city where one knows all it has to offer, than a great city where one
has no disinterested friend to direct him to the right places to find
what he wants. But of course there are some grand magazines which are
known all the world over, and which no one should leave London without
entering as a looker-on, if not as a purchaser.
There was one place I determined to visit, and one man I meant to see,
before returning. The place was a certain book-store or book-shop, and
the person was its proprietor, Mr. Bernard Quaritch. I was getting very
much pressed for time, and I allowed ten minutes only for my visit. I
never had any dealings with Mr. Quaritch, but one of my near relatives
had, and I had often received his catalogues, the scale of prices in
which had given me an impression almost of sublimity. I found Mr.
Bernard Quaritch at No. 15 Piccadilly, and introduced myself, not as one
whose name he must know, but rather as a stranger, of whom he might have
heard through my relative. The extensive literature of catalogues is
probably little known to most of my readers. I do not pretend to claim a
thorough acquaintance with it, but I know the luxury of reading good
catalogues, and such are those of Mr. Quaritch. I should like to deal
with him; for if he wants a handsome price for what he sells, he knows
its value, and does not offer the refuse of old libraries, but, on the
other hand, all that is most precious in them is pretty sure to pass
through his hands, sooner or later.
"Now, Mr. Quaritch," I said, after introducing myself, "I have ten
minutes to pass with you. You must not open a book; if you do I am lost,
for I shall have to look at every illuminated capital, from the first
leaf to the colophon." Mr. Quaritch did not open a single book, but let
me look round his establishment, and answered my questions very
courteously. It so happened that while I was there a gentleman came in
whom I had previously met,--my namesake, Mr. Holmes, the Queen's
librarian at Windsor Castle. My ten minutes passed very rapidly in
conversation with these two experts in books, the bibliopole and the
bibliothecary. No place that I visited made me feel more thoroughly that
I was in London, the great central mart of all that is most precious in
the world.
_Leave at home all your guineas, ye who enter here_, would be a
good motto to put over his door, unless you have them in plenty and can
spare them, in which case _Take all your guineas with you_ would be
a better one. For you can here get their equivalent, and more than their
equivalent, in the choicest products of the press and the finest work of
the illuminator, the illustrator, and the binder. You will be sorely
tempted. But do not be surprised when you ask the price of the volume
you may happen to fancy. You are not dealing with a _bouquiniste_
of the Quais, in Paris. You are not foraging in an old book-shop of New
York or Boston. Do not suppose that I undervalue these dealers in old and
rare volumes. Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and
Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and
in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or
an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets
of the quays. But there is a difference between going out on the Fourth
of July with a militia musket to shoot any catbird or "chipmunk" that
turns up in a piece of woods within a few miles of our own cities, and
shooting partridges in a nobleman's preserves on the First of September.
I confess to having felt a certain awe on entering the precincts made
sacred by their precious contents. The lord and master of so many
_Editiones Principes_, the guardian of this great nursery full of
_incunabula_, did not seem to me like a simple tradesman. I felt that
I was in the presence of the literary purveyor of royal and imperial
libraries, the man before whom millionaires tremble as they calculate,
and billionaires pause and consider. I have recently received two of Mr.
Quaritch's catalogues, from which I will give my reader an extract or two,
to show him what kind of articles this prince of bibliopoles deals in.
Perhaps you would like one of those romances which turned the head of
Don Quixote. Here is a volume which will be sure to please you. It is on
one of his lesser lists, confined principally to Spanish and Portuguese
works:--
"Amadis de Gaula ... folio, gothic letter, FIRST EDITION, unique ... red
morocco super extra, _doublé_ with olive morocco, richly gilt,
tooled to an elegant Grolier design, gilt edges ... in a neat case."
A pretty present for a scholarly friend. A nice old book to carry home
for one's own library. Two hundred pounds--one thousand dollars--will
make you the happy owner of this volume.
But if you would have also on your shelves the first edition of the
"Cronica del famoso cabaluero cid Ruy Diaz Campadero," not "richly
gilt," not even bound in leather, but in "cloth boards," you will have
to pay two hundred and ten pounds to become its proprietor. After this
you will not be frightened by the thought of paying three hundred
dollars for a little quarto giving an account of the Virginia
Adventurers. You will not shrink from the idea of giving something more
than a hundred guineas for a series of Hogarth's plates. But when it
comes to Number 1001 in the May catalogue, and you see that if you would
possess a first folio Shakespeare, "untouched by the hand of any modern
renovator," you must be prepared to pay seven hundred and eighty-five
pounds, almost four thousand dollars, for the volume, it would not be
surprising if you changed color and your knees shook under you. No doubt
some brave man will be found to carry off that prize, in spite of the
golden battery which defends it, perhaps to Cincinnati, or Chicago, or
San Francisco. But do not be frightened. These Alpine heights of
extravagance climb up from the humble valley where shillings and
sixpences are all that are required to make you a purchaser.
