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Title: Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7878]
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PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS

OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


VOL. I.



To Francis Bennoch, Esq.,

The dear and valued friend, who, by his generous and genial hospitality
and unfailing sympathy, contributed so largely (as is attested by the
book itself) to render Mr. Hawthorne's residence in England agreeable and
homelike, these ENGLISH NOTES are dedicated, with sincere respect and
regard, by                 The Editor.




PREFACE


It seems justly due to Mr. Hawthorne that the occasion of any portion of
his private journals being brought before the Public should be made
known, since they were originally designed for his own reference only.

There had been a constant and an urgent demand for a life or memoir of
Mr. Hawthorne; yet, from the extreme delicacy and difficulty of the
subject, the Editor felt obliged to refuse compliance with this demand.
Moreover, Mr. Hawthorne had frequently and emphatically expressed the
hope that no one would attempt to write his Biography; and the Editor
perceived that it would be impossible for any person, outside of his own
domestic circle, to succeed in doing it, on account of his extreme
reserve.  But it was ungracious to do nothing, and therefore the Editor,
believing that Mr. Hawthorne himself was alone capable of satisfactorily
answering the affectionate call for some sketch of his life, concluded to
publish as much as possible of his private records, and even extracts
from his private letters, in order to gratify the desire of his friends
and of literary artists to become more intimately acquainted with him.
The Editor has been severely blamed and wondered at, in some instances,
for allowing many things now published to see the light; but it has been
a matter both of conscience and courtesy to withhold nothing that could
be given up.  Many of the journals were doubtless destroyed; for the
earliest date found in his American papers was that of 1835.

The Editor has transcribed the manuscripts just as they were left,
without making any new arrangement or altering any sequence,--merely
omitting some passages, and being especially careful to preserve whatever
could throw any light upon his character.  To persons on a quest for
characteristics, however, each of his books reveals a great many, and it
is believed that with the aid of the Notes (both American and English)
the Tales and Romances will make out a very complete and true picture of
his individuality; and the Notes are often an open sesame to the artistic
works.

Several thickly written pages of observations--fine and accurate
etchings--have been omitted, sometimes because too personal with regard
to himself or others, and sometimes because they were afterwards absorbed
into one or another of the Romances or papers in Our Old Home.  It seemed
a pity not to give these original cartoons fresh from his mind, because
they are so carefully finished at the first stroke.  Yet, as Mr.
Hawthorne chose his own way of presenting them to the public, it was
thought better not to exhibit what he himself withheld.  Besides, to any
other than a fellow-artist they might seem mere repetitions.

It is very earnestly hoped that these volumes of notes--American,
English, and presently Italian--will dispel an often-expressed opinion
that Mr. Hawthorne was gloomy and morbid.  He had the inevitable
pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend of his
called "the awful power of insight"; but his mood was always cheerful and
equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his
wit and humor was the light of his home.  He saw too far to be
despondent, though his vivid sympathies and shaping imagination often
made him sad in behalf of others.  He also perceived morbidness, wherever
it existed, instantly, as if by the illumination of his own steady cheer;
and he had the plastic power of putting himself into each person's
situation, and of looking from every point of view, which made his
charity most comprehensive.  From this cause he necessarily attracted
confidences, and became confessor to very many sinning and suffering
souls, to whom he gave tender sympathy and help, while resigning judgment
to the Omniscient and All-wise.

Throughout his journals it will be seen that Mr. Hawthorne is
entertaining, and not asserting, opinions and ideas.  He questions,
doubts, and reflects with his pen, and, as it were, instructs himself.
So that these Note-Books should be read, not as definitive conclusions of
his mind, but merely as passing impressions often.  Whatever conclusions
be arrived at are condensed in the works given to the world by his own
hand, in which will never be found a careless word.  He was so extremely
scrupulous about the value and effect of every expression that the Editor
has felt great compunction in allowing a single sentence to be printed.
unrevised by himself; but, with the consideration of the above remarks
always kept in mind, these volumes are intrusted to the generous
interpretation of the reader.  If any one must be harshly criticised, it
ought certainly to be the Editor.

When a person breaks in, unannounced, upon the morning hours of an
artist, and finds him not in full dress, the intruder, and not the
surprised artist, is doubtless at fault.         S.  H.

Dresden, April, 1870.





PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS




Liverpool, August 4th, 1853.--A month lacking two days since we left
America,--a fortnight and some odd days since we arrived in England.  I
began my services, such as they are, on Monday last, August 1st, and here
I sit in my private room at the Consulate, while the Vice-Consul and
clerk are carrying on affairs in the outer office.

The pleasantest incident of the morning is when Mr. Pearce (the
Vice-Consul) makes his appearance with the account-books, containing the
receipts and expenditures of the preceding day, and deposits on my desk a
little rouleau of the Queen's coin, wrapped up in a piece of paper.  This
morning there were eight sovereigns, four half-crowns, and a shilling,--a
pretty fair day's work, though not more than the average ought to be.
This forenoon, thus far, I have had two calls, not of business,--one from
an American captain and his son, another from Mr. H----  B----, whom I
met in America, and who has showed us great attention here.  He has
arranged for us to go to the theatre with some of his family this
evening.

Since I have been in Liverpool we have hardly had a day, until yesterday,
without more or less of rain, and so cold and shivery that life was
miserable.  I am not warm enough even now, but am gradually getting
acclimated in that respect.

Just now I have been fooled out of half a crown by a young woman, who
represents herself as an American and destitute, having come over to see
an uncle whom she found dead, and she has no means of getting back again.
Her accent is not that of an American, and her appearance is not
particularly prepossessing, though not decidedly otherwise.  She is
decently dressed and modest in deportment, but I do not quite trust her
face.  She has been separated from her husband, as I understand her, by
course of law, has had two children, both now dead.  What she wants is to
get back to America, and perhaps arrangements may be made with some
shipmaster to take her as stewardess or in some subordinate capacity.  My
judgment, on the whole, is that she is an English woman, married to and
separated from an American husband,--of no very decided virtue.  I might
as well have kept my half-crown, and yet I might have bestowed it worse.
She is very decent in manner, cheerful, at least not despondent.

At two o'clock I went over to the Royal Rock Hotel, about fifteen or
twenty minutes' steaming from this side of the river.  We are going there
on Saturday to reside for a while.  Returning, I found that, Mr. B., from
the American Chamber of Commerce, had called to arrange the time and
place of a visit to the Consul from a delegation of that body.  Settled
for to-morrow at quarter past one at Mr. Blodgett's.


August 5th.--An invitation this morning from the Mayor to dine at the
Town Hall on Friday next.  Heaven knows I had rather dine at the humblest
inn in the city, inasmuch as a speech will doubtless be expected from me.
However, things must be as they may.

At a quarter past one I was duly on hand at Mr. Blodgett's to receive the
deputation from the Chamber of Commerce.  They arrived pretty seasonably,
in two or three carriages, and were ushered into the drawing-room,--seven
or eight gentlemen, some of whom I had met before.  Hereupon ensued a
speech from Mr. B., the Chairman of the delegation, short and sweet,
alluding to my literary reputation and other laudatory matters, and
occupying only a minute or two.  The speaker was rather embarrassed,
which encouraged me a little, and yet I felt more diffidence on this
occasion than in my effort at Mr. Crittenden's lunch, where, indeed, I
was perfectly self-possessed.  But here, there being less formality, and
more of a conversational character in what was said, my usual diffidence
could not so well be kept in abeyance.  However, I did not break down to
an intolerable extent, and, winding up my eloquence as briefly as
possible, we had a social talk.  Their whole stay could not have been
much more than a quarter of an hour.

A call, this morning, at the Consulate, from Dr. Bowrug, who is British
minister, or something of the kind, in China, and now absent on a
twelvemonth's leave.  The Doctor is a brisk person, with the address of a
man of the world,--free, quick to smile, and of agreeable manners.  He
has a good face, rather American than English in aspect, and does not
look much above fifty, though he says he is between sixty and seventy.  I
should take him rather for an active lawyer or a man of business than for
a scholar and a literary man.  He talked in a lively way for ten or
fifteen minutes, and then took his leave, offering me any service in his
power in London,--as, for instance, to introduce me to the Athenaeum
Club.


