University of Virginia Library

PASSAGES FROM AN EPISTOLARY JOURNAL.
KEPT ON A LATE VISIT TO ENGLAND.

Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight,
Evening of June 9th, 1839.

The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of
my cabin-lamp is at last still, I congratulate myself;
and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and
steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatetic
teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling washbasins
and et-ceteras, have returned to a quiet life.
The creaking bulk-heads cry no more. I sit on a
trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and
paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety
and attention. I have no apology for not writing to
you, except want of event since we parted. There is
not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred
miles I have travelled. “Travelled!” said I. I am
as unconscious of having moved from the wave on
which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in
the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and
rolled from my left cheek to my right; but as to any
feeling of having gone onward I am as unconscious
of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a
dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever
well upon it, can find material for thought. But for
one, I will sell, at sixpence a month, all copyhold
upon so much of my life as is destined “to the deep,
the blue, the black” (and whatever else he calls it) of
my friend the song-writer.

Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a
sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory
with a smile. Here and there a thought has come
to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the
elements—here and there a word has been said which
on shore should have been wit or good feeling—here
and there a good morning, responded to with an effort,
has, from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression
which will make to-morrow's parting phrases more
earnest than I had anticipated.—With this green isle
to windward, and the smell of earth and flowers coming
to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an interest
in several who have sailed with me. Humanity,
killed in me invariably by salt water, revives, I think,
with this breath of hawthorn.

The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed
ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel,
and that we have brought with us the first west wind
they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not
know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on
board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable
Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an
abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted
to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement
of the passengers he met the steward's usual
demand for a fee with an application for a contribution
to the funds of his society! His expectations

from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied
by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,”
whose sole errand is to record the golden results of
his friend's eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me
to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities
of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her
captain, which are more, I will put out my sea-lamp
for the last time, and get into my premonitory “six
feet by two.”

The George Inn, Portsmouth.—This is a morning
in which (under my circumstances) it would be difficult
not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair
day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of
seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through
rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleasant
day. Determined not to put myself in the way
of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest
hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an
elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to
stand between me and all my annoyances of the
morning. He was to get my baggage through the
customs, submit for me to all the inevitable impositions
of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach,
bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up
his services, all in one short phrase of l. s. d. So
putting my temper into my pocket, and making up
my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one
day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts
of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air
from my stomach, and admire everything that came
in my way. I would recommend to all newly-landed
passengers from the packets to step up and accept of
the sympathy of the oaks of the “king's bastion” in
their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees,
leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their
boughs as usual to the landward, present to the seaward
exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea
and disgust, which is as expressive to the commonest
observer as a sick man's first look at his bolus. I
have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly
that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleasant
to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here
as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive
are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but
it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its
nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively
every oak on the “king's bastion.”

The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one
long alley of ornamented cottages—wood-bine creeping
and roses flowering over them all. If there were
but two between Portsmouth and London—two even
of the meanest we saw—a traveller from any other
land would think it worth his while to describe them
minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less),
they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became
conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural paradises;
and I record it as the first point in which I find
myself worse for having become a “dweller in the
shade.” I was envious. Formerly, in passing a
tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, “What
a bright lawn! What a trim and fragrant hedge!
What luxuriant creepers! I congratulate their
fortunate owner!” Now it is, “How I wish I had
that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people
their shrubs, trellices, and flowers!” I wonder not
a little how the English emigrant can make a home
among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a
forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities.

After the first few miles, I discovered that the two
windows of the coach were very limited frames for
the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye,
and changing places with William, who was on the
top of the coach, I found myself between two tory
politicians, setting forth to each other most eloquently
the mal-administrations of the whigs, and the queen's
mismanagement. As I was two months behind the
English news, I listened with some interest. They
made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was
a silly girl; that she had been caught in a decided
fib about Sir Robert Peel's exactions with respect to
the household; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seemed
to be a sturdy grazier, said that “in 'igh life the
queen-dowager's 'ealth was now received uniwersally
with three times three, while Victoria's was drank in
solemn silence.” Her majesty received no better
treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of
the seat; and as we whirled under the long park fence
of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the
Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian
king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between
whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in
a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered
by the readers of D'Israeli's novels, is the original of
the picture of the luxurious maison de plaisance, drawn
in the young duke.

We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of
Hampton court, of Pitt's country seat at Putney, and
of Jane Porter's cottage at Esher, and in the seventh
hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles)
we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses
passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short
intervals, and the roads delightfully watered—symptoms
of suburban London. We skirted the privileged
paling of Hyde Park; and I could see, over the rails,
the flying and gay-colored equipages, the dandy horsemen,
the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with
their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short,
which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact
with unsightliness and vulgarity, struts its hour in this
green cage of aristocracy.

Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of
Wellington's was assembled a large crowd of carriages
and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buckingham
palace through the Green park, and they
were waiting for a glimpse of her majesty on horseback.
The regulator whirled mercilessly on; but
far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could
see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming
rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the
queen by a couple of minutes.

It was just the hour when all London is abroad,
and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid
equipages on their way to the park. I remembered
many a face, and many a crest; but either the faces
had beautified in my memory, or three years had
done time's pitiless work on them all. Near Devonshire
house I saw, fretting behind the slow-moving
press of vehicles, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood
horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new,
was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe
that was familiar to my eye. The next glance convinced
me that the livery was that of Lady B.; but,
for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here
was a stately coach—for the one tall footman, two—
for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and
superb caparison—the whole turn-out on a scale of
splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another
moment decided the doubt—for as we came against
the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed
press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back
in the corner with her wrists crossed, the same in the
grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet,
but stouter, more energetic, and graver in the expression
of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen
her. From the top of the stage-coach I looked,
unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by
chance, a daylight and more correct view of her
countenance than I should obtain in a year of opera
and drawing-room observation.

Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to hotel,

all full and overflowing; and finding at last a corner
at Raggett's, in Dover street, we dressed, dined,
and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful
news closed our first day in England with tears.

I drove up to London the second day after our arrival,
and having a little “Grub-street” business, made
my way to the purlieus of publishers in Paternoster
row. If you could imagine a paper mine, with a very
deep-cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth,
you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks
along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea
of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open
air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and
one long stripe of blue sky much farther off than usual,
are the predominant impressions.

From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way
through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, toward
that part of London which, as Horace Smith says,
is “open at the top.” Something in the way of a
ship's fender, to save the hips and elbows, would sell
well I should think to pedestrians in London. What
crowds, to be sure! On a Sunday in New York,
when all the churches are pouring forth their congregations
at the same moment, you have seen a faint
image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets
is very much changed since I was in London. The
passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he
would in a common chair—the body of the vehicle
suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon
it, and the wheels very high. The driver's seat would
suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship's tiller, well astern.
He whips over the passenger's head. I saw one or
two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly
one of safety, though they have something the beauty
of a prize hog.

The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not
finished when I left England, opened upon me as I
entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel
was a very fine effect, though critically, its “pepper-boxity”
is not very creditable to the architect. Fine
old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on
one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St.
Martin's noble church and the Gallery—with such a
fine opening in the very cor cordium of London, could
not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view.