One beauty of the Old World shops is that if a visitor comes back to the
place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a
great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit.
In driving down to the old city, to the place of business of the
Barings, I found many streets little changed. Temple Bar was gone, and
the much-abused griffin stood in its place. There was a shop close to
Temple Bar, where, in 1834, I had bought some brushes. I had no
difficulty in finding Prout's, and I could not do less than go in and
buy some more brushes. I did not ask the young man who served me how the
old shopkeeper who attended to my wants on the earlier occasion was at
this time. But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes
smooth show from those that knew their predecessors in the earlier
decade!
I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of
by Artemus Ward as "a sweet boon," so vividly remembered by me as the
scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the
Tower menagerie. But the project added a stone to the floor of the
underground thoroughfare which is paved with good intentions.
St. Paul's I must and did visit. The most striking addition since I was
there is the massive monument to the Duke of Wellington. The great
temple looked rather bare and unsympathetic. Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting
in semi-nude exposure, looked to me as unhappy as our own half-naked
Washington at the national capital. The Judas of Matthew Arnold's poem
would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found
himself in St. Paul's, and have earned another respite. We brought away
little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at
it. It gives us a greater idea of height than the sky itself, which we
have become used to looking upon.
A second visit to the National Gallery was made in company with A----.
It was the repetition of an attempt at a draught from the Cup of
Tantalus. I was glad of a sight of the Botticellis, of which I had heard
so much, and others of the more recently acquired paintings of the great
masters; of a sweeping glance at the Turners; of a look at the
well-remembered Hogarths and the memorable portraits by Sir Joshua. I
carried away a confused mass of impressions, much as the soldiers that
sack a city go off with all the precious things they can snatch up,
huddled into clothes-bags and pillow-cases. I am reminded, too, of Mr.
Galton's composite portraits; a thousand glimpses, as one passes through
the long halls lined with paintings, all blending in one not unpleasing
general effect, out of which emerges from time to time some single
distinct image.
In the same way we passed through the exhibition of paintings at the
Royal Academy. I noticed that A---- paid special attention to the
portraits of young ladies by John Sargent and by Collier, while I was
more particularly struck with the startling portrait of an ancient
personage in a full suit of wrinkles, such as Rembrandt used to bring
out with wonderful effect. Hunting in couples is curious and
instructive; the scent for this or that kind of game is sure to be very
different in the two individuals.
I made but two brief visits to the British Museum, and I can easily
instruct my reader so that he will have no difficulty, if he will follow
my teaching, in learning how not to see it. When he has a spare hour at
his disposal, let him drop in at the Museum, and wander among its books
and its various collections. He will know as much about it as the fly
that buzzes in at one window and out at another. If I were asked whether
I brought away anything from my two visits, I should say, Certainly I
did. The fly sees some things, not very intelligently, but he cannot
help seeing them. The great round reading-room, with its silent
students, impressed me very much. I looked at once for the Elgin
Marbles, but casts and photographs and engravings had made me familiar
with their chief features. I thought I knew something of the sculptures
brought from Nineveh, but I was astonished, almost awe-struck, at the
sight of those mighty images which mingled with the visions of the
Hebrew prophets. I did not marvel more at the skill and labor expended
upon them by the Assyrian artists than I did at the enterprise and
audacity which had brought them safely from the mounds under which they
were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city. I
never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and
the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread
before me. The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded
at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and
its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently
at work at the present day. I feel very grateful that many of its
revelations have been made since I have been a tenant of the travelling
residence which holds so many secrets in its recesses.
There is one lesson to be got from a visit of an hour or two to the
British Museum,--namely, the fathomless abyss of our own ignorance. One
is almost ashamed of his little paltry heartbeats in the presence of the
rushing and roaring torrent of Niagara. So if he has published a little
book or two, collected a few fossils, or coins, or vases, he is crushed
by the vastness of the treasures in the library and the collections of
this universe of knowledge.
I have shown how not to see the British museum; I will tell how to see
it.
Take lodgings next door to it,--in a garret, if you cannot afford
anything better,--and pass all your days at the Museum during the whole
period of your natural life. At threescore and ten you will have some
faint conception of the contents, significance, and value of this great
British institution, which is as nearly as any one spot the _noeud
vital_ of human civilization, a stab at which by the dagger of
anarchy would fitly begin the reign of chaos.
