After a few weeks in France, we returned to London, traveling through England, Ireland, and Scotland for several months.  We visited the scenes that Shakespeare, Burns, and Dickens had made classic.  We spent a few days at Huntingdon, the home of Oliver Cromwell, and visited the estate where he passed his early married life.  While there, one of his great admirers read aloud to us a splendid article in one of the reviews, written by Carlyle, giving “The Protector,” as his friend said, his true place in history.  It was long the fashion of England’s historians to represent Cromwell as a fanatic and hypocrite, but his character was vindicated by later writers.  “Never,” says Macaulay, “was a ruler so conspicuously born for sovereignty.  The cup which has intoxicated almost all others sobered him.”

We saw the picturesque ruins of Kenilworth Castle, the birthplace of Shakespeare, the homes of Byron and Mary Chaworth, wandered through Newstead Abbey, saw the monument to the faithful dog, and the large dining room where Byron and his boon companions used to shoot at a mark.  It was a desolate region.  We stopped a day or two at Ayr and drove out to the birthplace of Burns.  The old house that had sheltered him was still there, but its walls now echoed to other voices, and the fields where he had toiled were plowed by other hands.  We saw the stream and banks where he and Mary sat together, the old stone church where the witches held their midnight revels, the two dogs, and the bridge of Ayr.  With Burns, as with Sappho, it was love that awoke his heart to song.  A bonny lass who worked with him in the harvest field inspired his first attempts at rhyme.  Life, with Burns, was one long, hard struggle.  With his natural love for the beautiful, the terrible depression of spirits he suffered from his dreary surroundings was inevitable.  The interest great men took in him, when they awoke to his genius, came too late for his safety and encouragement.  In a glass of whisky he found, at last, the rest and cheer he never knew when sober.  Poverty and ignorance are the parents of intemperance, and that vice will never be suppressed until the burdens of life are equally shared by all.

We saw Melrose by moonlight, spent several hours at Abbotsford, and lingered in the little sanctum sanctorum where Scott wrote his immortal works.  It was so small that he could reach the bookshelves on every side.  We went through the prisons, castles, and narrow streets of Edinburgh, where the houses are seven and eight stories high, each story projecting a few feet until, at the uppermost, opposite neighbors could easily shake hands and chat together.  All the intervals from active sight-seeing we spent in reading the lives of historical personages in poetry and prose, until our sympathies flowed out to the real and ideal characters.  Lady Jane Grey, Anne Boleyn, Mary Queen of Scots, Ellen Douglas, Jeanie and Effie Deans, Highland Mary, Rebecca the Jewess, Di Vernon, and Rob Roy all alike seemed real men and women, whose shades or descendants we hoped to meet on their native heath.