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Dictated July 30, 1907

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A dinner at one of the colleges, at which Mr. Clemens was to respond to a toast. He wears evening dress when he should have worn his scarlet robe—His opinion of dinners and speech-making in general.

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There was to be [a dinner of high dignity that night at one of the colleges]. I was to occupy a place at the high table with the Chancellor, the heads of colleges, Ambassador Reid, and some other [distinguished] personages, and respond to a toast. I had asked and received permission to stay at home until the banquet should be over and speech-making time at hand. I had been asking and acquiring this privilege in America for six years, and valued it beyond price. A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except [ditch-digging]. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and [long-sustained] misery of mind and body. These sorrows begin with the assembling of the clans half an hour before the dinner. During all that half hour one must stand on his feet with the crowd, [amid] a persecuting din of conversation, and must shake hands and exchange banalities and [“I] am so glad to see you [sirs”] with apparently seven millions of fellow sufferers. Then the banquet begins, and there is an hour and a half of that. It is an hour and a half of nerve-wrecking clamor; of intolerable clattering and clashing of knives and forks and plates; of shrieking and shouting commonplaces at [one’s] elbow-mates, and of listening to the like shriekings and shoutings from them in return; and when there is a band—and there usually is—the pandemonium is complete, and there is nothing to approach it but hell on a Sunday night. During that awful hour and a half the faces of certain of the men are a study, and are pathetically interesting. These are the men who have been damned—that is to say, they are under sentence to make speeches. The faces of these are drawn and troubled, and exhibit a distressed preoccupation. Such of the damned as have come with memorized speeches are trying to say them over privately and talk to their neighbors at the same [time,] and [also at the same time] try to look interested in what the neighbors are saying. The result is a curious and piteous jumble of expressions and vacancies in the faces, an exhibition which compels the deep and sincere compassion of any beholder who has been of the damned himself and knows what it is like. The other men under sentence are the men who have not been appointed to speak, but who know they are likely to be called upon, and who are now trying their best to think up something to say; if they are not succeeding they are no better off than those others, as far as comfort goes. It is unquestionably best to stay away from the banquet until the feeding and the racket are over and the time arrived for the speaking to begin; and so, as I have said, I had long ago adopted the policy of staying away until the banquet should be over and the speech-making ready to begin. This judicious policy has saved my life, I suppose.

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That banquet at the College was to begin at seven o’clock. At eight nobody was able to tell me what kind of clothes I ought to wear; some said evening dress, others said the [begin page 86] scarlet gown. We sent a messenger to the College to inquire, and he came back and said evening dress. It was an error. I was fairly within the place before I noticed that it was just one wide and flaming conflagration of crimson gowns—a kind of human prairie on fire. I had to pass through the [centre]of it in my black clothes, and I had never in my life felt so painfully and offensively and humiliatingly conspicuous before; and then I had to stand at the high table and look out over that fire and try to keep my mind on my business and make a speech. I could not have been in the least degree more uncomfortable if I had been stark naked. I called to mind [a phrase which I had used ten years before when describing a great court function in the imperial palace at Vienna, a scene of dazzling color and splendor and gorgeousness, through the midst of which the American minister, in black evening dress, plowed his way, far and away the most conspicuous figure in that sea of flashing glories. I said he looked as out of place as a Presbyterian in hell]. I was looking the same way now, and I knew how odiously showy and uncomfortable he must have felt.

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Was it my conspicuousness that distressed me? Not at all. It was merely that I was not beautifully conspicuous, but uglily conspicuous—it makes all the difference in the world. If I had been clothed from helmet to spurs in plate armor of virgin gold and shining like the sun, I should have been entirely at ease, utterly happy, perfectly satisfied with myself; to be so thunderingly conspicuous, but at the same time so beautifully conspicuous, would have caused me not a pang—on the contrary it would have filled me with joy, pride, vanity, exaltation. When I appear clothed in white, a startling accent in the midst of a sombre multitude in [mid-winter], the most conspicuous object there, I am not ashamed, not ill at ease, but serene and content, because my conspicuousness is not of an offensive sort; it is not an insult, and cannot affront any eye, nor affront anybody’s sense of propriety. My red gown was brought to me just as I was leaving the place—oh infamously too late!

