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Sight-seeing—Westminster Hall.

My emotions on first entering Westminster Hall, were scarcely inferior to those excited by the Abbey. Of course my first glance was towards the oaken roof, whose noble span, and elaborate construction, have been so largely eulogized, but which derives a richer glory than its material one, from the moral sublimity of the historic events, to which its venerable shadow has been lent. Beneath this roof the Constitution of England has steadily and majestically matured for centuries; and to this spot belongs the somewhat mysterious credit of an assimilating power, akin to that of digestion in the human system. Whatever has been the food, it has always managed to turn it into wholesome nutriment, and to add it to the solid substance of the British State in the shape of bone and sinew, or of veins and nerves. It has been the scene of violence and outrage, and of both popular and imperial tyranny. No matter! Out of all this evil has always come substantial good. The roof dates from Richard Second’s time; and scene the first is the usurpation of the fiery Bolingbroke. Here rose up that daring subject, amid astounded bishops and barons, and crossing himself broadly on the breast, profanely uttered the famous bravado—“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster, do challenge this reaume of Englande”—adding mysterious words, from which it is equally difficult to say on what grounds he did or did not rest his claims. Here old Sir Thomas More forfeited his head, for high treason against “the best of princes,” as he had long called old Harry Eighth; and here sat old Hal himself, at Lambert’s trial, interrupting every fresh rejoinder of the reformer, with the savage assurance—“Thou shalt burn, Lambert!” I looked towards the great window beneath which he sat—and, lo! it was no longer a window, but an open way, just constructed for access to the New Houses of Parliament—a noble alteration, and a very speaking symbol too, in my opinion; for thus, in the path of history, and from the seat of law, will the future Senate of the Empire go to their responsible labors as stewards of the noblest inheritance that exists among mankind. Let them think, as they pass, of Strafford and of Charles; how in suffering and sorrow they contributed to the British people that distinguishing element of loyalty, which has rendered healthful their not less characteristic love of liberty. Too many, I fear, imbued with the superficial views of Macaulay, invest with sublimer associations the fanatical Court which tried and condemned their Sovereign. Here sat those bold, bad men; and daring, indeed, was their work; nor do I doubt that it has been over-ruled for good to England; but then it should not be forgotten, that the subsequent history of progressive and rational freedom is far more directly the result of the wholesome resistance opposed by Church and Crown to the spirit of anarchy, than to anything in that spirit itself. Had the King of England been a Bourbon—had the Church of England been a Genevan or a Roman one, that flood must have washed all landmarks away: and the fabric of Constitutional Liberty, which now attracts the admiration of all thinking men, could never have been constructed. Honour, then, to the martyrs of Law and of Religion, who, beneath this roof, built up the only barrier that has turned back the turbulent waves of modern barbarism! I stood, and thought of Charles, with sorrow for his grievous faults, but yet with gratitude for the manly recompense he offered here to a people whom he had unintentionally injured through their own antiquated laws, but whom he defended against the worse tyranny of lawless usurpation, by his majestic protest in this Hall, and by sealing it with his blood. Here, too, the seven bishops delivered the Church and State of England when they stood up against the treacherous son of Charles, and completed the triumph of the Church by proving it as true to the people, as it had been to the throne, on the same foundation of immutable principle. This was the roof that rang with the shouts of vindicated justice, when those fathers of the Church were set free! I looked up, and surveyed every beam and rafter with reverence. The angels, carved in the hammer-beams, were looking placidly down, each one with his shield upon his breast, like the guardian spirits of a nation, true to itself and to ancestral faith and order. The symbol is an appropriate one; for the frame-work of the British Constitution is like this roof of Richard in many respects, but in none more than this—that the strength and beauty of the whole are fitly framed together, with inseparable features of human wisdom and of divine truth; the latter being always conspicuous, and investing all with reverend dignity and grace.

