We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in
the mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable
monuments which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel
and its adjacent railway station. All underground York is
doubtless fuller of Home than even Bath is; and it has happened
that her civilization was much more largely dug up here than
elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading edifices were
laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but
Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically
ended in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth
Legion and many of the British slaves were religiously Christians
in the ancient metropolis before Constantine was elected emperor
there.
I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home
and is not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land.
Florence is very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long
thoughts, and Milan is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa,
or Marseilles, or Paris, or those romantic German towns where the
legends, if not the facts, abound; but, after all, for my
pleasure in the past, I could not choose any place before York.
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