On another night I walked from St. James's Palace to Whitehall (the York Place of Cardinal Wolsey), and viewed the ground that Charles the First must have traversed, on his way to the scaffold. The story of the slaughter of that king, always sorrowful to remember, is very grievous to consider, when you realise, upon the actual scene of his ordeal and death, his exalted fortitude and his bitter agony. It seemed as if I could almost hear his voice, as it sounded on that fateful morning, asking that his body might be more warmly clad, lest, in the cold January air, he should shiver, and so, before the eyes of his enemies, should seem to be trembling with fear. The Puritans, having brought that poor man to the place of execution, kept him in suspense from early morning till after two o'clock in the day, while they debated over a proposition to spare his life--upon any condition they might choose to make--that had been sent to them by his son, Prince Charles. Old persons were alive in London, not very long ago, who remembered having seen, in their childhood, the window, in the end of the Whitehall Banquet House--now a Chapel Royal and all that remains of the ancient palace--through which the doomed monarch walked forth to the block. It was long ago walled up, and the palace has undergone much alteration since the days of the Stuarts. In the rear of Whitehall stands a bronze statue of James the Second, by Roubiliac (whose marbles are numerous, in the Abbey and elsewhere in London, and whose grave is in the church of St. Martin), one of the most graceful works of that spirited sculptor. The figure is finely modelled. The face is dejected and full of reproach. The right hand points, with a truncheon, toward the earth. It is impossible to mistake the ruminant, melancholy meaning of this memorial; and equally it is impossible to walk without both thought that instructs and emotion that elevates through a city which thus abounds with traces of momentous incident and representative experience.