The Town Part 45

By and by, down to the chapel again, where Bishop Morley preached upon the song of the angels, 'Glory to G.o.d on high, on earth peace, and good-will towards men.' Methought he made but a poor sermon, but long, and reprehending the common jollity of the court for the true joy that shall and ought to be on these days; particularized concerning their excess in playes and gaming, saying, that he whose office it is to keep the gamesters in order and within bounds, serves but for a second rather in a duell, meaning the groome-porter. Upon which it was worth observing how far they are come from taking the reprehensions of a bishop seriously, that they all laugh in the chapel when he reflected on their ill actions and courses. He did much press us to joy in these publick days of joy, and to hospitality. But one that stood by whispered in my ear that the bishop himself do not spend one groate to the poor himself. The sermon done, a good anthem followed with violls, and the King come down to receive the sacrament.

"1662-3--February 1st.--This day Creed and I walking in White Hall did see the King coming privately from my Lady Castlemaine's; which is a poor thing for a Prince to do: and so I expressed my sense of it to Creed in terms which I should not have done, but that I believe he is trusty in that point."

The court of James II. is hardly worth mention. It lasted less than four years, and was as dull as himself. The most remarkable circ.u.mstance attending it was the sight of friars and confessors, and the brief restoration of Popery. Waller, too, was once seen there; the _fourth_ court of his visiting. There was a poetess also, who appears to have been attached by regard as well as office to the court of James--Anne Kingsmill, better known by her subsequent t.i.tle of Countess of Winchilsea. The attachment was most probably one of feeling only and good-nature, for she had no bigotry of any sort.

Dryden, furthermore, was laureate to King James; and in a fit of politic, perhaps real, regret, turned round upon the late court in his famous comparison of it with its predecessor.

James fled from England in December, 1688, and the history of Whitehall terminates with its conflagration, ten years afterwards.

FOOTNOTES:

[339] Lingard, vol. iv., p. 246. (Quarto Edit.)

[340] Vol. iii., p. 862, Edit. 1808.

[341] Folio edit

[342] _Ut supra_, p. 347. Henry had been afflicted with this ulcer a long while. He was in danger from it during his marriage with Anne Bullen. It should be allowed him among his excuses of temperament; but then it should also have made him more considerate towards his wives.

It never enters the heads, however, of such people that _their_ faults or infirmities are to go for anything, except to make others considerate for them, and warrant whatever humours they choose to indulge.

[343] Nicholls's "Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth," year 1595, pp. 4-8. "He will ever bear in his heart the picture of her beauty." "He now looks on his mistress's outside with the eyes of sense, which are dazzled and amased."

[344] See the poems in Anderson's Edition, vol. ii., p. 706.

[345] From an article in the second volume of that elegant and interesting publication, the "Retrospective Review;" the discontinuance of which, some years back, was regretted by every lover of literature.

[346] Biographical History of England. Vol. ii., p. 7. Fifth Edition.

[347] _Nugae Antiquae_, Ed. 1804, vol i., p. 348, _et seq._ (Quoted in a note to Peyton's "Catastrophe of the Stuarts," in "Secret History of the Court of James I." Vol. ii., p. 387.)

[348] Harris, vol. i., p. 17.

[349] Harris, vol. i., p. 79.

[350] See the Poem of "Gotham" in Churchill's works.

[351] Secret History, &c., as above, vol. ii., p. 1.

[352] Jesse's Memoirs of the Court of England during the Reign of the Stuarts, vol. ii., p. 91.

[353] Ibid., p. 94.

[354] Jesse, vol. ii., p. 79.

[355] Boulogne.

CHAPTER XII.

St. James's Park and its a.s.sociations. -- Unhealthiness of the Place and neighbourhood. -- Leper Hospital of St. James. -- Henry the Eighth builds St. James's Palace and the Tilt Yard.

-- Original State and Progressive Character of the Park. -- Charles the First. -- Cromwell. -- Charles the Second; his Walks, Amus.e.m.e.nts, and Mistresses. -- The Mulberry Gardens. -- Swift, Prior, Richardson, Beau Tibbs, Soldiers, and Syllabubs.

