Читать книгу Adventures in Journalism онлайн

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The task fell to me of describing the coronation of the new King in Westminster Abbey, and of all the great scenes of which I have been an eyewitness, this remains in my memory as the most splendid and impressive. As a lover of history, that old Abbey, which has stood as the symbol of English faith and rule since Norman days, is to me always a haunted place, filled with a myriad ghosts of the old vital past. And the coronation of an English king, in its ancient ritual, blots out modernity, and takes one back to the root sentiment of the race which is our blood and heritage. One may, in philosophical moments, think kingship an outworn institution, and jeer at all its pomp and pageantry. One’s democratic soul may thrust all its ritual into the lumber room of antique furniture, but something of the old romance of its meaning, something of its warmth and color in the tapestry of English history, something of that code of chivalry and knighthood by which the King was dedicated to the service of his peoples, stirs in the most prosaic mind alive when a king is crowned again in the Abbey Church of Westminster.