Reminiscences of European travel / by Andrew P. Peabody

Front matter

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Preface

The author was invited, last winter, to deliver twelve Lectures on what he saw in Europe, before the Lowell Institute. The chapters of this book are those Lectures, with hardly a verbal change, except the occasional substitution of readers for hearers. The author has not thought it necessary to interpolate or add a narrative of those portions of his tour not embraced in the Lectures ; for his way seldom diverged from the wonted highway of travel, about which enough has been written.

One word more. The Lectures were, for the most part, transcribed from letters written to the author's own family, without the remotest reference to publication either by voice or through the press. Ill many instances, in which his taste might have dictated a change, he has preserved the very words of his letters, in the belief that the form in which

IV PREFACE.

one describes new scenes and experiences while his impressions are still fresh and vivid, can only become less graphic by the attempt to improve it.

Harvard University, June 5, 1868.

Contents

CHAPTER T.

OLD KNGLAND.

First Impressions of England. — Chester. — Tokens of Antiquity. — Sherwood Forest. — Haddon Hall. — Fountains Abbey. — Boston. — Houses of Parliament. — Dinner Speaking. — Lord Brougham. — The English Pulpit. — Spurgeon. — Newman Hall — Martineau

Chapter I. Old England

First Impressions of England. — Chester. — Tokens of Antiquity. — Sherwood Forest. — Haddon Hall. — Fountains Abbey. — Boston. — Houses of Parliament. — Dinner Speaking. — Lord Brougham. — The English Pulpit. — Spurgeon. — Newman Hall. — Martineau.

Heaven's richest boon to a traveller is the presentific power of memory. Mere recollection would give us little pleasure or profit, nay, might awaken a comfortless yearning for what we had once seen, or a life-long regret that the beautiful visions could never be repeated. It would be worse than unsatisfying to recall places, names, and the mere details of an itinerary. But what we have once beheld is thenceforth ours. In a profounder sense than the poet meant,

" A thing of beauty is a joy forever."

We admire, and cannot admu^e to excess, the pho- 1 tograpliic art in its various modes of presentation. It is an unspeakable privilege to bi-ing together on our tables scenes fi'om every land, sun-pictures, too, of world-renowned master-works, and to make our tour in every zone and clime by shifting the sKdes in the stereoscope. But how immeasurably more precious is the gallery of photographs, taken on the retina of our own vision, deposited where they never grow diin, stored away in countless numbers, as vivid by night as by day, found at the very moment we seek them, the slide shifting as rapidly as the thought, — photographs, too, not with the mere Mghts and shadows, but polychromatic, retaining every hue of the sunset clouds, every delicate tint of the painter's brush, every bright color of the peasant's costume ! I propose to describe in part a series of these photogTaphs taken during a European tour, in the years 1866 and 1867.

It is fitting that I should begin with England, both as our mother country, and as the land in which almost every American obtains his first foreign experiences. Old England we learn at once to say with intense emphasis ; New England acquires a fulness of meaning which it never had before, and the two centuries and a half of our historyno longer carry us back to an appreciable antiquity.

The steamers that ply between the two countries have arrangements specially adapted to produce this impression of contrast. The American embarks at Boston or New York on Wednesday, and in the ordinary course of navigation, reaches Liverpool on