August 8th.--Day before yesterday I escorted my family to Rock Ferry, two
miles either up or down the Mersey (and I really don't know which) by
steamer, which runs every half-hour.  There are steamers going
continually to Birkenhead and other landings, and almost always a great
many passengers on the transit.  At this time the boat was crowded so as
to afford scanty standing-room; it being Saturday, and therefore a kind
of gala-day.  I think I have never seen a populace before coming to
England; but this crowd afforded a specimen of one, both male and female.
The women were the most remarkable; though they seemed not disreputable,
there was in them a coarseness, a freedom, an--I don't know what, that
was purely English.  In fact, men and women here do things that would at
least make them ridiculous in America.  They are not afraid to enjoy
themselves in their own way, and have no pseudo-gentility to support.
Some girls danced upon the crowded deck, to the miserable music of a
little fragment of a band which goes up and down the river on each trip
of the boat.  Just before the termination of the voyage a man goes round
with a bugle turned upwards to receive the eleemosynary pence and
half-pence of the passengers.  I gave one of them, the other day, a
silver fourpence, which fell into the vitals of the instrument, and
compelled the man to take it to pieces.

At Rock Ferry there was a great throng, forming a scene not unlike one of
our muster-days or a Fourth of July, and there were bands of music and
banners, and small processions after them, and a school of charity
children, I believe, enjoying a festival.  And there was a club of
respectable persons, playing at bowls on the bowling-green of the hotel,
and there were children, infants, riding on donkeys at a penny a ride,
while their mothers walked alongside to prevent a fall.  Yesterday, while
we were at dinner, Mr. B. came in his carriage to take us to his
residence, Poulton Hall.  He had invited us to dine; but I misunderstood
him, and thought he only intended to give us a drive.  Poulton Hall is
about three miles from Rock Ferry, the road passing through some pleasant
rural scenery, and one or two villages, with houses standing close
together, and old stone or brick cottages, with thatched roofs, and now
and then a better mansion, apart among trees.  We passed an old church,
with a tower and spire, and, half-way up, a patch of ivy, dark green, and
some yellow wall-flowers, in full bloom, growing out of the crevices of
the stone.  Mr. B. told us that the tower was formerly quite clothed with
ivy from bottom to top, but that it had fallen away for lack of the
nourishment that it used to find in the lime between the stones.  This
old church answered to my Transatlantic fancies of England better than
anything I have yet seen.  Not far from it was the Rectory, behind a deep
grove of ancient trees; and there lives the Rector, enjoying a thousand
pounds a year and his nothing-to-do, while a curate performs the real
duty on a stipend of eighty pounds.

We passed through a considerable extent of private road, and finally
drove over a lawn, studded with trees and closely shaven, till we reached
the door of Poulton Hall.  Part of the mansion is three or four hundred
years old; another portion is about a hundred and fifty, and still
another has been built during the present generation.  The house is two
stories high, with a sort of beetle-browed roof in front.  It is not very
striking, and does not look older than many wooden houses which I have
seen in America.  There is a curious stately staircase, with a twisted
balustrade much like that of the old Province House in Boston.  The
drawing-room is a handsome modern apartment, being beautifully painted
and gilded and paper-hung, with a white marble fireplace and rich
furniture, so that the impression is that of newness, not of age.  It is
the same with the dining-room, and all the rest of the interior so far as
I saw it.

Mr. B. did not inherit this old hall, nor, indeed, is he the owner, but
only the tenant of it.  He is a merchant of Liverpool, a bachelor, with
two sisters residing with him.  In the entrance-hall, there was a stuffed
fox with glass eyes, which I never should have doubted to be an actual
live fox except for his keeping so quiet; also some grouse and other
game.  Mr. B. seems to be a sportsman, and is setting out this week on an
excursion to Scotland, moor-fowl shooting.

While the family and two or three guests went to dinner, we walked out to
see the place.  The gardener, an Irishman, showed us through the garden,
which is large and well cared for.  They certainly get everything from
Nature which she can possibly be persuaded to give them, here in England.
There were peaches and pears growing against the high brick southern
walls,--the trunk and branches of the trees being spread out perfectly
flat against the wall, very much like the skin of a dead animal nailed up
to dry, and not a single branch protruding.  Figs were growing in the
same way.  The brick wall, very probably, was heated within, by means of
pipes, in order to re-enforce the insufficient heat of the sun.  It seems
as if there must be something unreal and unsatisfactory in fruit that
owes its existence to such artificial methods.  Squashes were growing
under glass, poor things!  There were immensely large gooseberries in the
garden; and in this particular berry, the English, I believe, have
decidedly the advantage over ourselves.  The raspberries, too, were large
and good.  I espied one gigantic hog-weed in the garden; and, really, my
heart warmed to it, being strongly reminded of the principal product of
my own garden at Concord.  After viewing the garden sufficiently, the
gardener led us to other parts of the estate, and we had glimpses of a
delightful valley, its sides shady with beautiful trees, and a rich,
grassy meadow at the bottom.  By means of a steam-engine and subterranean
pipes and hydrants, the liquid manure from the barn-yard is distributed
wherever it is wanted over the estate, being spouted in rich showers from
the hydrants.  Under this influence, the meadow at the bottom of the
valley had already been made to produce three crops of grass during the
present season, and would produce another.

