"On a lovely June morning, in the year 1897, a wondrous pageant moved through the enchanted streets of London. Squadron by squadron, and battery by battery, a superb cavalry and artillery went by—the symbol of the fighting strength of the United Kingdom. There went by also troops of mounted men, more carelessly riding and more lightly equipped—those who came from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to give a deeper meaning to the royal triumph; and black-skinned soldiers and yellow, and the fine representatives of the Indian warrior races. Generals and statesmen went by, and a glittering cavalcade of English and Continental princes, and the whole procession was a preparation—for what? A carriage at last, containing a quiet-looking old lady, in dark and simple attire; and at every point where this carriage passed through seven miles of London streets, in rich quarters and poor, a shock of strong emotion shot through the spectators, on pavement and on balcony, at windows and on housetops. They had seen the person in whom not only were vested the ancient kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, but who was also at once the symbol and the actual bond of union of the greatest and most diversified of secular empires."[1]
The inscription, cut, with Roman simplicity, into the broad paving-stone, runs thus:
HERE QUEEN VICTORIA
RETURNED THANKS TO
ALMIGHTY GOD FOR THE
SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY
OF HER ACCESSION.
June 22, a.d. 1897.
By how many generations,—for how many centuries,—will these words, I wonder, be read,—the distant message of Time from the buried Victorian Era?
Beyond, Queen Anne's statue, in flowing curls and a "sacque" robe, stands, with some dignity, facing busy Ludgate Hill, and surrounded by a circular, prison-like grating. Down towards noisy Fleet Street her gaze wanders; down to where the rumble of many wheels, the sound of many voices, make a distant murmur like the stormy sea, broken, at intervals, by a shriek from that most picturesque of railways, the iron "Bridge of Steam," that, ever and anon, emits a puff of smoke and a red spark into the general "fermenting-vat," the ingulfing vortex of life and energy below. For this is the roaring Niagara of London, the loom of Time, that never ceases, that ever fashions Order out of Disorder, ever, as by a magician's wand, raises system out of chaos. Kings, and even thrones, may "pass to rise no more;" but the busy phœnix-heart of London, like the vestals' fire, must ceaselessly burn; ever fed, ever renewed, ever immortal, ever young.
"Lord Tennyson always delighted in the 'central roar' of London. Whenever he and I (says his son) "went to London, one of the first things we did was to walk to the Strand and Fleet Street. 'Instead of the stuccoed houses in the West End, this is the place where I should like to live,' he would say." He was also fond of looking at London from the bridges over the Thames, and of going into St. Paul's, and into the Abbey. One day in 1842 Fitzgerald records a visit to St. Paul's with him when he said, 'Merely as an enclosed space in a huge city this is very fine,' and when they got out into the open, in the midst of the 'central roar,' 'This is the mind; that is a mood of it.'"—(Tennyson's Life, i. 183.)
St. Michael's, Paternoster Royal.