rich fronts of time-deepened gray, are
the stateliest in the world. In the centre of the court

ENGLISH -VIGNETTES. 299
are two or three acres of close-shaven la-wn, in the
midst of which rises a splendid gothic fountain, where
the serving-men fiU up their buckets. There are towers
and battlements and statues, and besides these things
there are cloisters and gardens and bridges. There
are charming rooms in a kind of stately gate-tower,
and the rooras, occupying the thickness of the build
ing, have windows looking out on one side over the
magnificent quadrangle, with half a mile or so of
Decorated architecture, and on the other into deep-
bosomed trees. And in the rooms is the best corapany
conceivable — distinguished men who are remarkably
good fellows. I spent a beautiful Sunday morning
walking about Cambridge, with one of these gentlemen,
and attempting, as the French say, to dibrouiller its
charms. These are a very coraplicated affair, and I do
not pretend, in raeraory, to keep the colleges apart.
There are, however, half a dozen points that raake in
effaceable pictures. Six or eight of the colleges stand
in a row, tuming their backs to the river; and here
upon ensues the loveliest confusion of gothic windows
and ancient trees, of grassy banks and raossy balustrades,
of sun-chequered avenues and groves, of lawns and
gardens and terraces, of single-arched bridges span
ning the little stream, which is small and shallow, and
looks as if it had been "turned on" for ornamental
purposes. The scantily-flowing Cam appears to exist
simply as an occasion for these enchanting little bridges
— the beautiful covered gallery of John's or the slightly-
coUapsing arch of Clare. In the way of college-courts
and quiet scholastic porticoes, of gray-walled gardens
and ivied nooks of study, in all the pictorial accidents
of a great English university, Cambridge is delightfully

300 PORTRAITS OF PLACES.
and inexhaustibly rich. I looked at these one by one,
and said to myself always that the last was the best.
If I were called upon, however, to mention the prettiest
corner of the world, I should heave a tender sigh and
point the way to the garden of Trinity HaU. My
companion, who was very competent to judge (but who
spoke, indeed, with the partiality of a son of the
house), declared, as he ushered rae into it, that it was,
to his mind, the most beautiful small garden in Europe.
I freely accepted, and I promptly repeat, an affirmation
so ingeniously conditioned. The little garden at Trinity
Hall is narrow and crooked; it leans upon the river,
from which a low parapet, all muffled in ivy, divides
it; it has an ancient wall, adorned with a thousand
matted creepers on one side, and on the other a group
of extraordinary horse-chestnuts. These trees are of
prodigious size; they occupy half the garden, and they
are remarkable for the fact that their giant limbs strike
down into the earth, take root again, and emulate, as
they rise, the majesty of the parent tree. The manner
in which this magnificent group of horse-chestnuts
sprawls about over the grass, out into the middle of
the lawn, is one of the most picturesque features of
the garden of Trinity Hall. Of course the single ob
ject at Cambridge that makes the most abiding im
pression is the faraous chapel of King's College — the
most beautiful chapel in England. The efifect it at
terapts to produce within belongs to the order of
sublimity. The atterapt succeeds, and the success is
attained by means so light and elegant that at first it
almost defeats itself The sublime usually has raore
of a frown and straddle, and it is not until after you
have looked about you for ten minutes that you per-

ENGLISH -VIGNETTES. 30I
ceive that the chapel is saved from being the prettiest
church in England by the accident of its being one of
the noblest. It is a cathedral without aisles or columns
or transepts, but (as a corapensation) with such a beau
tiful sliraness of clustered tracery soaring along the
waUs, and spreading, bending and commingling in the
roof, {hat its simplicity seeras only a richness the raore.
I stood there for a quarter of an hour on a Sunday
morning; there was no service, but in the choir behind
the great screen which divides the chapel in half, the
young choristers were rehearsing for the afternoon.
The beautiful boy-voices rose together and touched
the splendid vault; they hung there, expanding and
resounding, and then, like a rocket that spends itself,
they faded and melted toward the end of the building.
The sound was angelic.

VI.
Carabridgeshire is one ofthe so-called ugly counties;
which means that it is observably flat. It is for this
reason that Newmarket is, in its own peculiar fashion,
so thriving a locality. The country is like a board of
green cloth; the turf presents itself as a friendly
provision of nature. Nature offers her gentle bosom
as a gaming-table; card-tables, bUliard-tables are but
a humble imitation of Newmarket Heath. It was odd
to think that amid this gentle, pastoral scenery, there
is more betting than anywhere else in the world. The
large, neat English meadows roll away to a humid-
looking sky, the young patridges jump about in the
hedges, and nature does not look in the least as if she
were ofifering you odds. The gentlemen do, though —

302 PORTRAITS 'OF PLACES.
the gentlemen whom you meet on the roads and in
the railway carriage; they have that indefinable look
— ^it pervades a raan from the cut of his whisker to
the shape of his boot-toe — which denotes a familiarity
with the turf It is brought home to you that to an
immense number of people in England the events in
the Racing Calendar constitute tbe most important
portion of contemporary history. The very air about
Newmarket appears to contain a vague echo of stable-
talk, and you perceive that this is the landscape de
picted in those large coloured prints of the "sporting"
genus which you have admired in inn-parlours.
The destruction of patridges is, if an equally
classical, a less licentious pursuit, for which, I believe,
Cambridgeshire offers peculiar facilities. Araong these
is a certain shooting-box, which is a triuraph of ac
cidental picturesqueness (the highest order) and a
teraple of delicate hospitality. The shooting belongs
to the auturan, not to this vernal period; but as I have
spoken of echoes, I suppose that if I had listened at
tentively I might have heard the ghostly crack of
some of the famous shots that have been discharged
there. The air, I believe had vibrated to several
a«gust rifles, but all that I basppened to hear by listen-
iogg was sorae excellent talk.
In England, I said just now, a couple of -places
may be very near together, and yet have what the
philosophers call a connotation strangely different.
Only a few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St.
Edmunds, a town whose tranquil antiquity makes
horse-racing, and even partridge-shooting, appear a
rfestkss and fidgety mode of passing the 'time. I con
fess that I went to Bury St. Edmunds simply on the

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 303
strength of its name, which I had often encountered,
and which had always seemed to me to have a high
value for the tourist. I knew that St. Edmund had
been an Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my conviction that
the little town that bore his narae would afford enter
tainment between trains had nothing definite to rest
upon. The event, however, rewarded my faith — re
warded it with the sight of a magnificent old gatehouse
of the thirteenth century, the most substantial of many
relics of the great abbey which once flourished there.
There are many others; they are scattered about the
old precinct of the abbey, a large portion of which
has been converted into a rambling botanic garden,
the resort at Whitsuntide of a thousand very modem
merry-makers. The monument I speak of has the
proportions of a triumphal arch; it is at once a gate
way and a fortress; it is covered with beautiful orna
ment, and is altogether the lion of Bury.

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of Court and Government, by her ardent
English admirer.

An Englishwoman's Love-
Letters. i vol. -3476.
A pathetic story told in a series of
striking letters, which has raised much dis
cussion as to the probable identity of the
anonymous author.
Foes in Law. By Rhoda
Broughton. i vol. -3475.
A new novel by a favoiu-ite authoress.
Many of the characters are delightful
sketches.
A Master of Craft By W.
W. Jacobs, i vol. -3474.
Mr. Jacobs's seafaring characters are
as delightfully humorous as ever. A book
wbich absolutely compels laughter, and a
certain antidote for sad spirits.
The Life and Death of
Richard Yea-and-Nay. By
M. Hewlett. 2 v. -347 2/73.
A chronicle ofthe great King, his loves,
his fights, his Crusade, and bis death. The
book is brimful of action and incident.
The Brass Bottle. By F.
Anstey. i vol. -3 47 1.
A farcical conception of exquisite hu-
mour. By far the best work of the author
since his £rst great masterpiece.
In the Palace of the King.
A Love-Story of Old Madrid.
By F. Marion Crawford.
2 V0IS.-3469/70.
A romance of Don John of Austria,
and the Court of King Philip of Spain.
Eleanor. By Mrs. Humphry
Ward. 2 V0IS.-3467/68.
Mrs. Humphry Ward is at her best.
The story, though sad, is pleasant through
its nobility, and the reader is well satisfied
with the ending. The scenes are laid in
Italy.

Tauchnitz Edition. Latest Vohunes.

Cunning Murrell. By Ar-
thurMorrison. IV0I.-3466.
A tale of Essex life in the middle
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smuggling supply curious incidents and
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3463- A tale of farm life in Suffolk when the
century was still young. The story is full
of local colour.
Quisante. By Anthony Hope.
I V0I.-3462.
An absorbing story and a clever study
of modern life and human nature. The
book is full of smart conversation.
The Infidel. By M. E. Brad-
don. 2 vols. -3460/6 1.
A tale of the great Revival, and a
clever romance of the England of the
time. Wesley and his followers are subtly
portrayed. Prejudged. By Florence
\ Montgomery, i vol.- 3459.
A pretty love-story, of which the scene
J is laid in various Continental watering-
1' places. The heroine and her mysterious
I lover are interesting figures.
The Isle of Unrest By
Henry Seton Meriuman.
I vol. -3458.
A tale of Corsica and the Franco-
German war. The book teems with inter
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The Worldlings. By Leon
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Mrs. Atherton gives, us considerable
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The Man that corrupted
Hadleyburg, etc. By Mark
Twain. 2 vols.- 3453/54.
A series of humorous and quite new
tales and sketches. In these volumes Mr.
Clemens is again at his best.
Conversations with Prince
Bismarck. Edited by Sidney
Whitman, i vol. -3452.
A collection of important and curious
interviews with the great statesman, culled
from the publications of Heinrich von Po^
schinger. Many of them throw new and
interesting side - lights on Bismarck's
thoughts and character.
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Marie Corelll 2 v.- 3450/51.
A powerful and imaginative romance,
treating of Rome, the priesthood and mo
dern religion. The most phenomenal suc
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Nell Gwyn — Comedian. By
Frank Frankfort Moore.
I vol.- 3449.
A collection of scenes from the cele
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The Flower of the Flock.
ByW.E. Norris. IV0I.-3448.
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ways find Mr. Norris's books delightful
reading, and the present tale is one ofthe
best he has written. TheAmerican widow
is delicious.

Complete List
ofthe
Collection of British and American Authors.
Published with Continental Copyright hy special agreement
with the authors. Vide p. i.
— Price 1 M. 60 Pf. or 2 Fr. per Volume. —

Rev. W. Adams, f 1848.
Sacred Allegories i v.
Grace Aguilar, -j- 1847.
Home Infiuence 2 v. — The Mother's
Kecompense 2 v.
Hamilton Aide.
Rita XV. — Carr of Carrlyon 2 v. — The
Marstons 2 v. — In that State of Life 1 v. —
Morals and Mysteries i v. — Penruddocke
2 V. — "A nine Days' Wonder" i v. —
Poet and Peer 2 v. — Introduced to Society
I V.
W. Harrison Ainsworth, -j- 1882.
Windsor Castle i v. — Saint James's i v.
— Jack Sheppard {with Portrait) i v. —
Tbe Lancashire Witches 2 v. — The Star-
Chamber 2 v. — The Flitch of Bacon i v. —
The Spendthrift 1 v. — Mervj'n Clitheroe
2 V. — Ovingdean Grange i v. — The Con
stable of the Tower i v. — The Lord
Mayor of London 2 v. — Cardinal Pole
2 V. — John Law 2 v. — The Spanish
Match 2 V. — Tho Constable de Bourbon
2 V. — Old Court 2 V. — Myddleton Pom-
fret 2 V. — The South-Sea Bubble 2 v. —
Hilary St. Ives 2 v. — Talbot Harland
I V. — Tower Hill i v. — Boscobel 2 v. —
The Good Old Times 2 v, — Merry Eng
land 2 V. — The Goldsmith's Wife 2 v. —
Preston Fight 2 v. — Chetwynd Calverley
2 V. — The Leaguer of Lathom 2 v. —
The Fall of Somerset 2 v. — Beatrice
Tyldesley 2 v. — Beau Nash 2 v. — Stanley
Brereton 2 v.
Louisa M. Alcott (Am.), f 1888.
LitHe Women 2 v. — Little Men 1 v. —
An Old-Fashioned Girl 1 v. —Jo's Boys
I V.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Am.).
Marjorie Daw and other Tales iv, —
The Stillwater Tragedy iv.
Mrs. Alexander (Hector).
A Second Life 3 V. — By Woman's Wit
I V. — Mona's Choice 2 v. — A Life In

terest 2 V, — A Crooked Path 2 v. — Blind
Fate 2 V. — A Woman's Heart 2 v. — For
His Sake 2 v. ' — The Snare of the Fowler
2 V. — Found Wanting 2 v. — A Ward in
Chancery i v. — A Choice of Evils 2 t. —
A Fight with Fate 2 v. ¦ — A Winning
Hazard i v. — A Golden Autumn it. —
Mrs. Crichton's Creditor i v. — Barbara,
Lady's Maid and Peeress it. — The Cost
of Her Pride 2 v. — Brown, V. C. i v. —
Through Fire to Fortune i v. — A Missing
Hero I v.
Alice, Grand-Duchess of Hesse,
t 1878.
Letters to Her Majesty the Queen
(with Portrait). With a Memoir by H.
R. H. Princess Christian 2 v.
Lizzie AUdridge.
By LoveandLaw 2 v. — The World she
awoke in 2 v.
Grant Allen, f 1899.
The Woman who did i t.
Audior of "All for Greed"
(Baroness de Buiy).
All for Greed i v. — Love the Avenger
^ "• F. Anstey (Guthrie).
The Giant's Robe 2 v. — AFallen Idol
I V. — The Pariah 3 v. — The Talking
Horse and other Tales i v. — Voces
Populi (First and Second Series) i v. —
The Brass Bottle i v.
Mrs.Argles, vide Mrs.Hungerford.
Author of "The Aristocrats."
The Aristocrats i v.
Sir Edwin Arnold.
The Light of Asia (with Portrait) i v.
Matthew Arnold, j- 1888.
Essays in Criticism 2 v. — Essays in
Criticism (Second Series) i v.
Mrs. Gertrude Atherton (Am.).
American Wives and English Husbands
I V. — The Califomians i v  Patience

