THE STORY OF ST. DUNSTAN’S TEMPTATION.
“St. Dunstan,” said Master Lewis, “was Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, and was a very ambitious man.
“He caused a cell to be made in which he could neither stand erect nor lie down with comfort. He retired to this cell and there spent his time in working as a smith, and—so the report went—in devotion.
“Then the people said, ‘How humble and penitent Dunstan is! He has the back-ache all day, and the legs-ache all night, and he suffers all for the cause of purity and truth.’
“Then Dunstan told the people that the devil came to tempt him, which, with his aches for the good cause, made his situation very trying.
“The devil, he said, wanted him to lead a life of selfish gratification, but he would not be tempted to do a thing like that; he never thought of himself. O no, good soul, not he!
“The people said that Dunstan must have become a very holy man, or the devil would not appear to him bodily.
“The devil came to him one day, he said, as he was at work at his forge, and, putting his nose through the window of his cell, tempted him to lead a life of pleasure. He quickly drew his pincers from the fire, and seized his tormentor by the nose, which put him in such pain that he bellowed so lustily as to shake the hills.
“The boy-king Edred, who filled the throne at this time, was in poor health, and suffered from a lingering illness for years. He felt the need of the counsel of a good man, and he said to himself,—
“‘There is Dunstan, a man who has given up all selfish feelings and aspirations, a man whom even the devil cannot corrupt. I will bring him to court, and will make him my adviser.’
“Then pure-hearted Edred brought the foxy prelate to his court, and made him, of all things in the world, the royal treasurer; and he took such good care of the money entrusted to his keeping that he was speedily released from the responsibility. He seems to have been very easily tempted during his political career.”
The next day the party was borne away from shady Oxford, where one would indeed like to tarry long in the midsummer days, to the old city of Bristol, famous in the Roman conquest of Britain. In the journey the gay poppy-fields and the picturesque cottage scenes, which give a charm to the English landscape, often flitted into and out of view, reminding the boys of George Howe’s letter.
Glastonbury Abbey is indeed an interesting ruin. It stands apart from the popular lines of travel, and so it figures little in the narratives of those who make short tours abroad.
Think of the ruins of a church at least fourteen hundred years old! A church that Joseph of Arimathæa, who provided the tomb for Jesus, is reputed in the old monkish legends to have founded, and where St. Patrick and St. Augustine probably did preach, and where in the Middle Ages the remains of good King Arthur were disenterred!
ST. AUGUSTINE’S APPEAL TO ETHELBERT.
Of the great church and its five chapels there yet remain parts of the broken wall, and the three large crypts where the early kings of England and founders of the English Church were buried. A little westward [!-- original location of 'St Augustine's appeal to Ethelbert' --] [!-- blank page --] from the ruin stands the beautiful Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathæa.
“I do not wonder,” said Wyllys Wynn, “that the old English people liked to believe that their church sprang from the mission of so amiable a saint as St. Joseph.”
“Christianity,” said Master Lewis, “was really first established in Great Britain in 596 by St. Augustine and forty missionaries who came with St. Augustine from Rome to preach to the Anglo-Saxons. These missionaries were kindly received by King Ethelbert, whose wife was already a Christian. It is related that one of the Saxon priests, to see if indeed his gods would be angry, went forth on horse-back, and smote the images the people had been worshipping. To the astonishment of the Saxons no judgment followed. The king was baptized, and the missionaries baptized ten thousand converts in a single day in the river Swale. The Christian religion had been preached in Britain before, but not generally accepted.”
THE SAXON PRIEST STRIKING THE IMAGES.
“I like the association of St. Joseph’s name with this old ruin so well,” said Wyllys, “that I wish to see the staff that you say is believed to bloom at Christmas.”
On the south side of Glastonbury is Weary-all Hill. It owes its name to a very poetic legend. It is said that St. Joseph and his companions, all of them weary in one of their missionary journeys, here sat down to rest, and the Saint planted his staff into the earth, and left it there. From it, we are told, springs the famous Glastonbury Thorn which blossoms every Christmas, and whose miraculous flowers were adored in the Middle Ages. Such a shrub still remains which blooms in midwinter, and perpetuates the memory of the pretty superstition.
CHAPTER XII.
LONDON.