The lawn around Poulton Hall, like thousands of other lawns in England,
is very beautiful, but requires great care to keep it so, being shorn
every three or four days.  No other country will ever have this charm,
nor the charm of lovely verdure, which almost makes up for the absence of
sunshine.  Without the constant rain and shadow which strikes us as so
dismal, these lawns would be as brown as an autumn leaf.  I have not,
thus far, found any such magnificent trees as I expected.  Mr. B. told me
that three oaks, standing in a row on his lawn, were the largest in the
county.  They were very good trees, to be sure, and perhaps four feet in
diameter near the ground, but with no very noble spread of foliage.  In
Concord there are, if not oaks, yet certainly elms, a great deal more
stately and beautiful.  But, on the whole, this lawn, and the old Hall in
the midst of it, went a good way towards realizing some of my fancies of
English life.

By and by a footman, looking very quaint and queer in his livery coat,
drab breeches, and white stockings, came to invite me to the table, where
I found Mr. B. and his sisters and guests sitting at the fruit and wine.
There were port, sherry, madeira, and one bottle of claret, all very
good; but they take here much heavier wines than we drink now in America.
After a tolerably long session we went to the tea-room, where I drank
some coffee, and at about the edge of dusk the carriage drew up to the
door to take us home.  Mr. B. and his sisters have shown us genuine
kindness, and they gave us a hearty invitation to come and ramble over
the house whenever we pleased, during their absence in Scotland.  They
say that there are many legends and ghost-stories connected with the
house; and there is an attic chamber, with a skylight, which is called
the Martyr's chamber, from the fact of its having, in old times, been
tenanted by a lady, who was imprisoned there, and persecuted to death for
her religion.  There is an old black-letter library, but the room
containing it is shut, barred, and padlocked,--the owner of the house
refusing to let it be opened, lest some of the books should be stolen.
Meanwhile the rats are devouring them, and the damps destroying them.


August 9th.--A pretty comfortable day, as to warmth, and I believe there
is sunshine overhead; but a sea-cloud, composed of fog and coal-smoke,
envelops Liverpool.  At Rock Ferry, when I left it at half past nine,
there was promise of a cheerful day.  A good many gentlemen (or, rather,
respectable business people) came in the boat, and it is not unpleasant,
on these fine mornings, to take the breezy atmosphere of the river.  The
huge steamer Great Britain, bound for Australia, lies right off the Rock
Ferry landing; and at a little distance are two old hulks of ships of
war, dismantled, roofed over, and anchored in the river, formerly for
quarantine purposes, but now used chiefly or solely as homes for old
seamen, whose light labor it is to take care of these condemned ships.
There are a great many steamers plying up and down the river to various
landings in the vicinity; and a good many steam-tugs; also, many boats,
most of which have dark-red or tan-colored sails, being oiled to resist
the wet; also, here and there, a yacht or pleasure-boat, and a few ships
riding stately at their anchors, probably on the point of sailing.  The
river, however, is by no means crowded; because the immense multitude of
ships are ensconced in the docks, where their masts make an intricate
forest for miles up and down the Liverpool shore.  The small black
steamers, whizzing industriously along, many of them crowded with
passengers, snake up the chief life of the scene.  The Mersey has the
color of a mud-puddle, and no atmospheric effect, as far as I have seen,
ever gives it a more agreeable tinge.