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Sparhawk and her Times 2 v. — Senator
North 2 V. — The Doomswoman 1 v.
Jane Austen, f 181 7.
Sense and Sensibility 1 v. — Mansfield
Park IV. — Pride and Prejudice i v. —
Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion i v. —
Emma z v.
Author of "Autobiography of
LutfuUah," vide E. B. Eastwick.
Richard Bagot
A Roman Mystery 2 v. — Casting of
Nets 2 V. S. Baring- Gould.
Mehalah i v. — John Herring 2 v. —
Court Royal 2 v.
Lady Barker (Lady Broome).
Station Life in New Zealand i v. —
Station Amusements in New Zealand
XV. — A Year's Housekeeping in South
Africa IV. — Letters to Guy, and A Dis
tant Shore — Rodrigues i v.
Frank Barrett
The Smuggler's Secret it. — Outof the
Jaws of Death 2 v.
J. M. Barrie.
Sentimental Tommy 2 v. — Margaret
Ogilvy I V. — Tommy and Grizel 2 v.
Author of " Miss Bayle's
Romance," vide W. Fraser Rae.
Rev. Robert H. Baynes.
Lyra AngUcana, Hymns and Sacred
Songs I V.
Lord Beaconsfield, vide Disraeli.
Averil Beaumont (Mrs. Hunt).
Thornicroft's Model 2 v.
Currer Bell (Charlotte Bronte —
Mrs. Nicholls), f 1855.
Jane Eyre 2 v. — Shirley 2 v, — Villette
2 v. — The Professor i v.
Ellis & Acton Bell (Emily, f 1848,
and Anne, + 1849, Bronte).
Wuthering Heights, andAgnesGrey 2 v.
Edward Bellamy (Am.), f 1898.
Looking Backward 1 t,
Frank Lee Benedict (Am.).
St. Simon's Niece 2 v.
E. F. Benson.
Dodo 1 v. — The Rubicon 1 v.
Sir Walter Besant, f 1901.
The Revolt of Man j v. — Dorothy

Forster 2 v. — Children of Gibeon 2 v. —
The World went very well then 2 v. —
Katharine Regina i v. — Herr Paulus 2 v.
— The Inner House i v. — The Bell of
St. Paul's 2 v. — For Faith and Freedom
2 V. — Armorel of Lyonesse 2 v. — Ver
bena Camellia Stephanotis, etc. i v. —
Beyond the Dreams of Avarice 2 v. —
The Master Craftsman 2 v. — A Fountain
Sealed i v. — The Orange Girl 2 v. —
The Fourth Generation 1 v. — The Lady
of Lynn 2 v.
Sir Walter Besant, -j- 1901,
& James Rice, f 1882.
The Golden Butterfly 2 v. — Ready-
Money Mortiboy 2 v. — By Celia's Arbour
2 V. M. Betham- Edwards.
The Sylvestres i v. — Felicia 2 v. —
Brother Gabriel 2 v. — Forestalled i v. —
Exchange no Robbery, and other No
velettes IV. — Disarmed it. — Doctor
Jacob IT. — Pearla it. — Next of ICin
Wanted 1 v. — The Parting of the Ways
IV. — For One and the 'World i v. —
The Romance of a French Parsonage
IV. — France of To-day i v. — Two Aunts
and a Nephew i v. — A Dream of Mil
lions IV. — Tbe Curb of Honour it. —
France of To-day {Second Series) 1 v. — A
Romance of Dijon it. — The Dream-
Charlotte IV. — A Storm-Rent Sky IT. —
Reminiscences i v. — • The Lord of the
Harvest i v. — Anglo-French Reminis
cences, 1875— 1899 I v. — A Suffolk Court
ship I T.
Ambrose Bierce (Am.).
In the Midst of Life i t.
Mabel C. Birchenough.
Potsherds i v.
E. Bisland, v, Rhoda Broughton.
Prince Bismarck, vide Butler*
Vide also Wilhelm Gorlach (Col
lection of German Authors, p. 29).
William Black, f 1898.
A Daughter of Heth 2 v. — In Silk At
tire 2 V. — The Strange Adventures of a
Phaeton 2 v. — A Princess of Thule 2 v. —
Kilmeny i v. — The Maid of Killeena, and
other Stories i v. — Three Feathers 2 v. —
Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart, and other
Stories IV. — Madcap Violet 2 t. —
Green Pastures and Piccadilly 2 t. —
Macleod of Dare 2 v. — White Wings
2 V. — Sunrise 2 v. — The BeautifulWretclf

8

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

IV. — Mr. Pislstratus Brown, M.P. , in
the Highlands ; The Fotir Macnicols ; The
Pupil of Aurelius i v. — Shandon Bells
(with Portrait) 2 v. — Judith Shakespeare
2 V. — The Wise Women of Inverness,
etc. I V. — White Heather 2 v. — Sabina
Zembra 2 v. — The Strange Adventures
of a House-Boat 2 v. — In Far Lochaber
2 T. — The New Prince Fortunatus 2 v. —
Stand Fast, Craig- Royston ! 2 v. — Donald
Ross of Heimra 2 v. — The Magic Ink,
and other Tales i v. — Wolfenberg 2 v. —
The Handsome Humes 2 v. — Highland
Cousins 2 V. — Briseis 2 v. — Wild Eelin
2 V. Author of "The Black-Box
Murder."
The Black- Box Murder i v.
Richard Doddridge Blackmore,
f 1900.
Alice Lorraine 2 v. — Mary Anerley
3 V. — Christo well 2 v. — Tommy Upmore
2 V. — Perlycross 2 v.
" Blackwood."
Tales firom "Blackwood" (First Series)
IV. — Tales from "Blackwood" (Second
Series) 1 v.
Isa Blagden, j- 1 873.
The Woman I loved, and the Woman
who loved me ; A Tuscan Wedding i v.
Countess of Blessington (Mar
guerite Gardiner), -j- 1849.
Meredith i v. — Strathern 2 v. — Me
moirs of a Femme de Chambre i v. —
Marmaduke Herbert 2 v. — Country
Quarters (with Portrait) 2 v.
Baroness Bloomfield.
Reminiscences of Court and Diplo
matic Life (with the Portrait of Her
Majesty the Queen) 2 v.
Rolf Boldrewood.
Robbery under Arms 2 v. ^Nevermore
2 V.
Miss Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell).
Lady Audley's Secret 2 v. — Aurora
Floyd 2 V. — Eleanor's Victory 2 v. — John
Marchmont's Legacy 2 v. — Henry Dun
bar 2 V. — The Doctor's Wife 2 t. —
Only a Clod 2 v. — Sir Jasper's Tenant
2 V. — The Lady's Mile 2v. — Rupert God
win 2 V. — Dead-Sea Fruit 2 v. — Run to
Earth 2 v. — Fenton's Quest 2 v. — The
Lovels of Arden 2 v. — Strangers and
Pilgrims 2 v. — Lucius Davoren 3 V. —

Taken at the Flood 3 v. — Lost for Love
2 V. — AStrange World 2 v. — Hostages
to Fortune 2 v. — Dead Men's Shoes
2 v. — Joshua Haggard's Daughter 2 v. —
Weavers and Weft i v, — In Grreat Waters,
and other Tales i v. — An Open Verdict
3 V. — Vixen 3 V. — The Cloven Foot 3 v,
— The Story of Barbara 2 v. — Just as I
am 2 V. — Asphodel 3 V, — Mount Royal
2 V. — The Golden Calf 2 v. — Flower and
Weed IV. — Phantom Fortune 3 V. —
Under the Red Flag 1 v. — Ishmael 3 v.
— Wyllard's Weird 3 v,' — One Thing
NeedfiU 2 v. — Cut by the County i v. —
Like and Unlike 2 v. — The Fatal Three
2 V. — The Day will come 2 v. — One
Life, One Love 2 v. — Gerard 2 v. —
The Venetians 2 v. — All along the River
2 V. — Thou art the Man 2 v. — The Christ
mas Hirelings, etc. i v. — Sons of Fire
2 V. — London Pride 2 v. — Rough Justice
2 v. — In High Places 2 v. — His Darling
Sin I V. — The Infidel 2 v-
Lady Brassey, f 1887.
A Voyage in the "Sunbeam" 2 v. —
Sunshine and Storm in the East 2 v. — In
the Trades, tbe Tropics and the Roaring
Forties 2 v.
Author of "The Bread -Winners"
(Am.).
The Bread -Winners i v.
Bret Harte, vide Harte.
Rev. William Brock, t '^75*
Sir Henry Havelock, K. C. B. i v.
Charlotte Bronte, zizVfe Currer Bell.
Emily & Anne Bronte, vide
ElUs & Acton Bell.
Shirley Brooks, -j- 1874.
The Silver Cord 3 V. — Sooner or Later
Lady Broome, vide Lady Barker.
Rhoda Broughton.
Cometh up as a Flower i v. — Not
wisely, but too well 2 v  Red as a Rose
is She 2 V. — Tales for Christmas Eve
IV. — Nancy 2 v. — Joan 2 v. — Second
Thoughts 2 V. — BeUnda 2 v. — Doctor
Cupid 2 V. — Alas ! 2 v. — Mis. Bligh
I V. — A Beginner i v. — Scylla or
Charyhdis? i v  Dear Faustina i v. —
The Game and the Candle i v. — Foes in
Law I V,

Tauchnitz Edition, Complete List,

Rhoda Broughton & Elizabeth
Bisland.
A Widower Indeed i v.
John Brown, -j- 1882.
Rah and his Friends, and otherPapers xv.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
¦j- 1861.
A Selection from her Poetry (with
Portrait) I v. — Aurora Leigh i v.
Robert Browning, j 1 889.
Poetical Worts (with Portrait) 4 V.
Frank T. Bullen.
The Cruise ofthe "Cachalot" 2 v.
Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,
. t 1873.
Pelham (with Portrait) i v. — Eugene
Aram i v. — Paul Clifford i v. — Zanoni
IT. — The Last Days of Pompeii iv. —
The Disowned i v. — Ernest Maltravers
I T. — Alice 1 V. — Eva, and The Pilgrims
of the Rhine i v. — Devereux i v. —
Godolphin and Falkland it. — Rienzi
IT. — Night and Morning I V. — The Last
of the Barons 2 v. — Athens 2 v. — The
Poems and Ballads of Schiller i v. —
Lucretia 2 v. — Harold 2 v. — King Arthur
2v. — TheNewTimou, and St. Stephen's
IT. — The Caitons 2 V. — My Novel 4 V. —
What will he do with it? 4 v. — Dramatic
¦Works 2 V. — A Strange Story 2 v, —
Caxtoniana 2 V. — The Lost Tales ofMile-
tnsrv. — Miscellaneous ProseWorks 4V. —
Odes and Epodes of Horace 2 v. — Kenelm
ChiUingly 4 v. — The Coming Race i v. —
The Parisians 4 v. — Pausanias, the Spar
tan i v.
Henry Lytton Bulwer (Lord
Bailing), f 1872.
Historical Characters 2 v. — The Life of
Viscount Palmerston 3 v.
John Bunyan, f 1688.
The Pilgrim's Progress i v.
Author of "Buried Alone"
(Charles Wood).
Buried Alone 1 v.
Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
(Am.).
Ihroi^h one Administration 2 v. —
Idtde Lord Fauntleroy i v. — Sara Crewe,
and Editha's Burglar i v. — The Pretty
Sister of Jose i v. — A Lady of Quality
2 V. — His Grace of Osmonde 2 v.

Miss Bumey (Madame D^Arblay),
f 1840.
Evelina i v.
Robert Bums, \ 1796.
Poetical Works (with Portrait) i v.
Richard F. Burton, + 1890.
APilgrimageto Mecca and Medina 3 v.
Baroness de Bury, vide "All for
Greed."
A. J. Buder.
Bismarck. His Reflections and Re
miniscences. Translated from the great
German edition, under the supervision of
A. J. Butler. With two Portraits. 3 v.
Mrs. B. H. Buxton, j 1881.
Jennie of "The Prince's," 2 v. —
Won ! 2 V. — Great Grenfell Gardens
2 V. — Nell — on and off the Stage 2 v. —
From the Wings 2 v.
Lord Bjrron, | 1824..
Poetical Works (™th Portrait) 5 v.
Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, (Iota).
A Yellow Aster i v. — Children of
Circumstance 2 v. — Anne Mauleverer
2 v. Hall Caine.
The Bondman 2 v. — The Manxman
2 V. — The Christian 2 v.
Vemey Lovett Cameron.
Across Africa 2 v.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, vide Praed.
Rosa Nouchette Carey.
Not Like other Girls 2 v. — " But Men
must Work" i v. — Sir Godfrey's Grand
daughters 2 V. — The Old, Old Story 2 v.
Thomas Carlyle, -j- 1881.
The French Revolution 3 v. — Fre
derick the Great 13 v. — Ohver Crom
well's Letters and Speeches 4 V, — The
Life of Schiller i v.
Alaric Carr.
Treherne's Temptation 2 v.
Egerton Castle.
Consequences 2 v. — *'La Bella," and
Others i v.
Mrs. Elizabeth Rundle Charles,
f 1896, 7Jz'rf<f Author of "Chronicles
of the Schonberg-Cotta Family."

10

Tauchnitz Edition. Cotnplete List.

Maria Louisa Charlesworth,
t 1880.
Oliver of the Mill i v.
Mary Cholmondeley.
Diana Tempest 2 v. — Red Pottage 2 v.
Princess Christian, vide Alice,
Grand Duchess of Hesse.
Author of "Chronicles of the
SchSnberg-Cotta Family" (Mrs.
E. Rundle Charles), f 1896.
Chronicles of the Schonberg - Cotta
Family 2 v, — The Draytons and the
Davenants 2 v. — On Both Sides of
the Sea 2 v. — Winifred Bertram i v. —
Diary of Mrs. Kitty Trevylyan i v. —
The Victory of the Vanquished i v. —
The Cottage by the Cathedral and other
Parables i v. — Against the Stream 2 v.
— The Bertram Family 2 v. — Conquer
ing and to Conquer i v. — Lapsed, but not
Lost I V. Alfred Clark.
The Finding of Lot's Wife i v.
Samuel L. Clemens, vide Twain.
Mrs. W. K. Clifford.
Love-Letters of a Worldly Woman i v.
— AuntAnneav. — ^TheLastTouches, and
other Stories i v. — Mrs. Keith's Crime
I V. — A Wild Proxy i v. — A Flash of
Summer i v.
Mrs. Caroline Clive, f 1873, vide
Author of " Paul Ferroll."
Frances Power Cobbe.
Re-Echoes x t.
C. R. Coleridge.
An English Squire 2 t.
M. E. Coleridge.
The King with two Faces 2 t.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, •\ 1834.
Poems I V.
Charles AUston Collins, -f 1873.
A Cruise upon Wheels 2 t.
Mortimer Collins, ¦(¦ 1876.
Sweet and Twenty 2 v. — A Fight with
Fortune 2 t.
Wilkie Collins, f I889.
After Dark i v. — Hide and Seek 2 v. —
A Plot in Private Life, etc. i v. — The
Woman in White 2 v. — Basil i v. — No
Name 3 V. — The Dead Secret, and other

