It was just the time of the Fair, which had drawn together a great number of curiosities; among others, a beautiful collection of wild beasts. Two Bengal tigers, of an enormous size, were so perfectly tame, that even ladies and children were allowed to enter their cage, or the animals were let out in the riding school where the collection was exhibited. No dog could be more gentle; but I doubt whether our police would have suffered such experiments. A remarkable animal was the horned horse, or Nyl Ghau, from the Himalaya mountains,—handsome and fleet, and in some respects very strangely formed. The beautiful wild ass of Persia, which they say is swifter and more untireable than a horse, and can live for weeks without food, was new to me. There were also here, as in the collection of animals on the Pfaueninsel near Berlin, a giant and a dwarf.
London, Oct. 6th.
Before I left Nottingham I visited the neighbouring seat of Lord Middleton, which is worth seeing. The park offered little remarkable. There was a curious old picture—a faithful portrait of the house and gardens as they existed two hundred years ago. It is very interesting; the more so, as you see the family in the strangest dresses, with a great company and numerous attendants, walking in the garden, and as the noble owner therein represented is the same who is so often mentioned in connexion with the celebrated ghost story. Every one ought to have pictures of this kind painted for his successors: the comparisons they suggest are always amusing, and sometimes instructive.
I reached St. Albans in the night, and saw the celebrated Abbey by the light of the moon, and of lanterns. The clerk was quickly awakened, and conducted me thither. I first admired the exterior of the building, built by the Saxons, in the eighth century, of indestructible Roman bricks, and then entered the imposing interior. The nave of the church is doubtless one of the largest in the world; it is more than six hundred feet long. There are many beautiful stone carvings; and although little could be distinctly seen by so feeble a light, the general effect by this strange and uncertain illumination, with our dark figures in the middle, and the sounds of the midnight bell from the tower, was most romantic and awful.
This was still more the case when we descended into the vault where, in an open leaden coffin, lies the skeleton of the Duke of Gloucester who was poisoned six hundred years ago by Cardinal Beaufort. Time has rendered it as brown and smooth as polished mahogany; and curious antiquarians have already robbed it of several bones. The clerk, who was an Irishman, seized one of the leg-bones without ceremony, and brandishing it in the air like a cudgel, he remarked that this bone had become so beautiful and hard with time, that it would make an excellent shillelah. What would the haughty Duke have said, if he could have known how his remains would be treated by such ignoble hands? The magnificent oak ceiling, more than 1000 years old, is a glorious proof of the solid architecture of those times. It is still as beautiful and perfect as if there were no cyphers after the unit. The painted windows, with the golden tomb of St. Alban, were unhappily almost entirely destroyed in Cromwell’s time.
I reached London early enough to repose half the night; and my first business in the morning was to finish this letter, already swollen to a packet. In a few hours I hope it will be on its way.
Do not be impatient therefore; and receive this letter with the same affectionate indulgence as its numerous predecessors.
Your faithful L——.