CHESTER. 3

Saturday morning of the following week. Liverpool seems to him like New York without an Astor, St. Nicholas, or Fifth Avenue, — a vast wilderness of docks, shops, and warehouses, opulent, crowded, tumultuous, with some magnificent edifices, and some quiet and homelike streets, but without an inn that looks either restful or attractive. London is too remote for a Saturday's journey, and one who would economize his time prefers approaching the metropolis by stages that will enable him to visit various intermediate points of essential interest, without retracing his steps. Chester, within half an hour by railway, is, therefore, chosen for Sunday's repose ; and there the traveller finds himself transplanted into the Middle Ages, with not a few memorials of an antiquity to which they are modern. Chester, a corruption of Castra, (a camp,) was a Roman military station from the time of Julius Caesar until the Romans left the island. Tlie wall, which entirely surrounds the old city, and is broad enough for a promenade, was commenced under their auspices, and completed nearly a thousand years ago. The principal streets are distinguished by a style of architecture which some antiquaries refer to a Roman origin, and which undoubtedly belongs to a period prior to any continuous history of Great Britain. The sidewalks rest upon the basements, and are roofed by the second stories of the houses. The covered ways thus formed are lined with shops of every description, mider, behind, and above which are the dwelling-houses, each upper story projecting over the one next lower, — so tliat occupants of the fourth floor on opposite sides of the street are brought into a proximity which must make them either strong friends or very bitter enemies. From these streets lead all manner of narrow lanes and alleys, through the oddest places, among queer, antique houses, shops, and inns, glazed with miniature diamond-shaped panes in leaden sashes. There are no two buildings alike, and hardly one which does not look as if it had a history ; while several of the taverns carry us back at least three centuries, and can hardly have been new even then.

The Cathedral befits the city. It is partly in ruins ; the whole exterior wall is in slow decay ; and huge, ancient trees grow where some of the cloisters of the once adjacent abbey stood, and over vaults and crypts still occupied and frequented. Here may be found mosaic altar-pieces, and pavements, and painted glass, with figures indicating an age prior to the use of perspective in grouping ; while the grim forms of knights and churchmen and dames of high degree, in gray stone, look do"\vn from the walls, or lie in rudely ambitious sculpture on the floor.

Age and the consciousness of it form the most prominent characteristic of England and of the English people, and are the prime source of all their idiosyncrasies. No token of antiquity that can be preserved is obliterated. Restoration is preferred to renovation. An old building is not

LOVE OF ANTIQUITY. 5

disused so long as it admits of occupancy ; nor is a dilapidated member of a building removed simply because it is untenantable. The Church of St. John' the Baptist, in Chester, built in the tenth century, and now in full use for a large congregation, has, lying behind the chancel, the ruins of the lady-chapel, which was crushed by the fall of the *tower several centuries ago, and the tower that succeeded the one that fell has long been a ruin. An Englishman has no reverence for modern architectvire. In London, the buildings erected immediately after the Great Fire are the latest in which the citizens take pride, and these are new compared with the cathedrals, colleges, castles, and manorhouses that are the glory of the land.

The manners and habits of the people have their roots " in the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." Table etiquette retains, for the most part, the stateliness and formalism of earlier days. In dress and furniture, glaring colors and showy fashions are an infallible sign of \ailgar breeding, abjured by all who have, or pretend to have, ancestors. Precedent is imperative law, and the only way to dislodge a precedent that has become obsolete, is to conjure up the similitude of one still older. Steam, elsewhere revolutionary, here innovates but slowly, even in the departments that lie most open to its influence. Not only the niral inns, but those at important railway stations and in large provincial towns, and even many in London, retain the staff, appointments, and customs, made familiar to us by the Hterature of Queen Anne's reign ; and the table dliote dinner, universal on the Continent and very common in Scotland and Ireland, has been introduced, so far as I know, into but one English hotel.

Above all, England manifests everywhere the accumulated opulence of an age of many centuries.* Solidity and massiveness, regardless of cost, characterize constructions of every kind, — roads, briflges, railways, fences, public edifices, j)rivate dwellings. There are no makeshifts, no lath and plaster buildings, no cheap ornamentation, no imitation of mouldings and cornices in limewash, no mockery of precious woods in paltry pine. Wealth is not ostentatiously displayed ; but it is stowed away in masses that constantly protrude into sight, and impress the fresh beholder with perpetual amazement. England may have reached and passed her chmacteric : but if so, her decline must be slow and long ; for her hoarded resources may sustain her national strength for many generations.

Even the forms of vegetation that constantly meet the eye in England sustain the prestige of venerable age. Yews through whose decayed trunks a coach and six may be driven without collision on either side ; hedges of thick-set trees, once shrubs ; ivy with stalks as large as a man's body ; parterres of flowering moss and yellow house-leeks springing luxuriantly from the roofs of old farm-houses and

HADDON HALL. 7

bams ; single grape-vines whose fruit is reckoned by the ton ; avenues of box that screen a tall man from the sun or shelter him from the sudden shower, — these and many hke objects conspire to sustain the feeling that we are in an older world than our birth-world.