Visitors to-day, thus far, have been H. A. B., with whom I have arranged
to dine with us at Rock Ferry, and then he is to take us on board the
Great Britain, of which his father is owner (in great part).  Secondly,
Monsieur H., the French Consul, who can speak hardly any English, and who
was more powerfully scented with cigar-smoke than any man I ever
encountered; a polite, gray-haired, red-nosed gentleman, very courteous
and formal.  Heaven keep him from me!  At one o'clock, or thereabouts, I
walked into the city, down through Lord Street, Church Street, and back
to the Consulate through various untraceable crookednesses.  Coming to
Chapel Street, I crossed the graveyard of the old Church of St. Nicholas.
This is, I suppose, the oldest sacred site in Liverpool, a church having
stood here ever since the Conquest, though, probably, there is little or
nothing of the old edifice in the present one, either the whole of the
edifice or else the steeple, being thereto shaken by a chime of bells,--
perhaps both, at different times,--has tumbled down; but the present
church is what we Americans should call venerable.  When the first church
was built, and long afterwards, it must have stood on the grassy verge of
the Mersey; but now there are pavements and warehouses, and the thronged
Prince's and George's Docks, between it and the river; and all around it
is the very busiest bustle of commerce, rumbling wheels, hurrying men,
porter-shops, everything that pertains to the grossest and most practical
life.  And, notwithstanding, there is the broad churchyard extending on
three sides of it, just as it used to be a thousand years ago.  It is
absolutely paved from border to border with flat tombstones, on a level
with the soil and with each other, so that it is one floor of stone over
the whole space, with grass here and there sprouting between the
crevices.  All these stones, no doubt, formerly had inscriptions; but as
many people continually pass, in various directions, across the
churchyard, and as the tombstones are not of a very hard material, the
records on many of them are effaced.  I saw none very old.  A quarter of
a century is sufficient to obliterate the letters, and make all smooth,
where the direct pathway from gate to gate lies over the stones.  The
climate and casual footsteps rub out any inscription in less than a
hundred years.  Some of the monuments are cracked.  On many is merely cut
"The burial place of" so and so; on others there is a long list of
half-readable names; on some few a laudatory epitaph, out of which,
however, it were far too tedious to pick the meaning.  But it really is
interesting and suggestive to think of this old church, first built when
Liverpool was a small village, and remaining, with its successive dead of
ten centuries around it, now that the greatest commercial city in the
world has its busiest centre there.  I suppose people still continue to
be buried in the cemetery.  The greatest upholders of burials in cities
are those whose progenitors have been deposited around or within the city
churches.  If this spacious churchyard stood in a similar position in one
of our American cities, I rather suspect that long ere now it would have
run the risk of being laid out in building-lots, and covered with
warehouses; even if the church itself escaped,--but it would not escape
longer than till its disrepair afforded excuse for tearing it down.  And
why should it, when its purposes might be better served in another spot?

We went on board the Great Britain before dinner, between five and six
o'clock,--a great structure, as to convenient arrangement and adaptation,
but giving me a strong impression of the tedium and misery of the long
voyage to Australia.  By way of amusement, she takes over fifty pounds'
worth of playing-cards, at two shillings per pack, for the use of
passengers; also, a small, well-selected library.  After a considerable
time spent on board, we returned to the hotel and dined, and Mr. B. took
his leave at nine o'clock.


August 10th.--I left Rock Ferry for the city at half past nine.  In the
boat which arrived thence, there were several men and women with baskets
on their heads, for this is a favorite way of carrying burdens; and they
trudge onward beneath them, without any apparent fear of an overturn, and
seldom putting up a hand to steady them.  One woman, this morning, had a
heavy load of crockery; another, an immense basket of turnips, freshly
gathered, that seemed to me as much as a man could well carry on his
back.  These must be a stiff-necked people.  The women step sturdily and
freely, and with not ungraceful strength.  The trip over to town was
pleasant, it being a fair morning, only with a low-hanging fog.  Had it
been in America, I should have anticipated a day of burning heat.

Visitors this morning.  Mr. Ogden of Chicago, or somewhere in the Western
States, who arrived in England a fortnight ago, and who called on me at
that time.  He has since been in Scotland, and is now going to London and
the Continent; secondly, the Captain of the Collins steamer Pacific,
which sails to-day; thirdly, an American shipmaster, who complained that
he had never, in his heretofore voyages, been able to get sight of the
American Consul.

Mr. Pearce's customary matutinal visit was unusually agreeable to-day,
inasmuch as he laid on my desk nineteen golden sovereigns and thirteen
shillings.  It being the day of the steamer's departure, an unusual
number of invoice certificates had been required,--my signature to each
of which brings me two dollars.

The autograph of a living author has seldom been so much in request at so
respectable a price.  Colonel Crittenden told me that he had received as
much as fifty pounds on a single day.  Heaven prosper the trade between
America and Liverpool!