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At three the next afternoon we headed for the Pageant, beyond the walls of Oxford, and at once encountered signs of what was coming.

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[[The Oxford Pageant].

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Most] Americans have been to Oxford and will remember what a dream of the Middle Ages it is, with its crooked lanes, its gray and stately piles of ancient architecture and its meditation-breeding air of repose and dignity and unkinship with the noise and fret and hurry and bustle of these modern days. As a dream of the Middle Ages Oxford was not perfect until Pageant day arrived and furnished certain details which had been for generations lacking. These details began to appear at mid-afternoon on the 27th. At that time singles, couples, groups and squadrons of the three thousand five hundred costumed characters who were to take part in the Pageant began to ooze and drip and stream through house doors, all over the old town, and wend toward the meadows outside the walls. Soon the lanes were thronged with costumes which Oxford had from time to time seen and been familiar with in [bygone] centuries—fashions of dress which marked off centuries as by dates, and [milestoned] them back, and back, and back, until [begin page 87] history faded into legend and tradition, when Arthur was a fact and the Round Table a reality. In this rich commingling of quaint and strange and brilliantly colored fashions in dress the [dress-changes] of Oxford for [twelve] centuries stood [vivid] and realized to the eye; Oxford as a dream of the Middle Ages was complete now as it had [never in our day] been complete; at last there was no discord; the [mouldering] old buildings, and the picturesque throngs drifting past them, were in harmony; soon—astonishingly soon!—the only persons that seemed out of place, and grotesquely and offensively and criminally out of [place, were] such persons as came intruding along clothed in the ugly and odious fashions of the [twentieth] century; they were a bitterness to the feelings, an insult to the eye.

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The make-ups of illustrious historic personages seemed perfect, both as to portraiture and costume; one had no trouble in recognizing them. Also, I was apparently quite easily recognizable myself. The first corner I turned [brought] me suddenly face to face with Henry [VIII], a person whom I had been implacably disliking for sixty years; but when he put out his hand with royal courtliness and grace and said, “Welcome, well-beloved stranger, to my century and to the hospitalities of my realm,” my old [prejudices] vanished away and I forgave him. I think now that Henry [VIII] has been over-abused, and that most of [us,] if we had been situated as he was, domestically, would not have been able to get along with as limited a graveyard as he forced himself to put up with. I feel now that he was one of the nicest men in history. Personal contact with a king is more effective in removing baleful prejudices than is any amount of argument drawn from tales and histories. If I had a child I would name it Henry [VIII], regardless of sex.

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Do you remember Charles [I]?—and his broad slouch with the plume in it? and his slender, tall figure? and his body clothed in velvet doublet with [lace] sleeves, and his legs in leather, with long rapier at his side and his spurs on his heels? I encountered him at the next corner, and [knew] him in a moment—knew him as perfectly and as vividly as I should know [the Grand Chain] in the Mississippi if I should see it from the pilot-house after all these years. He bent his body and gave his hat a sweep that fetched its plume within an inch of the ground, and gave me a welcome that went to my heart. This king has been much maligned; I shall understand him better hereafter, and shall regret him more than I have been in the habit of doing these fifty or sixty years. He did some [things, in his time,] which might better have been left undone, and which cast a shadow upon his name—we all know that, we all concede it—but our error has been in regarding them as [crimes] and in calling them by that name, whereas I perceive now that they were only indiscretions. At every few steps I met persons of deathless name whom I had never encountered before outside of pictures and statuary and history, and these were most thrilling and charming encounters. I had [hand-shakes] with Henry [II], who had not been seen in the Oxford streets for nearly eight hundred years; and with the [Fair Rosamond], whom I now believe to have been chaste and blameless, although I had thought differently about it before; and with [Shakspeare], one of the pleasantest foreigners I have ever gotten acquainted with; and with [Roger Bacon]; and with [Queen Elizabeth, who talked five minutes and never swore once]—a fact which gave me a new and good opinion of her [begin page 88] and moved me to forgive her for beheading the Scottish Mary, if she really did it, which I now doubt; and with the quaintly and anciently clad young [King Harold [Harefoot] of near nine hundred] years ago, who came flying by on a bicycle and smoking a pipe, but at once checked up and got off to shake with me; and also I met a bishop who had lost his way because this was the first time he had been inside the walls of Oxford for as much as twelve hundred years [or thereabouts.] By this time I had grown so used to the obliterated ages and their [best known] people that if I had met Adam I should not have been either surprised or embarrassed; and if he had come in a racing automobile and a cloud of dust, with nothing on but his fig-leaf, it would have seemed to me all right and [harmonious.]

