University of Virginia Library

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL.

1. CHAPTER I.
LONDON.

There is an inborn and inbred distrust of “foreigners”
in England—continental foreigners, I should say
—which keeps the current of French and Italian society
as distinct amid the sea of London, as the blue
Rhone in Lake Leman. The word “foreigner,” in
England, conveys exclusively the idea of a dark-complexioned
and whiskered individual, in a frogged coat
and distressed circumstances; and to introduce a
smooth-cheeked, plainly-dressed, quiet-looking person
by that name, would strike any circle of ladies and
gentlemen as a palpable misnomer. The violent and
unhappy contrast between the Parisian's mode of life
in London and in Paris, makes it very certain that few
of those bien nés et convenablement riches will live in
London for pleasure; and then the flood of political
émigrés, for the last half century, has monopolised
hair-dressing, &c., &c., to such a degree, that the
word Frenchman is synonymous in English ears with
barber and dancing-master. If a dark gentleman,
wearing either whisker or mustache, chance of offend
John Bull in the street, the first opprobrious language
he hears—the strongest that occurs to the fellow's
mind—is, “Get out, you — Frenchman!”

All this, malgré the rage for foreign lions in London
society. A well-introduced foreigner gets easily into
this, and while he keeps his cabriolet and confines
himself to frequenting soirées and accepting invitations
to dine, he will never suspect that he is not on an
equal footing with any “milor” in London. If he
wishes to be disenchanted, he has only to change his
lodgings from Long's to Great Russell street; or (bitterer
and readier trial) to propose marriage to the
honorable Augusta or Lady Fanny.

Everybody who knows the society of Paris, knows
something of a handsome and very elegant young
baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small
fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived
to go on very swimmingly as an adorable roué and
vaurien till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the
first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the
politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to
Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty
pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these
cherished articles brought twice their original value,
saved his loyauté, and set him up in fans and monkeys
at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for
the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before
his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for
him, he galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of
whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious
histories of his adventures during the ages he had
been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous
obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning
to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable
vehicle, a suite of rooms à l'Africaine, and a mystery,
preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all
Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring astonishment

for a year. Among the crowd of his worshippers,
not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired
and glowing beauties who assemble at the levées of
their ambassador in the Rue St. Honoré, and upon
whom le beau Adolphe had looked as pretty savages,
whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent
might be tolerated one evening in the week—vu le
souper!

Eclipses will arrive as calculated by insignificant
astronomers, however, and debts will become due as
presumed by vulgar tradesmen. Le beau Adolphe
began to see another crisis, and betook himself to his
old advisers, who were desolés to the last degree; but
there was a new government, and the blood of the
Faubourg was at a discount. No embassies were to
be had for nothing. With a deep sigh, and a gentle
tone, to spare his feelings as much as possible, his
friend ventures to suggest to him that it will be necessary
to sacrifice himself.

“Ahi! mais comment!”

“Marry one of these bête Anglaises, who drink
you up with their great blue eyes, and are made of
gold!”

Adolphe buried his face in his gold-fringed oriental
pocket-handkerchief; but when the first agony was
passed, his resolution was taken, and he determined to
go to England. The first beautiful creature he should
see, whose funds were enormous and well-invested,
should bear away from all the love, rank, and poverty
of France, the perfumed hand he looked upon.

A flourishing letter, written in a small, cramped
hand, but with a seal on whose breadth of wax and
blazon all the united heraldry of France was interwoven,
arrived, through the ambassador's despatch
box, to the address of Miladi —, Belgrave square,
announcing, in full, that le beau Adolphe was coming
to London to marry the richest heiress in good society;
and as Paris could not spare him more than a
week, he wished those who had daughters to marry,
answering the description, to be bien prévenus of his
visit and errand. With the letter came a compend of
his genealogy, from the man who spoke French in the
confusion of Babel to le dit Baron Adolphe.

To London came the valet of le beau baron, two
days before his master, bringing his slippers and dressing-gown
to be aired after their sea-voyage across the
channel. To London followed the irresistible youth,
cursing, in the politest French, the necessity which
subtracted a week from a life measured with such
“diamond sparks” as his own in Paris. He sat himself
down in his hotel, sent his man Porphyre with his
card to every noble and rich house, whose barbarian
tenants he had ever seen in the Champs Elysées, and
waited the result. Invitations from fair ladies, who
remembered him as the man the French belles were
mad about, and from literary ladies, who wanted his
whiskers and black eyes to give their soirées the necessary
foreign complexion, flowed in on all sides, and
Monsieur Adolphe selected his most mignon cane and
his happiest design in a stocking, and “rendered himself”
through the rain like a martyr.

No offers of marriage the first evening!

None the second!!

None the third!!!

Le beau Adolphe began to think either that English
papas did not propose their daughters to people as in
France; or, perhaps, that the lady whom he had commissioned
to circulate his wishes had not sufficiently
advertised him. She had, however.

He took advice, and found it would be necessary to
take the first step himself. This was disagreeable,
and he said to himself, “Le jeu ne vaut pas le chandelle;”
but his youth was passing, and his English
fortune was at interest.

He went to Almack's and proposed to the first
authenticated fortune that accepted his hand for a
waltz. The young lady first laughed, and then told
her mother, who told her son, who thought it an insult,
and called out le beau Adolphe, very much to the
astonishment of himself and Porphyre. The thing
was explained, and the baron looked about the next
day for one pas si bête. Found a young lady with
half a million sterling, proposed in a morning call,
and was obliged to ring for assistance, his intended
having gone into convulsions with laughing at him.
The story by this time had got pretty well distributed
through the different strata of London society; and
when le beau Adolphe convinced that he would not
succeed with the noble heiresses of Belgrave square,
condescended, in his extremity, to send his heart by
his valet to a rich little vulgarian, who “never had a
grandfather,” and lived in Harley street, he narrowly
escaped being prosecuted for a nuisance, and, Paris
being now in the possession of the enemy, he buried
his sorrows in Belgium. After a short exile his friends
procured him a vice-consulate in some port in the
north sea, and there probably at this moment he sorrowfully
vegetates.

This is not a story founded upon fact, but literally
true. Many of the circumstances came under my own
observation; and the whole thus affords a laughable
example of the esteem in which what an English fox-hunter
would call a “trashy Frenchman” is held in
England, as well as of the travestie produced by transplanting
the usages of one country to another.

Ridiculous as any intimate mixture of English and
French ideas and persons seems to be in London, the
foreign society of itself in that capital is exceedingly
spiritual and agreeable. The various European embassies
and their attachés, with their distinguished
travellers, from their several countries, accidentally
belonging to each; the French and Italians, married
to English noblemen and gentry, and living in London,
and the English themselves, who have become
cosmopolite by residence in other countries, form a
very large society in which mix, on perfectly equal
terms, the first singers of the opera, and foreign musicians
and artists generally. This last circumstance
gives a peculiar charm to these reunions, though it
imparts a pride and haughty bearing to the prima
donna and her fraternity, which is, at least, sometimes
very inconvenient to themselves. The remark recalls
to my mind a scene I once witnessed in London,
which will illustrate the feeling better than an essay
upon it.

I was at one of those private concerts given at an
enormous expense during the opera season, at which
“assisted” Julia Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, Tamburini,
and Ivanhoff. Grisi came in the carriage of a foreign
lady of rank, who had dined with her, and she walked
into the room looking like an empress. She was
dressed in the plainest white, with her glossy hair put
smooth from her brow, and a single white japonica
dropped over one of her temples. The lady who
brought her chaperoned her during the evening, as if
she had been her daughter, and under the excitement
of her own table and the kindness of her friends, she
sung with a rapture and a freshet of glory (if one may
borrow a word from the Mississippi) which set all
hearts on fire. She surpassed her most applauded
hour on the stage—for it was worth her while. The
audience was composed, almost exclusively, of those
who are not only cultivated judges, but who sometimes
repay delight with a present of diamonds.

Lablache shook the house to its foundations in his
turn; Rubini ran through his miraculous compass
with the ease, truth, and melody, for which his singing
is unsurpassed; Tamburini poured his rich and even
fulness on the ear, and Russian Ivanhoff, the one
southern singing-bird who has come out of the north,
wire-drew his fine and spiritual notes, till they who had
been flushed, and tearful, and silent, when the others

had sang, drowned his voice in the poorer applause
of exclamation and surprise.

The concert was over by twelve, the gold and silver
paper bills of the performance were turned into fans, and
every one was waiting till supper should be announced
—the prima donna still sitting by her friend, but surrounded
by foreign attachés, and in the highest elation
at her own success. The doors of an inner suite of
rooms were thrown open at last, and Grisi's cordon of
admirers prepared to follow her in and wait on her at
supper. At this moment, one of the powdered menials
of the house stepped up and informed her very respectfully
that supper was prepared in a separate room for
the singers!

Medea, in her most tragic hour, never stood so
absolutely the picture of hate as did Grisi for a single
instant, in the centre of that aristocratic crowd. Her
chest swelled and rose, her lips closed over her snowy
teeth, and compressed till the blood left them, and, for
myself, I looked unconsciously to see where she would
strike. I knew, then, that there was more than fancy
—there was nature and capability of the real—in the
imaginary passions she plays so powerfully. A laugh
of extreme amusement at the scene from the highborn
woman who had accompanied her, suddenly
turned her humor, and she stopped in the midst of a
muttering of Italian, in which I could distinguish
only the terminations, and, with a sort of theatrical
quickness of transition, joined heartily in her mirth.
It was immediately proposed by this lady, however,
that herself and their particular circle should join the
insulted prima donna at the lower table, and they succeeded
by this manœuvre in retaining Rubini and the
others, who were leaving the house in a most unequivocal
Italian fury.

I had been fortunate enough to be included in the
invitation, and, with one or two foreign diplomatic
men, I followed Grisi and her amused friend to a
small room on a lower floor, that seemed to be the
housekeeper's parlor. Here supper was set for six
(including the man who had played the piano), and
on the side-table stood every variety of wine and fruit,
and there was nothing in the supper, at least, to make
us regret the table we had left. With a most imperative
gesture and rather an amusing attempt at
English, Grisi ordered the servants out of the room,
and locked the door, and from that moment the conversation
commenced and continued in their own
musical, passionate, and energetic Italian. My long
residence in that country had made me at home in it;
every one present spoke it fluently; and I had an
opportunity I might never have again, of seeing with
what abandonment these children of the sun throw
aside rank and distinction (yet without forgetting it),
and join with those who are their superiors in every
circumstance of life, in the gayeties of a chance hour.

Out of their own country these singers would probably
acknowledge no higher rank than that of the kind
and gifted lady who was their guest; yet, with the
briefest apology at finding the room too cold after the
heat of the concert, they put on their cloaks and hats
as a safeguard to their lungs (more valuable to them
than to others); and as most of the cloaks were the
worse for travel, and the hats opera-hats with two
corners, the grotesque contrast with the diamonds of
one lady, and the radiant beauty of the other, may
easily be imagined.

Singing should be hungry work, by the knife and
fork they played; and between the excavations of
truffle pies, and the bumpers of champagne and burgundy,
the words were few. Lablache appeared to be
an established droll, and every syllable he found time
to utter was received with the most unbounded laughter.
Rubini could not recover from the slight he conceived
put upon him and his profession by the separate table;
and he continually reminded Grisi, who by this time
had quite recovered her good humor, that, the night
before, supping at Devonshire house, the duke of
Wellington had held her gloves on one side, while his
grace, their host attended to her on the other.

“E vero!” said Ivanhoff, with a look of modest admiration
at the prima donna.

“E vero, e bravo!” cried Tamburini, with his sepulchral-talking
tone, much deeper than his singing.

“Si, si, si, bravo!” echoed all the company; and
the haughty and happy actress nodded all round with
a radiant smile, and repeated, in her silver tones,
“Grazie! cari amici! grazie!”

As the servants had been turned out, the removalof
the first course was managed in pic-nic fashion;
and when the fruit and fresh bottles of wine were set
upon the table by the attachés, and younger gentlemen,
the health of the princess who honored them by
her presence was proposed in that language, which, it
seems to me, is more capable than all others of expressing
affectionate and respectful devotion. All uncovered
and stood up, and Grisi, with tears in her eyes,
kissed the hand of her benefactress and friend, and
drank her health in silence.

It is a polite and common accomplishment in Italy
to improvise in verse, and the lady I speak of is well
known among her immediate friends for a singular
facility in this beautiful art. She reflected a moment
or two with the moisture in her eyes, and then commenced,
low and soft, a poem, of which it would be
difficult, nay impossible, to convey, in English, an
idea of its music and beauty. It took us back to Italy,
to its heavenly climate, its glorious arts, its beauty and
its ruins, and concluded with a line of which I remember
the sentiment to have been, “out of Italy every
land is exile!”

The glasses were raised as she ceased, and every
one repeated after her, “Fuori d'Italia tutto e esilio!”

“Ma!” cried out the fat Lablache, holding up his
glass of champagne, and looking through it with one
eye, “siamo ben esiliati qua!” and, with a word of
drollery, the party recovered its gayer tone, and the
humor and wit flowed on brilliantly as before.

The house had long been still, and the last carriage
belonging to the company above stairs had rolled from
the door, when Grisi suddenly remembered a bird that
she had lately bought, of which she proceeded to give
us a description, that probably penetrated to every
corner of the silent mansion. It was a mocking-bird,
that had been kept two years in the opera-house, and
between rehearsal and performance had learned parts
of everything it had overheard. It was the property
of the woman who took care of the wardrobes. Grisi
had accidentally seen it, and immediately purchased
it for two guineas. How much of embellishment there
was in her imitations of her treasure I do not know;
but certainly the whole power of her wondrous voice,
passion, and knowledge of music, seemed drunk up at
once in the wild, various, difficult, and rapid mixture
of the capricious melody she undertook. First came,
without the passage which it usually terminates, the
long, throat-down, gurgling, water-toned trill, in which
Rubini (but for the bird and its mistress, it seemed to
me) would have been inimitable: then, right upon it,
as if it were the beginning of a bar, and in the most
unbreathing continuity, followed a brilliant passage
from the Barber of Seville, run into the passionate
prayer of Anna Bolena in her madness, and followed
by the air of “Suoni la tromba intrepida,” the tremendous
duet in the Puritani, between Tamburini and
Lablache. Up to the sky, and down to the earth
again—away with a note of the wildest gladness, and
back upon a note of the most touching melancholy—
if the bird but half equals the imitation of his mistress,
he were worth the jewel in a sultan's turban.

“Giulia!” “Giulietta!” “Giuliettina!” cried out
one and another, as she ceased, expressing in their

Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had inspired
by her incomparable execution.

The stillness of the house in the occasional pauses
of conversation reminded the gay party, at last, that it
was wearing late. The door was unlocked, and the
half-dozen sleepy footmen hanging about the hall were
despatched for the cloaks and carriages; the drowsy
porter was roused from his deep leathern dormeuse,
and opened the door—and broad upon the street lay
the cold gray light of a summer's morning. I declined
an offer to be set down by a friend's cab, and strolled
off to Hyde Park to surprise myself with a sunrise;
balancing the silent rebuke in the fresh and healthy
countenances of early laborers going to their toil,
against the effervescence of a champagne hour, which,
since such come so rarely, may come, for me, with
what untimeliness they please.

2. CHAPTER II.
THE STREETS OF LONDON.

It has been said, that “few men know how to take
a walk.” In London it requires some experience to
know where to take a walk. The taste of the perambulator,
the hour of the day, and the season of the
year, would each affect materially the decision of the
question.

If you are up early—I mean early for London—say
ten o'clock—we would start from your hotel in Bond
street, and hastening through Regent street and the
Quadrant (deserts at that hour), strike into the zigzag
of thronged alleys, cutting traversely from Coventry
street to Covent Garden. The horses on the cabstand
in the Haymarket “are at this hour asleep.”
The late supper-eaters at Dubourg's and the Café de
l'Europe were the last infliction upon their galled
withers, and while dissipation slumbers they may find
an hour to hang their heads upon the bit, and forget
gall and spavin in the sunshiny drowse of morning.
The cabman, too, nods on his perch outside, careless
of the custom of “them as pays only their fare,” and
quite sure not to get “a gemman to drive” at that unseasonable
hour. The “waterman” (called a “water
man,” as he will tell you, “because he gives hay to
the 'orses”) leans against the gas-lamp at the corner,
looking with a vacant indifference of habit at the
splendid coach with its four blood bays just starting from
the Brighton coach-office in the Crescent. The side-walk
of Coventry street, usually radiant with the
flaunting dresses of the fail and vicious, is now sober
with the dull habiliments of the early-stirring and the
poor. The town (for this is town, not city) beats its
more honest pulse. Industry alone is abroad.

Rupert street on the left is the haunt of shabby-genteel
poverty. To its low-doored chop-houses steal
the more needy loungers of Regent street, and in confined
and greasy, but separate and exclusive boxes,
they cat their mutton-chop and potato, unseen of their
gayer acquaintances. Here comes the half-pay officer,
whose half-pay is halved or quartered with wife
and children, to drink his solitary half-pint of sherry,
and over a niggardly portion of soup and vegetables,
recall, as well as he may in imagination, the gay dinners
at mess, and the companions now grown cold—in
death or worldliness! Here comes the sharper out
of luck, the debtor newly out of prison. And here
comes many a “gay fellow about town,” who will dine
to-morrow, or may have dined yesterday, at a table of
unsparing luxury, but who now turns up Rupert street
at seven, cursing the mischance that draws upon his
own slender pocket for the dinner of to-day. Here
are found the watchful host and the suspicious waiter
—the closely-measured wine, and the more closely-
measured attention—the silent and shrinking company,
the close-drawn curtain, the suppressed call for
the bill, the lingering at the table of those who value
the retreat and the shelter to recover from the embarrassing
recognition and the objectless saunter through
the streets. The ruin, the distress, the despair, that
wait so closely upon the heels of fashion, pass here
with their victims. It is the last step within the
bounds of respectability. They still live “at the West
end,” while they dine in Rupert street. They may
still linger in the park, or stroll in Bond street, till
their better-fledged friends flit to dinner at the clubs,
and within a stone's throw of the luxurious tables and
the gay mirth they so bitterly remember, sit down to
an ill-dressed meal, and satisfy the calls of hunger in
silence. Ah, the outskirts of the bright places in life
are darker for the light that shines so near them!
How much sweeter is the coarsest meal shared with
the savage in the wilderness, than the comparative
comfort of cooked meats and wine in a neighborhood
like this!

