The month of October was passed in the southwest of England, and there dwell in my mind recollections of Chatsworth, Haddon Hall, and Bristol; but, above all, of a stay with the historian Freeman at Wells. The whole life of that charming cathedral town and its neighborhood was delightful. Freeman's kindness opened all doors to us. The bishop, Lord Arthur Hervey, showed us kindly hospitality at his grand old castle, which we had entered by a drawbridge over the moat. Of especial interest to me was a portrait of one of his predecessors—dear old Bishop Ken, whose morning and evening hymns are among the most beautiful ties between England and the United States. In the evening, dining with the magistrates and lawyers, I heard good stories, among them some characterizing various eminent members of the profession, and of these I especially remember one at the expense of the late Lord Chancellors Westbury and Cranworth. Lord Cranworth, after the amalgamation of law and equity, was for some time in the habit of going to sit with the new judges in order to familiarize himself with the reformed practice, whereupon some one asked Lord Westbury, "Why does 'Cranny' go to sit with the judges?" to which Westbury answered, "Doubtless from a childish fear of being alone in the dark."
Next day I was invited to sit with the squires in the Court of Quarter Sessions, and was greatly interested in their mode of administering justice. There was a firmness, but at the same time a straightforward common sense about it all which greatly pleased me. A visit to Wells Cathedral with Freeman was in its way ideal; for never in all my studies of mediaeval buildings have I had so good a guide. But perhaps the most curious experience of our stay was an attendance upon a political meeting at Glastonbury, in the Gladstonian interest. The first speech was made by the candidate, Sir Hugh Davey; and in his anxiety to propitiate his hearers he began by addressing them as men whose ancestors had for centuries shown their devotion to free principles, and had especially given proof of this by hanging the last Abbot of Glastonbury at the old tower above the town. But, shortly afterward, when Freeman began his speech, it was evident that his love of historical truth and his devotion to church principles would not permit him to pass this part of Davey's harangue unnoticed. Referring then respectfully to his candidate for Parliament, Freeman went on to say in substance that his distinguished friend was in error; that the last Abbot of Glastonbury was not a traitor, but a martyr—a martyr to liberty, and a victim of that arch-enemy of liberty, Henry VIII. Any one who had heard Freeman in America as a lecturer would have been amazed at his ability as a political speaker. As a lecturer, trying to be eloquent while reading a manuscript, he was generally ineffective and sometimes comical,—worse even than the general run of lecturers in the German universities, and that is saying much; but as a public speaker he was excellent—so much so that, congratulating him afterward, and bearing in mind the fact that he had been formerly defeated for Parliament, I assured him that if he would come to America and make speeches like that, we would most certainly put him in Congress and keep him there.
Toward the end of October we went on to Exeter, and there, at Heavitree Church, heard Bishop Bickersteth preach admirably, meeting him afterward at our luncheon with the vicar, and taking supper with him at the episcopal palace. He was perhaps best known in America as the author of the poem, "Yesterday, To-day, and Forever"; and of this he gave me a copy, remarking that every year he received from the American publisher a check for fifty pounds, though there was no copyright requiring any payment whatever. In his study he showed me a copy of "The Book Annexed," which presented the enrichments and emendations which a number of devout scholars and thinkers were endeavoring to make in the Prayer-book of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, and he spoke with enthusiasm of these additions, which, alas! have never yet been adopted.
Next came a visit to Torquay, where Kent's Cavern, with its prehistoric relics, interested me vastly. Looking at them, there could be no particle of doubt regarding the enormous antiquity of the human race. There were to be seen the evidences of man's existence scattered among the remains of animals long ago extinct—animals which must have lived before geological changes which took place ages on ages ago. Mixed with remains of fire and human implements and human bones were to be seen not only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave-bear, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer, which could have been deposited there only in a time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, saber-toothed tiger, and the like, which could have been deposited only when the climate was torrid. The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass through times of arctic cold, and times of torrid heat; times when great glaciers stretched far down into England and, indeed, into the Continent, and times when England had a land connection with the European continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle regions of England.
