As I went home that night, through the streets of London, my mind and heart were full.  My special studies at the moment were familiarising me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld.  In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House.  And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off.  So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the “Petition of Right.”  Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very similar.  Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted “Order!  Order!” as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the “Man of Blood,” as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will.  Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same.  The conditions and the environment looking at it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet.  In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena at Westminster.  The destinies of the two peoples are scarcely less interlocked at the present moment.  We are gravitating toward closer brotherhood, and the thoughtful American sees reason to study with the deepest interest each passage of arms in the ancient memorable arena.

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I saw in Germany in 1870, usually through the good offices of Bancroft, our minister, the most eminent historians of that day.  Giesebrecht and von Raumur were no longer living, but men were still in the foreground to the full as illustrious.  Heidelberg in those days was relatively a more conspicuous university than at present.  Its great men remain to it, though the process of absorption was beginning which at last carried the more distinguished lights to Berlin.  The lovely little town, whose streets for nearly six hundred years have throbbed with the often boisterous life of the student population, is at its best in the spring and early summer.  The Neckar ripples tumultuously into the broad Rhine plain, from which towers to the height of two thousand feet the romantic Odenwald.  From some ruin of ancient watch-tower or cloister on the height, entrancing views spread out, the landscape holding the venerable towns of Worms and Speyer, each with its cathedral dominating the clustered dwellings, while the lordly Rhine pours its flood northward—­a stream of gold when in the late afternoon it glows in the sunset.  The old castle stands on its height, more beautiful in its decay, with ivy clinging about the broken arches, and the towers wrecked by the powder-bursts of ancient wars, than it could ever have been when unshaken.