Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 1 | Page 3

Pacific coast with her Franciscan mission houses; to St.
Augustine with her Spanish gates; but all these are young and blushing
things compared with the historic places of the British Isles. None of
them, 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