Tales 2 V. — Antonina 2 v. — Armadale
3 V. — The Moonstone 2 v, — Man and
Wife 3 T. — Poor Miss Finch 2 v. — Miss
or Mrs.? i v. — The New Magdalen 2 v. —
The Frozen Deep i v, — The Law and the
Lady 2 T. — The Two Destinies i v. — My
Lady's Money, and Percy and the Prophet
I V. — The Haunted Hotel x v. — The
Fallen Leaves 2 v. — Jezebel's Daughter
2 v. — The Black Robe 2 v. — Heart and
Science 2 v. — "I say No," 2 v. — The Evil
Genius 2 V. — The Guilty River, and The
Ghost's Touch i v. — The Legacy of Cain
2 v. — Blind Love 2 v.
Author of "Cometh up as a
Flower," vide Rhoda Broughton.
Joseph Conrad.
An Outcast of the Islands 2 t. — Tales
of Unrest i v.
Hugh Conway (F.J.Fargus),f 1885.
Called Back i v. — Bound Together
2 V. — Dark Days i v. — A Family Affair
2 V. — Living or Dead 2 v.
James Fenimore Cooper (Am.),
t 1851.
The Spy (with Portrait) i v. — The Two
Admirals xv, — The Jack O'Lantern iv.
Mrs. Cooper, vide Katharine
Saunders.
Marie Corelli.
Vendettal 2 v. — Thelma 2 v. — A
Romance of Two Worlds 2 v. — " Ardath "
3 V. — Wormwood. A Drama of Paris
2 V. — The Hired Baby, with other Stories
and Social Sketches i v. — Barabbas ; A
Dream of the World's Tragedy. 2 v. —
The Sorrows of Satan 2 v. — The Mighty
Atom IV. — The Murder of Delicia i v. —
Ziska IV. — Boy. A Sketch. 2 v. — The
Master-Christian 2 v.
Author of "The County."
The County i v.
George Lillie Craik, -j- 1866.
A Manual of English Literature and of
the History of the English Language 2 v.
Mrs. Craik (Miss Dinah M. Mulock),
t 1887.
John Halifax, Gentleman 2 v. — The
Head of the Family 2 v. — A Life for a
Life 2 V. — A Woman's Thoughts about
Women I v. — Agatha's Husband i v.—
Romantic Tales i v. — Domestic Stories
IV. — Mistress and Maid it, — Tho
Ogilvies IV. — Lord Erlistoun i v. —

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Christian's Mistake it. — Bread upon
the Waters i v. — A Noble Life i v. —
Olive 2 V. — Two Marriages it. — Studies
from Life i v. — Poems it. — The
"Woman's Kingdom 2 v. — The Unkind
Word, and other Stories 2 v. — A Brave
Lady 2 v. — Hannah 2 v. — Fair France
IV.— My Mother and I i v.— The Little
Lame Prince it. — Sermons out of Church
1 v.— The Laurel-Bush ; Two little Tinkers
IT. — A Legacy 2 v. — YoungMrs. Jardine
2v, — His Littie Mother, and other Tales
and Sketches i v. — Plain Speaking 1 v. —
Miss Tommy it. — King Arthiu: i v*
Georgiana M. Craik (Mrs. May).
Lost and Won it. — Faith Unwin's
Ordeal it. — Leslie Tyrrell i t. — Wini
fred's Wooing, etc. i v. — Mildred 1 v. —
Esther Hill's Secret 2 v. — Hero Tre-
velyan i v. — Without Kith or Kin 2 v. —
Only a Butterfly it. — SylTia's Choice ;
Theresa 2 t. — Anne Warwick it. —
Dorcas 2 t. —Two Women 2 t.
Georgiana M. Craik & M. C
Stirling.
Two Tales of Married Life (Hard to
Bear, by Miss Craik : A True Man, by M.
C, Stirling) 2 t.
Mrs. Augustus Craven, vide Lady
FuUerton.
F. Marion Crawford (Am.).
Mr. Isaacs i v. — Doctor Qaudius i v. —
To Leeward i v. — A Roman Singer
1 V. — An American Politician 1 v. —
Zoroaster i v. —A Tale of a Lonely Parish
2 v. — Saracinesca 2 v. — Marzio's Crucifix
I v.— PaulPatoff 2 T.— With thelmmortals
IV. — Greifenstein 2 v. — Sant' Eario
2 V. — A Cigarette - Maker's Romance
IV. — Khaled i v.— The Witch of Prague
2 V. — The Three Fates 2 v. — Don Orsino
2 y. — The Children of the King i v. —
Pietro Ghisleri 2 v. — Marion Darche i v.
— Katharine Lauderdale 2 v. — The Ral-
stons 2 V. — Casa Braccio 2 v. — Adam
Johnstone's Son it. — Taquisara 2 t. —
A Rose of Yesterday it. — Corleone
2 V. —Via Crucis 2 v. — In the Palace of
the King 2 v. S. R, Crockett
The Raiders 2 t. — Cleg Kelly 2 v. —
The Grey Man 2 v.
J. W. Cross, vide George Eliot*s
Life.

Mrs. Pender Cudlip, vide
A. Thomas.
Miss Cummins (Am.), | 1866.
The Lamplighter i v. — MabelVaughan
I V. — El Fureidis it. — HauntedHearts iv.
Paul Cushing.
The Blacksmith of Voe 2 t,
"Daily News."
War Correspondence, 1877, by Archi
bald Forbes and others 3 t.
Author of "Dark."
Dark I T.
Richard Harding Davis (Am.).
Gallegher, etc. i v. — Van Bibber and
Others i v.
Daniel De Foe, -f 1731.
Robinson Crusoe i v.
Margaret Deland (Am.).
John Ward, Preacher i v.
Author of "Democracy" (Am.).
Democracy i v.
Author of " Demos," vide George
Gissing.
Author of "Diary and Notes," vide
Author of "Horace Templeton."
Charles Dickens, | 1870.
The Pickwick Club (with Portrait)*2 v. —
American Notes i v. — Oliver Twist i v. —
Nicholas Nickleby 2 v. — Sketches i v. —
Martin Chuzzlewit 2 v, — A Christmas
Carol ; Tho Chimes; The Cricket on the
Hearth i v. — Master Humphrey's Clock
(OldCuriosityShop; BamabyRudge,etc.)
3 V. — Pictures from Italy it. — Dombey
and Son 3 V. — David Copperfield 3 v. —
Bleak House 4 V. — A Child's History of
England (2 t. S^M. 2,70.) — Hard Times
IT. — Little Dorrit (with Illustrations) 4 t.
— The Battle of Life ; The Haunted Man
IV. — A Tale of two Cities 2 v, — Hunted
Down J The Uncommercial Traveller i v.
— Great Expectations 2 v. — Christmas
Stories, etc. i v. — Our Mutual Friend
(with Illustrations) 4 V. — Somebody's
Luggage; Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings; Mrs.
Lirriper's Legacy i v. — Doctor Mari
gold's Prescriptions; Mugby Junction it.
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood (with
Illustrations) 2 t. — The Mudfog Papers,
IV. — The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed.
byhis Sister-in-law and his eldestDaughter
4 v. — Vide also Household Words, Novels
and Tales, and John Forster.

12

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Charles Dickens & Wilkie Collins.
No Thoroughfare; The Late Miss Hol-
lingford i v.
Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Beacons-
field, f 1881.
Coningsby i v. — Sybil i v. — Contarini
Fleming (with Portrait) i v. — Alroy iv. —
Tancred 2 v. — Venetia 2 v. — Vivian
Grey 2 v. — Henrietta Temple it.- —
Lothair 2 t. — Endymion 2 v.
Ella Hepworth Dixon.
The Story of a Modern Woman i v.
W. Hepworth Dixon, f 1879.
iPersonal History of Lord Bacon i v. —
The Holy Land 2 v. — New America 2 v. —
Spiritual Wives 2 v. — Her Majesty's
Tower 4 V. — Free Russia 2 v. — History
of two Queens 6 v. — White Conquest
2 V. — Diana, Lady Lyle 2v.
L. Dougall (Am.).
Beggars All 2 v.
Menie Muriel Dowie.
A Girl in the Karpathians i v.
A. Conan Doyle.
The Sign of Four i v. — Micah Clarke
2 V. — The Captain of the Pole-Star, and
other Tales i v. — The White Corapany
2 v. — A Study in Scarlet i v. — The
Great Shadow, and Beyond the City it. —
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 2 v.
— The Refugees 2 v. ~ The Firm of
Girdlestone 2 v. — The Memoirs of Sher
lock Holmes 2 v. ^ Round the Red Lamp
1 V. — The Stark Munro Letters i v. —
The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard i v. —
Rodney Stone 2 v. — Uncle Bernac i v. —
The Tragedy of the Korosko i v. — A
Duet IV. — The Green Flag i v. — The
Great Boer War 2 v.
Professor Henry Drummond,
ti897.
The Greatest Thing in the Worid; Pax
Vobiscum ; The Changed Life i v.
Dunton, vide Th. Watts-Dunton.
The Earl and the Doctor.
South Sea Bubbles i v.
The Earl of Dufferin.
Letters frora High Latitudes i v.
Edward B. Eastwick, f 1883.
Autobiography of LutfuUah i v.
Maria Edgeworth, vide Series for
the Young, p. 29. I

Mrs. Annie Edwardes.
Archie Lovell 2 v, — SteTen Lawrence,
Yeoman 2 v. — Ought we to visit her? 2 v.
— A Vagabond Heroine i v. — Leah : A
Woman of Fashion 2 v. — A Blue-Stock
ing I T. — Jet : Her Face or Her Fortune?
IV. — Vivian the Beauty i v. — A Ball
room Repentance 2 v. — A Girton Girl
2 V. — A Playwright's Daughter, and
Bertie Griffiths i v. — Pearl- Powder i v.
The Adventuress i v,
Amelia B. Edwards, f 1892.
Barbara's History 2 v, — Miss Carew
2 V. — Hand and Glove i v. — Half a Mil
lion of Money 2 v. — Debenham's Vow
2 V. — In the Days of my Youth 2 v. —
Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Val
leys IV. — Monsieur Maurice i v. — A
Night on the Borders of the Black Forest
IV. — A Poetry-Book of Elder Poets
IV. — A Thousand Miles up the Nile 2 v.
— A Poetry-Book of Modern Poets i v. —
Lord Brackenbury 2 v.
M. Betham-Edwards, v. Betham.
Edward Eggleston (Am.).
The Faith Doctor 2 v.
Barbara Eibon (Am.).
Bethesda 2 v.
George Eliot (Miss Evans — Mrs.
Cross), -j- 1880.
Scenes of Clerical Life 2 v. — Adam
Bede 2 v. — The Mill on the Floss 2 v. —
Silas Marner i v, — Romola 2 v. — Felix
Holt 2 V. — Daniel Deronda 4 V. — The
Lifted Veil , and Brother Jacob i v. —
Impressions of Theophrastus Such i v. —
Essays and Leaves from a Note-Book
IV. — George Eliot's Life, edited by her
Husband, J. W. Cross 4 v.
Author of "Elizabeth and her
German Garden."
Elizabeth and her German Garden i t.
— The Solitary Summer i v.
Mrs. Frances Elliot, f 1898.
Diary of an Idle Woman in Italy 2 v. —
Old Court Life in France 2 v. — The
Italians 2 v. — The Diary of an Idle
Woman in Sicily i v. — Pictures of Old
Rome IV. — The Diary of an Idle Woman in
Spain 2 V. — The Red Cardinal i v. —
The Story of Sophia i v. — Diary of an
Idle Woman in Constantinople i v. —
Old Court Life in Spain 2 v. — Roman
Gossip I V.

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

13

Author of "An Englishwoman's
Love-Letters."
An Englishwoman's Love-Letters i v.
Henry Erroll.
An Ugly Duckling i v.
£. Rentoul Esler.
The Way they loved at Grimpat i v.
The Authors of " Essays and
Reviews."
Essays and Reviews. By various Authors
IV. Author of "Estelle RusseU."
Estelle Russell 2 v.
Elsa D'Esterre-Keehng.
Three Sisters i v. — A Laughing Philo
sopher IV. — The Professor's Wooing i v.
— In Thoughtlaud and ia Dreamland
IV. — Orchardscroft i v. — Appassionata
IV. — Old Maids and Young 2 v. — The
Queen's Serf i v.
Author of "Euthanasia."
Euthanasia i v.
Juliana Horatia Ewing, -J- 1885.
Jackanapes ; The Story of a Short Life ;
Daddy Darwin's Dovecot i v. — A Flat
Iron for a Farthing i v. — The Brownies,
and other Tales i v.
Author of " Expiated."
E^iated 2 v.
F.J. Fargus, vide Hugh Conway.
F. W. pean) Farrar.
Darkness and Dawn 3 v.
Authors of " The Fate of Fenella."
The Fate of Fenella, by 24 Authors i v.
Percy Fendall, vide F. C. Philips.
George Manville Fenn.
The Parson o' Dumford 2 v. — The
Clerk of Portwick 2 v.
Henry Fielding, f 1754.
Tom Jones 2 v.
Five Centuries
of the English Language and Literature :
John Wycliffe. — Geoffrey Chaucer. —
Stephen Hawes. — Sir Thomas More. —
Edmund Spenser. — Ben Jonson. — John
Locke. — Thomas Gray (vol.500, published
i860) 1 V.
George Fleming (Am.).
Kismet IV. — Andromeda 2 t.

Archibald Forbes, f 1900.
My Experiences of the War between
France and Germany 2 v. — Soldiering
and Scribbling i v. — Memories and
Studies of War andPeace 2 v. — Vide also
'* Daily News," War Correspondence.
R. E. Forrest
Eight Days 2 v.
Mrs. Forrester.
Viva 2 V. — Rbona 2 v. — Roy and Viola
2 V. — My Lord and My Lady 2 v. — I
have Lived andLoved 2 v. — June 2 v. —
Omnia Vanitas i v. — Although he was a
Lord, and other Tales i v. — Corisande,
and other Tales i v. — Once Again 2 v. —
Of the World, Woridly i v. — Dearest
2 V, — The Light of other Days i v. —
Too Late Repented i v.
John Forster, f 1876,
The Life of Charles Dickens (with
Illustrations and Portraits) 6 v. — Life and
Times of Oliver Goldsmith 2 v.
Jessie Fothergill.
The First Violin 2 v. — Probation 2 v. —
Made or Marred, and " One of Three"
IV. — Kith and Kin 2 v. — Peril 2 v. —
Borderland 2 v.
Author of "Found Dead," vide
James Payn.
Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler.
A Double Thread 2 v. — The Farring-
dons 2 V. Carohne Fox, f 187 1.
Memories of Old Friends from her
Journals and Letters, edited by Horace
N. Pym. 2 V.
Author of "Frank Fairiegh" (F. E.
Smedley), f 1864.
Frank Fairiegh 2 v.
M. E. Francis.
The Duenna of a Genius 1 v.
Harold Frederic (Am.), f 1898.
Illumination 2 v. — March Hares i v.
Edward A. Freeman, -|- 1892.
The Growth ofthe English Constitution
IT. — Select Historical Essays i v. —
Sketches frora French Travel i v.
James Anthony Froude, + 1894.
Oceana i v. — The Spanish Story of
the Armada, and other Essays i v.