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[The] Oxford Pageant [continued.]

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The living pictures were to begin to appear toward four o’clock. Facing and commanding a wide prospect of meadow and winding river and scattered groups of venerable trees, with glimpses of dreamy blue distances between them, was the [grand stand], and under its sheltering roof were banked like a slanting garden of flowers several thousand summer-clothed ladies and gentlemen. In the [centre] of the stand, down at the front, was a low-railed box with a sofa and chairs, capable of accommodating loosely and comfortably, twenty persons, perhaps. This choice place was for Royalty, but [Royalty was detained, and did not come]. Rudyard Kipling and his wife, and I, with two or three others, were substituted by the management, and we represented Royalty as well as we could in a sudden and unprepared way without opportunity for practice. Lord Curzon was presently added; then we did [better; for he had been a king, (Viceroy of India), and a very great and competent one.]

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The situation, and the outlook, seemed vaguely familiar, for we seemed to be gazing into the swarded and wooded deeps and distances of the operatic [stage;] but that was as far as the seeming went: we realized, with a stirring and uplifting feeling, that these lovelinesses were not a painted fiction, but were real, splendidly real, and more noble and gracious and satisfying than any fiction could be; we realized that the little river winding here and there and yonder in the middle-ground, in the shadow of the June-clad old trees, was real water, fresh and sweet, and to our sense the very same water that had been gliding and glinting [and whispering] along between those banks in shadow and sunflash for unnumbered centuries and looking as it looked now—a winsome and worshipful allegory of eternal youth; the snowy swans that were diligently and contentedly breasting its surface, in the way of recreation or business, were real swans, not fictions worked with a string by a [[“supe”]] hidden behind a pasteboard tree; the country birds that were flitting and singing unafraid all about this bewitching sylvan theatre were real birds, not make-believes; and what a delightful feature they were, with their fearless intrusions, their impudent indifference to the swarming human life there present, and to the pomps and tragedies of Old English history which were soon being displayed under [them!] And why shouldn’t they feel at home, and indifferent? They were full of inherited sentiment; their ancestors of the [bygone] centuries had [actually seen the] pomps and tragedies which [begin page 89] were here reproduced as a dream and a memory, and no doubt these birds carried the recollection of those [long-vanished] scenes in their blood.

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Here is the first scene; it dates back nearly twelve hundred years:

Click to add citation to My Citations. [THE LEGEND OF ST. FRIDESWIDE]. Click to add citation to My Citations. Circa a.d. 727. Click to add citation to My Citations. A flock of sheep are being driven by, when one of the Shepherds makes his way to a wattled hut by the river side, where fishermen are talking and jesting over their work as they draw their nets to the bank. One of the group catches sight of a boat in the distance, and calls the attention of his comrades to the strange vessel, which is being rowed towards them so swiftly as to suggest the fear of pursuit. It is Frideswide with her maidens, and the fishermen, realising her need for succour, offer their ready help in drawing her boat to shore. Then Frideswide, fainting with fatigue, is borne into the hut, but no sooner has she gained its shelter than two galleys heave in sight, manned with warriors, the thanes and chosen house-carles of Algar, Earl of Leicester. They put to land, and despite the protestations of the fishermen, Algar forces his way into the hut and attempts to carry off the maiden. But Frideswide, despairing of mortal help, sinks to her knees and implores a less uncertain aid; and not in vain, for the audacious noble is stricken with a sudden blindness from heaven. Terrified and repentant, he prevails upon her to plead for his sight to be restored; and laying his crown and arms on a shield, he makes a solemn vow to build upon that spot a convent for the maiden whose destruction he had planned. The scene closes with the departure of Frideswide, who is borne off on her return to Oxford in a waggon drawn by a team of oxen. Her bones still rest in the Cathedral built where the Convent stood, and round which the City of Oxford grew up.

