There is a condition called aphantasia where missed connections in the brain do not allow humans to visualise images in the mind's eye. Etymologically phantasia means imagination, channelled to Modern English from the Greek word phainomai: to appear. The prefix ‘a’ – not or without – added here feels especially cruel to me. My father suffered from this disorder. Once, just after the 9/ 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, he had a dream where I was captured in a white van and disappeared. He didn't dream. I was a loudmouth, an activist. His dream held truth. We both knew it, but what set him off was the veracity of the image in his mind because it was new to him. ‘Picture a dragon,’ my father said. And I easily conjured Smaug from the animated Hobbit and told him as much. ‘I can't do that,’ he said. ‘Even if I try, I can’t.’ I didn't think to ask him then if it had always been this way, and I cannot ask now because he died soon after, but I’ve been terrified of losing my mental theatre ever since. I spent most of my childhood deeply invested in my fantasy life, one so necessary to my everyday existence that I’d set aside time as a boy to follow my designs either in my bedroom, or I’d choose to face the back of the couch when my mother wanted me near, the grey dark, a perfect atmosphere to drift through phantasia. I grew up in a poor, urban centre where water veins and abandoned houses were my hundred-acre wood, and so movies often served as catalysts. The movie Stand by Me, perhaps more than any other correlative in my early life, created the beginnings of fantasy travel. There were so many elements that appealed to my sense of self, but chief among them was the rag-tag friendships and the attempt to suspend a fracturing of the gang through adventure. It is dark to say, but I wanted adventure to begin with a lie told to my parents that ended with finding a dead body. I saw through those boys’ experience – Chambers, LaChance, Tessio, Duchamp – how important fear, near-death, the breakdown of self-esteem and the admittance of thresholds and boundaries were to the adventure itself. Perspective.

In the 1990s, I flew to East Indonesia, to the Tanimbar archipelago in south-east Maluku, to try to make myself an anthropologist. For the previous two years, I had read everything I could get hold of about Tanimbar: travel accounts, academic papers, reports written by missionaries, obscure anthropological monographs. There wasn't much to read; this was part of the appeal: Tanimbar seemed always on the periphery, a corner of the world perpetually on the fringes of great events.

What I did read allowed me to piece together a picture of life in the place that later became my home. From anthropologist Susan McKinnon, who carried out fieldwork in Tanimbar in the late 1980s, I learned of the Tanimbarese adventurer So’u Melatunan, who travelled through the world of the colonial Dutch powers, bringing back valuables, riches and stories. From McKinnon, also, I learned how warfare was a ‘persistent fact of life’ in the Tanimbar islands, as if there were something about Tanimbar that was, and had always been, war-like. It was a picture corroborated by the travel narratives of the nineteenth-century travellers Henry and Anna Forbes and by their tales of intervillage warfare, headhunting and violence. So when, in her elegant account of her stay in Tanimbar, Anna Forbes concluded the Tanimbarese were ‘a rude people subjected to no restraint’, I took the war-like nature of the Tanimbarese for granted. Even after I returned home, after I started to weave stories of my own about Tanimbar, I worked on the assumption that this is just how things were, and it was how they always had been. But more recently, I have started to wonder. What if this tale of the war-like Tanimbarese is more complex than it first seems? What if, like everything else, violence has a history? What if I, and everybody else, had got Tanimbar wrong?

What follows is a story of getting things wrong. It is a story about Henry and Anna Forbes. It is a story about So’u Melatunan, whose own tale was darker than I ever imagined. And it is a story about how I – a rude person, subjected to little restraint – played my own small part in this history of violence.

In the autumn of 1933, author, playwright and social commentator John Boynton Priestley began a journey through England. His travels took him to the ‘ancient metropolis’ of Bristol and the ‘smouldering carpet’ of the Black Country, from the ‘Lilliputian’ bleakness of Stoke-on-Trent to the ‘Dickensian atmosphere’ of Norwich. Priestley's account was jointly published by Heinemann and Gollancz a year later in 1934. Titled English Journey, the book's subtitle promised the reader ‘a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the Autumn of the year 1933’. Although he deployed a populist image to great effect, Priestley was not just ‘one man’. While he was scorned by the modernist Bloomsbury set as the ultimate ‘middlebrow’, responsible for the cultural fragmentation and decline associated with commercialisation and democratisation, by 1933 Priestley was one of the nation's most popular journalists and novelists. His novel The Good Companions, published in 1929, made him famous overnight and had already been reprinted 16 times just a year later. English Journey was a follow-up to this success and was Priestley's first ostensibly nonfiction book. It immediately rose to the top of the Bookseller's bestseller list and, by 1956, had sold 96,000 copies in hardback, making it his most successful book in that format between Angel Pavement in 1930 and Bright Day in 1946. This success was predicated on the very populist traits that the likes of Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and even George Orwell railed against. Priestley's cultural authority ensured English Journey's often radical national portrait was immensely influential.

