"No. 5 also showed me the illuminated manuscripts of the collection; they are kept locked in glass-topped cases, and a curtain protects them from the light. We saw also the oldest copy of the Bible in the world.
"The art of printing has brought incalculable blessings; but as I looked at a neat manuscript book by Queen Elizabeth, copied from another as a present to her father, I could not help thinking it was much better than worsted work!
"A much-worn prayer-book was shown me, said to be the one used by Lady Jane Grey when on the scaffold. Nothing makes me more conscious that I am on foreign soil than the constant recurrence of associations connected with the executioner's block. We hung the Quakers and we burned the witches, but we are careful not to remember the localities of our barbarisms; we show instead the Plymouth Rock or the Washington Elm.
"Among other things, we were shown the 'Magna Charta'—a few fragments of worn-out paper on which some words could be traced; now carefully preserved in a frame, beneath a glass.
"Thus far England has impressed me seriously; I cannot imagine how it has ever earned the name of 'Merrie England.'
"August 19. There are four great men whose haunts I mean to seek, and on whose footsteps I mean to stand: Newton, Shakspere, Milton, and Johnson.
"To-day I told the driver to take me to St. Martin's, where the guide-book says that Newton lived. He put me down at the Newton Hotel, but I looked in vain to its top to see anything like an observatory.
"I went into a wine-shop near, and asked a girl, who was pouring out a dram, in which house Newton lived. She pointed, not to the hotel, but to a house next to a church, and said, 'That's it—don't you see a place on the top? That's where he used to study nights.'
"It is a little, oblong-shaped observatory, built apparently of wood, and blackened by age. The house is a good-looking one—it seems to be of stone. The girl said the rooms were let for shops.
"Next I told the driver to take me to Fleet street, to Gough square, and to Bolt court, where Johnson lived and died.