Our Hundred Days in Europe | Page 8

not
considered in place in a well-kept lawn. But remembering the cuckoo
song in "Love's Labour's Lost," "When daisies pied ... do paint the
meadows with delight," it was hard to look at them as unwelcome
intruders.
The old cathedral seemed to me particularly mouldy, and in fact too
high-flavored with antiquity. I could not help comparing some of the
ancient cathedrals and abbey churches to so many old cheeses. They
have a tough gray rind and a rich interior, which find food and lodging
for numerous tenants who live and die under their shelter or their
shadow,--lowly servitors some of them, portly dignitaries others,
humble holy ministers of religion many, I doubt not,--larvae of angels,
who will get their wings by and by. It is a shame to carry the
comparison so far, but it is natural enough; for Cheshire cheeses are

among the first things we think of as we enter that section of the
country, and this venerable cathedral is the first that greets the eyes of
great numbers of Americans.
We drove out to Eaton Hall, the seat of the Duke of Westminster, the
many-millioned lord of a good part of London. It is a palace,
high-roofed, marble-columned, vast, magnificent, everything but
homelike, and perhaps homelike to persons born and bred in such
edifices. A painter like Paul Veronese finds a palace like this not too
grand for his banqueting scenes. But to those who live, as most of us do,
in houses of moderate dimensions, snug, comfortable, which the
owner's presence fills sufficiently, leaving room for a few visitors, a
vast marble palace is disheartening and uninviting. I never get into a
very large and lofty saloon without feeling as if I were a weak solution
of myself,--my personality almost drowned out in the flood of space
about me. The wigwam is more homelike than the cavern. Our wooden
houses are a better kind of wigwam; the marble palaces are artificial
caverns, vast, resonant, chilling, good to visit, not desirable to live in,
for most of us. One's individuality should betray itself in all that
surrounds him; he should secrete his shell, like a mollusk; if he can
sprinkle a few pearls through it, so much the better. It is best, perhaps,
that one should avoid being a duke and living in a palace,--that is, if he
has his choice in the robing chamber where souls are fitted with their
earthly garments.
One of the most interesting parts of my visit to Eaton Hall was my tour
through the stables. The Duke is a famous breeder and lover of the turf.
Mr. Rathbone and myself soon made the acquaintance of the chief of
the stable department. Readers of Homer do not want to be reminded
that hippodamoio, horse-subduer, is the genitive of an epithet applied
as a chief honor to the most illustrious heroes. It is the last word of the
last line of the Iliad, and fitly closes the account of the funeral pageant
of Hector, the tamer of horses. We Americans are a little shy of
confessing that any title or conventional grandeur makes an impression
upon us. If at home we wince before any official with a sense of
blighted inferiority, it is by general confession the clerk at the hotel
office. There is an excuse for this, inasmuch as he holds our destinies in

his hands, and decides whether, in case of accident, we shall have to
jump from the third or sixth story window. Lesser grandeurs do not
find us very impressible. There is, however, something about the man
who deals in horses which takes down the spirit, however proud, of him
who is unskilled in equestrian matters and unused to the horse-lover's
vocabulary. We followed the master of the stables, meekly listening
and once in a while questioning. I had to fall back on my reserves, and
summoned up memories half a century old to gain the respect and win
the confidence of the great horse-subduer. He showed us various fine
animals, some in their stalls, some outside of them. Chief of all was the
renowned Bend Or, a Derby winner, a noble and beautiful bay, destined
in a few weeks to gain new honors on the same turf in the triumph of
his offspring Ormonde, whose acquaintance we shall make by-and-by.
The next day, Tuesday, May 11th, at 4.25, we took the train for London.
We had a saloon car, which had been thoughtfully secured for us
through unseen, not unsuspected, agencies, which had also beautified
the compartment with flowers.
Here are some of my first impressions of England as seen from the
carriage and from the cars.--How very English! I recall Birket Foster's
Pictures of English Landscape,--a beautiful, poetical series of views,
but hardly more poetical than the reality.