The floor of the old Hall presents a less sentimental aspect, and might easily plunge imagination, by one step, into the ridiculous. Here are the barristers walking about with clients, and with each other, arm in arm, their gray wigs of divers tails, some set awry, and some strongly contrasted with black and red whiskers, giving them a ludicrous appearance; while their gowns, some of them shabby enough, are curiously tucked under the arm, or carelessly dangling about the heels, apparently an annoyance to the wearers, in either case. The several courts were in session, in chambers which open out of the hall, along its sides. I stepped into the Chancellor’s Court, where sat Lord Truro, listening, or perhaps not listening, to the eminent Mr. Bethell. His Lordship in his walrus wig, with a face proverbially likened to the hippopotamus, seemed to represent the animal kingdom, as well as that of which the mace and seal-bag, lying before him, were the familiar tokens. The court-room is very small, popular audiences being not desirable, and open doors being all that popular right can require. Here the same barristers looked far from ludicrous—their attire seemed to fit the place and its duties. Doubtless the influence of such things is an illusion, but nevertheless it is a useful one, and contributes to the dignity, which it only appears to respect. We need some such things in our Republic. Next I stepped into the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, and saw Sir J. L. Knight Bruce administering the law; and here I was introduced to several eminent lawyers, whose cauliflower wigs covered a world of learning and of grave intelligence. Stepping into the Common Pleas, there sat in a row, Lord Chief Justice Jervis, and Justices Creswell, Williams and Talfourd. I could not but look with interest at the author of Ion, but in the disguise of his magistracy, I looked in vain for any feature which I could identify with his portraits. In the Court of Queen’s Bench, Lord Campbell was presiding, with three others; in the Bail Court, I saw Justice Coleridge; and in the Court of Exchequer, Lord Chief Baron Pollock, with Barons Park, Platt and Martin. Thus, with the greatest facility, and in a very short space of time, can one see the most favoured sons of the British Themis, and gain a good idea of the dignity and close attention to business with which these courts are managed. The Supreme Court of our own country, is far inferior in appearance, although it is the only American Court which admits of any comparison with these, and yet it is allowed on all hands, that “the law’s delay” in England is an intolerable grievance, and that the expense of obtaining justice, at these tribunals, is of itself a crying injustice.

Sallying forth into the street, I went round to view the rising splendours of the Victoria Tower, the massive proportions of which almost dwarf those of the Abbey. It confuses the beholder by the elaborate richness of its details, its profuse symbolism, and all the variety of its heraldic and allegorical decoration. When completed, it will give a new, but harmonious aspect, to the acres of sacred and princely architecture which spread around; but these English builders are very slow in its construction, and prefer that it should rise only ten feet a year, rather than hazard its chance of continuing forever. How differently we go ahead in America! This new palace of Westminster will still be many years in finishing, but it is worthy of the nation to let it thus grow after its own fashion. Alas! one fears, however, that it is to be made the scene of the gradual taking down of the nation itself. It is too likely to prove the house in which John Bull will be worried to death by his own family.

In company with a friend, I next “took water” at Westminster bridge, for a trip down the river. This silent highway is now as busy as the Strand itself—the spiteful little steamers that ply up and down, being almost as numerous and as noisy as the omnibusses. Very swiftly we glide along the river’s graceful bend, passing Whitehall, Richmond Terrace, and the house lately occupied by Sir Robert Peel; shooting under Hungerford bridge, past old Buckingham house, and the Adelphi Terrace, and so under Waterloo bridge, to the Temple Gardens, where we land, and where I find myself delighted with the casual survey of the different walks and buildings, and especially with the Temple Church. Emerging into Fleet-street, choked with carts and carriages, here is Temple-bar! Passing under its arches, we are in the Strand, and so make our way to Charing-Cross. Having made a complete circuit, by land and water, I again went to Westminster bridge, and stepping into a steamer sailed up the river to Chelsea. Here we pass the river-front of the New Houses of Parliament; and granting that there is a monotony of aspect in the long stretch of the pile, as it rises from the water, I think it must be allowed that, when complete, with its towers and decorations, the whole, taking the Abbey also into view, will furnish the noblest architectural display in the world. Westminster bridge should be reconstructed, in harmony with the rest, and then, whoever may find fault with the scene, may be safely challenged to find its parallel for magnificence and imperial effect.