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[Those] were real sheep; they emerged from a forest some distance away on our left, beyond the river and the bridge, and a shepherd clad in skins drove them lazily across a meadow, the sheep taking their time and munching grass in a most real and natural way, and not ostentatiously and fictitiously and criminally and mechanically, as they would have done if they had been on the opera stage under salary. The swarm of skin-clad fishermen fussing at their nets had a genuine look also; and so had the commotions, likewise, which broke out when the beautiful and [high-born] young saint and her maidens arrived in a barge and scrambled up the shore in fright, closely followed by that savage earl and his savage men, who also scrambled ashore [from their boat] and started a furious fight and overcame the fishermen and captured the ladies. Everything was so well done that one was continually being thrilled and stirred as the events unfolded themselves and followed briskly one upon another.

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In time the actors in this scene went drifting away across the meadows and among the trees to the right, and as they were disappearing in the distance cheering is heard far to the left, mingled with a singing of anthems, and [the year 1036 has arrived; a swarming crowd of primitively armed cavalry and foot-soldiers and priests and civilian men and women and boys and girls of that ancient day comes marching by, and the coronation of Harold Harefoot] takes place with bountiful pomp and ceremony.

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[begin page 90] Between the scenes there are no stage-waits; always while one multitude is marching away [to the right and vacating the field,] a fresh multitude is coming into view away to the left, a new date is arriving, and the picture presents new and fascinating splendors of costume and color. A multitude comes clothed in the fashions of 1110, and pictures the beginnings and institution of the University of Oxford; while these people are fading out of sight Henry [II] comes strolling along with the Fair Rosamond. Presently the gorgeous court comes [flowing] past, and in its midst one catches, with a distinct and lively thrill, a glimpse of a sweet and dainty little child, and [recognizes] and welcomes in that charming little figure a personage whom he has familiarly known all his life but had never once thought of him in that small and gentle and innocent form—for this is the formidable Richard of the Lion [Heart,] of deathless [story!]

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Next comes [Friar Bacon, (1270) illustrious and shining scientist in a dark time when scientists were few and far [between;] and he exhibits his legendary Brazen Head] and makes it talk.

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He and his crowd pass and disappear, and are followed by a riotous [multitude,] (1354) and a historic riot between town and gown takes place. I think I never saw a better riot on any stage. One of the marvels of these pageants was the easy and natural and competent and thoroughly satisfactory acting of these [unprofessional] multitudes of men and women and children—ordinary citizens of the little town of Oxford, every one of them—people who had never acted in their lives until they entered upon drill for these performances a year ago. There was never a hitch, never a stage-wait, never an awkwardness of any kind; the scenes had not the look of stage plays; they seemed distinctly real, and as if they were simply [happening]—happening by impulse, not studied invention.

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[Next scene—[the] Masque of the Mediaeval Curriculum, a fine allegorical piece, the creation of a young American].

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Next, [Wolsey] [receives] Henry [VIII] at Oxford. (1518.) It was a brilliant and [richly upholstered] and multitudinous double procession marching from two different points and melting together at the [centre] of the stage. It was a [sumptuous] spectacle, a marvel of variety in costume, an undulating sea of flashing and [flushing] colors; when the head of the King’s cavalcade came in sight it was so far away that it looked like a flower-bed gliding along the ground from among the distant trees; this was [real] perspective, real distance, and it made the mimic distances of the operatic stage seem very poor by comparison. I had never seen anything so fine and so remote and so moving as this before, and I shall not see its like again; but it has permanently spoiled the [opera-perspectives] for me.

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[The] Oxford Pageant [concluded.]

