Hampton Court ... Illustrated with forty-three drawings by Herbert ...

X
INTRODUCTION
plotted and schemed, and yet learnt somehow to say,
" Ihave placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in
the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects. ...I
knowIhave the bodv but of a weak and feeble woman;
butIhave the heart and stomach of a king, and of a
king of England too "— some of the finest words mankind
ever uttered. Here Charles showed the beauty
of his nature through its outer husk of unworthy
duplicity. Here Milton meditated and Cromwell
agonised : and here, since the days of these heroes,
many noble souls have passed, in quietness and simplicity,
to their reward. It were as ill to romp and be
facetious here as in some old abbey, or in any ancient
place where history has been made. It is ours rather
to linger over its memories and to cherish them, and
to dream again of the great days that are gone by.
And so as we ponder, and as the noble names come
up before us, and merge insensibly into the present,
where still the echoes of renown are heard in the
lodgings of the kindred of our English worthies,
the scene assumes an unity which brings the old time
together with the new.
' It seems as if in one were cast
The present and the imaged past,
Spanning, as with a bridge sublime.
That fearful lapse of human time,
That gulf unfathomably spread
Between the living and the dead."
And thus it is one picture we are to look upon,
the old Palace with its history and its memories and
its art. It presents one story, and that the world
will not willingly let die.