



Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
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 _SPECIAL EDITION_

 WITH THE WORLD'S
 GREAT TRAVELLERS

 EDITED BY CHARLES MORRIS
 AND OLIVER H. G. LEIGH

 VOL. III

 CHICAGO
 UNION BOOK COMPANY
 1901




 COPYRIGHT 1896 AND 1897
 BY
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

 COPYRIGHT 1901
 E. R. DUMONT




[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, CITY OF MEXICO]




CONTENTS.


 SUBJECT.                                AUTHOR.                    PAGE

 London, Glasgow, Dublin, Manchester,
     Liverpool                           OLIVER H. G. LEIGH            5
 Kenilworth and Warwick Castles          ELIHU BURRITT                25
 Windsor Forest and Castle               ANONYMOUS                    36
 The Aspect of London                    HIPPOLYTE TAINE              47
 Westminster Abbey                       NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE          56
 The Gardens at Kew                      JULIAN HAWTHORNE             64
 Chatsworth Castle                       JOHN LEYLAND                 75
 King Arthur's Land                      J. YOUNG                     84
 The English Lake District               AMELIA BARR                  93
 The Roman Wall of Cumberland            ROSE G. KINGSLEY            105
 English Rural Scenery                   SARAH B. WISTER             112
 The "Old Town" of Edinburgh             ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON      120
 In the Land of Rob Roy                  NATHANIEL P. WILLIS         129
 The Island of Staffa and Fingal's Cave  BERIAH BOTFIELD             140
 Ireland and Its Capital                 MATTHEW WOODS, M. D.        148
 From Cork to Killarney                  SARA J. LIPPINCOTT          157
 North of Ireland Scenes                 W. GEORGE BEERS             168
 Paris and Its Attractions               HARRIET BEECHER STOWE       178
 Travel in France Fifty Years Ago        CHARLES DICKENS             189
 From Normandy to Provence               DONALD G. MITCHELL          200
 A French Farmer's Paradise              M. BENTHAM-EDWARDS          211
 Cordova and Its Mosque                  S. P. SCOTT                 218
 The Spanish Bull-Fight                  JOSEPH MOORE                230
 Seville, the Queen of Andalusia         S. P. SCOTT                 238
 Street Scenes in Genoa                  AUGUSTA MARRYAT             249
 The Alhambra                            S. P. SCOTT                 257




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


VOLUME III

 THE CATHEDRAL, CITY OF MEXICO                            _Frontispiece_
 LONDON BRIDGE                                                        14
 BANK OF ENGLAND                                                      50
 WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND VICTORIA TOWER                                 62
 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTHWEST                             114
 PRINCES STREET AND SIR WALTER SCOTT'S MONUMENT, EDINBURGH           122
 THE FORTH BRIDGE FROM THE NORTH                                     136
 CUSTOM-HOUSE, DUBLIN, IRELAND                                       150
 QUEENSTOWN HARBOR                                                   164
 GRAND OPERA HOUSE, PARIS                                            180
 THE LUMINOUS PALACE, PARIS                                          216
 THE GROTTO OF THE SIBYL, TIVOLI                                     250




 WITH THE WORLD'S
 GREAT TRAVELLERS.




THE WORLD'S GREAT CAPITALS OF TO-DAY.

OLIVER H. G. LEIGH.


LONDON.

To the ordinary eye the moon and stars have at least prettiness, perhaps
grandeur. To the trained astronomer, and the contemplative poet, the
mighty firmament overwhelms the mind with the sense of human inability
to grasp the vast. Knowing and loving the features and characteristics
of London as a lover those of his mistress, it can be imagined how such
a one despairs of doing justice, in a brief space, either to his subject
or his own sane enthusiasm. He would fain impart his knowledge, insight,
and what glimmerings of romantic fancy may add charm to the prosy
exposition, but the showman's harangue is received as art without heart.