Priestley's more-than-400-page portrait, therefore, deserves pride of place in the large historical gallery showcasing accounts by public intellectuals and social commentators who have used the process of travel to convey to readers something fundamental about the nation in which they lived. Alongside English Journey could stand Daniel Defoe's A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, published in three volumes between 1724 and 1727; H. V. Morton's In Search of England from 1927; or John Higgs's more recent Watling Street: Travels through Britain and Its Ever Present Past. Yet, in its style and ideological purpose, English Journey is a book born from the radical 1930s.

I first visited Varese Ligure in January 1995. It was very cold. There was thick ice along the roadsides. The hotel I stayed at, the ancient Albergo Amici founded in 1760 and run by the Marcone family ever since, was freezing, as the heating had broken down just before we arrived. We were the only guests and we huddled with the family around the single wood-burning stove in the reception area. It was hard to be impressed, and I really did not want to go back if I am honest, certainly not at that time of year. I travelled there with Charles Watkins from the School of Geography, University of Nottingham. We soon developed a new course for final-year undergraduates, called ‘The Landscape History of Liguria’, centred on an annual week-long field trip to Varese. The first field trip was 24–31 March 1995. As it turned out, I have been returning almost every year since with between 10 and 30 final-year university students in tow, usually in March/ April, but last year for the first time in September. I have also been there in August for summer holidays. I will not be going in 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic caused the cancellation of the module, as well as all overseas field work at my university (University of Nottingham, UK). For this year at least, I have become a Victorian cliché, the ‘fireside traveller’ who features elsewhere in my teaching portfolio. Instead I shall have to visit from a suitable social distance (roughly 1670 km) looking again at Varese through the eyes of Frederic Lees, a rather eccentric traveller, who made a single visit to Varese in 1911 during a three-month walking tour of Liguria. He was 39 years old.

Varese Ligure is a small town, the capital of the Upper Vara Valley in the far east of the Liguria region. The northern part of the town's jurisdiction (Ital.: comune) borders the region of Emilia Romagna at the Pass of Cento Croci (1055 m a.s.l.). The earliest historical evidence for the town is a brief mention of the plebs de Varia (‘Vara parish’) in a register of the archbishops of Genoa dated 1031 AD.

In the first days of January 2020 I decided to make a literary pilgrimage within the English Midlands. Given that this region has produced some of the most revered writers in English literature, I was somewhat spoilt for choice in terms of destination. Stratfordupon-Avon, the picture-perfect birthplace of William Shakespeare, stands out as the obvious choice for the bookish tourist. The city of Birmingham, erstwhile stomping ground and inspiration of a young J. R. R. Tolkien, compounds cosmopolitan cuisine with a profound literary heritage to make for another attractive destination. Perhaps even the rugged, industrial landscape of the Erewash Valley, backdrop to so many of D. H. Lawrence's rebellious and panoptic castigations of modernity, might serve to attract the literary pilgrim. Yet I chose a different, and altogether overlooked, destination. I went to the loose confederation of towns that comprise the Potteries, or Stoke-on-Trent as they are described on a map today. I went on the trail of an author who once ruled the literary world, but has long since departed from the popular imagination. I went in search of Arnold Bennett.

You may be forgiven if that name means little to you. It means little to most. Yet, during the early twentieth century, Arnold Bennett was perhaps the most frequently read, prodigious and recognisable authors in the English-speaking world. At the age of 21, Bennett left behind his humble origins and moved from the provincial Midlands to the bright lights of London in order to pursue a career as a writer. In 1898 he published his first novel, A Man from the North, which took inspiration from his experiences of moving southwards. By the end of the First World War, he had continued publishing novels at the rate of one per year, penned eight plays, worked as a wartime propagandist for His Majesty King George V, served as the editor of a popular women's magazine, and all the while maintained a lively career as a journalist publishing across numerous newspapers and periodicals. Bennett's literary success thrust him into a world of international acclaim. Writing in 1925, fellow Midlander J. B. Priestley described Bennett as ‘one of the most successful men of letters of his time’.

