# Letters from England/"Merry Old England"

​“Merry Old England”
ONCE again, however, we must come to a standstill; we must just look to see where merry old England really is. Old England, that is, let us say, Stratford, and that is Chester and I know not what else. Stratford, Stratford, let’s see, have I been there? No, I haven’t; so I haven’t seen the house in which Shakespeare was born, if we do not take into account that it has been entirely rebuilt and that, more over, perhaps no such person as Shakespeare ever existed. But, on the other hand, I have been in Salisbury, where a quite undoubted Massinger worked, and in the Temple in London, where a well-attested Dickens stayed, and at Grasmere, where a historically authenticated Wordsworth lived, and in many other birthplaces and centres of activity which are ​undeniably vouched for by documentary evidence. Good, I have found here and there, that good old England, which outwardly has survived in the form of black rafters and carved frontages, as a result of which it has a pretty black and white criss-cross pattern. I should be reluctant to indulge in too venturesome hypotheses, but it seems to me that the black and white stripes on the sleeves of English policemen have their origin precisely in that criss-cross style of old English houses, as shown in the drawing.
England, it should be explained, is a country of historical traditions; and everything that is, has some cause, as was taught by John Locke, if I remember rightly. In some towns, as, for example Chester, the ​policemen wear white cloaks like surgeons or barbers; possibly that is a tradition from the time of the Romans. Besides this, old England was fond of all kinds of projecting storeys and gables, so that a house of that sort grows broader and broader towards the top; in addition to all that, the windows are commonly thrust forward like half-opened drawers, so that a house of that sort with its storeys, bow-windows, dormers and oriels looks like a large toy with detachable parts, or an old escritoire with drawers, which is perhaps closed up and locked for the night, and there it is. At Chester, moreover, they have something known as “rows.” This consists of an arbour, but on the first floor, and from the street, it is reached by means ​of stairs, the shops being below and above; this exists nowhere else in the world. At Chester, too, they have also a cathedral of pink stone, while at York the cathedral is brown, at Salisbury pike-blue, and at Exeter black and green. Nearly all English cathedrals have pillars in the form of water-pipes, a rectangular presbytery, a horrible organ in the middle of the chief nave, and fan-like ribs on the vaulting; what the Puritans did not destroy was added by the blessed Wyatt with his renovations which are unmixed in style. For instance, Salisbury Cathedral is so hopelessly perfect that it makes you feel uneasy: and you circumambulate the town of Salisbury three times as Achilles did at Troy, and then, discovering that you still have two hours to spare before the train starts, you sit down on a bench in the town amid three one-legged old men and watch the local constable puffing out his cheeks to make a baby laugh in its pram. Altogether, nothing is more dreadful than rain in a small town.
​At Salisbury they have also walls of houses covered with roof-tiles; I have drawn them to delight the tiler whose hands this paper may reach.
In the northern counties they have built cottages of nice grey stone; that is the reason why in London nearly all the houses are built of ugly grey bricks. In Berkshire and Hampshire they have carried out building operations wholesale with paprika-red bricks; that is why in London also there are whole streets of red bricks, as if the angel of death had smeared them with blood. At Bristol ​some builder or other produced thousands of windows with queer arches slightly Moorish in character, and at Tavistock all the cottages have an entrance-door like that of Princetown prison. I fear that I have now exhausted the architectural diversity of England.
The most beautiful things in England, however, are the trees, the herds, and the people; and then, too, the ships. But old England comprises those rosy old gentlemen who in the spring-time wear grey top-hats, and in the summer chase tiny balls over golf-courses, and they look so fresh and nice that I should like to play with them if I were eight years old; and the old ladies who always have some knitting in their hands and are rosy, nice-looking and kind, drink hot water and never tell you about their ailments.
On the whole, a country which has contrived to produce the finest childhood and the finest old age certainly possesses something of the best there is in this vale of tears.