August 15th.--Many scenes which I should have liked to record have
occurred; but the pressure of business has prevented me from recording
them from day to day.

On Thursday I went, on invitation from Mr. B., to the prodigious steamer
Great Britain, down the harbor, and some miles into the sea, to escort
her off a little way on her voyage to Australia.  There is an immense
enthusiasm among the English people about this ship, on account of its
being the largest in the world.  The shores were lined with people to see
her sail, and there were innumerable small steamers, crowded with men,
all the way out into the ocean.  Nothing seems to touch the English
nearer than this question of nautical superiority; and if we wish to hit
them to the quick, we must hit them there.

On Friday, at 7 P.M., I went to dine with the Mayor.  It was a dinner
given to the Judges and the Grand Jury.  The Judges of England, during
the time of holding an Assize, are the persons first in rank in the
kingdom.  They take precedence of everybody else,--of the highest
military officers, of the Lord Lieutenants, of the Archbishops,--of the
Prince of Wales,--of all except the Sovereign, whose authority and
dignity they represent.  In case of a royal dinner, the Judge would lead
the Queen to the table.

The dinner was at the Town Hall, and the rooms and the whole affair were
all in the most splendid style.  Nothing struck me more than the footmen
in the city livery.  They really looked more magnificent in their
gold-lace and breeches and white silk stockings than any officers of
state.  The rooms were beautiful; gorgeously painted and gilded,
gorgeously lighted, gorgeously hung with paintings,--the plate was
gorgeous, and the dinner gorgeous in the English fashion.

After the removal of the cloth the Mayor gave various toasts, prefacing
each with some remarks,--the first, of course, the Sovereign, after which
"God save the Queen" was sung, the company standing up and joining in the
chorus, their ample faces glowing with wine, enthusiasm, and loyalty.
Afterwards the Bar, and various other dignities and institutions were
toasted; and by and by came the toast to the United States, and to me, as
their Representative.  Hereupon either "Hail Columbia," or "Yankee
Doodle," or some other of our national tunes (but Heaven knows which),
was played; and at the conclusion, being at bay, and with no alternative,
I got upon my legs, and made a response.  They received me and listened
to my nonsense with a good deal of rapping, and my speech seemed to give
great satisfaction; my chief difficulty being in not knowing how to pitch
my voice to the size of the room.  As for the matter, it is not of the
slightest consequence.  Anybody may make an after-dinner speech who will
be content to talk onward without saying anything.  My speech was not
more than two or three inches long; and, considering that I did not know
a soul there, except the Mayor himself, and that I am wholly unpractised
in all sorts of oratory, and that I had nothing to say, it was quite
successful.  I hardly thought it was in me, but, being once started, I
felt no embarrassment, and went through it as coolly as if I were going
to be hanged.

Yesterday, after dinner, I took a walk with my family.  We went through
by-ways and private roads, and saw more of rural England, with its
hedge-rows, its grassy fields, and its whitewashed old stone cottages,
than we have before seen since our arrival.


August 20th.--This being Saturday, there early commenced a throng of
visitants to Rock Ferry.  The boat in which I came over brought from the
city a multitude of factory-people.  They had bands of music, and banners
inscribed with the names of the mills they belong to, and other devices:
pale-looking people, but not looking exactly as if they were underfed.
They are brought on reduced terms by the railways and steamers, and come
from great distances in the interior.  These, I believe, were from
Preston.  I have not yet had an opportunity of observing how they amuse
themselves during these excursions.

At the dock, the other day, the steamer arrived from Rock Ferry with a
countless multitude of little girls, in coarse blue gowns, who, as they
landed, formed in procession, and walked up the dock.  These girls had
been taken from the workhouses and educated at a charity-school, and
would by and by be apprenticed as servants.  I should not have conceived
it possible that so many children could have been collected together,
without a single trace of beauty or scarcely of intelligence in so much
as one individual; such mean, coarse, vulgar features and figures
betraying unmistakably a low origin, and ignorant and brutal parents.
They did not appear wicked, but only stupid, animal, and soulless.  It
must require many generations of better life to wake the soul in them.
All America could not show the like.