As we write, the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak continues to pose an unprecedented challenge to the travel writing community, but in our isolation from places, spaces and landscapes, we can still turn to historical travel accounts to remind us of the locations we have previously visited. Although, currently, ‘a way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop’ and ‘our lives are going to be more physically constrained’, as John Gray notes, ‘an advantage of quarantine is that it can be used to think afresh’. Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is a collection of chapters by authors from a variety of backgrounds. We have gathered an ensemble cast of distinguished and widely published travel writers, novelists and academics. Each contributor travels vicariously, writing about a place they have visited, with reference to an historical account of the same place.

Travel Writing in an Age of Global Quarantine is something of a double entendre. We have asked contributors to ‘travel’ while subjected to epidemiologically mandated isolation. Yet, these travels are anything but isolated, as they are conducted in the company of an historical companion. Whether it be living with Freya Stark and the Bedouin in the Sinai Peninsula, riding with Dorothy Wordsworth in her nineteenth-century ‘travelling car’ through the Scottish Highlands or hiking Liguria with Frederic Lees in 1913, our personal memory and understanding of space and place is influenced by our historical predecessors. Our current enforced stasis offers us a unique opportunity to explore this process. Hopefully, the recent vaccines will free us once again, and for the future reader, this book will serve to explain what it felt like not to be able to move, to travel. This is how we explored and imagined the places we had been before.

Prior to early 2020, Wuhan was not a place that loomed large in the European imaginary. It is now, perhaps, the most famous place in the world. Strangely, this is the third time that Wuhan has risen from obscurity to worldwide prominence, as Jonathan Chatwin discusses in the opening chapter of this volume.

Two rivers meet at Wuhan. The city sprawls around the junction where the tributary Han joins the Yangtze, before that great river's breadth bends itself around the top half of a circle to push eastward to Shanghai and the coast. On the north-western bank of the Yangtze sit two of the three old cities which make up the modern city of Wuhan – split themselves by the winding waters of the Han, and taking their names, in part, from it: Hanyang and Hankou. On the opposite bank of the Yangtze is Wuchang: the third, and most politically important, of Wuhan's tri-cities, which donates its first syllable to the city's portmanteau name.

Wuhan's position at the confluence of these two rivers meant that even the British colonial forces, when they arrived in 1858, could not fail to recognise its potential importance as a trading port, despite some initial misgivings. In December of that year, the British paddle steamer HMS Furious anchored off Hankou, as part of the first foreign fleet ever to have ascended the 636 miles of the Yangtze from the coast; those aboard were here to cast an appraising eye over a port to which they had just secured trading rights at the end of what would turn out to be the first phase of the Second Opium War.

On this first occasion when the Western gaze was directed towards Wuhan, those examining the cities were distinctly unimpressed: the site, wrote Laurence Oliphant, private secretary to Lord Elgin, was ‘eminently disappointing. We had heard so much of the congeries of cities that are situated at the junction of the Han and the Yang-tse […] that we had formed grander expectations, and anticipated a nobler reward after all our anxieties and exertions.’

We are about to walk through Rome. Not in a single day, or even in a single century, but through a flickering palimpsest of overlaid time, of records and recollection. We will walk down composite constructions of wisteria-draped ruins and secret courtyards and bonelined crypts, and we will do this without having to go anywhere.

This is just as well, because as I write in the late summer of 2020, it is in fact very difficult (if possible at all) to go anywhere at all. To have been to a place is a precious thing – those memories warm us like the remembered heat of summer in a frozen winter. I first arrived in Rome by night. Anywhere known as the Eternal City has quite a lot to live up to, but even in darkness, it was captivating. As the taxi rolled past the uplit, mighty Aurelian walls, I had the sense that I was arriving. Both into a place where the warm night felt thick with history, and into a role. To enter Rome feels like becoming part of a story, a complicated and ever-unfolding living performance that weaves itself continually along the weft of time.