London.—Westminster Abbey.—Westminster Hall and Parliament Houses.—The Tower.—Sir Henry Wyat and His Cat.—Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works.—Tommy Accosts a Stranger.—Hampton Court Palace.—Stories of Charles I. and Cromwell.—The Duchess’s Wonderful Pie.—The Boys’ Day.—Tommy goes Punch and Judy Hunting.—Street Amusements.—Tommy’s Misadventure.—George Howe’s Cheap Tour.—Windsor Castle.—Story of Prince Albert and his Queen.—Antwerp.
THE train, from its sinuous windings among old English landscapes and thickly populated towns, seemed at last to be gliding into a new world of vanishing houses and streets. It suddenly stopped under the glass roof of an immense station, where a regiment of porters in uniform were awaiting it, and where all outside seemed a world of cabmen.
London!—the world’s great city, the nations’ bazaar,—where humanity runs in no fixed channels, but ceaselessly ebbs and flows like the sea. Cabs, cabs! then a swift rattle through rattling vehicles, going in every direction, on, on, on! Names of places read in histories and story-books pass before the eye. The tides of travel everywhere seem to overflow; all is bewildering, confusing. What a map a man’s mind must be to thread the innumerable streets of London!
The Class stopped at a popular hotel in a fine part of the city, called the West End. It is pleasanter and more economical to take furnished lodgings in London, if one is to remain in the city for a week or more, but as Master Lewis was to allow the boys but a few days’ visit, he took them to a hotel in a quarter where the best London life could be seen.
The London cabs meet the impatient stranger’s wants at once, and the boys were soon rattling in them about the city, out of the quarter of stately houses into the gay streets of trade, which seemed to them indeed like a great world’s fair.
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
“This is Pall Mall [Pell Mell],” said Frank to Tommy, as their cab rounded a corner.
“It seems to be all pell mell here,” said Tommy. “Had the poet been to London when he wrote,—
“‘Oh, then and there was hurrying to and fro’?
But this street has a more quiet look. What splendid houses!”
“Those,” said Frank, “are the houses of the famous London Clubs.”
The first visit that the boys made was to that time-honored pile of magnificence into which kings and queens for centuries have gone to be crowned and been carried to be buried,—Westminster Abbey.
The party entered at the western entrance, which commands an awesome, almost oppressive, view of the interior. In the softened light of the stained windows rose a forest of columns, rich with art and grandly gloomy with the associations of antiquity. Far, far away it stretched to the chapel of Edward the Confessor, a name that led the mind through the faded pomps of the past almost a thousand years.
Monuments of kings and queens, benefactors and poets, beginning with old Edward the Confessor and coming down to the Stuarts; of Eleanor, who sucked the poison from her husband’s wounds, and Philippa, who saved the heroes of Calais. Here Bloody Mary, Queen Elizabeth, and Mary, Queen of Scots, sleep in peace in the same chapel; and here the merry monarch, Charles II., lies among the kingly tombs without a slab to mark the place.
The new Houses of Parliament which stand between the Abbey and the Thames are the finest works of architecture that have been erected in England for centuries. They form a parallelogram nine hundred feet long and three hundred feet wide. The House of Lords and House of Commons occupy the centre of the building. Between these two halls of State rises a tower three hundred feet high. At each end of the building are lofty towers; the Victorian Tower, three hundred forty-six feet high, and a clock tower, in which the hours are struck on a bell called Big Ben, which weighs nine tons.
The entrance to the Houses of Parliament is through old Westminster Hall, ninety feet high and two hundred and ninety long, whose gothic roof of wood is the finest specimen of its kind in English art, and is regarded as one of the wonders of human achievement.
It was in this hall that Charles I. was tried for treason, and condemned; and it was here, at the trial, that the words of a mysterious lady smote Oliver Cromwell to the heart.
“The Prisoner at the bar has been brought here in the name of the People of England,” said the solicitor.
“Not half the people!” exclaimed a mysterious voice in the gallery. “Oliver Cromwell is a traitor!”
The assembly shuddered.
“Fire upon her!” said an officer.
They did not fire. It was Lady Fairfax.
Westminster Bridge, one thousand one hundred and sixty feet long, is near the clock tower, and here the Class took its best view of the Parliament Houses.
The next day the Class visited London Tower and the relics that recall the long list of tragedies of ambitious courts and kings.
