Page:Hutton, William Holden - Hampton Court (1897).djvu/22

x plotted and schemed, and yet learnt somehow to say, "I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and goodwill of my subjects I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too"—some of the finest words man-kind ever uttered. Here Charles showed the beauty of his nature through its outer husk of unworthy duplicity. Here Milton meditated and Cromwell agonised: and here, since the days of these heroes, many noble souls have passed, in quietness and simplicity, to their reward. It were as ill to romp and be facetious here as in some old abbey, or in any ancient place where history has been made. It is ours rather to linger over its memories and to cherish them, and to dream again of the great days that are gone by. And so as we ponder, and as the noble names come up before us, and merge insensibly into the present, where still the echoes of renown are heard in the lodgings of the kindred of our English worthies, the scene assumes an unity which brings the old time together with the new.

And thus it is one picture we are to look upon, the old Palace with its history and its memories and its art. It presents one story, and that the world will not willingly let die.