The esplanade or parade ground of the castle covers about six acres. Over the drawbridge, between the low protecting batteries, along the ramparts we pass to the strong gate that gives us admission to the inner fort, which contains the older portions of the castle. In this pile of buildings on the east side are, what we more specially came to see, the state apartments of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the wall down which her infant son was lowered in a basket. Here, too, we see the crown-room containing the regalia of Scotland, the crown, scepter, and sword of state, and the lord-treasurer’s rod of office. From the ramparts we are shown northward the magnificent view of the new town, while to the east lies the old town, backed by Arthur’s Seat. The line of street eastward from the castle to Holyrood House, contains many of Edinburgh’s most prominent buildings, both new and old. Near the foot of the hill is the new Assembly Hall, the meeting place of the General Assembly of the Established Church of Scotland, and near it the Church Normal Schools and the extensive buildings of the Free Church College, and the Parliament House, whose carved, oaken-roofed hall—the Westminster Hall of Edinburgh—was used by the Parliament before the union with England. Near at hand is the old Cathedral of St. Giles, whose space after the Reformation was divided into four churches, in one of which John Knox was wont to preach. We pass near his house also, and approach the memorial of Scotland’s ancient splendor, the ancient palace and abbey of Holyrood. The ruins of the chapel where Mary Stuart was married to Darnley, and where King Charles the First was crowned, lie behind the present structure, which was rebuilt after the destruction of the old palace by Cromwell. The spot abounds in historical associations. It was a most powerful institution as an abbey, the abbot holding regular court like other barons: as a royal refuge it sheltered Charles the Tenth of France during the Revolution, and as a residence has received at times nearly all the crowned heads of England, not excepting Queen Victoria, who sometimes stops here en route to Balmoral, and who held a levee here in 1842. Yet of all its associations, that with Mary Stuart is the one most familiar, and perhaps most painfully interesting to the stranger. Here are the rooms she last occupied, her bed-chamber remaining as she left it, here the cabinet where Rizzio was murdered. These apartments are in the northwest corner, and the oldest portion of the present quadrangular building.
But, interesting as is all that is connected with a historic or tragic past, we must not overlook the city of to-day. Records of what Edinburgh has been, as found in ruins, in buildings, in monuments, in books, would require a volume, and records of her present condition, another. We can only glance at a few of the more marked evidences of her material advancement. Formerly she accommodated her growing population by building higher and higher in the air, but more recently they have filled up the ravine and extended in every direction on the ground. Her population increases, though not with the rapidity of Glasgow, for she has no great trade or manufacture to attract the rural districts. The women exceed the men by some twenty thousand. Her moral condition has been of the best, her sanitary condition unfortunately of the worst, but great improvements have been made in drainage and in destruction of dilapidated dwellings, ventilation of unhealthy courts, and especially in cleansing of the streets. In this latter particular Edinburgh is better cared for then any other large town in the kingdom. While the city has been, like the rest of the world, wofully behind in caring for the bodies of the healthful, her numerous hospitals, public and private, testify her kindness to the ill. Nothing of prevention and everything in the way of cure seems to be the motto of modern philanthropy. Churches for souls, university, colleges, every type of school, free and charitable, for the brain; all stress laid upon what the people believe, what they learn, what they do, and what they wear, combined with utter disregard of what they breathe or what they eat. There is no disregard of what they drink, however, even in this western Athens, for Edinburgh can boast larger breweries than any other place in the world. But then she boasts larger printing houses and more of them than almost any other. Printing is indeed her principal craft; scholarship flourishes; learning is reckoned at its true value; philanthropy is active and earnest, and the city abounds in monuments of all; there is an air of vigorous heartiness in the people that is tonic in its effect, like the feel of a country morning with the first crisp frost in the air.
From Edinburgh to London we take the Great Western Railway, one of the best managed in the kingdom. Already we have learned that we have no more “baggage,” and how to “own our luggage;” that there are no cars in this country, but carriages, and “luggage vans.” The man who locks us in our own compartment is not a conductor, but a “guard;” we hear nothing of railroads, but a good deal of “ways” and trains. After days of steady running hither and thither, to see this, to hear that, to learn the other, it is agreeable to lean back and doze and dream while the swift train bears us away from the highlands and the heather. We sleep in England at the quaint old Roman town of Chester, and take time enough in the morning to visit the cathedral, walk through the queer streets where the covered sidewalk for foot passengers is on the roofs, and the carriage-way is sunken several feet below the level of the road. Anxious as we were to reach London, we could not resist stopping at Warwick for a couple of days, resting at the Old Warwick Arms, and crowding every hour with a living interest hardly to be aroused in any other part of England. For from this point a drive of eight miles through a charming country takes us to Stratford-on-Avon, and to the oft-described home and tomb of Shakspere. This is almost always a white day in the tourist’s memory, for, through all the delightful drive, at the house of Shakspere, in the room where he was born, by the desk at which he sat at school, in the cottage of Ann Hathaway, and by his tomb in the church, one feels in a new world. A crowd of visitors may throng the cottage and the house, and one hears all sorts of chatter, but they and we and all modern folk seem strange and out of place. And I doubt not many minds have found it hard to associate the place with Shakspere at all. It doesn’t suit our idea of the man or his work, and it is hard to dispossess the mind of the idea that we are lending ourselves to a little farce.