14

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Lady Georgiana FuUerton, -j- 1885.
Ellen Middleton IV. — Grantley Manor
2 V. — Lady Bird 2 v. — Too Strange not
to be True 2 v. — Constance Sherwood
2 V. — A Stormy Life 2 v. — Mrs. Geralds'
Niece 2 v. — TheNotary's Daughter i v. —
The Lilies ofthe Valley, and The House of
Penarvan i v. — TheCountess de Bonneval
IV. — Rose Leblanc i v. — Seven Stories
I V. — The Life of Luisa de Carvajal i v.
— A Will and a Way, and The Hand
kerchief at the Window 2 v. — Eliane
2 V. (by Mrs. Augustus Craven, translated
by Lady FuUerton). — Laurentia i v.
Marguerite Gardiner, vide Lady
Blessington.
Mrs. Gaskell, | 1865.
Mary Barton it. — Ruth 2 t. — North
and South it. — Lizzie Leigh, and other
Tales IT.— The Life of Charlotte Bronte
2 V. — Lois the Witch, etc. i v. — Sylvia's
Lovers 2 v. — A Dark Night's Work
IV. — Wives and Daughters 3 V. — Cran-
ford IV. — Cousin Phillis, and other Tales
I V.
Author of "Geraldine Hawthorne,"
vide Author of " Miss Molly."
Dorothea Gerard (Madame de
Longard).
Lady Baby 2 v. — Recha i v, — Ortho
dox t V. — TheWrong Man i v, — A Spot
less Reputation i v. — A Forgotten Sin i v.
— One Year i v. — The Supreme Crime i v.
E. Gerard (Emily de i:aszowslca).
A Secret Mission i v. — A Foreigner 2 v.
— The Extermination of Love 2 v.
Agnes Giberne.
The Curate's Home i v.
George Gissing.
Demos. A Story of English Socialism
2 V. — New Grub Street 2 v.
Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone,
t 1898.
Rome and the Newest Fashions in
Religion i v. — Bidgarian Horrors, and
Russia in Turkistan, with other Tracts
IV. — The Hellenic Factor in the Eastern
Problem, with other Tracts i v.
Elinor Glyn.
The Visits of Elizabeth i v.
Hal Godfrey (Charlotte O'Conor-
Eccles).
Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore i v. |

Ohver Goldsmith, f 1774.
Select Works (with Portrait) i v.
Edward J. Goodman.
Too Curious X V,
Julien Gordon (Am.).
A Diplomat's Diary i v.
Major-Gen. C.G. Gordon, f 1885.
His Journals at Kartoum. Introduction
and Notes by A. E. Hake (with eighteen
Illustrations) 2 v.
Mrs. Gore, f 1861,
Castles in the Air i v. — The Dean's
Daughter 2 v. — Progress and Prejudice
2 V. — Mammon 2 v. — A Life's Lessons
2 V. — The Two Aristocracies 2 v. — Heck-
ington 2 V. Sarah Grand.
Our Manifold Nature it. — Babs the
Impossible 2 v. Miss Grant.
Victor Lescar 2 v. — The Sun-Maid
2 V. — My Heart's in the Highlands 2 v.
— Artiste 2 V. — Prince Hugo 2 v. — Cara
Roma 2 V. Maxwell Gray.
The Silence of Dean Maitland 2 v. —
The Reproach of Annesley 2 v.
E. C. GrenviUe : Murray (Trois-
Etoiles), t 1 88 1.
The Member for Paris 2 v. — Young
Erown 2 v. — The Boudoir Cabal 3 V. —
French Pictures in English Chalk (First
Series) 2 v. — The Russians of To-day
IV. — French Pictures in English Chalk
(Second Series) 2 v. — Strange Tales
I V. — That Artfiil Vicar 2 v. — Six Months
in the Ranks i v. — People I have met i v.
Ethel St Clair Grimwood.
My Three Years in Manipur (with
Portrait) 1 v.
W. A. Baillie Grohman.
Tyrol and the Tyrolese i v.
Archibald Clavering Gunter (Am.).
Mr. Barnes of New York i v.
F. Anstey Guthrie, vide Anstey.
Author of "Guy Livingstone"
(George Alfred Laurence), f 1876.
Guy Livingstone i v. — Sword and
Gown IV. — Barren Honour i v, —
Border and Bastillei v. — Maurice Dering
I V. — Sans Merci 2 v. — Breaking a
Butterfly 2 v. — Anteros 2 v. — Ha-
garene 2 v.

Tauchnitz Edition. Coinplete List.

15

John Habberton (Am.).
Helen's Babies & Other People's Chil
dren IV. — The Bowshara Puzzle i v. —
One Tramp; Mrs, Maybum's Twins it.
H. Rider Haggard.
KingSolomon'sMines i v. — She 2 v. —
Jess 2 V. — Allan Quatermain 2 v. — The
Witch's Head 2 v. — Maiwa's ReTenge
it. — Mr. Meeson's WiU i v, — Colonel
Quaritch, V, C. 2 v. — Cleopatra 2 v. —
Allan's Wife i v. — Beatrice 2 v. — Dawn
2 V. — Montezuma's Daughter 2 v. — The
People of the Mist 2 v. — Joan Haste 2 v. —
Heart of the World 2 v. — The Wizard
IV. — Doctor Theme i v. — Swallow
2 T. — Black Heart and White Heart,
and Elissa it. — Lysbeth 2 v.
H.Rider Haggard & AndrewLang.
The World's Desire 2 t.
A. E. Hake, vide Gen. Gordon.
Mrs. S. C Hall, f 1881.
Can Wrong be Right? i v. — Marian
2 T.
Philip Gilbert Hamerton, f 1894.
Marmome i t. — French and English 2t.
Miss Iza Hardy, vide Author of
"Not Easily Jealous."
Thomas Hardy.
The Hand of Etheiberta 2 v. — Far
from the Madding Crowd 2 v. — The Re
turn of the Native 2 v. — The Trumpet-
Major 2 V. — ^ A Laodicean 2 v. — Two on
a Tower 2 v. — A Pair of Blue Eyes 2 v.
— A Group of Noble Dames i v. — Tess
of the D'Urbervilles 2v. — Life's Littie
Ironies i v. — Jude the Obscure 2 v.
Beatrice Harraden.
Ships that pass in the Night i v. —
In Varying Moods 1 v. — Hilda Strafford,
and The Remittance Man i v. — The
Fowler 2 v. Agnes Harrison.
Martin's Vineyard i v.
Bret Harte (Am.).
Prose and Poetry (Tales of the Argo
nauts: — The Luci df Roaring Camp;
The Outcasts of Poker Flat, etc. —
Spanish and American Legends; Con
densed Novels; Civic and Character
Sketches ; Poems) 2 v. — Idyls of , the
Foothills IV. — Gabriel Conroy 2 v. —
Two Men of Sandy Bar i v. — Thankful

Blossom, and other Tales i v. — The
Story of a Mine i v. — Drift from Two
Shores i v. — An Heiress of Red Dog,
and other Sketches i v. — The Twins oi
Table Mountain, and other Tales i v. —
Jeff Briggs's Love Story, and other Tales
IV. — Flip, and other Stories i v. — On
the Frontier i v. — By Shore and Sedge
IV. — Maruja i v. — Snow-bound at
Eagle's, and Devil's Ford i v. — The
Crusade of the "Excelsior" i v. ^ A
Millionaire of Rough -and -Ready, aiid
other Tales i v. — Captain Jim's Friend,
and the Argonauts of North Liberty i v.
— Cressy I v. — The Heritage of Dedlow
Marsh, and other Tales i v. — A Waif of
the Plains i v. — A Ward of the Golden
Gate IV. — A Sappho of Green Springs,
and other Tales i v. — A First Family of
Tasajara i v. — Colonel Starbottle's Client,
and some other People i v. — Susy i v. —
Sally Dows, etc. i v, — A Protegee of
Jack Hamlin's, etc. i v. — The Bell-
Ringer of Angel's, etc. i v. — Clarence
I v. — In a Hollow of the Hills, and The
Devotion of Enriquez IV. — TheAncestors
ofPeter Atherly, etc. iv. — Three Partners
IV. — Tales of Trail and Town i v. —
Stories in Light and Shadow i v. — Mr.
JackHamlin'sMediation, and otherSto ries
IV. — From Sand-Hill to Pine i v. —
Under the Redwoods i v.
Sir Henry Havelock, z/ziii? Rev.W.
Brock.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (Am,),
f 1864.
The Scarlet Letter i v. — Transforma
tion (The Marble Faun) 2 v. — Passages
from tbe English Note-Books of Nathaniel
Hawthorne 2 v.
Mrs. Hector, vide Mrs. Alexander.
Author of "The Heir of Red-
clyfFe," vide Charlotte M. Yonge.
Sir Arthur Helps, f 1875.
Friends in Council 2 v. — Ivan de Biron
2 V. Mrs. Felicia Hemans, \ 1835.
Select Poetical Works i v.
Maurice Hewlett.
The Forest Lovers i v. — Little Novels
of Italy IV. — The Life and Death of
Richard Yea-and-Nay 2 v.
Robert Hichens.
Flames 2 v. — The Slave 2 v.

i6

Tauchnitz Editioii. Complete List.

Admiral Hobart Pasha, f 1886.
Sketches from my Life x v.
John OUver Hobbes.
The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord
Wickenham 1 v. — The Serious Wooing
I V. Mrs. Cashel Hoey.
A Golden Sorrow 2 v. — Out of Court
2 V. Annie E. Holdsworth.
The Years that the Locust hath Eaten
IV. — The Gods Arrive i v. — The Val
ley of the Great Shadow i v.
Holme Lee, vide Harriet Parr.
OUver Wendell Holmes (Am.),
t 1894-
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table
IV. — The Professor at the Breakfast-
Table IV. — The Poet at the Breakfast-
Table IV. — Over tho Teacups i v.
Anthony Hope (Hawldns).
Mr. Witt's Widow i v. — A Change
of Air IV. — Half a Hero i v. — The In
discretion of the Duchess i v. — The God
in the Car i v. — The Chronicles of Count
Antonio i v. — Comedies of Courtship
IV. — The Heart of Princess Osra i v. —
Phroso 2 V. — Simon Dale 2 v. — Rupert
of Hentzau i v. — The King's Mirror
.2 v. — Quisante i v. — Tristram of Blent 2 v.
Tighe Hopkins.
An Idler in Old France i v. — The
Man in the Iron Mask i v.
Author of "Horace Templeton."
Diary and Notes i v.
Ernest William Hornung.
A Bride from the Bush i v. — Under
Two Skies i v. — Tiny Luttrell i v. —
The Boss of Taroomba it. — My Lord
Duke IV. — Young Blood i v. — Some
Persons Unknown i v. — The Amateur
Cracksman i v. — The Rogue'sMarch i v.
— The Belle of Toorak i v. — Peccavi 1 v.
" Household Words."
Conductedby Charles Dickens. 1851-56.
36 V. — NovtLs and Talus reprinted from
Household Words by Charles Dickens.
1856-59. II V.
Mrs. Houstoun, vide "Recom
mended to Mercy."

Author of "How to be Happy
though Married."
How to be Happy though Married i v.
Blanche Willis Howard (Am.),
t 1899.
One Summer i v. — Aunt Serena i v. —
Guenn 2 v. —Tony, the Maid, etc. i Vf —
The Open Door 2 v.
Blanche Willis Howard, \ 1899,
& WilUam Sharp.
A Fellowe and His Wife i v.
William Dean Howells (Am.).
A Foregone Conclusion i v. — The
Lady of the Aroostook i v. — A Modern
Instance 2 v. — The Undiscovered Country
IV. — Venetian Life (with Portrait) i v.
— Italian Journeys i v. — A Chance Ac
quaintance IV. — Their Wedding Journey
IV. — A Fearful Responsibility, and
Tonelli's Marriage i v. — A Woman's
Reason 2 v. — Dr. Breen's Practice i v. —
The Rise of Silas Lapham 2 v.
Thomas Hughes, \ 1898.
Tom Brown's School-Days i v.
Mrs. Hungerford (Mrs. Argles),
t 1897.
Molly Bawn 2 v. — Mrs. Geoffrey 2 v.
— Faith and Unfaith 2 v. — Portia 2 v. —
Loys , Lord Berresford, and other Tales
IV, — Her First Appearance, and other
Tales IV. — Phyllis 2 v. — Rossmoyne
2 V. — Doris 2 V. — A Maiden all Forlorn,
etc. IV. — A Passive Crime, and other
Stories IV. — Green Pleasure and Grey
Grief 2 V. — A Mental Struggle 2 v. —
Her Week's Amusement , and Ugly
Barrington i v, — Lady Branksmere 2 v.
— Lady Valworth's Diamonds i v. — A
Modern Circe 2 v. — r Marvel 2 v. - — The
Hon. Mrs. Vereker i v. — Under-Cur-
rents 2 v. — In Durance Vile, etc. iv. — A
Troublesome Girl, and other Stories i v. —
A Life's Remorse 2 v. — A Bom Coquette
2 V. — The Duchess i v. — Lady Verner's
Flight IV. — A Conquering Heroine,
and "When in Doubt" i v. — Nora
Creina 2 v. — A Mad Prank, and other
Stories i v. — The Hoyden 2 v. — The
Red House Mystery i v. — An Unsatis
factory Lover i v. — Peter's Wife 2 v. —
The Three Graces 1 v. — A Tug of War
I v. — The Professor's Experiment 2 v. —
A Point of Conscience 2 v. — A Lonely
Girl I v. — Lovice i v. — The Coming of
Chloe I V.

Tatichnitz Edition, Complete List.

17

Mis. Hunt, vide Averil
Beaumont
Violet Hunt
The Human Interest i v.
Jean Ingelow, f 1897.
Ofi the Skelligs 3 v. — Poems 2 v. —
Fated to be Free 2 v. — Sarah de
Berenger 2 v. — Don John 2 v.
The Hon. L.ady Inglis.
The Siege of Lucknow i v.
John H. Ingram, vide E. A. Poe.
Iota, vide Mrs. Mannington
Caflyn.
Washington Irving (Am.), ¦]- 1859.
The Sketch Book (with Portrait) i v. —
The Life of Mahomet i v. — Lives of the
Successors of Mahomet I v. — Oliver Gold
smith IV. — Chronicles ofWolfert's Roost
IV. — Life of George Washington 5 v.
Mrs. Helen Jackson (H. H.)
(Am.), t 1885.
Ramona 2 v.
W. W. Jacobs.
Many Cargoes i v. — The Skipper's
Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant
IV. — Sea Urchins i v. — A Master of
Craft I V.
Charles T. C. James.
Holy Wedlock i v.
G. P. R. James, f i860.
Morley Emstein {with Portrait) i v. —
Forest Days i v. — The False Heir i v. —
Arabella Stuart i v. — Rose d'Albret
IV. — Arrah Neil i v. — Agincourt i v. —
The Smuggler i v. — The Step-Mother
2 V. — Beauchamp i v, — Heidelberg
IV. — The Gripsy i v. — The Castle of
Ehrenstein i v. — Damley i v. — Russell
2 V. — The Convict 2 v. — Sir Theodore
Broughton 2 v.
Henry James (Am.).
The American 2 v. — The Europeans
I v. — Daisy Miller; An International
Episode; Four Meetings i v. — Roderick
Hudson 2 V. — The Madonna of the
Future, etc. i v. — Eugene Pickering,
etc. IV. — Confidence i v. — Washing
ton Square, etc. 2 v. — The Portrait of a
Lady 3 V, — Foreign Parts i v. — French
Poets and Novelists i v. — The Siege of
London; The Point of View; A Pas
sionate Pilgrim i v. — Portraits of Places
I v. — A Little Tour in France i v.

