HY, Sir, I do think the times 'ave changed a great deal, but I am afeered they will change wuss nor ever agin. They do say as how Gladstone has, wen he likes, a will of his own to overturn the Crown itself. And I know 'is son—'a past eight-and-twenty years the young one is. He is just a bit of a curate in yon church of St. Mary's, Lambith; and I can say for 'im as he is a hard-working man—it's no bed of ease, the parish—and 'is father, who is now more than the Queen herself, might have given young Gladstone the richest living in Ingland, and nobody to say boo to him for the favor. Yisar, I'm sixty past, last Miklemas, and man and boy I've lived in Lambeth; and now I'm broke down with the parlyatics—but I once was a good man on the river, and could pull a wherry or waterman's tub with the best on 'em."
The murky beams of an August sun were falling slantingly on the muddy waters beneath my feet as I leaned over the stone balustrades of Westminster Bridge, which connects the ancient borough of Westminster with the Surrey side of the River Thames. Far down the river, I could see craft of every description lying in the stone docks, the pride and boast of all Englishmen. Bridge after bridge loomed up in the sun's hazy beams. Waterloo, Charing Cross, Blackfriars, Vauxhall, and Lambeth Bridges, crowded with traffic and swarming with the wild, heedless, ever-bustling life of the greatest city of the modern world. Under the piers of this grand bridge, nearly a thousand feet long, swept coal barges, wherries bearing noisy cockney watermen, who halloed to each other from roast-beef stomachs and brown-stout lungs, and every minute the paddling, roaring steamboats, peculiar to the Thames,—each boat about sixty feet long, their clean black hulls set off to advantage by the narrow streaks of red paint that served as an ornament to their keels, dashed to and fro, in and out of the bridge, conveying homeward clerks, shop boys, barristers, solicitors, M. P.'s, business men from the city, physicians, and here and there a stray white neck-clothed curate of the Established Church, disgusted with the latest work of Parliament, while, within a few feet of him, scarcely conscious of the visible triumph that shone over his face, sat a Dissenting preacher reading Bright's last effort in the Commons on behalf of Disestablishment.
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT.
On either side of the Thames, beginning at one end and ceasing at the other end of the Houses of Parliament, the magnificent embankment of hewn granite stone stretches, thirty or forty feet in width, for a mile each way, thousands of foot passengers traversing its massive blocks, each man and woman busy with his or her thoughts, or preoccupied with the passing vagaries of the hour.
VIEW FROM WESTMINSTER BRIDGE.
On my right is Westminster Palace and the Houses of Parliament, the finest modern gothic buildings in the world. The dozen towers and belfries of this truly glorious edifice, gilded over with brass, glisten with the refulgent hues of the dying sunset,—for nine hundred and forty feet on the river, these massive, brown buildings, (that, on the first view, bring up memories of some grand, old Gothic Cathedral,) stretch away with tower, buttress, and pinnacle, presenting a river facade which cannot be equaled by any other edifice for legislative purposes in the world.
Beyond, to the left, on the Surrey side, I can see Lambeth Palace, with its faded reddish-brown brick piled up to the clouds, where resides his Grace, the high and puissant spiritual prince, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England. The feverish broil and confusion of the great city are all round me, and are present in, and to an extent pervade, the air above me. The whistling and puffing of the locomotives may be heard night and day as they sweep to and fro, conveying passengers and freight to and from all parts of England and the Continent, over Charing Cross Bridge. The old man by my side on the bridge, with whom I have been conversing for half an hour, is an intelligent artisan of the conservative class, benumbed and enfeebled by illness, and his poor old watery, dazed utterances confess to his astonishment at the marvelous rapidity with which one of the great strongholds of every Englishman's belief,—the Established Church, has been over-turned by the now foremost man in Britain—William Ewart Gladstone. The old man has relations in America, somewhere,—he thinks, near Cincinnati, and he asks after their health and well-being with the most implicit trust that I should know all about them, believing that the Queen City is only a few miles distant by rail from New York. Yet the relatives of his youth and manhood have been absent over twenty years, and are possibly all dead and dust by this time.