On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wedmore, who had promised to be my
guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a
hansom for the old city. The first place we visited was the Temple, a
collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of
the edifices reminding me of our college dormitories. One, however, was
a most extraordinary exception,--the wonderful Temple church, or rather
the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple. We had some
trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a
girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us. It
affected my imagination strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old,
or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their
place there for some six or seven hundred years; for the church was
built in the year 1185, and the most recent of the crusaders' monuments
is said to date as far back as 1241. Their effigies have lain in this
vast city, and passed unharmed through all its convulsions. The Great
Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and they must
have shaken day and night, as the bodies of the victims of the Plague
were rattled over the pavements.
Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain
stone laid flat on the turf bears these words: "Here lies Oliver
Goldsmith." I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that
Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have
written,
Where doubt is disenchantment
'Tis wisdom to believe.
We do not "drop a tear" so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but
the memory of the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" stirred my feelings
more than a whole army of crusaders would have done. A pretty rough set
of filibusters they were, no doubt.
The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as
the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnson; not the Johnson of the
"Rambler," or of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," or even of "Rasselas,"
but Boswell's Johnson, dear to all of us, the "Grand Old Man" of his
time, whose foibles we care more for than for most great men's virtues.
Fleet Street, which he loved so warmly, was close by. Bolt Court,
entered from it, where he lived for many of his last years, and where he
died, was the next place to visit. I found Fleet Street a good deal like
Washington Street as I remember it in former years. When I came to the
place pointed out as Bolt Court, I could hardly believe my eyes that so
celebrated a place of residence should be entered by so humble a
passageway. I was very sorry to find that No. 3, where he lived, was
demolished, and a new building erected in its place. In one of the other
houses in this court he is said to have labored on his dictionary. Near
by was a building of mean aspect, in which Goldsmith is said to have at
one time resided. But my kind conductor did not profess to be well
acquainted with the local antiquities of this quarter of London.
If I had a long future before me, I should like above all things to
study London with a dark lantern, so to speak, myself in deepest shadow
and all I wanted to see in clearest light. Then I should want time,
time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is
one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of
any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than
would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my
younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre
was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time
spent in walking the wards of a hospital.
Another grand sight there was, not to be overlooked, namely, the
Colonial Exhibition. The popularity of this immense show was very great,
and we found ourselves, A---- and I, in the midst of a vast throng, made
up of respectable and comfortable looking people. It was not strange
that the multitude flocked to this exhibition. There was a jungle, with
its (stuffed) monsters,--tigers, serpents, elephants; there were
carvings which may well have cost a life apiece, and stuffs which none
but an empress or a millionairess would dare to look at. All the arts of
the East were there in their perfection, and some of the artificers were
at their work. We had to content ourselves with a mere look at all these
wonders. It was a pity; instead of going to these fine shows tired,
sleepy, wanting repose more than anything else, we should have come to
them fresh, in good condition, and had many days at our disposal. I
learned more in a visit to the Japanese exhibition in Boston than I
should have learned in half a dozen half-awake strolls through this
multitudinous and most imposing collection of all
"The gorgeous East with richest hand
Showers on her kings,"
and all the masterpieces of its wonder-working artisans.
One of the last visits we paid before leaving London for a week in Paris
was to the South Kensington Museum. Think of the mockery of giving one
hour to such a collection of works of art and wonders of all kinds! Why
should I consider it worth while to say that we went there at all? All
manner of objects succeeded each other in a long series of dissolving
views, so to speak, nothing or next to nothing having a chance to leave
its individual impress. In the battle for life which took place in my
memory, as it always does among the multitude of claimants for a
permanent hold, I find that two objects came out survivors of the
contest. The first is the noble cast of the column of Trajan, vast in
dimensions, crowded with history in its most striking and enduring form;
a long array of figures representing in unquestioned realism the
military aspect of a Roman army. The second case of survival is thus
described in the catalogue: "An altar or shrine of a female saint,
recently acquired from Padua, is also ascribed to the same sculptor
[Donatello]. This very valuable work of art had for many years been used
as a drinking-trough for horses. A hole has been roughly pierced in it."
I thought the figure was the most nearly perfect image of heavenly
womanhood that I had ever looked upon, and I could have gladly given my
whole hour to sitting--I could almost say kneeling--before it in silent
contemplation. I found the curator of the Museum, Mr. Soden Smith,
shared my feelings with reference to the celestial loveliness of this
figure. Which is best, to live in a country where such a work of art is
taken for a horse-trough, or in a country where the products from the
studio of a self-taught handicraftsman, equal to the shaping of a
horse-trough and not much more, are put forward as works of art?
