Westminster Abbey

Comely and calm he ridesHard by his own Whitehall.

A little crowd clusters every morning at

UNITED SERVICES MUSEUM

eleven to see the guard relieved at the Horse Guards, now the office of the C.I.C. of the Home Forces.

On the king’s birthday, June 3rd, the Trooping of the Colour at the Horse Guards is an unforgettable pageant.

The English have not, like the French, the courteous custom of saluting their flag, but on this occasion every civilian head is bared as the drums beat and swords flash, and the uplifted colours are borne slowly round the parade ground to the strains ofGod Save the Kingand the old regimental marches, played by the band of the Life Guards in their magnificent uniforms.

It is a gallant sight, and a goodly thing to see.

“It is a wonderful place ... a nation, not a city.”

Even more than of the British Museum I feel that it would be an impertinence to speak of Westminster Abbey as a London corner unnoticed by Londoners,—and yet I have known people who have left London and gone back across the seas with never a thought for the cloisters nor a “memorie” of Jane Lister, “dear childe,” who lies buried there, people who may have perfunctorily “done” the Abbey with a guide but have never lingered there at the uncrowded hours till the exquisite beautyof its many corners has become a possession they can carry away with them.

I can make no attempt to point out the manifold interest of the Abbey, but there are certain places that I love that I would not willingly let anyone miss.

There is no need to write of the interior. No one was ever known to miss the Poets’ Corner, or the Coronation Chair, or Henry VII.’s Chapel, or the Chapel of Edward the Confessor, but I have known people who visited Westminster Abbey and missed seeing the Chapter House.

To miss seeing that thirteenth-century octagonal room is a calamity. It is not only very beautiful, with a beauty that reminds you at once of the Sainte Chapelle, but there is an atmosphere about it that takes you back through the centuries to the time when Simon de Montfort was laying the foundations of constitutional government, and the first parliament of twenty-three barons, one hundred and twenty ecclesiastics, two knights from each shire and two burghers from each town met in this very room.

The House of Commons was born within these grey walls nearly five and a half centuries ago, when the Commons were told to go to “leur ancienne place en la maison du Chapitre de l’Abbeye de Westminster.” The members met here till they moved to the Chapel of St. Stephen, within the walls of Westminster Palace, in 1547.

Turn your back on the ugly cases of the seals

POETS’ CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY

and charters that should have been removed to the Record Office with the rest of the public records that were stored here since Elizabethan days, and look instead at the faint fourteenth-century mural decoration of Christ surrounded by the Christian virtues. Even the unsightly cases cannot destroy the sense of the lovely proportions of the shaft-supported roof and the arcaded walls with the six noble windows, filled with glass none the less beautiful because it happens to be modern, and all the more interesting because it honours the memory of that great lover of Westminster, Dean Stanley.

When Edward the Confessor about 1050 built the first round Chapter House on this spot for his Benedictine monks to transact the business of their monastery, they little thought to what varied uses it would be put. The present octagonal room has seen the age-long struggle of the people for their liberties. It was damaged in the Civil Wars and suffered from repairs in the eighteenth century. It has had its painted walls concealed by unsightly cupboards, when the public records were stored there. It has housed the Domesday Book till it and the records were removed in 1862, and now that it has been restored as nearly as possible to its old beauty, it exists, spacious and dignified as ever, to remind the passing visitor of the value of tradition and the history of a great nation.

A few steps farther along the cloister is another less well-known corner, the Chapel ofthe Pyx—not so ecclesiastical a chamber as it sounds, “pyx” meaning only a chest or box where the standard of references for testing the coins of the realm used to be kept. Nowadays they make these tests at the hall of the ancient Company of Goldsmiths, at the corner of Foster Lane and Gresham Street.

Long ago the king’s treasure was kept here, and only the king and my Lord Chancellor and the Abbot of Westminster had the keys, a fact that was very inconvenient when a robbery occurred, as at least one abbot found to his cost. He and forty of his monks saw the inside of the Tower in consequence, but punishment was not always so light, as the pieces of human skin still to be seen nailed to the door will show.

Inside the seven-locked door with its gruesome lining, that is only opened to visitors on Tuesdays and Fridays, you find a low vaulted room supported by rounded Romanesque arches on thick short pillars, and a stone altar—the earliest in the Abbey.