Come through this narrow lane into Leicester
square. You cross here the first limit of the fashionable
quarter. The Sablonière hotel is in this square;
but you may not give it as your address unless you
are a foreigner. This is the home of that most miserable
fish out of water—a Frenchman in London.
A bad French hotel, and two or three execrable
French restaurants, make this spot of the metropolis
the most habitable to the exiled habitué of the Palais
Royal. Here he gets a mocking imitation of what, in
any possible degree, is better than the sacré biftek, or
the half-raw mutton-chop and barbarous boiled potato!
Here he comes forth, if the sunshine perchance for
one hour at noon, and paces up and down on the side-walk,
trying to get the better of his bile and his bad
breakfast. Here waits for him at three, the shabby,
but most expensive remise cab, hired by the day for
as much as would support him a month in Paris.
Leicester square is the place for conjurors, bird-fanciers,
showmen, and generally for every foreign
novelty in the line of nostrums and marvels. If there
is a dwarf in London, or a child with two heads, or a
learned pig, you will see one or all in that building, so
radiant with placards, and so thronged with beggars.

Come on through Cranbourne alley. Old clothes,
second-hand stays, idem shawls, capes, collars, and
ladies' articles of ornamental wear generally: cheap
straw-bonnets, old books, gingerbread, and stationery!
Look at this once-expensive and finely-worked muslin
cape! What fair shoulders did it adorn when these
dingy flowers were new—when this fine lace-edging
bounded some heaving bosom, perhaps, like frost-work
on the edge of a snow-drift. It has been the property
of some minion of elegance and wealth, vicious or virtuous,
and by what hard necessity came it here? Ten
to one, could it speak, its history would keep us standing
at this shop window, indifferent alike to the curious
glances of these passing damsels and the gentle
eloquence of the Jew on the other side, who pays us
the unflattering compliment of suggesting an improvement
in our toilet by the purchase of the half-worn
habiliments he exposes.

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of
Venice. The half-daylight between the high and
overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and
occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of
hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the
absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the
damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to
those close passages in the rear of the canals between
St. Mark's and the Rialto. Then I like studying a
pawnbroker's window, and I like ferreting in the old
book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in
humility for an author to see what he can be bought
for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who

has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you
for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may
have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the
shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the
terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy
Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity
with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

The labyrinth of alleys between this and Covent
Garden, are redolent of poverty and pot-houses. In
crossing St. Martin's lane, life appears to have become
suddenly a struggle and a calamity. Turbulent
and dirty women are everywhere visible through the
open windows: the half-naked children at the doors
look already care-worn and incapable of a smile; and
the men throng the gin-shops, bloated, surly, and repulsive.
Hurry through this leprous spot in the vast
body of London, and let us emerge in the Strand.

You would think London Strand the main artery
of the world. I suppose there is no thoroughfare on
the face of the earth where the stream of human life
runs with a tide so overwhelming. In any other
street in the world you catch the eye of the passer-by.
In the Strand, no man sees another except as a solid
body, whose contact is to be avoided. You are safe
nowhere on the pavement without all the vigilance of
your senses. Omnibuses and cabs, drays, carriages,
wheelbarrows, and porters, beset the street. Newspaper-hawkers,
pickpockets, shop-boys, coal-heavers,
and a perpetual and selfish crowd dispute the sidewalk.
If you venture to look at a print in a shop-window,
you arrest the tide of passengers, who immediately
walk over you; and, if you stop to speak with a friend,
who by chance has run his nose against yours rather
than another man's, you impede the way, and are
made to understand it by the force of jostling. If you
would get into an omnibus you are quarrelled for by
half-a-dozen who catch your eye at once, and after
using all your physical strength and most of your discrimination,
you are most probably embarked in the
wrong one, and are going at ten miles the hour to
Blackwell, when you are bound to Islington. A
Londoner passes his life in learning the most adroit
mode of threading a crowd, and escaping compulsory
journeys in cabs and omnibuses; and dine with any
man in that metropolis from twenty-five to sixty years
of age, and he will entertain you, from the soup to the
Curacoa, with his hair-breadth escapes and difficulties
with cads and coach-drivers.

3. CHAPTER III.
LONDON.

A Londoner, if met abroad, answers very vaguely
any questions you may be rash enough to put to him
about “the city.” Talk to him of “town,” and he
would rather miss seeing St. Peter's, than appear ignorant
of any person, thing, custom, or fashion, concerning
whom or which you might have a curiosity.
It is understood all over the world that the “city” of
London is that crowded, smoky, jostling, omnibus and
cab-haunted portion of the metropolis of England
which lies east of Temple Bar. A kind of debatable
country, consisting of the Strand, Covent Garden, and
Tottenham Court road, then intervenes, and west of
these lies what is called “the town.” A transit from
one to the other by an inhabitant of either is a matter
of some forethought and provision. If milord, in
Carlton Terrace, for example, finds it necessary to
visit his banker in Lombard street, he orders—not the
blood bay and the cane tilbury which he is wont to
drive in the morning—but the crop roadster in the
cab, with the night harness, and Poppet his tiger in
plain hat and gaiters. If the banker in Lombard
street, on the contrary, emerges from the twilight of
his counting-house to make a morning call on the
wife of some foreign correspondent, lodging at the
Clarendon, he steps into a Piccadilly omnibus, not in
the salt-and-pepper creations of his Cheapside tailor,
but (for he has an account with Stultz also for the
west-end business) in a claret-colored frock of the last
fashion at Crockford's, a fresh hat from New Bond
street, and (if he is young) a pair of cherished boots
from the Rue St. Honoré. He sits very clear of his
neighbors on the way, and, getting out at the crossing
at Farrance's, the pastry cook, steps in and indulges
in a soup, and then walks slowly past the clubs to his
rendezvous, at a pace that would ruin his credit irrevocably
if practised a mile to the eastward. The difference
between the two migrations is, simply, that
though the nobleman affects the plainness of the city;
he would not for the world be taken for a citizen;
while the junior partner of the house of Firkins and
Co. would feel unpleasantly surprised if he were not
supposed to be a member of the clubs, lounging to a
late breakfast.

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner,
practised with great nicety by all who frequent
both extremities of London. Nothing could be in
more violent contrast, for example, than the manner
of your banker when you dine with him at his country-house,
and the same person when you meet him
on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you
had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would
wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing
sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself
to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you
met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you
would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment,
how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave
of mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation,
be called a gentleman. And when you have
seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is
a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished
still more to see how completely he will sustain
both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a
way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning,
and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants,
completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon.
Two souls inhabit the banker's body, and each is apparently
sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early
coach turns the corner by St. Giles's, on its way to
the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of
the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the
same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly
inhabitants. Between those hours, look to
Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written
upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no
courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the
junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul's.
With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the
returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham
Court road, the angel of port wine and green
fields passes his finger across Firkins's brow, and
presto! the man is changed. The sight of a long
and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor's
pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he
criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting
past, says some very true things of the architecture of
the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the
end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous-looking
a fellow as you would meet on that side of
London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and
as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to
dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables,
which you are welcome to drive to the devil if
you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself;
or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins's
two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger.
Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has

her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she
proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home
to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to
Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, extempore, at
Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least
twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and
says—“By Jove, it's a bright thought! touch up the
near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins
amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to
Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook
and butler when nobody comes to dine.

There is an aristocracy in the city, of course, and
Firkins will do business with twenty persons in a day
whom he could never introduce to Mrs. Firkins. The
situation of that lady with respect to her society is
(she will tell you in confidence) rather embarrassing.
There are many very worthy persons, she will say,
who represent large sums of money or great interests
in trade, whom it is necessary to ask to the Lodge,
but who are far from being ornamental to her new
blue satin boudoir. She has often proposed to Firkins
to have them labelled in tens and thousands according
to their fortunes; that if, by any unpleasant
accident, Lord Augustus should meet them there, he
might respect them like = in algebra, for what they
stand for. But as it is, she is really never safe in calculating
on a societé choisie to dine or sup. When
Hook or Smith is just beginning to melt out, or Lady
Priscilla is in the middle of a charade, in walks Mr.
Snooks, of the foreign house of Snooks, Son, and
Co.—“unexpectedly arrived from Lisbon, and run
down without ceremony to call on his respectable correspondent.”

“Isn't it tiresome?”

“Very, my dear madam! But then you have the
happiness of knowing that you promote very essentially
your husband's interests, and when he has made
a plum —”

“Yes, very true; and then, to be sure, Firkins has
had to build papa a villa, and buy my brother Wilfred
a commission, and settle an annuity on my aunt, and
fit out my youngest brother Bob to India; and when I
think of what he does for my family, why I don't mind
making now and then a sacrifice; but, after all, it's a
great evil not to be able to cultivate one's own class
of society.”

And so murmurs Mrs. Firkins, who is the prettiest
and sweetest creature in the world, and really loves
the husband she married for his fortune; but as the
prosperity of Haman was nothing while Mordecai sat
at the gate, it is nothing to Mrs. Firkins that her father
lives in luxury, that her brothers are portioned
off, and that she herself can have blue boudoirs and
pony-chaises ad libitum, while Snooks, Son, and Co.,
may at any moment break in upon the charade of
Lady Priscilla!

There is a class of business people in London,
mostly bachelors, who have wisely declared themselves
independent of the West End, and live in a style of
their own in the dark courts and alleys about the Exchange,
but with a luxury not exceeded even in the
silken recesses of May Fair. You will sometimes
meet at the opera a young man of decided style, unexceptionable
in his toilet, and quiet and gentleman-like
in his address, who contents himself with the side
alley of the pit, and looks at the bright circles of beauty
and fashion about him with an indifference it is difficult
to explain. Make his acquaintance by chance,
and he takes you home to supper in a plain chariot on
the best springs Long Acre can turn out; and while
you are speculating where, in the name of the prince
of darkness, these narrow streets will bring you to,
you are introduced through a small door into saloons,
perfect in taste and luxury, where, ten to one, you sup
with the prima donna, or la première danseuse, but
certainly with the most polished persons of your own
sex, not one of whom, though you may have passed a
life in London, you ever met in society before. There
are, I doubt not, in that vast metropolis, hundreds of
small circles of society, composed thus of persons
refined by travel and luxury, whose very existence is
unsuspected by the fine gentleman at the West End,
but who, in the science of living agreeably, are almost
as well entitled to rank among the cognoscenti as Lord
Sefton or the “member for Finsbury.”

4. CHAPTER IV.
LONDON.

You return from your ramble in “the city” by two
o'clock. A bright day “toward,” and the season in
its palmy time. The old veterans are just creeping
out upon the portico of the United Service club, having
crammed “The Times” over their late breakfast,
and thus prepared their politics against surprise for
the day; the broad steps of the Athenæum are as yet
unthronged by the shuffling feet of the literati, whose
morning is longer and more secluded than that of idler
men, but who will be seen in swarms, at four, entering
that superb edifice in company with the employés and
politicians who affect their society. Not a cab stands
yet at the “Travellers,” whose members, noble or
fashionable, are probably at this hour in their dressing-gowns
of brocade or shawl of the orient, smoking
a hookah over Balzac's last romance, or pursuing at
this (to them) desert time of day some adventure which
waited upon their love and leisure. It is early yet for
the park; but the equipages you will see by-and-by
“in the ring” are standing now at Howell and James's,
and while the high-bred horses are fretting at the
door, and the liveried footmen lean on their gold-headed
sticks on the pavement, the fair creature whose
slightest nod these trained minions and their fine-limbed
animals live to obey, sits upon a three-legged
stool within, and in the voice which is a spell upon all
hearts, and with eyes to which rank and genius turn
like Persians to the sun, discusses with a pert clerk
the quality of stockings!

Look at these equipages and their appointments!
Mark the exquisite balance of that claret-bodied chariot
upon its springs—the fine sway of its sumptuous hammer-cloth
in which the un-smiling coachman sits
buried to the middle—the exact fit of the saddles, setting
into the curve of the horses' backs so as not break,
to the most careless eye, the fine lines which exhibit
action and grace! See how they stand together,
alert, fiery, yet obedient to the weight of a silken
thread; and as the coachman sees you studying his
turn-out, observe the imperceptible feel of the reins
and the just-visible motion of his lips, conveying to
the quick ears of his horses the premonitory, and, to
us, inaudible sound, to which, without drawing a
hair's breadth upon the traces, they paw their fine
hoofs, and expand their nostrils impatiently! Come
nearer, and find a speck or a raised hair, if you can,
on these glossy coats! Observe the nice fitness of
the dead-black harness, the modest crest upon the
panel, the delicate picking out of white in the wheels,
and, if you will venture upon a freedom in manners,
look in through the window of rose-teinted glass, and
see the splendid cushions and the costly and perfect
adaptation of the interior. The twinmated footmen
fly to the carriage-door, and the pomatumed clerk who
has enjoyed a tête-à-tête for which a prince-royal might
sigh, and an ambassador negotiate in vain, hands in
his parcel. The small foot presses on the carpeted
step, the airy vehicle yields lightly and recovers from
the slight weight of the descending form, the coachman
inclines his ear for the half-suppressed order

from the footman, and off whirls the admirable structure,
compact, true, steady, but magically free and
fast—as if horses, footmen, and chariot were but the
parts of some complicated centaur—some swift-moving
monster upon legs and wheels!

Walk on a little farther to the Quadrant. Here
commences the most thronged promenade in London.
These crescent colonnades are the haunt of foreigners
on the lookout for amusement, and of strangers in the
metropolis generally. You will seldom find a town-bred
man there, for he prefers haunting his clubs; or,
if he is not a member of them, he avoids lounging
much in the Quadrant, lest he should appear to have
no other resort. You will observe a town dandy
getting fidgety after his second turn in the Quadrant,
while you will meet the same Frenchman there from
noon till dusk, bounding his walk by those columns as
if they were the bars of a cage. The western side
toward Piccadilly is the thoroughfare of the honest
passer-by; but under the long portico opposite, you
will meet vice in every degree, and perhaps more
beauty than on any other pavé in the world. It is
given up to the vicious and their followers by general
consent. To frequent it, or to be seen loitering there
at all, is to make but one impression on the mind of
those who may observe you.

The two sides of Regent street continue to partake
of this distinction to the end. Go up on the left, and
you meet the sober citizen perambulating with his
wife, the lady followed by her footman, the grave and
the respectable of all classes. Go up on the other,
and in color and mien it is the difference between a
grass-walk and a bed of tulips. What proof is here
that beauty is dangerous to its possessor! It is said
commonly of Regent street, that it shows more beauty
in an hour than could be found in all the capitals of
the continent. It is the beauty, however, of brilliant
health—of complexion and freshness, more than of
sentiment or classic correctness. The English features,
at least in the middle and lower ranks, are seldom
good, though the round cheek, the sparkling lip, the
soft blue eyes and hair of dark auburn, common as
health and youth, produce the effect of high and almost
universal beauty on the eye of the stranger. The
rarest thing in these classes is a finely-turned limb,
and to the clumsiness of their feet and ankles must be
attributed the want of grace usually remarked in their
movements.

Regent street has appeared to me the greatest and
most oppressive solitude in the world. In a crowd of
business men, or in the thronged and mixed gardens
of the continent, the pre-occupation of others is less
attractive, or at least, more within our reach, if we
would share in it. Here, it is wealth beyond competition,
exclusiveness and indifference perfectly unapproachable.
In the cold and stern mien of the
practised Londoner, it is difficult for a stranger not to
read distrust, and very difficult for a depressed mind
not to feel a marked repulsion. There is no solitude,
after all, like the solitude of cities.

“O dear, dear London” (says the companion of
Asmodeus on his return from France), “dear even in
October! Regent street, I salute you! Bond street,
my good fellow, how are you? And you, oh, beloved
Oxford street, whom the opium-eater called `stony-hearted,'
and whom I, eating no opium, and speaking
as I find, shall ever consider the most kindly and maternal
of all streets—the street of the middle classes—
busy without uproar, wealthy without ostentation.
Ah, the pretty ankles that trip along thy pavement!
Ah! the odd country-cousin bonnets that peer into
thy windows, which are lined with cheap yellow shawls,
price one pound four shillings, marked in the corner!
Ah! the brisk young lawyers flocking from their quarters
at the back of Holborn! Ah! the quiet old ladies,
living in Duchess street, and visiting thee with their
eldest daughters in the hope of a bargain! Ah, the
bumpkins from Norfolk just disgorged by the Bull and
Mouth—the soldiers—the milliners—the Frenchmen
—the swindlers—the porters with four-post beds on
their backs, who add the excitement of danger to that of
amusement! The various shifting, motley group that
belong to Oxford street, and Oxford street alone! What
thoroughfares equal thee in the variety of human
specimens! in the choice of objects for remark, satire,
admiration! Besides, the other streets seem chalked
out for a sect—narrow-minded and devoted to a coterie.
Thou alone art catholic—all-receiving. Regent street
belongs to foreigners, cigars, and ladies in red silk,
whose characters are above scandal. Bond street belongs
to dandies and picture-dealers. St. James's
street to club loungers and young men in the guards,
with mustaches properly blackened by the cire of
Mr. Delcroix; but thou, Oxford street, what class can
especially claim thee as its own? Thou mockest at
oligarchies; thou knowest nothing of select orders!
Thou art liberal as air—a chartered libertine; accepting
the homage of all, and retaining the stamp of
none. And to call thee `stony-hearted!'—certainly
thou art so to beggars—to people who have not the
WHEREWITHAL. But thou wouldst not be so respectable
if thou wert not capable of a certain reserve to
paupers. Thou art civil enough, in all conscience,
to those who have a shilling in their pocket—those
who have not, why do they live at all?”

5. CHAPTER V.
LONDON.

It is near four o'clock, and in Bond street you
might almost walk on the heads of livery-servants—
at every stride stepping over the heads of two ladies
and a dandy exclusive. Thoroughfare it is none, for
the carriages are creeping on, inch by inch, the blood-horses
“marking time,” the coachman watchful for
his panels and whippletrees, and the lady within her
silken chariot, lounging back, with her eyes upon the
passing line, neither impatient nor surprised at the
delay, for she came there on purpose. Between the
swaying bodies of the carriages, hesitating past, she
receives the smiles and recognitions of all her male
acquaintances; while occasionally a female ally (for
allies against the rest of the sex are as necessary in
society to women, as in war to monarchs)—occasionally,
I say, a female ally announced by the crest upon
the blinker of an advancing horse, arrives opposite her
window, and, with only the necessary delay in passing,
they exchange, perhaps, inquiries for health, but, certainly,
programmes, comprehensive though brief, for
the prosecution of each other's loves or hates. Occasionally
a hack cab, seduced into attempting Bond
street by some momentary opening, finds itself closed
in, forty deep, by chariots, butckas, landaus, and family
coaches; and amid the imperturbable and unanswering
whips of the hammercloth, with a passenger
who is losing the coach by the delay, he must wait,
will-he-nill-he, till some “pottering” dowager has
purchased the old lord his winter flannels, or till the
countess of Loiter has said all she has to say to the
guardsman whom she has met accidentally at Pluck-rose,
the perfumer's. The three tall fellows, with
gold sticks, would see the entire plebeian population
of London thrice-sodden in vitriol, before they would
advance miladi's carriage a step, or appear to possess
eyes or ears for the infuriated cabman.