“This,” said the guide, as the Class was taken into an apartment in the White Tower, an old prison whose walls are twelve feet thick, “is the beheading block that was used on Tower Hill. The Earl of Essex was beheaded on it: see the dints!”
An axe stood beside the block, which is kept on exhibition in one of the rooms in which Sir Walter Raleigh was confined.
“Where were the children of Edward murdered?” asked Frank Gray, after being shown the place of the execution of Anne Boleyn.
“In the Bloody Tower,” said the guide. “I am not hallowed to admit visitors into that.”
“We are a class in an American school. Could you not make some arrangement to admit us?” asked Wyllys.
TRIAL OF CHARLES I.
The guide left the party a few minutes, and then returned with a bunch of keys.
He led the way to a small room in which the little sons of Edward had been lodged, to be accessible to the murderers. Here the unhappy children were smothered in bed. The room, apart from its dreadful associations, was a pleasant one looking out on the Thames.
The party was next shown the stairs at the foot of which the remains of the princes were discovered.
“I can imagine,” said Ernest Wynn, “the life of the boys in the Tower. How they went from window to window and looked out on the Thames, the sunlight, and the sky as we do now; how they saw the bright, happy faces pass, and children in the distance at play; how they watched, it may be, the lights in their dead father’s palace at night, and how they wondered why the freedom of the gay world beyond the prison was denied them. It is said that an old man who loved them used to play on some instrument in the evening under the walls of the Tower, and thus express to them his sympathy which he could not do in words.”
“The burial of Richard III., who caused the death of the royal children,” said Master Lewis, “was almost as pitiful as that of the princes themselves. After the fatal battle, his naked body was thrown upon a sorry steed and carried over the bridge to Leicester amid derision and scorn. For two hot summer days it was exposed to the jeers of the mob, and then was laid in a tomb costing £10 1s., to rest fifty years. The tomb was dashed in pieces during the Reformation, the bones thrown into the river and the stone coffin, according to tradition, used as a horse-trough.”
The collection of armor in an apartment of the Tower called the Horse Armory, a building over one hundred and fifty feet long, presented a spectacle that filled our visitors with wonder. It seemed like a sudden reproduction of the faded days of chivalry. On each side of the room was a row of knights in armor, in different attitudes, looking as though they were real knights under some spell of enchantment, waiting for the magic word to start them into life again.
BURIAL OF RICHARD.
The Jewel Tower did not so much excite the boys’ astonishment. It was like a costumer’s shop; and even the royal crown of England wore an almost ridiculous look, civilization and republican progress have so far outgrown these theatrical playthings. The Queen’s diadem, as it is called, was indeed a glitter of diamonds, and the royal sceptres of various devices carried one back to the days of Queen Esther.
THE TOWER OF LONDON.
“Among the stories told of the prisoners in the Tower,” said Master Lewis, “there is one that is pleasant to remember. Sir Henry Wyat was confined here in a dark low cell, where he suffered from cold and hunger. A cat came to visit him at times, and used to lie in his bosom and warm him. One day the cat caught a pigeon and brought it to him to eat. The keeper heard of pussy’s devotion to the prisoner, and treated him more kindly. When Wyat was released, he became noted for his fondness for cats.”
Leaving the Tower, the boys stopped to look at the Traitor’s Gate, which had clanged behind so many illustrious prisoners brought to the prison in the fatal barge; Cranmer, More, Anne Boleyn, bad men and good men, how it swung behind them all, and ended even hope! With sober faces the boys turned away.
The Zoölogical Gardens in Regent’s Park presented the boys, on the day after their visit to the Tower, a more cheerful scene. Who that has read of the London “Zoo” has not wished to visit it? Here specimens of the whole animal kingdom may be seen, and one wanders among the immense cages, artificial ponds, bear-pits, enclosures of tropical animals, reptile dens, feeling as free and secure as Adam appears in the picture of Naming the Creation.
Here, unlike a menagerie, the animals all have room for the comforts of existence. The rhinoceroses have a pond in which to stand in the mud, and the hippopotami may sport as in their native rivers.
The British Museum, with its Roman sculptures, Elgin marbles, and almost innumerable classic antiquities, and St. Paul’s with its fifty monuments of England’s heroes and benefactors, presented to the Class an extended view of the world’s history. Sight-seeing became almost bewildering, and when it was asked what place they next should visit, Tommy Toby replied,—
“I feel as though I had seen almost enough.”
