Difficult as it is adequately to state or to measure the extension of the mails within the century, it is far from telling the whole story of the amplitude and celerity with which the people of our day interchange intelligence.

Only to the last third of the period under review has the electric telegraph been known. It is now a necessity of the public and private life of every civilized spot upon the globe. It traverses all lands and all seas. The forty miles of wire with which it started from Washington City have become many millions. Its length of line in the United States is about the same with that of the mail-routes, and a similar equality probably obtains in other parts of the world. We have nearly as much line as all Europe together, though the extent of wire may not be so great. It is little to say that this continent, so dim to the founders of the Union, has been by the invention of Morse compressed within whispering distance, the same advantage having been conferred on other countries. It is the property of mankind, and the comparison must be between present and past, not between any two countries of the present. Strictly, a comparison is not possible, nothing like magnetic communication having been known forty years ago, unless to the half imagination, half realization of one or two scientific experimenters. Steam and stamps wrought a difference in degree—the telegraph one of kind. Against eighteen hundred miles of wagon-road we set seventy-three thousand of railway; but two hundred thousand miles of telegraph are opposed by nothing, unless by Franklin's kite-string. Looked at along the perspective of poles, the old days disappear entirely—the patriots become pre-historic. Yet modern self-conceit is somewhat checked by the reflection that the career of these two great agents of intercommunication has but just opened; that their management even yet remains a puzzle to us; and that the next generation may wonder how we happened to get hold of implements whose use and capabilities we so poorly comprehended. So far as prediction can now be ventured, a force and pathway more economical than coal and the rail will not soon be forthcoming; nor is Canton apt to "interview" New York at the rate of more words in a minute over a single wire than she can now. Some day dynamite may be harnessed to the balloon, which stands, or drifts, where it did with Montgolfier, and we may all become long-range projectiles; but even this age of hurry will contentedly wait a little for that.

Possibly the Post-office Department would be less of a valetudinarian, financially, had it confined itself to its legitimate occupation, the speeding of intercourse and wafting of sighs, and not yielded to the heavy temptation of disseminating shoes, pistols and *garden-seeds over three millions of square miles. Newspapers are enough to test its powers as a freight-agent. Where these and their literary kindred of books, magazines, etc. used to be estimated by the dozen and the ounce, the ton is becoming too small a unit.

West of the Blue Ridge, or the front line of the Alleghany, so called in most of its length, there was not a newspaper published in 1776. Ten years later, scarcely more than one—the Pittsburg Gazette—existed west of the mountains. The few in the seaboard towns kept alive the name, and little more. In 1850, '60 and '70 the periodicals of the Union numbered, respectively, 2526, 4051 and 5871, with an average circulation, at the three periods, of twenty-one hundred, thirty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred copies each. The circulation thus outgrew the numbers in the proportion of nearly two to one. And both are largely in excess of the increase of the population, that being in the twenty years but 65 percent. The number of daily papers (254 in 1850 and 574 in 1870) must now be equal to the entire number of periodicals in France outside of Paris (796 in 1875), with an average issue less than half that of ours. The proportion of readers to the population, certainly in this class of literature, thus appears to be rapidly growing: and the change is most striking if we take, for example, that group of periodicals which are most purely literary and most remote from the mere chronicle. The returns for the three periods place the monthlies at, respectively, 100, 280 and 622—an advance of sixfold.

The magazine leads us to the door of the library; and here the exhibit is still more marked, significant and gratifying. The census figures are, for many reasons, extremely confused, but in the general result they cannot be outrageously wrong, and they can mislead us only in degree as to the immense multiplication of books in both public and private libraries. The returns are manifestly far below the truth. To give them here without the explanations accompanying them in the census volumes would mislead; and those explanations, or a fair synopsis of them, would occupy too much space, and would, after all, leave the problem unsolved. That the supply of books has fully kept pace with every other means of culture is patent enough. The Congressional Library has risen in half the century from the shelves of a closet to nearly four hundred thousand volumes—an accumulation not surpassed in '76 by more than two libraries in Europe. It now demands a separate edifice of its own, fit to stand by the side of the fine structures which have within a generation recreated the architectural aspect of the Federal metropolis with the most stately government-offices in the world. Other public libraries, belonging to colleges, schools, societies and independent endowments, show similar progress. While none of them are equal, for reference, to some of the great European establishments, they are generally better adapted to the purposes of popular instruction. Their literary wealth is fresh and available, little encumbered by lumber kept merely because old or curious. Thus adjuncts, in some sort, of the newspaper and the common school, their catalogues prove, as do the bookcases of private houses, that the newest and deepest results of European thought and inquiry are eagerly sought and used by our people.

Our system of public schools, long classed among the "peculiar institutions" of the country, is notably gaining in scope and efficiency, be the English and Prussians right or not in their claim of greater thoroughness and a higher curriculum. The different States have engaged in a series of competitive experiments for the common good, and cities and counties, in their sphere, labor to the same end. Schools of higher grade are being multiplied, and the examination of teachers, still lax enough, becomes more exact and faithful, as befits the drill of an army of two hundred and forty thousand charged with the intellectual police of eight millions of children—the number said by the new "National Bureau of Education" to have been enrolled in 1875, against 7,209,938, 5,477,037 and 3,642,694 by the censuses of 1870, '60 and '50. Little more than half this number is estimated by the Bureau to represent the average daily attendance, which is quite compatible with the attendance, for the greater part of the school-year, of nine-tenths of the whole number on the lists. A comparison of the number enrolled and the entire supposed number of children between six and sixteen leaves an excess of nearly two millions and a half outside the public schools. Of these private schools will account, and account well, for a large proportion. These are fulfilling indispensable offices, one being that of normal schools—a want likely to be inadequately satisfied for a long time to come.

In one respect our public schools are beyond, though not above, comparison with those of the most advanced European states. An annual outlay of a trifle less than seventy-five millions of dollars, with an investment in buildings, ground, etc. of a hundred and sixty-six millions, implies a determination that should be rewarded with the most unexceptionable results. It reaches eighteen dollars yearly, leaving out the interest on the fixed stock, for each child in daily attendance. Such an expenditure, trebling, we believe, that of Prussia, ought to secure better teachers and a higher range of instruction. It must be said, however, that the duties of the school-boards are as honestly and economically discharged as those of any other public bodies; that the cost for each pupil is highest where common schools have been longest established and most thoroughly studied; and that the statistics certainly show a steady advance in their efficiency. That is the truest test. Any pecuniary means are justifiable by the end. If common schools, themselves a means to a higher education, mental and moral, than they can directly afford, take some part of the wealth we accumulate to prevent our men's decaying, it is well used. It helps to purchase for us progress more genuine than that whereof railways and cotton-factories are the exponents.

It is thus a guarantee of a brighter century even than the one just closed that, in the wildest quarter of the still unkempt continent, the school actually precedes the pioneer. Choose his homestead where he may, the sixteenth section is staked out before it. From it the rills of knowledge soon trickle along the first furrows, as strange to the soil as its new products. It provides the modern settler in advance with an equipment, mental and material, if not moral, altogether superior to that of his colonial prototype, that enables him in a shorter time to impart a higher stamp to his surroundings. He attacks the prairie with a plough unimagined by his predecessor; cuts his wheat with a cradle—or, given a neighbor or two, a reaper—instead of a sickle; sends into the boundless pasture the nucleus of a merino flock, and returns at evening to a home rugged enough, in unison with its surroundings, but brightened by traits of culture and intelligence which must adhere to any ménage of to-day and were out of reach of any of the olden time. The civilization that travels West now is a different thing from that which went West a hundred years ago.

Science has done much for the farmer, though not as much as he has done for it and its hotbeds, the towns. In one point his shortcomings are notable. He has not learned how to eat his cake and have it. He works the virgin soil as the miner does the coal-seam. What Nature has placed in it he takes out, and, until forced by the pressure of his friends and enemies, the cities, returns no nest-egg of future fertility. So it is that many portions of the rural East have to be resettled and started afresh in the process of agricultural redemption. A hundred years ago England grew fifteen bushels of wheat to the acre. Her standard is now thirty-two. Within three-quarters of the century New York has fallen from twenty-five to twelve; and half that period, again, has brought Ohio and Indiana from thirty to fifteen. But this process is a natural part of the sum of American progress. Land was the only property of the country originally, and subsequently of different parts of it in succession. It was used like any other commodity, and worn out like leather or cloth. The original cuticle of the continent has disappeared for ever. The task, now is to induce the granulation of a new one. The restorative process may be complete by the time we have four hundred souls to the square mile, like England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the exporting of Iowa and California in the shape of wheat is going on at what must be esteemed a profitable rate; for our farmers, as a class, do not seem to be losing ground. Their glebes have risen in value from thirty-two hundred millions in 1850 to sixty-six hundred ten years later, and ninety-three hundred in 1870. This has been accompanied by a diminution of their average extent, the farm of 1870 covering a hundred and fifty-three acres. This is small enough, considering the capital necessary for stock in these days of improved and costly implements, when a farmer can no longer pack his entire kit in a cart. It matches closely the size of English holdings, where agricultural science is at its height. The French peasant-farmers, with their plats of three and four acres, are chained to the spade and hoe, and their steading becomes a poultry-yard—a consummation we are not yet in sight of, as is proved by the legions of pigs and beeves, barreled or bellowing, that roll in from the ancient realms of Pontiac and the Prophet with a smoothness and velocity unattained by the most luxurious coach that carried a First Congressman.

Everything that makes a nation, we are told, and the nation itself, is the product of the soil. But the less immediate, finer and most delicate fruits cannot usually be garnered until the soil is thoroughly subdued. The mass of matter keeps the intellectual in abeyance. Were Europe enlarged one-half, and her population reduced to one-eighth what it actually is, the spectacle of culture she now presents would be an impossibility. It is our merit that, thus brought to American conditions, she would in no way compare with American achievement. An offset wherewith we must at the same time be debited is the aid we have, in so many forms, derived from her. Making every allowance for this, it is a clear credit in our favor that one-tenth of Christendom should have done so much more than a tenth of its effective thinking simultaneously with taming the most savage half of its domain. We have more than our share of laborers in the mental vineyard, though fewer of them are master-workmen. We utilize for Europe herself, and send back to her in its first available shape, much of what her students produce. As between thought and substance, the two continents interchange offices. We import the crude material her philosophers harvest or mine, work it up and return it, just as she takes the yield of our non-metaphorical fields and strata and restores it manufactured. Much of the social, political and industrial advancement of Europe within the century she may be said to owe to the United States. Her governmental reforms certainly and confessedly found here their germ. These gave birth to others of a social character. In this manner, as well as more directly by our commerce, inventions and example, we have stimulated her industry. We have spread before her the two oceans, and taught her to traverse them with a firm and masterful mien, no longer

We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals, and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages. No community on her varied surface but is the better for America. That our people and their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old World's progress in the period under review can be but very partially accounted for by any internal force of its own. None of its rulers or peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward. Collectively as members of a European republic of nations, and internally each within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant struggles, to recognize and respect local independence. Municipal law has gained new life. The commune has become an entity everywhere, and the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers of the peace. The contribution of the American Union to such results would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into nothing to-morrow. Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery in the remotest wilds.

UP THE THAMES.

CONCLUDING PAPER.

Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England, the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural eikon basiliké, Windsor. To reach the famous castle it will not do to lounge along the river. We must cut loose from the suburbs of the suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight. Our destination is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.

We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate children. That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch "persuasion." The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other. Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority to a weak minority. Neither the American nor the British constitution, with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded them from this evil. In the battle of the gauges both have gone to the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to reel over into the ranks of their enemies.

This relative debility is, at the same time, more apparent to the stockholders than to their customers. The superstructure and "plant" of the Erie has lately stood interested inspection from abroad with great credit, and that of the Great Western is unexceptionable. The vote of travelers may be safely allotted to the broad gauge. They have more elbow room. The carriages attain the requisite width without unpleasantly, not to say dangerously, overhanging the centre of gravity; and, other things equal, the movement is steadier. Nor is the financial aspect of the question apt to impress gloomily the tourist as he enters the Paddington station and looks around at its blaze of polychrome and richness of decoration generally. As the coach doors are slammed upon you, the guard steps into his "van," the vast drivers, taller than your head plus the regulation stove-pipe, slowly begin their whirl, and you roll majestically forth through a long file of liveried servants of the company, drawn up or in action on the platform, the sensation of patronizing a poverty-stricken corporation is by no means likely to harass you. You cease to realize that the Napoleon of engineers, Monsieur Brunel, made a disastrous mistake in the design of this splendid highway, and that, as some will have it, it was his Moscow. His error, if one there was, existed only in the selection of the width of track. Whatever the demerits of the design in that one particular, the execution is in all above praise. The road was his pet. Once finished, it was his delight, as with the breeder of a fine horse, to mount it and try its mettle. Over and again would he occupy the footboard between London and Bristol, and rejoice as a strong man in running his race at close to seventy miles an hour. He and Stephenson were capital types of the Gaul and Briton, striving side by side on the same field, as it will be good for the world that they should ever do.

Combats of another character—in fact, of two other characters—recur to our reflections as we find that we have shuffled off the coil of bricks and mortar and are rattling across Wormwood Scrubs. More fortunate than some who have been there before us, we have no call to alight. Calls to this ancient field of glory, whether symbolized by the gentlemanly pistol or the plebeian fist, have ceased to be in vogue. Dueling and boxing are both frowned down effectually, one by public opinion and the other by the police. It is only of late years that they finally succumbed to those twin discouragers; but it seems altogether improbable that the ordeal by combat in either shape will again come to the surface in a land where tilting-spear and quarter-staff were of old so rife. In France chivalry still asserts, in a feeble way, the privilege of winking and holding out its iron, and refuses to be comforted with a suit for damages.

Southall, a station or two beyond, suggests sport of a less lethal character, being an ancient meeting-place for the queen's stag-hounds. John Leach may have collected here some of his studies of Cockney equestrianism. The sportsmen so dear to his pencil furnished him wealth of opportunities on their annual concourse at the cart's tail. The unloading of the animal, his gathering himself up for a leisurely canter across country, the various styles and degrees of horsemanship among his lumbering followers, and the business-like replacing of the quarry in his vehicle, to be hauled away for another day's sport, served as the most complete travesty imaginable of the chase. It has the compensation of placing a number of worthy men in the saddle at least once in the year and compelling them to do some rough riding. The English have always made it their boast that they are more at home on horseback than any other European nation, and they claim to have derived much military advantage from it. Lever's novels would lose many of their best situations but for this national accomplishment and the astounding development it reaches in his hands.

To the left lies the fine park of Osterley, once the seat of the greatest of London's merchant princes, Sir Thomas Gresham. An improvement proposed by Queen Bess, on a visit to Gresham in 1578, does not speak highly for her taste in design. She remarked that in her opinion the court in front of the house would look better split up by a wall. Her host dutifully acceded to the idea, and surprised Her Majesty next morning by pointing out the wall which he had erected during the night, sending to London for masons and material for the purpose. The conceit was a more ponderous one than that of Raleigh's cloak—bricks and mortar versus velvet.

A greater than Gresham succeeded, after the death of his widow, to the occupancy of Osterley—Chief-justice Coke. His compliment to Elizabeth on the occasion of a similar visit to the same house took the more available and acceptable shape of ten or twelve hundred pounds sterling in jewelry. She had more than a woman's weakness for finery, and Coke operated upon it very successfully. His gems outlasted Gresham's wall, which has long since disappeared with the court it disfigured. In place of both stands a goodly Ionic portico, through which one may pass to a staircase that bears a representation by Rubens of the apotheosis of Mr. Motley's hero, William the Silent. The gallery offers a collection of other old pictures. Should we, however, take time for even a short stop in this vicinity, it would probably be for the credit of saying that we walked over Hounslow Heath intact in purse and person. The gentlemen of the road live only in the classic pages of Ainsworth, Reynolds and, if we may include Sam Weller in such worshipful company, that bard of "the bold Turpin." Another class of highwaymen had long before them been also attracted by the fine manoeuvring facilities of the heath, beginning with the army of the Cæsars and ending with that of James II. Jonathan Wild and his merry men were saints to Kirke and his lambs.

Hurrying on, we skirt one of Pope's outlying manors, in his time the seat of his friend Bathurst and the haunt of Addison, Prior, Congreve and Gay, and leave southward, toward the Thames, Horton, the cradle of Milton. A marble in its ivy-grown church is inscribed to the memory of his mother, ob. 1637. At Horton were composed, or inspired, Lycidas, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus and others of his nominally minor but really sweetest and most enjoyable poems. In this retirement the Muse paid him her earliest visits, before he had thrown himself away on politics or Canaanitish mythology. Peeping in upon his handsome young face in its golden setting of blonde curls,

she wooed him to better work than reporting the debates of the archangels or calling the roll of Tophet. Had he confined himself to this tenderer field, the world would have been the gainer. He might not have "made the word Miltonic mean sublime," but we can spare a little of the sublime to get some more of the beautiful.

To reach Milton, however, we have run off of the track badly. His Eden is no station on the Great Western. We shall balance this southward divergence with a corresponding one to the north from Slough, the last station ere reaching Windsor. We may give a go-by for the moment to the halls of kings, do homage to him who treated them similarly, and point, in preference, to where,

They show Gray's tomb in Stoke Pogis church, and his house, West End Cottage, half a mile distant. The ingredients of his Elegy—actually the greatest, but in his judgment among the least, of his few works—exist all around. "The rugged elm," "the ivy-mantled tower," and "the yew tree's shade," the most specific among the simple "properties" of his little spectacle, are common to so many places that there are several competitors for the honor of having furnished them. The cocks, ploughmen, herds and owls cannot, of course, at this late day be identified. Gray could not have done it himself. He drew from general memory, in his closet, and not bit by bit on his thumb-nail from chance-met objects as he went along. Had his conception and rendering of the theme been due to the direct impression upon his mind of its several aspects and constituents, he would have more thoroughly appreciated his work. He could not understand its popularity, any more than Campbell could that of Ye Mariners of England, which he pronounced "d——d drum-and-trumpet verses." Gray used to say, "with a good deal of acrimony," that the Elegy "owed its popularity entirely to the subject, and the public would have received it as well had it been written entirely in prose." Had it been written in prose or in the inventory style of poetry, it would have been forgotten long ago, like so much else of that kind.

Not far hence is Beaconsfield, which gave a home to Burke and a title to the wife of Disraeli, the nearest approach to a peerage that the haughty Israelite, soured by a life of struggle against peers and their prejudices, would deign to accept. We know it will be objected to this remark that Disraeli is, and has been for most of his career, associated with Toryism. But that was part of his game. A man of culture, thought and fastidious taste, he would, had he been of the sangre azul, have been the steadiest and sincerest of Conservatives. Privilege would have been his gospel. As it is, it has only been his weapon, to use in fighting for himself. "The time will come when you shall listen to me," were his words when he was first coughed down. The time has come. The most cynical of premiers, he governs England, and he scorns to take a place among those who ruled her before him.

Extending our divergence farther west toward "Cliefden's proud alcove, the bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love," we find ourselves in a luxuriant rolling country, rural and slumberous. Cookham parish, which we should traverse, claims quite loudly American kinship on the strength of its including an estate once the property of Henry Washington, who is alleged, without sufficient ground, to have been a relative of the general. But we are within the purlieus of Windsor. The round tower has been looking down upon us these many miles, and we cannot but yield to its magnetism.

Eton, on the north bank, opposite Windsor, and really a continuous town with that which nestles close to the castle walls, is on our way from Slough. The red-brick buildings of the school, forming a fine foil to the lighter-colored and more elegantly designed chapel, are on our left, the principal front looking over a garden toward the river and Windsor Home Park beyond. We become aware of a populace of boys, the file-closers of England's nineteenth century worthies, and her coming veterans of the twentieth. We may contemplatively view them in that light, but it has little place in their reflections. Their ruddy faces and somewhat cumbrous forms belong to the animal period of life that links together boyhood, colthood and calfhood. Education of the physique, consisting chiefly in the indulgence and employment of it in the mere demonstration of its superabundant vitality, is a large part of the curriculum at English schools. The playground and the study-room form no unequal alliance. Rigid as, in some respects, the discipline proper of the school may be, it does not compare with the severity of that maintained by the older boys over the younger ones. The code of the lesser, and almost independent, republic of the dormitory and the green is as clear in its terms as that of the unlimited monarchy of the school-room, and more potent in shaping the character. The lads train themselves for the battle of the world, with some help from the masters. It is a sound system on the whole, if based, to appearance, rather too much on the principle of the weaker to the wall. The tendency of the weaker inevitably is to the wall, and if he is to contend against it effectively, it will be by finding out his weakness and being made to feel it at the earliest possible moment.

Not on land only, but on the river, whereinto it so gradually blends, does lush young England dissipate. Cricket and football order into violent action both pairs of extremities, while the upper pair and the organs of the thorax labor profitably at the oar. The Thames, in its three bends from Senly Hall, the Benny Havens of Eton, down to Datchet Mead, where Falstaff overflowed the buck-basket, belongs to the boys. In this space it is split into an archipelago of aits. In and out of the gleaming paths and avenues of silvery water that wind between them glide the little boats. The young Britons take to the element like young ducks. Many a "tall admiral" has commenced his "march over the mountain wave" among these water-lilies and hedges of osier.

Shall we leave the boys at play, and, renewing our youth, go ourselves to school? Entering the great gate of the western of the two quadrangles, we are welcomed by a bronze statue of the founder of the institution, Henry VI. He endowed it in 1440. The first organization comprised "a provost, four clerks, ten priests, six choristers, twenty-five poor grammar-scholars, and twenty-five poor infirm men to pray for the king." The prayers of these invalids were sorely needed by the unhappy scion of Lancaster, but did him little good in a temporal sense. The provost is always rector of the parish. Laymen are non-eligible. Thus it happens that the list does not include two names which would have illuminated it more than those of any of the incumbents—Boyle the philosopher, "father of chemistry and brother of the earl of Cork," and Waller the poet. The modern establishment consists of a provost, vice-provost, six fellows, a master, under-master, assistants, seventy foundation scholars, seven lay clerks and ten choristers, with a cortege of "inferior officers and servants"—a tolerably full staff. The pay-students, as they would be termed in this country, numbering usually five to six hundred, do not live in the college precincts, but at boarding-houses in the town, whence their designation of oppidans, the seventy gowns-men only having dormitories in the college. The roll of the alumni contains such names as the first earl of Chatham, Harley, earl of Oxford, Bolingbroke, Fox, Gray, Canning, Wellington and Hallam. That is enough to say for Eton. The beauties of the chapel, the treasures of the library and the other shows of the place become trivial by the side of the record.

Over the "fifteen-arch" bridge, which has but three or four arches, we pass to the town of Windsor, which crouches, on the river-side, close up to the embattled walls of the castle—so closely that the very irregular pile of buildings included in the latter cannot at first glance be well distinguished from the town. High over all swells the round tower to a height above the water of two hundred and twenty feet—no excessive altitude, if we deduct the eminence on which it stands, yet enough, in this level country, to give it a prospect of a score or two of miles in all directions. The Conqueror fell in love with the situation at first sight, and gave a stolen monastery in exchange for it. The home so won has provided a shelter—at times very imperfect, indeed—to British sovereigns for eight centuries. From the modest erection of William it has been steadily growing—with the growth of the empire, we were near saying, but its chief enlargements occurred before the empire entered upon the expansion of the past three centuries. It is more closely associated with Edward III. than with any other of the ancient line. He was born at Windsor, and almost entirely rebuilt it, William of Wykeham being superintending architect, with "a fee of one shilling a day whilst at Windsor, and two shillings when he went elsewhere on the duties of his office," three shillings a week being the pay of his clerk. It becomes at once obvious that the margin for "rings" was but slender in those days. The labor question gave not the least trouble. The law of supply and demand was not consulted. "Three hundred and sixty workmen were impressed, to be employed on the building at the king's wages; some of whom having clandestinely left Windsor and engaged in other employments to greater advantage, writs were issued prohibiting all persons from employing them on pain of forfeiting all their goods and chattels." In presence of so simple and effective a definition of the rights of the workingman, strikes sink into nothingness. And Magna Charta had been signed a hundred and fifty years before! That document, however, in honor of which the free and enlightened Briton of to-day is wont to elevate his hat and his voice, was only in the name and on behalf of the barons. The English people derived under it neither name, place nor right. English liberty is only incidental, a foundling of untraced parentage, a filius nullius. True, its growth was indirectly fostered by aught that checked the power of the monarch, and the nobles builded more wisely than they knew or intended when they brought Lackland to book, or to parchment, at Runnymede, not far down the river and close to the edge of the royal park. The memorable plain is still a meadow, kept ever green and inviolate of the plough. A pleasant row it is for the Eton youngsters to this spot. On Magna Charta island, opposite, they may take their rest and their lunch, and refresh their minds as well with the memories of the place. The task of reform is by no means complete. There is room and call for further concessions in favor of the masses. These embryo statesmen have work blocked out for them in the future, and this is a good place for them to adjust to it the focus of their bright young optics.

The monarchical idea is certainly predominant in our present surroundings. The Thames flows from the castle and the school under two handsome erections named the Victoria and Albert bridges; and when, turning our back upon Staines, just below Runnymede, with its boundary-stone marking the limit of the jurisdiction of plebeian London's fierce democracy, and inscribed "God preserve the City of London, 1280," we strike west into the Great Park, we soon come plump on George III, a great deal larger than life. The "best farmer that ever brushed dew from lawn" is clad in antique costume with toga and buskins. Bestriding a stout horse, without stirrups and with no bridle to speak of, the old gentleman looks calmly into the distance while his steed is in the act of stepping over a perpendicular precipice. This preposterous effort of the glyptic art has the one merit of serving as a finger-board. The old king points us to his palace, three miles off, at the end of the famous Long Walk. He did not himself care to live at the castle, but liked to make his home at an obscure lodge in the park, the same from which, on his first attack of insanity, he set out in charge of two of his household on that melancholy ride to the retreat of Kew, more convenient in those days for medical attendance from London, and to which he returned a few months later restored for the time. Shortly after his recovery he undertook to throw up one of the windows of the lodge, but found it nailed down. He asked the cause, and was told, with inconsiderate bluntness, that it had been done during his illness to prevent his doing himself an injury. The perfect calmness and silence with which he received this explanation was a sufficient evidence of his recovery.

Bidding the old man a final farewell, we accept the direction of his brazen hand and take up the line of march, wherein all traveling America has preceded us, to the point wherefrom we glanced off so suddenly in obedience to the summons of Magna Charta. On either hand, as we thread the Long Walk, open glades that serve as so many emerald-paved courts to the monarchs of the grove, some of them older than the whole Norman dynasty, with Saxon summers recorded in their hearts. One of them, thirty-eight feet round, is called after the Conqueror. Among these we shall not find the most noted of Windsor trees. It was in the Home Park, on the farther or northern side of the castle, that the fairies were used to perform their

Whether the genuine oak was cut down at the close of the last century, or was preserved, carefully fenced in and labeled, in an utterly leafless and shattered state, to our generation, is a moot point. Certain it is that the most ardent Shakespearean must abandon the hope of securing for a bookmark to his Merry Wives of Windsor one of the leaves that rustled, while "Windsor bell struck twelve," over the head of fat Jack. He has the satisfaction, however, of looking up at the identical bell-tower of the sixteenth century, and may make tryst with his imagination to await its midnight chime. Then he may cross the graceful iron bridge—modern enough, unhappily—to Datchet, and ascertain by actual experiment whether the temperature of the Thames has changed since the dumping into it of Falstaff, "hissing hot."

Back at the castle, we must "do" it, after the set fashion. Reminders meet us at the threshold that it is in form a real place of defence, contemplative of wars and rumors of wars, and not a mere dwelling by any means in original design. A roadway, crooked and raked by frowning embrasures, leads up from the peaceful town to the particularly inhospitable-looking twin towers of Henry VIII.'s gateway, in their turn commanded by the round tower on the right, in full panoply of artificial scarp and ditch. Sentinels in the scarlet livery that has flamed on so many battlefields of all the islands and continents assist in proving that things did not always go so easy with majesty as they do now. But two centuries and more have elapsed since there happened any justification for this frown of stone, steel and feathers; Rupert's futile demonstration on it in 1642 having been Windsor's last taste of war, its sternest office after that having been the safe-keeping of Charles I., who here spent his "sorrowful and last Christmas." Once inside the gate, visions of peace recur. The eye first falls on the most beautiful of all the assembled structures, St. George's Chapel. It, with the royal tomb house, the deanery and Winchester tower, occupies the left or north side of the lower or western ward. In the rear of the chapel of St. George are quartered in cozy cloisters the canons of the college of that ilk—not great guns in any sense, but old ecclesiastical artillery spiked after a more or less noisy youth and laid up in varnished black for the rest of their days. Watch and ward over these modern equipments is kept by Julius Cæsar's tower, as one of the most ancient erections is of course called. Still farther to our left as we enter are the quarters of sundry other antiquated warriors, the Military Knights of Windsor. These are a few favored veterans, mostly decayed officers of the army and navy, who owe this shelter to royal favor and an endowment. The Ivy tower, west of the entrance, is followed in eastward succession by those of the gateway, Salisbury, Garter and Bell towers.

The fine exterior of St. George's is more than matched by the carving and blazonry of the interior. The groined roof bears the devices of half a dozen early kings, beginning with Edward the Confessor. Along the choir stretch the stalls of the sovereign and knights-companions of the order of the Garter, each hung with banner, mantle, sword and helmet. Better than these is the hammered steel tomb of Edward IV., by Quentin Matsys, the Flemish blacksmith. In the vaults beneath rest the victim of Edward, Henry VI., Henry VIII., Jane Seymour and Charles I. The account of the appearance of Charles' remains when his tomb was examined in 1813 by Sir Henry Halford, accompanied by several of the royal family, is worth quoting. "The complexion of the face was dark and discolored. The forehead and temples had lost little or nothing of their muscular substance. The cartilage of the nose was gone; but the left eye, in the moment of first exposure, was open and full, though it vanished almost immediately, and the pointed beard so characteristic of the reign of King Charles was perfect. The shape of the face was a long oval; many of the teeth remained; and the left ear, in consequence of the interposition of some unctuous matter between it and the cere-cloth, was found entire. The hair was thick at the back part of the head, and in appearance nearly black. A portion of it, which has since been cleaned and dried, is of a beautiful dark-brown color. That of the beard was a reddish-brown. On the back part of the head it was not more than an inch in length, and had probably been cut so short for the convenience of the executioner, or perhaps by the piety of friends after death in order to furnish memorials of the unhappy king. On holding up the head to determine the place of separation from the body, the muscles of the neck had evidently contracted themselves considerably, and the fourth cervical vertebra was found to be cut through its substance transversely, leaving the face of the divided portions perfectly smooth and even—an appearance which could have been produced only by a heavy blow inflicted with a very sharp instrument, and which furnished the last proof wanting to identify Charles I."