-- Character of the Park at present. -- St. James's Palace during the Reigns of the Stuarts and two first Georges. -- Anecdotes of Lord Craven and Prince George of Denmark. -- Characters of Queen Anne and of George the First and Second. -- George the First and his Carp. -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Sack of Wheat. -- Horace Walpole's Portrait of George the First. -- The Mistresses of that King, and of his Son. -- Mistake of Lord Chesterfield. -- Queen Caroline's Ladies in Waiting. -- Miss b.e.l.l.e.n.den and the Guineas. -- George the Second's Rupture with his Father, and with his Son. -- Character of that Son. -- Buckingham House. -- Sheffield and his d.u.c.h.ess. -- Character of Queen Charlotte. -- Advantages of Queen Victoria over her predecessors.

St. James's Park is a.s.sociated in contemporary minds with nothing but amusing recollections of bands of music, marching soldiers, maid-servants and children, drinkings of "milk from the cow," the hoop-petticoats of the court days of George the Third, and fading images of pa.s.sages in novels, or of shabby-genteel debtors sitting lounging on the benches. A little further back in point of time we see a novelist himself, Richardson, walking in it, with other invalids, for his health; then Swift crossing it from Suffolk Street in his way to Chelsea, or thinking of the _Spectator_ and _Rosamond's Pond_; then the gallants of the time of Charles the Second, with Charles himself feeding his ducks and playing at mall; then his unhappy father led through it from St. James's Palace on his way to the scaffold at Whitehall; and then the chivalresque sports of the Tudors in the famous tilt-yard, which occupied the site of the Horse Guards. To all these points we shall return for the purpose of entering into a few particulars; but as geographers begin their accounts of a place with the soil, we shall first make a few remarks of a like nature.

The site of this park, which must always have been low and wet, is said in the days before the Conquest to have been a swamp. Yet so little understood, not only at that time but any time till within these few years, were those vitalest arts of life which have been disclosed to us by the Southwood Smiths and others, that the good citizens of London in those days built a hospital upon it for lepers (by way of purifying their skins), and people of rank and fashion have been cl.u.s.tering about it more and more ever since, especially of late years. "If a merry-meeting is to be wished," says the man in Shakspeare, "may G.o.d prohibit it." If our health is to be injured while in town by luxury and late nights, say the men of State and Parliament, let us all go and make it worse in the bad air of Belgravia. Nay, let us sit with our feet in the water, while in Parliament itself, and then let us aggravate our agues in Pimlico and the park.--There is no use in mincing the matter, even though the property of a great lord be doubled by the mistake. The fashionable world should have stuck to Marylebone and the good old dry parts of the metropolis, or gone up hill to Kensington gravel-pits, or into any other wholesome quarter of the town or suburbs, rather than have descended to the water-side, and built in the _mush_ of Pimlico.

Building and house-warming doubtless make a difference; and wealth has the usual advantages compared with poverty: but the malaria is not done away. A professional authority on the subject gave the warning five and twenty years ago in the _Edinburgh Review_; but what are warnings to house-building and fashion? "It is not suspected," he says (vol. x.x.xvi. p. 341) "that St. James's Park is a perpetual source of malaria, producing frequent intermittents, autumnal dysenteries, and various derangements of health, in all the inhabitants who are subject to its influence. The cause being unsuspected, the evil is endured, and no further inquiries are made." The malaria (he tells us in another pa.s.sage of the same article) "spreads even to Bridge Street and Whitehall. Nay, in making use of the most delicate _miasmometer_ (if we may coin such a word) that we ever possessed, an officer who had suffered at Walcheren, we have found it reaching up to St. James's Street even to Bruton Street, although the rise of ground is here considerable, and the whole s.p.a.ce from the nearest water is crowded with houses."

This statement, corroborated as it is by the obvious nature of the soil and air in the park, where the people to any eye coming from higher ground seem walking about only in a thinner kind of water--a perpetual haze and _mugginess_--ought to settle the question respecting the doom of Buckingham Palace. Her Majesty, whose life and comfort are precious to her subjects, should have her town residence in quite another sort of place. Almost everything indeed, artificial as well as natural, conspires to render the spot unwholesome. See what the royal lungs receive on all sides of the present abode whichever way the windows are opened. In front of it is the steam of the mushy ground and the ca.n.a.l; on the left comes draining down the wet of Const.i.tution Hill; and on the right and at the back are the vapours of the river and the pestilential smokes of the manufactories. What an air in which to set forth the colours of the royal flag and refresh the anxieties of the owner! We never look down on the flag from Piccadilly, but we long to see it announcing the royal presence on higher ground and in a healthy breeze.

