The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard TaylorConwell, Russell H.
General
The Life, Travels, and Literary Career of Bayard Taylor
Conwell, Russell H.
Taylor, Bayard, 1825-1878
London is a world in itself, as has often been written and, to such an
impressible mind as that of Bayard, was a place, replete with pleasure
and instruction. London instructs by two methods; one by agreeable, and
the other by disagreeable examples. Bayard was equally taught by both.
There was Westminster Abbey, with its numberless tombs of the talented
and noble; and there was the Tower of London, with its dungeons and
beheading blocks. There were the palatial residences of the West End,
and there the hovels and holes of the Wych Street district. There were
the great mercantile houses of Holborn and Regent Street, and there were
the gambling dens of Drury Lane. There were the magnificent galleries of
art, at the Museum, at the Palaces, at Westminster, and at Kensington;
and there were the dirty, slimy exhibitions of marred humanity along the
wharves of the Thames. There were the zoölogical wonders of the parks,
and there were the dog-shows, and cock-pits of the St. Giles Rookery.
There was the palace of the Queen, and there the Old Bailey. There was
the office of the “Thunderer” (Daily Times), and there were the attics
from whence flowed the vilest trash that man ever printed. There were
Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, St. James Park, and the broad squares; and
there were the filthy alleys and narrow lanes about London Bridge. There
were the Rothschilds, and there the poor Micawbers and deserted Nicholas
Nicklebys. The richest, the poorest, the best, the worst; the most
cultivated, and the most ignorant; the most powerful monarch, and the
most degraded fishmongers. Extremes! Extremes that meet in everything
there. They all instruct by teaching the beholder what he ought to be,
and what he ought not to be. One sees much in London that ought not
to have been; and, strange to relate, many of the relics connected
with such things, are exhibited with great pride. If there is any one
thing above all others, for which the American should be thankful, it
is for the fact that the dungeon, the rack, the wheel, the thumbscrew,
the guillotine, the gibbet, the headsman’s block, the deadly hates of
royalty, the cruelty of kings, and the jealousy of queens, have no
place in the history of the Republic of the West. Yet there, somehow,
the officials and guides who open to the public the records of the past
and show visitors their institutions, give the most prominent places to
deeds of horrid cruelty and shameless murders, as if they took pride
in such fearful annals. It would seem as if, had our rulers butchered
in cold blood their sons and daughters; had they cruelly starved their
friends and relatives, we in America would be ashamed of it. It would be
regarded as very natural here, if an ancestor was hung and quartered and
his head carried about on a pole, to speak of it as seldom as possible.
It would appear consistent if, had our national government oppressed the
weak, degraded the poor, killed inoffensive captives, and, for selfish
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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