I spent a day in Sherwood Forest, where there is not a tree that might not have been a shelter for Robin Hood and his merry men. The very oak on which he used to hang his venison is pointed out. I dined under another oak beneath which I fancied he must have often dined, and in whose shade fifty men might hold high festival. Except those destroyed by lightning, not a tree has been taken from this forest for four or five centuries, nor has one been added to it. No undergrowth is suffered, except a tall and beautiful fern. The trees are wreathed into all manner of fantastic shapes, gnarled and knotted, bulging out with huge excrescences, many of them with hollows in which children might play hide-and-seek, and yet with foliage as rich and full as in tlieir prime.

Of ancient houses, the most remarkable in the kingdom is Haddon Hall, belonging to the Duke of Rutland, for a century and a half occupied only by its custodians, kept in perfect repair, and wholly unaltered from the time when it harbored full seven score of servants, and kept incessant revel with open doors from Christmas to Twelfthnight. It differs from a Pompeian house in having been preserved without being buried. There remains the kitchen, almost as large as the parish church, with two fire-places, in either of which an ox might be roasted whole ; adjacent to it is the bakery, with immense ovens, the very thought of filling which, makes one feel poverty-stricken ; and this opens into the butchery, with its murderous apparatvis, and the meat-block for cutting up the slain beasts. On the other side of the rude, stonefloored hall is the great dining-room, with the dais at the upper end where the master of the house sat with his more distinguished guests. Still chained to the wall is the iron handcuff that used to be employed for the punishment of the guest who would not or could not drain his bumper. By this contrivance the hand was fastened at a painful height, while water was poured down the recusant's sleeve from time to time, until either he desisted from his obduracy, or his tormentors became too drunk to do their duty. The chapel contains some painted glass more than four centuries old, and reading-desk, family pew, and servants' seats, all bear tokens of an age when personal comfort was wholly dissociated from the rites of pubhc worship. Besides a great number of mere kennels for o-uests and their servants, too small for half the paraphernalia of a modern toilette, there are several state-chambers. One of these contains two very deeply embayed windows, with panes but little over an hich square set in lead. In another ctf these chambers is pre-

FOUNTAINS ABBEY. 9

served a once most magnificent state-bed, with canopy and hangings in tatters, in which royal personages have often slept, and which was transported to Beaver Castle, the usual residence of the Duke of Rutland, when George IV. once made him a visit. In the garden attached to this house, I saw the finest specimens I have ever seen of the topiary-art, — the training and clipping of trees and shrubs so as to represent various figures. There was one clump of shrubbery so cut as to reproduce in great perfection the form of a peacock with bill, crest, and tail com^Dlete ; another equally good, representing the heraldic cognizance of the bear and staff.

With the prevailing love for antiquity, ruins are of course cherished in England as nowhere else. So strong is the passion for them, that brand-new artificial ruins are found, not only on the grounds of parvenus of cockney extraction, but, incongruously enough, on the estates of some of the oldest families in the kingdom, — showing that taste does not appertain of necessity to noble lineage.

Of all tlie actual ruins I have seen, those of Fountains Abbey are the most extensive and tlie most interesting. They cover sixty-four acres, a space about as large as the Boston Common; and they are set in a framework of lake, stream, lawn, grove, and forest, unsurpassed in that quiet, slumberous beauty, which is the dominant type of Enghsh scenery, and which accords most perfectly in tone with the memorials of long-vanished generations. The tower of the convent-church, two hundred feet high, is still standing, together with fragments of its walls, arches, and pillars, sufficient to enable one to trace its contour, to determine its several divisions, and to form a distinct conception of its architecture. It was of the upright Gothic, highly ornate, and yet massive enough to survive in its dismantled condition from the time of Henry VIII., when it was first exposed to human violence, through several succeeding centuries in which no efficient measures were taken for its preservation. The walls of the abbot's house, too, are in great part standing, and his magnificent dining-room is distinctly traceable, with portions of its splendid double colonnade. Least of all to be forgotten are the convent kitchen, with its chimney sixteen feet broad, and the dining-room of the brethren hard by, with the high little gallery where one of the fraternity was doomed to read while the rest ate. Then there are cloisters , enough to lodge a little army of cenobites, almshouses, reception-houses for strangers, supplementary edifices for divers uses, sacred and secular, all unroofed, shattered, and dismembered, yet in such a condition that the reconstructive fancy is seldom bafiled or perplexed. The walls are heavily festooned with ivy ; the brook that turned the abbey mill winds mvirmuring among the displaced flagstones ; venerable yews, beeches, and sycamores curtain all the avenues ; and in the park through which the tourist's access lies, vast herds of deer,

