Читать книгу Through London's highways - Walter Jerrold - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Long, it may well be believed, will all that is best in the British character move the passer-by to raise his hat in silent homage to the young manhood of a world-scattered people united in the faith of freedom, who fell in the struggle against the Moloch of militarism.

Shortly after passing the Cenotaph and passing on the left the entrance to the head-quarters of the Metropolitan Police—New Scotland Yard—we reach Parliament Square. Right, the way goes to St. James’s Park, Birdcage Walk, and Buckingham 10 Palace; left, immediately to Westminster Bridge, across which pass many buses and trams to diverge on the farther side along many routes serving the southern suburbs; while across Parliament Square go some buses to Victoria, and others through byways to reach the river again near Vauxhall.

Parliament Square is assuredly one of London’s main centres of sight-seeing. On the farther side—focal point of British history for many centuries—is Westminster Abbey; while on the left, shutting off the river along which they are ranged, are the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Hall. Round about us here, too, are various statues—a specially notable trio which may be mentioned being Oliver Cromwell, Abraham Lincoln, and the Earl of Beaconsfield, representing as they do national ideas and ideals of dramatic diversity.

Westminster has long been honoured with the distinction of being a city, “public complaisance” having permitted it to continue to bear a courtesy title for which it was not ecclesiastically qualified. Here we cannot follow the story of Westminster since it was brought into existence by the establishment on a marshy island by the Thames of the Abbey from which it was to take its name; we are concerned more directly with things as they are than as they were, with the present rather than the past out of which it 11 has developed, with the beautiful Abbey as we can see it to-day rather than with the endlessly ramifying record of its storied stones.

St. Peter’s Abbey Church of Westminster is not one of the exceptions to the fairly general rule, that the magnificent buildings erected by our forefathers are not to be seen to the best advantage from the outside. Other buildings have in course of time been all too often permitted to hem them in and prevent their being seen as beautiful wholes. Of Westminster Abbey some very impressive partial views may be had. At the eastern end is a very memorable view of the sixteenth century Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, with, on the left, the far older octagonal Chapter House in which Parliament met in the thirteenth century. The main entrance to the Abbey at the western end is most conspicuous for the eighteenth century twin towers, the beginning of which was the last work undertaken by the veteran Sir Christopher Wren. The north entrance, or “Solomon’s Porch”, opening into the north transept, is that portion which has most recently been restored, and the view of this side as a whole is broken by the close contiguity of the church of St. Margaret’s. The south side is close crowded with the Precincts, so that it is not possible to get any unbroken view of the beautiful—though never completed—whole. The original design, 12 it may be said, contemplated a tall central spire, and spires also on the western towers.

Within the Abbey there is so much to appeal to architectural taste, to the historic sense, and to the multitude of interests implicit in the fact that Westminster has come to be regarded as the Valhalla of the nation’s great, that it is possible here to do little more than state that fact. Entering by the western door—to reach which we pass the slender column memorial to old Westminster boys who fell in the Crimean War—we come at once into the grand lofty nave, and to the simplest and most impressive of all the memorials within the wonderful place. This is the grave of the Unknown Soldier—the nameless man buried here in Britain’s house of fame to represent those who fell in the Great War of 1914-18. Unknown by any merely individualizing label, he lies here entitled to the name of every man who fell in that momentous struggle to save our civilization.

GATEHOUSE, ST. JAMES’S PALACE

Fronting up St. James’s Street, the gateway of Henry the Eighth’s palace is the main portion that is left of that monarch’s original building.

The burial of an Unknown Soldier as representative of all those who fell in the War was, as it were, a consecration of the nation’s Valhalla anew, by making it the shrine of a great idea transcending all the individualities in whose honour inscribed tablets, memorial busts, and monstrous monuments had previously been placed in the national shrine. Massive groups of uninspired marble, however, greatly as they may invite criticism on close inspection, are more or less lost in the grandeur of the lofty edifice. Where the memorials are mostly of a more modest character, in the Poets’ Corner, is the spot to which pilgrims are most strongly drawn. This is the eastern part of the South Transept, with memorials to or busts of a succession of great and lesser poets from Chaucer to Tennyson and Browning, many of whom, including the three named, are actually buried here. Though known as Poets’ Corner, this is the shrine of many men associated with literature and the arts generally. David Garrick and Sir Henry Irving, Samuel Johnson, Macaulay, and Charles Dickens, for instance, are among those buried here, while the memorials to those buried otherwhere include Shakespeare and Milton, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, Oliver Goldsmith and Robert Southey. Near the very beginning of the “Corner” is a bust of Longfellow—the first memorial here to an American contributor to the great body of English literature.

Between the Abbey and the river stands the ancient Westminster Hall, and the whole range of the Houses of Parliament from the Clock Tower at the western end of Westminster Bridge to the Victoria Tower. Westminster Hall also invites to a lingering stay; it is the surviving portion of the old Westminster Palace, and was built by William Rufus at the 14 close of the eleventh century, but was largely rebuilt two centuries later, when its most notable feature, the recently restored magnificent oaken hammer-beam roof was erected. In this Hall were holden, for many generations, great royal banquets and other festivities, including, up to the reign of George the Fourth, the coronation banquets. Here, too, for centuries were held the Courts of Justice, until in 1882 the new Law Courts were opened in the Strand. Many great public events—such as the trial of Warren Hastings—took place in this hall which has for upwards of eight hundred years been associated with the governance of the kingdom.

The best general view of the New Palace of Westminster is that from Westminster Bridge, or from the opposite side of the river, where the fretted range of its beautiful Gothic front, tower-terminated at either end, extends for a distance of about a thousand feet.

Beyond Westminster, by the river side, is Millbank, with the Tate Gallery as the sightseers’ main objective, and beyond that, Vauxhall Bridge. Our particular bus route, however, is that which, passing the western end of the Abbey, goes along the modern highway of offices and shops, Victoria Street, to Victoria Station, and its ramification of routes. On the way thither we may note on the left, standing back off the street itself, the most remarkable of recent 15 additions to London’s ecclesiastical architecture, the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, the lofty campanile of which, rising to the great height of two hundred and eighty-three feet, is a notable landmark from many parts of the West End. This magnificent edifice of red brick with white stone courses, in the early Christian Byzantine style, has something of a bizarre effect among the neighbouring flats and mansions. Though it will be long before it takes on that mellowness which time alone can give to the great work of the architect, the cathedral should be visited, if for nothing else, for the wonderful view—given a clear day—which is afforded from its lofty dome-capped campanile.