J. Cordy Jeaffreson.
A Book about Doctors 2 v. — A
Woman in spite of Herself 2 v, — The
Real Lord Bjron 3 v.
Mrs. Charles Jenkin, f 1885.
"Who Breaks — Pays" i v. — Skir
mishing IV. — Once and Again 2 v. —
Two French Marriages 2 v. — Within an
Ace IV. — Jupiter's Daughters i v.
Edward Jenkins.
Ginx's Baby, his Birth and other Mis
fortunes ; Lord Bantam 2 v.
Author of "Jennie of *The
Prince's,' " vide B. H. Buxton.
Jerome K. Jerome.
The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
I V. — Diary of a Pilgrimage, and Six
Essays IV. — Novel Notes i v. — Sketches
in Lavender, Blue and Green i v. —
The Second Thoughts of au Idle Fellow
IV. — Three Men on the Bumrael i v.
Douglas Jerrold, f 1857.
History of St. Giles and St. James
2 v. — Men of Character 2 v.
Author of "John Halifax, Gentle
man," vide Mrs. Craik.
Johnny Ludlow, vide Mrs.
Henry Wood.
Samuel Johnson, -j- 1784.
Lives ofthe English Poets 2 v.
Emily Jolly.
Colonel Dacre 2 v.
Author of "Joshua Davidson,"
vide Mrs. E. Lynn Linton.
Miss Julia Kavanagh, f 1877.
Nathalie 2 v. — Daisy Burns 2 v. —
Grace Lee 2 v. — Rachel Gray i v. —
Adele 3 V. — A Summer and Winter in
the Two Sicilies 2 v. — Seven Years, and
other ^ales 2 v. — French Women of
Letters i v. — Englishwomen of Letters
IV. — Queen Mab 2 v. — Beatrice 2 v. —
Sybil's Second Love 2 v. — Dora 2 v. —
Silvia 2 V. — Bessie 2 v. — John Dorrien
3 V. — Two Lilies 2 v. — Forget-me-nots
2 V. — Vide also Series for the Young,
p. 29. Annie Keary, ¦[¦ 1879.
Oldbury 2 v. — Castle Daly 2 v.

7'auchnitz Edition. Complete List.

D'Esterre- Keeling, vide Esterre.
Thomas a Kempls.
The Imitation of Christ. Translated
from the Latin by W. Benham, b.d. i v.
Richard B. Kimball (Am.), f
Saint Leger i v. — Romance of Student
Life Abroad i v. — Undercurrents i v. —
Was he Successful? iv. — To-Day in New
York I V.
Alexander William Kinglake,
t 1891.
Eothen i v. — The Invasion of tbe
Crimea 14 v.
Charles Kingsley, j- 1875.
Yeast I V. — Westward hoi 2 v. — Two
Years ago 2 v. — Hypatia 2 v. — Alton
Locke IV. — Hereward the Wake 2 v. —
At Last 2 V. — His Letters and Memories
of his Life, edited by his Wife 2 v.
Henry Kingsley, f 1876.
Ravenshoe 2 v. — Austin Elliot i v. —
Geoffry Hamlyn 2 v. — Tho Hillyars and
the Burtons 2 v. — Leighton Court i v. —
Valentin i v. — Oakshott Castle i v. —
Reginald Hetherege 2 v. — Tbe Grange
Garden 2 v. Albert Kinross.
An Opera and Lady Grasmere i v.
Rudyard Kipling.
Plain Tales from the Plills i v. — The
Second Jungle Book i v. — The Seven
Seas IV. — "Captains Courageous"
IV. — The Day's Work i v. — A Fleet
in Being i v. — Stalky & Co. i v. — From
Sea to Sea 2 v. — The City of Dreadful
Night I v. May Laffan.
Flitters, Tatters, and tho Counsellor,
etc. I V. Charles Lamb, •[• 1834.
The Essays of Elia and Eliana i v.
Mary Langdon (Am.).
Ida May i v.
Author of "The Last of the Cava
liers" (Miss Piddington).
The Last of the Cavaliers 2 v, — The
Gain of a Loss 2 v.
M ™e de Laszo wska, vide E.Gerard.
The Hon. Emily Lawless.
Hurrisfa I V.

George Alfred Laurence , vide
Author of " Guy Livingstone."
"Leaves from the Journal of
our Life in the Highlands," vide
Victoria R. I.
Holme Lee, -{- 1900, vide Harriet
Parr.
J. S. Le Fanu, f 1873.
Uncle Silas 2 v. — Guy Deverell 2 v.
Mark Lemon, f 1870.
Wait for tbe End 2 v. — Loved at Last
2 V. — Falkner Lyle 2 v. — Lejrton Hall,
and other Tales 2 v. — Golden Fetters
2 V. Charles Lever, j- 1872.
The O'Donogbue i v. — The Knight of
Gwynne 3 V. — Arthur O'Leary 2 v. —
Harry Lorrequer 2 v. — Charles O'Mal
ley 3 V. — Tom Burke of " Ours" 3v. —
Jack Hinton 2 v. — Tho Daltons 4 V.—
The Dodd Family Abroad 3 v. — The
Martins of Cro' Martin 3 V. — The For
tunes of Glencore 2 v. — Roland Cashel
3 V. — Davenport Dunn 3 V, — Confessions
of Con Cregan 2 v. — Ono of Them 2 v. —
Maurice Tiemay 2 v. — Sir Jasper Carew
2 V. — Barrington 2 v. — A Day's Ride
2 V. — Luttrell of Arran 2 v. — Tony Butler
2 V. — Sir Brook Fossbrooke 2 v. — The
Bramleighs of Bishop's Folly 2 v. — A
Rent in a Cloud i v. — That Boy of Nor-
cott's IV. — St. Patrick's Eve; Paul
Gosslett's Confessions i v. — Lord Kil-
gobbin 2 V. S. Levett -Yeats.
The Honour of Savelli i v. — The
Chevalier d'Auriac i t.
G. H. Lewes, f 1878.
Ranthorpe x v. — The Physiology of
Common Life 2 v. — On Actors and the
Art of Acting i v.
Mrs. E. Lynn Linton, | 1898.
The true History of Joshua Davidson
IV. — Patricia Kemball 2 v. — The
Atonement of Leam Dundais 2 v.  Tho
World well Lost 2 v. — Under which
Lord? 2 V. — With a Silken Thread, and
other Stories i v. — Todhunters* at Loan-
in' Head, and other Stories i v.  "My
Love! " 2 V. — The Girl of the Period,
and other Social Essays i v.  lone 2 v.

Tauchnitz Edition. Com.plete List.

19

Laurence W. M. Lockhart, f 188 2.
Mine is Thine 2 v.
Lord Augustus Lofhis.
Diplomatic Reminiscences 1837-1862
(with Portrait) z v.
Mnie de Longard, vide D. Gerard.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Am.), t 1882.
Poetical Works (with Portrait) 3 V. —
The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri
3 V. — The New- England Tragedies 1 v.
— The Divine Tragedy i v. — Flower-de-
Luce, and Three Books of Song i v. —
The Masque of Pandora, and other Poems
I V. Margaret Lonsdale.
Sister Dora (with a Portrait of Sister
pora) I V.
Author of "A Lost Battle."
A Lost Battle 2 v.
Sir John Lubbock, Bart.
The Pleasures of Life i v. — The Beau
ties of Natiu-e (with Illustrations) i v. —
The Use of Life i v. — Scenery of Switzer
land (with BlustratioDs) 2 v.
"LutfuUah," vide Eastwick.
Edna Lyall.
We Two 2 V. — Donovan 2 v. — In
the Golden Days 2 v. — Knight-Errant
2 V. — Won by Waiting 2 v. — Wayfaring
Men 2 V. — Hope the Hermit 2 v. —
Doreen 2 v.
Lord Lytton, vide E. Bulwer.
Robert Lord Lytton (Owen
Meredith), f 1891.
Poems 2 V. — Fables in Song 2 v.
Maarten Maartens.
The Sin of Joost Avelingh i v. — An
Old Maid's Love 2 v. — God's Fool 2 v.
— The Grreater Glory 2 v. — My Lady
Nobody 2 v. — Her Memory i v.
Thomas Babington, Lord Mac
aulay, t 1859.
History of England (with Portrait)
10 v.- Critical and Historical Essays 5 v.
— Lays of Ancient Rorae i v. — Speeches
2 V. — Biographical Essays i v. — Wil-
ham Pitt, Atterbury i v. — (See also
Trevelyan).

Justin McCarthy.
The Waterdale Neighbours 2 v. —
Dear Lady Disdain 2 v. — Miss Misau-
thrope 2 V. — A History of our own Times
5 V. — Donna Quixote 2 v. — A short
History of our own Tiraes 2 v. — A
History of the Four Georges vols, i &
2. — A History of our own Times vols.
6 & 7 (supplemental) . — A History of the
Four Georges and of William TV. Vols. 3,
4 & 5 (supplemental). George Mac Donald.
Alec Forbes of Howglen 2 v. — Annals
of a Quiet Neighbourhood 2 v. — David
Elginbrod 2 v. — The Vicar's Daughter
2 V. — Malcolm 2 v. — St. George and
St. Michael 2 v. — The Marquis of
Lossie 2 v. — Sir Gibbie 2 v. — Mary
Marston 2 v. — The Gifts of the Child
Christ, and other Tales i v. — The Prin
cess and Curdie i v.
Mrs. Mackarness, f 1881.
Sunbeam Stories i v. — A Peerless
Wife 2 V. — A Mingled Yam 2 v.
Eric Mackay, f 1898.
Love Letters of a Violinist, and other
Poems I V.
Charles MC Knight (Am.).
Old Fort Duquesne 2 v.
Ian Maclaren.
Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush i v. —
The Days of Auld Langsyne i v.
Norman Macleod, f 1872.
The Old Lieutenant and his Son i v.
James Macpherson, -j- i6g6, vide
Ossian.
Mrs. Macquoid.
Patty 2 V. — Miriam's Marriage 2 v. —
Pictures across the Channel 2 v. — Too
Soon IV. — My Story 2 v. — Diane 2 v.
— Beside the River 2 v. — A Faithful
Lover 2 v.
Author of "Mademoiselle Mori"
(Miss Roberts).
Mademoiselle Mori a v. — Denise i v.
— Madame Fontenoy i v. — On the
Edge o£ the Storm i v. — Tho Atelier du
Lys 2 V. — In the Olden Time 2 v.
Lord Mahon, vide Stanhope.
£. S. Maine.
Scarscliff Rocks 2 ?.

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Lucas Malet
Colonel Enderby's Wife 2 v.
The Earl of Malmesbury, G.C.B.
Memoirs of an Ex- Minister 3 v.
Mary E. Mann.
A Winter's Tale i v. — The Cedar
Star I V.
Robert Blachford Mansfield.
The Log of the Water Lily i v.
Mark Twain, vide Twain,
Audior of "Marmorne," vide
P. G. Hamerton.
Capt. Marryat, f 1848.
Jacob Faithful (with Portrait) i v. —
'ercival Keene i v. — Peter Siraple i v. —
aphet in Search of a Father i v. —
lonsieur Violet i v. — The Settlers in
'anada i v. — The Mission i v. — The
'rivateer's-Man i v. — The Children of
be New- Forest i v. — Valerie i v. —
Ir. Midshipraan Easy i v. — The King's
)wn I V.
Florence Marryat, -j- 1899.
Love's Confiict 2 v. — For Ever and
)ver 2 V. — The Confessions of Gerald
Istcourt 2 V. — Nelly Brooke 2 v. —
""eronique 2 v. — Petronel 2 v. — Her
,ord and Master 2 v. — The Prey of the
rods IV. — Life aud Letters of Captain
larryat i v. — Mad Dumaresq 2 v. —
To Intentions 2 v. — Fighting the Air
v. — A Star and a Heart ; An Utter Im-
ossibility i v. — The Poison of Asps,
?d other Stories i v. — A Lucky Disap*
ointment, and other Stories i v. — "My
wn Child" 2 v. — Her Father's Name
V. — A Harvest of Wild Oats 2 v. —
I. Little Stepson i v. — Written in Fire
V. — Her World against a Lie 2 v. —
. Broken Blossom 2 v. — The Root of
11 Evil 2 V. — The Fair-haired Alda 2 v. —
T'ith Cupid's Eyes 2 v. — My Sister the
.ctress 2 V. — Phyllida 2 v. — How they
ived Hira 2 v. — Facing the Footlights
7ith Portrait) 2 v. — A Moment of Mad-
ass, and other Stories i v. — The Ghost
I Charlotte Cray, and other Stories
V. — Peeress and Player 2 v. — Under
le Lilies and Roses 2 v. — The Heart
f Jane Warner 2 v. — The Heir Pre-
imptive 2 V. — The Master Passion 2 v.
- Spiders of Society 2 v. — Driven to Bay
V. — A Daughter of the Tropics 2 v. —

Gentleman and Courtier 2 v. — On Cir
cumstantial Evidence 2 v. — Mount Eden.
A Romance 2 v. — Blindfold 2 v. — A
Scarlet Sin iv. — A Bankrupt Heart 2 v.
— The Spirit World i v. — The Beautiful
Soul IV. — At Heart a Rake 2 v, —
The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah
Stubbs IV. — The Dream that Stayed
2 V. — A Passing Madness i v. — The
Blood of the Vampire i v. — A Soul on
Fire i v. — ¦ Iris the Avenger i v.
Mrs. Anne Marsh (Caldwell),
t 1874.
Ravenscliffe 2 v. — Emilia Wyndham
2 V. — Castle Avon 2 v. — Aubrey 2 v. —
The Heiress of Haughton 2 v. — Evelyn
Marston 2 v. — The Rose of Ashurst
2 V.
Mrs. Emma Marshall, j- 1899.
Mrs. Mainwaring's Journal i v. —
Benvenuta i v. — Lady Alice i v. —
Dayspring i v. — Life's Aftermath i v. —
In the East Country i v. — No. XIII ; or,
The Story of the Lost Vestal i v. — In
Four Reigns i v. — On the Banks of the
Ouse IV. — In the City of Flowers i v. —
Alma IV. — Under Salisbury Spire i v.
— The End Crowns All 1 v. — Winchester
Meads 1 v. — Eventide Light i v. —
Winifrede's Journal i v. — Bristol Bells
IV. — In the Service of Rachel Lady
Russell IV. — A Lily among Thorns i v.
— Penshurst Castle i v. — Kensington
Palace i v. — The White King's Daughter
IV. — The Master of the Musicians i v.
— An Escape from the Tower i v. — A
Haunt of Ancient Peace i v. — Castle
Meadow i v. — In the Choir of West
minster Abbey i v. — The Young Queen
of Hearts i v. — Under the Dome of St.
Paul's IV. — The Parson's Daughter
I V.
Helen Mathers(Mrs.HenryReeves).
"Cherry Ripe!" 2 v. — "Land o' the
Leal " IV. — My Lady Green Sleeves 2 v.
— As he coraes up the Stair, etc. i v. —
Sam's Sweetheart 2 v. — Eyre's Acquittal
2 V. — Found Out i v. — Murder or Man
slaughter? I V. — The Fashion of this
World (80 Pf.)— Blind Justice, and "Who,
being dead, yet Speaketh " i v. —What
the Glass Told, and A Study of a Woman
1 y. — Bam Wildfire 2 v. —Becky 2 v. —
Cinders i v.
Colonel Maurice.
The Balance of Military Power in
Europe i v.