And yet looking to the other side of the river, how far more attractive to my eye were the quiet gardens and the venerable towers of Lambeth! Its dingy brick, and solemn little windows, with the reverend ivy spreading everywhere about its walls, seemed to house the decent and comely spirit of religion itself: and one could almost gather the true character of the Church of England, from a single glance at this old ecclesiastical palace, amid the stirring and splendid objects with which it is surrounded. Old, and yet not too old; retired, and yet not estranged from men; learned, and yet domestic; religious, yet nothing ascetic; and dignified, without pride or ostentation; such is the ideal of the Metro-political palace, on the margin of the Thames. I thought as I glided by, of the time when Henry stopped his barge just here to take in Archbishop Cranmer, and give him a taste of his royal displeasure: and of the time when Laud entered his barge at the same place, to go by water to the Tower, “his poor neighbours of Lambeth following him with their blessings and prayers for his safe return.” They knew his better part.

We had a fine view of Chelsea Hospital, and passed by Chelsea Church, famous for the monument of Sir Thomas More. We landed not far from this Church, and called upon Martin, whose illustrations of Milton and “Belshazzar’s Feast” have rendered him celebrated as a painter of a certain class of subjects, and in a very peculiar style. He was engaged on a picture of the Judgment, full of his mannerism, and sadly blemished by offences against doctrinal truth, but not devoid of merit or of interest. He asked about Allston and his Belshazzar, and also made inquiries about Morse, of whose claim as the inventor of the Electric Telegraph, he was entirely ignorant. Returning, we landed at Lambeth, and my friend left his card at the Archbishop’s; observing, as we passed into the court, that we should find the door of the residence itself standing open, with a servant ready to receive us, as we accordingly did. Such is the custom.

We then crossed Westminster bridge, and went to Whitehall, on foot, visiting the Banqueting-room, now a royal chapel. The Apotheosis of James the First, by Rubens, adorns the roof, but I tried in vain to be pleased with it. The first question—“which is the fatal window through which King Charles passed to the scaffold”—I asked quite in vain, for nobody seems to be entirely sure about it. The chapel is heavy, and unecclesiastical, although more like a sanctuary, in appearance, than the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. We went into the court, or garden behind the Banqueting-house, to look at James Second’s statue, by Grinling Gibbons. It is in Roman costume, and defiled by soot and dust, and the peculiar pointing position of one of its hands, has given currency to a vulgar error, that it indicates the spot where the blood of Charles fell from the scaffold. A soldier mounts guard in this place, for it is yet regarded as a royal palace; all beside is quiet, and I often returned to the spot during my residence in London, as one well fitted for meditation, recalling such historical associations as memory retained, and striving in vain to conceive it possible that here, in very deed, such thrilling scenes were enacted two hundred years ago. Even now there is nothing ancient about the looks of Whitehall. It requires an effort to connect it at all with the past: and when one sees the vane upon its roof, and imagines it the very one to which James Second was always looking, while he prayed the Virgin and all the Saints to keep William of Orange off the coast, even the era of 1688 seems reduced to a modern date, and stripped of all its character as something ancestral, and belonging to past time. I confess that in this garden of Whitehall, I awoke from an American illusion, and began to feel that two centuries is a very short period of time; just as afterward, on the Continent, the scale took another slide upwards, and taught me to feel that everything is modern which has happened since the Christian era. This discovery gives one a curious sensation, and I am not sure that I am the happier for having seen monuments of real antiquity, which have had the effect of freshening the comparative antiquity of England, and of reducing everything in America to the dead level of time present. I was happier when I visited the ruins of the old Fort on Lake George, and innocently imagined it a spot both ancient and august.

My reader will think my day sufficiently full already, but I must not conclude without some reference to the pleasures of the evening. I drove out to Chelsea, where the pupils of St. Mark’s Training College performed the Oratorio of “Israel in Egypt.” The hail-stone chorus was given with great effect, and several of the solos and recitatives were creditably executed. I saw there, among others, Lord Monteagle, better known as Mr. Spring Rice, but was more pleased with an introduction to the head of the College, Mr. Derwent Coleridge, who showed me a very striking portrait of his father—“the rapt one of the godlike forehead,” and made some feeling allusions to his brother Hartley, then lately dead. I saw also another member of this interesting family, Sara Coleridge, one of the cleverest of womankind. Returning to London, I stepped from the carriage at Hyde Park Corner, where chariots and wheels of every description were still rumbling incessantly, and where the gas-lamps made it light as day, though it was now eleven o’clock. I looked at Apsley-house, where the Iron Duke was then living, and so made my way along Piccadilly and St. James’s-street, as pleasantly as if I had known them all my days, but thinking such thoughts as nothing but an American’s earliest experiences of London life can possibly inspire.