In lieu of the physical place, we will walk through the Rome of my memories, and those of Augustus Hare, the ‘last Victorian’. He is an excellent companion, perhaps the best person one could pick for this walk. He has impeccable travel-guide-writer credentials and perhaps, more importantly, he is good company and knows all the gossip. A friend of his recalled that he always said, ‘The moment you have become discreet, you ease to be interesting.’ He is in fact so committed to being the man in the know that, on leading a tour group to a favourite cafe only to find it had closed down, he actually swooned.

Before we strike out, I will tell you a little more about Augustus and how he would advise us to prepare for our time in Rome. Let's start with the man. Augustus was born in Rome in 1834. A surplus child born to an eccentric family, he was sent to live with his widowed godmother, Maria Hare, in England, apparently on a whim.

In 2020, with the opportunities for any form of travel to local areas and micro-adventures reduced by the onslaught of Covid-19, it feels as if vicarious travel has taken on a greater urgency. With many people isolated for months of the year and unable to connect and socialise, experiencing travel as a solo activity has perhaps felt abnormal for many readers. However, there are those of us who have always valued that peculiarly effervescent glow that comes from exploring the world on our own. As Freya Stark wrote of her first morning in Baghdad, Iraq, in October 1929: ‘To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.’ To feel immersed in the unfamiliar with a yearning to know and learn is what took me in 2011 to Nuweiba’, South Sinai, Egypt, to discover more about the Tarrabin Bedouin tribe and a traditional dance called Dahiyya. After many years of ‘downward exploration’ in small communities across the world – and occasionally cities – I had recognised not only the thrill of travelling alone but also how it enabled me to connect and communicate with local people in a slow, quiet way. Travelling alone, especially as a woman, is not a brave decision as many continue to insist but, in my opinion, can be a necessary one. Admittedly, there is a deep personal satisfaction to completing solo journeys, but that is far outweighed by the mesh of encounters created by entering an unknown environment armed with only our individual tool kit of language, empathy and experience, and with no recourse other than to choose to be vulnerable and put our faith in those around us.

Freya Stark was an individual who, with little money and few connections, forged an impressive career as an ethnographer, traveller and writer, driven by a deep-rooted belief that travel creates understanding across cultures. She believed that this subtle understanding is essential for compassion towards and consideration of others and should comfort and guide all travellers. Many of her later employments revolved around improving relations between cultures or groups. In 1979, the year that I was born, Stark, at age 86, was climbing mountains in Nepal with a BBC film crew.

The door bangs continually. A portal conducting the well-equipped and the shoddy alike between the warm haven of the bar and the Biblical deluge beyond. Orderly Dutch and German hikers stand tall and proficient in expensive, pristine kit. Reluctant British teenagers hump unkempt backpacks, complaining at their parents to the accompaniment of clattering, colliding walking poles. They bump against frowning disapproval from chisel-faced and heavily biceped fanatics, practically born outdoors, impervious, for whom a little rain is the least of climatic dramas.

Jack and I hear the clatter more than see it. We are both distracted: he, an errant spaniel focused on mind control techniques, willing the bar staff to throw him yet another sausage; me, one hand wrapped around a coffee mug, the other marking my place in Dorothy Wordsworth's account of her own journey to this place.

Dorothy and her brother, the better-known Romantic poet William Wordsworth, together with fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, travelled nearly 700 miles through Scotland, in 1803, on a six-week tour. According to John Campbell Shairp, editor of the first published account of the journey, ‘poor Coleridge’ was ‘ill at ease, and in the dumps all the way, stretched asleep on the car [carriage] cushions’. Dorothy records how Coleridge, having been unwell for many of the 15 days he endured, and being unwilling to continue travelling in an open car through regular downpours, eventually left their party at Loch Lomond to make his own way to Edinburgh and thence home. Dorothy and William continued on together for the full six-week tour. Dorothy recorded her observations for her friends rather than public consumption. It was common practice to circulate such private journals among interested friends and acquaintances. That said, it is likely that she did indeed intend for her ‘private’ journal to be published at some point. C. K. Walker, the editor of the 1997 edition of Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland – A.D. 1803, describes Dorothy's writing up, which she did back home over a period of 20 months, as ‘crafting’ her account. The very fact that her writing was interrupted and that, despite finding the task arduous, she worked assiduously on it until complete suggests it was more than a simple journal for friends and family. Recollections was eventually published in 1874, nearly 20 years after Dorothy's death in 1855.