BOSTON. 11

SO tame that they suffer the near approach of man, are, no doubt, the lineal descendants of those whose haunches were wont to smoke on the abbot's table.

On the same journey from London on which I saw Fountains Abbey I visited Boston, which, in the air of venerable antiquity, is second only to Chester. It lies somewhat aside from the usual route of travellers ; but when I was at Cambridge, I could not resist the temptation to make my almost daily home-passage " from Cambridge to Boston."

The greater part of Lincolnshire — the fen-country — looks like a tract borrow^ed from Holland. By diking and draining it has been reclaimed from the sea, which, but for unnumbered windmills that work pumps in times of inundation and freshet, would long since have taken back what it gave. It abounds in canals much wider than most of the English rivers, which, great in song and with crowding historical and literary associations, are generally smaller than the nameless rivulets of our country. This whole region is on a dead level, with scarce a hillock, and it has a dreary, chill, waterlogged aspect ; but it is profusely fertile, and its crops of grain and grass are the richest on the island.

In this region is Boston, about five miles from the sea, on both sides of the river Witham, — an estuary almost dry at low tide, but swollen into a deep and vigorous stream by the rapid and high tides that set in from the German Ocean. The most remarkable object in Boston is the Church of

St. Botolpli, which is, I think, the largest, and is regarded as the most magnificent parish church in Eno-land. By a coincidence singular, if not designed (and it can hardly have been designed), it has as many doors as there are months, as many windows as there are weeks, and as many stairs in the ascent of the tower as there are days in the year. The tower, which is most elaborately finished, is as high as the church is long ; and in the lantern near its summit, in early times, a beacon fire was kept up for the guidance of travellers by water, whether on the open ocean or among the adjacent marshes. The eastern chancel window is one of surpassing beauty, representing a series of subjects connected with the ancestry, the earthly sufferings, and the celestial glory of the Saviour. The Cotton Chapel, used as a vestry and a depository for records, was put into its present neat, but by no means elegant condition, by contributions fi'om Boston, Massachusetts, and has a mural tablet of brass, with a highly classical inscription in Latin to the memory of John Cotton, written by the late Mr. Everett. I confess I was but ill-satisfied to find so scanty memorials of a name which had there become illustrious for learning and piety, long before it was heard in the New World. Indeed, the inconspicuousness and smallness of the tablet, and the reticence as to this chapel of the otherwise very communicative sextoness, led me to believe that there Avas at least a willingness to imiore the Puritan vicar.

BOSTON: PAST AND PRESENT. 13

Among the many old houses in Boston is the birth-house of John Fox, the martyrologist, — long, low, with broad latticed windows, and with heavy cornices projecting over each story, — evidently in its time the house of a family of ample substance and a highly respectable position, but now kept as an ale-house and dram-shop. There are many other family mansions that must have been old in John Cotton's time, and yet seem incapable of decay; and there is one mediseval tower, windowless and roofless, the only remaining portion of the splendid residence of an ancient and extinct family, whose lands somehow fell into the o^vnership of the municipal corporation, and were conveyed by that body to a citizen of Boston, with the truly English stipulation, that he should " keep the tower in its present form as a ruin."

There was a time when Boston maintained a very extensive commerce in fish, corn, salt, wool, and woollen goods ; and in King John's reign it was the second commercial town in the kingdom, having about nine-tenths as much trade as London. The only remaining tokens of this thriving condition are certain quaint, massive, low-browed warehouses, too dark and mouldy for any possible use, too thoroughly soaked in brine to be ever burned, and seemingly too solid for mastication by the mordant tooth of time.