The street in front of the gallery was crowded with
carriages, showing a throng of visiters within; and
mounting the imposing steps (the loftiness of the vestibule
dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance),
I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pillars
ran through the entire length of the building,
offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off
from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries
of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were
crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the
equipages without. You will not care to be bothered
with criticisms on pictures, and mine was a cursory
glance—but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble
lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise
in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh
among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of
Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume, with her pretty
feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickersgill,
are among those I remember. I found a great
many acquaintances in the gallery; and I was sitting upon
a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait
of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor's wig and robes
—a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts.
Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a person
with his back to me, cutting off my view very provokingly.
“When this dandy gets out of the way with
his eyeglass,” said I, “I shall be able to see the picture.”
My friend smiled. “Who do you take the
dandy to be?” It was a well-formed man, dressed in
the top of the fashion, with a very straight back, curl
ing brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years
of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I
saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself.

I had not seen Taglioni since the first representation
of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris.
Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La
Gitana; and except that her limbs are the least in the
world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely
unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could
then (when opera dancing was new to me), what it is
that gives this divine woman the right to her proud
title of La Déesse de la Danse. It is easy for the
Ellslers, and Augusta, and others, who are said to be
only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even
to produce, by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect
of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without being
indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alone
finishes the step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound
over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly,
as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if,
instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by
it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of
trying herself and a plomb (as is seen in all other dancers,
by their effort to recover composure), it had been
the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed.
The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own
grace, which steals over Taglioni's lips when she closes
a difficult step, seems communicated, in an indefinable
languor, to her limbs. You can not fancy her fatigued
when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she
courtesies to the applause of the enchanted audience,
and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive
that she has undertaken too much. You never detect,
as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred
over adroitly, and movements that, from their anticipating
the music of the ballet, are known by the critical
eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness
or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears
the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces
her companions in the ballet! Whether the
motion seems born of the music, or the music floats
out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might
be almost embarrassed to know.

In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based
upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the
child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and recovered
by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing
over her of a recollection of music she had heard in
her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic acting
I ever saw. But there is one dance, the Cachucha,
introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni
has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done
by herself; for there is a succession of flying movements
expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she
alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet,
with a look over her shoulder of fierté and animation
possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It
was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and
neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of
his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of
swiftness embodied in a look! How can I describe it
to you?

My last eight hours have been spent between Bedlam
and the opera—one of those antipodal contrasts
of which London life affords so many. Thanks to
God, and to the Howards who have arisen in our time,
a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that
it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melancholy
imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the
humane as imprisonment can be made by care and
kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are inmates
of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and
content, some playing at ball in the spacious court-yards,
some lying on the grass, and some working voluntarily

at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water
to their rooms.

On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite
apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came
up two hundred miles from the country to marry the
queen! You will remember the story of his forcing
himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout,
sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps
twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes
on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even
an eyelash while we were there. There was a very
gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or
rather walking round, with his hand on the bar, in a
gait that would have suited the most finished exquisite
of a drawing-room—Mr. Davis, who shot (I think)
at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we
saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the
queen's face when she went to the city—really a most
officer-like and handsome fellow; and in the next
room, poor old Hatfield, who shot at George the Third,
and has been in Bedlam for forty years—quite sane!
He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with
scars got in battle before his crime. He employs himself
with writing poetry on the death of his birds and
cats whom he has outlived in prison—all the society
he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He
received us very courteously, and called our attention
to his favorite canary showed us his poetry, and all
with a sad, mild, subdued resignation, that quite
moved me.

In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, except
one very noble-looking woman who was standing
at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the
Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending
melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for
years under the terrible belief that she has committed
“the unpardonable sin,” and though quiet all the day,
her agony at night becomes horrible. What a comment
on a much-practised mode of preaching the mild
and forgiving religion of our Savior!

As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman
of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very polite
courtesy, and said, “Will you be so kind as to
have me released from this dreadful place?” “I am
afraid I can not,” said I. “Then,” she replied, laying
her hand on my arm, with a most appealing earnestness,
“perhaps you will on Monday—you know
I've nothing to pack!” The matron here interposed,
and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the
door closed. She was confined there for the murder
of her child.

We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c.,
&c.—all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our
names on the visiters' book, quite of the opinion of a
Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had
written under his own name this expressive praise:—
“J'ai visité certains palais moins beaux et moins bien
entretenus que cette maison de la folie.”

Two hours after, I was listening to the overture of
La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance to the opera
of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the
house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does
always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exaltation
of brain and spirit—but how different from that
exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour,
by creatures of the same human family, at the opera!
It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of
allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat
the queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious
singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister standing
behind her chair, and her maids of honor around
—herself the smiling, youthful, and admired sovereign
of the most powerful nation on earth! I thought of
the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring
release.

The queen's face has thinned and grown more oval
since I saw her at a drawing-room, four years ago, as
Princess Victoria. She has been compelled to think
since then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life,
work out the expression of the face. She has now
what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual
countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns
to speak, but, on the whole, quite beautiful enough
for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed
paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less
gayly than many others around her. Her box was at
the left side of the house, undistinguished by any mark
of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected
her presence.

Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possible
for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She
has her sister's look about the forehead and eyes, and
all her sister's soul and passionateness in her style of
singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain
as it is, and young as she is, the opera-going public
prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful
Grisi. The latter long triumphant prima donna is
said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new favorite;
and it is curious enough to hear the hundred
and one faults found in the declining songstress by
those who once would not admit that she could be
transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom
I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi
the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers
in her box last night that she had always said that
Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was
a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune;
but soul or sentiment she never had! Poor Grisi!
Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have
been much admired. “Le monde ne haït rien autant
que ses idoles quand ils sont à terre,” said the wise La
Bruyère.

Some of the most delightful events in one's travels
are those which afford the least matériel for description,
and such is our séjour of a few days at the vicarage
of B—. It was a venerable old house with
pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with
panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand,
low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected
rooms, and creepers outside, trellised and trained to
every corner and angle. Then there was the modern
wing, with library and dining-room, large windows,
marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going
from your bedroom to breakfast, you might fancy
yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth's time to
Queen Victoria's. A high hedge of holly divided the
smoothly-shaven lawn from the churchyard, and in
the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray
old church with four venerable towers, one of the most
picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old English
architecture that I have ever seen. The whole
group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine-covered
and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap
of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were
spread landscapes of the finished and serene character
peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering
hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant
parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the
horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct
than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after
a thunderstorm in America.

Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by
the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with
brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon
most musically, till the hour for the morning services.
We have little idea in America of the perfection to
which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In
the towers of this small rural church are hung eight
bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them
by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring
hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the

simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a
pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was
serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and
jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains
of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned
with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature.
We were told at breakfast that the chimes had
been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves,
the villagers always expressing thus their congratulations
on the arrival of guests at the vicarage.
The compliment was repeated between services, and a
very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship
to the vicar's family authorizing a very special
rejoicing.

The interior of the church was very ancient looking
and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the
massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The congregation
was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the
men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet
carters' frocks, and most of them in leather leggins.
The children sat on low benches placed in the centre
of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were
in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod
with iron like horses' hoofs, and their little legs buttoned
up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather.
They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended
to wear but one suit in this world.

