nster, Chertsey, Sheen, Reading, Abingdon, and Osney
disappeared.

One writes the list straight off without considering, taking it for
granted that everything which could have roused the cupidity of that
generation necessarily disappeared: and as one writes it one remembers
that, after all, Westminster survived. Its survival was an accident,
which will be further considered. But that survival, so far from
redeeming, emphasises and throws into relief the destruction of the
rest.

Of these enduring monuments of human energy and, what is more
important still in the control of energy, human certitude, what
besides Westminster survived? Of Chertsey there is perhaps a gateway
and part of a wall; of Sheen nothing; of Reading a few flints built
into modern work; of Abingdon a gateway, and a buttress or two that
long served to support a brewhouse; of Osney nothing, contrariwise,
electric works and the slums of a modern town. All these were
Westminsters. In all of these was to be discovered that patient
process of production which argues the continuity, and therefore the
dignity, of human civilisation. Each had the glass which we can no
longer paint, the vivid, living, and happy grotesque in sculpture
which only the best of us can so much as understand; each had a
thousand and another thousand details of careful work in stone meant
to endure, if not for ever, at least into such further centuries as
might have the added faith and added knowledge to restore them in
greater plenitude. The whole thing has gone. It has gone to no
purpose. Nothing has been built upon it save a wandering host of rich
and careworn men.

Suppose a man to have gone down the Thames when the new discussions
were beginning in London and (as was customary even at the close of
the Middle Ages) were spreading from town to town with a rapidity that
we, who have ceased to debate ideas, can never understand. Let such a
traveller or bargeman have gone down from Cricklade to the Tower, how
would the Great Houses have appeared to him?

The upper river would have been much the same, but as he came to that
part of it which was wealthy and populous, as he turned the corner of
Witham Hill, he would already have seen far off, larger and a little
nearer than the many spires of Oxford, a building such as to-day we
never see save in our rare and half-deserted cathedral country towns.
It was the Abbey of Osney. It would have been his landmark, as
Hereford is the landmark