London is a hundred captivating sights and themes for our hundred
capacities and moods. You go to it the first time with the child's
enviable eye-delight in novelty, and are lucky if in a week you are not
eye-sore, dazed, and jaded with the very monotony of new scenes and
blurred impressions. You wisely fly to the lovely country lanes for
restful change, and come back with new eyes and a clean slate. Then
the mysterious quality which lifts visible London into the London of
real romance and realizable antiquity dawns upon the mind. A third
exploration reveals its almost omniscient and omnipotent headship as for
three centuries the world's centre for the intellectual and material
forces that have so largely built up our civilization. Continued
observation brings other and endless aspects of the indescribable city,
which is no city, but a Chinese puzzle of separately whirling worlds
within each other.

This mystifying prelude may seem rather disheartening to the stranger,
primed with rational curiosity to understand, as well as see, this
unwieldy London. He will find, however, his curiosity whetted, deepened,
elevated, in proportion as he takes with him a moderate grounding
in the historical associations of the old city. This easily acquired
information will prove to be a key that will unlock hidden places
holding bunches of other keys, so that everywhere one may turn, the
streets, buildings, and monuments recite their own fascinating stories.

We live in the day of big things, and sneer as we may at the
superficiality of estimating quality by size, there is no escape from it
when the purpose is only to kindle interest. Analysis can be undertaken
afterwards. London "whips creation" in the number of its people, though
its greatness is quite independent of this. The circle can be drawn to
include four, six, or seven millions and it will still be true that the
sustainers of its greatness come within a single million, possibly the
half of that. Yet it has a few businesses useful for the novice to know.
People have walked and ridden through the double tunnel under the wider
part of the Thames since 1843. Its underground railway, costing five
million dollars per mile to make, carries one hundred and fifty millions
of people a year, and has been running forty years. The public are
served by fifteen thousand cabs, which earn twenty-five million dollars
a year. There are over one thousand omnibuses, not including tram-cars,
on which there are roof seats, and you pay from two to six cents,
according to distance. Steamboats afford a fine view of the city, at the
same fares.

It has about five hundred theatres and music-halls, giving variety
programmes. Many of these hold from three to five thousand and they are
always well-filled. The roof of a famous music-hall built in 1870 slides
off for a few minutes at a time, for ventilation on summer nights. The
Crystal Palace entertains a hundred thousand people without being
crowded, in its beautiful glass hall, 1,608 feet long, with two great
aisles and transepts, and a charming pleasure park. In the palace are
reproductions of ancient architecture, primitive peoples, extinct
animals, everything in art and nature that can expand knowledge. The
orchestra seats four thousand, the concert-hall four thousand, and the
theatre four thousand, all under the same roof, yet their performances
are simultaneous. The Palace cost over seven million dollars in 1854,
and admission is twenty-five cents. The Albert Memorial Hall holds ten
thousand. The Agricultural Hall covers three acres and a half, and holds
audiences of twenty-five thousand.

There is not a day in the year without half-a-dozen or more public
meetings, convened by religious, scientific, or other societies, a
free field for the stranger to see distinguished people, hear average
oratory, study character and customs, and lay in stores of useful
knowledge with varied entertainment. "Doing the sights" is a matter of
course, but they should be selected to suit one's mood at the time, also
the usually unlovely weather, and above all, after some preliminary
guide-book reading. The Tower is already familiar in story and picture,
yet not every cockney is aware that its walls enclose a virtual town of
over three thousand inhabitants. It has a hundred distinct interests
for the leisurely-minded, besides that of being a great old fortress.
The new Tower bridge equals the underground railway and sub-river
tunnels as a triumph of engineering, lifting itself high above the tall
ships' masts when they sail in and out of the port. Near by, the much
maligned East End, the Whitechapel district beloved by horror-vending
reporters, invites and will repay a visit.

Would you like to realize a dream of some magnificent pageant, in
which the great notabilities of all the earth take a share? Take your
stand where Rotten Row meets the Drive any morning or afternoon between
April and July. Here meet the pink of fashion and the celebrities
distinguished for honors won in art, science, diplomacy, statesmanship,
and war. The outward and visible magnificence belongs to the horses
rather than their riders and drivers, for plainness of attire and
decoration is the rule among the great folks. This double daily parade
is truly a unique spectacle, viewed by throngs of idlers of all nations,
themselves a picturesque feature of the show.

A panorama with another sort of interest should be viewed ponderingly.
Let the visitor approach Westminster Abbey from Victoria station along
Victoria Street, once a worse than any Whitechapel nest of criminal
slum-dwellers. Grouped into a picture unrivalled elsewhere in the world
for architectural splendor combined with historic glory, he will see the
hoary Abbey, not simply the stone record of a thousand years of human
progress; not simply the petrified survival of druidicial worship in the
forest groves, with its soaring tree-trunk columns breaking into foliage
as their tops meet to screen the sun and echo down again the ascending
incense of prayer and song; not simply the stately temple which for ages
has been the shrine of England's great ones, thirteen kings, fourteen
queens, and the greater than these--the glorious array of its poets,
musicians, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and explorers, who, like
Livingstone in his line and Chaucer in his, poured all their wealth of
genius and power into the lap of their motherland, to make her happier
and stronger. He will see through the mediaeval stained windows the
deeper meaning of the old church's story, the reddened sun-rays telling
of the bloodshed that watered the growing plant of the nation's
greatness, and the blue beams that figure Britannia's olden mastery of
the seas, and the rainbow hues suggestive of her labors to give hope to
the people that long sat in darkness till she brought the light of
civilization.

Close to the Abbey's side stands the venerable St. Margaret's parish
church, where Caxton printed the first book and is buried; where
Ambassador James Russell Lowell's epitaph on Raleigh graces the window
that honors the memory of Virginia's founder, whose headless body
reposes in its precincts. Just behind the two churches stands
Westminster Hall, as King William Rufus built it in 1099, though its
great oak-beam roof was heightened by Richard II. Close behind it
rises the majestic file of the Houses of Parliament, the great Victoria
tower at one end, at the other the clock tower, with its minute-hand
twelve feet long and its chimes that float around for miles. From its
foot Westminster Bridge gladly crosses the Thames to the noblest of
hospitals, St. Thomas's, founded in 1213. Its separate blocks corridored
together, fitly match the Parliament building on the opposite bank of
the river. When you stand on the Abbey sidewalk, near the Beaconsfield
statue, you may feel you are standing in the true centre of the earth,
for there will pass you in the course of a week in the season the
picked leaders of most nations, the representatives of every faith and
system of government, the ruling men of Asiatic empires and tribes,
and travellers from the world's end to do homage to the mother of
parliaments and the shrine of the immortal dead. And far in the distant
haze hovers the dome of St. Paul's like a balloon ascending through the
smoke clouds to the clear blue.

Starting westward from the Abbey, in this sacred bit of the great city,
it is possible to walk seven miles on the grass and paths, through St.
James's park, surrounded by Government buildings, stately old mansions,
the home of the king when Prince of Wales, St. James's Palace, and
Buckingham Palace. Then along Constitution Hill, across Piccadilly into
Hyde Park, along Rotten Row (from _Route du Roi_) to Kensington Gardens
with the house Victoria was born in, and so on, with a few breaks. The
group of palatial museums at South Kensington tempt the stranger,
whatever his tastes or culture, to spend a year there, and each year so
spent will need another to do justice to their marvellous contents.

Turn back now, along Piccadilly, a unique panorama in itself, pass the
cluster of great restaurants, theatres, music-halls, and other pleasure
places that reach half a mile or so towards the Strand, where the hotels
range round Charing Cross. Along this narrow but brilliant highway lie
more theatres and a famous church or two, and the cold bath in use since
the Romans made it two thousand years ago. Then up Fleet Street, whence
the daily papers flutter morning, noon and night, until St. Paul's
crowns the highest bit of the city. Its interior, and the monuments to
the nation's naval and military heroes, will impress the visitor, though
hardly so much as the exquisite singing at the short services of morning
and afternoon, the strains of vocal and organ music floating and
billowing in the great dome and along the lofty aisles.

Between St. Paul's and old Bishopsgate lies "the city," that is, the
square mile or so given up to business, with no private houses left
in it. Still going eastward the route passes through the Billingsgate
fishmarket quarter, where its famous language still flourishes.
Here stands "the Monument," a column surmounted with a gilt frame,
commemorating the great fire of 1666, which began at this spot. If we
take our stand far away on Blackfriars Bridge some thirty-five church
steeples may be counted, each with its upper part painted black. The
dome of St. Paul's is one of these. They mark the area of the fire,
as each rebuilt church had to bear this memorial. But for this law St.
Paul's would have had a gilded dome. Soon we come to the Tower, and then
the long line of docks, covering thousands of acres, and stretching
miles down the river. Here the merchant wealth of the country, and of
the world, is realizable as nowhere else.