I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and
the decorous attention of men, women, and children,
to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of
simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the
name of their farm or place of residence printed on
the back of the pew, with the number of seats to
which they were entitled, probably in proportion to
their tithes. The “living” is worth, if I remember
right, not much over a hundred pounds—an insufficient
sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is
appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar
chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his
excellent character the exemplary pastor with the
physician and lord of the manor. I left B— with
the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happiness,
inhabit one spot more than all others in a world
whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the
vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland.

We left B— at twelve in the Brighton “Age”—
the “swell coach” of England. We were to dine
thirty miles nearer London, at — Park, and we did
the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop
of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all
travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road; but
what stage-coach in the United States ever limited
its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American
dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever despatched
so briefly? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of
the better class; and whose who were my fellow-passengers
the day I refer to were particularly well
dressed and gentlemanly—yet all of them achieved a
substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid
their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within
the quarter of an hour. John Bull's blindness to the
beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that
this hasty meal is sometimes called a “lunch!”

The two places beside our own in the inside were
occupied by a lady and her maid and two children—
an interpretation of the number two to which I would
not have agreed if I could have helped it. We can not
always tell at first sight what will be most amusing,
however; and the child of two years, who sprawled
over my rheumatic knees with her mother's permission,
thereby occasioning on my part a most fixed
look out of the window, furnished me after a while
with a curious bit of observation. At one of the
commons we passed, the children running out from a
gipsy encampment flung bunches of heath flowers
into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and
commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother,
the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them
with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face
of my own when not particularly called on to be
pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in her
distributions. At last, after collecting and re-distributing
the flowers for about an hour, she grew suddenly
grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the
largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a
nosegay. My attention was attracted by the seriousness
of the child's occupation; and I was watching
her without thinking my notice observed, when she
raised her eyes to me very timidly, turned her new
bouquet over and over, and at last, with a blush,
deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed
the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother's
bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the
little coquette's pleasure in her victory was excessive.
For the remainder of the journey, those who had
given her their smiles too readily were entirely neglected,
and all her attentions were showered upon the
only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought
it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in
baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished
coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain.

The coachman of “the age” was a young man of
perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through
a considerable fortune, and drives for a living—but he
was not at all the sort of looking person you would
fancy for a “swell whip.” He drove beautifully, and
helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage,
&c., very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and
had no desire to chat with the “outsides.” The excessive
difficulty in England of finding any clean way
of making a living after the initiatory age is passed—
a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keenly—probably
forced this person as it has others to
take up a vocation for which the world fortunately
finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat
for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it
were offered to him when the whip was out of his
hand he would knock the giver down for his impertinence.
I may as well record here, by the way, for
the benefit of those who may wish to know a comparison
between the expense of travelling here and at
home, that for two inside places for thirty miles the
coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman's fee
five shillings, or half-a-crown each inside. To get
from the post town to — Park (two miles) cost me
five-and-sixpence for a “fly,” so that for thirty-two
miles travel I paid 2l. 10s. 6d., a little more than
twelve dollars.

And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful
lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a beginning
at getting a living in England. I was never
at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and
salt for a young man, till I had occasion lately to endeavor
to better the condition of a servant of my own
—a lad who has been with me four or five years, and
whose singular intelligence, good principles, and high
self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any confidential
trust or place whatever. His own ideas, too
(I thought, not unreasonably), had become somewhat
sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to continue
longer as a servant. He went home to his
mother, a working-woman of London, and I did my
utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all
classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any
possible livelihood above menial service. I was met
everywhere with the same answer: “There are
hundreds of gentlemen's sons wearing out their youth
in looking for the same thing.” I was told daily that
it was quite in vain—that apprenticeships were as
much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to
the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inaccessible.

My boy and his mother at last came to
their senses; and, consenting to apply once more for
a servant's place, he was fortunate enough to engage
as valet to a bachelor, and is now gone with his new
master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter
said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip,
“England is a great place to take the nonsense out of
people.”

When London shall have become the Rome or
Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever?) the termini
of the railways will be among its finest ruins.
That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is almost
as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness,
the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really
an impressive scene simply to embark for “Brummagem;”
and there is that utility in all this showy
expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one
is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshingly
permitted to manage your baggage, &c., without
the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling
each. Then there are “ladies' waiting-rooms,” and
“gentlemen's waiting-rooms,” and attached to them
every possible convenience, studiously clean and orderly.
I wish the president and directors of the Utica
and other American railroads would step over and
take a sumptuary hint.

The cars are divided into stalls, i. e. each passenger
is cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neighbor's
shoulder, and sleeps without offence or encroachment.
When they are crowded, that is an admirable
arrangement; but I have found it very comfortable in
long journeys in America to take advantage of an
empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the
vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy
but your upright place. In every car are suspended
lamps to give light during the long passages through
the subterranean tunnels.

We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the
terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney
for Marie-la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck
six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty
miles in the hour; and with the exception of the
slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening
and getting under way at the different stations, this
rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liverpool
(205 miles or upward) at three o'clock, our
stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether.

I thought, toward the end, that all this might be
very pleasant with a consignment of buttons, or an
errand to Gretna Green. But for the pleasure of the
thing, I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales
of striped green silk unfolded for eight hours, as travel
the same length of time by the railroad. (I have described
in this simile exactly the appearance of the
fields as you see them in flying past.) The old women
and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for you can not
tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washerwoman
at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so
quickly that you confound the two irresistibly—the
thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the
browsing donkeys like thatched cottages—you ask the
name of a town, and by the time you get up your
finger, your point at a spot three miles off—in short,
the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the
coach, and called fresh-fish after a journey of 200
miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most
intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a
new distinction in phraseology. “Have you travelled
in England?” will soon be a question having no
reference to railroads. The winding turnpike and
cross-roads, the coaches and post-carriages, will be
resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight
as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags
will have almost undisputed possession of the rail-cars.

The Adelphi is the Astor house of Liverpool, a
very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the
railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent
parlor on our arrival; and very hungry with rail-roading
since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at
their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour,
and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipating
a meal corresponding to the stout person and
pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my
travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish
and disclosed—divers small bits of second-hand beef-steak,
toasted brown and warped at the corners by a
second fire, and on the removal of the other three
silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of
peas that had been once used for green soup, three
similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three
potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook's intentions,
I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he had probably
mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of
some sportsman's respectable brace of pointers; but
on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar,
I sent word to the master of the house that we had
rather a preference for a dinner new and hot, and
would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour
more brought up the landlord's apologies and a fresh
and hot beef-steak, followed by a tough-crusted apple-pie,
custard, and cheese—and with a bottle of Moselle,
which was good, we finished our dinner at one of the
most expensive and showy hotels in England. The
manners and fare at the American hotels being always
described as exponents of civilization by English
travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counterpicture
of one of the most boasted of their own.

Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning
of my two companions must prevent their presence
at the gay festivities of Eglinton, I put them on board
the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin,
and returned to the Adelphi to wait en garçon for the
Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large
and well-furnished room, with windows looking out
on the area shut in by the wings of the house; and I
must make you still more contented at the Astor, by
describing what is going on below at this moment.
It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the
bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most
of them very impatiently, and in the area before the
kitchen windows are six or eight idle waiters, and four
or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding,
and screaming; the language of both men and women
more profane and indecent than anything I have ever
before chanced to hear, and every word audible in
every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has
been going on since six this morning; and I seriously
declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent
conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must
have “murdered sleep” for every lady and gentleman
lodged on the rear side of the “crack hotel” of Liverpool.