After leaving the Chapel of the Pyx, stroll along the Norman cloister to the left, past the Norman undercroft, where, if you have a mind to pay a small fee to the verger in the Poets’ Corner, you can see any day in the week the quaint effigies that used to be carried at royal funerals. Through the dark entry you come to the Little Cloister, a part of the old monastery, that ought only to be seen on a hot summer’s day, for in the winter-time it is dreary andyour thoughts tend to turn to the smug ingratitude that allowed the woman Nelson loved to die in poverty,—for she once lived in the tower built by Abbot Littlington and originally the bell tower of the church.

Turn back through the south walk of the Great Cloister and come into the Deanery Yard.

It is customary to write to the dean for permission to see the Jerusalem Chamber, but, if you go without this formality and he happens to be absent, the caretaker will show it to you and tell quite unique stories which I will not steal his thunder by repeating.

You go through the sixteenth-century Jericho Room first, and it too is interesting, with its linenfold deal panelling. It is the ante-room to the Jerusalem Chamber, and is now used as a sort of vestry room for the cathedral. In the Jerusalem Chamber, as every schoolboy knows, King Henry IV. died in 1413. I refuse to quote Shakespeare on this occasion. It is a fine fourteenth-century cedar-panelled room, and the light through fragments of very ancient glass in the windows shines on early seventeenth-century tapestries and a very old mediæval portrait of Richard II. It is a gracious place, but when the authors of the Revised Version of the Bible worked here in 1870, it failed to inspire them with the same sense of the beauty of words that made their predecessors produce the finest literature in the world.

Many famous men have lain in state in theJerusalem Room before their interment in the Abbey—Congreve and Addison were both honoured in this way, and that seventeenth-century poet-diplomatist, Matthew Prior, who was so esteemed by Louis XIV. that he sent him a bust by the great Coysevox. With one of those piquant inconsistencies that enliven history, Nance Oldfield, Mrs. Bracegirdle’s rival, also lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber before she was buried in the Abbey. Mrs. Bracegirdle lies in front of the entrance to the Chapter House, but Nance Oldfield was the only actress honoured by burial within the Abbey walls.

The Jerusalem Chamber was originally the drawing-room of the Abbot of Westminster, and in James the First’s day a banquet was given here to the French Ambassadors who came over to arrange the marriage of Prince Charles and the daughter of Henri IV.

“If ever princess put all princes down,For temperance, prowess, prudence, equity;This, this was she, that, in despite of death,Lives still admired, adored, Elizabeth!”Anon.

Coming out of Dean’s Court and passing through the gateway in the east side of Dean’s Yard, you find another enticing and little-known corner in Westminster School in Little Dean’s Yard.

Every monastery had to have its school, sothe monks of St. Peter’s started theirs—the forerunner of the Westminster School or St. Peter’s College founded by Queen Elizabeth in 1560. Ben Jonson went to school here, and so did George Herbert and Dryden and Cowper and Southey, Hakluyt ofVoyagesfame, and Wren and Locke and Warren Hastings and many other famous men I do not know, including Prior.

The school sergeant at the lodge will show the Edward III. College Hall, with its minstrel gallery and oaken tables made from the beams of the Spanish Armada. Forty years ago the school annexed Ashburnham House, another interesting unnoticed corner that can be seen any Saturday afternoon, on application to the hall porter. This charming house was built in the seventeenth century by Webb, a famous disciple of Inigo Jones. Alas, his celebrated staircase is given over to dust and spiders, and only restored to a semblance of its former beauty on state occasions, such as Founders’ Day in November or at Christmas, when the boys perform their well-known Latin plays.

There are many interesting things about the school and the buildings that I leave untold, so go and see for yourself this quiet backwater of London.

“That, if I chance to hold my peace,These stones to praise Thee may not cease.”George Herbert.

St. Margaret’s Church, open till four except on a Saturday, is interesting not only for its architectural beauty, but for its many associations, and since 1916 it has had a deepened interest for the British Dominions beyond the Seas, as it was then created their parish church.

Pepys, who simply refuses to be left out of anything, was married here to his pretty wife, of whom he was so proud that she need not have been jealous of Mrs. Knipp.

In the chancel lies Sir Walter Raleigh, buried in St. Margaret’s after his execution in front of Westminster Palace in 1618. Admiral Blake lies in the churchyard, and there is a fine window in his honour on the north side.

