WESTMINSTER AND WHITEHALL

Lambeth Palace The Archbishops Queen Anne's Gate and Mansions The new Cathedral The Inverted Footstool Origins of street names The Abbey Writing on the Tombs The Guides Henry VII's Chapel Cromwell's body Waxworks A window's vicissitudes The Houses of Parliament London's Police Extinct Humour London's street wit Whitehall Relics of Napoleon and Nelson The Deathly Maxims The End.

AFTER leaving the Tate, and following the river along Grosvenor Road, we come to Westminster; but I would like first to cross over and look at Lambeth Palace, secure in its serene antiquity, where the Archbishop of Canterbury lives. This one may do by inquiring for permission by letter to the Primate'schaplain. There is a little early English chapel here, dating from the thirteenth century, which is one of the most beautiful things in London; and the cicerone is full of kindly interest in his visitors, and of a very attractive naive pleasure, ever being renewed, in his work as the exhibitor. The great names here are Boniface, who built the chapel, Chicheley, who built the tower, Howley, who built the residential portion and did much restoring, and such moderns as Tait and Benson, who beautified where they could. It was Archbishop Tait, for example, who set up the present windows, which follow in design those which Laud erected or amended, and which the Puritans broke on seeing, as they thought, popery in them. Laud also gave the screen, and from this Palace he went by barge in the old stately manner of the primates to his death. It seems to be a point of honour with the Archbishops to leave some impress of their own personality on the Palace. Archbishop Benson's window in the little ante-room, or vestry, to the chapel could hardly be more charming; and the inlaid marble floor to the altar with which the present Archbishop's name is associated is a very magnificent addition.

Long rows of Archbishops painted by the best portrait painters of their day Holbein, Van Dyck, Lely, Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough hang on the walls of the dining-ball; but the German tourist who was making the tour of the rooms at the time that I was would not look at them. All his eyes were for the Archbishop's silver, and in particular a crumb-scoop in the form of a trowel.

Despite the rebuilder Westminster is still very good to wander in, for it has the Abbey and the little old streets behind the Abbey, and St. James's Park, and Queen Anne's Gate, that most beautiful stronghold of eighteenth century antiquity while close by it, to emphasise its beauty and good taste, are Queen Anne's Mansions. I always think that one gets a sufficiently raw idea of the human rabbit-warren from the squares of paper and marks of stairs and floors and partitions that are revealed on the walls when a house is in course of demolition : a sight very common in London ; but I doubt if the impression of man's minuteness and gregariousness is so vivid as that conveyed by the spectacle of Queen Anne's Mansions by St. James's Park station surely the ugliest block of buildings out of America, and beyond doubt the most aggressively populous.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Westminster's architectural variety is by no means exhausted in the buildings I have named, for between the Army and Navy Stores and Victoria station (which I fancy is Pimlico) is the wonderful Byzantine Roman Catholic Cathedral. It is characteristic of London methods that a building so ambitious and remarkable as this should have been packed into an enclosed space from which a sight of it as a whole from any point of view is impossible. Its presence here, in the very heart of flat-land, would be hardly less amazing to the simple intelligence of George III than was that of the apple within the dumpling. One is conscious that it is vast and domineering and intensely un-English, but of its total effect and of its proportions, whether good or bad, one knows nothing. The lofty tower is of course visible from all points. Sometimes it has mystery and sometimes not, the effect depending upon the amount of it that is disclosed. From Victoria station I have seen it through a slight haze wearing an unearthly magical beauty ; and again from another point it has been merely a factory chimney with a desire for sublimity.

Whatever opinion one may hold as to the architectural scheme of the new cathedral, there can be no doubt as to its nobility as sheer building, and no question of the splendid courage behind its dimensions. It appears to me to conquer by vastness alone, and I seem to discern a certain grim humour in these people setting as near their old time Westminster cathedral as might be this new and flauntingly foreign temple, in which the Abbey and St. Margaret's could both be packed, still leaving interstices to be filled by a padding of city churches.

For one of London's oddest freaks of ecclesiastical architecture you have only to seek Smith Square, just behind the Abbey, and study the church of St. John the Evangelist, the peculiar oddity of which is its four belfries, one at each corner. I used to be told when I lived within sound of its voice that the shape of this church was due to a passionate kick on the part of the wealthy lady who endowed it, and who, in disgust at the plans submitted by her architect, projected the footstool across the room. "There," said she, pointing to it as it lay upside down, "build it like that"; and the architect did. That is the Westminster legend, and it is probably false a derivative from the church's shape rather than the cause of it. St. John's, however, has something more interesting to offer than its design, for it was here that the scathing author of "The Rosciad" and other satires Charles Churchill, who was born close by in Vine Street (now Romney Street) and educated close by at Westminster School held for a while the position of curate and lecturer, in succession to his gentle old father. Churchill's name is forgotten now, but during the four years in which he blazed it was a menace and a power.

GIRL AT A WINDOW,

FROM THE PAINTING BY REMBRANDT AT DULWICH

Smith Square still contains two or three of Westminster's true Georgian houses, of which there were many when I lived in Cowley Street many years ago. New roads and new buildings, including the towering pile of offices and flats which the Ecclesiastical Commissioners erected, as reckless of the proportions of this neighbourhood as of its traditions, have ruined Westminster. Meanwhile, concurrently with the big schemes, a number of individuals with Georgian tastes have been renovating all the little houses here without impairing their character.