ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS.
CHAPTER I.
I have undertaken in this book a series of very familiar and informal talks with my readers about English literary people, and the ways in which they worked; and also about the times in which they lived and the places where they grew up. We shall have, therefore, a good deal of concern with English history; and with English geography too—or rather topography: and I think that I have given a very fair and honest descriptive title to the material which I shall set before my readers, in calling it a book about English Lands and Letters and Kings.
It appears to me that American young people have an advantage over British-born students of our History and Literature—in the fact that the localities consecrated by great names or events have more illuminating power to us, who encounter them rarely and after voyage over sea, than to the Englishman who lives and grows up beside them. Londoners pass Bolt Court, Fleet Street, and Dr. Johnson’s tavern a hundred times a year with no thought but of the chops and the Barclay’s ale to be had there. But to the cultivated American these localities start a charming procession, in which the doughty old Dictionary-maker, with his staff and long brown coat and three cornered hat, is easily the leader.
For my own part, when my foot first struck the hard-worked pavement of London Bridge, even the old nursery sing-song came over me with the force of a poem,—
As I was going over London Bridge
I found a penny and bought me a kid.
So, too—once upon a time—on a bright May-day along the Tweed, I was attracted by an old square ruin of a tower—very homely—scarcely picturesque: I had barely curiosity enough to ask its name. A stone-breaker on the high-road told me it was Norham Castle; and straightway all the dash and clash of the poem of “Marmion”[1] broke around me.
Now I do not think our cousins the Britishers, to whom the loveliest ruins become humdrum, can be half as much alive as we, to this sort of enjoyment.