The Leper Hospital, being the ancientest known domicile in the spot before us, stood on the site of the present St. James's Palace; so that where state and fashion have congregated, and blooming beauties come laughing through the trees, was once heard the dismal sound of the "cup and clapper," which solicited charity for the most revolting of diseases. The spot was probably selected for the hospital, not only as being at the greatest convenient distance from the habitations of the good citizens its founders (lepers being always put as far as possible out of the way), but because it suggested itself to the imagination as possessed of an a.n.a.logous dreariness and squalidity.

Unfavourable circ.u.mstances in those days were only thought fit for one another, not for the super-induction of favourable ones. The lunatic was to be exasperated by whips and dark-keeping, and the leper thrust into the ditch. The world had not yet found out that light, cleanliness, and consolation were good for all. Imagine this "lake of the dismal swamp," now St. James's Park, with not another house nearer to it than the walls at Ludgate, presenting to the timid eyes of the Sunday pedestrian its lonely spital, which at once attracted his charity and repelled his presence (for leprosy was thought infectious), the wind sighing through the trees, and the rain mingling with the pestilential-looking mud.

The endowment of St. James's Hospital is said to have been originally for women only, fourteen in number, to whom were subsequently added eight brethren "to administer divine service." They were probably, however, in a good condition of life--"leper ladies," as an old poem styles the companions of Cressida; but ladies, according to the poem, were not exempt from the duty of asking alms with the "cup and clapper;" and as it was probably a part of their business and humiliation to watch for the appearance of wayfarers, and accost them with cries and clamour, scenes of that kind may have taken place in the walk now const.i.tuting the Mall.

The hospital was exchanged with Henry the Eighth for "a consideration;" and upon its site, or near it, that soul of leprosy built a manor, and transferred into it his own bloated and corrupted body. He was then in the forty-third year of his age, and in the same year (1532) he married poor Anne Boleyn. The town-residences (as they would now be called) of the kings of England had hitherto been at Kensington, or on the banks of the Thames at London and Westminster (such as the Tower, Westminster Hall, &c.) What it was that attracted Henry to the Leper Hospital it is difficult to conceive; though the neighbourhood, no doubt, had become a little cleansed and refined by the growth of Westminster and Whitehall. Much neatness was not required by a state of manners, which, according to Erasmus, must have been one of the dirtiest in Europe, and which allowed the refuse of meats and drinks, in gentlemen's houses, to collect under the rushes in the dining-rooms. Perhaps the new palace was to be a place of retirement for the King and his thoughtless victim, whom four years afterwards he put to death. Most likely, however, his great object was to grasp all he could, and add to the number of his parks and amus.e.m.e.nts; for the whole of the St. James's Fields (as they were called) fell into his hands with the house, and he stocked them with game, built a tilt-yard in front of Whitehall, on the site of the present Horse Guards, together with a c.o.c.k-pit in its neighbourhood; and on the downfall of Wolsey took possession of Whitehall itself, which thenceforth became added to the list of royal abodes. The new palace could never have been handsome. It had the homely look which it retains to this day, as the reader will see in the print before him; the gateway looking up St. James's Street being evidently a remnant of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. JAMES'S PALACE. 1650.]

The Tilt Yard, as its name implies, was the chief scene of knightly amus.e.m.e.nt in the reigns of the Tudors. Here Henry jousted till he grew too fat; and here Elizabeth sat at the receipt of chivalrous adulation. The spot is full of life and colour in the eyes of one's imagination, with heralds and coats of arms, plumed champions, caparisoned steeds, and courts looking on from draperied galleries.

The present tranquil exercises on parade may be considered as a remnant of the old military shows. But the people had no admittance within the court grounds, except on favour.

