for aught we know, Wickliffe himself may have been one. As our kind host moved about among us with his placid face, we could not but think that times had altered since the days when archbishops used to imprison heretics, and preside over grim, inquisitorial tribunals. We all agreed, however, that, considering the very beautiful prospect this tower commands up and down the Thames, the poor Lollards in some respects might have been worse lodged.
We passed through the guard room, library, and along a corridor where hung a row of pictures of all the archbishops from the very earliest times; and then the archbishop took me into his study, which is a most charming room, containing his own private library: after that we all sat down to lunch in a large dining hall. I was seated between the archbishop and a venerable admiral in the navy. Among other things, the latter asked me if there were not many railroad and steamboat accidents in America. O my countrymen, what trouble do you make us in foreign lands by your terrible carelessness! I was obliged, in candor, to say that I thought there was a shocking number of accidents of that sort, and suggested the best excuse I could think of—our youth and inexperience; but I certainly thought my venerable friend had touched a very indefensible point.
Among other topics discussed in the drawing room, I heard some more on dits respecting spiritual rappings. Every body seems to be wondering what they are, and what they are going to amount to.
We took leave of our kind host and his family, gratefully impressed with the simplicity and sincere cordiality of our reception. There are many different names for goodness in this world; but, after all, true brotherly kindness and charity is much the same thing, whether it show itself by a Quaker's fireside or in an archbishop's palace.
Leaving the archbishop's I went to Richmond's again, where I was most agreeably entertained for an hour or two. We have an engagement for Playford Hall to-morrow, and we breakfast with Joseph Sturge: it being now the time of the yearly meeting of the Friends, he and his family are in town.
LETTER XXIV
MY DEAR S.:—
The next morning C. and I took the cars to go into the country, to Playford Hall. "And what's Playford Hall?" you say. "And why did you go to see it?" As to what it is, here is a reasonably good picture before you. As to why, it was for many years the residence of Thomas Clarkson, and is now the residence of his venerable widow and her family.
Playford Hall is considered, I think, the oldest of the fortified houses in England, and is, I am told, the only one that has water in the moat. The water which is seen girdling the wall, in the picture, is the moat: it surrounds the place entirely, leaving no access except across the bridge, which is here represented.
After crossing this bridge, you come into a green court yard filled with choice plants and flowering shrubs, and carpeted with that thick, soft, velvet-like grass which is to be found nowhere else in so perfect a state as in England.
The water is fed by a perpetual spring, whose current is so sluggish as scarcely to be perceptible, but which yet has the vitality of a running stream.
It has a dark and glassy stillness of surface, only broken by the forms of the water plants, whose leaves float thickly over it.
The walls of the moat are green with ancient moss, and from the crevices springs an abundant flowering vine, whose delicate leaves and bright yellow flowers in some places entirely mantle the stones with their graceful drapery.
The picture I have given you represents only one side of the moat. The other side is grown up with dark and thick shrubbery and ancient trees, rising and embowering the entire place, adding to the retired and singular effect of the whole. The place is a specimen of a sort of thing which does not exist in America. It is one of those significant landmarks which unite the present with the past, for which we must return to the country of our origin.
Playford Hall is peculiarly English, and Thomas Clarkson, for whose sake I visited it, was as peculiarly an Englishman—a specimen of the very best kind of English mind and character, as this is of characteristic English architecture.
We Anglo-Saxons have won a hard name in the world. There are undoubtedly bad things which are true about us.
Taking our developments as a race, both in England and America, we may be justly called the Romans of the nineteenth century. We have been the race which has conquered, subdued, and broken in pieces other weaker races, with little regard either to justice or mercy. With regard to benefits by us imparted to conquered nations, I think a better story, on the whole, can be made out for the Romans than for us. Witness the treatment of the Chinese, of the tribes of India, and of our own American Indians.
But still there is in Anglo-Saxon blood, a vigorous sense of justice, as appears in our habeas corpus, our jury trials, and other features of state organization; and, when this is tempered, in individuals, with the elements of gentleness and compassion, and enforced by that energy and indomitable perseverance which are characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon mind, they form a style of philanthropy peculiarly efficient. In short, the Anglo-Saxon is efficient, in whatever he sets himself about, whether in crushing the weak or lifting them up.
Thomas Clarkson was born in a day when good, pious people imported cargoes of slaves from Africa, as one of the regular Christianized modes of gaining a subsistence and providing for themselves and their households. It was a thing that every body was doing, and every body thought they had a right to do. It was supposed that all the sugar, molasses, and rum in the world were dependent on stealing men, women, and children, and could be got in no other way; and as to consume sugar, molasses, and rum, were evidently the chief ends of human existence, it followed that men, women, and children must be stolen to the end of time.
Some good people, when they now and then heard an appalling story of the cruelties practised in the slave ship, declared that it was really too bad, sympathetically remarked, "What a sorrowful world we live in!" stirred their sugar into their tea, and went on as before, because, what was there to do?—"Hadn't every body always done it? and if they didn't do it, wouldn't somebody else?"
It is true that for many years individuals at different times had remonstrated, written treatises, poems, stories, and movements had been made by some religious bodies, particularly the Quakers, but the opposition had amounted to nothing practically efficient.
The attention of Clarkson was first turned to the subject by having it given out as the theme for a prize composition in his college class, he being at that time a sprightly young man, about twenty-four years of age. He entered into the investigation with no other purpose than to see what he could make of it as a college theme.
He says of himself, "I had expected pleasure from the invention of arguments, from the arrangement of them, from the putting of them together, and from the thought, in the interim, that I was engaged in an innocent contest for literary honor; but all my pleasures were damped by the facts which were now continually before me."
"It was but one gloomy subject from morning till night; in the daytime I was uneasy, in the night I had little rest; I sometimes never closed my eyelids for grief."
It became not now so much a trial for academical reputation as to write a work which should be useful to Africa. It is not surprising that a work written under the force of such feelings should have gained the prize, as it did. Clarkson was summoned from London to Cambridge, to deliver his prize essay publicly. He says of himself, on returning to London, "The subject of it almost wholly engrossed my thoughts. I became at times very seriously affected while on the road. I stopped my horse occasionally, dismounted, and walked."
"I frequently tried to persuade myself that the contents of my essay could not be true; but the more I reflected on the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit. Coming in sight of Wade's Mill, in