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The coming, and passing, and disappearing of dazzling pageants continued during the next two hours, without interruption. These great scenes are summarized as follows, in [the Book of the Pageant]:

Click to add citation to My Citations. [begin page 91] THE FUNERAL OF AMY ROBSART. Click to add citation to My Citations. a.d. 1560. Click to add citation to My Citations. A mournful procession winds its way along the old Oxford Streets; the body of Amy Robsart, wife of Robert, Lord Dudley, is on its way to be interred with the most elaborate heraldic ceremony in St. Mary’s Church. She has been found dead at the foot of a stone staircase in Cumnor Place, three miles from Oxford, on the very day when all the servants of the house had been granted special permission to visit Abingdon Fair. Her husband was in attendance at the Court of Queen Elizabeth at Windsor, and rumour said that he had connived at her death, and aspired to the hand of the Queen, whose principal favourite he had lately become. His wife had spent her life for the most part in country retirement, and was unaccustomed to join those courtly circles in which he was always found. He has caused her funeral to be conducted with great pomp and solemnity, but as the long procession, to the chanting of the choir, winds slowly past, there are not a few among the crowd who shake their heads and whisper to one another the dark tales of jealousy and murder which were current on every [hand.]

Click to add citation to My Citations. THE STATE PROGRESS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. Click to add citation to My Citations. a.d. 1566. Click to add citation to My Citations. Heralded by trumpeters whose fanfare is heard before she comes in sight, the Queen makes her state entry into Oxford, and is met and welcomed by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Chancellor of the University. He is preceded by the ‘Esquires Bedell’ with staves of office, and with him walk the Doctors of the University in their scarlet robes. The Queen advances, carried shoulder high by six of the gentlemen on a litter covered with a cloth of gold; and a gay crowd of brilliant courtiers throngs round their royal mistress. The Chancellor kisses the royal hand, and a speech of welcome is read in Latin by the University Orator. The civic authorities deliver up the city mace, and present the Queen with a rich silver cup, double gilt, and filled with old gold; and as the procession passes on through rows of kneeling scholars, Elizabeth smilingly replies ‘Gratias ago!’ to the loud ‘Vivat Regina!’ shouted by the [crowd.]

Click to add citation to My Citations. VISIT OF JAMES I. Click to add citation to My Citations. a.d. 1605. Click to add citation to My Citations. The expected visit of the first Stuart and his Queen has filled the city with excitement, and in St. Giles’, just outside St. John’s College, active preparations are afoot for the performance of the Three Witches of Macbeth. The stage management is in the hands of one Master William Shakespeare, who has been summoned from London for the special purpose of superintending a play which the next year is to see produced in the capital. Loudly acclaimed by the assembled citizens, the royal party makes its entry on horseback, guarded by a detachment of cavalry, and accompanied by a large and brilliant court. At the King’s elbow is Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, who has ridden over with him from Woodstock with the King; and on their way into the city they halt for a few minutes to watch the progress of the play.

Click to add citation to My Citations. [begin page 92] CHARLES I. AT OXFORD. Click to add citation to My Citations. The Happy Days. (a.d. 1636). Click to add citation to My Citations. To the strains of musicians and minstrels on deck, a state barge is rowed slowly up the river, bearing the King and Queen Henrietta Maria, with the Princes Charles and James. Putting to shore, the Royal Party is received by Archbishop Laud and the Heads of Houses and Officials of the University, who have assembled at the riverside to give them welcome. A halt is made while a pavane is danced upon the bank, to the music of a band of players ensconced under the shadow of the trees; and after the measure is finished the barge moves slowly up the river with its royal burden. Click to add citation to My Citations. The Early Days of the Civil War. (a.d. 1643). Click to add citation to My Citations. The City by this time is the residence of the Court. With a bodyguard of troopers, Charles rides out of Oxford to meet his Queen, who arrives from the North in a coach of state. At the moment of their meeting news is brought of the Royalist victory at Roundway Down. The King dismounts, and enters the coach; the escorts join forces, and the two cavalcades return to the city in a triumphal progress with flags flying and drums beating. The gay dresses of the heralds and trumpeters of the various regiments make a brave show in the procession, and the pikemen and musketeers bring up the rear. Click to add citation to My Citations. The Surrender of Oxford. (a.d. 1646). Click to add citation to My Citations. Armed and in good order, with colours displayed, matches burning, and rattle of drums, the royal troops under Sir Thomas Glemham depart from Oxford between companies of Parliamentarian soldiers, who chant a puritan psalm and line their path on either side. They go out with all the honours of war, amid the scarcely concealed sorrow of the loyal academicians, who ever hated the Roundheads and gave all their sympathies to the Cavalier [party.]