Bond street, at this hour, is a study for such observers,
as, having gone through an apprenticeship of
criticism upon all the other races and grades of men
and gentlemen in the world, are now prepared to study

their species in its highest fashionable phase—that of
“nice persons” at the West End. The Oxford-street
“swell,” and the Regent-street dandy, if seen here,
are out of place. The expressive word “quiet” (with
its present London signification), defines the dress,
manner, bow, and even physiognomy, of every true
denizen of St. James's and Bond street. The great
principle among men of the clubs, in all these particulars,
is to subdue—to deprive their coats, hats, and
manners, of everything sufficiently marked to be caricatured
by the satirical or imitated by the vulgar.
The triumph of style seems to be that the lines which
define it shall be imperceptible to the common eye—
that it shall require the difficult education which creates
it to know its form and limit. Hence an almost
universal error with regard to English gentlemen—
that they are repulsive and cold. With a thousand
times the heart and real politeness of the Frenchman,
they meet you with the simple and unaffected address
which would probably be that of shades in Elysium,
between whom (we may suppose) there is no longer
etiquette or concealment. The only exceptions to
this rule in London, are, first and alone, Count—,
whose extraordinary and original style, marked as it
is, is inimitable by any man of less brilliant talents
and less beauty of person, and the king's guardsmen,
who are dandies by prescriptive right, or, as it were,
professionally. All other men who are members of
Brooks's and the Traveller's, and frequent Bond street
in the flush of the afternoon, are what would be called
in America, plain, unornamental, and, perhaps, ill-dressed
individuals, who would strike you more by the
absence than the possession of all the peculiarities
which we generally suppose marks a “picked man of
countries.” In America, particularly, we are liable to
error on this point, as, of the great number of our
traveliers for improvement, scarce one in a thousand
remains longer in London than to visit the tower and
the Thames tunnel. The nine hundred and ninety-nine
reside principally, and acquire all they get of foreign
manner and style, at Paris—the very most artificial,
corrupt, and affected school for gentlemen in the
polite world.

Prejudice against any one country is an illiberal
feeling, which common reflection should, and which
enlightened travel usually does, entirely remove.
There is a vulgar prejudice against the English in
almost all countries, but more particularly in ours,
which blinds its entertainers to much that is admirable,
and deprives them of the good drawn from the
best models. The troop of scurrilous critics, the class
of English bagmen, and errant vulgarians of all kinds,
and the industriously-blown coals of old hostilities,
are barriers which an educated mind may well overlook,
and barriers beyond which lie, no doubt, the best
examples of true civilization and refinement the world
ever saw. But we are getting into an essay when we
should be turning down Bruton street, on our way to
the park, with all the fashion of Bond street and May
Fair.

May Fair! what a name for the core of dissipated
and exclusive London! A name that brings with it
only the scent of crushed flowers in a green field, of a
pole wreathed with rose, booths crowded with dancing
peasant-girls, and nature in its holyday! This—to
express the costly, the courtlike, the so-called “heartless”
precinct of fashion and art, in their most authentic
and envied perfection. Mais, les extrêmes se touchent,
and, perhaps, there is more nature in May Fair
than in Rose Cottage or Honeysuckle Lodge.

We stroll on through Berkeley square, by Chesterfield
and Curzon streets to the park gate. What an
aristocratic quiet regins here! How plain are the exteriors
of these houses: how unexpressive these doors,
without a name, of the luxury and high-born pride
within! At the open window of the hall sit the butler
and footman, reading the morning paper, while they
wait to dispense the “not at home” to callers not disappointed.
The rooks are noisy in the old trees of
Chesterfield house. The painted window-screens of
the probably still-slumbering Count —, in his bachelor's
den, are closely drawn, and, as we pass Seymour
place, a crowd of gay cabs and diplomatic chariots,
drawn up before the dark-green door at the farther extremity,
announce to you the residence of one whose
morning and evening levées are alike thronged by distinction
and talent—the beautiful Lady —.

This short turn brings us to the park, which is rapidly
filling with vehicles of every fashion and color,
and with pedestrians and horsemen innumerable. No
hackney-coach, street-cab, cart, or pauper, is allowed
to pass the porters at the several gates: the road is
macadamized and watered, and the grass within the
ring is fresh and verdant. The sun here triumphs
partially over the skirt of London smoke, which sways
backward and forward over the chimneys of Park lane,
and, as far as it is possible so near the dingy halo of
the metropolis, the gay occupants of these varied conveyances
“take the air.”

Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what
comes by. This is the field of display for the coachman,
who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth,
and takes more pride in his horses than their owner,
and considers them, if not like his own honor and
blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate
handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of
his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how
beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily
and well follows the compact carriage! Within (it is
a dark-green calêche, and the liveries are drab, with
red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual
face of a banker's wife, the daughter of a noble race,
who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in “marrying
into the finance,” and who soars up into the sky
of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has escaped
the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny
could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows?
D'Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy,
disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing
his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like
and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst
at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of
his “tiger” is neglected, and he drives like a man who
has to choose between running and being run against,
and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for reflection.
Poor D'Israeli! With a kind and generous
heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition
which consumes his soul, and a father who expects
everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact
common to understandings fathoms deep below his
own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years
hence, if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment,
no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times
more melancholy.

An open barouche follows, drawn by a pair of dark
bays, the coachman and footman in suits of plain gray,
and no crest on the panels. A lady, of remarkable
small person, sits, with the fairest foot ever seen, just
peeping from under a cashmere, on the forward cushion,
and from under her peculiarly plain and small
bonnet burn, in liquid fire, the most lambent and
spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the
world. She is a niece of Napoleon, married to an
English nobleman; and beside her sits her father,
who refused the throne of Tuscany, a noble-looking
man, with an expression of calm and tranquil resignation
in his face, unusually plain in his exterior, and
tess alive than most of the gay promenaders to the
bright scene passing about him. He will play in the
charade at his daughter's soiréc in the evening, however,
and forget his exile and his misfortunes; for he
is a fond father and a true philosopher.

6. CHAPTER VI.
LONDON.

If you dine with all the world at seven, you have
still an hour or more for Hyde Park, and “Rotten
Row:” this half mile between Oxford street and Piccadilly,
to which the fashion of London confines itself,
as if the remainder of the bright green park were forbidden
ground, is now fuller than ever. There is the
advantage in this condensed drive, that you are sure to
see your friends here, earlier or later, in every day—
(for wherever you are to go with horses, the conclusion
of the order to the coachman is, “home by the
park”)—and then if there is anything new in the way
of an arrival, a pretty foreigner, or a fresh face from
the country, some dandy's tiger leaves his master at
the gate, and brings him at his club, over his coffee,
all possible particulars of her name, residence, condition,
and whatever other circumstances fall in his
way. By dropping in at Lady —'s soirèe in the
evening, if you were interested in the face, you may
inform yourself of more than you would have drawn
in a year's acquaintance from the subject of your curiosity.
Malapropos to my remark, here comes a
turn-out, concerning which and its occupant I have
made many inquiries in vain—the pale-colored chariot,
with a pair of grays, dashing toward us from the Seymour
gate. As it comes by you will see, sitting quite
in the corner, and in a very languid and elegant attitude,
a slight woman of perhaps twenty-four, dressed
in the simplest white cottage-bonnet that could be
made, and, with her head down, looking up through
heavy black eyelashes, as if she but waited till she had
passed a particular object, to resume some engrossing
revery. Her features are Italian, and her attitude,
always the same indolent one, has also a redolence of
that land of repose; but there has been an English
taste, and no ordinary one, in the arrangement of that
equipage and its dependants; and by the expression,
never mistaken in London, of the well-appointed menials,
you may be certain that both master and mistress
(if master there be), exact no common deference.
She is always alone, and not often seen in the park;
and whenever I have inquired of those likely to know,
I found that she had been observed, but could get no
satisfactory information. She disappears by the side
toward the Regent's park, and when once out of the
gate, her horses are let off at a speed that distances
all pursuit that would not attract observatin. There
is a look of “Who the deuce can it be?” in the faces
of all the mounted dandies, wherever she passes, for
it is a face which once seen is not easily thought of
with indifference, or forgotten. Immense as London
is, a woman of anything like extraordinary beauty
would find it difficult to live there incognito a week;
and how this fair incomprehensible has contrived to
elude the curiosity of Hyde-park admiration, for nearly
two years, is rather a marvel. There she goes, however,
and without danger of being arrested for a flying
highwayman you could scarcely follow.

It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the
clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable
comers to the park. Here is a horseman, surrounded
with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of England.
He rides a light bay horse with dark legs,
whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken
threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose
small, animated head seems to express the very essence
of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful
park horse in England; and behind follows a high-bred
milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly-dressed
groom, who sits the spirited and fretting creature
as if he anticipated every movement before the
fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably,
but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of
black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar
hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like
profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as
the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but
for the muscular neck and broad chest from which
the head rises, and the indications of great personal
strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat
would disguise the proportions of a less admirable
figure; but, au reste, his dress is without fold or
wrinkle, and no figurante of the ballet ever showed
finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one
of the most daring in this country of bold riders; but
modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism,
with the ease and grace of that of his own country.
His manner, though he is rather Angtomane, is in
striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his companions;
and between his recognitions, right and left,
to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses
himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a
child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to possess
splendid talents, this “observed of all observers”
is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite—content
to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advantages
of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment.
He seems exempt from all the usual penalities of such
a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him
—care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the disapprobation
of the heavy-handed opinion of the world.
Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any
moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse
an hour, one wonders how and where such an unwonted
meteor will disappear.

But here comes a carriage without hammercloth or
liveries; one of those shabby-genteel conveyances,
hired by the week, containing three or four persons in
the highest spirits, all talking and gesticulating at once.
As the carriage passes the “beau-knot” (as —, and
his inseparable troop are sometimes called), one or
two of the dandies spur up, and resting their hands on
the windows, offer the compliments of the day to the
only lady within, with the most earnest looks of admiration.
The gentlemen in her company become
silent, and answer to the slight bows of the cavaliers
with foreign monosyllables, and presently the coachman
whips up once more, the horsemen drop off, and
the excessive gayety of the party resumes its tone.
You must have been struck, as the carriage passed,
with the brilliant whiteness and regularity of the lady's
teeth, and still more with the remarkable play of her
lips, which move as if the blood in them were imprisoned
lightning. (The figure is strong, but nothing
else conveys to my own mind what I am trying to describe.)
Energy, grace, fire, rapidity, and a capability
of utter abandoment to passion and expression, live
visibly on those lips. Her eyes are magnificent. Her
nose is regular, with nostrils rimmed round with an
expansive nerve, that gives them constantly the kind
of animation visible in the head of a fiery Arab. Her
complexion is one of those which, dark and wanting
in brilliance by day, light up at night with an alabaster
fairness; and when the glossy black hair, which is
now put away so plainly under her simple bonnet,
falls over her shoulders in heavy masses, the contrast
is radiant. The gentlemen in that carriage are Rubini,
Lablache, and a gentleman who passes for the lady's
uncle; and the lady is Julia Grisi.

The smoke over the heart of the city begins to
thicken into darkness, the gas-lamps are shooting up,
bright and star-like, along the Kensington road, and
the last promenaders disappear. And now the world
of London, the rich and gay portion of it at least,
enjoy that which compensates them for the absence
of the bright nights and skies of Italy—a climate
within doors, of comfort and luxury, unknown under
brighter heavens.

7. CHAPTER VII.
ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.

“Instead of parboiling you with a soirée or a dinner,”
said a sensible and kind friend, who called on us
at Ryde, “I shall make a pic-nic to Netley.” And on
a bright, breezy morning of June, a merry party of
some twenty of the inhabitants of the green Isle of
Wight shot away from the long pier, in one of the
swift boats of those waters, with a fair wind for Southampton.

Ryde is the most American-looking town I have
seen abroad; a cluster of white houses and summery
villas on the side of a hill, leaning up from the
sea. Geneva, on the Seneca lake, resembles it. It
is a place of baths, boarding-houses, and people of
damaged constitutions, with very select society, and
quiet and rather primitive habits. The climate is deliciously
soft, and the sun seems always to shine
there.

As we got out into the open channel, I was assisting
the skipper to tighten his bowline, when a beautiful
ship, in the distance, putting about on a fresh track,
caught the sun full on her snowy sails, and seemed to
start like an apparition from the sea.

“She's a liner, sir!” said the bronzed boatman, suspending
his haul to give her a look of involuntary admiration.

“An American packet, you mean?”

“They're the prettiest ships afloat, sir,” he continued,
“and the smartest handled. They're out to New
York, and back again, before you can look round,
a'most. Ah, I see her flag now—stars and stripes.
Can you see it, sir?”

“Are the captains Englishmen, principally?” I
asked.

“No, sir! all `calkylators;' sharp as a needle!”

“Thank you.” said I; “I am a calculator too!”

The conversation ceased, and I thought from the
boatman's look, that he had more respect than love
for us. The cloud of snowy sail traversed the breadth
of the channel with the speed of a bird, wheeled again
upon her opposite tack, and soon disappeared from
view, taking with her the dove of my imagination to
return with an olive-branch from home. It must be
a cold American heart whose strings are not swept by
that bright flag in a foreign land, like a harp with the
impassioned prelude of the master.

Cowes was soon upon our lee, with her fairy fleet
of yachts lying at anchor—Lord Yarborough's frigate-looking
craft asleep amid its dependant brood, with all
its fine tracery of rigging drawn on a cloudless sky, the
picture of what it is, and what all vessels seem to me
a thing for pleasure only. Darting about like a swallow
on the wing, a small, gayly-painted sloop-yacht,
as graceful and slender as the first bow of the new
moon, played off the roadstead for the sole pleasure
of motion, careless whither; and meantime the low-fringed
shores of the Southampton side grew more
and more distinct, and before we had well settled upon
our cushions, the old tower of the abbey lay sharp
over the bow.

We enjoyed the first ramble through the ruins the
better, that to see them was a secondary object. The
first was to select a grassy spot for our table. Threading
the old unroofed vaults with this errand, the pause
of involuntary homage exacted by a sudden burst upon
in arch or a fretted window, was natural and true; and
or those who are disturbed by the formal and trite
enthusiasm of companions who admire by a prompter,
his stalking-horse of another pursuit was not an inlifferent
advantage.

The great roof over the principal nave of the abbey
has fallen in, and lies in rugged and picturesque masses
within the Gothic shell—windows, arches, secret staircases,
and gray walls, all breaking up the blue sky
around, but leaving above, for a smooth and eternal
roof, an oblong and ivy-fringed segment of the blue
plane of heaven. It seems to rest on those crumbling
corners as you stand within.

We selected a rising bank under the shoulder of a
rock, grown over with moss and ivy, and following the
suggestion of a pretty lover of the picturesque, the
shawls and cloaks, with their bright colors, were
thrown over the nearest fragments of the roof, and everybody
unbonneted and assisted in the arrangements. An
old woman who sold apples outside the walls was employed
to build a fire for our teakettle in a niche
where, doubtless, in its holier days, had stood the
effigy of a saint; and at the pedestals of a cluster of
slender columns our attendants displayed upon a table
a show of pasties and bright wines, that, if there be
monkish spirits who walk at Netley, we have added a
poignant regret to their purgatories, that their airy
stomachs can be no more vino ciboque gravati.

We were doing justice to a pretty shoulder of lamb,
with mint sauce, when a slender youth who had been
wandering around with a portfolio, took up an artist's
position in the farther corner of the ruins, and began
to sketch the scene. I mentally felicitated him on the
accident that had brought him to Netley at that particular
moment, for a prettier picture than that before
him an artist could scarce have thrown together. The
inequalities of the floor of the abbey provided a mossy
table for every two or three of the gayly-dressed ladies,
and there they reclined in small and graceful groups,
their white dresses relieved on the luxuriant grass,
and between them, half buried in moss, the sparkling
glasses full of bright wines, and an air of ease and
grace over all, which could belong only to the two
extremes of Arcadian simplicity, or its high-bred imitation.
We amused ourselves with the idea of appearing,
some six months after, in the middle ground
of a landscape, in a picturesque annual; and I am
afraid that I detected, on the first suggestion of the
idea, a little unconscious attitudinizing in some of the
younger members of the party. It was proposed that
the artist should be invited to take wine with us; but
as a rosy-cheeked page donned his gold hat to carry
our compliments, the busy draughtsman was joined
by one or two ladies not quite so attractive-looking as
himself, but evidently of his own party, and our messenger
was recalled. Sequitur—they who would find
adventure should travel alone.

The monastic ruins of England derive a very peculiar
and touching beauty from the bright veil of ivy
which almost buries them from the sun. This constant
and affectionate mourner draws from the moisture
of the climate a vividness and luxuriance which is
found in no other land. Hence the remarkable loveliness
of Netley—a quality which impresses the visiters
to this spot, far more than the melancholy usually
inspired by decay.

Our gayety shocked some of the sentimental people
rambling about the ruins, for it is difficult for those
who have not dined to sympathize with the mirth of
those who have. How often we mistake for sadness
the depression of an empty stomach! How differently
authors and travellers would write, if they commenced
the day, instead of ending it, with meats and wine! I
was led to these reflections by coming suddenly upon
a young lady and her companion (possibly her lover),
in climbing a ruined staircase sheathed within the
wall of the abbey. They were standing at one of the
windows, quite unconscious of my neighborhood, and
looking down upon the gay party of ladies below, who
were still amid the débris of the feast arranging their
bonnets for a walk.

“What a want of soul,” said the lady, “to be eating
and drinking in such a place!”

“Some people have no souls,” responded the gentlean.

After this verdict, I thought the best thing I could
do was to take care of my body, and I very carefully
backed down the old staircase, which is probably more
hazardous now than in the days when it was used to
admit damsels and haunches of venison to the reverend
fathers.