The celebrated east window has had a career that is not without its comic side. It was originally sent over to England by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain as a betrothal gift to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of Henry VII., with whom they had arranged the marriage of their daughter Catherine.

Before the window arrived the bridegroom had died, and Henry VIII., who married the bride, did not want a window with a portrait of Prince Arthur and Catherine. He sent it toWaltham Abbey, and from that time its history is a moving one.

At the dissolution of the monasteries, the last abbot sent the window to New Hall in Essex, later bought by the Villiers family, who buried it. At the Restoration General Monk set it up again till its next owner took it down, and had the window packed away in a case till he found a purchaser for fifteen guineas. In 1758 the churchwardens of St. Margaret’s bought back the window for four hundred guineas, but its troubles were not ended.

The Dean and Chapter of Westminster thought the window a superstitious image, and it was only after a lawsuit lasting seven years that the churchwardens were allowed to keep their window.

As usual, I have not told of half the beauty and interest of this fifteenth-century parish church, only of enough, I hope, to make a reader go and discover the rest for himself, but let him take thought to go before four o’clock and not on a Saturday.

“O place! O people! Manners! framed to pleaseAll nations, customs, kindreds, languages!”Herrick.

Iamrather diffident about putting any name on this chapter, for no one would ever think of calling the British Museum an unnoticed place. It has what the newspapers call a world-wide reputation. Its very name smacks of solid worth with nothing unexpected about it. It is an institution looming large and august, its massive masonry dominating Bloomsbury as its reputation does the universe, and absorbing an unending queue of earnest-minded people intent on storing their minds with knowledge.

And yet, every time my frivolous feet have strayed through that solemn portico, I have longed to tell the thousands of people who never dream of coming so far north as Great Russell Street, W.C. 1, of unexpected things they could find there if they would. I remember as a small person being made to recite the names of the seven wonders of the world, and I used to repeat solemnly, “The Temple of Mausolaus at Halicarnassus—the Pyramid of Cheops—the Lighthouse of Alexandria—the Colossus of Rhodes—the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis—the Statue of Jupiter at Olympus, and the Temple of Diana at Ephesus”—with a considerable amount of annoyance that I could never hope to see these ancient splendours. When I found the remains of two of them in the British Museum, I felt, like the Queen of Sheba, that the half had not been told to me, and since that first moment of delighted surprise how many unexpected things I have found there which make me long to say to all the unwitting London visitors, “Don’t be put off by the solemnity of its name and the distance from Bond Street, but go, only go, and you will be rewarded.”

The proper way to make friends with a museum, as with people, is to get to know it slowly, or its very excellences will give you a surfeited memory. I once avoided the beautiful old Cluny Museum in Paris for many years, because I had been oppressed by the fact that it contained 11,000 objects of interest. No one had shown me how to ignore their number and get to love the very walls of Cardinal Jacques d’Amboise’s stately house, by never crossing the sunny courtyard to see more than one sort of exhibit at a time.

I think this plan is even more applicable to the British Museum, that great collection, partly bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane and opened to the public in 1759. There are two things the hurried visitor can do so as to carryaway the possession of a definite memory of one phase of the treasures contained in the vast building in Great Russell Street. He may choose to go there at the hours of 12 or 3P.M.and follow one of the two expert lecturers who conduct people each day to see a different group of exhibits and listen to their story. (Lists of these lectures are given at the door.) Or he may choose for himself the sort of thing he finds most interesting and sternly traverse the other rooms intent only on the objects of his choice. In either case he is luckier than the visitors in the early days of the museum’s existence, who were herded in companies of only fifteen for a two hours’ visit.

To-day one is diffident about directing any choice; as the old guardian said, “Most people ’as their fancies!” They may lie in the direction of the mummy rooms, where the prehistoric man, so startlingly like a modern, crouches in his grave, with his stone flints within reach, or in the room of gold ornaments and gems, where lie the necklaces that rose and fell on breasts dead these thousand years, necklaces that differ nowise from the amethyst and jade trinkets to be seen in Bond Street to-day.

Or you may like best to stroll in that pleasant place the King’s Library—a long, gracious apartment where the sunlight gilds the warm brown of the lovely tooled bindings of George III.’s books.

