University of Virginia Library

139. LETTER CXXXIX.

England would be a more pleasant country to
travel in if one's feelings took root with less facility.
In the continental countries, the local ties are those of
the mind and the senses. In England they are those
of the affections. One wanders from Italy to Greece,
and from Athens to Ephesus, and returns and departs
again; and, as he gets on shipboard, or mounts his
horse or his camel, it is with a sigh over some picture
or statue left behind, some temple or waterfall—perhaps
some cook or vintage. He makes his last visit
to the Fount of Egeria, or the Venus of the Tribune
—to the Caryatides of the Parthenon, or the Cascatelles
of Tivoli—or pathetically calls for his last bottle
of untransferable lachryma christi, or his last cotelettes
provençales. He has “five hundred friends” like
other people, and has made the usual continental inti
macies—but his valet-de-place takes charge of his
adieus—(distributes his “p. p. c.'s” for a penny each),
and he forgets and is forgotten by those he leaves behind,
ere his passport is recorded at the gates. In all
these countries, it is only as a resident or a native that
you are treated with kindness or admitted to the penetralia
of domestic life. You are a bird of passage,
expected to contribute a feather for every nest, but
welcomed to none. In England this same disqualification
becomes a claim. The name of a stranger
opens the private house, sets you the chair of honor,
prepares your bed, and makes everything that contributes
to your comfort or pleasure temporarily your
own. And when you take your departure, your host
has informed himself of your route, and provided you
with letters to his friends, and you may go through
the country from end to end, and experience everywhere
the same confiding and liberal hospitality. Every
foreigner who has come well introduced to England,
knows how unexaggerated is this picture.

I was put upon the road again by my kind friend,
and with a strong west wind coming off the Atlantic,
drove along within sound of the waves, on the road to
Liverpool. It was a mild wind, and came with a welcome—for
it was freighted with thoughts of home.
Goëthe says, we are never separated from our friends
as long as the streams run down from them to us.
Certain it is that distance seems less that is measured
by waters and winds. America seemed near, with the
ocean at my feet and only its waste paths between. I
sent my heart over (against wind and tide) with a blessing
and a prayer.

There are good inns, I believe, at Liverpool, but
the coach put me down at the dirtiest and worst specimen
of a public house that I have encountered in
England. As I was to stay but a night, I overcame
the prejudice of the first coup d'œil, and made the
best of a dinner in the coffeeroom. It was crowded
with people, principally merchants, I presumed, and
the dinner-hour having barely passed, most of them
were sitting over their wine or toddy at the small tables,
discussing prices or reading the newspapers.
Near me were two young men, whose faces I thought
familiar to me, and with a second look I resolved them
into two of my countrymen, who, I found out
presently by their conversation, were eating their first
dinner in England. They were gentlemanlike young
men, of good education, and I pleased myself with
looking about and imagining the comparison they
would draw, with their own country fresh in their
recollection, between it and this. I could not help
feeling how erroneous in this case would be a first impression.
The gloomy coffeeroom, the hurried and
uncivil waiters, the atrocious cookery, the bad air,
greasy tables, filthy carpet, and unsocial company—
and this one of the most popular and crowded inns of
the first commercial town in England! My neighbors
themselves, too, afforded me some little speculation.
They were a fair specimen of the young men of our
country, and after several years' exclusive conversance
with other nations, I was curious to compare an untravelled
American with the Europeans around me.
I was struck with the exceeding ambitiousness of their
style of conversation. Dr. Pangloss himself would
have given them a degree. They called nothing by
its week-day name, and avoided with singular pertinacity
exactly that upon which the modern English are
as pertinaciously bent — a concise homeliness of
phraseology. They were dressed much better than
the people about them (who were apparently in the
same sphere of life), and had on the whole a superior
air—owing possibly to the custom prevalent in America
of giving young men a university education before
they enter into trade. Like myself, too, they had not
yet learned the English accomplishment of total unconsciousness
of the presence of others. When not

conversing they did not study profoundly the grain of
the mahogany, nor gaze with solemn earnestness into
the bottom of their wine-glasses, nor peruse, with the
absorbed fixedness of Belshazzar, the figures on the
wall. They looked about them with undisguised curiosity,
ordered a great deal more wine than they
wanted (very American, that!) and were totally without
the self-complacent, self-amused, sober-felicity air
which John Bull assumes after his cheese in a coffee-room.

I did not introduce myself to my countrymen, for
an American is the last person in the world with whom
one should depart from the ordinary rules of society.
Having no fixed rank either in their own or a foreign
country, they construe all uncommon civility into
either a freedom, or a desire to patronise, and the last
is the unpardonable sin. They called after awhile for
a “mint julep” (unknown in England), for slippers,
(rather an unusual call also—gentlemen usually wearing
their own), and, seemed very much surprised on
asking for candles, at being ushered to bed by the
chambermaid.

I passed the next morning in walking about Liverpool.
It is singularly like New York in its general
air, and quite like it in the character of its population.
I presume I must have met many of my countrymen,
for there were some who passed me in the street, whom
I could have sworn to. In a walk to the American
consul's (to whose polite kindness I, as well as all my
compatriots, have been very much indebted), I was
lucky enough to see a New York packet drive into
the harbor under full sail—as gallant a sight as you
would wish to see. It was blowing rather stiffly, and
she ran up to her anchorage like a bird, and taking in
her canvass with the speed of a man-of-war, was lying
in a few moments with her head to the tide, as neat
and as tranquil as if she had slept for the last month
at her moorings. I could feel in the air that came
ashore from her, that I had letters on board.

Anxious to get on to Cheshire, where, as they say
of the mails, I had been due some days, and very
anxious to get rid of the perfume of beer, beefsteaks,
and bad soup, with which I had become impregnated
at the inn, I got embarked in an omnibus at noon, and
was taken to the railway. I was just in time, and
down we dived into the long tunnel, emerging from
the darkness at a pace that made my hair sensibly
tighten and hold on with apprehension. Thirty miles
in the hour is pleasant going when one is a little accustomed
to it. It gives one such a contempt for
time and distance! The whizzing past of the return
trains, going in the other direction with the same velocity,
making you recoil in one second, and a mile
off the next—was the only thing which, after a few
minutes, I did not take to very kindly. There were
near a hundred passengers, most of them precisely the
class of English which we see in our country—the
fags of Manchester and Birmingham—a class, I dare
say, honest and worthy, but much more to my taste
in their own country than mine.

I must confess to a want of curiosity touching spinning-jennies.
Half an hour of Manchester contented
me, yet in that half hour I was cheated to the amount
of four-and-six-pence—unless the experience was
worth the money. Under a sovereign I think it not
worth while to lose one's temper, and I contented myself
with telling the man (he was a coach proprietor)
as I paid him the second time for the same thing in
the course of twenty minutes, that the time and trouble
he must have had in bronzing his face to that degree
of impudence gave him some title to the money.
I saw some pretty scenery between Manchester and
my destination, and having calculated my time very
accurately, I was set down at the gates of — Hall,
as the dressing-bell for dinner came over the park
upon the wind. I found another English welcome,
passed three weeks amid the pleasures of English
country life, departed as before with regrets, and without
much more incident or adventure reached London
on the first of November, and established myself for
the winter.