August 22d.--A Captain Auld, an American, having died here yesterday, I
went with my clerk and an American shipmaster to take the inventory of
his effects.  His boarding-house was in a mean street, an old dingy
house, with narrow entrance,--the class of boarding-house frequented by
mates of vessels, and inferior to those generally patronized by masters.
A fat elderly landlady, of respectable and honest aspect, and her
daughter, a pleasing young woman enough, received us, and ushered us into
the deceased's bedchamber.  It was a dusky back room, plastered and
painted yellow; its one window looking into the very narrowest of
back-yards or courts, and out on a confused multitude of back buildings,
appertaining to other houses, most of them old, with rude chimneys of
wash-rooms and kitchens, the bricks of which seemed half loose.

The chattels of the dead man were contained in two trunks, a chest, a
sail-cloth bag, and a barrel, and consisted of clothing, suggesting a
thickset, middle-sized man; papers relative to ships and business, a
spyglass, a loaded iron pistol, some books of navigation, some charts,
several great pieces of tobacco, and a few cigars; some little plaster
images, that he had probably bought for his children, a cotton umbrella,
and other trumpery of no great value.  In one of the trunks we found
about twenty pounds' worth of English and American gold and silver, and
some notes of hand, due in America.  Of all these things the clerk made
an inventory; after which we took possession of the money and affixed the
consular seal to the trunks, bag, and chest.

While this was going on, we heard a great noise of men quarrelling in an
adjoining court; and, altogether, it seemed a squalid and ugly place to
live in, and a most undesirable one to die in.  At the conclusion of our
labors, the young woman asked us if we would not go into another chamber,
and look at the corpse, and appeared to think that we should be rather
glad than otherwise of the privilege.  But, never having seen the man
during his lifetime, I declined to commence his acquaintance now.

His bills for board and nursing amount to about the sum which we found in
his trunk; his funeral expenses will be ten pounds more; the surgeon has
sent in a bill of eight pounds, odd shillings; and the account of another
medical man is still to be rendered.  As his executor, I shall pay his
landlady and nurse; and for the rest of the expenses, a subscription must
be made (according to the custom in such cases) among the shipmasters,
headed by myself.  The funeral pomp will consist of a hearse, one coach,
four men, with crape hatbands, and a few other items, together with a
grave at five pounds, over which his friends will be entitled to place a
stone, if they choose to do so, within twelve months.

As we left the house, we looked into the dark and squalid dining-room,
where a lunch of cold meat was set out; but having no associations with
the house except through this one dead man, it seemed as if his presence
and attributes pervaded it wholly.  He appears to have been a man of
reprehensible habits, though well advanced in years.  I ought not to
forget a brandy-flask (empty) among his other effects.  The landlady and
daughter made a good impression on me, as honest and respectable persons.


August 24th.--Yesterday, in the forenoon, I received a note, and shortly
afterwards a call at the Consulate from Miss H----, whom I apprehend to
be a lady of literary tendencies.  She said that Miss L. had promised her
an introduction, but that, happening to pass through Liverpool, she had
snatched the opportunity to make my acquaintance.  She seems to be a
mature lady, rather plain, but with an honest and intelligent face.  It
was rather a singular freedom, methinks, to come down upon a perfect
stranger in this way,--to sit with him in his private office an hour or
two, and then walk about the streets with him, as she did; for I did the
honors of Liverpool, and showed her the public buildings.  Her talk was
sensible, but not particularly brilliant nor interesting; a good, solid
personage, physically and intellectually.  She is an English woman.

In the afternoon, at three o'clock, I attended the funeral of Captain
Auld.  Being ushered into the dining-room of his boarding-house, I found
brandy, gin, and wine set out on a tray, together with some little
spicecakes.  By and by came in a woman, who asked if I were going to the
funeral; and then proceeded to put a mourning-band on my hat,--a
black-silk band, covering the whole hat, and streaming nearly a yard
behind.  After waiting the better part of an hour, nobody else appeared,
although several shipmasters had promised to attend.  Hereupon, the
undertaker was anxious to set forth; but the landlady, who was arrayed in
shining black silk, thought it a shame that the poor man should be buried
with such small attendance.  So we waited a little longer, during which
interval I heard the landlady's daughter sobbing and wailing in the
entry; and but for this tender-heartedness there would have been no tears
at all.  Finally we set forth,--the undertaker, a friend of his, and a
young man, perhaps the landlady's son, and myself, in the black-plumed
coach, and the landlady, her daughter, and a female friend, in the coach
behind.  Previous to this, however, everybody had taken some wine or
spirits; for it seemed to be considered disrespectful not to do so.