Into this spacious room come all sorts of people—small boys in knickerbockers anxiousto consult the postage stamp collections, artists to pore over delicately illuminated pages of fifteenth-century manuscripts, students to worship at the shrine of first editions of Shakespeare and Spenser, and people who are touched with the human interest of poignant letters like that of Mary Queen of Scots to “ma bonne sœur et cousine Elizabeth.”

But when I am fancy-free, and come to the British Museum, perhaps with only an hour to spare and no very definite idea about what I want to see, I choose one of two courses. Either I spend the entire hour in walking briskly through the galleries and taking a sort of bird’s-eye view of the different kinds of treasures that the museum guards, without making an attempt at intimacy with any one of them—or I turn to the left of the big entrance hall, pass through the Roman and Greco-Roman rooms and spend the whole time in the western wing, because there I can see the art of three great nations of the ancient world and the greatest of all the museum’s treasures—the Elgin Marbles. In the galleries surrounding them are the stupendous sculptures of Egypt and Assyria; statues of the Egyptian kings who lived 3000 years ago; colossal bulls, human-headed, that once guarded the gate of the palace that belonged to the father of one Sennacherib, King of Assyria, who “came up against all the defenced cities of Judah and took them,” and fragments from his own great palace of Nineveh.

Théophile Gautier’s words:

Tout passe.—L’art robusteSeul a l’étérnité:Le busteSurvit à la cité,

come into one’s mind, for the bas-reliefs show the effect of the fire of the Babylonians and Medes when they destroyed “Nineveh that great city” in 609B.C., yet they survived and the city is as dust! What a people they must have been, the folk who built the Lycian tombs, you can see best when you are half-way down the steps into the Mausoleum room, where lie the tremendous fragments of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—the tomb that his wife and sister built for Mausolos, Prince of Caria, in a little town in Asia Minor some 2275 years ago.

Traces of another of the seven wonders are in the Ephesus room, where remains of the vast Temple of Artemis, “Diana of the Ephesians,” are gathered, and this room leads to the greatest wonder of them all, the pediment groups of statues from the Parthenon at Athens, that most of us calltout courtthe Elgin Marbles.

I believe that a great many people have a vague idea that Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, did a little “scrounging” when he was British ambassador to the Porte in 1801, and that our possession of these sculptures is due to a mixture of luck and audacity.

It is really due to the common sense, artisticperception and generosity of a statesman who at great inconvenience and a cost to himself of £70,000, only half of which sum he later received from the English Government, removed the treasures that were daily being destroyed by the Turkish bombardment and that, but for his action, would have been irretrievably lost to the world.

One does not need to be an artist nor learned in artistic lore to feel the peculiar charm of the Elgin Marbles. I have seen quite ignorant people approach them with unseeing eyes and some flippancy about their mutilation on the lips, but after a few minutes’ contemplation, something of the calm beauty of the pose, the benignant sweep of the drapery, damp with the sea-spray, the mystery of those nostalgic figures, penetrates the onlooker and the work of Pheidias and his craftsmen has wrought its spell.

Now and then the official lecturer tells the story of what they had in their minds when they carved those noble statues, carved every inch of them, even the parts they thought would never again be seen by any human eye once they were placed on the pediment of the Great Temple, and you come away feeling that your eyes have been opened to a great beauty and the truth of it sinks into the soul.

It is not possible in these brief notes to mention more than a very few of the unnoticed treasures in the British Museum. As the old porter said, there is something to interest everyone.

If you search you may come across the manuscript of Rupert Brooke’s immortal sonnet, the toys small children played with 2000 years ago, Mrs. Delany’s curious paper flowers in the students’ room of the print collection and many, many other things to draw you there.

“O what a multitude they seemed, these flowers of London town,Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!”Blake.

Not far from the British Museum is the Foundling Hospital in Guilford Street. One hears of it vaguely as an orphan asylum where the children wear quaint costumes that may be seen at the service in the chapel on Sunday mornings, when the singing attracts many visitors.

But there are more reasons than that to take you to this corner off the beaten track of the West End. For one thing, it may not be there very long. Already there are rumours that the Foundling Hospital may be moved to the country and one more link with eighteenth-century London be snapped.

