"I guess that is him," answered the guide. "I understand he was a literary man."
"Who was this chap Goldsmith? Was he the first pawnbroker, or the man who invented watches?"
"I think he had something to do with the watches," said our guide, awestricken by our profound knowledge.
"Who was this Salisbury?" we asked. "He must have been somebody important to have such a fine monument?"
"He was some rich lawyer chap," was the answer we received. We were certainly having our money's worth.
We wandered up and down the aisles; beneath whose flagstones rest Britain's honored dead.
"What strikes me most," said Robinson, "is not the number of tombs and monuments to the great, but the numberless monuments to nonentities that by some means have managed to creep into the shadow of greatness, by crowding upon the tombs of the Immortals in this Holy of Holies, the Temple of Fame of the British race."
After we had grilled our guide to our heart's content, and fed him till he almost fainted, we went around to have a look at Cromwell's monument and the spot in the great hall where Charles I. stood when he received his death sentence. Poor Charles, whose pictures look so much like his descendant William of Germany, the Kaiser, who has caused so much trouble for us all.
Of all the public buildings I have ever seen the great Hall of William Rufus at Westminster impressed me most. It is of the Norman order of architecture. The conception and simplicity of the structure is magnificent. King William announced to the banquetting courtiers, according to tradition, that this majestic structure was intended as an ante-room to the great Parliament Buildings which he intended to rear on the banks of the Thames. The person who reads the poetry of the stones inwardly curses the careless archer whose arrow cut short the career of this truly great king, for this is not the only great structure that "William the Red" conceived and commenced during his turbulent reign.
The three distinctive monuments of London are, this Hall of William the Red, the grim dominating lineaments shown in Cromwell's statue, and the noble well balanced head of the great Clive, the foremost of Empire builders.