there is no royal road to the selection of judges; only a judge in a condition of ignorance is much more damaging to the public than a pretended originator, who turns out to be a quack. Better blunder over a hundred mistakes, than mistake the one right thing when it starts up.
In this matter of war-tools lies physical salvation. When war-tools shall have culminated, war-work will be at an end. Men will cease to fight when destruction shall be rendered certain.
A VISIT TO AN OLD HALL AT ELTHAM.
One who treads alone
A banquet-hall deserted,
Whose lights are fled,
Whose garlands dead,
And all but he departed.
St. Swithin, never so dreary since 1829, has given us this year drenching rains and nipping winds: and we have only exchanged the chilly room and cold firegrate, for sloppy streets, and a murky sky overhead. A bright sun and a welcome holiday were not to be neglected, and we therefore bethought ourselves of a trip, to take advantage of the rare opportunity of a lull in the long bad weather, that has made us doubt the veracity of the almanacs. Emerging from the Railway Station, at Blackheath, we crossed the Common, rejoicing in the fine clear air that always blows across its undulating range of turf, and wiled the way by thinking of the days when Queen Caroline, and Lord Chesterfield, and the great General Wolfe took their walks here, and Vanbrugh was piling up his heavy architecture on Maze Hill. Behind us we see where the Astronomer Halley sleeps; on the left we see Charlton with its fine Jacobean house, and Woolwich, where the gallant Lovelace was born, with its Arsenal and Dockyard, its constant bugle-calls and thundering artillery, booming among the marshes, or echoing from the mortar battery near the Rotunda. Before us, on Shooter’s Hill—a dangerous pass for travellers in the days of the outlaws who lurked in the adjoining woods—rose the quaint tower, known to the vulgar as “Seven Dogs Castle,” which commemorates the capture of Severndroog Castle, on the coast of Malabar, by Sir W. James. We shall soon look upon his grave at Eltham, whither we are going. We think of Falstaff’s robbery in “Henry the Fourth,” and the two hundred courteous archers who, on a certain May-day, entertained here another Henry with one of his “Sweet Kates” in booths with loyal cheer and pageants; and then take our way, avoiding the somewhat dull road that lies between the hill and the village by following the field-path, with a right pleasant companion, through corn land and meadows purple with clover, over stiles and along hedges where the only flowers were those of the woodbine, the chamomile, the bramble, and the pimpernel. But the open petals of the latter reassured us, as we looked up with some dismay on the threatening clouds.
The title of Eltham was borne by John of Eltham, son of Edward II., who died in 1334: his elaborate effigy in St. Edmund’s chapel, in Westminster Abbey, presents the earliest specimen of a ducal coronet. By a confusion of names, the old hall has been frequently described as King John’s. But omitting all memory of Lackland, we can repeople it with better men than he. The manor was held by the soldier-bishop, Odo, of Bayeux, by de Vescis, and de Mandevilles, and de Scropes; but the Crown long preserved a moiety, and now holds its entire extent. Many a gay and gallant gathering of barons and knights, courtiers and fair dames, have been held in the old palace. In 1270, Henry III. kept Christmas here, and Lionel the Regent, in 1347; Richard II., in 1384 and the two following years; Henry IV., in 1409 and 1412; we have Henry V. in 1414, and his weak successor in 1429. The last monarch who made Whitsun and Christmas cheer, was Bluff Hal, in 1515 and 1526; but on the latter occasion he came with so few attendants, owing to the raging of the plague, that the townsfolk, by way of distinction to past merry making, called it the Still Christmas. Anthony Bec, the only English Patriarch of Jerusalem, bestowed his new buildings on Queen Eleanor, and died here in 1311. Parliaments too, in 1329 and in 1375, have sat in the old Palace; in 1364, the captive John, king of France, came as an unwilling guest, and the exile King Leo, of Armenia, in 1386, when Richard II. fully maintained his reputation for superfluous hospitality.
Froissart, here a frequent guest, records how on a Sunday afternoon, in 1364, Edward and Philippa waited at the gates to receive the fallen monarch, and how, “between that time and supper, in his honour were many grand dances and carols, at which the young Lord de Courcy distinguished himself by singing and dancing.” It was a strange exhibition in the presence of a captive prince, who afterwards pathetically applied the complaint by the waters of Babylon to his own sorrowful case—“How can I sing in a strange land?” But the fascinating young nobleman contrived to win and wed the Princess Royal of England, so that he had no cause for regret on his own account. Eltham and Shene were the favourite palaces of Richard and the “good Queen” Anne, of Bohemia, the famous lady who introduced the side-saddle. Parliament met here to arrange the king’s second marriage with Isabella of Valois, who was brought hither after her bridal, and set out from the gates to her coronation, as her namesake “the she-wolf of France” had done more than a century before, with her unfortunate husband, Edward of Carnarvon. Here, too, Henry IV. forbade the French ambassadors to speak of Richard to Isabella, as one too young (so the grim hypocrite declared) to know of the sorrows of this world. Here, too, he himself was espoused to Joanna of Navarre, in the presence of the primate and chief officers of state; Antonio Riezi acting as the lady’s proxy, and actually having the ring placed upon his finger.
Henry IV. feasted in fear, for the Duke of York, so report ran, designed to scale the walls, and rob him of life and crown together; and here he actually sickened in death-like trances of his mortal disease, before the approach of the unwelcome guest, who knocks with equal foot at cotters’ doors