Institutions as a rule are about as dull to see as to live in, but the Foundling Hospital is an exception. Handel, Hogarth and Dickens all gave tangible proof that they loved the place, and people from all over the world come to seeit, attracted either by the reputation of the choir, the fame of the pictures in the museum, or the pathetic interest of the children, who indeed look merry, healthy little creatures.

Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: A seventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of his life in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children he saw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coram seventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowed hospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got a royal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. The Foundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742.

Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking at the cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “The portrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularly wished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.” The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to be done for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of the old sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all he had. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting a pension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have not wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am notashamed to confess that in this my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than £100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel. That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gate and whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little Coram Street.

The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service at eleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube to Russell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk down Grenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will be seen to the left.

Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each side of the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered since it was decreed by the founder.

Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during the ten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say inLittle Dorrit:

Oh, dear, dear, ... when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world.

But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since Thomas Coram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and

FOUNDLING HOSPITAL

if later in life the mother marries and can prove that she is able to support her child, she can claim it again. The children are never allowed to be adopted. They are sent to foster-mothers in the country when first received, and only come to the hospital when they are six. The girls with few exceptions are trained for domestic service and the boys as regimental bandsmen, if they show talent, or they are apprenticed to different trades when they are fourteen.

There is something infinitely touching in the sight of these rows of small creatures, chanting with their trained treble voices, “Let me never be confounded,” when life had confounded them at its very gates. But seeing them later on, as every Sunday morning visitor is allowed to do, happily eating their dinners in their pleasant rooms, it is obvious that the life of the little brown-coated boy or white-capped girl in Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital has many things in its favour. One may compare their lot with that of more sophisticated children in the London slums, for whom it is necessary to have a society for their protection from the parents who have ill-treated over 100,000 in England in the last year.

One does not ordinarily associate a foundling hospital with the fine arts, but, as I said before, this is an exception. Hogarth not only painted the founder’s portrait and one or two other pictures that he gave to the hospital, but he persuaded his friends to do likewise. Sir JoshuaReynolds gave a portrait of Lord Dartmouth, Gainsborough a view of Charterhouse, Kneller a portrait of Handel, and the exhibition of these gifts, including a beautiful cartoon of Raphael’sMassacre of the Innocents, was a forerunner of the exhibitions of the Royal Academy. The pictures alone are worth going to Guilford Street to see. Some of them are in the picture gallery with the cases holding tokens that in the old days before 1760 used to be left to identify the foundling. In the board-room, which is supposed to be one of the most beautiful rooms in London, hangs Hogarth’sMarch to Finchley, of which I believe there is a copy in the ugly “Adam and Eve” public-house, built on the site of the “Adam and Eve” Inn of the picture, at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road and Euston Road.

The tale of how the hospital came to get the picture is rather quaint. Hogarth painted soldiers marching to Finchley in a state that their Frenchconfrèreswould call “débraillés.” He then asked George II. to buy it, but that monarch—the last English king to go into battle—was so enraged at this presentation of his soldiers, that he indignantly refused, and Hogarth, not being able to dispose of the picture elsewhere, issued lottery tickets for it. About sixty tickets were left on his hands, so he gave them to his favourite hospital, which won the picture, and there it is to-day.

The careful training of the child choir, andthe choice of a musical career for the boys whenever possible, is only carrying on one of the earliest traditions, for Handel rivalled Hogarth in his interest and his gifts to the Foundling Hospital. He used to conduct performances of theMessiahin the chapel to crowded audiences, and as he induced the performers to give their services, the proceeds that he handed over sometimes amounted to nearly £1,000. In a glass case is carefully preserved the gift the great master bestowed on the hospital of the MS. of his oratorio, and near by is the autograph copy of the number ofGood Wordscontaining the story Dickens wrote about the Foundling Hospital.

In the secretary’s room is a fine old Jacobean oak table but lately retrieved from the kitchen premises where it had been in use for centuries.

“Were I a physician I would prescribe nothing but Recipe,CCCLXV drachm. Londin.”—Walpole.

One of the nicest things about the South Kensington Museum is the lively way it keeps in touch with what happens to be interesting Londoners at the moment.

Is there a loan exhibition of Spanish pictures at Burlington House, at once everything Spanish that the Museum possesses is gathered together so that the different phases of Spanish art may be conveniently noted, and there is nearlyalways some extra little exhibition of special interest, either in celebration of the centenary of some great artist or to introduce the work of some foreigner of outstanding merit like Mestrovic.