“Let us visit Madame Tussaud’s wax works,” said Master Lewis.
“Are they like Mrs. Jarley’s ‘wax figgers?’” said Tommy; “if so I would like to go. Who was Madame Tussaud?”
“She was a little French lady who took casts of faces of great men, sometimes after their death or execution, and who died herself some twenty or more years ago, at the age of ninety years.”
The price of the exhibition was a shilling, and—
“For the Chamber of Horrors a sixpence hextra,” said the man admitting the party. Each one paid the “hextra” sixpence.
There were three hundred figures in all, supposed to be exact representations of the persons when living. In a room called the Hall of Kings were fifty figures of kings and queens, reproducing to the life these generally condemned players on the stage of English history.
A clever, winsome old man sat on one of the benches in the place, holding a programme in his hand, and now and then raising his head, as from studying the paper, to scrutinize one or another of the astonishing works of art.
Tommy sat down beside the much interested, benevolent-looking old gentleman, and said,—
“It was not George Wilkes Booth who killed President Lincoln, it was—
“Well, if this don’t cap the whole! Why, you are a ‘figger,’ too.”
And so the mild, attentive-looking old gentleman proved to be.
The Chamber of Horrors revived the feeling the visitors had felt in the Tower. It was a collection of representations of criminals. Among the relics is the blade of the guillotine used during the Reign of Terror in France, which is said to have cut off two thousand heads.
WOLSEY SERVED BY NOBLES.
Hampton Court Palace, the gift of Cardinal Wolsey to Henry VIII., and probably the most magnificent present that a prelate ever gave a king, next received our tourists’ attention. The palace originally consisted of five courts, only a part of which now remain, but which assist the fancy in stereoscoping the old manorial splendor. Here Wolsey lived in vice-regal pomp, and had nearly one thousand [!-- original location of 'Wolsey served by nobles' --] [!-- blank page --] persons to do his house-keeping, and noble lords, on state occasions, waited upon him upon bended knees.
The establishment at this time contained fifteen hundred rooms.
WHITEHALL.
Edward VI., the last of the boy-kings of England, a youth noted for his piety and love of learning, was born here, and here spent in scholarly occupations a part of his short life. Catharine Howard, who for a long time held the affections of Henry VIII., and who in his best years greatly influenced his conduct by her wisdom and accomplishments, was first acknowledged as queen here; and here also Henry married another Catharine,—Catharine Parr, his sixth and last wife. Bloody Mary kept Christmas here in 1557, when the great hall was lighted with one thousand lamps.
Our visitors found Hampton Court open to the public,—a place of rare freedom where people go out from London and enjoy the grounds much as though it were their own. It is in fact a grand picture gallery and a public garden.
WOLSEY’S PALACE.
“Wolsey gave this palace to the king,” said Master Lewis; “and the king was sporting in the palace when he received the news of the death of the Cardinal, who was stricken with a mortal sickness near Leicester Abbey, soon after having been arrested for high treason. The sad event did not seem to give the king the slightest pain. Such is the value of the presents of a corrupt friendship.
“Charles I. resided here at times. Here he brought his young bride when all London was reeking with the pestilence.
“Charles had three beautiful children, and was fond of their company. Once, it is said, when he was with them at a window of Hampton Court Palace, a gypsy appeared before him and asked for charity. He and the children laughed at her grotesque appearance, which angered her, when she took from her basket a glass and held it up to the king. He looked into it and saw his head severed from his shoulders.
“The king gave her money.
“‘A dog shall die in this room,’ she said, ‘and then the kingdom which you will lose shall be restored to your family.’
DEATH OF CARDINAL WOLSEY.
“Many years passed; and Oliver Cromwell, attended by his faithful dog, came to Hampton Court Palace and slept in this room. When he awoke in the morning, the dog was dead.
“‘The kingdom has departed from me,’ he said, recalling the gypsy’s prophecy; and so it proved.
“Of course the story of the gypsy’s mirror is untrue, but the legend is a part of the old romance of the palace; and such poetic incidents, though false colored lights, serve to impress the facts of history more vividly on the mind.
CHILDREN OF CHARLES I.
“This legend of Charles I.,” continued Master Lewis, “reminds me of a more pleasant story, which I will tell you, now that you are at the palace where the king brought his bride when life looked so fair and promising. I will call the story—