A little time before my visit to England, before I had even thought of
it as a possibility, I had the honor of having two books dedicated to me
by two English brother physicians. One of these two gentlemen was Dr.
Walshe, of whom I shall speak hereafter; the other was Dr. J. Milner
Fothergill. The name Fothergill was familiar to me from my boyhood. My
old townsman, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who died in 1846 at the age of
ninety-two, had a great deal to say about his relative Dr. John
Fothergill, the famous Quaker physician of the last century, of whom
Benjamin Franklin said, "I can hardly conceive that a better man ever
existed." Dr. and Mrs. Fothergill sent us some beautiful flowers a
little before we left, and when I visited him he gave me a medallion of
his celebrated kinsman.
London is a place of mysteries. Looking out of one of the windows at the
back of Dr. Fothergill's house, I saw an immense wooden blind, such as
we have on our windows in summer, but reaching from the ground as high
as the top of the neighboring houses. While admitting the air freely, it
shut the property to which it belonged completely from sight. I asked
the meaning of this extraordinary structure, and learned that it was put
up by a great nobleman, of whose subterranean palace and strange
seclusion I had before heard. Common report attributed his unwillingness
to be seen to a disfiguring malady with which he was said to be
afflicted. The story was that he was visible only to his valet. But a
lady of quality, whom I met in this country, told me she had seen him,
and observed nothing to justify it. These old countries are full of
romances and legends and _diableries_ of all sorts, in which truth
and lies are so mixed that one does not know what to believe. What
happens behind the high walls of the old cities is as much a secret as
were the doings inside the prisons of the Inquisition.
Little mistakes sometimes cause us a deal of trouble. This time it was
the presence or absence of a single letter which led us to fear that an
important package destined to America had miscarried. There were two
gentlemen unwittingly involved in the confusion. On inquiring for the
package at Messrs. Low, the publishers, Mr. Watts, to whom I thought it
had been consigned, was summoned. He knew nothing about it, had never
heard of it, was evidently utterly ignorant of us and our affairs. While
we were in trouble and uncertainty, our Boston friend, Mr. James R.
Osgood, came in. "Oh," said he, "it is Mr. Watt you want, the agent of a
Boston firm," and gave us the gentleman's address. I had confounded Mr.
Watt's name with Mr. Watts's name. "W'at's in a name?" A great deal
sometimes. I wonder if I shall be pardoned for quoting six lines from
one of my after-dinner poems of long ago:--
--One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt,
One trivial letter ruins all, left out;
A knot can change a felon into clay,
A not will save him, spelt without the k;
The smallest word has some unguarded spot,
And danger lurks in i without a dot.
I should find it hard to account for myself during our two short stays
in London in the month of August, separated by the week we passed in
Paris. The ferment of continued over-excitement, calmed very much by our
rest in the various places I have mentioned, had not yet wholly worked
itself off. There was some of that everlasting shopping to be done.
There were photographs to be taken, a call here and there to be made, a
stray visitor now and then, a walk in the morning to get back the use of
the limbs which had been too little exercised, and a drive every
afternoon to one of the parks, or the Thames Embankment, or other
locality. After all this, an honest night's sleep served to round out
the day, in which little had been effected besides making a few
purchases, writing a few letters, reading the papers, the Boston "Weekly
Advertiser" among the rest, and making arrangements for our passage
homeward. The sights we saw were looked upon for so short a time, most
of them so very superficially, that I am almost ashamed to say that I
have been in the midst of them and brought home so little. I remind
myself of my boyish amusement of _skipping stones_,--throwing a
flat stone so that it shall only touch the water, but touch it in half a
dozen places before it comes to rest beneath the smooth surface. The
drives we took showed us a thousand objects which arrested our
attention. Every street, every bridge, every building, every monument,
every strange vehicle, every exceptional personage, was a show which
stimulated our curiosity. For we had not as yet changed our Boston eyes
for London ones, and very common sights were spectacular and dramatic to
us. I remember that one of our New England country boys exclaimed, when
he first saw a block of city dwellings, "Darn it all, who ever see
anything like that 'are? Sich a lot o' haousen all stuck together!" I
must explain that "haousen" used in my early days to be as common an
expression in speaking of houses among our country-folk as its phonetic
equivalent ever was in Saxony. I felt not unlike that country-boy.