The lectures given here daily by expert guides at 12 and 3 p.m. would probably be crowded if they cost a guinea. With that curious apathy towards what is not expensive that is one of our less pleasing attributes, only a few people take advantage of these pleasant scholarly talks. If they were known to be very exclusive and costly, the thousands of excellent people with modest incomes and no occupation who live in Bloomsbury and Earl’s Court boarding-houses, would sigh for the privilege of sharing these hour-long strolls through the museum, when the lecturer gives no disconnected account of individual objects but deftly traces the development of the art of different countries and ages, illustrating his teaching by the treasures under his care.

I think this apathy is largely due to lack of initiative and imagination, as well as to the aforesaid deeply-rooted idea that what costs nothing cannot be worth much. I have found so many people who have never heard of these lectures that another cause of the small attendance may be that the news of their existence is not sufficiently widely spread.

There is, alas, no one at Claridge’s or the Ritz or the Savoy to tell mothers who bring their girls over here to buy clothes and do thetheatres, that there is also a way open to them to gain something that will still be theirs when the memory of the play has faded—in most cases let us hope so—and the clothes have been cast aside—since no one nowadays wears clothes long enough to wear them out.

The South Kensington Museum is the finest museum of applied art in the world. That is why it is the Mecca of students who come here to study and draw inspiration from the lovely things fashioned by our forefathers in gold and silver and bronze and leather, in silk and lace and precious stones, in the furnishings and decorations of the houses and persons of other times and other nations. There are paintings and sculpture as well: the Raphael cartoons are one of the glories of the place.

There is something, indeed, to appeal to everyone’s taste in this most marvellous museum. For the little schoolgirls who seem to throng the place in cohorts, in the charge of apathetic teachers, there are the dolls and dolls’ houses that their great-grandmothers played with—the former as delicately waxen and elegantly dressed as any to be found to-day. Furniture lovers may study here the finest specimens of every period, from the handsome Jacobean chairs and settles that harmonise so well with the background of panelled walls and decorated ceilings taken from old English houses, to the marvellous ornate escritoires, toilet tables and gilt couches of French royal palaces. There isless formality about the English furniture, but it was not more comfortable; and the heavy projecting carvings even on the back of the little children’s chairs may well have been the reason for the erect bearings used for odious comparisons in one’s youth. They say that the beds of our forefathers were comfortable. That may be true, but they were certainly depressing, and the state bed from Boughton House, Northampton, in which William III. slept, with its dingy hangings and horrible hearse-like plumes, reaching into the lofty roof, makes you thankful for the airier ideas of to-day.

For book-lovers there are upstairs the old, old missals and books of hours, illuminated with such skill and patience by monks in mediæval monasteries—some with colours almost as perfect, the ink as black, the paper as white as when they were first executed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As marvellous, and perhaps even more exquisite as works of art, are the slender Persian volumes, love-poems and prayers, inscribed in delicate characters of the East, with pictures of shahs and houris, and leather covers, so wonderfully embossed and inlaid and beautifully coloured that no description could give the faintest idea of their perfection.

Even people who are not musicians love the gallery where musical instruments of the past stand silent in their cases: guitars that troubadours in parti-coloured hose twanged dolorously to their lady-loves; virginals belonging to QueenElizabeth and that other Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, who was a daughter of James I.; the harpsichord that Handel bequeathed to George II.; the great harp of the famous blind Welsh harper. Zithers are there, and other instruments of cunning workmanship, lovely to see and with names as melodious as the sounds they once gave forth: dulcimers and clavicords, lutes and ceteras, pandores and clavecins. Here are the spinets of our grandmothers, and what must be the veritable father of the hurdy-gurdy, and a little pianino made by Chappell more than one hundred years ago, so small that you could carry it about from place to place.

Then there is the jewellery—bracelets, girdles, necklaces, earrings, rings chosen and worn by “Flora la Belle Rommaine” and her sisters of other ages and countries, but so like, both in design and execution, the work of the modern goldsmith.

There is an interesting and beautiful collection of the peasant jewellery of continental countries—wonderful gilt crowns of Russian and Norwegian brides and curious rings of gigantic size and significant names, charm rings, motto rings, incantation rings, iconigraphic rings, Gnostic rings and rings with all sorts of devices.