The new park seems to have remained strictly enclosed as a nursery for game till the period of the civil wars of the Commonwealth. A new palace by Inigo Jones was intended to overlook it at Whitehall, of which only the Banqueting House was erected. Charles the First was brought to this house across the Park, from St. James's Palace, in order to suffer death. Cromwell is then discerned in the park grounds taking the air in a sedan; but its popular history does not commence till the Restoration, when Charles the Second, who seems not to have known what to do with the quant.i.ty of life and animal spirits that had been suppressed during his exile, took to improving and enjoying it with great vivacity. The walks with him became real walks, for he was a great pedestrian. He had got the habit, perhaps, when he could not afford a horse. He let the people in to see him feed his ducks in the ca.n.a.l, a branch of which, called Duck Island, he pleasantly erected into a "Government" for the French wit and refugee, St. Evremond. He made an aviary on the south-east side of the park, thence called Birdcage Walk; turned the north side into a mall for the enjoyment of the pastimes so called, in which he excelled; introduced skating from Holland on the ca.n.a.l and Rosamond's Pond (which was another branch of it on the south-west); had mistresses in lodgings east and west of him (Cleveland at Whitehall and Nell Gwyn in Pall Mall); and saw, in the course of his reign, new streets rising and old places of entertainment flourishing in other quarters of his favourite district; Spring Gardens (which became famous for the tavern called "Lockett's"), at Charing Cross, and the Mulberry Gardens and n.o.blemen's mansions between Pimlico and Piccadilly. It has been a question whether the site of the Mulberry Gardens was on the spot now occupied by Arlington Street, or on that of the Queen's Palace. We suspect it is difficult to say which, and that they extended along the whole s.p.a.ce between the two. Particular sites are too often confounded with places near them; and houses are said to displace one another, which only occupied successive neighbourhoods. By some writers, for instance, the sites of Arlington and Old Buckingham Houses are considered as identical, while others represent them in one another's vicinity. At all events, the Mulberry Gardens appear to have included the site of both those houses. Ladies came there in masks to eat syllabubs, and converse with their lovers. Sedley made them the scene of a play. The whole park, indeed, in Charles's reign, may be said to have been the scene of a play, especially towards evening, when the meetings took place which Sedley and Etherege dramatised. In the morning all was duck-feeding and dog-playing and playing at mall; in the evening all intrigue and a.s.signation. At one time Waller is admiring the King's masterly use of the small stick; at another Pepys is asking questions of the park-keepers, or transported at sight of the court ladies on horseback; at another Evelyn is horrified (though he seems to have sought occasions for such horrors) at overhearing a "very familiar discourse" between his Majesty and that "impudent comedian," Nelly Gwyn, who is standing at her garden-wall at the back of Pall Mall (near the present Marlborough House).

Matters in this respect mended, though not suddenly, at the Revolution. Whitehall Palace was then accidentally burnt down, and that of St. James's becomes one of the chief residences of the sovereign, which it remains till the reign of the present. Swift and Prior are now seen walking for their health in the park,--Swift to get thin, and Prior to get fat. The heroes and hungry debtors of the novelists (for the park was privileged from arrest) make their appearance, the former with their wives or friends, the latter sitting starving on the benches. Staid ladies have Sunday promenades under the eye of staid sovereigns. Something of a new license returns with the first and second Georges; but it comes from Germany, is discreet, and makes little impression. The greatest a.s.signation we read of is an innocent one of Richardson with a Lady Bradshaigh, who is "mighty curious" to know what sort of man he is, and accordingly moves him to describe himself in the formal terms of an advertis.e.m.e.nt, in order that he may be recognised when she meets him. Goldsmith's Beau Tibbs, who "blasts himself with an air of vivacity" at seeing "n.o.body in town," is now the pleasantest fellow we encounter in the park for many a day. The ducks, and the dogs, and the birdcages, and Rosamond's Pond, dismal for drowning lovers, have long vanished; and the place begins to look as it used to do forty years ago. The gayest entertainment in it is "the soldiers," with their bands of music; and the most sensual pleasure a gla.s.s of milk from the cow. A mad woman (Margaret Nicholson) makes a sensation, by attempting to stab George the Third at the palace door; but all is quiet again, sedate and orderly, even when court-days bring together a crowd of beauties.

George the Fourth just lives long enough to turn Buckingham Palace into a toy, and the site of Carlton Gardens into something better.

With his successors comes the greatest of all the park improvements--the conversion of the poor fields and ca.n.a.l into a public pleasure-ground and an ornamental piece of water. Upon this King Charles's ducks have returned, equally improved; and if it did but possess a good atmosphere, St. James's Park would now be as complete a place of recreation for the promenaders of its neighbourhood, as it is handsome and well-intended.