I reached the bottom in safety, and informed my
friends that they had no souls, but they manifested
the usual unconcern on the subject, and strolled away
through the echoing arches, in search of new points
of view and fresh wild-flowers. “Commend me at
least,” I thought, as I followed on, “to those whose
pulses can be quickened even by a cold pie and a glass
of champagne. Sadness and envy are sown thickly
enough by any wayside.”

We were embarked once more by the middle of the
afternoon, and with a head wind, but smooth water and
cool temperature, beat back to Ryde. If the young
lady and her lover have forgiven or forgotten us, and
the ghosts of Netley, frocked or petticoated, have
taken no umbrage, I have not done amiss in marking
the day with a stone of the purest white. How much
more sensible is a party like this, in the open air, and
at healthy hours, than the untimely and ceremonious
civilities usually paid to strangers. If the world would
mend by moralising, however, we should have had a
Utopia long ago.

8. CHAPTER VIII.
COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF EUROPE AND
AMERICA.

One of Hazlitt's nail-driving remarks is to the effect
that he should like very well to pass the whole of his life
in travelling, if he could anywhere borrow another life
to spend afterward at home. How far action is necessary
to happiness, and how far repose—how far the
appetite for novelty and adventure will drive, and how
far the attractions of home and domestic comfort will
recall us—in short, what are the precise exactions of
the antagonist principles in our bosoms of curiosity
and sloth, energy and sufferance, hope and memory—
are questions which each one must settle for himself,
and which none can settle but he who has passed his
life in the eternal and fruitless search after the happiest
place, climate, and station.

Contentment depends upon many things within our
own control, but, with a certain education, it depends
partly upon things beyond it. To persons delicately
constituted or delicately brought up, and to all idle
persons, the principal ingredient in the cup of enjoyment
is climate; and Providence, that consults “the
greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has made
the poor and the roughly-nurtured independent of the
changes of the wind. Those who have the misfortune
to be delicate as well as poor—those, particularly, for
whom there is no hope but in a change of clime, but
whom pitiless poverty compels to languish in vain
after the reviving south, are happily few; but they
have thus much more than their share of human calamity.

In throwing together my recollections of the climates
with which I have become acquainted in other
lands, I am aware that there is a greater difference of
opinion on this subject than on most others. A man
who has agreeable society about him in Montreal, but
who was without friends in Florence, would be very
likely to bring the climate in for its share of the difference,
and prefer Canada to Italy; and health and
circumstances of all kinds affect, in no slight degree,
our susceptibility to skies and atmosphere. But it is
sometimes interesting to know the impressions of others,
even though they agree not with our own; and I
will only say of mine on this subject, that they are so
far likely to be fair, as I have been blessed with the
same perfect health in all countries, and have been
happy alike in every latitude and season.

It is almost a matter of course to decry the climate
of England. The English writers themselves talk of
the suicidal months; and it is the only country where
part of the livery of a mounted groom is his master's
great-coat strapped about his waist. It is certainly a
damp climate, and the sun shines less in England than
in most other countries. But to persons of full habit
this moisture in the air is extremely agreeable; and
the high condition of all animals in England, from
man downward, proves its healthfulness. A stranger
who has been accustomed to a brighter sky, will, at
first, find a gloom in the gray light so characteristic of
an English atmosphere; but this soon wears off, and
he finds a compensation, as far as the eye is concerned,
in the exquisite softness of the verdure, and
the deep and enduring brightness of the foliage. The
effect of this moisture on the skin is singularly grateful.
The pores become accustomed to a healthy action,
which is unknown in other countries; and the
bloom by which an English complexion is known all
over the world is the index of an activity in this important
part of the system, which, when first experienced,
is almost like a new sensation. The transition
to a dry climate, such as ours, deteriorates the condition
and quality of the skin, and produces a feeling,
if I may so express it, like that of being glazed. It is
a common remark in England, that an officer's wife
and daughters follow his regiment to Canada at the
expense of their complexions; and it is a well-known
fact that the bloom of female beauty is, in our country,
painfully evanescent.

The climate of American is, in many points, very
different from that of France and Great Britain. In
the middle and northern states, it is a dry, invigorating,
bracing climate, in which a strong man may do
more work than in almost any other, and which makes
continual exercise, or occupation of some sort, absolutely
necessary. With the exception of the “Indian
summer,” and here and there a day scattered through
the spring and the hot months, there is no weather
tempered so finely that one would think of passing
the day in merely enjoying it, and life is passed, by
those who have the misfortune to be idle, in continual
and active dread of the elements. The cold is so
acrid, and the heat so sultry, and the changes from
one to the other are so sudden and violent, that no
enjoyment can be depended upon out-of-doors, and
no system of clothing or protection is good for a day
together. He who has full occupation for head and
hand (as by far the greatest majority of our countrymen
have) may live as long in America as in any portion
of the globe—vide the bills of mortality. He
whose spirits lean upon the temperature of the wind,
or whose nerves require a genial and constant atmosphere,
may find more favorable climes; and the habits
and delicate constitutions of scholars and people
of sedentary pursuits generally, in the United States,
prove the truth of the observation.

The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which
is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely possible
in America. It is said, and said truly, of the
first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may
not ride comfortably on horseback; but with us, the
extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous character
of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a delicate
person, anything like regularity in exercise. The
consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the
high and glowing health so common in England, and
consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of
the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently

rare to excite remark. “Very English-looking,” is a
common phrase, and means very healthy-looking.
Still our people last—and though I should define the
English climate as the one in which the human frame
is in the highest condition, I should say of America,
that it is the one in which you could get the most
work out of it.

Atmosphere, in England and America, is the first
of the necessaries of life. In Italy, it is the first of its
luxuries. We breathe in America, and walk abroad,
without thinking of these common acts but as a means
of arriving at happiness. In Italy, to breathe and to
walk abroad are themselves happiness. Day after day
—week after week—month after month—you wake
with the breath of flowers coming in at your open
window, and a sky of serene and unfathomable blue,
and mornings and evenings of tranquil, assured, heavenly
purity and beauty. The few weeks of the rainy
season are forgotten in these long halcyon months of
sunshine. No one can have lived in Italy a year, who
remembers anything but the sapphire sky and the
kindling and ever-seen stars. You grow insensibly to
associate the sunshine and moonlight only with the
fountain you have lived near, or the columns of the
temple you have seen from your window, for on no
objects in other lands have you seen their light so
constant.

I scarce know how to convey, in language, the effect
of the climate of Italy on mind and body. Sitting
here, indeed, in the latitude of thirty-nine, in the
middle of April, by a warm fire, and with a cold wind
whistling at the window, it is difficult to recall it, even
to the fancy. I do not know whether life is prolonged,
but it is infinitely enriched and brightened, by
the delicious atmosphere of Italy. You rise in the
morning, thanking Heaven for life and liberty to go
abroad. There is a sort of opiate in the air, which
makes idleness, that would be the vulture of Prometheus
in America, the dove of promise in Italy. It is
delicious to do nothing—delicious to stand an hour
looking at a Savoyard and his monkey—delicious to
sit away the long, silent noon, in the shade of a column,
or on the grass of a fountain—delicious to be
with a friend without the interchange of an idea—to
dabble in a book, or look into the cup of a flower. You do not read, for you wish to enjoy the weather.
You do not visit, for you hate to enter a door while
the weather is so fine. You lie down unwillingly for
your siesta in the hot noon, for you fear you may
oversleep the first coolness of the long shadows of
sunset. The fancy, meantime, is free, and seems liberated
by the same languor that enervates the severer
faculties; and nothing seems fed by the air but
thoughts, which minister to enjoyment.

The climate of Greece is very much that of Italy.
The Mediterranean is all beloved of the sun. Life
has a value there, of which the rheumatic, shivering,
snow-breasting, blue-devilled idler of northern regions
has no shadow, even in a dream. No wonder Dante
mourned and languished for it. No wonder at the
sentiment I once heard from distinguished lips—Fuori
d'Italia tutto e esilio.

This appears like describing a Utopia; but it is
what Italy seemed to me. I have expressed myself
much more to my mind, however, in rhyme, for a
prose essay is, at best, but a cold medium.

9. CHAPTER IX.
STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

“One-p'un'-five outside, sir, two p'un' in.”

It was a bright, calm afternoon in September, promising
nothing but a morrow of sunshine and autumn,
when I stepped in at the “White Horse Cellar,” in
Piccadilly, to take my place in the Tantivy coach for
Stratford-on-Avon. Preferring the outside of the
coach, at least by as much as the difference in the
prices, and accustomed from long habit to pay dearest
for that which most pleased me, I wrote myself down
for the outside, and deposited my two pounds in the
horny palm of the old ex-coachman, retired from the
box, and playing clerk in this dingy den of parcels and
portmanteaus. Supposing my business concluded, I
stood a minute speculating on the weather-beaten,
cramp-handed old Jehu before me, and trying to reconcile
his ideas of “retirement from office” with those
of his almost next door neighbor, the hero of Strathfieldsaye.

I had mounted the first stair toward daylight, when
a touch on the shoulder with the end of a long whip
—a technical “reminder,” which probably came easier
to the old driver than the phrasing of a sentence to a
“gemman”—recalled me to the cellar.

“Fifteen shillin', sir,” said he laconically, pointing
with the same expressive exponent of his profession
to the change for my outside place, which I had left
lying on the counter.

“You are at least as honest as the duke,” I soliloquised,
as I pocketed the six bright and substantial
half-crowns.

I was at the “White Horse Cellar” again the following
morning at six, promising myself with great
sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an
English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside
places were all taken, and with twelve fellow-outsides,
I mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw
by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my umbrella,
abandoned my knees with a single effort of
mind to the drippings of the driver's weather-proof
upper Benjamin, and away we sped. I was “due” at
the house of a hospitable catholic baronet, a hundred
and two miles from London, at the dinner-hour of that
day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is
to expect the millennium.

London in the morning—I mean the poor man's
morning, daylight—is to me matter for the most
speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in
the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with
equipages and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank
and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial qualities
of the blood trippingly through the veins. But
Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through
fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who
has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispiriting
and dreary. To remember that behind the barricaded
and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the
hero of Waterloo—that under these crowded and fog-wrapped
houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing
of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly-moulded
creatures who preserve for the aristocracy
of England the palm of the world's beauty—to remember
this, and a thousand other associations linked with
the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen,
the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the
deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball-room,
the loneliness of a frequented promenade in
untimely hours—any scene, in short, of gayety gone
by but remembered—oppresses and dissatisfies the
heart! One would think memory should re-brighten
and re-populate such places.

The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the
Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small
hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick
and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept
his eye on the traces, and “reminded” now and then
with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler
or leader, and the complicated but compact machine
of which the square foot that I occupied had been so
nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour

with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as independent
of clouds and rain.

“Est ce que monsieur parle Francois?” asked at the
end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little
gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that
he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with
great tenacity.

Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been
in France, I was first distinctly made to understand
that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham
purely for pleasure, and without the most distant object
of business—a point on which he insisted so long,
and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in
persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for
the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons.
After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rashness
of committing one's life to an English stagecoach,
with scarce room enough for the perch of a
parrot, and a velocity so diablement dangereaux, I tired
of my Frenchman; and, since I could not have my
own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a
straw-bonnet and shawl on my left—the property, I
soon discovered, of a very smart lady's maid, very indignant
at having been made to change places with
Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress,
were dry and comfortable inside. She “would not
have minded the outside place,” she said, “for there
were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the outside,
very!—but she had been promised to go inside,
and had dressed accordingly; and it was very provoking
to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just
because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that
would damage chose not to ride in the rain.”

“Very provoking, indeed!” I responded, letting in
the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my
umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of
the wind.

“We should have gone down in the carriage, sir,”
she continued, edging a little closer to get the full advantage
of my umbrella; “but John the coachman
has got the hinfluenzy, and my missis wo'n't be driven
by no other coachman; she's as obstinate as a mule,
sir. And, that isn't all I could tell, sir; but I scorns
to hurt the character of one of my own sex.” And
the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked
determined not to destroy her mistress's character—
unless particularly requested.

I detest what may be called a proper road-book—
even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on
a country so well conned as England.

I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which
looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen
through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember
is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and
my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovelyto
the wild eye of an American unused to high cultivation;
and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp,
I arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England
sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed
of its coaches.

The Avon, above and below the bridge, ran brightly
along between low banks, half sward, half meadow;
and on the other side lay the native town of the immortal
wool-comber—a gay cheerful-looking village,
narrowing in the centre to a closely built street, across
which swung, broad and fair, the sign of the “Red
horse.” More ambitious hotels lay beyond; and
broader streets; but while Washington Irving is remembered
(and that will be while the language lasts),
the quiet inn in which the great Geoffrey thought
and wrote of Shakspere will be the altar of the pilgrim's
devotions.

My baggage was set down, the coachman and guard
tipped their hats for a shilling, and, chilled to the bone,
I raised my hat instinctively to the courtesy of a slender
gentlewoman in black, who, by the keys at her girdle,
should be the landlady. Having expected to see a
rosy little Mrs. Boniface, with a brown pinafore and
worsted mittens, I made up my mind at once that the
inn had changed mistresses. On the right of the old-fashioned
entrance blazed cheerily the kitchen fire,
and with my enthusiasm rather dashed by my disappointment,
I stepped in to make friends with the cook,
and get a little warmth and information.

“So your old mistress is dead, Mrs. Cook,” said I,
rubbing my hands with great satisfaction between the
fire and a well-roasted chicken.

“Lauk, sir, no, she isn't!” answered the rosy lass,
pointing with a dredging-box to the same respectable
lady in black who was just entering to look after me.

“I beg pardon, sir,” she said, dropping a courtesy;
“but are you the gentleman expected by Sir
Charles —?”

“Yes, madam. And can you tell me anything of
your predecessor who had the inn in the days of
Washington Irving?”

She dropped another courtesy, and drew up her
thin person to its full height, while a smile of gratified
vanity stole out at the corners of her mouth.

“The carriage has been waiting some time for you,
sir,” she said, with a softer tone than that in which
she had hitherto addressed me; “and you will hardly
be at C— in time for dinner. You will be coming
over to-morrow or the day after, perhaps, sir; and
then, if you would honor my little room by taking a
cup of tea with me, I should be pleased to tell you all
about it, sir.”

I remembered a promise I had nearly forgotten,
that I would reserve my visit to Stratford till I could
be accompanied by Miss J. P—, whom I was to
have the honor of meeting at my place of destination;
and promising an early acceptance of the kind land-lady's
invitation, I hurried on to my appointment over
the fertile hills of Warwickshire.

I was established in one of those old Elizabethan
country-houses, which, with their vast parks, their
self-sufficing resources of subsistence and company,
and the absolute deference shown on all sides to the
lord of the manor, give one the impression rather of a
little kingdom with a castle in its heart, than of an
abode for a gentleman subject. The house itself
(called, like most houses of this size and consequence
in Warwickshire, a “Court,”) was a Gothic, half-castellated
square, with four round towers, and innumerable
embrasures and windows; two wings in
front, probably more modern than the body of the
house, and again two long wings extending to the rear,
at right angles, and enclosing a flowery and formal
parterre. There had been a trench about it, now
filled up, and at a short distance from the house stood
a polyangular and massive structure, well calculated
for defence, and intended as a strong-hold for the retreat
of the family and tenants in more troubled times.
One of these rear wings enclosed a catholic chapel,
for the worship of the baronet and those of his tenants
who professed the same faith; while on the northern
side, between the house and the garden, stood a large
protestant stone church, with a turret and spire, both
chapel and church, with their clergyman and priest,
dependant on the estate, and equally favored by the
liberal and high-minded baronet. The tenantry formed
two considerable congregations, and lived and worshipped
side by side, with the most perfect harmony
—an instance of real Christianity, in my opinion, which
the angels of heaven might come down to see. A
lovely rural graveyard for the lord and tenants, and a
secluded lake below the garden, in which hundreds of
wild ducks swam and screamed unmolested, completed
the outward features of C— court.

There are noble houses in England, with a door
communicating from the dining-room to the stables,
that the master and his friends may see their favorites,

after dinner, without exposure to the weather. In the
place of this rather bizarre luxury, the oak-panelled
and spacious dining-hall of C— is on a level with
the organ loft of the chapel, and when the cloth is removed,
the large door between is thrown open, and
the noble instrument pours the rich and thrilling
music of vespers through the rooms. When the
service is concluded, and the lights on the altar extinguished,
the blind organist (an accomplished musician,
and a tenant on the estate), continues his voluntaries
in the dark until the hall-door informs him of
the retreat of the company to the drawing-room.
There is not only refinement and luxury in this
beautiful arrangement, but food for the soul and
heart.

I chose my room from among the endless vacant
but equally luxurious chambers of the rambling old
house; my preference solely directed by the portrait
of a nun, one of the family in ages gone by—a picture
full of melancholy beauty, which hung opposite the
window. The face was distinguished by all that in
England marks the gentlewoman of ancient and pure
descent; and while it was a woman with the more
tender qualities of her sex breathing through her features,
it was still a lofty and sainted sister, true to her
cross, and sincere in her vows and seclusion. It was
the work of a master, probably Vandyke, and a picture
in which the most solitary man would find company
and communion. On the other walls, and in most of
the other rooms and corridors, were distributed portraits
of the gentlemen and soldiers of the family, most
of them bearing some resemblance to the nun, but
differing, as brothers in those wild times may be supposed
to have differed, from the gentle creatures of the
same blood, nursed in the privacy of peace.

10. CHAPTER X.
VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON—SHAKSPERE.

One of the first visits in the neighborhood was naturally
to Stratford-on-Avon. It lay some ten miles
south of us, and I drove down, with the distinguished
literary friend I have before mentioned, in the carriage
of our kind host, securing, by the presence of
his servants and equipage, a degree of respect and attention
which would not have been accorded to us in
our simple character of travellers. The prim mistress
of the “Red Horse,” in her close black bonnet and
widow's weeds, received us at the door with a deeper
courtesy than usual, and a smile of less wintry formality;
and proposing to dine at the inn, and “suck the
brain” of the hostess more at our leisure, we started
immediately for the house of the wool-comber—the
birthplace of Shakspere.

Stratford should have been forbidden ground to
builders, masons, shopkeepers, and generally to all
people of thrift and whitewash. It is now rather a
smart town, with gay calicoes, shawls of the last pattern,
hardware, and millinery, exhibited in all their
splendor down the widened and newer streets; and
though here and there remains a glorious old gloomy
and inconvenient abode, which looks as if Shakspere
might have taken shelter under its eaves, the gayer
features of the town have the best of it, and flaunt their
gaudy and unrespected newness in the very windows
of that immortal birthplace. I stepped into a shop to
inquire the way to it.