Click to add citation to My Citations. THE EXPULSION OF THE FELLOWS OF MAGDALEN BY KING JAMES II. Click to add citation to My Citations. (a.d. 1687). Click to add citation to My Citations. The King arrives with a small cavalry escort, and is received with honours by the City and University. Maidens clad in white strew flowers before him and his retinue, and on his way he is entertained with music, and the Waits of the City play before him. The Constables of the various parishes advance with their staves of office, followed by the guilds of the Glovers, Cordwainers, Tailors, and Mercers, on foot and on horseback, with the ensigns which bear the arms of their Company. A picturesque ceremony is seen when the monarch on his progress touches for the King’s Evil poor folk who are brought to his presence. The Fellows of Magdalen are summoned before him, and are bidden to rescind their election of the Protestant, Dr. Hough, in favour of Mr. Farmer, the candidate favoured by James; and when they refuse to obey this unconstitutional demand, the King takes the law into his own hands and orders their immediate expulsion.

Click to add citation to My Citations. SCENE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Click to add citation to My Citations. Circa a.d. 1785. Click to add citation to My Citations. The last Scene gives a glimpse of Saint Giles’ Fair in the Eighteenth Century. In the midst of a joyous scene of revelry the Royal Barge of George III. comes up the [begin page 93] river; the King himself is on board, paying a brief visit to the city, and the strains of Handel’s Water Music are heard as the barge advances. The King’s arrival is greeted with great popular enthusiasm. The coaches of the country gentry and the sedan chairs of the townsfolk make a brave show among the crowd, and those gallants and belles who come out afoot to see the entry are conspicuous in the quaint dress of the period—the men bewigged and buckled, the ladies in towering head-dresses, and both in powder and in patches.

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No one to whom was granted the privilege of seeing these great pictures can ever forget them; it was the Arabian Nights come again. The interest was so deep and intense and moving that the flight of time was not noticeable. There was seldom a time, during the four hours, when I had the feeling—a feeling seldom absent at the opera—that this was only a show, not reality; we seemed to be seeing the facts of history, not a mimicry of them. There was one little incident which proved to me that my sense of the reality, the flesh and blood concreteness of these passing shows, was shared by the whole multitude in the [grand stand]: when Royalty surrendered and the victorious Puritan troops came marching solemnly by, this multitude hissed them!

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In a curving sweep of distant meadows beyond the curtaining trees that bordered the river, there were always glimpses of life and movement and color: there were knights in armor prancing along; there were bodies of brown-clad monks and white-clad nuns following on foot; there were crowds of peasants out of all the centuries drifting hither and thither; there were squadrons of infantry plodding along; there were regiments of cavalry flitting past them on the gallop. Always we were having these tinted and sparkling glimpses through the crevices and windows in the foliage, and always the movement was toward the left; always it was the marshaling of the clans to a point in the grove far up on our left, whence they would come streaming, at exactly the appointed moment, down upon our plain. One might well inquire how these movements could be so exactly timed, and kept in such perfect order, over distances so great. Kipling was moved to go out and inquire into this. When he came back he brought the solution of the mystery; he had been on the roof of the [grand stand]; from there the master of the show was dictating, by telephone, every slightest movement of his thousands, over a stretch of two miles. From his place up there he was conducting every motion, every movement of his host, with the order and system and precision of a general superintending and conducting a battle from a commanding point on the verge of the field. There was also a prompter up there. In front of us the crowds of actors were always uttering cries and delivering speeches appertaining to their parts, and it was matter of surprise that they never hesitated for a word, although there was no prompter out there to help them. It was a happy idea to put him on the roof. He used a megaphone there and easily made himself heard all about the [field in front of us,] yet no one in the [grand stand] could hear him.