Bloemfontein is a complex place. An American might call it ‘flyover country’ – a space which you pass ‘over’ or ‘through’ on your way from Johannesburg to Cape Town. For those visiting the country on holiday, their time is more likely to be spent looking for the ‘big five’ at Kruger National Park, marvelling at Table Mountain in Cape Town, making the solemn pilgrimage to Robben Island or sipping pinotage in the winelands around Stellenbosch. In short, Bloemfontein is rarely thought of as a destination. As one former resident has put it, ‘The isolation of this rural province from the big cities, the desolation of the endless spread of dry, brown, open veld, the general lack of cosmopolitan entertainment and the rigid conservatism of the place will test your spirit.’ Yet in January 2013 – one-way ticket in hand – I found myself moving there. With my suitcase and a sense of trepidation for company, I was on my way to take up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of the Free State (UFS) in the newly formed International Studies Group.

Although I’d spent time in Cape Town, Bloemfontein – I was told – was quite a different proposition. If the mood in (White) Cape Town is generally one of confident exceptionalism (try finding anyone who admits to voting for the NP – the political party that instituted and maintained apartheid), then I’d got the sense that the idea of the ‘rainbow nation’ – a metaphor coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to promote racial reconciliation in the post-apartheid period – didn't have the same resonance in a city that was feted as the home of Afrikanerdom. After I had accepted the job and was trying to make sense of the unending loop of Kafkaesque bureaucracy that getting a visa entailed, I set about some half-hearted research, attempting to get a sense of the university and city – some 6,000 miles away – that I was moving to. My sofa sleuthing yielded a series of peculiar if not particularly exciting titbits: J. R. R Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, was born in Bloemfontein in 1892; it was where the English football team had been knocked out of the 2010 World Cup; shops were prohibited from selling alcohol on Sunday; and there was a zoo/ big cat park, the ominously titled ‘Cheetah Experience’.

Look – up ahead where the road bends: two figures, moving forwards, about to vanish from view.

At this distance, their forms are indistinct, but look harder and certain details will come clear: two young men, both carrying knapsacks. One of them is short – five feet, six inches to be precise (you can say this with some certainty). He is wearing a stovepipe hat (this is an informed supposition), dark jacket and trousers, loose about the thighs. If you could somehow leap ahead, meet him head on, you’d see a fleshy face, softly boyish despite a pronounced widow's peak; a broad and bulbous brow; and eyes set deep behind little wire-rimmed spectacles (there's excellent evidence here). The other figure is harder to discern. Taller, you might say; certainly a few years older; and probably dressed in similar garb. But just one small detail is absolutely clear: the square ruler, strapped to his knapsack.

Two figures, up ahead, about to vanish from view. Follow them!

The line of the road is perfectly familiar, though it lacks today's tarmac: the bend where the brook begins its sharp descent to the cove at Portheras, then the slight rise to the upper part of Bojewyan. But the jumbled grey cottages to the right have a strange, shape-shifting quality. There are buildings here, alright, as there should be. But when you try to fix them in their familiar positions, the rough-cut quoins tumble out, reconfigure elsewhere. But as the two figures move past the houses, stride towards the next bend at Keigwin, solidly familiar ground opens in the distance: the intersection of sea with coast; the rough rising hulk of Watch Croft, then the shallow saddle sweeping up to the twin granite crags of the Carn, all darkly tawny under a lowering sky.

The two figures are already around the Keigwin bend. Hurry! Follow them down the slope to the bridge on the parish boundary, past the turn to Chypraze. Watch them into the little hamlet clustered by the church, watch their response to this place.

I am a historian of Venice. Since the mid-1980s, I have spent a lot of time in the Venetian state archives. In recent years I have barely crossed their threshold. I have stopped researching the city's past. I have, instead, spent a decade and a half researching what other historians said about Venice's past. Rarely does a day pass when I do not spend some time pondering what scholars wrote about the Republic of Saint Mark. Most of what they wrote is repetitive and dull. Historians spend a lot of time taking in each other's washing. They often launder it badly; sometimes they deliberately stain or tear it; sometimes they are just careless when it comes to folding. In the trade this is called historiography.