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

21

George du Maurier, ^ 1896.
Trilby 2 V. — The Martian 2 v.
Mrs. Maxwell, vide Miss Braddon.
Author of "Mehalah," wzVfe Baring-
Gould.
George J. Whjrte Melville, f 1878.
Kate Coventry i v. — Holmby House
2 V. —Digby Grand i v. — Good for No
thing 2 V. — The Queen's Maries 2 v. —
The Gladiators 2 v. — The Brookes of
Bridlemere 2 v. — Cerise 2 v. ^ The
Interpreter 2 v. — The White Rose 2 v. —
M. or N, I V. — Contraband i v. —
Sarthedon 2 v. — UncleJohn 2 v. —
Katerfelto i v. — Sister Louise 1 v. —
Rosine 1 v. — Roys* Wife 2 v. — Black
but Comely 2 v. — Riding Recollections i v.
Memorial Volumes, vide Five
Centuries (vol. 500); The New
Testament (vol. 1000); Henry
Morley (vol, 2000).
George Meredith.
The Ordeal ot Richard Feverel 2 v. —
Beauchamp's Career 2 v. — The Tragic
Comedians i v. — Lord Ormont and his
Aminta 2 v. — The Amazing Marriage
2 V.
Owen Meredith, vide Robert Lord
Lytton.
Leonard Merrick.
The Man who was good i v. — This
Stage of Fools i v. — Cynthia i v. — One
Man's View i v. — The Actor-Manager
I V. — The Worldlings i v.
Heniy Seton Merriman.
Young Mistley i v. — Prisoners and
Captives 2 v. — From One Generation to
Another i v. —With Edged Tools 2 v. —
The Sowers 2 v. — Flotsam i v. — In
Kedar's Tents i v. — Roden's Corner
I V. — The Isle of Unrest i v.
H. S. Merriman & S. G. Tallentyre.
The Money- Spinner, etc. i v.
jfohn Milton, f 1674.
Poetical Works i v.
Author of "Miss Molly."
Geraldine Hawthorne i v.

Author of "Molly Bawn," vide
Mrs. Hungerford.
Florence Montgomery.
Misunderstood i v. — Thrown To
gether 2 v. — Thwarted i v. — Wild Mike
IV. — Seaforth 2 v. — The Blue Veil
IV. — Transformed 1 v. — The Fisher
man's Daughter , etc. i v. — Colonel
Norton 2 v. — Prejudged r v.
Frank Frankfort Moore.
"I Forbid the Banns" 2 v. — A Gray
Eye or So 2 v. — One Fair Daughter
2 V. — They Call it Love 2 v. — The
Jessamy Bride 1 v. — The Millionaires
IV. — Nell Gwyn — Comedian i v.
George Moore.
Celibates i v. — Evelyn Innes 2 v.
Thomas Moore, f 1852.
Poetical Works (with Portrait) 5 v.
Lady Morgan, j- 1859.
Memoirs 3 v.
Henry Morley, -j- 1894.
Of English Literature in the Reign of
Victoria, With Facsimiles of the Signa
tures of Authors in the Tauchnitz Edition
(v. 2000, published 1881) i v.
William Morris.
A Selection from his Poems. Edited
with a Memoif by F. Hueffer i v.
Arthur Morrison.
Tales of Mean Streets i v. — A Child
of the Jago IV. — To London Town i v.
— Cunning Murrell i v.
James Fullarton Muirhead.
The Land of Contrasts i v.
Miss Mulock, vide Mrs. Craik.
David Christie Murray.
Rainbow Gold 2 v.
GrenviUe: Murray, t/zV^^ GrenviUe.
Author of " My Little Lady," vide
E. Frances Poynter.
The New Testament
The Authorised English Version, with
Introduction and Various Readings frora
the three most celebrated Manuscripts of
the Original Text, by Constantine Tischen-
dorf (vol. 1000, published 1869) 1 v.
Mrs. C. J, Newby.
Common Sense 2 v.

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Dr. J. H. Newman (Cardinal New
man), f 1890.
Callista i v.
Mrs. Nicholls, vide Currer Bell.
Author of "Nina Balatka," vide
Anthony TroUope.
Author of "No Church" (F.
Robinson).
No Church 2 V. — Owen : — a Waif 2 v.
Lady Augusta Noel.
From Generation to Generation i v. —
Hithersea Mere 2 v.
W. E. Norris.
My Friend Jim i v. — A Bachelor's
Blunder 2 v. — Major and Minor 2 v. —
The Rogue 2 v. — Miss Shafto 2 v. ^ Mrs.
Fenton i v. — Misadventure 2 v. — Saint
Ann's IV. — A Victim of Good Luck
IV, — The Dancer in Yellow i v. —
Clarissa Furiosa 2 v. — Marietta's Mar
riage 2 V. — The Fight for the Crown
IV. — TheWidower i v. — Giles Ingilby i v.
— The Flower of the Flock i v. — His
Own Father i v.
Hon. Mrs. Norton, f 1877.
Stuart of Dunleath 2 v. — Lost and
Saved 2 v. — Old Sir Douglas z v.
Author of "Not Easily Jealous"
(Miss Iza Hardy).
Not Easily Jealous 2 v.
" Novels and Tales," vide^^ House
hold Words."
Charlotte 0*Conor-Eccles , vide
Hal Godfrey.
Laurence Oliphant, f 1888,
Altiora Peto 2 v. — Masollam 2 v.
Mrs. Oliphant, f 1897.
The Last ofthe Mortimers 2 v. — Mrs,
Margaret Maitland i v. — Agnes 2 v. —
Madonna Mary 2 v. — The Minister's
Wife 2 V. — The Rector and the Doctor's
Family i v. — Salem Chapel 2 v. — The
Perpetual Curate 2 v. — Miss Marjori-
banks 2 v. — Ombra 2 v. — Memoir of
Count de Montalembert 2 v. — May 2 v. —
Innocent 2 v. — For Love andLife 2 v. —
A Rose in June i v. — The Story of
Valentine and his Brother 2 v. — White-
ladies 2 V. — The Curate in Charge i v. — ,

Phoebe, Junior 2 v. — Mrs. Arthur 2 v. —
Carit4 2 V. — Young Musgrave 2 v. . —
The Primrose Path 2 v. — Within the
Precincts 3 V. — The Greatest Heiress in
England 2 v. — He that will not when he
may 2 v. — Harry Joscelyn 2 v. — In
Trust 2 V. — It was a Lover and his Lass
3 V. — The Ladies Lindores 3 V. — Hester
3 V. — The Wizard's Son 3 V. — A
Country Gentleman and his Family 2 v. —
Neighbours on the Green i v. — TheDuke's
Daughter i v. ^ — The Fugitives i v. —
Kirsteen 2 v. — Life of Laurence Oliphant
and of Alice Oliphant, hisWife 2 v. -^ The
Little Pilgrim in the Unseen i v. — The
Heir Presumptive and the Heir Apparent
2 V. — The Sorceress 2 v. — Sir Robert's
Fortune 2 v. — The Ways of Life i v. —
Old Mr, Tredgold 2 v.
"One who has kept a Diary,"
vide George W. E- RusseU.
Ossian.
The Poems of Ossian. Translated by
James Macpherson i v.
Ouida.
Idalia 2 v. — Tricotrin 2 v. —Puck 2 v. —
Chandos 2 v. — Strathmore 2 v. — Under
two Flags 2 V. — FoUe-Farine 2 v. — A
Leaf in tbe Storm ; A Dog of Flanders ;
A Branch of Lilac; A Provence Rose
IV. — Cecil Castlemaine's Gage, and other
Novelettes 1 v. — Madame la Marquise,
and other Novelettes i v. — Pascarel 2 v.
— Held in Bondage 2 v. — Two little
Wooden Shoes i v. — Signa(with Portrait)
3 V. — Id aWinter City iv. — Ariadn@2v. —
Friendship 2 v. — Moths 3 V. — Pipistrello,
and other Stories i v. — A Village Com
mune 2 T. — In Maremma 3 V. — Bimbi
IV. — Wanda 3 V. — Frescoes and other
Stories i v. — Princess Napraxine 3 V. —
Othmar3v. — A RainyJune(6oPf.). Don
Gesualdo (6oPf.). — A House Party i v. —
Guilderoy 2 v. — Syrlin 3 V. — RufEno, and
other Stories i v. — Santa Barbara, etc.
IV. — Two Offenders i v. — The Silver
Christ, etc. IV. — Toxin, and other Papers
IV. — Le Selve, and Tonia i v. — The
Massarenes 2 v. — An Altruist, and Four
Essays i v. — La Strega, and other
Stories IV. — The Waters of Edera i v.
— Street Dust, and Other Stories i v. —
Critical Studies i v.
Author of "The Outcasts," vide
"Roy TelleL"
Gilbert Parker.
The Battle of the Strong 2 v.

latichnitz Edition. Complete List.

23

Harriet Parr (Holme Lee), f 1900.
Basil Godfrey's Caprice 2 v. — For
Richer, for Poorer 2 v. — The Beautiful
Miss Barrington 2 v. — Her Title of
Honour i v. — Echoes of a Famous
Year i v. — Katherine's Trial i v. — The
Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax 2 v. — Ben
Milner's Wooing i v. — • Straightforward
2v. — Mrs.DenysofCote 2 v. — A Poor
Squire i v. Mrs. Parr.
Dorothy Fox i v. — Tho Prescotts of
Pamphilloo 2 v. — The Gosau Smithy, etc.
IV. — Robin 2 v. — Loyalty George 2 v.
George Paston.
A Study in Prejudices i v. — A Fair
Deceiver i v.
Mrs. Paul, vide Author of "StiU
Waters."
Author of "Paul FerroU" (Mrs.
Caroline Clive).
Paul Forrdll i v. — Year after Year
I V. — Why Paul Ferroll killed his Wife
IV. James Payn, -j- 1898.
Found Dead i v. — Gwendoline's Har
vest 1 V. — Like Father, like Son 2 v. —
Not Wooed , but Won 2 v. — Cecil's Tryst
I V. — A Woman's Vengeance 2 v. —
Murphy's Master i v. — In the Heart of
a Hill, and other Stories i v. — At Her
Mercy 2 v. — The Best of Husbands 2 v. —
Walter's Word 2 v. — Halves 2 v. —
Fallen Fortunes 2 v. — What He cost Her
2v. — By Proxy 2 v. — Less Black than
we're Painted 2 v. — Under one Roof
2 V. — High Spirits i v. — High Spints
(Second Series) i v. — A Confidential
Agent z V. — From Exile 2 v. — A Grape
from a Thom z v. — Some Private Views
I V. — For Cash Only 2 v. — Kit : A Me
mory 2 V. — The Canon's Ward (with
Portrait) 2 v. — Some Literary Re
collections 1 V. — The Talk of the Town
I V. — The Luck of tho Darrells 2 v. —
The Heir ofthe Age32 v. — Holiday Tasks
I V. — Glow -Worm Tales (First Series)
IV.— Glow- Worm Tales (Second Series)
1 V. — A Prince of the Blood 2 v. — The
Mystery of Mirbridge 2 v. — The Burnt
Million 2 V. — The Word and the Will
2 V. — Sunny Stories, and some Shady
Ones I V. — A Modern Dick Whitting-
ton 2 V. — A Stumble on the Threshold
2 V. — A Trying Patient 1 v. — Gleams
of Memory, and The Eavesdropper i v. —
In Market Overt i v. — The Disappear

ance of George Drifiell, and other Tales
IV. — Another's Burden etc. i v. — The
Backwater of Life, or Essays of a Literary
Veteran i v.
Frances Mary Peard,
OneYearzv. — The Rose- Garden i v. —
Unawares i v. — Thorpe Regis i v. — A
Winter Story i v. — A Madrigal, and
other Stories i v. — Cartouche i v. —
Mother Molly i v. — Schloss and Town
2 V. — Contradictions 2 v. — Near Neigh
bours IV. — Alicia Tennant i v. — Ma-
dame's Granddaughter i v. — Donna
Teresa i v. — Number One and Number
Two X V. Max Pemberton.
The Impregnable City i v, — A Woman
of Kronstadt i v, — The Phantom Army
IV. — The Garden of Swords i v. — The
Footsteps of a Throne i v. — Pro Patria i v.
Bishop Thomas Percy, f 181 1.
Reliques of Andent English Poetry 3 v.
F. C. PhiUps.
As in a Looking Glass i v. — The Dean
and his Daughter i v. — Lucy Smith i v. —
A Lucky Young Woman i v. — Jack and
Three Jills i v. — Little Mrs. Murray i v. —
Young Mr. Ainslie's Courtship i v. — Social
Vicissitudes i v. — Extenuating Circum
stances, and A French Marriage i v. —
More Social Vidssitudes iv. — Constance
2 V. — That Wicked Mad'moiselle, etc.
I V. — A Doctor in Difficulties, etc. i v. —
Black and White i v. — " One Never
Knows" 2 V. — Of Course i v. — Miss
Ormerod's Protege i v. — My little Hus
band IV. — Mrs. Bouverie i v. — A
Question of Colour, and otherStories IV. —
A Devil in Nun's Veiling i v. — A Full
Confession, and other Stories i v. — The
Luckiest of Three it. — Poor Little Bella
XV. — Eliza Clarke, Governess, and Other
Stories I V.
F. C. Philips & Percy Fendall.
A Daughter's Sacrifice i v. — Margaret
Byng I V.
F. C. PhiUps & C. J. WUls.
The Fatal Phryne iv. — The Scudamores
I V. — A Maiden Fair to See i v. — Sybil
Ross's Marriage i v.
Eden Phillpotts.
Lying Prophets 2 v. — Tho Human Boy
IV. — Sons of the Morning 2 v. — The
Good Red Earth i v.
Miss Piddington, vide Author of
"The Last of the Cavaliers."

