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| The British National Gallery as snapped from Trafalgar Square |
We managed a quick couple hours at the British Museum, during which Carolyn snapped a couple shots of some British lootings. We saw the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone, several dead Egyptians who were quite rudely removed from their graves, and more than a few great pieces that would surely have been destroyed and lost had it not been for those archeological activities I so crassly termed "lootings."
However, I found the Reading Room more impressive than any of the exhibits. When I stepped into the Reading Room I felt the silence, the awesome sense of history, and the serene depths of this place of hundreds of years of deep thought. I did not need to imagine those 19th. Century authors who sat down at the Reading Room desks to write and study; I felt their presence, their lingering thoughts, their spirits. A research library, or at least a good one, stands as a cathedral to the intellect. The British Museum Reading Room may have been the most amazing place of worship I have ever visited.
| Carolyn snapped this shot of a temple from the British Museum collection. |  |
| And this one. |  |
| On our way to the British Museum we passed the Charles Dickens House / museum. |  |
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Trafalgar Square is, I have decided, one of the most amazing places in the world. The British National Gallery is there. After feasting my eyes on the works of Turner, Constable, and many, many other painters I'm not going to mention by name, I carried home a £ 5 print of Titian's Bacchus & Ariadne. Behind the National Gallery is the National Portrait Gallery, where I saw Gladstone's and Disraeli's separate portraits glaring at each other (a perfect pairing); saw Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus Darwin; saw Robert Louis Stevenson's father, likewise Mathew Arnold's father; and saw Coleridge, Shelley, Dickens, Mary Ann Evans, ... ! I also saw some folks who were around for centuries other than the 19th., but I don't suppose they really matter. <wink> Also in the neighborhood are many, many booksellers: some with rare books, some with specialty books, including Watkins of Cecil Court who have been selling occult titles for over one hundred years. |
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| Carolyn in front of the Trafalgar Square fountain. |  |
| A closer shot of the National Gallery. |  |
| The fountain with a string of double-decker buses behind. |  |
| And a big lion basking on the square (I have a thing for Lions; does this mean I should have married a Leo, though I am more than happy sharing time with my Taurean spouse?) |  |
| The End | Greenwich 1 / Greenwich 2 / Thames & Tower of London / Avebury / Regents Park / Trafalgar Square |