London is not only the center of business but of literary, artistic and political activity. Especially is this true for Americans. All of our history prior to 1776 is English, and in the annals of the world 1776 is only the day before yesterday. Our writers, as soon as they get their feet on the ground at home, look to London, this clearing-house of literature as of money. London writers, from the time of Shakespeare to Dickens, Thackeray and Kipling, are ours just as much as they are England’s. Not an American but recognizes the names of Piccadilly, Hyde Park, Westminster, Temple Bar, Ludgate, the Tower, Tooley street, London Bridge, Charing Cross, Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Billingsgate, and other streets and places in London as familiarly as he does those of places in the nearest city to which he lives. A common history for more than a thousand years, a common literature which cannot be divided, and a common trend of religious and political thought make Great Britain and the United States one people although divided by an ocean and by arbitrary political lines. I think that up to a few years ago there was much prejudice in each country against the other. That has now practically disappeared. Englishmen on the continent and at home have fraternized with us Americans at every opportunity, and no place in London that I have gone but I have been received with unmistakable heartfelt kindness.
After getting comfortably settled the question comes to the tourist, “What first?” And there is so much in London we want to see, that it was a question. I suppose we answered it as every American would, Westminster Abbey. There we spent our first afternoon. I had been afraid of disappointment. I may say I am getting used to finding things which sounded and seemed big when viewed from Kansas, actually getting small and ordinary when right before us. But it was not so with Westminster. The present building was put up by Henry III., in the thirteenth century to take the place of the structure on the same spot erected by the Saxons soon after the year 1000. A few towers and façades were added a century later, but for practically 400 years this grand church has been the national memorial hall of the English people. Although tombs and monuments are on every side, the spacious church is used for service every day, and it is an agreeable memory now that we joined in the afternoon service that day in the hall where kings are crowned and where they are buried, and where men greater than kings have been laid away after their work was done.
The church is very large, the form of a Latin cross, beautifully proportioned, rather gloomily lighted, but impressive in appearance. Of course it was originally Catholic, but being the state church it went Protestant when Henry VIII. turned against the pope, partly because the pope would not recognize his divorce machine. There are not many statues of saints, but up one side and down the other of the double aisles and the little chapels are monuments, usually statues, of the men whose names are England’s greatness. I do not mean the kings and queens, for most of them would not by their own merit deserve the honor, but such as these: The Pitts, father and son, who ruled in England a hundred years ago; Fox, Peel, Cobden, statesmen of the world; Beaconsfield and Gladstone, not far apart now; Wilberforce, the philanthropist; Darwin, Newton and Herschel, the scientists; Livingstone, the African explorer, and Gordon, the general; André, who was shot as a spy in America; John and Charles Wesley, the Methodists; Watts, the hymn-writer; Händel, the composer, and Jenny Lind, the sweet singer of a generation ago; Addison, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Dickens; Chaucer, Ben Jonson, and Tennyson, poets laureate; Booth and Garrick, the actors; Spenser and Dryden, and many other poets;—a great aristocracy of learning, and now in the democratic, barrier-razing grave. Then there are nearly all the great English generals of the last four centuries, with heroes whose names are familiar to American school-boys as to English. And in the chapels are the tombs of England’s rulers from Edward the Confessor, some great kings and some little kings, some good and some bad, surrounded by the graves of queens and lords and ladies with the familiar names of English nobility. Near the tomb of the great Queen Elizabeth is that of her rival whom she executed, Mary Queen of Scots, the remains of the latter placed there by her son, King James, who by the irony of fate succeeded his mother’s enemy. I could go on with the list, but it would be with the reader as with the visitor, only the general effect, with here and there some great name singled out from the rest because of special interest or connection with some great event. And a fact which impressed me was that many men and women were executed by one monarch and their remains brought to Westminster and monuments erected to them by the next.
In Westminster Abbey the kings and queens of England have been crowned since the time of its building. A sovereign may inherit or receive from the representatives of the people the royal power, but he is not fully authorized and empowered to perform the duties of the job, or, to paraphrase a slang expression, his crown is not on straight until he receives it here. There are times when the great church is brilliant with light and resonant with music, when gay uniforms and gowns fill the galleries and aisles, when bells peal merrily and the banners wave from choir and column, concealing for the day the monuments and tombs of the past with their lesson of the end to earthly greatness and the fate of human pomp and grandeur.
The way to see London is from the top of an omnibus. There are no electric or cable lines or any other above-ground means of transportation in London except cabs and ’buses. The underground railroad, called “the tube,” is useful for quick traveling from one part of the city to the other, but the ’bus is the ordinary conveyance. It has regular seats on top, and they are always occupied except when the rain comes in torrents. An ordinary drizzle rain does not bother a Londoner. The sight of the long line of omnibuses with people filling the tops of every one of them is in itself a show. I am told there is not an hour in the day when there are not 100,000 people on top of the London ’buses. We have found that we can learn and see more of London sitting next to the driver of a ’bus in an hour than we could in a day with a carriage and guide. The driver is always glad to trade you all the news about the street for a sixpence, and a London ’bus-driver is a man of intelligence and learning; he has to be in order to drive through the jam of traffic and not get lost in the crooked streets. It was like reading a story when we rode down the Strand past St. Paul’s and the Bank of England to the Whitechapel, as the driver pointed out the house where Peter the Great lived when in England; William Penn’s old home; Somerset House, where queens have lived; the theatre in which the great actors of to-day appear, Covent Garden; Garrick’s house; the rooms which Dickens described as David Copperfield’s at Miss Trotwood’s; the Temple, England’s great lawyer factory; the grave of Goldsmith; the inn where Johnson and congenial sports dined and drank; and all kinds of places mentioned or described by Dickens and Thackeray, or connected with the history of England. I am not writing a guidebook, but I can make affidavit that a ride on a London omnibus is the quickest and easiest way I know to fill one’s head with a jumble of literature and history, as well as to test the elastic qualities of the neck. If I were to advise a tourist coming to Europe I would not only tell him to read in advance and bring plenty of money, but he should have all the rubber possible between his head and his body.
AT KING EDWARD’S HOUSE.