“Shiksper's 'ouse, sir? Yes, sir!” said a dapper
clerk, with his hair astonished into the most impossible
directions by force of brushing; “keep to the
right, sir! Shiksper lived in the wite 'ouse, sir—the
'ouse, you see beyond, with the windy swung up, sir.”

A low, old-fashioned house, with a window suspended
on a hinge, newly whitewashed and scrubbed,
stood a little up the street. A sign over the door informed
us in an inflated paragraph, that the immortal
Will Shakspere was born under this roof, and that an
old woman within would show it to us for a consideration.
It had been used until very lately, I had been
told, for a butcher's shop.

A “garrulous old lady” met us at the bottom of the
narrow stair leading to the second floor, and began-not
to say anything of Shakspere—but to show us the
names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, &c., written among
thousands of others on the wall! She had worn out
Shakspere! She had told that story till she was tired
of it! or (what, perhaps, is more probable) most
people who go there fall to reading the names of the
visiters so industriously, that she has grown to think
some of Shakspere's pilgrims greater than Shakspere.

“Was this old oaken chest here in the days of
Shakspere, madam?” I asked.

“Yes, sir, and here's the name of Byron—here with
a capital B. Here's a curiosity, sir.”

“And this small wooden box?”

“Made of Shakspere's mulberry, sir. I had sich a
time about that box, sir. Two young gemmen were
here the other day—just run up, while the coach was
changing horses, to see the house. As soon as they
were gone I misses the box. Off scuds my son to the
`Red Horse,' and there they sat on the top looking as
innocent as may be. `Stop the coach,' says my son
`What do you want?' says the driver. `My mother's
mulberry-box!—Shakspere's mulberry-box!—One of
them 'ere young men's got it in his pocket.' And
true enough, sir, one on 'em had the imperence to
take it out of his pocket, and flings it into-my son's
face; and you know the coach never stops a minnit for
nothing, sir, or he'd a' smarted for it.”

Spirit of Shakspere! dost thou not sometimes walk
alone in this humble chamber! Must one's inmost
soul be fretted and frighted always from its devotion
by an abominable old woman? Why should not such
lucrative occupations be given in charity to the deaf
and dumb? The pointing of a finger were enough in
such spots of earth!

I sat down in despair to look over the book of visiters,
trusting that she would tire of my inattention.
As it was of no use to point out names to those who
would not look, however, she commenced a long story
of an American who had lately taken the whim to
sleep in Shakspere's birth chamber. She had shaken
him down a hed on the floor, and he had passed the
night there. It seemed to bother her to comprehend
why two thirds of her visiters should be Americans—
a circumstance that was abundantly proved by the
books.

It was only when we were fairly in the street that I
began to realize that I had seen one of the most glorious
altars of memory—that deathless Will Shakspere,
the mortal, who was, perhaps (not to speak profanely),
next to his Maker, in the divine faculty of creation
first saw the light through the low lattice on which
we turned back to look.

The single window of the room in which Scott died
at Abbotsford, and this in the birth-chamber of Shakspere,
have seemed to me almost marked with the
touch of the fire of those great souls—for I think we
have an instinct which tells us on the spot where
mighty spirits have come or gone, that they came and
went with the light of heaven.

We walked down the street to see the house where
Shakspere lived on his return to Stratford. It stands
at the corner of a lane, not far from the church where
he was buried, and is a newish un-Shaksperian looking
place—no doubt, if it be indeed the same house, most
profanely and considerably altered. The present proprietor
or occupant of the house or site took upon
himself some time since the odium of cutting down

the famous mulberry-tree planted by the poet's hand
in the garden.

I forgot to mention in the beginning of these notes
that two or three miles before coming to Stratford we
passed through Shottery, where Anne Hathaway lived.
A nephew of the excellent baronet whose guests we
were occupies the house. I looked up and down the
green lanes about it, and glanced my eye round upon
the hills over which the sun has continued to set and
the moon to ride in her love-inspiring beauty ever
since. There were doubtless outlines in the landscape
which had been followed by the eye of Shakspere
when coming, a trembling lover, to Shottrey—doubtless,
teints in the sky, crops on the fields, smoke-wreaths
from the old homesteads on the high hillsides,
which are little altered now. How daringly the
imagination plucks back the past in such places!
How boldly we ask of fancy and probability the thousand
questions we would put, if we might, to the magic
mirror of Agrippa? Did that great mortal love timidly,
like ourselves? Was the passionate outpouring
of his heart simple, and suited to the humble condition
of Anne Hathaway, or was it the first fiery coinage of
Romeo and Othello? Did she know the immortal
honor and light poured upon woman by the love of
genius? Did she know how this common and oftenest
terrestrial passion becomes fused in the poet's bosom
with celestial fire, and, in its wondrous elevation
and purity, ascends lambently and musically to the
very stars? Did she coy it with him? Was she a
woman to him, as commoner mortals find woman—capricious,
tender, cruel, intoxicating, cold—everything
by changes impossible to calculate or foresee? Did
he walk home to Stratford, sometimes, despairing, in
perfect sick-heartedness, of her affection, and was he
recalled by a message or a lover's instinct to find her
weeping and passionately repentant?

How natural it is by such questions and speculations
to betray our innate desire to bring the lofty
spirits of our common mould to our own inward level—
to seek analogies between our affections, passions, appetites,
and theirs—to wish they might have been no more
exalted, no more fervent, no more worthy of the adorable
love of woman than ourselves! The same temper
that prompts the depreciation, the envy, the hatred,
exercised toward the poet in his lifetime, mingles, not
inconsiderably, in the researches so industriously prosecuted
after his death into his youth and history. To
be admired in this world, and much more to be beloved
for higher qualities than his fellow-men, insures to
genius not only to be persecuted in life, but to be
ferreted out with all his frailties and imperfections
from the grave.

The church in which Shakspere is buried stands
near the banks of the Avon, and is a most picturesque
and proper place of repose for his ashes. An avenue
of small trees and vines, ingeniously overlaced, extends
from the street to the principal door, and the
interior is broken up into that confused and accidental
medley of tombs, pews, cross-lights, and pillars, for
which the old churches of England are remarkable.
The tomb and effigy of the great poet lie in an inner
chapel, and are as described in every traveller's book.
I will not take up room with the repetition.

It gives one an odd feeling to see the tomb of his
wife and daughter beside him. One does not realize
before, that Shakspere had wife, children, kinsmen,
like other men—that there were those who had a right
to lie in the same tomb; to whom he owed the charities
of life; whom he may have benefited or offended;
who may have influenced materially his destiny, or
he theirs; who were the inheritors of his household
goods, his wardrobe, his books—people who looked
an him—on Shakspere—as a landholder, a renter of a
pew, a townsman; a relative, in short, who had claims
upon them, not for the eternal homage due to celestial
inspiration, but for the charity of shelter and bread
had he been poor, for kindness and ministry had he
been sick, for burial and the tears of natural affection
when he died. It is painful and embarrassing to the
mind to go to Stratford—to reconcile the immortality
and the incomprehensible power of genius like Shakspere's,
with the space, tenement, and circumstance
of a man! The poet should be like the sea-bird, seen
only on the wing—his birth, his slumber, and his
death, mysteries alike.

I had stipulated with the hostess that my baggage
should be put into the chamber occupied by Washington
Irving. I was shown into it to dress for dinner
—a small neat room, a perfect specimen, in short, of
an English bedroom, with snow-white curtains, a looking-glass
the size of the face, a well-polished grate
and poker, a well-fitted carpet, and as much light as
heaven permits to the climate.

Our dinner for two was served in a neat parlor on
the same floor—an English inn dinner—simple, neat,
and comfortable, in the sense of that word unknown in
other countries. There was just fire enough in the
grate, just enough for two in the different dishes, a
servant who was just enough in the room, and just
civil enough—in short, it was, like everything else in
that country of adaptation and fitness, just what was
ordered and wanted, and no more.

The evening turned out stormy, and the rain pattered
merrily against the windows. The shutters were
closed, the fire blazed up with new brightness, the
well-fitted wax lights were set on the table; and when
the dishes were removed, we replaced the wine with a
tea-tray, and sent for the hostess to give us her company
and a little gossip over our cups.

Nothing could be more nicely understood and defined
than the manner of English hostesses generally
in such situations, and of Mrs. Gardiner particularly
in this. Respectful without servility, perfectly sure
of the propriety of her own manner and mode of expression,
yet preserving in every look and word the
proper distinction between herself and her guests, she
insured from them that kindness and ease of communication
which would make a long evening of social
conversation pass, not only without embarrassment on
either side, but with mutual pleasure and gratification.

“I have brought up, mem,” she said, producing a
well-polished poker from under her black apron, before
she took the chair set for her at the table—“I
have brought up a relic for you to see, that no money
would buy from me.”

She turned it over in my hand, and I read on one
of the flat sides at the bottom—“GEOFFREY CRAYON'S
SCEPTRE.”

“Do you remember Mr. Irving,” asked my friend,
“or have you supposed, since reading his sketch of
Stratford-on-Avon; that the gentleman in number
three might be the person?”

The hostess drew up her thin figure, and the expression
of a person about to compliment herself stole
into the corners of her mouth.

“Why, you see, mem, I am very much in the habit
of observing my guests, and I think I may say I knows
a superior gentleman when I sees him. If you remember,
mem” (and she took down from the mantlepiece
a much-worn copy of the Sketch-Book), “Geoffrey
Crayon tells the circumstance of my stepping in
when it was getting late, and asking if he had rung.
I knows it by that, and then the gentleman I mean
was an American, and I think, mem, besides” (and she
hesitated a little, as if she was about to advance an
original and rather venturesome opinion)—“I think
I can see that gentleman's likeness all through this
book.”

A truer remark or a more just criticism was perhaps
never made on the Sketch-Book. We smiled,
and Mrs. Gardiner proceeded:—

“I was in and out of the coffee-room the night he
arrived, mem, and I sees directly by his modest ways
and timid look that he was a gentleman, and not fit
company for the other travellers. They were all young
men, sir, and business travellers, and you know, mem,
ignorance takes the advantage of modest merit, and after
their dinner they were very noisy and rude. So, I
says to Sarah, the chambermaid, says I, `That nice
gentleman can't get near the fire, and you go and light
a fire in number three, and he shall sit alone, and it
shan't cost him nothing, for I like the look on him.'
Well, mem, he seemed pleased to be alone, and after
his tea, he puts his legs up over the grate, and there
he sits with the poker in his hand till ten o'clock.
The other travellers went to bed, and at last the house
was as still as midnight, all but a poke in the grate
now and then in number three, and every time I heard
it, I jumped up and lit a bed-candle, for I was getting
very sleepy, and I hoped he was getting up to ring for
a light. Well, mem, I nodded and nodded, and still
no ring at the bell. At last I says to Sarah, says I,
`Go into number three, and upset something, for I am
sure that gentleman has fallen asleep.'—`La, ma'am,'
says Sarah, `I don't dare.'—`Well, then,' sayd I, `I'll
go.' So I opens the door, and I says, `If you please,
sir, did you ring?'—little thinking that question would
ever be written down in such a beautiful book, mem.
He sat with his feet on the fender poking the fire, and
a smile on his face, as if some pleasant thought was
in his mind. `No, ma'am,' says he, `I did not.' I
shuts the door, and sits down again, for I hadn't the
heart to tell him that it was late, for he was a gentleman
not to speak rudely to, mem. Well, it was past
twelve o'clock, when the bell did ring. `There,' says
I to Sarah, `thank Heaven he has done thinking, and
we can go to bed.' So he walked up stairs with his
light, and the next morning he was up early and off
to the Shakspere house, and he brings me home a box
of the mulberry-tree, and asks me if I thought it was
genuine, and said it was for his mother in America.
And I loved him still more for that, and I'm sure I
prayed she might live to see him return.”

“I believe she did, Mrs. Gardiner; but how soon
after did you set aside the poker?”

“Why, sir, you see there's a Mr. Vincent that
comes here sometimes, and he says to me one day—
`So, Mrs. Gardiner, you're finely immortalized. Read
that.' So the minuit I read it, I remembered who it
was, and all about it, and I runs and gets the number
three poker, and locks it up safe and sound, and by-and-by
I sends it to Brummagem, and has his name
engraved on it, and here you see it, sir—and I wouldn't
take no money for it.”

I had never the honor to meet or know Mr. Irving,
and I evidently lost ground with the hostess of the
“Red Horse” for that misfortune. I delighted her,
however, with the account which I had seen in a late
newspaper, of his having shot a buffalo in the prairies
of the west; and she soon courtesied herself out, and
left me to the delightful society of the distinguished
lady who had accompanied me. Among all my many
loiterings in many lands, I remember none more intellectually
pure and gratifying, than this at Stratford-on-Avon.
My sleep, in the little bed consecrated by
the slumbers of the immortal Geoffrey, was sweet and
right; and I write myself his debtor for a large share
of the pleasure which genius like his lavishes on the
world.

11. CHAPTER XI.
CHARLECOTE.

Once more posting through Shottery and Stratford-on-Avon,
on the road to Kenilworth and Warwick, I
felt a pleasure in becoming an habitué in Shakspere's
town—in being recognised by the Stratford post-boys,
known at the Stratford inn, and remembered at the
toll-gates. It is pleasant to be welcomed by name
anywhere; but at Stratford-on-Avon, it is a recognition
by those whose fathers or predecessors were the
companions of Shakspere's frolics. Every fellow in
a slouched hat—every idler on a tavern bench—every
saunterer with a dog at his heels on the highway—
should be a deer-stealer from Charlecote. You would
almost ask him, “Was Will Shakspere with you last
night?”

The Lucys still live at Charlecote, immortalized
by a varlet poacher who was tried before old Sir
Thomas for stealing a buck. They have drawn an
apology from Walter Savage Landor for making too
free with the family history, under cover of an imaginary
account of the trial. I thought, as we drove
along in sight of the fine old hall, with its broad park
and majestic trees—very much as it stood in the
days of Sir Thomas, I believe—that most probably
the descendants of the old justice look even now upon
Shakspere more as an offender against the game-laws
than as a writer of immortal plays. I venture to say,
it would be bad tact in a visiter to Charlecote to felicitate
the family on the honor of possessing a park in
which Shakspere had stolen deer—to show more interest
in seeing the hall in which he was tried than in
the family portraits.

On the road which I was travelling (from Stratford
to Charlecote) Shakspere had been dragged as a culprit.
What were his feelings before Sir Thomas!
He felt, doubtless, as every possessor of the divine fire
of genius must feel, when brought rudely in contact
with his fellow-men, that he was too much their superior
to be angry. The humor in which he has drawn
Justice Shallow proves abundantly that he was more
amused then displeased with his own trial. But was
there no vexation at the moment? A reflection, it
might be, from the estimate of his position in the
minds of those who were about him—who looked on
him simply as a stealer of so much venison. Did he
care for Anne Hathaway's opinion then?

How little did Sir Thomas Lucy understand the
relation between judge and culprit on that trial! How
little did he dream he was sitting for his picture to the
pestilent varlet at the bar; that the deer-stealer could
better afford to forgive him than he the deer-stealer!
Genius forgives, or rather forgets, all wrongs done in
ignorance of its immortal presence. Had Ben Jonson
made a wilful jest on a line in his new play, it would
have rankled longer than fine and imprisonment for
deer-stealing. Those who crowd back and trample
upon men of genius in the common walk of life; who
cheat them, misrepresent them, take advantage of their
inattention or their generosity in worldly matters, are
sometimes surprised how their injuries, if not themselves,
are forgotten. Old Adam Woodcock might
as well have held malice against Roland Græme for
the stab in the stuffed doublet of the Abbot of Misrule.

Yet, as I might have remarked in the paragraph
gone before, it is probably not easy to put conscious
and secret superiority entirely between the mind and
the opinions of those around who think differently.
It is one reason why men of genius love more than
the common share of solitude—to recover self-respect.
In the midst of the amusing travesty he was drawing
in his own mind of the grave scene about him, Shakspere
possibly felt at moments as like a detected culprit
as he seemed to the gamekeeper and the justice. It
is a small penalty to pay for the after worship of the
world! The ragged and proverbially ill-dressed
peasants who are selected from the whole campagna,
as models to the sculptors of Rome, care little what
is thought of their good looks in the Corso. The

disguised proportions beneath their rags will be admired
in deathless marble, when the noble who scarce
deigns their possessor a look will lie in forgotten dust
under his stone scutcheon.

12. CHAPTER XII.
WARWICK CASTLE.

Were it not for the “out-heroded” descriptions in
the guide-books, one might say a great deal of Warwick
castle. It is the quality of overdone or ill-expressed
enthusiasm to silence that which is more
rational and real. Warwick is, perhaps, the best kept
of all the famous old castles of England. It is a superb
and admirably-appointed modern dwelling, in the shell,
and with all the means and appliances preserved, of
an ancient stronghold. It is a curious union, too. My
lady's maid and my lord's valet coquet upon the bartizan,
where old Guy of Warwick stalked in his coat-of-mail.
The London cockney, from his two days'
watering at Leamington, stops his pony-chaise, hired
at half-a-crown the hour, and walks Mrs. Popkins
over the old draw-bridge as peacefully as if it were the
threshold of his shop in the Strand. Scot and Frenchman
saunter through fosse and tower, and no ghost of
the middle ages stalks forth, with closed visor, to
challenge these once natural foes. The powdered
butler yawns through an embrasure, expecting “miladi,”
the countess of this fair domain, who in one day's
posting from London seeks relief in Warwick Castle
from the routs and soirées of town. What would old
Guy say, or the “noble imp” whose effigy is among
the escutcheoned tombs of his fathers, if they could
rise through their marble slabs, and be whirled over the
drawbridge in a post-chaise? How indignantly they
would listen to the reckoning within their own portcullis,
of the rates for chaise and postillion. How
astonished they would be at the butler's bow, and the
proffered officiousness of the valet. “Shall I draw
off your lordship's boots? Which of these new vests
from Staub will your lordship put on for dinner?”

Among the pictures at Warwick, I was interested
by a portrait of Queen Elizabeth (the best of that sovereign
I ever saw); one of Machiavelli, one of Essex,
and one of Sir Philip Sidney. The delightful and
gifted woman whom I had accompanied to the castle
observed of the latter, that the hand alone expressed
all his character. I had often made the remark in
real life, but I had never seen an instance on painting
where the likeness was so true. No one could doubt,
who knew Sir Philip Sidney's character, that it was a
literal portrait of his hand. In our day, if you have
an artist for a friend, he makes use of you while you
call, to “sit for the hand” of the portrait on his easel.
Having a preference for the society of artists myself,
and frequenting their studios habitually, I know of
some hundred and fifty unsuspecting gentlemen on
canvass, who have procured for posterity and their
children portraits of their own heads and dress-coats
to be sure, but of the hands of other persons!

