had left the orb and purple to the kindred house so fatal to his name)
through a stormy and perilous transition to a bloodless revolution and a
new charter.

Tier upon tier, in the division set apart for them, the members of the
Lower House moved and murmured above the pageant; and the coronation of
the new sovereign was connected in their minds with the great measure
which, still undecided, made at that time a link between the People and
the King, and arrayed against both, if not, indeed, the real Aristocracy,
at least the Chamber recognized by the Constitution as its
representative. Without the space was one dense mass. Houses, from
balcony to balcony, window to window, were filled as some immense
theatre. Up, through the long thoroughfare to Whitehall, the eye saw
that audience,--A PEOPLE; and the gaze was bounded at the spot where
Charles the First had passed from the banquet-house to the scaffold.

The ceremony was over, the procession had swept slowly by, the last huzza
had died away; and after staring a while upon Orator Hunt, who had
clambered up the iron palisade near Westminster Hall, to exhibit his
goodly person in his court attire, the serried crowds, hurrying from the
shower which then unseasonably descended, broke into large masses or
lengthening columns.

In that part of London which may be said to form a boundary between its
old and its new world, by which, on the one hand, you pass to
Westminster, or through that gorge of the Strand which leads along
endless rows of shops that have grown up on the sites of the ancient
halls of the Salisburys and the Exeters, the Buckinghams and
Southamptons; to the heart of the City built around the primeval palace
of the "Tower;" while, on the other hand, you pass into the new city of