Dr. Allchin called and took me to a dinner, where I met many professional brothers, and enjoyed myself highly.

By this time every day was pledged for one or more engagements, so that many very attractive invitations had to be declined.  I will not follow the days one by one, but content myself with mentioning some of the more memorable visits.  I had been invited to the Rabelais Club, as I have before mentioned, by a cable message.  This is a club of which the late Lord Houghton was president, and of which I am a member, as are several other Americans.  I was afraid that the gentlemen who met,

  “To laugh and shake in Rabelais’s easy chair,”

might be more hilarious and demonstrative in their mirth than I, a sober New Englander in the superfluous decade, might find myself equal to.  But there was no uproarious jollity; on the contrary, it was a pleasant gathering of literary people and artists, who took their pleasure not sadly, but serenely, and I do not remember a single explosive guffaw.

Another day, after going all over Dudley House, including Lady Dudley’s boudoir, “in light blue satin, the prettiest room we have seen,” A——­ says, we went, by appointment, to Westminster Abbey, where we spent two hours under the guidance of Archdeacon Farrar.  I think no part of the Abbey is visited with so much interest as Poets’ Corner.  We are all familiarly acquainted with it beforehand.  We are all ready for “O rare Ben Jonson!” as we stand over the place where he was planted standing upright, as if he had been dropped into a post-hole.  We remember too well the foolish and flippant mockery of Gay’s “Life is a Jest.”  If I were dean of the cathedral, I should be tempted to alter the J to a G.  Then we could read it without contempt; for life is a gest, an achievement,—­or always ought to be.  Westminster Abbey is too crowded with monuments to the illustrious dead and those who have been considered so in their day to produce any other than a confused impression.  When we visit the tomb of Napoleon at the Invalides, no side-lights interfere with the view before us in the field of mental vision.  We see the Emperor; Marengo, Austerlitz, Waterloo, Saint Helena, come before us, with him as their central figure.  So at Stratford,—­the Cloptons and the John a Combes, with all their memorials, cannot make us lift our eyes from the stone which covers the dust that once breathed and walked the streets of Stratford as Shakespeare.

Ah, but here is one marble countenance that I know full well, and knew for many a year in the flesh!  Is there an American who sees the bust of Longfellow among the effigies of the great authors of England without feeling a thrill of pleasure at recognizing the features of his native fellow-countryman in the Valhalla of his ancestral fellow-countrymen?  There are many memorials in Poets’ Corner and elsewhere in the Abbey which could be better spared than that.  Too many that were placed there as