The head of Machiavelli is, as is seen in the marble
in the gallery of Florence small, slender, and visibly
“made to creep into crevices.” The face is impassive
and calm, and the lips, though slight and almost feminine,
have an indefinable firmness and character. Essex
is the bold, plain, and blunt soldier history makes
him, and Elizabeth not unqueenly, nor (to my thinking)
of an uninteresting countenance; but, with all
the artist's flattery, ugly enough to be the abode of
the murderous envy that brought Mary to the block.

We paid our five shillings for having been walked
through the marble hall of Castle Warwick, and the
dressing-room of its modern lady, and, gratified much
more by our visit than I have expressed in this brief
description, posted on to Kenilworth.

13. CHAPTER XIII:
KENILWORTH.

On the road from Warwick to Kenilworth, I thought
more of poor Pierce Gaveston than of Elizabeth and
her proud earls. Edward's gay favorite was tried at
Warwick, and beheaded on Blacklow hill, which we
passed soon after leaving the town. He was executed
in June; and I looked about on the lovely hills and
valleys that surround the place of his last moments,
and figured to myself very vividly his despair at this
hurried leave-taking of this bright world in its brightest
spot and hour. Poor Gaveston! It was not in
his vocation to die! He was neither soldier nor prelate,
hermit nor monk. His political sins, for which
he suffered, were no offence against good-fellowship,
and were ten times more venial than those of the
“black dog of Arden,” who betrayed and helped to
murder him. He was the reckless minion of a king,
but he must have been a merry and pleasant fellow;
and now that the world (on our side the water at least),
is grown so grave, one could go back with Old Mortality,
and freshen the epitaph of a heart that took life
more gayly.

As we approached the castle of the proud Leicester,
I found it easier to people the road with the flying
Amy Robsart and her faithful attendant, with Mike Lambourne,
Flibbertigibbet, Richard Varney, and the troop
of mummurs and players, than with the more real
characters of history. To assist the romance, a little
Italian boy, with his organ and monkey, was fording
the brook on his way to the castle, as if its old towers
still held listeners for the wandering minstrel. I
tossed him a shilling from the carriage window, and
while the horses slowly forded the brook, asked him
in his own delicious tongue, where he was from.

“Son' di Firenze, signore!”

“And where are you going?”

“Li! al castello.”

Come from Florence and bound to Kenilworth!
Who would not grind an organ and sleep under a hedge,
to answer the hail of the passing traveller in terms
like these? I have seen many a beggar in Italy,
whose inheritance of sunshine and leisure in that delicious
clime I could have found it in my heart to
envy, even with all its concomitants of uncertainty
and want; but here was a bright-faced and inky-eyed
child of the sun, with his wardrobe and means upon
his back, travelling from one land to another, and loitering
wherever there was a resort for pleasure, without
a friend or a care; and, upon my life, I could have
donned his velveteen jacket, and with his cheerful
heart to button it over, have shouldered his organ,
put my trust in i forestieri, and kept on for Kenilworth.
There really is, I thought, as I left him behind, no
profit or reward consequent upon a life of confinement
and toil; no moss ever gathered by the unturned
stone, that repays, by a thousandth part, the loss of
even this poor boy's share of the pleasures of change.
What would not the tardy winner of fortune give to
exchange his worn-out frame, his unloveable and
furrowed features, his dulled senses, and his vain
regrets, for the elastic frame, the unbroken spirits,
and the redeemable. yet not oppressive poverty of this
Florentine regazzo! The irrecoverable gem of youth
is too often dissolved, like the pearl of Cleopatra, in a
cup which thins the blood and leaves disgust upon
the lip.

The magnificent ruins of Kenilworth broke in upon
my moralities, and a crowd of halt and crippled ciceroni

beset the carriage-door as we alighted at the outer
tower. The neighborhood of the Spa of Leamington,
makes Kenilworth a place of easy resort; and the
beggars of Warwickshire have discovered that your
traveller is more liberal of his coin than your sitter-at-home.
Some dozens of pony-chaises and small, crop
saddle-horses, clustered around the gate, assured us
that we should not muse alone amid the ruins of
Elizabeth's princely gift to her favorite. We passed
into the tilt-yard, leaving on our left the tower in
which Edward was confined, now the only habitable
part of Kenilworth. It gives a comfortable shelter to
an old seneschal, who stands where the giant probably
stood, with Flibbertigibbet under his doublet for a
prompter; but it is not the tail of a rhyme that serves
now for a passport.

Kenilworth, as it now stands, would probably disenchant
almost any one of the gorgeous dreams conjured
up by reading Scott's romance. Yet it is one
of the most superb ruins in the world. It would scarce
be complete to a novel-render, naturally, without a
warder at the gate, and the flashing of a spear-point
and helmet through the embrasures of the tower. A
horseman in armor should pace over the draw-bridge,
and a squire be seen polishing his cuiras through
the opening gate; while on the airy bartizan should
be observed a lady in hoop and farthingale, philandering
with my lord of Leicester in silk doublet and
rapier. In the place of this, the visiter enters Kenilworth
as I have already described, and stepping out
into the tilt-yard, he sees, on an elevation before him,
a fretted and ivy-covered ruin, relieved like a cloud-castle
on the sky; the bright blue plane of the western
heavens shining through window and broken wall,
flecked with waving and luxuriant leaves, and the
crusted and ornamental pinnacles of tottering masonry
and sculpture just leaning to their fall, though the
foundations upon which they were laid, one would
still think, might sustain the firmament. The swelling
root of a creeper has lifted that arch from its base,
and the protruding branch of a chance-sprung tree
(sown perhaps by a field-sparrow) has unseated the
key-stone of the next; and so perish castles and reputations,
the masonry of the human hand, and the
fabrics of human forethought; not by the strength
which they feared, but by the weakness they despised!
Little thought old John of Gaunt, when these rudely-bewn
blocks were heaved into their seat by his herculean
workmen, that, after resisting fire and foe, they
would be sapped and overthrown at last by a vine-tendril
and a sparrow!

Clinging against the outer wall, on that side of the
castle overlooking the meadow, which was overflowed
for the aquatic spots of Kenilworth, stands an antique
and highly ornamental fireplace, which belonged,
doubtless, to the principal hall. The windows on
either side looking forth upon the fields below, must
have been those from which Elizabeth and her train
observed the feats of Arion and his dolphin; and at all
times, the large and spacious chimney-place, from the
castle's first occupation to its last, must have been the
centre of the evening revelry, and conversation of its
guests. It was a hook whereon to hang a revery, and
between the roars of vulgar laughter which assailed
my ears from a party lolling on the grass below, I contrived
to figure to myself, with some distinctness, the
personages who had stood about it. A visit to Kenilworth,
without the deceptions of fancy, would be as
disconnected from our previous enthusiasm on the
subject as from any other scene with which it had no
relation. The general effect at first, in any such spot,
is only to dispossess us, by a powerful violence, of the
cherished picture we had drawn of it in imagination;
and it is only after the real recollection has taken root
and ripened—after months, it may be—that we can
fully bring the visionary characters we have drawn to
inhabit it. If I read Kenilworth now, I see Mike
Lambourne stealing out, not from the ruined postern
which I clambered through, over heaps of rubbish,
but from a little gate that turned noiselessly on its
hinges, in the unreal castle built ten years ago in my
brain.

I had wandered away from my companion, Miss
Jane Porter, to climb up a secret staircase in the wall,
rather too difficult of ascent for a female foot, and
from my elevated position I caught an accidental view
of that distinguished lady through the arch of a Gothic
window, with a background of broken architecture and
foliage—presenting, by chance, perhaps the most fitting
and admirable picture of the authoress of the
Scottish Chiefs, that a painter in his brightest hour
could have fancied. Miss Porter, with her tall and
striking figure, her noble face (said by Sir Martin Shee
to have approached nearer in its youth to his beau
ideal of the female features than any other, and still
possessing the remains of uncommon beauty), is at all
times a person whom it would be difficult to see without
a feeling of involuntary admiration. But standing,
as I saw her at that moment, motionless and erect, in
the morning dress, with dark feathers, which she has
worn since the death of her beloved and gifted sister,
her wrists folded across, her large and still beautiful
eyes fixed on a distant object in the view, and her
nobly-cast lineaments reposing in their usual calm and
benevolent tranquillity, while, around and above her,
lay the material and breathed the spirit over which she
had held the first great mastery—it was a tableau
vivant which I was sorry to be alone to see.

Was she thinking of the great mind that had evoked
the spirits of the ruins she stood among—a mind in
which (by Sir Walter's own confession) she had first
bared the vein of romance which breathed so freely
for the world's delight? Were the visions which
sweep with such supernatural distinctness and rapidity
through the imagination of genius—visions of which
the millionth portion is probably scarce communicated
to the world in a literary lifetime—were Elizabeth's
courtiers, Elizabeth's passions, secret hours, interviews
with Leicester—were the imprisoned king's
nights of loncliness and dread, his hopes, his indignant,
but unheeded thoughts—were all the possible circumstances,
real or imaginary, of which that proud castle
might have been the scene, thronging in those few
moments of revery through her fancy? Or was her
heart busy with its kindly affections, and had the
beauty and interest of the scene but awakened a thought
of one who was most wont to number with her the
sands of those brighter hours?

Who shall say? The very question would perhaps
startle the thoughts beyond recall—so elusive are even
the most angelic of the mind's unseen visitants?

I have recorded here the speculations of a moment
while I leaned over the wall of Kenilworth, but as I
descended by the giddy staircase, a peal of rude
laughter broke from the party in the fosse below, and
I could not but speculate on the difference between
the various classes whom curiosity draws to the spot.
The distinguished mind that conceives a romance
which enchants the world, comes in the same guise
and is treated but with the same respect as theirs.
The old porter makes no distinction in his charge of
half-a-crown, and the grocer's wife who sucks an
orange on the grass, looks at the dark crape hat and
plain exterior—her only standards—and thinks herself
as well dressed, and therefore equal or superior to the
tall lady, whom she presumes is out like herself on a
day's pleasuring. One comes and goes like the other,
and is forgotten alike by the beggars at the gate and
the seneschal within, and thus invisibly and unsuspected,
before our very eyes, does genius gather its golden
fruit, and while we walk in a plain and commonplace
world, with commonplace and sordid thoughts

and feelings, the gifted walk side by side with us in a
world of their own—a world of which we see distant
glimpses in their after-creations, and marvel in what
unsunned mine its gems of thought were gathered!

14. CHAPTER XIV.
A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN'S
MARRIAGE.

The usual directions for costume, in the corner of
the court card of invitation, included, on the occasion
of the queen's marriage, a wedding favor, to be worn
by ladies on the shoulder, and by gentlemen on the
left breast. This trifling addition to the dress of the
individual was a matter of considerable importance to
the milliners, hatters, etc., who, in a sale of ten or
twelve hundred white cockades (price from two dollars
to five) made a very pretty profit. The power of giving
a large ball to the more expensive classes, and ordering
a particular addition to the costume—in other
words, of laying a tax on the rich for the benefit of
the poor, is exercised more frequently in Ireland than
in other countries, and serves the double purpose of
popularity to the lord lieutenant, and benefit to any
particular branch of industry that may be suffering
from the decline of a fashion.

The large quadrangular court-yard of the castle
rattled with the tramp of horses' feet and the clatter of
sabres and spurs, and in the uncertain glare of torches
and lamps, the gay colors and glittering arms of the
mounted guard of lancers had a most warlike appearance.
The procession which the guard was stationed
to regulate and protect, rather detracted from the romantic
effect—the greater proportion of equipages
being the covered hack cars of the city—vehicles of
the most unmitigated and ludicrous vulgarity. A
coffin for two, set on its end, with the driver riding on
the turned-down lid, would be a very near resemblance;
and the rags of the driver, and the translucent leanness
of his beast, make it altogether the most deplorable
of conveyances. Here and there a carriage with
liveries, and here and there a sedan-chair with four
stout Milesian calves in blue stockings trotting under
the poles, rather served as a foil than a mitigation of
the effect, and the hour we passed in the line, edging
slowly toward the castle, was far from unfruitful in
amusement. I learned afterward that even those who
have equipages in Dublin go to court in hack cars as
a matter of economy—one of the many indications of
that feeling of lost pride which has existed in Ireland
since the removal of the parliament.

A hall and staircase lined with files of soldiers is not
quite as festive an entrance to a ball as the more common
one of alleys of flowering shrubs; but with a
waltz by a military band resounding from the lofty
ceiling, I am not sure that it does not temper the blood
as aptly for the spirit of the hour. It was a rainy
night, and the streets were dark, and the effect upon
myself of coming suddenly into so enchanted a scene
—arms glittering on either side, and a procession of
uniforms and plumed dames winding up the spacious
stairs—was thrilling, even with the chivalric scenes of
Eglinton fresh in my remembrance.

At the head of the ascent we entered a long hall,
lined with the private servants of Lord Ebrington, and
the ceremony of presentation having been achieved the
week before, we left the throne-room on the right, and
passed directly to St. Patrick's Hall, the grand scene
of the evening's festivities. This, I have said before,
is the finest ball-room I remember in Europe. Twelve
hundred people, seated, dancing, or promenading,
were within its lofty walls on the night whose festivities
I am describing; and at either end a gallery, sup
ported by columns of marble, contained a band of
music, relieving each other with alternate waltzes and
quadrilles. On the long sides of the hail were raised
tiers of divans, filled with chaperons, veteran officers,
and other lookers-on, and at the upper end was raised
a platform with a throne in the centre, and seats on
either side for the family of the lord lieutenant and the
more distinguished persons of the nobility. Lord
Ebrington was rather in his character of a noble host
than that of viceroy, and I did not observe him once
seated under his canopy of state; but with his aids
and some one of the noble ladies of his family on his
arm, he promenaded the hall conversing with his acquaintances,
and seemingly enjoying in a high degree
the brilliant gayety of the scene. His dress, by the
way, was the simple diplomatic dress of most continental
courts, a blue uniform embroidered with gold,
the various orders on his breast forming its principal
distinction. I seldom have seen a man of a more
calm and noble dignity of presence than the lord lieutenant,
and never a face that expressed more strongly
the benevolence and high purity of character for which
he is distinguished. In person, except that he is
taller, he bears a remarkably close resemblance to the
Duke of Wellington.

We can scarcely conceive, in this country of black
coats, the brilliant effect of a large assembly in which
there is no person out of uniform or court-dress—
every lady's head nodding with plumes, and every
gentleman in military scarlet and gold or lace and
embroidery. I may add, too, that in this country of
care-worn and pale faces, we can as little conceive the
effect of an assembly rosy with universal health,
habitually unacquainted with care, and abandoned with
the apparent child-like simplicity of high breeding, to
the inspiring gayety of the hour. The greater contrast,
however, is between a nation where health is the
first care, and one in which health is never thought
of till lost; and light and shade are not more contrasted
than the mere general effect of countenance
in one and in the other. A stranger travelling in our
country, once remarked to me that a party he had attended
seemed like an entertainment given in the convalescent
ward of a hospital—the ladies were so pale
and fragile, and the men so unjoyous and sallow. And
my own invariable impression, in the assemblies I
have first seen after leaving my own country was a
corresponding one—that the men and women had the
rosy health and untroubled gayety of children round a
May-pole. That this is not the effect of climate, I do
most religiously believe. It is over-much care and over-much
carelessness—the corroding care of an avid temerity
in business, and the carelessness of all the functions
of life till their complaints become too imperative to
be disregarded. But this is a theme out of place.

The ball was managed by the grand chamberlain
(Sir William Leeson), and the aids-de-camp of the
lord lieutenant, and except that now and then you
were reminded by the movement around you that you
stood with your back to the representative of royalty,
there was little to draw your attention from the attractions
of the dance. Waltz, quadrille, and gallop, followed
each other in giddy succession, and “what do
you think of Irish beauty?” had been asked me as
often as “how do you like America?” was ever mumbled
through the trumpet of Miss Martineau, when I
mounted with a friend to one of the upper divans, and
tried, what is always a difficult task, and nowhere so
difficult as in Ireland, to call in the intoxicated fancy,
and anatomize the charm of the hour.

Moore's remark has been often quoted—“there is
nothing like an Irish woman to take a man off his
feet;” but whether this figure of speech was suggested
by the little bard's common soubriquet of “Jump-up-and-kiss-me
[3] Tom Moore,” or simply conveyed his

idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it
contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed)
in that country, a very just, as well as realizing description.
Physically, Irish women are probably the finest
race in the world—I mean, taller, better limbed and
chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair,
and freer action, than any other nation I have observed.
The Phœnician and Spanish blood which
has run hundreds of years in their veins, still kindles
its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the
northern mind and the bright color of the nor hern
skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admirable
and superb harmony. The idea we form of Italian
and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and
Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and exceeded.
Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright
teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eyebrows
of jet, are what we should look for on the palette
of Appelles, could we recall the painter, and reanimate
his far-famed models; and these varied charms, united,
fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian
of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the
rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a brunette,
makes beauty as rare—but whether it is the
damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon
blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland.
I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society,
for in all my travels in Ireland, I did not chance to
see even one peasant-girl of any pretensions to good
looks. From north to south, they looked, to me,
coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive.

I noticed in St. Patrick's Hall what I had remarked
ever since I had been in the country, that with all
their beauty, the Irish women are very deficient in
what in England is called style. The men, on the
contrary, were particularly comme il faut, and as they
are a magnificent race (corresponding to such mothers
and sisters), I frequently observed I had never seen
so many handsome and elegant men in a day. Whenever
I saw a gentleman and lady together, riding,
driving, or walking, my first impression was, almost
universally, that the man was in attendance upon a
woman of an inferior class to his own. This difference
may be partly accounted for by the reduced circumstances
of the gentry of Ireland, which keeps the
daughters at home, that the sons may travel and improve;
but it works differently in America, where,
spite of travel and every other advantage to the contrary,
the daughters of a family are much oftener
lady-like than the sons are gentleman-like. After
wondering for some time, however, why the quick-witted
women of Ireland should be less apt than those
of other countries in catching the air of high breeding
usually deemed so desirable, I began to like them better
for the deficiency, and to find a reason for it in the
very qualities which make them so attractive. Nothing
could be more captivating and delightful than the
manners of Irish women, and nothing, at the same
time, could be more at war with the first principles of
English high breeding—coldness and reténu. The
frank, almost hilarious “how are you?” of an Irish
girl, her whole-handed and cordial grasp, as often in
the day as you meet her, the perfectly un-missy-ish,
confiding, direct character of her conversation, are all
traits which would stamp her as somewhat rudely bred
in England, and as desperately vulgar in New York
or Philadelphia.