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I shall not try to describe the wonderful picture at the close, when the whole strength of the histrionic troop came streaming, with banners and music, from three different points of the compass, and fused themselves together, three thousand five hundred [begin page 94] strong, in one splendid mass of motion and color. All that saw it can remember it, and vividly, but none that saw it can put that fine picture on paper.

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Two incidents of the 28th of June: the visit to the University Press

and the luncheon with Robert Porter and family, and

interview with the butler who offered his services in order

to have speech with Mr. Clemens.

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The next day, (28th June) was a busy one. However that is a term which softly and moderately describes every one of the twenty-seven days which I spent in England. I was most pleasantly and satisfactorily and violently busy straight through each day, from breakfast until whisky punch; whisky punch occurs at [11 p.m.,] after I have been reading and smoking an hour in bed and am ready for sleep. One of the incidents of the 28th was a visit to the ancient, the vast, the illustrious [University Press. Under the guidance of its superintendent, Dr. Hart], I went all over it. For seven years I had been feeling unkindly toward it, but when I found that it was flying the American flag from its staff, in compliment to me, my vanity was touched, and the same result followed that had followed my meeting with Henry [VIII]—a good deal of my prejudice was sponged out.

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The buildings are very old, and they enclose a feature which is not possessed by any other printing-office on the planet, I suppose; and a darling feature it is—a roomy great court carpeted with the greenest grass, upon which [falls] the [flooding sunshine, broken by] the black shadows of venerable trees. From all the four [sides,] scores of windows look out upon this beautiful [imprisoned] patch of sylvan England, and through them pour the whir and clash of up-to-date [steam presses]. It was a curious conjunction, but it had its charm.

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The University Press is not a thing of yesterday, it is an antiquity; it dates back to a time when there wasn’t any such thing as a printing-press as yet. In the long [ago,] learned monks made books there—made them on vellum with the pen and illuminated them with the brush. At every case in the long composing-rooms stood a young compositor who was [an erudite] scholar; these young men were setting type in all the impossible languages known to erudition; they were setting up Egyptian [hieroglyphics, (known by sight to you and me,)] and [other] hieroglyphics which I had not seen before. With the deepest interest I examined many galleys of matter, but found none that I could read. There is an abundance of presses, and they are turning out hundreds of books, but they were all in tongues unintelligible to me. Apparently the bulk of these books were Bibles—Bibles in all sorts of languages, including the modern ones. Necessarily the expenses of such an establishment are prodigious, but when Dr. Hart casually observed that all these expenses were paid out of the profits on the Bibles, my prejudice experienced a sudden and acrid resurrection for a moment, for [I knew, through Mr. John Murray, what not many people are aware of—to wit: that whereas the stingy and [begin page 95] dishonest copyright laws of America and England steal the native author’s book in its forty-second year, and make the publisher a present of it, a pious English Parliament has granted [perpetual] copyright to the Bible]. Certainly this is one of the meanest discriminations that can be found in the statutes of any country, prodigally defiled as all statute books are with legalized crimes against the human race.

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One of the other incidents of the 28th gave me peculiar pleasure, and reminded me of the prized welcome extended to me by the stevedores at Tilbury. In Oxford I was the guest of [Robert Porter] and his family; he had a luncheon party that day, and the butler of an Oxford don volunteered his services and superintended the function in order that he might have speech of me. After the guests had retired to the drawing-room I returned and talked with him and found, to my large contentment, that he knew ten or fifteen times as much about my books as I knew about them myself. He was an evidence that to me has been granted that rare and precious prize which [Louis Stevenson and I dubbed the Suppressed Fame]; and so I highly valued his frank and earnest homage. He did not spoil his compliments by adding what other and less gracious people are always adding—“But you are always hearing these things and are tired of them.” It may be that there are persons in the world who get tired of compliments—a thing which I doubt—but I am not one of them; if I should run out of all other nourishment I believe I could live on compliments.