The Venetian Republic came to an end suddenly in 1797. Contrary to what many long-dead historians wrote, and a lot of living ones – unthinkingly and incorrectly – echo, the Most Serene Republic did not expire because of a century or so of decadence and decline. A myth persists that Venice's ruling elites had become effete and effeminate by the eighteenth century; that the men who ran Venice were either inflexible relics of a faded glory, or fops, addicted to coffee and gossip, the whorehouse and the gaming table. But repetition does not equate to fact. When Venice fell, it was a vigorous imperial power: to the west its territories stretched almost to Milan, encompassing the rich and populous mainland territories of the Po Valley; to the east, they reached deep into the Julian Alps, and down the Dalmatian Coast. In the 1790s, the winged lion still lurked, carved protectively into the walls of Adriatic ports; the Venetian gonfalone, the symbol of St Mark fluttered over the smattering of Greek islands that the Ottomans had never managed to seize.

Introduction

In this chapter, I explore Swedish-language LGB young adult (YA) novels, arguing that while liberal in their approaches to a certain extent, they also tend to implicitly raise the issue of nature versus nurture while focusing on the ‘causes’ of queerness; in other words, they suggest, through their plotlines and character depictions, that it is usually nurture that ‘turns’ someone queer. In addition, many texts rely on stereotyped ideas of queerness, some of which are related to the concept of who or what is to ‘blame’ for a character being LGBTQ+. It is important to acknowledge some limitations of this research at the outset. In this chapter, I do not discuss trans or, more generally, queer literature; for one thing, I do not have enough space here to do so, and for another, Asa Warnqvist's chapter in this book explores Swedish-language trans literature in particular. Also, I focus on young adult literature, rather than also analysing picturebooks and junior fiction (see Epstein 2013a for more on picturebooks and middle-grade literature). In large part, I focused the chapter in this way because YA books usually have young adults as their protagonists while picturebooks and junior fiction tend to have LGBTQ+ adults as the main queer characters, usually parents of the protagonists, and so the works were not exactly comparable, and also this kept the corpus size manageable for a short chapter. Finally, I only look at Swedish-language originals, rather than also analysing translations to Swedish; I do this in order to keep the focus firmly on the Swedish context. I discuss the corpus more below.

I also want to note that I take a queer theoretical approach to the concept of queerness. Some people claim that queerness is caused by nature (that is, it stems from genes and biology), while others say it is nurture (in other words, the environment, including family and culture, that someone was raised in); oddly, however, we do not often have this discussion regarding what causes someone to be heterosexual or cisgender, when it would arguably follow that all sexualities and gender identities would be shaped or constructed in the same way (see Sullivan 2011, 4–6).

Westminster Abbey, if not the oldest, then one of the most ancient buildings in London, deserves the attention of a traveler, first of all, as an architectural monument of the Middle Ages, and secondly, as a pantheon of British glory, preserving in itself the mortal remains of the people who glorified their country (see Figure 1.10, Westminster Abbey).

The Abbey, as well as the Cathedral of St. Paul, lies near the bank of the Thames and the bridge bearing the same name. Not far from the abbey, closer to the riverbank, sits the Parliament building. The exterior of the abbey is grey—at certain places, dark grey, even black. For the entrance to the abbey and sightseeing, visitors have to pay a fixed fee, with the exception of the time during which the worship service is held. This building is designed in the form of an elongated cross. The middle part (le choeur) is separated from the chapels by a tall, wooden partition: this is the place where the services are conducted and the kings of England are crowned. Such partition of the building specifically for the worship service is necessary in Protestant cathedrals, where the sermon constitutes a significant part of the liturgy: In the Berlin cathedral (Domkirche), also built in the shape of a cross, the middle forms one elongated hall: if the side additions were partitioned, the voice of the preacher would be lost under the arches of the vaults. I visited Westminster Abbey once during the service, which was administered with the proper splendor and sincere piety. The preacher talked simply, or, to say it better, read from a notebook. Such is a custom in England: the preachers here are not allowed to declaim or be carried away by eloquence at the pulpit or to expound upon religious teachings with rhetorical embellishments. As a result, there are few outstanding religious orators in England, despite the great number of thinkers and writers on Christian Religion. The singing in the gallery, accompanied by the quiet sounds of an organ, is beautiful and touching. The English people are devout in their souls.