Modest to a proverb, the Irish woman is as unsuspecting
of an impropriety as if it were an impossible
thing, and she is as fearless and joyous as a midshipman,
and sometimes as noisy. In a ball-room she
looks ill-dressed, not because her dress was ill-put-on,
but because she dances, not glides, sits down without
care, pulls her flowers to pieces, and if her head-dress
incommodes her, gives it a pull or a push—acts which
would be perfect insanity at Almack's. If she is of
fended, she asks for an explanatino. If she does not
understand you, she confesses her ignorance. If she
wishes to see you the next day, she tells you how and
when. She is the child of nature, and children are
not “stylish.” The niminy-piminy, eye-avoiding,
finger-tipped, drawling, don't-touch-me manner of
some of the fashionable ladies of our country, would
amuse a cold and reserved English woman sufficiently,
but they would drive an Irish girl into hysterics. I
have met one of our fair country-people abroad, whose
“Grecian stoop,” and exquisitely subdued manner,
was invariably taken for a fit of indigestion.

The ball-supper was royally sumptuous, and served
in a long hall thrown open at midnight; and in the
gray of the morning, I left the floor covered with
waltzers, and confessed to an Irish friend, that I never
in my life, not even at Almack's, had seen the half as
much true beauty as had brightened St. Patrick's Hall
at the celebration of the queen's marriage.

15. CHAPTER XV.
CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON.

The paradox of “the more one does, the more one
can do,” is resolved in life at Washington with more
success than I have seen it elsewhere. The inexorable
bell at the hotel or boarding-house pronounces the
irrevocable and swift transit of breakfast to all sleepers
after eight. The elastic depths of the pillow have
scarcely yielded their last feather to the pressure of
the sleeper's head, before the drowse is rudely shaken
from his eyelids, and with an alacrity which surprises
himself, he finds his toilet achieved, his breakfast over,
and himself abroad to lounge in the sunshine till the
flag waves on the capitol. He would retire to his
chamber to read during these two or three vacant
hours, but the one chair in his pigeon-hole creaks, or
has no back or bottom, or his anthracite fire is out, or
is too hot for the size of the room; or, in short, Washington,
from whatever cause, is a place where none
read except those who stand up to a padlocked newspaper.
The stars and stripes, moving over the two
wings of the capitol at eleven, announce that the two
chambers of legislation are in session, and the hard-working
idler makes his way to the senate or the
house. He lingers in the lobby awhile, amused with
the button-hole seizers playing the unwilling ears of
members with their claims, or enters the library,
where ladies turn over prints, and enfilade, with their
battery of truant eyes, the comers in at the green
door. He then gropes up the dark staircase to the
senate gallery, and stifles in the pressure of a hot
gallery, forgetting, like listeners at a crowded opera,
that bodily discomfort will unlink the finest harmonies
of song or oratory. Thence he descends to the rotunda
to draw breath and listen to the more practical, but
quite as earnest eloquence of candidates for patents;
and passes, after while, to the crowded gallery of the
house, where, by some acoustic phenomena in the
construction of the building, the voices of the speakers
comes to his ear as articulate as water from a narrownecked
bottle. “Small blame to them!” he thinks,
however: for behind the brexia columns are grouped
all the fair forms of Washington; and in making his
bow to two hundred despotic lawgivers in feathers and
velvet, he is readily consoled that the duller legislators
who yield to their sway are inaudible and forgotten.
To this upper house drop in, occasionally, the younger
or gayer members of the lower, bringing, if not political
scandal, at least some slight résumer of what Mr.
Somebody is beating his desk about below; and thus,
crammed with the day's trifles or the day's business,
and fatigned from heel to eyelid, our idler goes home

at five to dress for dinner and the night's campaign,
having been up and on his legs for ten mortal hours.

Cold water and a little silence in his own room have
rather refreshed him, and he dines at six with a party
of from fifteen to twenty-five persons. He discusses
the vital interests of fourteen millions of people over
a glass of wine with the man whose vote, possibly,
will decide their destiny, and thence hurries to a ball-room
crammed like a perigord-pie, where he pants,
elbows, eats supper, and waltzes till three in the
morning. How human constitutions stand this, and
stand it daily and nightly, from the beginning to the
end of a session, may well puzzle the philosophy of
those who rise and breakfast in comfortable leisure.

I joined the crowd on the twenty-second of February,
to pay my respects to the president, and see the
cheese. Whatever veneration existed in the minds of
the people toward the former, their curiosity in reference
to the latter predominated, unquestionably.
The circular pavé, extending from the gate to the
White House, was thronged with citizens of all classes,
those coming away having each a small brown paper
parcel and a very strong smell; those advancing manifesting,
by shakings of the head and frequent exclamations,
that there may be too much of a good thing,
and particularly of a cheese. The beautiful portico
was thronged with boys and coach-drivers, and the
odor strengthened with every step. We forced our
way over the threshold, and encountered an atmosphere,
to which the mephitic gas floating over Avernus
must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the
hall hung a rough likeness of the general, emblazoned
with eagle and stars, forming a background to the
huge tub in which the cheese had been packed; and
in the centre of the vestibule stood the “fragrant gift,”
surrounded with a dense crowd, who, without crackers,
or even “malt to their cheese,” had, in two hours,
eaten and purveyed away fourteen hundred pounds!
The small segment reserved for the president's use
counted for nothing in the abstractions.

Glad to compromise for a breath of cheeseless air,
we desisted from the struggle to obtain a sight of the
table, and mingled with the crowd in the east room.
Here were diplomates in their gold coats and officers
in uniform, ladies of secretaries and other ladies,
soldiers on volunteer duty, and Indians in war-dress
and paint. Bonnets, feathers, uniforms, and all—it
was rather a gay assemblage. I remembered the descriptions
in travellers' books, and looked out for
millers and blacksmiths in their working gear, and for
rudeness and vulgarity in all. The offer of a mammoth
cheese to the public was likely to attract to the
presidental mansion more of the lower class than would
throng to a common levee. Great-coats there were,
and not a few of them, for the day was raw, and unless
they were hung on the palings outside, they must remain
on the owners' shoulders; but, with a single exception
(a fellow with his coat torn down his back,
possibly in getting at the cheese), I saw no man in a
dress that was not respectable and clean of its kind,
and abundantly fit for a tradesman out of his shop.
Those who were much pressed by the crowd put their
hats on; but there was a general air of decorum
which would surprise any one who had pinned his
faith on travellers. An intelligent Englishman, very
much inclined to take a disgust to mobocracy, expressed
to me great surprise at the decency and proper
behavior of the people. The same experiment in
England, he thought, would result in as pretty a riot
as a paragraph-monger would desire to see.

The president was down stairs in the oval reception
room, and, though his health would not permit him
to stand, he sat in his chair for two or three hours, and
received his friends with his usual bland and dignified
courtesy. By his side stood the lady of the mansion,
dressed in full court costume, and doing the honors
of her place with a grace and amenity which every one
felt, and which threw a bloom over the hour. General
Jackson retired, after a while, to his chamber, and
the president elect remained to support his relative,
and present to her the still thronging multitude, and
by four o'clock the guests were gone, and the “banquet
hall” was deserted. Not to leave a wrong impression
of the cheese, I dined afterward at a table to
which the president had sent a piece of it, and found
it of excellent quality. It is like many other things,
more agreeable in small quantities.

Some eccentric mechanic has presented the president
with a sulkey, made entirely (except the wheels)
of rough-cut hickory, with the bark on. It looks
rude enough, but has very much the everlasting look
of old Hickory himself; and if he could be seen driving
a high-stepping, bony old iron-gray steed in it,
any passer by would see that there was as much fitness
in the whole thing as in the chariot of Bacchus and
his reeling leopards. Some curiously-twisted and
gnarled branches have been very ingeniously turned
into handles and whip-box, and the vehicle is compact
and strong. The president has left it to Mr. Van
Buren.

In very strong contrast to the sulkey, stood close by,
the elegant phaeton, made of the wood of the old
frigate Constitution. It has a seat for two, with a
driver's box, covered with a superb hammercloth, and
set up rather high in front; the wheels and body are
low, and there are bars for baggage behind; altogether,
for hightness and elegance, it would be a creditable
turn out for Long Acre. The material is excessively
beautiful—a fine-grained oak, polished to a very high
degree, with its colors delicately brought out by a coat
of varnish. The wheels are very slender and light, but
strong, and, with all its finish, it looks a vehicle capable
of a great deal of service. A portrait of the Constitution,
under full sail, is painted on the panels.

16. CHAPTER XVI.
THE INAUGURATION.

While the votes for president were being counted
in the senate, Mr. Clay remarked to Mr. Van Buren,
with courteous significance:—

“It is a cloudy day, sir!”

“The sun will shine on the fourth of March!” was
the confident reply.

True to his augury, the sun shone out of heaven
without a cloud on the inaugural morning. The air
was cold, but clear and life-giving; and the broad
avenues of Washington for once seemed not too large
for the throning population. The crowds who had
been pouring in from every direction for several days
before, ransacking the town for but a shelter from the
night, were apparent on the spacious sidewalks; and
the old campaigners of the winter seemed but a thin
sprinkling among the thousands of new and strange
faces. The sun shone alike on the friends and opponents
of the new administration, and, as far as one
might observe in a walk to the capitol, all were made
cheerful alike by its brightness. It was another
augury, perhaps, and may foretell a more extended
fusion under the light of the luminary new risen. In
a whole day passed in a crowd composed of all classes
and parties, I heard no remark that the president would
have been unwilling to hear.

I was at the capitol a half hour before the procession
arrived, and had leisure to study a scene for
which I was not at all prepared. The noble stairease
of the east front of the building leaps over three
arches, under one of which carriages pass to the basement
door; and, as you approach from the gate, the

eye cuts the ascent at right angles, and the sky, broken
by a small spire at a short distance, is visible beneath.
Broad stairs occur at equal distances, with corresponding
projections; and from the upper platform rise
the outer columns of the portico, with ranges of columns
three deep extending back to the pilasters. I
had often admired this front with its many graceful
columns, and its superb flight of stairs, as one of the
finest things I had seen in the world. Like the effect
of the assembled population of Rome waiting to receive
the blessing before the front of St. Peter's, however,
the assembled crowd on the steps and at the
base of the capitol heightened inconceivably the grandeur
of the design. They were piled up like the
people on the temples of Babylon in one of Martin's
sublime pictures—every projection covered, and an
inexpressible soul and character given by their presence
to the architecture. Boys climbed about the
bases of the columns, single figures stood on the posts
of the surrounding railings in the boldest relief against
the sky; and the whole thing was exactly what Paul
Veronese would I have delighted to draw. I stood near
an accomplished artist who is commissioned to fill one
of the panels of the rotunda, and I can not but hope
he may have chosen this magnificent scene for his
subject.

The republican procession, consisting of the presidents
and their families, escorted by a small volunteer
corps, arrived soon after twelve. The General and
Mr. Van Buren were in the constitution phaeton,
drawn by four grays, and as it entered the gate, they
both rode uncovered. Descending from the carriage
at the foot of the steps, a passage was made for them
through the dense crowd, and the tall white head of
the old chieftain, still uncovered, went steadily up
through the agitated mass, marked by its peculiarity
from all around it.

I was in the crowd thronging the opposite side of
the court, and lost sight of the principal actors in this
imposing drama, till they returned from the senate
chamber. A temporary platform had been laid, and
railed in on the broad stair which supports the portico,
and, for all preparation to one of the most important
and most meaning and solemn ceremonies on
earth—for the inauguration of a chief magistrate over a
republic of fifteen millions of freemen—the whole addition
to the open air, and the presence of the people,
was a volume of holy writ. In comparing the impressive
simplicity of this consummation of the wishes of
a mighty people, with the tricked-out ceremonial, and
hollow show, which embarrass a corresponding event
in other lands, it was impossible not to feel that the
moral sublime was here—that a transaction so important,
and of such extended and weighty import, could
borrow nothing from drapery or decoration, and that
the simple presence of the sacred volume, consecrating
the act, spoke more thrillingly to the heart than the
trumpets of a thousand heralds.

The crowd of diplomatists and senators in the rear
of the columns made way, and the ex-president and
Mr. Van Buren advanced with uncovered heads. A
murmur of feeling rose up from the moving mass below,
and the infirm old man, emerged from a sick-chamber,
which his physician had thought it impossible
he should leave, bowed to the people, and, still
uncovered in the cold air, took his seat beneath the
portico. Mr. Van Buren then advanced, and with a
voice remarkably distinct, and with great dignity, read
his address to the people. The air was elastic, and
the day still; and it is supposed that near twenty thousand
persons heard him from his elevated position distinctly.
I stood myself on the outer limit of the
crowd, and though I lost occasionally a sentence from
the interruption near by, his words came clearly articulated
to my ear.

When the address was closed, the chief justice ad
vanced and administered the oath. As the book
touched the lips of the new president, there arose a
general shout, and expression of feeling common
enough in other countries, but drawn with difficulty
from an American assemblage. The sons, and the
immediate friends of Mr. Van Buren, then closed
about him; the ex-president, the chief justice, and
others, gave him the hand of congratulation, and the
ceremony was over. They descended the steps, the
people gave one more shout as they mounted the constitution
carriage together, and the procession returned
through the avenue, followed by the whole population
of Washington.

Mr. Van Buren held a levee immediately afterward,
but I endeavored in vain to get my foot over the
threshold. The crowd was tremendous. At four,
the diplomatic body had an audience; and in replying
to the address of Don Angel Calderon, the president
astonished the gold coats, by addressing them as the
democratic corps. The representatives of the crowned
heads of Europe stood rather unesily under the
epithet, till it was suggested that he possibly meant to
say diplomatic.

17. CHAPTER XVII.
WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.

There is a sagacity acquired by travel on the subject
of forage and quarters which is useful in all other
cities in the world where one may happen to be a
stranger, but which is as inapplicable to the emergencies
of an arrival in Washington as waltzing in a shipwreck.
It is a capital whose peculiarities are as much
sui generis as those of Venice; but as those who have
become wise by a season's experience neither remain
on the spot to give warning, nor have recorded thei
experiences in a book, the stranger is worse off in a
coach in Washington than in a gondola in the “city
of silver streets.”

It is well known, I believe, that when the future
city of Washington was about being laid out, there
were two large lot-buyers or land-owners, living two
miles apart, each of whom was interested in having
the public buildings upon the centre of his own domain.
Like children quarrelling for a sugar horse,
the subject of dispute was pulled in two, and one got
the head, the other the tail. The capitol stands on a
rising ground in solitary grandeur, and the president's
house and department buildings two miles off on another.
The city straddles and stretches between,
doing its best to look continuous and compact; but
the stranger soon sees that it is, after all, but a “city
of magnificent distances,” built to please nobody on
earth but a hackney-coachman.

The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will
drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that
nearest the capitol—supposing, of course, that, as
Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the
most central part will naturally be near the scene of
action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby's, and,
at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he
engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that
boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby's, however,
he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and
wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the
hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the
foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might
have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars
a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and
foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and
dinner-giving people shower upon him the “small
rain” of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth
day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses

of his friends (which they never write on their cards,
because, if they did, it would be no guide), and is told
it is impossible to direct him, but the hackney-coachmen
all know! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the
most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has
ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into
his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two
miles away from the capitol. He passes the president's
house, and getting off the smooth road, begins
to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots,
laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of
geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends living
in houses that want nothing of being in the country,
but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had
rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and
each occupant had made a street with reference to his
own front door. The much-shaken and more-astonished
victim consumes his morning and his temper,
and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty
calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and
wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geography.

A fortnight's experience satisfies the stranger that
this same journey is worse at night than at morning;
and that, as he leaves his dinner which he pays for at
home, runs the risk of his neck, passes an hour or
two on the road, and ruins himself in hack-hire, it
must be a very—yes, a very pleasant dinner-party to
compensate him. Consequently, he either sends a
“p. p. c.” to all his acquaintances, and lives incog.,
or, which is a more sensible thing, moves up to the
other settlement, and abandons the capitol.

Those who live on the other side of the president's
house are the secretaries, diplomatists, and a few
wealthy citizens. There is no hotel in this quarter,
but there are one or two boarding-houses, and (what
we have been lucky enough to secure ourselves) furnished
lodgings, in which you have everything but
board. Your dinner is sent you from a French cook's
near by, and your servant gets your breakfast—a plan
which gives you the advantage of dining at your own
hour, choosing your own society, and of having covers
for a friend or two whenever it suits your humor, and
at half an hour's warning. There are very few of
these lodgings (which combine many other advantages
over a boarding-house), but more of them would be a
good speculation to house-owners, and I wish it were
suggested, not only here, but in every city in our
country.

Aside from society, the only amusement in Washington
is frequenting the capitol. If one has a great
deal of patience and nothing better to do, this is very
well; and it is very well at any rate till one becomes
acquainted with the heads of the celebrated men in
both the chambers, with the noble architecture of the
building, and the routine of business. This done, it
is time wearily spent for a spectator. The finer orators
seldom speak, or seldom speak warmly, the floor is
oftenest occupied by prosing and very sensible gentlemen,
whose excellent ideas enter the mind more
agreeably by the eye than the ear, or, in other words,
are better delivered by the newspapers, and there is a
great deal of formula and etiquetical sparring which
is not even entertaining to the members, and which
consumes time “consumedly.” Now and then the
senate adjourns when some one of the great orators
has taken the floor, and you are sure of a great effort
the next morning. If you are there in time, and can
sit, like Atlas with a world on your back, you may enjoy
a front seat and hear oratory, unsurpassed, in my
opinion, in the world.

The society in Washington, take it all in all, is by
many degrees the best in the United States. One is
prepared, though I can not conceive why, for the contrary.
We read in books of travels, and we are told
by everybody, that the society here is promiscuous,
rough, inelegant, and even barbarous. This is an
untrue representation, or it has very much changed.