Sick of the scene described above, I went out just
now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long
entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing
stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter
who served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He
evidently had some errand with me, but what I did
not immediately fathom. At last he approached—

“You—a—got your things, sir?”

“What things?”

“The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bed-room,
sir.”

“Yes, thank you,” and I resumed my walk.

The waiter resumed his, and presently approached
again.

“You—a—don't intend to use the parlor again, sir?”

“No; I have explained to the master of the house
that I shall breakfast in the cofee-room.” And again
I walked on.

My friend began again at the next turn.

“You—a—pay for those ladies' dinner yourself,
sir?”

“Yes.” I walked on once more.

Once more approaches my fat incubus, and with a
twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain
be delivered of something.

“Why the d—l am I badgered in this way?” I
stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering
hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat
obstruction and pursue my walk.

“Will you—a—remember the waiter, if you please,
sir?”

“Oh! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter
at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the
house. Perhaps you'll be kind enough to let me
finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?”

P. S. Evening in the coffee-room.—They say the
best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly
as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender
recollection of it for the admirable and unequalled
luxury of its baths. A long and beautiful Grecian
building crests the head of George's pier, built by the
corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to
salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to
enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday
evening, I was shown into the ladies' end of the
building. The room where I waited till the bath
was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned
apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superbly
bound books and pictures, the tables covered with
engravings, and the whole thing looked like a central
apartment in a nobleman's residence. A boy showed
me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was
attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir
fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice
carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to
such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentlemen's
baths were as elegant as these. “Oh yes,” he
said: “there are two splendid pictures of Niagara
Falls and Catskill.” “Who painted them?” “Mr.
Wall.” “And whose are they?” “They belong to
our father, sir!” I made up my mind that “our
father” was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool.

I have just returned from the dinner given to Macready
at the Freemason's tavern. The hall, so celebrated
for public “feeds,” is a beautiful room of a
very showy style of architecture, with three galleries,
and a raised floor at the end usually occupied by the
cross table. It accommodated on this occasion four
hundred persons.

From the peculiar object of the meeting to do
honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for
his efforts to spiritualise and elevate the stage, there
probably never was collected together in one room so
much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors,
critics, publishers, and amateurs of the stage—a large
body in London—made up the company. My attention
was called by one of my neighbors to the singularly
superior character of the heads about us, and I
had already observed the striking difference, both in
head and physiognomy, between this and a common
assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected
with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps
it would have been a worthy service to the world had
some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the
temple upon the heads of the Philistines.

The cry of “make way!” introduced the duke of
Sussex, the chairman of the meeting—a stout, mild-looking,
dignified old man, wearing a close black scull-cap
and the star and riband. He was followed by
Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had
done much to promote the interests of the drama; by
Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing a scampavia
in the bay of Corfu), by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr.
Sheil, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes,
the poet, and other distinguished men. I should
have said, by the way Mr. Macready followed next
his royal highness.

The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked
up the room, were completely deafening. Macready
looked deadly pale and rather overcome; and amid
the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproar
of four hundred “gentlemen and scholars,” the duke
placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his
seat before the turbot.

The dinner was an uncommonly bad one; but of
this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provisory
chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to
look about me, and truly there was work enough for
the eyes. M—'s head interested me more than
any one's else, for it was the personification of his
lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which
was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the
loftiest forehead; but about the lower part of the face
lay all the characteristics which go to make up a
voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery,
yet self-possessed and well directed character. He was
excessively handsome; yet it was the beauty of
Masaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect
than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer
face for an artist; and judging from his looks and
from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four), I would
stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness.

On the same side were the L—s, very quiet-looking
men, and S— the portrait-painter, a merry-looking
grenadier, and L— B— the poet, with a
face like a poet. Near me was L—, the painter,
poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and
good fellow—seven characters of which his friends
scarce know in which he is most excellent—and he
has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his
eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his
gifts as if they were no load at all.—And on my left
was S—, the glorious painter of Venice, of the
battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea
in all its belongings; and you would take him for a
gallant lieutenant of the navy, with the fire of a score
of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a
hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more
manly face would not cross your eye in a year's travel.

Mr. J— was just beyond, a tall, sagacious-looking,
good humored person of forty-five. He was a
man of very kind manners, and was treated with great
marks of liking and respect by all about him. But
directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul
Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of
my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult
not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I
heard some one behind me point him out, soon after,
as the well-known original in that character—the
gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as
manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole.—
“That's my name—what's yours?” said he the moment
after he had seated himself, thrusting his card
close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took
it of course for a piece of fun between two very old
friends, but to my astonishment the gentlemen next
him was as much astonished as I.

The few servants scattered up and down were deaf
to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only
at an extra charge when called for—a very mean
system for a public dinner, by the way), and the
wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to
champagne or the doctor. Each person had four
plates, and when used, they were to be put under the
bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon,
or what you would, except to be taken away, and the
soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having
been put on together, was all removed at one fell
swoop—the entire operation of dinner having lasted

just twenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are recorded
by some new English traveller as the most expeditious
eaters in Christendom.

Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches
commenced directly, and admirable they were. To
the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I
listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison,
the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard
in England. All the world tells you that he makes
signal failures in oratory—yet he rose, when his health
was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesitating
language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not
extravagant, he replied to the compliments of his
royal highness, and brought forward his plan (as you
have seen it reported in the papers) for the erection
of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Macready.
I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a
belief in his future eminence as an orator—and I would
warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of
ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who followed
him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really
there is nothing like one's own eyes and ears in this
world of envy and misrepresentation.

D— sat near Sheil, at the cross table, very silent,
as is his custom and that of most keen observers.
The courtly Sir M— S— was near B—, looking
like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the
second's time, and he and Y— the actor made two
very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. I believe
I have told you nearly all that struck me, except what
was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no
need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and
reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the
Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and
with a look-in at a ball, I concluded one of those exhausting,
exciting, overdone London days, which are
pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter
to read about than either.

One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I
ever saw was Miss P—, and I think her conversation
more delightful to remember than any person's
I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he
remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female
beauty; but in those days she was more “fancy-rapt,”
and gave in less to the current and spirit of society.
Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less
selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth,
like Pactolus—that gold which is sand from others.
She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or,
if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than
a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her
person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in
this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded,
and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always
is so—where it ever was. The smile seems to be the
work of the soul.

I have passed months under the same roof with Miss
P—, and nothing gave me more pleasure than to
find the company in that hospitable house dwindled
to a “fit audience though few,” and gathered around
the figure in deep mourning which occupied the
warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, and à-propos
to the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored
mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich current
of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw
an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one evening
a lady's singing “Auld Robin Gray,” and some
one remarking (rather unsentimentally), at the close,
“By-the-by, what is Lady — (the authoress of the
ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkeley
square is quite deafened with their hammering!”
“A-propos of carpenters and Lady —,” said Miss
P—, “this same charming ballad-writer owes something
to the craft. She was better-born than provided
with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was
once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay
a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought
with them a mania for private theatricals. Her wardrobe
was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary
events of a week-day, and her purse contained one
solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the
question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline
taking a part was impossible, for her talent and sprightliness
were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast
for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the
gay party bound to the country town to make purchases
of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to
mortified low spirits. The character required a smart
village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could
come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting
her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she
could borrow of some one, when her attention was attracted
to a carpenter, who was employed in the construction
of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the
court below, was turning off from his plane broad and
long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck
her that it was like riband. The next moment she
was below, and begged of the man to give her half-a-dozen
lengths as smooth as he could shave them. He
performed his task well, and depositing them in her
apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the village,
and with her single shilling succeeded in purchasing
a chip hat of the coarsest fabric. She carried
it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings,
and on the evening of the performance appeared with
a white dress, and hat and belt-ribands which were
the envy of the audience. The success of her invention
gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to
admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark.
She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled
auditors, whom she afterward married. You will allow
that Lady — may afford to be tolerant of carpenters.”