The streets of Boston are narrow and very crooked, and there are many lanes hardly wide enough for a wagon-path. The houses of the poorer sort have brick floors, generally a little below the level of the sidewalk. The town is neat and orderly ; but there are few indications of enterprise or of wealth. Indeed, Boston has been stranded during; the whole lifetime of her New England namesake, and now claims our interest chiefly on account of the daughter, who, with her name, robbed her of her brightest jewels.

I have selected for description certain places and objects associated together solely on the score of age. I propose in the residue of this chapter, to give my remembrances and impressions of Parhament and Church, of English oratory and public speaking ; and though all I have to say does not fall naturally under the text of " Old England," still the differences between English and American oratory are chiefly those which would naturally exist between an old and a young people, while there is a not unlike contrast between the organism and ceremonial both of Church and State on this and the other side of the Atlantic.

Westminster Palace includes the new Houses of Parhament, with old Westminster Hall incorporated into the structure as a vestibule. The entire building, old and new, covers a surface of eight acres. Westminster Hall is an immense apartment, about three hundred feet long, and is rendered memorable as the scene of the great state trials for

HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. 15

many centuries, from that of Sir Thomas More to that of Warren Hastings. Here Charles I. was condemned to die. Here have been enacted the most momentous tragedies in the history of the kingdom. The architecture of this hall is solemn and impressive, as befits the theatre of transactions involving the destiny of a nation. In apartments opening from the hall on either side still sit the four great law-courts of the kingdom. The Houses of Parliament are built of Yorkshire limestone. They are of a modernized Gothic, with three huge and lofty towers. The edifice is splendid and beautiful, yet unsatisfying to the eye ; for it lacks symmetry, — it suggests no idea but that of a costliness beyond calculation. It is immense without grandeur, exhausting all the resources of art save the genius which alone can vivify and harmonize its creations. The ante-rooms to the Chambers of Parliament are interesting chiefly from their historical frescos,^ among which I was glad to see one representing the embarkation of the Pilgrims from Delft Haven for New Eng-land. The Chambers of the Lords and the Commons are richly decorated with gilding and carved work, but are smaller and much less convenient for their uses, than most of the legislative halls in our state capitols.

1 I use the word fresco in its common acceptation. It properly belongs only to pictures in which the colors are laid on fresh plaster, into which they sink so deep as to be indelible; while almost all the modern and many of the mediseval pictures that bear the name of frescos are paintings on dry walls.

In the House of Commons the Speaker and the clerks wear (as do all the judges and barristers in the several courts) gowns, bands, and gray flaxen wigs, — the wigs being made of flax as fine as silk, with rows of pufl'-curls, and two curls pendent behind. The Lord Chancellor, in presiding over the House of Lords, wears a huge flaxen wig which entirely covers his cheeks, and hangs over his shoulders like a vandyke. His seat looks like a scarlet woolsack (Avhence its name), with another smaller sack as a pillow for the back, but with no support for the arms, — the very acme of discomfort for a long session. The bishops appear in the House of Lords in white robes, with full lawn sleeves.

In the House of Commons I heard Mr. Gladstone's valedictory speech on retiring from the ministry. His elocution was plain and dignified, but with no display of oratory. The speech would have fallen dead upon an American audience. His manner could hardly have been other than it was, had he said the same things in his own library to two or three intimate friends.

In the House of Lords I heard a singular debate, which seemed to belong to the dark ases. A bill was introduced which ran somewhat in this wise : " Whereas in the year 1814, the parish church of Sunbury, having fallen into decay, was repaired and remodeled, and the altar was placed ten feet six inches from its former site ; whereas this change