One of the most popular aspects of St. James's Park is that of a military and music-playing and milk-drinking spot. The milk-drinkings, and the bands of music, and the parades, are the same as they used to be in our boyish days; and, we were going to add, may they be immortal. But though it is good to make the best of war as long as war cannot be helped, and though music and gold lace, &c., are wonderful helps to that end, yet conscience will not allow us to blink all we know of a very different sort respecting battlefields and days after the battle. We say, therefore, may war turn out to be as mortal, and speedily so, as railroads and growing good-sense can make it; though in the meantime, and the more for that hope, we may be allowed to indulge ourselves as we did when children, in admiring the pretty figures which it cuts in this place--the harmlessness of its glitter and the transports of its beholders. Will anybody who has beheld it when a boy ever forget how his heart leaped within him when, having heard the music before he saw the musicians, he issued hastily from Whitehall on to the parade, and beheld the serene and stately regiment a.s.sembled before the colonel, the band playing some n.o.ble march, and the officers stepping forwards to the measure with their saluting swords? Will he ever forget the mystical dignity of the band-major, who made signs with his staff; the barbaric, and as it were, Oth.e.l.lo-like height and l.u.s.tre of the turbaned black who tossed the cymbals; the dapper juvenility of the drummers and fifers; and the astounding prematureness of the little boy who played on the triangle?

Is it in the nature of human self-respect to forget how this little boy, dressed in a "right earnest" suit of regimentals, and with his hair as veritably powdered and plastered as the best, fetched those amazing strides by the side of Oth.e.l.lo, which absolutely "kept up"

with his lofty shanks, and made the schoolboy think the higher of his own nature for the possibility? Furthermore, will he ever forget how some regiment of horse used to come over the Park to Whitehall, in the midst of this parade, and pa.s.s the foot-soldiers with a sound of cl.u.s.tering magnificence and dancing trumpets? Will he ever forget how the foot then divided itself into companies, and turning about and deploying before the colonel, marched off in the opposite direction, carrying away the school-boy himself and the crowd of spectators with it; and so, now with the brisk drums and fifes, and now with the deeper glories of the band, marched gallantly off for the court-yard of the palace, where it again set up its music-book, and enchanted the crowd with Haydn or Mozart? What a strange mixture, too, was the crowd itself--boys and grown men, gentlemen, vagabonds, maid-servants--there they all went listening, idling, gazing on the ensign or the band-major, keeping pace with the march, and all of them more or less, particularly the maid-servants, doting on the "sogers." We, for one, confess to having drunk deep of the attraction, or the infection, or the balmy reconcilement (whichever the reader pleases to call it).

Many a holiday morning have we hastened from our cloisters in the city to go and hear "the music in the park," delighted to make one in the motley crowd, and attending upon the last flourish of the hautboys and clarionets. There we first became acquainted with feelings which we afterwards put into verse (if the recollection be not thought an impertinence); and there, without knowing what it was called, or who it was that wrote it, we carried back with us to school the theme of a glorious composition, which afterwards became a favourite with opera-goers under the t.i.tle of _Non piu andrai_, the delightful march in _Figaro_. We suppose it is now, and has ever since been played there, to the martialisation of hundreds of little boys, and the puzzlement of philosophy. Everything in respect to military parade takes place, we believe, in the park just as it used to do, or with little variation. The objects also which you behold, if you look at the parade and its edifices, are the same. The Admiralty, the Treasury, the back of the Minister's house in Downing Street, and the back-front of the solid and not inappropriate building, called the Horse Guards, look as they did fifty years ago; and there also continue to stand the slender Egyptian piece of cannon, and the dumpy Spanish mortar, trophies of the late war with France. The inscriptions, however, on those triumphant memorials contain no account of the sums we are still paying for having waged it.

"The soldiers" and the "milk from the cow" do not at all clash in the minds of boyhood. The juvenile imagination ignores what it pleases, especially as its knowledge is not very great. It no more connects the idea of village ma.s.sacre with guns and trumpets, than it supposes the fine scarlet coat capable of being ragged and dirty. Virgil may say something about ruined fields, and people compelled to fly for their lives; but this is only part of a "lesson," and the calamities but so many nouns and verbs. The maid-servants, and indeed the fair s.e.x in general, till they become wives and mothers, enjoy the like happy exemption from ugly a.s.sociations of ideas; and the syllabub is taken under the trees, with a delighted eye to the milk on one side, and the military show on the other.