The change wrought by such discoveries as these, not only in England, but in Belgium, France, and elsewhere, as regards our knowledge of the antiquity of the human race and the character of the creation process, is one of the great things of our epoch.[11]
[11] I have discussed this more fully in my "History of the Warfare of Science with Theology," Vol. I, chap. vi.
Thence we visited various cathedral towns, being shown delightful hospitality everywhere. There remains vividly in my memory a visit to Worcester, where the dean, Lord Alwyn Compton, now Bishop of Ely, went over the cathedral with us, and showed us much kindness afterward at the deanery—a mediaeval structure, from the great window of which we looked over the Severn and the famous Cromwellian battle-field.
Salisbury we found beautiful as of old; then to Brighton and to "The Bungalow" of Halliwell-Phillips the Shaksperian scholar, and never have I seen a more quaint habitation. On the height above the town Phillips had brought together a number of portable wooden houses, and connected them with corridors and passages until all together formed a sort of labyrinth; the only clue being in the names of the corridors, all being chosen from Shakspere, and each being enriched with Shaksperian quotations appropriate and pithy. At his table during our stay we met various interesting guests, one of whom suggested the idea regarding the secret of Carlyle's cynicism and pessimism to which reference is made in my "Warfare of Science." Next came visits to various country houses, all delightful, and then a stay at Oxford, to which I was reinitiated by James Bryce; and for two weeks it was a round of interesting visits, breakfasts, luncheons, and dinners with the men best worth knowing at the various colleges. Interesting was a visit to All Souls College, which, having been founded as a place where sundry "clerks" should pray for the souls of those killed at the battle of Crecy, had, as Sir William Anson, its present head, showed me, begun at last doing good work after four hundred years of uselessness. In the chapel was shown me the restored reredos, which was of great size, extending from floor to ceiling, taking the place of the chancel window usual in churches, and made up of niches filled with statues of saints. As the heads of all the earlier statues had been knocked off during the fanatical period, there had been substituted, during the recent restoration, new statues of saints bearing the heads of noted scholars and others connected with the college, among which Max Muller once pointed out to me his own, and a very good likeness it was. Interesting to me were Bryce's rooms at Oriel, for they were those in which John Henry Newman had lived: at that hearth was warmed into life the Oxford Movement. At one of the Oriel dinners, Bryce spoke of the changes at Oxford within his memory as enormous, saying that perhaps the greatest of these was the preference given to laymen over clergymen as heads of colleges. An example of this was the president of Magdalen. I had met him not many years before in Switzerland, as a young man, and now he had become the head of this great college, one of the foremost in the university. This impressed me all the more because my memory suggested a comparison between him and the president at my first visit, thirty years before: Warren, the present president, being an active-minded layman hardly over thirty, and his predecessor, Routh, a doctor of divinity, who was then in his hundredth year. It was curious to see that, while this change had been made to lay control, various relics of clerical dominance were still in evidence, and, among these, the surplice worn by Bryce, a member of Parliament, when he read the lessons from the lectern in Oriel chapel. At another dinner I was struck by a remark of his, that our problems in America seemed to him simple and easy compared with those of England; but as I revise these recollections, twenty years later, and think of the questions presented by our acquisitions in the West Indies and in the Philippine and Hawaiian islands, as well as the negro problem in the South and Bryanism in the North, to say nothing of the development of the Monroe Doctrine and the growth of socialistic theories, the query comes into my mind as to what he would think to-day.
November 9, 1885.
Dining at All Souls with Professor Dicey, I met Professor Gardiner, the historian, whom I greatly liked; his lecture on "Ideas in English History," which I had heard in the afternoon, was suggestive, thorough, and interesting: he is evidently one of the historians whose work will last. In the hall I noted Lord Salisbury's portrait in the place of honor.