An eminent clergyman one evening became the subject
of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that
he had never married. “That wonder,” said Miss
P—, “was once expressed to the reverend gentleman
himself in my hearing, and he told a story in answer
which I will tell you—and perhaps, slight as it
may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive
and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination,
he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in
a small village not twenty miles from London. Among
his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a
young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and
whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him
an object of thought and pleasure. She left the
church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced
that he went on for a year without knowing her name;
but his sermon was never written without many a
thought how she would approve it, nor preached with
satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face.
Gradually he came to think of her at other times than
when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other
days than Sundays; but the weeks slipped on, and
though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he
never brought himself to the resolution either to ask
her name or to seek to speak with her. By these
silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart,
and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaintance
and marry her, if possible, when one day he was
sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the
corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sunday
after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part
of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform
the service, and another clergyman present officiated;
and after she was buried, her father took him aside and
begged his pardon for giving him pain—but he could
not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter
had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he
was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hurried

her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman
in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I
look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven.”

London is wonderfully embellished within the last
three years—not so much by new buildings, public or
private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists
among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the expensive
magnificence of their shops. When I was in
England before, there were two or three of these palaces
of columns and plate-glass—a couple of shawl-shops,
and a glass warehouse or two, but now the
west end and the city have each their scores of establishments
of which you would think the plate-glass
alone would ruin anybody but Aladdin. After an absence
of a month from town lately, I gave myself the
always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among
the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neighborhood,
and to my surprise, found four new wonders
of this description—a shawl-house in the upper Regent
Circus, a silk-mercer's in Oxford street, a whip-maker's
in Regent street, and a fancy stationer's in the
Quadrant—either of which establishments fifty years
ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The
first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of
the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford
street with what seems but one window—a series of
glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from
the ground to the roof—window-panes twelve feet high,
and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which
this immense transparency of front gives for the display
of goods is proportionately improved; and in the
mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there
is evidently no small degree of art—so harmonious are
the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that
several more renovations are taking place in different
parts of both “city” and “town;” and London promises,
somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its
emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which
eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed.

If I may judge by my own experience and by what
I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of
doors empties the play-houses—for I would rather
walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine
plays in a hundred; and so think, apparently, multitudes
of people, who stroll up and down the clean and
broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous
succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright
glare of the illumination exchanging nods and smiles
—the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable
evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and delightful.
There are large classes of society, who find
the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient
homes, and who must go somewhere; and while the
streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the
play-house was the only resort where they could beguile
their cares with splendor and amusement, and
in those days theatrieals flourished, as in these days
of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evidently
languish. I will lend a hint to the next essayist
on the “Decline of the Drama.”

The increased attractiveness of London, from thus
disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compensates
in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me
—the distastefulness of the country, from the forbidding
and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden-walls,
impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance
for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but
the road. What should we say in America to travelling
miles between two brick walls, with no prospect
but the branches of overhanging trees from the invisible
park lands on either side, and the alley of cloudy
sky overhead? How tantalizing to pass daily by a
noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its
centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and
some miles of the tops of trees over a paling! All
this to me is oppressive—I feel abridged of breathing-room
and eyesight—deprived of my liberty—robbed
of my horizon Much as I admire high preservation
and cultivation, I would compromise for a “snake-fence”
all over England.

On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the
neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long
walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-gravelled
and secluded path, which commanded what the
proprietor's fence enviously shut from the road—a
noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed
to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in
America without question, as suits their purpose, and
tired of the bricks, hedges and placards of blacking
and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of
great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my imagination
in the beautiful grounds of my friend's opulent
neighbor. The Thames with its innumerable
steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships—a
vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the
soft green meadows of Kent and Essex—formed a delicious
picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which
I gazed upon with great delight for—some ten minutes.
In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B—'s
gardener, who, with a very pokerish-looking stick in
his hand, came running toward me, evidently, by his
pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious
intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of
breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick,
what business I had there. I was not very well prepared
with an answer, and short of beating the man
for his impudence (which in several ways might have
been a losing job), I did not see my way very clearly
out of Mr. B—'s grounds. My first intention, to
call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion
while I complained of the man's insolence, was defeated
by the information, evidently correct, that Mr.
B— was not resident at the place, and so I was walked
out of the lodge-gate with a vagabond's warning—
never to let him “catch me there again!” So much
for my liberal translation of a park-fence!

This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably
felt where a gentleman's paling chances to
include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as
well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth, is
the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is
interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the
orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let
through a gate by an old man, who received a
douceur; we crossed a newly-reaped field, and came
to another gate; another person opened this, and we
paid another shilling. We walked on toward the
glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object
apparently but the toll, there was another locked
gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made
our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds,
after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a
fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I
remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the
other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan,
who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as
a tribute to his father's memory, or to the beauty of
Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever
ground he pockets it, the mode of assessment is, to say
the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself
to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may
say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very
much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling
the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I
should think no sum lost which was expended in
bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but
it should be levied somewhere else than within sound
of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than midway
between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.

The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly
a Frenchman in England without acquaintances.
The illness of a friend has lately occasioned
me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being
abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies
of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not
a little with watching the ennui of one of these unfortunate
foreigners, who was evidently there simply to
qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton
in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself
at one of the small tables, when, without looking
up, I became aware that some one at the other end of
the room was watching me very steadily. The place
was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the
dinner-hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound
that disturbed the digestion of the eight or ten persons
present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!”
informed me that if I looked up I should encounter
the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the
call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite
neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an
apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but the shevaleer
wishes to know if your name is Coopair.” Not very
much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation
in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite
answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and
took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long
sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing
his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound
study of the grain of the mahogany.

What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading
half-a-dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till
ten o'clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier,
who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to
the last extremity. One person after another called
for a bed-room candle, and exit finally the Frenchman
himself, making me, however, a most courteous
bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen
left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy,
the other a short portly gentleman of fifty or thereabouts,
both quite bald. They rose together and
came to the fire near which I was sitting.

“That last man who went out calls himself a chevalier,”
said the thin gentleman.

“Yes,” said his stout friend—“he took me for a
Mr. Cooper he had travelled with.”

“The deuce he did,” said the other—“why he
took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very
much alike.”

“I beg pardon, gentlemen,” said I—“he took me
for this Mr. Cooper too.”

The Frenchman's ruse was discovered. It was instead
of a snuff-box—a way he had of making acquaintance.
We had a good laugh at our triple resemblance
(three men more unlike it would be difficult
to find), and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper
good night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up
stairs.