The late Mr. West, the painter, was so pleased with this pastoral group of cows and milk-drinkers in the park, that he went out of the line of his art to make a picture of it.

Saint James's Palace was not much occupied by the Tudor and Stuart sovereigns. Their princ.i.p.al town residence was Whitehall. The first of the Stuarts may have intended to make St. James's the residence of the Princes of Wales; for he gave it his son Henry, who died there. We have spoken of this prince and his doubtful "promise" already. The best thing known of him is the astonishment he expressed at his father's keeping "such a bird" as Walter Raleigh locked up in a cage.

Charles the First spent the three last days of his life in this palace, occupying himself in devotion, and preparing to fall with dignity;--happy if he had but known how to value the dignity of truth, which would have saved him from the necessity. The Stuarts, unfortunate everywhere in proportion to the gravity of their pretensions, had their customary bad fortune in this palace; at least the male portion of them. James the Second's daughters, who got his throne, were born and married there; but here also was born his son, the first Pretender, whose mother's chamber being situate near some backstairs gave colour to the ridiculous story of his having been a spurious child smuggled into the palace in a warming pan; and here his unlucky and narrow-minded father partly resided when he _per force_ invited his ouster and son-in-law William to take up his abode in it, and received in return notice to quit his throne. The old romantic Lord Craven, who was supposed to have been privately married to James the First's daughter, the luckless Queen of Bohemia, and who was thus destined to witness the whole of the troubles of the English dynasty of the Stuarts, happened to be on duty at St. James's when the Dutch troops were coming across the park to take possession of it. Agreeably to his chivalrous character, and to his habit of taking warlike steps to no purpose, the gallant veteran would have opposed their entrance; but his master forbade him; and he marched away, says Pennant, "with sullen dignity."

"_Est-il-possible_" got the house after James;--we mean his daughter Anne's husband, George of Denmark, who being no livelier a man than his father-in-law, made no other comment than these three words (_Is it possible?_) on the accounts given him by the poor King of every successive desertion from his cause. In due time the man of one remark followed the deserters; upon which James observed to one of the few friends left him, "Who do you think is gone now? Little _Est-il-possible_ himself."

St. James's was given to Anne and her husband by the new sovereign William the Third. She made it her chief palace when she came to the throne, and such it continued to be with the sovereigns of England till the reign of George the Third, with whom its occupation was divided with Buckingham house. Lady Strafford, the wild daughter of Rochester, who lived in France because England, she said, was "too dull" for her, used to relate stories of the "orgies" in Anne's palace. Palaces for the most part have been places of greater license than the world supposes, owing to the natural results of luxury, privilege, and the bringing of idle and agreeable people together; but the orgies which the rattle-headed Lady Strafford talked of, were probably never anything much greater than a drinking-bout of her husband, who unluckily taught his wife to drink too. Anne, between her Protestant accession and her exiled Popish kindred, her imperious favourite the d.u.c.h.ess of Marlborough, and her quarrelling and fluctuating Administrations, had an anxious time of it. There is an old French story of a sage but ugly cavalier, who married a handsome fool, in the persuasion that his children would inherit their mother's beauty and his own wisdom. Unfortunately, they turned out to be specimens of his own ugliness, combined with the mother's folly. We do not say that Queen Anne was a fool, though she was not very wise; but when her grandfather, Lord Clarendon, saw the match between his clever daughter and the future James the Second, he probably hoped that their offspring would possess the father's figure combined with the mother's wit; whereas neither Mary nor Anne possessed the latter, and Anne inherited the mother's fat with the father's dulness. She was a well-meaning and fond, but sluggish-minded woman, with no force of character; her temperament was heavy and lax; she did not know what to do with her political perplexities; and the screw-up of her nerves with strong waters appears to have become irresistible. Swift gives a curious account of her levees, in which she would sit with a parcel of courtiers about her, silently giving glances at them, and putting the end of her fan in her mouth for want of address. She was glad to get the whole set away, that she might sink into her easy chair, and complain of the troubles of human life.

St. James's thus began with being a dull court, and dull for the most part it remained to the last--quite worthy of its external appearance.