Westminster, 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 for a man to-day rowing up to Wye, or the new spire of Chichester for a man that makes harbour out of the channel past Bisham upon a rising tide.  And as he passed beneath it (for, of the many branches here, the main stream took him that way) he would have seen a great and populous place with nothing ruinous in it, all well ordered, busy with men and splendid; here again that which we now look upon as a relic and a circumstance of repose was once alive and strong.