shown by the modern English architect? (But Mr. Ruskin must surely that day have been in search for a windmill to tilt against, for the abused "straight lines" do not prevent this being one of the loveliest of London views.) And does not M. Taine pour the vials of his wrath on to the great river Palace of Somerset House, with its "blackened porticoes filled with soot"? "Poor Greek architecture," he adds compassionately, "what is it doing in such a climate?" Evidently the idea of the artistic value of soot, to which I have already alluded, had not occurred to him.
The noble Victoria Embankment now runs where of old, in Elizabethan times, ran a glittering, almost Venetian, river-frontage of palaces. And where the old palaces stood in Tudor days, stand now enormous hotels—the palaces of our own day—each newer hotel in its turn eclipsing the other in size, magnificence, expense. The picturesque "Savoy," with its river balconies, the stately "Cecil," with its wonderful banqueting halls, and, further from the river, the spacious "Métropole," the "Grand," the "Victoria." All these hotels are so recent as to impress one fact upon us—the fact that London has really only lately become a tourist haunt. Statistics, indeed, show now that London attracts more visitors than any other great European town. Twenty-five years ago, it was as hard to find a good, clean, and thoroughly satisfactory London hotel, as it was to get a cup of tea for less than sixpence; or, indeed, a good one at all! But times have changed. Big hotels now, like flats, threaten to be overdone. We can well imagine the disappointment of the foreign visitor to London on discovering the names and uses of the fine buildings that adorn the river front between Westminster and Blackfriars. "What," he or she may ask, "is that imposing structure with Nuremberg-like green roofs, towering over the trees of the Embankment Gardens?" "That, Sir or Madam," answers politely the lady guide (for it is of course a charming and very certificated lady guide who "personally conducts" the party), "is Whitehall Court, a building let out in high class flats." "And what," continues the crushed tourist, "is that turreted, buttressed, red-brick edifice? Probably some rich nobleman's whim?" "Those, Madam, are the new buildings of Scotland Yard, recently designed by Mr. Norman Shaw, one of the most famous of our modern architects." "And what are those Venetian-like balconies, all hung with greenery and flowers?" "They belong, Madam, to the Savoy and Cecil Hotels. At the Savoy you may get a very nice dinner for a guinea; they have a wonderful chef; and in the enormous dining-hall of the Cecil, most of the great public banquets are given." "Truly, a nation of shopkeepers," the foreign visitor will re-echo sadly, as she dismisses her "lady guide."
Sightseers.
There is, I maintain, no finer walk in the world than that along the Victoria Embankment, from Blackfriars to Westminster. You may walk it every day of the year, and every day see some new, strange and beautiful effect of light, of water, of cloud. In midsummer, when the long row of plane trees offer a welcome shade and relief of greenery, and it is pleasant to watch the slow barges pass and repass; in autumn, when red and saffron sunsets flood all the west with light; in midwinter, when, sometimes, great blocks of ice line the turbid stream. One winter, not long past, when the Thames was all but frozen over, it was a curious and interesting sight to watch the crowd of sea-gulls, driven inshore by the intense cold, making their temporary home on the ice, and fed all day with raw meat and bread by thousands of sympathizing Londoners. Some of the birds had almost become tame when their compulsory visit came to an end.
The river, in old pre-embankment days, flowed at the foot of the curious ancient stone archway called "York Stairs," that stranded water-gate of old York House, which stands, lonely and neglected, in a corner of the Embankment Gardens. It has, however, survived, and that, in London, is always something. Its long buried, and now excavated, columns show the ancient level of the river, and the height to which the present Embankment has been raised. The Palace of York House, to which it was the river-gate, has gone the way of all palaces; its ruins (as all ruins must ever be in London), are thickly built over. Indeed, Somerset House is almost the only palace left to tell of the ancient river-side glories, glories of which Herrick wrote:
"I send, I send, here my supremest kiss
To thee, my silver-footed Tamasis,
No more shall I re-iterate thy strand
Whereon so many goodly structures stand."
Even Somerset House is merely an old palace rebuilt, for the present edifice is not much more than a century old. Buildings in London tend to become utilitarian; and Royalty, besides, has deserted the City for the West End. So the ancient Palace of the Lord Protector Somerset, that Palace that he destroyed so much to build, spent such vast sums on, and yet never lived in, but had his head cut off instead; the Palace that used to be the residence of the wives of the Stuart Kings, as described by Pepys, is now superseded by the vast Inland Revenue Office, with its myriad suites, corridors, chambers. Truly, a change typical of our busy and practical era!
Somerset House occupies the site of the older palace, a site almost equal in area to Russell Square. But the older palace, as befitted the "Dower House" of the Queens of England had gardens that extended along the river-shore. It was in Old Somerset House that Charles II.'s poor neglected Queen, Catherine of Braganza, used to sit all night playing at "ombre," a game which she had herself imported from Portugal; and it was here, in 1685, that three of her household were charged with decoying Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey into the precincts of the palace, and there strangling him. The wide courtyard of the interior has a bronze allegorical group by Bacon, of George III. mixed up with "Father Thames." Queen Charlotte, apparently rather resenting the ugliness of the representation, said to the sculptor, "Why did you make so frightful a figure?" The artist was ready with his reply. "Art," he said, bowing, "cannot always effect what is ever within the reach of Nature—the union of beauty and majesty." I myself must confess to some sympathy with Queen Charlotte; but the art of her day had ever a tendency to efflorescent excrescence.
On the river's very brink, a little higher up than Somerset House and its adjacent hotels, Cleopatra's Needle, that "great rose-marble monolith," stands guarded by two bronze sphinxes on a pediment of steps, backed by the Embankment and the trees of its gardens. The monolith is here in strange and novel surroundings. What ruins of empires and dynasties has not this ancient Egyptian obelisk seen! We poor human beings soon live out our little day, and are gone:
"The Eternal Saki from the Bowl hath poured
Millions of bubbles like us, and will pour——"
while this senseless block of stone lives for ever, regardless of the tides of humanity that ebb and flow ceaselessly about its feet. Has it not been a "silent witness" of the pageants of the magnificent Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty? Its hieroglyphics record its erection by Thotmes III., before the Temple of the Sun in On (Heliopolis), where it remained for the first 1600 years of its existence, and (says Mr. Hare) witnessed the slavery and imprisonment of the patriarch Joseph. The obelisk has had a strange and eventful history. Removed to Alexandria shortly before the Christian era, it was never erected there, but lay for years prone in the sand. Then, in 1820, Mahomet Ali presented it to the British nation; with, however, no immediate result. For, the difficulties of removal being great, no advantage was taken of the offer, till, in 1877, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Erasmus Wilson gave the necessary funds, amounting to £10,000. A special cylinder boat was made for the obelisk, but even with its removal its adventures were not ended, for, in the Bay of Biscay, the vessel encountered a terrific storm, and the crew of the ship that towed it, in peril of their lives, cut it adrift. For days it was lost, till a passing steamer happened to sight the strange-looking object and picked it up, earning salvage on it.
The granite is said to be slowly disintegrating and the hieroglyphics therefore becoming less deeply scored, by the action of the London smoke and mist—the mist glorified poetically by Mr. Andrew Lang in his "Ballade of Cleopatra's Needle";
"Ye giant shades of Ra and Tum,