London shows both sides of its shield: incalculable wealth, poverty that
defies description. Years of familiarity with its slums, before slumming
was invented as a fashionable fad, only deepened the conviction that
all the noble efforts to eradicate the worst evils in the situation are
utterly hopeless. The breed flourishes faster than the mild measures to
improve it can operate.

The homes of aristocracy in Mayfair, the heart of the West End,
disappoint those who expect magnificence--long rows of houses in narrow
streets, once red brick, now dingy black and musty-looking, the monotony
broken here and there by a newer and more pretentious stone mansion. The
great Squares are a brighter feature. The same sooty brick houses, large
and small, make the quadrangle, each having a key to the gates that
enclose the park, in which nursemaids exercise the children and pet
dogs, and an occasional game of croquet is ventured by country cousins.
The coating of soot on every branch and leaf is fatal to clean hands
and summer costumes. The newer streets, and the region around the South
Kensington Museums, make a better display of architecture. A little
experience will reconcile the stranger to the general dowdiness of house
exteriors, when he learns that the English climate has caused the
English people to think most of the home within. The contrast on
entering these plain structures is startling and gratifying. While
this home love and home pride with homely ways are the strongest
characteristics of the people, the saying of Charles the Second is still
true, that there is no other country in which one can spend so many
hours the year round in the open air. They spend as much of their
daylight as possible out of doors and their evenings at home have a
hearty, informal, delightful charm, wholly in contrast to the stiff and
stagy receptions known in other cities.

The innate love of country life is shown by rich and poor alike. On
the four legal bank holidays, the Monday after Christmas, Easter
Monday, Whitsun Monday, and the first Monday in August, all business is
suspended throughout the land, in most cases from the Friday evening
until Tuesday morning. Then the masses come forth in all their might and
finery, they take possession of the street vehicles, the railways and
boats. The "upper" and "upper middle" classes religiously stay at home
on those days, dreading the uproarious throngs of 'Arries and 'Arriets,
who jam themselves ten deep into seats for five and monopolize every
place of amusement. Yet it is a cheery sight to see all these hundreds
of thousands of London toilers hurrying on wheels of all sorts away to
Epping Forest, kept in its virgin state these four hundred years, and
to Hampstead Heath, the Crystal Palace, the great parks, and similar
handy breathing places, not to mention the favorite resorts within a
twenty-mile radius. You will smile at grown folks playing skip the rope
the whole day long, and kiss in the ring, and such like primitive games,
but it is a wholesome sign when a whole population can find hearty
pleasure in romping on the grass, for simple delights gained by healthy
open-air exercise yield a more lasting happiness than is to be got by
paying money to sit still and see hirelings make antics for you.

These outlying places are the crowning glory of London. Beautiful
Windsor, Richmond Park, Kew Gardens, Epping Forest, and the ideally
delightful Edens that nestle along the bends of the upper Thames, are
all within the twenty-five mile circle, though one can find fifty
fairy-grounds within five miles from any city station, where one can
sprawl on the velvet grass beneath some spreading oak, and drink in the
balmy scent-laden air, out of sight and sound of bricks and mortar. You
may, certainly, be disturbed by the carolling of larks, linnets and
others of the feathered choir, and perhaps by the waftings of some
village church's silvery peal of bells, celebrating a wedding on the
general holiday merrymaking. Even in the very heart of London's busiest
quarters one can instantaneously step from the streets into grassy
enclosures with great old trees, as silent and restful as if we were
in some monastic cloister a century or two back. Until it has been
experienced it is impossible to realize the beauty and mental relief of
being able to turn from the rush and roar of the great city into one of
these lovely retreats, or into the Cathedral, or Abbey, or nearest old
church, where "the dim, religious light" of the stained windows, and the
poetry of design and associations, and perhaps the pealing organ, waft
the jaded senses into lotos land.