These are only a tithe of the treasures in the Victoria and Albert Museum that can easily be reached by District Railway and Inner Circle to South Kensington Station or by the Piccadilly Tube and the Brompton Road.

“Ce qui nous a tous profondément touchés, c’est moins la grandeur de vos largesses, qui ont été immenses, que la bonne grâce spirituelle avec laquelle vous les avez faites.”Sarcey.

“Ce qui nous a tous profondément touchés, c’est moins la grandeur de vos largesses, qui ont été immenses, que la bonne grâce spirituelle avec laquelle vous les avez faites.”

Sarcey.

People say vaguely, “The Wallace Collection? Oh, yes, I really must go some day; I’ve heard of it so many times,” and the “some day” recedes and London is left behind and that most delightful place remains unseen.

And yet this treasure-house is so easy to reach. The shopper at Debenham and Freebody’s need only turn up Duke Street at the corner where Wigmore Street embraces Lower Seymour Street, and there is Manchester House at the far side of Manchester Square.

If you have only a short time to spend there, give it all to the French pictures. They are thepièce de résistanceof the Wallace Collection, gathered by two men who loved France and spent most of their lives there. The story of the Hertfords who made the Wallace Collection is almost as interesting as anything in their house. The first Marquess of Hertford had thirteen children, and the portraits he asked Reynolds to paint of two of his daughters (Nos. 31 and 33) were the nucleus of the collection. The second marquess only added Reynolds’ “Nelly O’Brien” and the Romney “Perdita.”

His son was the celebrated Marquess of Hertford whose meteoric career enlivened the first half of the last century—the original of bothThackeray’s Marquis of Steyne and Lord Beaconsfield’s Coningsby, whose wealth, wit and reckless egoism provided food for gossip for many a year. It was for him that Decimus Burton built St. Dunstan’s in Regent’s Park, and he filled it withobjets d’artof all kinds, and a number of pictures, chiefly of the Dutch school.

His son, Richard Seymour-Conway, fourth Marquess of Hertford, spent his life in amassing, with the help of Sir Richard Wallace, the collection that is now the property of the British nation. M. Yriarte, a French art expert who knew this eccentric nobleman well, published an account of his curious life in thePall Mall Magazinefor September 1900, but it is not possible to give the details now.

Sir Richard Wallace inherited his wealth and his pictures. His name is legendary here in England, but in Paris it is a household word, for every thirsty street urchin calls the graceful bronze drinking fountains he put all over the city “un Vallace.”

M. Francisque Sarcey, who never met Sir Richard Wallace, has expressed in the dedication of hisLe Siège de Parissomething of the feeling Parisians had for this Englishman who stayed in the city, sharing their perils and discomforts and proving his sympathy by immense gifts. Luckily for us, his friendship did not induce him to leave the Hertford Collection to France. He had always shared his father’s passion for collecting, and began to buy pictures as a young man. The Corot, Rousseau’s lovelyForest Glade, and the enchanting fresco on plaster of aBoy Readingby the Milanese artist Foppa, are among the works he bought.

To come back to the French pictures: there is no example of Chardin’s work (to see “Le Bénédicité” you must go to the Louvre), but there are eight pictures by his pupil Fragonard, and if the Louvre has “The Music Lesson,” Hertford House has the “Gardens of the Villa d’Este.”

I think the Fragonards must be seen if there is time for nothing else; not because Fragonard is a greater artist than the others, but because his work may be better studied here than in his own country.

There is a lovely interior of Fragonard’s in the National Gallery, and a “Lady with a Dog” in the Tennant Collection, 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, but I am informed that the present occupiers of the Glenconner mansion do not follow the generous custom of the owners in admitting the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays from two to six.

The eccentric Marquess’s statement, “I only like pleasing pictures,” perhaps accounts for the number of Greuze canvases—over a score; but the collection is particularly rich in eighteenth-century French painters—Largillière, Watteau, Nattier, Lancret, Vernet, Van Loo, Boucher, etc.

If you have time for two visits, spend the second with the Dutch pictures, where the Rembrandt portraits almost console me for the absence of Vermeer’s. One must go to the National Gallery to see the “Lady at the Virginal.”