We drive slowly back along the Avon at sunset, and give a second day to Warwick Castle and a drive to the ruins of Kenilworth. In the former we have the best representation of an old English castle that we shall see; one all the more impressive because it is the first seen; in the latter the grandest ruin that England can show. Both have many historical associations, but we have not yet escaped from the dominion of Scott, and have just re-read his “Kenilworth,” and naturally look for traces of Queen Bess, and of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose tomb is in the Church of St. Mary in Warwick. So we sit down under the ivy-crowned battlements, and listen while one reads aloud the account of the five days of entertainment that Leicester gave the Queen, and imagination peoples the ruined banquet hall with the knights and ladies fair who made the place so gay.
Yet, strange to say, such dreams fade as we drive home to dinner, and find us quite ready, after a refreshing sleep in the queerest and quaintest of all English inns, to depart for classic Oxford, which lies direct upon our London route. Time was when no more venerable and imposing architectural effect could be found in all Europe than that produced by the groups of buildings along the main street of Oxford, belonging to the twenty colleges that make the University. But, in these latter days, so many of the colleges have been remodeled, or restored, that the air of venerable antiquity is entirely lost. Outside the college buildings, new hotels, a town hall, savings banks, a corn exchange, and other mercantile structures materially alter the effect of the place, which owed its character formerly to the University alone. Among the colleges themselves, University and Exeter have new chapels, Jesus College a new Gothic front, Merton’s Library has been remodeled, and the old gate-house of Brasennose restored. The new buildings, given at a cost of thirty thousand pounds, by Miss Brackenbury, the daughter of an old scholar, are very fine, and the new Gothic building, called the Union Debating and Reading Room, decorated in part by Rossetti, from the legends of King Arthur, is a great ornament to the group. The new Keble College, in memory of the author of “The Christian Year,” is near the University Museum, which is the principal addition to the group of buildings, which we can not mention in detail. As the most important of all institutions of learning, Oxford University must have an interest for every lover of knowledge. Its origin is not certainly known. Its government is by statutes, originating with the University authorities, and confirmed by the kings of England. Its chancellor was formerly an ecclesiastic, and chosen for three years; now he is chosen for life, and from among nobles of distinction who have been members of the University. Its professors are paid partly by the crown, partly from the University chest, and partly from estates left for this purpose. Both Oxford and Cambridge have the privilege of choosing two representatives in Parliament. There is no end to what may be seen and learned if the traveler can linger a few weeks just here. In that event, leave the hotel, which is very luxurious, but very dear, and take lodgings in some one of the many comfortable houses, kept for that purpose, within easy walking distance of the libraries and museums. There is only one danger, and that is, that the longer one stays the longer one wishes to stay, and if we should linger to see one moiety of what we might enjoy, our trip to London would be indefinitely deferred. So we decide against the lodging, and take instead—the train.
The one blessed thing about London, especially to travelers who have rushed through miles of country and crowded the sight with constantly varying scenes, is that it can not be seen in a day. We might as well try to eat a life-time’s Thanksgiving banquet at once, or to grow from youth to age in a night. London is of all places in the world the one to stay in, and we have come to stay. Not at any so-called American boarding-house, not even at the great caravansary in Portland Place, or down by the Alexandra Gate, but in our own hired house. A wee place, not far from St. James in Piccadilly, whose master was once upon a time head butler to lord somebody or other, and whose mistress was the maid to my lady. And butler and maid saved their wages and were wed, and now there they are living in the basement of this their home, he to wait at table, with an air that makes our masculine friends feel, as if he were saying, “Yes, my lord,” and “No, my lord;” and she to keep all tidy and bright in our tiny parlor and dining room, and the bedrooms above. Here we can rest until the home letters are written and the books read, and we are ready to attack the great city with real zest, happy in the thought of what it has in store. Our life will cost us half what it would at the great hotels, where we should meet only the American life we know so well. English life we can see only in the streets, in church, in making purchases, in books, and in its out of door public aspects, unless we are indeed so fortunate as to have brought letters that shall open English homes. Then, indeed, we come to know England and the English in a way to appreciate its best, and to estimate justly what seem to us some of its worst characteristics.
To its social life, of any class whatever, introductions are the only key. To its political movements the ordinary tourist has little access beyond what the newspapers give, and that he may have at home. To be an eye-witness of momentous events or of the circumstances that shape a nation’s destinies is hardly to be hoped. Her history lies all about in monuments, and ruins, and palaces, and institutions, volumes in changeless stone. Her general conditions of prosperity, commercial and other, may be guessed from what one sees, and, reading backward from effect to cause, the thoughtful observer may determine something of individual and national character. Something comes to him by intuition, something by observation, and slowly, by ways he knows and ways he knows not, he feels that he is coming to a knowledge of England, of English people, and English life. London of all places seems the spot to bide. He haunts her galleries and walks her streets, and dreams in her abbey, and sits in her churches, and finds he is claiming her history as his own. If Americans must live anywhere out of America, London, with its teeming varied interests, its thousand worlds in one, is the place for him to live. What sights he will see there, what things he will do there, everybody knows. Let art, or literature, or commerce, or religion, or science be his hobby, he will find companions enough and to spare. There is room for everything in London, notwithstanding it is the most crowded place under the sun; room even for us who, while jogging along together, yet have each cast our nets in separate streams. What we shall gather, who can tell?
[To be continued.]