Coming back to details of another kind it is to be remarked that for
noise, we can conscientiously claim our own New York as champion
unrivalled. This item of metropolitan noise in some wise hits off
the characteristics of the nations. New York has its fearsome
rattle-clatter, sharp, pungent, nerve-racking, incessant, typical of
the ceaseless "hurry-up" of its folk, in talk and motion. All is
"rapid-transit" rush, anyhow, anywhere. Paris has its light, flitting,
skipping, pittypat noise, as of a million chattering magpies busy
shifting quarters. London has altogether another noise--a deep, soft
diapason, Niagara-like in its immensity and pitch--a low melodious roar,
the noise of "the roaring loom of time"; noises of the past; great
booming echoes of dead centuries; the wailings of populations crushed by
endless wars, oppressed by dynasties of tyrants, crowned and uncrowned;
smitten to death by plagues; swept out of life by Ignorance, Poverty,
Evil Fate. Great London has gathered the voices of the peoples in a
thousand years of matchless history, and he who listens aright can hear
them all as they go up to heaven in the mighty volume of its sun-dimmed
incense of smoke.

This London is a miniature world. It is made up of representatives
of every nationality; is the hive of every land's industry; the
market-place for every country's products. It is the mart where
traders from all the ends of the earth transact their business; the
bank to which every nation and tribe intrust their gains; the parlor,
the parleying-place, the parliament of the earth, where rulers and
subjects, races and clans, leaders and followers, explorers, travellers,
scholars, reformers, do their best talking, most of it in the hearing
of all peoples who use the English tongue.

[Illustration: LONDON BRIDGE]

London is more than all this. It is the purgatory and the elysium of
generations of Britain's great souls. As the centuries have cast their
hallowed tints of sombre gray over her dumbly eloquent stones, they have
seen a long procession of sad figures threading the old, quaint, crooked
byways and highways, figures of gaunt men and weary women, dropping
out from the ranks here and there from sheer want of the wherewithal
of life. These have been the forerunners, the seed-sowers, the pioneers
of England's greatness--singers and seers, planners and day-dreamers,
toilers with hand and brain, potential Caesars and Alfreds, Shakespeares
and Arkwrights, Wrens, Reynoldses and Wellingtons, without a ray of the
ripening sunshine. Old England had its genius-breeders long before the
luckier later sons were born. Not a stone of St. Paul's that glorifies
the powers of its designers but is also, when you rightly look, a
tombstone to the memory of some unknown toiler whose brain, heart,
muscle or blood was spent to make that cathedral sublime; nor can you
pick up a page of your Chaucers, Shakespeares, Miltons, Goldsmiths, and
Tennysons but, if you scan it closely enough, you will find it stained
with the tears of countless strugglers, who wrought themselves sore
in the cause of man's elevation, only to earn a nameless grave for
themselves. Pioneers, they sank, but their bones so enriched the soil
that the London which was a purgatory to them is an elysium to us
to-day, pacing whose witching shades we may see, if we close our eyes on
inferior sights, the ghosts of the legion of Greathearts who haunt the
old home, whose coldness to them in their own day they have avenged by
making it glow with the glory of their names and works.

This is the crowning charm of London the unique--that we tread on ground
every inch of which has its thrilling story to tell. There Shakespeare
trod. Here Marlowe fell. Here Otway died, starved. Here Carey fainted,
foodless. Here Goldsmith trailed footsore, hungry, despairing of fame.
Here Johnson and Savage tramped the street all night with three cents
between them for coffee at the street stall in the early morning. Here
gentle De Quincey slept on the doorsteps. Hear him: "So then, Oxford
Street, stony-hearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of
orphans and drinkest the tears of children, the time was come at last,
that I no more should pace in anguish thy never-ending terraces; no more
should dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of hunger. Thou, Oxford
Street, hast echoed to the groans of innumerable hearts!" Aye, and still
do thy throbbing streets, O glorious, pitiless London, reverberate with
the wails of unsuspected thousands! To-day, this very day, the artist,
the poet, the scholar, the inventor, the helpless sons of genius may
perish, and most literally do perish, die of the heart-break that is
born of hunger, in the wilderness of merry London. Who cannot readily
recall a