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Edgar Allan Poe (Am.), f 1849.
Poems and Essays, edited with a new
Memoir by John H. Ingram i v. — Tales,
edited by John H, Ingram i v.
Alexander Pope, f 1744.
Select Poetical Works (with Portrait) i v.
Miss E. Frances Poynter.
My Little Lady 2 v. — Ersilia 2 v, —
Among the Hills 1 v. — Madame de
Presnel i v.
Mrs. Campbell Praed.
Zero IV, — Affinities i v. — The Head
Station 2 V.
Mrs. E. Prentiss (Am.), f 1878.
Stepping Heavenward i v.
The Prince Consort, f 1861.
His Principal Speeches and Addresses
(with Portrait) i v.
Richard Pryce.
Miss Maxwell's Affections i v. — The
Quiet Mrs. Fleming i v. — Time and the
Woman i v.
Hor. N. Pym, vide Caroline Fox.
Q (A. T. Quiller-Couch).
Noughts and Crosses i v. — I Saw Three
Ships IV. — Dead Man's Rock i v. — la
and other Tales i v. — The Ship of Stars
I V.
H. M.theQueen,7/z^ Victoria R.L
W. Fraser Rae.
Westward by Rail i v. — Miss Bayle's
Romance 2 v. — The Business of Travel i v,
C. E. Raimond (Miss Robins).
The Open Question 2 v.
Author of "The Rajah's Heir."
The Rajah's Heir 2 v,
Charles Reade, f 1884.
"It is never too late to mend" 2 v. —
"Love me little, lovo me long" i v. —
The Cloister and the Hearth 2 v. — Hard
Cash 3 V. — Put Yourself in his Place 2 v. —
A Terrible Temptation 2 v. — Peg Wof-
fington IV. — Christie Johnstone i v. —
A Simpleton 2 v. — The Wandering Heir
IV. — A Woman-Hater 2 v. — Readiana
IV. — Singleheart and Doubleface i v.
Author of "Recommended to
Mercy" (Mrs. Houstoun).
"Recommended to Mercy" 2 v. 
Zoe's "Brand" 2 v.

Mrs. Reeves, vide Helen Mathers.
Grace Rhys.
Mary Dominic i v.
James Rice, vide Walter Besant
Alfred Bate Richards, f 1876.
So very Human 3 v.
S. Richardson, f 1761.
Clarissa Harlowc 4 v.
Mrs. RiddeU (F, G. Trafford).
George Geith of Fen Court 2 v. — Max
well Drewitt 2 v, — The Race for Wealth
2 V. — Far above Rubies 2 v. — The Earl's
Promise 2 v. — Mortomley's Estate 2 v.
Mrs, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, vide
Miss Thackeray.
Miss Roberts, vide Author of
"Mademoiselle Mori."
Rev. Frederick W. Robertson,
1 1853.
Sermons 4 v.
Miss Robins, vide Raimond.
F. Robinson, vide Author of " No
Church."
Charles H. Ross.
The Pretty Widow 1 v. — A London
Romance 2 v.
Martin Ross, vide Somerville.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, f 1882.
Poems XV. — Ballads and Sonnets iv.
"Roy Tellet."
The Outcasts i v. — A Draught of
Lethe i v. — Pastor and Prelate 2 v.
J. Ruffini, f 1 88 1.
Lavinia 2 v. — Doctor Antonio i v. —
Lorenzo Benoni i v. — Vincenzo 2 v. —
A Quiet Nook in the Jura i v. — The
Paragreens on a Visit to Paris i v. —
Carlino, and other Stories i v.
W. Clark RusseU.
A Sailor's Sweetheart 2 v. — The
"Lady Maud" 2 v. — A Sea Queen 2 v.
George W. E. RusseU.
Collections and Recollections. By One
who has kept a Diary 2 v.
George Augustus Sala, f 1895.
The Seven Sons of Mammon 2 v.
John Saunders-
Israel Mort , Overman 2 v. — The
Shipowner's Daughter 2 v. — A Noble
Wife 2 v.

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

25

Katherine Saunders (Mrs. Cooper).
Joan Merryweather, and other Tales
I V. — Gideon's Rock, and other Tales
I V. — The High Mills 2 v. — Sebastian i v.
Richard Henry Savage (Am.).
My Offidal Wife i v. — The Littie Lady
of Lagunitas (with Portrait) 2 v. — Prince
Schamyl's Wooing i v. — The Masked
Venus 2 V. — Dehlah of Harlem 2 v. — The
Anarchist 2 v. — A Daughter of Judas
I V. — In the Old Chateau i v. — Miss
Devereux ofthe Mariquita 2 v. — Checked
Through 2 v. — A Modem Corsair 2 v. —
In the Swim 2 v. — The White Lady of
Khajninavatka 2 v. — In the House of His
Friends 2 v, Olive Schreiner.
Trooper Peter Halket of Mashona-
land I v.
Sir Walter Scott, f 1832.
Waveriey (with Portrait) i v. — The
Antiquary i v. — Ivanhoe i v. — Kenil
worth IV. — Quentin Durward i v. — Old
Mortality i v. — Guy Mannering i v. —
Rob Roy 1 V. — The Pirate i v. — The
Fortunes of Nigel i v. — The Black Dwarf ;
A Legend of Montrose i v. — The Bride
of Lammermoor i v. — The Heart of Mid-
Lothian 2 V. — The Monastery i v. — The
Abbot I V. — Peveril of the Peak 2 v. —
Poetical Works 2 v. — Woodstock i v. —
The Fair Maid of Perth i v. — Anne of
Geiierstein i v.
Prof. J, R. Seeiey, M.A., f 1895.
Life and Times of Stein (with a Portrait
of Stein) 4 v. — The Expansion of Eng
land 1 V. — Goethe i v.
Elizabeth SeweU.
Amy Herbert 2 v. — Ursula 2 v. — A
Glimpse of the World 2 v. — The Journal
of a Home Life 2 v, — After Life 2 v. —
The Experience of Life 2 v.
William Shakespeare, + i6i6.
PlaysandPoems (with Portrait) (Second
EditioH) 7 V. — Doubtful Plays i v.
Shakespeare^ s Plays may also be had in
37 numbers, at M 0,30. each number.
William Sharp, v. Miss Howard.
Percy Bysshe SheUey, f 1822.
A Selection from his Poems i v.
Nathan Sheppard (Am.), f 1888.
Shut up in Paris i v.
EychardBrinsleySheridan,f 18 16.
The Dramatic Works i v.

J. Henry Shorthouse.
John Inglesant 2 v. — Blanche , Lady
Falaise i v.
Rudolf C. Slatin Pasha, C.B.
Fire and Sword in the Sudan (with
two Maps in Colours) 3 v.
F. E. Smedley, vide Author of
"Frank Fairiegh."
Tobias SmoUett, f 1771.
Roderick Random i v. — Humphry
Clinker i v. — Peregrine Pickle 2 v.
Author of "Society in London."
Society in London. By a. Foreign
Resident i v.
E. CE. Somerville & Martin Ross.
Naboth's Vineyard i v.
Author of" The Spanish Brothers."
The Spanish Brothers 2 v.
Earl Stanhope (Lord Mahon),
t 1875.
The History of England 7 V. — Reign
of Queen Anne 2 v.
G. W. Steevens, f 1900.
From Capetown to Ladysmith i v.
Laurence Sterne, f 1768.
Tristram Shandy i v. — A Sentimental
Journey (with Portrait) i v.
Robert Louis Stevenson, ^ 1894.
Treasure Island i v. — Dr, Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde, and An Inland Voyage i v. —
Kidnapped IV. —The Black Arrow i v. —
The Master of Ballantrae i v. — The Merry
Men, etc. iv. — Across the Plains, etc. i v.
— Island Nights' Entertainments i v. —
Catriona i v. — Weir of Hermiston i v. —
St. Ives 2 V. — In the South Seas 2 v.
Author of "StiU Waters" (Mrs.
Paul).
StiU Waters i v, — Dorothy i v. — De
Cressy i v. — Uncle Ralph i v. — Maiden
Sisters i v. — Martha Brown i v. — Vanessa
I V,
M. C. Stirling, vide G. M. Craik.
Frank R. Stockton (Am.).
The House of Martha i v.
Author of "The Story of a Penitent
Soul."
The Story of a Penitent Soul i v.
Author of "The Story of Elizabeth,"
vide Miss Thackeray.

26

lauchnitz Edition, Complete List,

Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe
(Am.), f 1896.
Uncle Tom's Cabin (with Portrait) 2 v. —
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin 2 v. — Dred
2 V. — The Minister's Wooing i v. — Old-
town Folks 2 V.
Author of " Sunbeam Stories,"
vid£ Mrs. Mackarness.
Jonathan Swift (Dean Swifl),f 1745.
Gulliver's Travels i v.
Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Atalanta in Calydon : and Lyrical Poems
(edited, with an Introduction, by William
Sharp) I V.
John Addington Symonds, f 1893.
Sketches in Italy i v. — New Italian
Sketches x v.
S.G. Tallentyre, r/.H.S. Merriman.
Tasma.
Uncle Piper of Piper's Hill 2 v.
Baroness Tautphoeus, f 1893.
Cyrilla 2 V. — The Initials 2 v. — Quits
2 V. — At Odds 2 V.
Col. Meadows Taylor, \ 1876.
Tara ; a Mahratta Tale 3 v.
Templeton, vide Author of
" Horace Templeton."
Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, -j- 1892.
Poetical Works 8 v. — Queen Mary
IV. — Harold i v. — Becket; The Cup ;
The Falcon i v. — Locksley Hall , sixty
Years after ; The Promise of May ; Tiresias
and other Poems i v. — A Memoir. By
His Son (with Portrait) 4 v.
The New Testament, vide New.
William Makepeace Thackeray,
t 1863.
Vanity Fair 3 v. — Pendennis 3 v. —
Miscellanies 8 v. — Henry Esmond 2 v. —
The English Humourists ofthe Eighteenth
Century iv. — TheNewcomes4v. — The
Virginians 4 V. — The Four Georges ;
Lovel the Widower i v. — The Adventures
of Philip 2 V. — Denis Duval i v. —
Roundabout Papers 2 v. — Catherine
I V. —The Irish Sketch Book 2 v. — The
Paris Sketch Book {with Portrait) 2 v.
Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Ritchie).
The Story ofElizabeth I v.— The Village
on the Qiff i v. — Old Kensington 2 v. —
Bluebeard's Ke3rs, and other Stories i v. —
Five Old Friends i v. — Miss Ansel i v. —

Out of the World, and other Tales i v. —
FulhamLawn , and other Tales i v. — From
an Island. A Story and some Essa3's i v. —
Da Capo, and other Tales i v. — Madara'e
de Sevigne; From a Stage Box; Miss
Williamson's Divagations i v. — A Book
of Sibyls IV. — Mrs. Dymond 2 v. —
Chapters from sorae Memoirs i v.
Thomas ct Kempis, vide Kempis.
A. Thomas (Mrs. Pender Cudlip).
Denis Donne 2 v. — On Guard 2 v. —
Walter Goring 2 v. — Played Out 2 v. —
Called to Account 2 v. — Only Herself
2 V. — A Narrow Escape 2 v.
James Thomson, f 1748.
Poetical Works (with Portrait) i t.
Author of "Thoth."
Thoth I V.
Author of "Tim."
Tim r v.
F. G Trafford, vide Mrs. RiddeU.
Right Hon. Sir George Otto
Trevelyan.
The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay
(with Portrait) 4 V. — Selections from the
Writings of Lord Macaulay 2 v. — The
American Revolution (with a Map) 2 v.
Trois-Etoiles, vide GrenviUe:
Murray.
Anthony TroUope, f 1882.
Doctor Thome 2 v. — The Bertrams
2 V. — The Warden i v. — Barchester
Towers 2 v. — Castle Richmond 2 v, — The
West Indies i v. — Fraraley Parsonage 2 v.
— North America 3 V. — Orley Farm 3 v.
— Rachel Ray 2 v. — The Small House
at AUington 3 V. — Can you forgive her?
3 V. — TTie Belton Estate 2 v. — Nina
Balatka i v. — The Last Chronicle of
Barset 3 v. — The Claverings 2 v. — Phineas
Finn 3 V. — He knew he was right 3 V. —
TheVicarofBullhampton 2v- — Sir Harry
Jlotspur of Humblethwaite i v, — Ralph
the Heir 2 v. — The Golden Lion of
Granpere i v. — Australia and New Zea
land 3 V. — Lady Anna 2 v. — Harry
Heathcote of Gangoil i v. — The Way we
live now 4 V. — The Prime Minister 4 V. —
The American Senator 3 V. — South Africa
2 V. — Is He Popenjoy ? 3 v. — An Eye for
an Eye i v. — John Caldigate 3 v. — Cousin
Henry i v. — The Duke's Children 3 V.—
Dr. Wortle's School i v. — Ayala's Angel
3 V. — TheFixed Period i v. — Marion Fay
T^__i. , .- _ j.^^ Froh-

Tatichnitz Edition. Complete List.

27

mann, and otherStories i v. — Alice Dug-
dale, and other Stories i v. — La Mere
Bauche, and other Stories I v. — The
Mistletoe Bough, and other Stories i v. —
An Autobiography 1 v. — An Old Man's
Love I V.
T. Adolphus TroUope, + 1892.
The Garstangs of Gaistang Grange 2 v.
— A Siren 2 v.
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens)
(Am.).
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer i v. —
The Innocents Abroad; or. The New
Pilgrims' Progress 2 v. — A Tramp Abroad
2 V. — "Roughing it" i v, — The In
nocents at Home i v. — The Prince and
the Pauper 2 v. — The Stolen White
Elephant, etc. i v. — Life on the Mis
sissippi 2 V, — Sketches (with Portrait)
1 V. — Huckleberry Finn 2 v. — Selections
from American Humour i v. — A Yankee
at the Court of King Arthur 2 v. — Tho
American Q^mant i v. — The £ 1 000 000
Bank-Note and other new Stories i v. —
Tom Sawyer Abroad i v. — Pudd'nhead
Wilson I V. — Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc 2 v.— Tom Sawyer, Detective,
and other Tales i v. — More Tramps
Abroad 2 v. — The Man that corrupted
Hadleyburg, etc. 2 v.
Author of "The Two Cosmos."
The Two Cosmos i v.
Author of "Venus and Cupid."
Venus and Cupid i v.
Author of "V6ra."
V&ra 1 V. — The Hotel du Petit St.
Jean i v. — Blue Roses 2 v. — Within
Sound of the Sea 2 v. — The Maritime
Alps and their Seaboard 2 v.— Ninette i v.
Victoria R. I.
Leaves from the Journal of our Life in
the Highlands from 1848 to 1861 i v. —
More Leaves, etc. from 1862 to 1882 i v.
Author of "Virginia."
Virginia i v.
Ernest Alfred Vizetelly.
With Zola in England i v.
L. B. Walford.
Mr: Smith 2 v. — Pauline 2 v. — Cousins
2 v. — Troublesome Daughters 2 v. —
Leddy Marget i v.
D. Mackenzie Wallace.
Russia 3 V.
Lew. Wallace (Am.).
Ben-Hur 2 v.

