Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 1 | Page 3

save one, is of greater age than a century and a half. Even the exception (St. Augustine) is a child in arms compared with Westminster Hall, the Tower of London, St. Martin's of Canterbury, the ruined abbey of Glastonbury, the remains of churches on the island of Iona, or the oldest ruins found in Ireland.
What to an American is ancient history, to an Englishman is an affair of scarcely more than yesterday. As Goldwin Smith has said, the Revolution of 1776 is to an American what the Norman conquest is to an Englishman--the event on which to found a claim of ancestral distinction. More than seven hundred years divide these two events. With the Revolution, our history as a nation began; before that we were a group of colonies, each a part of the British Empire. We fought single-handed with Indians, it is true, and we cooperated with the mother country in wresting the continent from the French, but all this history, in a technical sense, is English history rather than the history of the United States.
Our Revolution occurred in the reign of the Third George; back of it runs a line of other Hanoverian kings, of Stuart kings, of Tudor kings, of Plantagenet kings, of Norman kings, of Saxon kings, of Roman governors, of Briton kings and queens, of Scottish tribal heads and kings, of ancient Irish kings. Long before Caesar landed in Kent, inhabitants of England had erected forts, constructed war chariots, and reared temples of worship, of which a notable example still survives on Salisbury Plain. So had the Picts and Scots of Caledonia reared strongholds and used war chariots, and so had Celts erected temples of worship in Ireland, and Phoenicians had mined tin in Cornwall. When Cavaliers were founding a commonwealth at Jamestown and the Puritans one on Massachusetts Bay, the British Isles were six hundred years away from the Norman conquest, the Reformation of the English church had been effected, Chaucer had written his "Tales," Bacon his "Essays," and Shakespeare all but a few of his "Plays."
Of the many races to whom belong these storied annals--Briton, Pict, Scot, Saxon, Dane, Celt, Norman--we of America, whose ancestral lines run back to those islands, are the far-descended children, heirs actual. Our history, as a civilized people, began not in Independence Hall, Philadelphia, not at Jamestown, not at Plymouth Rock, but there in the northeastern Atlantic, in lands now acknowledging the sway of the Parliament of Westminster, and where, as with us, the speech of all is English. Not alone do we share that speech with them, but that matchless literature, also English, and more than that, racial customs, laws and manners, of which many are as old as the Norman conquest, while others, for aught we know, are survivals from an age when human sacrifices were made around the monoliths of Stonehenge.
It is not in lands such as these that any real American can ever feel himself a stranger. There lies for so many of us the ancestral home--in that "land of just and of old renown," that "royal throne of kings," that "precious stone set in the silver sea," that "dear, dear land, dear for her reputation through the world."
F.W.H.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--PART ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION AND INTRODUCTION TO VOLS. I AND II--By the Editor
I--LONDON
A GENERAL SKETCH--By Goldwin Smith WESTMINSTER ABBEY--By Washington Irving THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT--By Nathaniel Hawthorne ST. PAUL'S--By Augustus J.C. Hare THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND THE CRYSTAL PALACE--By H.A. Taine THE TEMPLE'S GALLERY OF GHOSTS PROM DICKENS--By J.R.G. Hassard THE TEMPLE CHURCH--By Augustus J.C. Hare LAMBETH CHURCH AND PALACE--By Augustus J.C. Hare DICKENS'S LIMEHOUSE HOLE--By J.E.G. Hassard WHITEHALL--By Augustus J. C. Hare THE TOWER--By W. Hepworth Dixon ST. JAMES'S PALACE--By Augustus J. C. Hare LITERARY SHRINES OF LONDON--By William Winter
II--CATHEDRALS AND ABBEYS
CANTERBURY--By the Editor OLD YORK--By William Winter YORK AND LINCOLN COMPARED--By Edward A. Freeman DURHAM--By Nathaniel Hawthorne ELY--By James M. Hoppin SALISBURY--By Nathaniel Hawthorne EXETER--By Anna Bowman Dodd LICHFIELD--By Nathaniel Hawthorne WINCHESTER--By William Howitt WELLS--By James M, Hoppin BURY ST. EDMUNDS--By H. Claiborne Dixon GLASTONBURY--By H. Claiborne Dixon TINTERN--By H. Claiborne Dixon
III--CASTLES AND STATELY HOMES
LIVING IN GREAT HOUSES--By Richard Grant White WINDSOR--By Harriet Beecher Stowe BLENHEIM--By the Duke of Marlborough WARWICK--By Harriet Beecher Stowe KENILWORTH--By Sir Walter Scott ALNWICK--By William Howitt HAMPTON COURT--By William Howitt CHATSWORTH AND HADDON HALL--By Elihu Burritt EATON HALL--By Nathaniel Hawthorne HOLLAND HOUSE--By William Howitt ARUNDEL--By Anna Bowman Dodd PENSHURST--By William Howitt
IV--ENGLISH LITERARY SHRINES
STRATFORD-ON-AVON--By Washington Irving NEWSTEAD ABBEY--By Nathaniel Hawthorne HUCKNALL-TORKARD CHURCH (Byron's Grave)--By William Winter DR. JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE--By Nathaniel Hawthorne
_(English Literary Shrines continued in Vol. II)_

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME I
FRONTISPIECE TRAFALGAR SQUARE, LONDON
PRECEDING PAGE I WESTMINSTER ABBEY RIVER FRONT OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL INTERIOR OF ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL CHAPEL OF EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, WESTMINSTER ABBEY THE TOWER OF LONDON CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL