When they enter
the palace, to look at the late queen's dolls and toys, as they do
in troops, they are commonly in charge of their teachers; and their
raptures of loyalty in the presence of those reminders that queens,
too, must have once been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are
doubtless as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and
political associations. Since William III. built the palace and laid out
the gardens that he might dwell within easy reach of his capital, but
out of its smoke and din, the place has not lost the character which
his homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially sweet and
commendable because of its relation to the good Victoria's childhood.
One does not forget “great Anna's” drinking tea there in the Orangery
so nobly designed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is dearest
because Victoria spent so many of her early days in it, and received
there the awful summons literally to rise from her dreams and come and
be queen of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke of
poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet provided even for the
election of young girls to the presidency; and though we may prefer our
prosaical republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of such an
incident in the mother monarchy.
The Temple was another of the places that I did not think I should visit
again, because I had so pleasant and perfect a memory of it, which I
feared to impair. More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in
the chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and then went out
and wandered about in the wet, for it was raining very diligently. I
cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it
was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first
images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the
Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as
I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to
unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them
then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such
sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted
gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler after our drive from
the Thames Embankment and began to walk up towards the Temple Church.
I will not ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will merely
have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies of the crusaders
lying cross-legged in the pavement of the circle to which one enters.
According to the strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our
party, these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture since she
saw them first. It was not merely that they had uncrossed their legs and
crossed them another way, or some such small matter; but that now
they lay side by side, whereas formerly they had better accommodated
themselves to the architectural design, and lain in a ring with their
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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