Eliot Warburton, J 1852.
The Crescent and the Cross 2 v. —
Darien 2 v.
Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Robert Elsmere 3 V, — David Grieve
3v. — Miss Breth erton i v. — Marcella 3 v.
Bessie Costrell i v. — Sir George Tressady
2 V. — Helbeck of Bannisdale 2 v. —
Eleanor 2 v.
Susan Warner, vide WetherelL
Samuel Warren, f 1877.
Diary of a late Physician 2 v. — Ten
Thousand a- Year 3 V. — Now and Then
IV. — The Lily and the Bee i v.
Author of "The Waterdale Neigh
bours," vwfe Justin McCarthy.
Theodore Watts-Dunton.
Aylwin 2 v. H. G. Wells.
The Stolen Bacillus, etc. i v. — The
War of the Worlds i v. — The Invisible
Man IV. — The Time Machine, and Tho
Island of Doctor Moreau i v. — When
the Sleeper Wakes i v. — Tales of Space
and Time i v. — The Plattner Story, and
Others IV. — Love andMr. Lewisham i v.
Hugh Westbury.
Acte 2 V.
Elizabeth Wetherell (Susan War
ner) (Am.), t 1885.
The wide, wide World i v. — Queechy
2 V. — The Hills of the Shaterauc 2v. —
Say and Seal 2 v. — The Old Helmet 2 v.
Stanley J. Weyman.
The House of the Wolf i v. — The Story
of Francis Cludde 2 v. — A Gentleman of
Franco 2 v. — The Man in Black i v. —
Under tho Red Robe 1 v. — My Lady
Rotha 2 V. — From the Memoirs of a Minis
ter of France i v. — The Red Cockade 2 v.
 Shrewsbury 2 v. — The Castle Inn 2 v.
— Sophia 2 V.
Author of "A Whim, and its Con
sequences."
A Whim, and its Consequences i v.
Beatrice Whitby.
The Awakening of Mary Fenwick 2 v. —
In the Suntime of her Youth 2 v.
Percy White.
Mr, Bailey-Martin i v.
Walter White.
Holidays in Tyrol i v.

28

Tauchnitz Edition. Complete List.

Richard Whiteing.
The Island ; or. An Adventure of a Per
son of Quality i v. — No. 5 John Street i v.
— The Life of Paris i v.
Sidney Whitman.
Imperial Germany 1 v. — The Realm
of the Habsburgs i v. — Teuton Studies
IV. — Reminiscences of the King of
Roumania, edited by Sidney Whitman i v.
— Conversations with Prince Bismarck,
edited by Sidney Whitman i v. — Life of
the Emperor Frederick 2 v.
George J, Whyte MelviUe, vide
Melville.
Author of "Who Breaks — Pays,"
vide Mrs. Jenkin.
Kate Douglas Wiggin (Am.).
Timothy's Quest i v. — A Cathedral
Courtship, and Penelope's English Ex
periences IV. — Penelope's Irish Experi
ences I V.
Mary E. Wilkins (Am.).
Pembroke i v. — Madelon i v. —
Jerome 2 v. — Silence, and other Stories iv.
— The Love of Parson Lord, etc. i v.
C. J. Wills, vide F. C. PhiUps.
Mrs. J. S. Winter.
Regimental Legends i v.
Charles Wood, vide Author of
"Buried Alone."
H. F. Wood.
The Passenger from Scotland Yard i v.
Mrs. Henry Wood (Johnny Lud
low), t 1887.
East Lynne 3 V. — The Channings 2 v, —
Mrs. Halliburton's Troubles 2 v. —
Verner's Pride 3 v. — Shadow of Ashlydyat
3V. — TrevlynHold 2 v. — Lord Oakburn's
Daughters 2 v, — Oswald Cray 2 v. —
Mildred Arkell 2 v. — St. Martin's Eve
2 V, — Elster'sFoUy 2 v. — Lady Adelaide's
Oath 2v. — Orville College iv. — A Life's
Secret i v. — Red Court Farm 2 v. — Anne
Hereford 2 v. — Roland Yorke 2 v. —
George Canterbury's Will 2 v. — Bessy
Rane 2 v. — Dene Hollow 2 v. — Foggy
Night at OfFord; Martyn Ware's Temp
tation j Night- Walk over the Mill Stream
IV. — Within the Maze 2 v. — Master of
Greylands 2 v. — Johnny Ludlow 2 v. —
Told in the Twilight 2 v. — Adara Grainger
IV. — Edina2 v. — Pomeroy Abbey 2 v. —
Court Netherleigh 2 v. — (Following by

Johnny Ludlow) : Lost in the Post , and
Other Tales i v. — ATale of Sin, and Other
Tales IV. — Anne, and Other Tales i v. —
OMystery of Jessy Page, and Other Tales
IV. — Helen Whitney's Wedding, and
Other Tales i v. — Story of DorothyGrape,
and Other Tales i v.
Daniel Woodroffe.
Tangled, Trinities i v.
Margaret L. Woods.
A Village Tragedy i v. — The Vaga
bonds I V.
WiUiam Wordsworth, \ 1850.
Select Poetical Works 2 v.
Lascelles Wraxall, j- 1865.
Wild Oats I v.
Edmund Yates, f 1894.
Land at Last 2 v.— Broken to Harness 2 v.
— Forlorn Hope 2 v. — Black Sheep 2 v.
— Rock Ahead 2 v. — Wrecked in Port 2 v.
— Dr. Wainwright's Patient 2 v. — Nobo
dy's Fortune 2 v. — Castaway 2 v. — A
Waiting Race 2 v. — Yellow Flag 2 v.—
Impending Sword 2 v. — Two, by Tricks
IV. — A Silent Witness 2 v. — Recollec
tions and Experiences 2 v.
Yeats, vide Levett-Yeats.
Charlotte M. Yonge, f 1901.
Heir of RedclyfEo 2 v. — Heartsease 2 v.
— Daisy Chain 2 v. — Dynevor Terrace
2 V. — Hopes and Fears 2 v. — Young
Step-Mother 2 v.— The Trial 2 v.— Clever
Woman of the Family 2 v. — Dove in the
Eagle'sNest 2 v. — Danvers Papers j The
Prince and the Page i v. — Chaplet of
Pearls 2 v. — Two Guardians i v. — Caged
Lion 2 V. — ¦ Pillars of the House 5 v. —
Lady Hester i v. — My Young Alcides
2 V. — Three Brides 2 v. — Womankind
2 V. — Magnum Bonum 2 v. — Love antl
Life IV. — Unknown to History 2 v. —
Stray Pearls (with Portrait) 2 v. — Ar
mourer's Prentices 2 v. — Two Sides ofthe
Shield 2 V. — Nuttie's Father 2 v. — Beech-
croft at Rockstone 2 v. — A Reputed
Changeling 2 v. — Two Penniless Prin
cesses IV. — That Stick i v. — Grisly
Grisell i v. — The Long Vacation 2 v. —
Modem Broods i v.
Author of "Young Mistley," vide
Henry Seton Merriman.
I. ZangwiU.
Dreamers of the Ghetto 2 v.
"2. Z."
The World and a Man.? v.

Series for the Young.
JO Volumes. Published with Continental Copyright on the same
conditions as the Collection of English and American Authors. Videp, i,
— Price 1 M. 60 Pf. or 2 Fr. per Volume. —

Lady Barker (Lady Broome).
Stories About;— I v.
MariaLouisaChaTlesworth, j 1 88o.
Ministeiing^ Children i v.
Mrs. Craik (Miss Mulock), f 1887.
Our Year i v. — Three Tales for Boys
IV. — Three Tales for Girls i v.
Georgiana M. Craik (Mrs. May).
Cousin Trix, and her welcome Tales x v.
Maria Edgeworth, f 1849.
Moral Tales i v. — Popular Tales 2 v.
Bridget & Julia Kavanagh, f 1 8 7 7 .
The Pearl Fountain, and other Fairy-
Tales 1 V.
Charles & Mary Lamb,
f 1834 and 1847.
Tales irom Shakspeare i v.
Captain Marfyat, -j- 1848.
Masterman Ready x v.

Mrs. Emma Marshall, \ 1899.
Rex and Regina x t.
Florence Montgomery.
The Town-Crier; to which is added:
The Children with tho Indian-Rubber
BaU. IV.
Author of " Ruth and her Friends."
Ruth and herFriends. AStoryforGirlsiv.
Mrs. Henry Wood, f 1887.
William All^r i v.
Charlotte M. Yonge.
Kenneth; or, the Rear- Guard of the
Grand Army i v. — Th© Little Duke.
Ben Sylvester's "Word i v. — The
Stokesley Secret i v. — Countess Kate i v.
— A Book of Golden Deeds 2 v. — Friars-
wood Post-Office IV. — Henrietta's "Wish
IV — Kings of England i v. — The
Lances of Lynwood ; the Pigeon Pie i v.
— P'sandQ'siv. — AuntCharlotte'sStories
of EngUsh History i v. — Bye-"Words iv.—
Lads and Lasses of Langley, etc. i v.

Collection of German Authors.
5/ Volumes. Translations from the German, published with universal
copyright. These volumes may be imported into any country.
— Price 1 M. 60 Pf. or 2 Fr. per Volume. —

Berthold Auerbach, f 1882.
OntheHeights, (Second Edition) ^\ . —
Brigitta IV. — Spinoza 2 v.
Georg Ebers, f 1898.
An Egyptian Princess 2 v. — "IJarda
2v. — Homo Sum 2V. — The Sisters [Die
Schwestern] 2 v. — Joshua 2 v. — Per
Aspera 2 v.
De la Motte Fouque, \ 1843.
Undine, Sintram, etc. x v.
Ferdinand Freiligrath, f 1876.
Poems (Second Edition) 1 v.
Wilhelm Gorlach.
Prince Bismarck (with Portrait) i v.

W. V. Goethe, f 1832.
Faust IV. — "Wilhelm Meister's Ap
prenticeship 2 V.
Karl Gutzkow, f 1878.
Through Night to Light i v.
F. W. Hacklander, f 1877.
Behind the Counter [Handel und
"Wandel] I v.
Wilhelm Hauff, f 1827.
Three Tales i v.
Paul Heyse.
L'Arrabiata, etc. I v. — TheDead Lake,
etc. IV. — Barbarossa, etc. i v.
Wilhelmine von Hillern.
The "Vulture Maiden [die Geier-"Wally]
IV, — The Hour will come .2 v.

30 Tauchnitz Edition. Collection of German Authors, Students' Series.

Salomon Kohn.

Fritz Reuter, | 1874.

Gabriel i v.

In tho Year '13 i v. — An old Story

of my farming Days [Ut mine Stromtid] 3 v.

G. E. Lessing, f 1781.
Nathan the "Wise and Emilia Galotti i v.

J. P. Friedrich Richter (Jean Paul),

t 1825.

Fanny Lewald, f 1889.

Flower, Fruit and Thom Pieces 2 v.

Stella 2 V.

Victor von ScheEfel, f 1886.

E. Marlitt, f 1887.

Ekkehard 2 t.

Tho Princess of tho Moor [das Haide-

George Taylor.

prinzesscben] 2 v.

Klytia 2 v.

Maria Nathusius, | 1857.

Heinrich Zschokke, \ 1848.
The Princess of Bninswjck-"Wolfen-

Joachim v. Kamern, and Diary of a

poor young Lady i v.

biittel, etc. i v.

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mit deutschen Anmerkungen und Spedal-Worterbiichern.
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Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton,
ti873-
The Lady of Lyons. Von Dr. Fritz
Bischoff. Br. Ji 0,50. Kart. M 0,60.
Frances Hodgson Burnett (Am.).
Little Lord Fauntleroy. Von "Dz. Ernst
Groth, Br. .^1,50. Kart. .^^1,60. — An-
merkuDgen und"Wdrterbuch. Br. M 0,40.
Thomas Carlyle, f 1881.
The Reign of Terror (French Revo
lution). Von Dr. Ludwig Herrig, Br.
jfh 1,00. Kart. Jt, x,io.
Mrs. Craik (Miss Mulock), f 1887.
A Hero. A Tale for Boys. Von Dr.
Otto Dost. Br. M 0,80. Kart. M 0,90.—
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Charles Dickens, "I- 1870.
Sketches. First Series. Von Dr. A.
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Sketches. Second Series. Von Dr. A.
Hoppe. Br. .y<i,40. Kart.^i.so  "Worter
buch (First andSecondSeries). Br. .^iS i ,00.
A Christmas Carol in Prose. Being
a Ghost Story of Christmas. Von Dr.
G. Tanger. Br. M x,oo. Kart. M x,io.
George Eliot (Miss Evans — Mrs.
Cross), f 1880.
The Mill on the Floss. Von Dr. H.
Conrad. Br. M 1,70. Kart. M 1,80.

Juliana Horatia Ewing, -j- 1885.
Jackanapes. "Von E.Roos. Br. ^0,50.
Kart, Ji 60. — "Worterbuch. Br. Ji 0,20.
The Brownies ; and The Land of Lost
Toys. Von Dr. A. Mutter. Br. Ji 0,60.
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Timothy's Shoes ; An Idyll of the
"Wood; BenjyinBeastland. Von£. Roos.
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Benjamin Franklin (Am.), •)" 1790.
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II. Teil. Die Mannesjahre (1731 his
1757). Mit einer Beigabe : The "Way to
"Wealth. Von Dr. Karl Feyerabend,
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Edward A. Freeman, ¦]¦ 1892.
Three Historical Essays. Von Dr. C,
Balzer, Br. Ji 0,70. Kart. Ji 0,80.
Bret Harte (Am.).
Tales of the Argonauts. "Von Dr. G,
Tanger, Br. Ji 1,40. Kart. Ji 1,50.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (Am.).
"Wonder Book tor Boys and Gkls. Von
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Thomas Hughes, f 1898.
Tom Brown's School Days. Von Dr. /.
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31

jH 3,20. Part I. apart. Br. Ji 1,70.
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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Am.), 1 1882.
Tales of a "Wayside Inn. Von Dr. H.
Vamhagen. 2 Bando. Br. Ji 2,00.
Kart. Ji 2,20. x. Band apart. Br. Ji x,oo.
Kart..^i,io. 2.Bandapart. Br.J$i,oo.
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Thomas Babington, Lord
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England under Charles the Second.
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The RebeUions of Argyle and Mon
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Lord Clive. (Histor. Essay.) Von Prof.
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Hamann. Br. Ji 0,60. Kart. Ji 0,70.
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Florence Montgomery.
Misunderstood. Von Dr. R. Palm.
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Sir Walter Scott, f 1832.
The Talisman. Von Dr. R. Dressel.
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Tales of a Grandfather. First Series.
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Tales of a Grandfather. Second Series.
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William Shakespeare, -j- 1616.
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Julius Cssar. Von Dr. Immanuel
Schmidt. Br. Ji x,oo. Kart. Ji x,xo.
Macbeth.Von Jir, lynmanuelSckmidt,
Br. Ji 1,00. Kart. Ji x,io.
Earl Stanhope (Lord Mahon),
t 1875-
Prince Charles Stuart. (History of
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tho Peace of Versailles. 17x3 — 1783.)
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Alfred Lord Tennyson, f 1892.
Enoch Arden and other Poems. Von
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W. M. Thackeray, f 1863.
Samuel Titmarsh and The great Hog-
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Charlotte M. Yonge.
The Little Duke, or, Richard the
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Far Deutsche.
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von L. Rollin.
Russische Conversationssprache
von Dr. Z. Koiransky.

German Language of Conversation
by A. Schlessing,
A I' usage des itudiants francais.
Conversation AUeifiande par MM.
L, Rollin et Wolfgang Weber.

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