Among the fifty-seven artists represented, there are many old friends, Frans Hals, Brouwer, Van Ostade, Gerard Dou, Terborch, Wouverman with his inevitable white horse, six of the excellent Ruysdaels—that somehow never give me as much pleasure as Metsu’s charming pictures—Hobbema, the Flemish Teniers, and eight Rubens (he is more likeable here than in the Louvre).

Of course there are numberless other treasures. A very complete catalogue will tell you all about them, but I hope I have made you want to go and buy that catalogue.

“So I set out on my walk to see the wonders of the big city, and, as chance would have it, I directed my course to the East.”—G. Borrow.

I have never met anyone who knew of this Benjamin among museums—it was only opened the year the war came upon us—except the man of learning who told me that, tucked away in the heart of the manufacturing district of Shoreditch, there was a wonderful collection of period furniture arranged in an old almshouse.So one day I climbed into a 22 bus at Piccadilly Circus and asked the conductor to discard me at the Geffrye Museum in the Kingsland Road. We travelled for miles along streets where every second shop seemed to be a cabinet-maker’s, and then stopped conveniently at the very gate of the quiet, spacious courtyard where elderly people were taking the air on the old oak benches. It was past six of the clock on a warm evening in June, but a misguided guide-book had said the museum was open till eight in summer.

That halcyon arrangement disappeared with the fashion of the eight-hour day, and the museum now closes at six o’clock like its olderconfrères. It is also closed on Sunday morning and all Monday.

The people who used to live in the fourteen quaint little brick almshouses have been transferred to a building in the country, and the London County Council has bought this property for their museum from the Ironmongers’ Company, from whose seventeenth-century “Master,” Sir Robert Geffrye, it takes its name. It is a fascinating place; like a rather badly arranged old curiosity shop. There are old staircases—one from Boswell’s house in Queen Street is the most beautiful—and lovely panelled rooms and all sorts of things that demonstrate how beautiful interior decoration was before the age of machine-made furniture.

There is a charming room from New Court, Lincoln’s Inn, and many other interestingexhibits including a beautiful lacquered Chinese palanquin, but what I liked best were the fragile, unbelievable wood carvings of Grinling Gibbons.

If there were nothing else to see in the Geffrye Museum, it would be worth while to go to look at what a master hand can do with a block of wood. Evelyn thought Grinling Gibbons “the greatest master both of invention and rarenesse of work that the world ever had in any age.”

I had cherished the mistaken belief that Gibbons was an Englishman for so long that it was with regret I found that this great artist was born in Rotterdam and only came to England in 1667 when he was twenty-four years old.

It is many long years since I was first shown some of Grinling Gibbons’ marvellous work—so many that only the effect it had on me remains, while the date and place have gone from me. I never willingly miss seeing what his hand has carved, and if any reader of these pages is in the habit of coming to London often and making friends on each trip with another of the men of genius who have given the city its proud record, I can tell them where they may study the wizardlike work of this master craftsman and great artist.

The most magnificent piece of work he carved is in the choir of St. Paul’s, but there are long festoons of flowers in St. Mary Abchurch, in Abchurch Yard, off Abchurch Lane, a turningout of Cannon Street. In old St. Mary Abchurch you will also find a wonderful painted dome by Sir James Thornhill, Hogarth’s father-in-law, whose house in Dean Street, Soho, has only lately been pulled down. St. James’s, Piccadilly, that suave building that breathes mid-Victorian portliness, broadcloth and self-satisfaction, has a lovely marble font carved by Grinling Gibbons, but the cover was stolen. Later research has destroyed the widely-spread belief that Grinling Gibbons carved the pedestal for King Charles I.’s statue in Trafalgar Square, but over the mantelpiece in the vestry of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East, between Great Tower Street and Lower Thames Street, you will find another carving.

The rest I will leave you to hunt out for yourself. Some of it is in unlikely places, one of them not a hundred miles from Clifford’s Inn. I do not know if there is any trace of the pot of flowers Grinling Gibbons carved when he lived in Belle Sauvage Court on Ludgate Hill, and which Walpole said “shook surprisingly with the motion of the coaches that passed by.”

He lived for forty-three years in Bow Street, Covent Garden. The house fell down, says an old record, in 1701, “but by a genial providence none of the family were killed,” and they seem to have propped up their house, for they went on living there till Grinling Gibbons died in 1721.

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