Next after the state apartments St. George's Chapel engaged our attention. This chapel was begun by Edward IV. in 1461, and not completed till early in the sixteenth century. The architectural beauty of the interior is indescribable. The richly-ornamented roof and the great east window are most exquisitely done, and it is a wonder that tourists, authors, and the guide-books do not say more than they do about it. Knights of the Garter are installed here. Their banners and escutcheons hang above their carved oaken stalls. A wrought steel screen, by that cunning artificer in iron, Quintin Matsys, stands above the last resting-place of Edward IV. Here, below the marble pavement, rests the gigantic frame of Henry VIII.; here slumber Charles I. and Henry VI, George III., IV., and William IV. The monument to the Princess Charlotte is a magnificent group, representing her upon a couch as if just expired, and a sheet thrown over the body, while her maids by its side, with mantles thrown over their heads, are bowed down with grief. Above, the spirit is represented as an angel soaring towards heaven—a figure exquisitely cut, and so gracefully poised that the spectator half expects to see it rise, float away into the air, and soar out of sight. The effect is much heightened by the admirable manner in which it has been managed to have the light fall upon this beautiful sculpture.
There is a home park to Windsor Castle; and how large, think you, American reader, is this home park for British royalty? Why, only five hundred acres! This is connected with Windsor Great Park by the Long Walk, a splendid avenue lined with elms, which avenue is continued on for three miles. The Great Park has one thousand eight hundred acres within its area. Here was Windsor Forest, Herne's Oak, where Herne the Hunter was said to dash forth upon his steed, and where old Falstaff,—
"A Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i' the forest,"—
made his assignation with the merry wives of Windsor. Old Windsor itself is some little distance away, nestled down on the banks of the River Thames; and though we saw some ancient houses and an inn or two, there were none that, in our brief sojourn, we could conjure by imagination into such a one as fat Jack and his friends, Bardolph and Pistol, swilled sack in, nor anything that looked like the Garter Inn, or Mistress Quickly. One inn rejoices in the name of Star and Garter, but the briskness and modern style of it savored not of Jack Falstaff's time.
We closed our visit to Windsor with an inspection of the royal stables, or Queen's Mews, as they call them here. These stables were very well arranged and kept, and contain nearly a hundred horses when all are in. Many were away with the family, who were absent at the time of our visit; but there were the horses for park drives, the horses for road drives, &c., while there were also a dozen or more very handsome barouches, pony and basket carriages, and seven handsome carriages for the queen and suite to go to and from railway stations, Clarences, and various other vehicles, among them a large open-sided affair, with a white tent-like roof, a present from Louis Philippe. Considering that this is only one of the Queen's Mews, it seemed as if this part of her "establishment" was regal indeed. After patting the fat old white pony, which her majesty always uses in her morning drives in the park when at Windsor, we presented our cicerone with an English shilling, which, notwithstanding he wore the queen's livery, he did not scorn to receive, and, taking a glance at the interior of the Riding School, which is a handsomely-arranged room about two hundred feet long, where scions of royalty may be taught to
"Witch the world with noble horsemanship,"
we bade adieu to Windsor.
If there is any one thing aggravating to the American tourist, on his first trip to England, it is the supreme indifference of the English press to American affairs. Accustomed to the liberal enterprise of the press of his own country, which, with a prodigality of expenditure, stops at nothing when news is to be had, and which every morning actually gives him news from all parts of the world, in addition to copious extracts from foreign and domestic papers, he is struck with astonishment at the comparative lack of enterprise shown by the London papers.
The London Times, which for the past half century it has been the custom for American papers to gratuitously advertise in paragraphs about its wonderful system and enterprise, can no more compare with the New York Tribune and New York Herald in lateness of news, amount of news by telegraph, and correspondence, than a stage coach with a locomotive.
Marked features in the Times are the finished style of its editorials and correspondence, and its parliamentary reports, although the latter, I hardly think, are much better made up than the American Congressional reports in our own papers. But where the inferiority of the English, and the superiority of the American papers is most conspicuous, is in the matter of telegraphic despatches, the American papers using the telegraph without stint, and the English very sparingly. The New York Tribune will generally give its readers, every morning, from five to eight times as much by home lines of wire as the London Times. To be sure we have a much larger extent of territory, at home, that the wires go over; but then the American papers generally give more telegraphic news from the continent of Europe even, than the London papers.