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[The] Rhodes Scholars’ Club, and similar [benefactions.]

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There was still another incident of the 28th of which I wish to make a note: in the evening, after dinner, I went down by invitation [to talk to the Rhodes scholars at their club]—the American Rhodes scholars, I mean. As I understand it, the American Club is made up of American students, and not exclusively of Rhodes American students. There are about ninety American Rhodes scholars on the foundation all the time, for each of our States is privileged to send two.

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Rhodes students come from many countries to enrich their minds and broaden and elevate and compact their characters by help of the mighty hand of that dead man, and this will go on, and on, and on, century after [century,] until this brisk and alert day of ours shall have drifted back, and back, and back, and melted into the times called ancient; and through all that stretch of time that dead hand will never have been idle, and never other than most nobly and beneficently active; it will have scattered, every year, those precious seeds out of which grow moral and intellectual depth and breadth of character; and year after year and century after century the world will have gathered and wholesomely nourished itself with the resulting harvests. It is a vast work, and a sublime work, that that dead hand is directing from the grave.

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From the earliest days—from away back to the Crusades, with their generous hospitals for the diseased and helpless poor—the purse of the rich private citizen has wrought deeds of high and lasting benevolence for mankind—benevolences which [begin page 96] have earned the title “great,” and have deserved it—but perhaps it is only in our day, and within the past twenty-five years, that the benefactions of the private purse have been of a character to make the word “great” insufficient and supplant it with the more majestic and yet accurately descriptive word, “colossal.” Our generation is indeed the generation of colossal private benefactions, and I am persuaded to believe it is the only one in history that is entitled to label itself with that great name. In our time Mr. Carnegie, Mr. Rockefeller, and a dozen other Americans, have given away millions upon millions of dollars for the uplifting of the less fortunate among the people; Mr. Carnegie’s contributions in this interest have exceeded a hundred millions; Mr. Rockefeller’s sixty millions; Mr. Stanford’s twenty or thirty millions; Mr. Pierpont Morgan’s many and many millions—how many I do not know; and the contributions of others, toward colleges and hospitals, have amounted to piles and pyramids of millions; but I believe that none of this money has been more wisely spent than the money which is being devoted to the Rhodes Scholarships. The Rhodes money promises to gather from the ends of the earth the brightest and best of the young intellect and character of every nation, and train it, educate it, elevate it, and send it back to diffuse itself like a stimulating and health-giving atmosphere all over the globe. There is indeed something sublime about it. Perhaps of all the millions contributed by Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Carnegie, the [ten millions with which Mr. Rockefeller has endowed that Institution] in New York, and the one [endowed [with ten millions] by Mr. Carnegie in Washington—both of these being devoted to medical research]—promise the best and most beneficent results, on our side of the water, for the world. [Within the past two or three months Mr. Rockefeller’s Institution has removed one incurable malady from the list of the world’s incurable diseases—cerebro-spinal meningitis]—and thus at a single stroke has earned its costly endowment ten times over; for centuries to come it will go on in its gracious work of ameliorating the bitter conditions of the human race. Mr. Carnegie has contributed free public libraries, all over the globe, at cost of a hundred millions of dollars, and——but I will not go into that at present; I am getting too far away from the American Club of Oxford and the American Rhodes scholars.

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I have uttered nothing but praises in speaking of the Rhodes benefaction, but they have been wrung from me; they have not come easily and fluently, for [I always detested Mr. Rhodes]; I never saw him, either in South Africa or in London; I avoided his vicinity; I never met him, and never wanted to meet him; my praises of what he has done must at least be granted the merit of [sincerity. In several ways he was a very great sinner,] but I think there is not a saint in the endless [Roman] calendar whom he could afford to trade halos with.

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The conditions under which the benefits of the Rhodes endowment were to be extended to the Rhodes scholars were drafted by Mr. Rhodes himself; and [while I was in Oxford a thing happened which showed what a wise and far-seeing document it was].

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