There is no city, probably no village in America,
where the female society is not refined, cultivated, and
elegant. With or without regular advantages, woman
attains the refinements and the tact necessary to polite
intercourse. No traveller ever ventured to complain
of this part of American society. The great deficiency
is that of agreeable, highly-cultivated men, whose pursuits
have been elevated, and whose minds are pliable
to the grace and changing spirit of conversation.
Every man of talents possesses these qualities naturally,
and hence the great advantage which Washington enjoys
over every other city in our country. None but
a shallow observer, or a malicious book maker, would
ever sneer at the exteriors or talk of the ill-breeding
of such men as form, in great numbers, the agreeable
society of this place—for a man of great talents never
could be vulgar; and there is a superiority about most
of these which raises them above the petty standard
which regulates the outside of a coxcomb. Even
compared with the dress and address of men of similar
positions and pursuits in Europe, however (members
of the house of commons, for example, or of the chamber
of deputies in France), it is positively the fact that
the senators and representatives of the United States
have a decided advantage. It is all very well for Mr.
Hamilton, and other scribblers whose books must be
spiced to go down, to ridicule a Washington soirée for
English readers; but if the observation of one who
has seen assemblies of legislators and diplomatists in
all the countries of Europe may be fairly placed
against his and Mrs. Trollope's, I may assert, upon
my own authority, that they will not find, out of May
Fair in England, so well-dressed and dignified a body
of men. I have seen as yet no specimen of the rough
animal described by them and others as the “western
member;” and if David Crockett (whom I was never
so fortunate as to see) was of that description, the race
must have died with him. It is a thing I have learned
since I have been in Washington, to feel a wish that
foreigners should see congress in session. We are
so humbugged, one way and another, by travellers'
lies.

I have heard the observation once or twice from
strangers since I have been here, and it struck myself
on my first arrival, that I had never seen within the
same limit before, so many of what may be called
“men of mark.” You will scarce meet a gentleman
on the sidewalk in Washington who would not attract
your notice, seen elsewhere, as an individual possessing
in his eye or general features a certain superiority.
Never having seen most of the celebrated speakers of
the senate, I busied myself for the first day or two in
examining the faces that passed me in the street, in
the hope of knowing them by the outward stamp
which, we are apt to suppose, belongs to greatness.
I gave it up at last, simply from the great number I
met who might be (for all that features had to do with
it) the remarkable men I sought.

There is a very simple reason why a congress of the
United States should be, as they certainly are, a much
more marked body of men than the English house of
commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies
in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in
either case, they come by their honors. In England
and France the lords and peers are legislators by hereditary
right, and the members of the commons and
deputies from the possession of extensive property or
family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in
most cases, no great personal talent in the individual.
They are legislators, but they are devoted very often
much more heartily to other pursuits—hunting or
farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door passions
common to English gentlemen and lords, or the
corresponding penchants of French peers and deputies

It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote
themselves to politics exclusively. With us every
one knows it is quite the contrary. An American
politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pursuit.
He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in
subservience to his aim. He can not afford to have
another passion of any kind till he has reached the
point of his ambition—and then it has become a
mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is,
that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our
country, who has not had occasion for more than ordinary
talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of
his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals
leave their marks, and they who have thought, and
watched, and struggled, and contended with the passions
of men as an American politician inevitably
must, can not well escape the traces of such work.
It usually elevates the character of the face—it always
strongly marks it.

A-propos of “men of mark;” the dress circle of the
theatre, at Power's benefit, not long since, was graced
by three Indians in full costume—the chief of the
Foxes, the chief of the Ioways, and a celebrated warrior
of the latter tribe, called the Sioux-killer. The
Fox is an old man of apparently fifty, with a heavy,
aquiline nose, a treacherous eye, sharp as an eagle's,
and a person rather small in proportion to his head
and features. He was dressed in a bright scarlet
blanket, and a crown of feathers, with an eagle's plume,
standing erect on the top of his head, all dyed in the
same deep hue. His face was painted to match, except
his lips, which looked of a most ghastly sallow,
in contrast with his fiery nose, forehead, and cheeks.
His tomahawk lay in the hollow of his arm, decked
with feathers of the same brilliant color with the rest
of his drapery. Next him sat the Sioux-killer, in a
dingy blanket, with a crown made of a great quantity
of the feathers of a pea-hen, which fell over his face,
and concealed his features almost entirely. He is
very small, but is famous for his personal feats, having,
among other things, walked one hundred and thirty
miles in thirty successive hours, and killed three Sioux
(hence his name) in one battle with that nation. He
is but twenty-three, but very compact and wiry-looking,
and his eye glowed through his veil of hen-feathers
like a coal of fire.

Next to the Sioux-killer sat “White Cloud,” the
chief of the Ioways. His face was the least warlike
of the three, and expressed a good nature and freedom
from guile, remarkable in an Indian. He is about
twenty-four, has very large features, and a fine, erect
person, with broad shoulders and chest. He was
painted less than the Fox chief, but of nearly the same
color, and carried, in the hollow of his arm, a small,
glittering tomahawk, ornamented with blue feathers.
His head was encircled by a kind of turban of silver-fringed
cloth, with some metallic pendents for earrings,
and his blanket, not particularly clean or handsome,
was partly open on the breast, and disclosed a calico
shirt, which was probably sold to him by a trader in
the west. They were all very attentive to the play,
but the Fox chief and White Cloud departed from the
traditionary dignity of Indians, and laughed a great
deal at some of Power's fun. The Sioux-killer sat
between them, as motionless and grim as a marble
knight on a tomb-stone.

The next day I had the pleasure of dining with
Mr. Power, who lived at the same hotel with the Indian
delegation; and while at dinner he received a
message from the Ioways, expressing a wish to call on
him. We were sitting over our wine when White
Cloud and the Sioux-killer came in with their interpreter.
There were several gentlemen present, one
of them in the naval undress uniform, whose face the
Sioux-killer scrutinized very sharply. They smiled
in bowing to Power, but made very grave inclinations
to the rest of us. The chief took his seat, assuming
a very erect and dignified attitude, which he preserved
immoveable during the interview; but the Sioux-killer
drew up his legs, resting them on the round of the
chair, and, with his head and body bent forward,
seemed to forget himself, and give his undivided attention
to the study of Power and his naval friend.

Tumblers of champagne were given them, which
they drank with great relish, though the Sioux-killer
provoked a little ridicule from White Cloud, by coughing
as he swallowed it. The interpreter was a halfbreed
between an Indian and a negro, and a most intelligent
fellow. He had been reared in the loway
tribe, but had been among the whites a great deal for
the last few years, and had picked up English very
fairly. He told us that White Cloud was the son of
old White Cloud, who died three years since, and
that the young chief had acquired entire command
over the tribe by his mildness and dignity. He had
paid the debts of the Ioways to the traders, very much
against the will of the tribe; but he commenced by
declaring firmly that he would he just, and had carried
his point. He had come to Washington to receive a
great deal of money from the sale of the lands of the
tribe, and the distribution of it lay entirely in his own
power. Only one old warrior had ventured to rise in
council and object to his measures; but when White
Cloud spoke, he had dropped his head on his bosom
and submitted. This information and that which
followed was given in English, of which neither of the
Ioways understood a word.

Mr. Power expressed a surprise that the Sioux-killer
should have known him in his citizen's dress.
The interpreter translated it, and the Indian said in
answer:—

“The dress is very different, but when I see a man's
eye I know him again.”

He then told Power that he wished, in the theatre,
to raise his war-cry and help him fight the three bad-looking
men who were his enemies (referring to the
three bailiffs in the scene in Paddy Carey). Power
asked what part of the play he liked best. He said
that part where he seized the girl in his arms and ran
off the stage with her (at the close of an Irish jig in
the same play).

The interpreter informed us that this was the first
time the Sioux-killer had come among the whites.
He had disliked them always till now, but he said he
had seen enough to keep him telling tales all the rest
of his life. Power offered them cigars, which they
refused. We expressed our surprise; and the Sioux-killer
said that the Indians who smoked gave out
soonest in the chase; and White Cloud added, very
gravely, that the young women of his tribe did not
like the breaths of the smokers. In answer to an inquiry
I made about the comparative size of Indians
and white men, the chief said that the old men of the
whites were larger than old Indians, but the young
whites were not so tall and straight as the youths of
his tribe. We were struck with the smallness of the
chief's hands and feet; but he seemed very much
mortified when the interpreter translated our remark to
him. He turned the little sallow fingers over and over,
and said that old White Cloud, his father, who had
been a great warrior, had small hands like his. The
young chief, we were told by the interpreter, has never
yet been in an engagement, and is always spared from
the heavier fatigues undergone by the rest of the
tribe.

They showed great good nature in allowing us to
look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White
Cloud wore a collar of bear's claws, which marked
him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great
cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of
which he explained the use very energetically. It
was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in

he fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him.
After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose
to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand
gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused,
however, with the Sioux-killer's more characteristic
adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave
us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood
tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward
customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very
much belie him.

18. CHAPTER XVIII.
WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.

The leaf that is lodged in some sunny dell, after
drifting on the whirlwind—the Indian's canoe, after it
has shot the rapids—the drop of water that has struggled
out from the Phlegethon of Niagara, and sleeps
on the tranquil bosom of Ontario—are faint images
of contrast and repose, compared with a Washingtonian
after the session. I have read somewhere, in an
oriental tale, that a lover, having agreed to share his
life with his dying mistress, took her place in the
grave six months in the year. In Bagdad it might
have been a sacrifice. In Washington I could conceive
such an arrangement to make very little difference.

Nothing is done leisurely in our country; and, by
the haste with which everybody rushes to the railroad
the morning after the rising of congress, you
would fancy that the cars, like Cinderella's coach,
would be changed into pumpkins at the stroke of
twelve. The town was evacuated in a day. On the
fifth of March a placard was sent back by the innkeepers
at Baltimore, declaring that there was not so
much as a garret to be had in that city, and imploring
gentlemen and ladies to remain quietly at Washington
for twenty-four hours. The railroad engine, twice a
day, tugged and puffed away through the hills, drawing
after it, on its sinuous course, a train of brick-colored
cars, that resembled the fabulous red dragon trailing
its slimy length through the valley of Crete. The
gentlemen who sit by the fire in the bar-room at
Gadsby's, like Theodore Hook's secretary, who could
hear his master write “Yours faithfully” in the next
room, learned to distinguish “Received payment”
from “Sundries,” by listening to the ceaseless scratch
of the bookkeeper. The ticket-office at the depot
was a scene of struggle and confusion between those
who wanted places; while, looking their last on these
vanishing paymasters, stood hundreds of tatterdemalions,
white, yellow, and black, with their hands in
their pockets, and (if sincere regret at their departure
could have wrung it forth) a tear in their eye. The
bell rang, and the six hundred departures flocked to
their places—young ladies, with long faces, leaving
the delights of Washington for the dull repose of the
country—their lovers, with longer faces, trying, in vain,
to solve the X quantity expressed by the aforesaid
“Sundries” in their bill—and members of congress
with long faces, too—for not one in twenty has “made
the impression” he expected; and he is moralizing
on the decline of the taste for eloquence, and on the
want of “golden opportunity” for the display of indignant
virtue!

Nothing but an army, or such a concourse of people
as collects to witness an inauguration, could ever make
Washington look populous. But when congress, and
its train of ten thousand casual visiters are gone, and
only the official and indigenous inhabitants remain,
Balbec, or Palmyra, with a dozen Arabs scattered
among its ruins, has less a look of desolation. The
few stragglers in the streets add to its loneliness—pro
ducing exactly the effect sometimes given to a woodland
solitude by the presence of a single bird. The
vast streets seem grown vaster and more disproportionate—the
houses seem straggling to greater distances—the
walk from the president's house to the capitol
seems twice as long—and new faces are seen here and
there, at the doors and windows—for cooks and innkeepers
that had never time to lounge, lounge now,
and their families take quiet possession of the unrented
front parlor. He who would be reminded of his departed
friends should walk down on the avenue. The
carpet, associated with so many pleasant recollections
—which has been pressed by the dainty feet of wits
and beauties—to tread on which was a privilege and
a delight—is displayed on a heap of old furniture, and
while its sacred defects are rudely scanned by the curious,
is knocked down, with all its memories, under the
hammer of the auctioneer. Tables, chairs, ottomans
—all linked with the same glowing recollections—go
for most unworthy prices; and while, humiliated with
the sight, you wonder at the artificial value given to
things by their possessors, you begin to wonder whether
your friends themselves, subjected to the same
searching valuation, would not be depreciated too!
Ten to one, if their characters were displayed like
their carpets, there would come to light defects as unsuspected!

The person to whom this desolation is the “unkindest
cut” is the hackney-coachman. “His vocation”
is emphatically gone! Gone is the dollar made
every successive half hour! Gone is the pleasant sum
in compound addition, done “in the head,” while waiting
at the doors of the public offices! Gone are the
short, but profitable, trips to the theatre! Gone the
four or five families, all taken the same evening to parties,
and each paying the item of “carriage from nine
till twelve!” Gone the absorbed politician, who would
rather give the five-dollar bill than wait for his change!
the lady who sends the driver to be paid at “the bar;”
the uplifted fingers, hither and thither, which embarrass
his choice of a fare—gone, all! The chop-fallen
coachy drives to the stand in the morning and drives
home at noon; he creeps up to Fuller's at a snail-pace,
and, in very mockery of hope, asks the homeward-bound
clerk from the department if he wants a
coach! Night comes on, and his horses begin to believe
in the millenium—and the cobwebs are wove
over his whip-socket.

These changes, however, affect not unpleasantly the
diplomatic and official colony extending westward from
the president's. The inhabitants of this thin-sprinkled
settlement are away from the great thoroughfare, and
do not miss its crowds. The cessation of parties is to
them a relief from night-journeys, colds, card-leavings,
and much wear and tear of carriage-horses. They
live now in dressing-gowns and slippers, read the reviews
and the French papers, get their dinners comfortably
from the restaurateurs, and thank Heaven that
the capitol is locked up. The attachés grow fat, and
the despatches grow thin.

There are several reasons why Washington, till the
month of May, spite of all the drawbacks in the picture
delineated above, is a more agreeable residence
than the northern cities. In the first place, its climate
is at least a month earlier than that of New York, and,
in the spring, is delightful. The trees are at this moment
(the last week in March) bursting into buds;
open carriages are everywhere in use; walking in the
sun is oppressive; and for the last fortnight, this has
been a fair chronicle of the weather. Boston and
New York have been corroded with east winds, meantime,
and even so near as Baltimore, they are still
wrapped in cloaks and shawls. To those who, in
reckoning the comforts of life, agree with me in making
climate stand for nine tenths, this is powerful attraction.

Then the country about Washington, the drives
and rides, are among the most lovely in the world,
the banks of Rock creek are a little wilderness of
beauty. More brigh waters, more secluded bridle-paths,
more sunny and sheltered hill-sides, or finer
mingling of rock, hill, and valley, I never rode among.
Within a half hour's gallop, you have a sylvan retreat
of every variety of beauty, and in almost any direction;
and from this you come home (and this is not the
case with most sylvan rides) to an excellent French
dinner and agreeable society, if you like it. You have
all the seclusion of a rural town, and none of its petty
politics and scandal—all the means and appliances of
a large metropolis, and none of its exactions and limitations.
That which makes the charm of a city, and
that for which we seek the country, are equally here,
and the penalties of both are removed.

Until the reflux of population from the Rocky
mountains, I suppose Washington will never be a metropolis
of residence. But if it were an object with
the inhabitants to make it more so, the advantages I
have just enumerated, and a little outlay of capital and
enterprise, would certainly, in some degree, effect it.
People especially who come from Europe, or have
been accustomed to foreign modes of living, would be
glad to live near a society composed of such attractive
materials as the official and diplomatic persons at the
seat of government. That which keeps them away is,
principally, want of accommodation, and, in a less degree,
it is want of comfortable accommodation in the
other cities which drives them back to Europe. In
Washington you must either live at an hotel or a
boarding-house. In either case, the mode of life is
only endurable for the shortest possible period, and
the moment congress rises, every sufferer in these detestable
places is off for relief. The hotels are crowded
to suffocation; there is an utter want of privacy in
the arrangement of the suites of apartments; the service
is ill-ordered, and the prices out of all sense or
reason. You pay for that which you have not, and
you can not get by paying for it that which you want.

The boarding-house system is worse yet. To possess
but one room in privacy, and that opening on a
common passage; to be obliged to come to meals at
certain hours, with chance table companions, and no
place for a friend, and to live entirely in your bedroom
or in a public parlor, may truly be called as abominable
a routine as a gentleman could well suffer. Yet the
great majority of those who come to Washington are
in one or the other of these two categories.

The use of lodgings for strangers or transient residents
in the city does not, after all the descriptions in
books, seem at all understood in our country. This
is what Washington wants, but it is what every city in
the country wants generally. Let us describe it as if
it was never before heard of, and perhaps some enlightened
speculator may advance us half a century in
some of the cities, by creating this luxury.

Lodgings of the ordinary kind in Europe generally
consist of the apartments on one floor. The house,
we will suppose, consists of three stories above the
basement, and each floor contains a parlor, bedroom,
and dressing-room, with a small antechamber. (This
arrangement of rooms varies, of course, and a larger
family occupies two floors.) These three suites of
apartments are neatly furnished; bed-clothes, table-linen,
and plate, if required, are found by the proprietor,
and in the basement story usually lives a man and
his wife, who attend to the service of the lodgers;
i. e., bring water, answer the door-bell, take in letters,
keep the rooms in order, make the fires, and, if it is
wished, do any little cookery in case of sickness.
These people are paid by the proprietor, but receive a
fee for extra service, and a small gratuity, at departure,
from the lodger. It should be added to this, that it is
not infra. dig. to live in the second or third story.

In connexion with lodgings, there must be of course
a cook or restaurateur within a quarter of a mile.
The stranger agrees with him for his dinner, to consist
of so many dishes, and to be sent to him at a certain
hour. He gives notice in the morning if he dines out,
buys his own wine of the wine-merchant, and thus
saves two heavy items of overcharge in the hotel or
boarding-house. His own servant makes his tea or
coffee (and for this purpose has access to the fire in
the basement), and does all personal service, such as
brushing clothes, waiting at table, going on errands,
&c., &c. The stranger comes in, in short, at a moment's
warning, brings nothing but his servant and
baggage, and finds himself in five minutes at home,
his apartments private, and every comfort and convenience
as completely about him as if he had lived
there for years.

At from ten to fourteen dollars a week, such apartments
would pay the proprietor handsomely, and afford
a reasonable luxury to the lodger. A cook would
make a good thing of sending in a plain dinner for a
dollar a head (or more if the dinner were more expensive),
and at this rate, a family of two or more persons
might have a hundred times the comfort now enjoyed
at hotels, at certainly half the cost.

We have been seduced into a very unsentimental
chapter of “ways and means,” but we trust the suggestions,
though containing nothing new, may not be
altogether without use. The want of some such thing
as we have recommended is daily and hourly felt and
complained of.