The next morning I came down rather late to brealfast,
and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to
pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the
night before. He rose immediately with a look of
radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elaborate
apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper
(whom I was so like, cependant, that we should be
mistaken for each other by our nearest friends), and
in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had entered
by chance, would have returned the compliment,
and taken me for the chevalier's most intimate friend
and fellow-traveller.

I remained three or four days at Brighton, and
never discovered in that time that the chevalier's ruse
succeeded with any other person. I was his only
successful resemblance to “Monsieur Coopair.” He
always waited breakfast for me in the coffee-room,
and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he
dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London
—and at what hour—and if I would be so obliging as
to take a place for him in the same coach.

It was a remarkably fine day; and with my friend
by my side outside of “the Age,” we sped on toward
London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the
fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from
the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of
spirits—let alone the ever-depressed bosom of a stranger
in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant
and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and informed
my friend, for the first time, that I was bound
to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce
know how I had escaped telling him of it before, but
his “impossible mon ami!” was said in a tone and
accompanied with a look of the most complete surprise
and despair. I was evidently his only hope in
London.

I went up to town a day or two after; and in making
my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on
the opposite side of the strand, with his hands thrust
up to the wrists in the pockets of his “Taglioni,” and
his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the
shop windows without much distinction between the
trunkmaker's and the printsellers—evidently miserable
beyond being amused at anything. I was too
much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office
of escape-valve to his cnnui, and I soon outwalked his
slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he
had to the “chevalier” (and he was decidedly too
deficient in address to belong to the order “d'industrie”),
he had no letter of recommendation in his
personal appearance, and as little the air of even a
Frenchman of “quality” as any man I ever saw in
the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the person
who would first occur to me if I were to see a
paragraph in the times headed “suicide by a foreigner.”

Revenons un peu. Brighton at this season (November)
enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the
heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely
exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of
my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a
feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I
was beginning to forget the very existence, in the
eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland.
I do not wonder at the passion of the English for
Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the
air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous
ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy,
“winter and rough weather.” The miles of broad
gravel-walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so
hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five
minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are alone no
small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers
and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along
this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The
beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all
weathers (and what children on earth are half as
beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant
source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and
by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay
throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splendid
shops and all the features of a metropolis, while
midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk
pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horseback,
and vehicles of every description, all subservient
to exercise and pleasure.

My first visit to Brighton was made in a very cold
day in summer, and I saw it through most unfavorable
spectacles. But I should think that along the cliffs,
where there are no trees or vendure to be seen, there
is very little apparent difference between summer and
winter; and coming here with the additional clothing
of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and
saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate children

play upon the beach in days when there is no
sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these convenient
bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watching
the coming and retreating of the waves, apparently
without any sensation of cold—and this in December.
In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and
Venice), an invalid sitting out of doors at this season
would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as
cold in August, in England, as it has been in November,
and it is this temperate evenness of the weather
throughout the year which makes English climate,
on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world.

In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very
fond of the perpetual loud beat of the sea upon the
shore. Whether, like the “music of the spheres,”
it becomes at last “too constant to be heard,” I did
not ask—but I never lost the consciousness of it except
when engaged in conversation, and I found it
company to my thoughts when I dined or walked
alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This
majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, indoors
and out, and nothing overpowers it but the
wind in a storm; it is even then only by fits, and the
alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast
with the broken and heavy plash of the waters, is so
like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the
rigging, and the burst of the waves), that those who
have been at Brighton in rough weather have realized
all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sickness—rather
a large but not an undesirable diminution
of experience.

Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced
casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did
not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second
look at the gentleman did—for I thought I had never
seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen
minutes' conversation, which touched upon nothing
that could give me a clue to his profession, still satisfied
me that so distinguished an address, and so keen
an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was
scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at parting—
Horace Smith. I need not say it was a very
great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too,
that the author of books we love as much as “Zillah,”
and “Brambletye-House,” looks unlike other men.
It gratifies somehow a personal feeling—as if those
who had won so much admiration from us should, for
our pride's sake, wear the undeniable stamp of superiority—as
if we had acquired a property in him by
loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked
and thought a great deal about an author, to call him
“ours.” “What Smith? Why our Smith—Horace
Smith”—is as common a dialogue between persons
who never saw him as it is among his personal friends.

These two remarkable brothers, James and Horace
Smith, are both gifted with exteriors such as are not
often possessed with genius—yet only James is so
fortunate as to have stumbled upon a good painter.
Lonsdale's portrait of James Smith, engraved by
Cousens, is both the author and the man—as fine a
picture of him, with his mind seen through his features,
as was ever done. But there is an engraved picture
extant of the author of Zillah, that, though it is no
likeness of the author, is a detestable caricature of the
man. Really this is a point about which distinguished
men, in justice to themselves, should take some
little care. Sir Thomas Lawrence's portraits, and
Sir Joshua Reynolds's, are a sort of biography of the
eminent men they painted. The most enduring
history, it has been said, is written in coins. Certainly
the most effective biography is expressed in portraits.
Long after the book and your impressions of
the character of which it treats have become dim in
your memory your impression of the features and
mien of a hero or a poet, as received from a picture,
remains indelible. How often does the face belie the
biography—making us think better or worse of the
man, after forming an opinion from a portrait in words,
that was either partial or malicious! I am persuaded
the world would think better of Shelley, if there were
a correct and adequate portrait of his face, as it has
been described to me by one or two who knew him.
How much of the Byronic idolatry is born and fed
from the idealized pictures of him treasured in every
portfolio! Sir Thomas Lawrence, Chalon, and Parris,
have composed between them a biography of Lady
Blessington, that have made her quite independent
of the “memoirs” of the next century. And who, I
may safely ask, even in America, has seen the nice,
cheerful, sensible, and motherly face which prefaces
the new edition of “The Manners of the American
Domestics” (I beg pardon for giving the title from my
Kentucky copy), without liking Mrs. Trollope a great
deal better, and at once dismissing all idea of “the
bazar” as a libel on that most lady-like countenance?

I think Lady S— had more talent and distinction
crowded into her pretty rooms, last night, than I ever
before saw in such small compass. It is a bijou of a
house, full of gems of statuary and painting, but all
its capacity for company lies in a small drawing-room,
a smaller reception-room, and a very small, but very
exquisite boudoir—yet to tell you who were there
would read like Colburn's list of authors, added to a
paragraph of noble diners-out from the Morning Post.

The largest lion of the evening certainly was the
new Persian ambassador, a man six feet in his slippers;
a height which, with his peaked calpack, of a foot and
a half, superadded, keeps him very much among the
chandeliers. The principal article of his dress does
not diminish the effect of his eminence—a long white
shawl worn like a cloak, and completely enveloping
him from beard to toe. From the twisted shawl
around his waist glitters a dagger's hilt, lumped with
diamonds—and diamonds, in most dazzling profusion,
almost cover his breast. I never saw so many
together except in a cabinet of regalia. Close behind
this steeple of shawl and gem, keeps, like a short
shadow when the sun is high, his excellency's secretary,
a dwarfishly small man, dressed also in cashmere
and calpack, and of a most ill-favored and bow-stringish
countenance and mien. The master and man seem
chosen for contrast, the countenance of the ambassador
expressing nothing but serene good nature. The
ambassador talks, too, and the secretary is dumb.