DINNER SPEAKING. 17

in the position of tlie altar remained unnoticed until it was recently discovered in the examination of plans of the church in its original state ; and whereas many persons have been married at that altar, supposing it a place legally consecrated for the celebration of marriage, — therefore be it enacted, that such marriages be declared and deemed legitimate." This bill was opposed by one of the bishops, on the ground that, were it passed, due care might not hereafter be taken in the repairing of churches to preserve the site of the altar unchanged, — a possibility, the very thought of which seemed to fill him with holy horror, and to avert which he was willing to throw into chaos the property, domestic relations, peace, and well-being of an entire community. The bill was passed by a large majority ; that on such a question there should have been a minority in the negative, unless in an assembly of idiots, is to me inconceivable. The epithet which best characterizes the speaking in the House of Lords is gentlemanly. It is not merely courteous in form ; but it is manifestly the natural, spontaneous utterance of high-bred men, who would not know how to be coarse, rude, or vulgar.

I had several opportunities of hearing the best English after-dinner speaking, which is so utterly unlike ours, that the lovers of one could not even tolerate the other. At an Enolish dinner-table the spread-eagle element is entirely wanting. There is no talking against time, no oration making, none of tliat kind of speaking which has primary reference to the next day's newspaper report. It is literally table-talk, only loud enough to be heard by the whole company, — as free, simple, unartificial as the tete-d-tete conversation of fellow-guests, but withal rich either in wit, wisdom, or both. It seemed to me that on such occasions men did not talk for the sake of saying something, but because they had something to say. The only dinnerspeaker whom I heard that approached the studied oratory to which we are used on similar occasions, was a deaf man, Napier, late Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who evidently had adopted an almost rhythmical style of utterance as the best mode of governing the voice without the aid of the ear.

It was my happiness to receive an invitation to the last dinner at which Lord Brougham presided, the annual dinner of the Association for the Promotion of Law Reform and Social Science. Lord Brougham was too feeble to walk across the room without assistance ; yet he spoke mth all the vigor and earnestness of youth. Age has had no mellowing influence upon him, but has manifestly toughened and indurated him. His face is as hard as flint, with the deep furrows of strong thinking, but without a line suggestive of kind feeling or of ordinary human sympathies. I suppose that he has been a not ungraceful speaker ; but, if so, no grace is left. His speech is abrupt, vehement, torrent-like in its rapidity, — like a torrent tumbling among rocks

THE ENGLISH PULPIT. 19

that roughen its flow. On the occasion on which I saw him, he made, as President, the opening speech, and followed several other speakers with shorter addresses expressive of approval or dissent. I cannot dispel certain canine associations with his face and. voice. H'e certainly has, with nobler elements, no little of the bull-dog.

At a dinner of the Society of Political Economists, I lieard, among other distinguished men, John Stuart Mill, who cannot of course speak otherwise than ably and pertinently, but whose utterance is feeble, hesitating, and unimpressive, while his bearing indicates extreme timidity and diffidence.

English pulpit eloquence, in general, seemed to me utterly unworthy of its office, and entirely below the demand of the times ; and I always found the most meagre preaching where the apparatus for the highly artistical performance of religious services was the most ample and elaborate. I attended, one Sunday evening, one of the meetings for -the people of which we have heard so much, under the dome of St. Paul's. There could not have been less than three or four thousand persons present. The preacher had come from Edinburgh, and v^as announced by placards all over the city for eight or ten days beforehand. His sermon was just fifteen minutes long, consisted only of desultory remarks by which I thought he was groping his way toward a subject, and while

I was listening with some solicitude for the announcement of his theme he broke off with the closing doxology. The sermons that I heard at the Temple Church, Westminster Abbey, and sundrycathedrals, were, in general, admirably written, but jejune or trite in thought, and cold as an iceberg. The ministers of the parish churches, especially those of the evangelical party, impressed me much more favorably. They preach like men thoroughly in earnest ; but they have not yet found the most efficient way of doing their work. They are very much in the habit of preaching from partially written sermons, extemporizing at frequent intervals, with a small Bible in the hand from which they read illustrative texts, often naming the chapter and verse. Their evident sincerity and earnestness greatly interested me ; yet it seemed to me — I know not if it were so — as if they were iu a transition state, — as if this method had but lately come into use ; they had not yet become accustomed to it, and were forfeiting the advantages, of the fully written sermon, without ha-vmig acquu-ed due freedom and power in extempore utterance.