T— H— stood bolt upright against a mirror-door,
looking like two T— H—s trying to see
which was taller. The one with his face to me looked
like the incarnation of the John Bull newspaper, for
which expression he was indebted to a very hearty
face, and a very round subject for a buttoned-up coat;
while the H— with his back to me looked like an
author, for which he was indebted to an exclusive view
of his cranium. I dare say Mr. H— would agree
with me that he was seen, on the whole, at a most enviable
advantage. It is so seldom we look, beyond the
man, at the author.

I have rarely seen a greater contrast in person and
expression than between H— and B—, who stood
near him. Both were talking to ladies—one bald,
burly, upright, and with a face of immovable gravity,
the other slight, with a profusion of curling hair, restless
in his movements, and of a countenance which
lights up with a sudden inward illumination. H—'s
partner in the conversation looked into his face with a
ready-prepared smile for what he was going to say,
B—'s listened with an interest complete, but without
effort. H— was suffering from what I think is the
common curse of a reputation for wit—the expectation
of the listener had outrun the performance.

H— B—, whose diplomatic promotion goes on
much faster than can be pleasing to “Lady Cheveley,”

has just received his appointment to Paris—the object
of his first wishes. He stood near his brother, talking
to a very beautiful and celebrated woman, and I
thought, spite of her ladyship's unflattering description,
I had seldom seen a more intellectual face, or a
more gentlemanly and elegant exterior.

Late in the evening came in his royal highness the
duke of C—, and I wondered, as I had done many
times before, when in company with one of these royal
brothers, at the uncomfortable etiquette so laboriously
observed toward them. Wherever he moved in the
crowded rooms, everybody rose and stood silent, and
by giving way much more than for any one else, left
a perpetual circular space around him, in which, of
course, his conversation had the effect of a lecture to
a listening audience. A more embarrassed manner
and a more hesitating mode of speech than the duke's,
I can not conceive. He is evidently gêné to the last
degree with this burdensome deference; and one
would think that in the society of highly-cultivated
and aristocratic persons, such as were present, he
would be delighted to put his highness into his pocket
when the footman leaves him at the door, and hear no
more of it till he goes again to his carriage. There
was great curiosity to know whether the duke would
think it etiquetical to speak to the Persian, as in consequence
of the difference between the shah and the
British envoy the tall minister is not received at the
court of St. James. Lady S— introduced them,
however, and then the duke again must have felt his
rank nothing less than a nuisance. It is awkward
enough, at any time, to converse with a foreigner who
has not forty English words in his vocabulary, but
what with the duke's hesitating and difficult utterance,
the silence and attention of the listening guests, and
the Persian's deference and complete inability to comprehend
a syllable, the scene was quite painful.

There was some of the most exquisite amateur singing
I ever heard after the company thinned off a little,
and the fashionable song of the day was sung by a
most beautiful woman in a way to move half the company
to tears. It is called “Ruth,” and is a kind of
recitative of the passage in Scripture, “Where thou
goest I will go,” &c.

I have driven in the park several days, admiring the
queen on horseback, and observing the changes in the
fashions of driving, equipages, &c., &c. Her majesty
seems to me to ride very securely and fearlessly,
though it is no wonder that in a country where everybody
rides, there should be bolder and better horsewomen.
Miss Quentin, one of the maids of honor,
said to be the best female equestrian in England,
“takes the courage out” of the queen's horse every
morning before the ride—so she is secured against one
class of accidents. I met the royal party yesterday in
full gallop near the centre of Rotten Row, and the two
grooms who ride ahead had brief time to do their work
of making the crowd of carriages give way. On came
the queen upon a dun-colored, highly-groomed horse,
with her prime minister on one side of her and Lord
Byron upon the other, her cortège of maids of honor
and ladies and lords in waiting checking their more
spirited horses, and preserving always a slight distance
between themselves and her majesty. Victoria's round
and plump figure looks extremely well in her dark-green
riding-dress, but I thought the man's hat unbecoming.
Her profile is not sufficiently good for
that trying style, and the cloth riding-cap is so much
prettier, that I wonder she does not remember that
“nice customs courtesy to great queens,” and wear
what suits her. She rode with her mouth open, and
looked exhilarated with the exercise. Lord Melbourne,
it struck me, was the only person in her party whose
face had not the constrained look of consciousness of
observation.

I observe that the “crack men” ride without martingals,
and that the best turnouts are driven without
a check-rein. The outstretched neck which is the
consequence, has a sort of Arab or blood look, probably
the object of the change; but the drooping head
when the horse is walking or standing seems to me
ugly and out of taste. All the new carriages are built
near the ground. The low park-phæton, light as a
child's plaything, and drawn by a pair of ponies, is the
fashionable equipage. I saw the prettiest thing conceivable
of this kind yesterday in the park—a lady
driving a pair of small cream-colored horses of great
beauty, with her two children in the phæton, and two
grooms behind mounted on cream-colored saddle-horses,
all four of the animals of the finest shape and
action. The new street cabs (precisely the old-fashioned
sedan-chair suspended between four wheels, a
foot from the ground) are imitated by private carriages,
and driven with two horses—ugly enough. The cabphæton,
is in great fashion, with either one or two
horses. The race of ponies is greatly improved since
I was in England. They are as well-shaped as the
large horse, with very fine coats and great spirit. The
children of the nobility go scampering through the
park upon them, looking like horsemen and horsewomen
seen through a reversed opera-glass. They
are scarce larger than a Newfoundland dog, but they
patter along with great speed. There is one fine lad
of about eight years, whose parents seem to have very
little care for his neck, and who, upon a fleet, milk-white,
long-tailed pony, is seen daily riding at a rate
of twelve miles an hour through the most crowded
streets, with a servant on a tall horse plying whip and
spur to keep up with him. The whole system has the
droll effect of a mixture of Lilliput and Brobdignag.

We met the king of Oude a few days since at a party,
and were honored by an invitation to dine with his
majesty at his house in the Regent's park. Yesterday
was the appointed day; and with the pleasant anticipation
of an oriental feast, we drove up at seven,
and were received by his turbaned ayahs, who took
shawl and hat with a reverential salaam, and introduced
us to the large drawing-room overlooking the park.
The king was not yet down; but in the corner sat
three parsees or fire-worshippers, guests like ourselves,
who in their long white linen robes, bronze faces, and
high caps, looked like anything but “diners-out” in
London. To our surprise they addressed us in excellent
English, and we were told afterward that they
were all learned men—facts not put down to the credit
of the Ghebirs in Lalla Rookh.

We were called out upon the balcony to look at a
balloon that was hovering over the park, and on stepping
back into the drawing-room, we found the company
all assembled, and our royal host alone wanting.
There were sixteen English ladies present, and five
white gentlemen beside myself. The Orient, however,
was well represented. In a corner, leaning silently
against a table, stood Prince Hussein Mirza, the
king's cousin, and a more romantic and captivating
specimen of Hindoo beauty could scarcely be imagined.
He was slender, tall, and of the clearest olive
complexion, his night-black hair falling over his
shoulders in profusion, and his large antelope eyes
fixed with calm and lustrous surprise upon the half-denuded
forms sitting in a circle before him. We
heard afterward that he has conceived a most uncontrollable
and unhappy passion for a high-born and
beautiful English girl whom he met in society, and
that it is with difficulty he is persuaded to come out
of his room. His dress was of shawls most gracefully
draped about him, and a cap of gold cloth was thrown
carelessly on the side of his head. Altogether he was
like a picture of the imagination.

A middle-aged stout man, ashy black, with Grecian

features, and a most determined and dignified expression
of mouth, sat between Lady — and Miss Porter,
and this was the wakeel or ambassador of the
prince of Sutara, by name Afzul Ali. He is in England
on business for his master, and if he does not succeed
it will be no fault of his under lip. His secretary,
Keeram Ali, stood behind him—the wakeel dressed in
shawls of bright scarlet, with a white cashmere turban,
and the scribe in darker stuffs of the same fashion.
Then there was the king's physician, a short, wiry,
merry-looking, quick-eyed Hindoo, with a sort of quizzical
angle in the pose of his turban: the high-priest,
also a most merry-looking Oriental, and Ali Acbar, a
Persian attaché. I think these were all the Asiatics.

The king entered in a few minutes, and made the
circuit of the room, shaking hands most cordially with
all his guests. He is a very royal-looking person indeed.
Perhaps you might call him too corpulent, if
his fine height (a little over six feet), and very fine
proportions, did not give his large size a character of
majesty. His chest is full and round, and his walk
erect and full of dignity. He has the Italian olive
complexion, with straight hair, and my own remark at
first seeing him was that of many others, “How like
a bronze cast of Napoleon!” The subsequent study
of his features remove this impression, however, for
he is a most “merry monarch,” and is seldom seen
without a smile. His dress was a mixture of oriental
and English fashions—a pair of baggy blue pantaloons,
bound around the waist with a rich shawl, a splendid
scarlet waistcoat buttoned close over his spacious
chest, and a robe of very fine snuff-colored cloth something
like a loose dressing-gown without a collar. A
cap of silver cloth, and a brilliant blue satin cravat
completed his costume, unless in his covering should
be reckoned an enormous turquoise ring, which almost
entirely concealed one of his fingers.

Ekbal-ood-Dowlah, Nawaub of Oude (his name and
title), is at present appealing to the English against
his uncle, who usurps his throne by the aid and countenance
of the East Indian company. The Mohammedan
law, as I understand, empowers a king to choose
his successor from his children without reference
to primogeniture, and the usurper, though an elder
brother, having been imbecile from his youth, Ekbal's
father was selected by the then king of Oude to succeed
him. The question having been referred to
Lord Wellesley, however, then governor of India, he
decided that the English law of primogeniture should
prevail, or in other words (as the king's friends say)
preferred to have for the king of a subject province an
imbecile who would give him no trouble. So slipped
from the Nawaub's hands a pretty kingdom of six
millions of faithful Mohammedans! I believe this is
the “short” of the story. I wonder (we are reproached
so very often by the English for our treatment of
the Indians) whether a counter-chapter of “expedient
wrong” might not be made out from the history of the
Indians under British government in the east?

Dinner was announced with a Hindostance salaam,
and the king gave his arm to Lady —. The rest
of us “stood not upon the order of our going,” and
I found myself seated at table between my wife and a
Polish countess, some half dozen removes from the
Nawaub's right hand. His highness commenced helping
those about him most plentifully from a large
pillau, talking all the while most merrily in broken
English, or resorting to Hindostance and his interpreter
whenever his tongue got into trouble. With
the exception of one or two English joints, all the
dishes were prepared with rice or saffron, and (wine
being forbidden by the Mahommedan law) iced water
was served round from Indian coolers freely. For
one, I would have compounded for a bottle of wine
by taking the sin of the entire party on my soul, for,
what with the exhaustion of a long London day, and
the cloying quality of the Nawaub's rich dishes, I
began to be sorry I had not brought a flask in my
pocket. His majesty's spirits seemed to require no
aid from wine. He talked constantly, and shrewdly,
and well. He impresses every one with a high
estimate of his talents, though a more complete and
undisguised child of nature I never saw. Good sense,
with good humor, frankness, and simplicity, seem to
be his leading qualities.

We were obliged to take our leave early after dinner,
having other engagements for the evening, but
while coffee was serving, the Hindostance cook, a
funny little old man, came in to receive the compliments
of the company upon his dinner, and to play
and dance for his majesty's amusement. He had at
his back a long Indian drum, which he called his
“tum tum,” and playing himself an accompaniment
upon this, he sang two or three comic songs in his
own language to a sort of wild yet merry air, very
much to the delight of all the orientals. Singer,
dancer, musician, and cook, the king certainly has a
jewel of a servant in him.

One moment bowing ourselves out from the presence
of a Hindoo king, and the next beset by an Irishman
with “Heaven bless your honor for the sixpence
you mean to give me!” what contrasts strike the traveller
in this great heart of the world! Paddy lighted
us to our carriage with his lantern, implored the coachman
to “dhrive carefully,” and then stood with his
head bent to catch the sound upon the pavement of
another sixpence for his tenderness. Wherever there
is a party in the fashionable quarters of London, these
Tantaluses flit about with their lanterns—for ever at
the door of pleasure, yet shivering and starving for
ever in their rags. What a life!

One of the most rational and agreeable of the fashionable
resorts in London is Kensington Gardens, on the
days when the royal band plays from five to seven
near the bridge of the Serpentine. Some twenty of
the best instrumental musicians of London station
themselves under the trees in this superb park (for
though called “gardens,” it is but a park with old
trees and greensward), and up and down the fine silky
carpet stroll hundreds of the fashionables of “May
fair and Belgrave square,” listening a little perhaps,
and chattering a great deal certainly. It is a good
opportunity to see what celebrated beauties look like
by daylight; and, truth to say, one comes to the conclusion
there, that candle-light is your true kalydor.
It is very ingeniously contrived by the grand chamberlain
that this public music should be played in a far
away corner of the park, inaccessible except by those
who have carriages. The plebeians, for whose use
and pleasure it seems at first sight graciously contrived,
are pretty well sifted by the two miles walk,
and a very aristocratic and well-dressed assembly indeed
is that of Kensington gardens.

Near the usual stand of the musicians runs a bridle-path
for horsemen, separated from the greensward by
a sunk fence, and as I was standing by the edge of the
ditch yesterday, the queen rode by, pulling up to listen
to the music, and smile right and left to the crowd of
cavaliers drawn up in the road. I pulled off my hat
and stood uncovered instinctively, but looking around
to see how the promenaders received her, I found to
my surprise that with the exception of a bald-headed
nobleman whem I chanced to know, the Yankee stood
alone in his homage to her.

I thought before I left America that I should find
the stamp of the new reign on manners, usages, conversation,
and all the outer form and pressure of society.
One can not fancy England under Elizabeth to
have struck a stranger as did England under James.
We think of Shakspere, Leicester, and Raleigh, and
conclude that under a female sovereign chivalry at

least shines brighter, and poetry should. A good
deal to my disappointment, I have looked in vain for
even a symptom of the queen's influence on anything.
She is as completely isolated in England, as entirely
above and out of the reach of the sympathies and
common thoughts of society, as the gilt grasshopper
on the steeple. At the opera and play, half the
audience do not even know she is there; in the park,
she rides among the throng with scarcely a head
turned to look after her; she is unthought of, and
almost unmentioned at balls, routes, and soirées; in
short, the throne seems to stand on glass—with no one
conductor to connect it with the electric chain of human
hearts and sympathies.