Before us went the plumed hearse, a stately affair, with a bas-relief of
funereal figures upon its sides.  We proceeded quite across the city to
the Necropolis, where the coffin was carried into a chapel, in which we
found already another coffin, and another set of mourners, awaiting the
clergyman.  Anon he appeared,--a stern, broad-framed, large, and
bald-headed man, in a black-silk gown.  He mounted his desk, and read the
service in quite a feeble and unimpressive way, though with no lack of
solemnity.  This done, our four bearers took up the coffin, and carried
it out of the chapel; but, descending the steps, and, perhaps, having
taken a little too much brandy, one of them stumbled, and down came the
coffin,--not quite to the ground, however; for they grappled with it, and
contrived, with a great struggle, to prevent the misadventure.  But I
really expected to see poor Captain Auld burst forth among us in his
grave-clothes.

The Necropolis is quite a handsome burial-place, shut in by high walls,
so overrun with shrubbery that no part of the brick or stone is visible.
Part of the space within is an ornamental garden, with flowers and green
turf; the rest is strewn with flat gravestones, and a few raised
monuments; and straight avenues run to and fro between.  Captain Auld's
grave was dug nine feet deep.  It is his own for twelve months; but, if
his friends do not choose to give him a stone, it will become a common
grave at the end of that time; and four or five more bodies may then be
piled upon his.  Every one seemed greatly to admire the grave; the
undertaker praised it, and also the dryness of its site, which he took
credit to himself for having chosen.  The grave-digger, too, was very
proud of its depth, and the neatness of his handiwork.  The clergyman,
who had marched in advance of us from the chapel, now took his stand at
the head of the grave, and, lifting his hat, proceeded with what remained
of the service, while we stood bareheaded around.  When he came to a
particular part, "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the undertaker lifted a
handful of earth, and threw it rattling on the coffin,--so did the
landlady's son, and so did I.  After the funeral the undertaker's friend,
an elderly, coarse-looking man, looked round him, and remarked that "the
grass had never grown on the parties who died in the cholera year"; but
at this the undertaker laughed in scorn.

As we returned to the gate of the cemetery, the sexton met us, and
pointed to a small office, on entering which we found the clergyman, who
was waiting for his burial-fees.  There was now a dispute between the
clergyman and the undertaker; the former wishing to receive the whole
amount for the gravestone, which the undertaker, of course, refused to
pay.  I explained how the matter stood; on which the clergyman
acquiesced, civilly enough; but it was very strange to see the worldly,
business-like way in which he entered into this squabble, so soon after
burying poor Captain Auld.

During our drive back in the mourning-coach, the undertaker, his friend,
and the landlady's son still kept descanting on the excellence of the
grave,--"Such a fine grave,"--"Such a nice grave,"--"Such a splendid
grave,"--and, really, they seemed almost to think it worth while to die,
for the sake of being buried there.  They deemed it an especial pity that
such a grave should ever become a common grave.  "Why," said they to me,
"by paying the extra price you may have it for your own grave, or for
your family!" meaning that we should have a right to pile ourselves over
the defunct Captain.  I wonder how the English ever attain to any
conception of a future existence, since they so overburden themselves
with earth and mortality in their ideas of funerals.  A drive with an
undertaker, in a sable-plumed coach!--talking about graves!--and yet he
was a jolly old fellow, wonderfully corpulent, with a smile breaking out
easily all over his face,--although, once in a while, he looked
professionally lugubrious.

All the time the scent of that horrible mourning-coach is in my nostrils,
and I breathe nothing but a funeral atmosphere.


Saturday, August 27th.--This being the gala-day of the manufacturing
people about Liverpool, the steamboats to Rock Ferry were seasonably
crowded with large parties of both sexes.  They were accompanied with two
bands of music, in uniform; and these bands, before I left the hotel,
were playing, in competition and rivalry with each other in the
coach-yard, loud martial strains from shining brass instruments.  A prize
is to be assigned to one or to the other of these bands, and I suppose
this was a part of the competition.  Meanwhile the merry-making people
who thronged the courtyard were quaffing coffee from blue earthen mugs,
which they brought with them,--as likewise they brought the coffee, and
had it made in the hotel.

It had poured with rain about the time of their arrival, notwithstanding
which they did not seem disheartened; for, of course, in this climate, it
enters into all their calculations to be drenched through and through.
By and by the sun shone out, and it has continued to shine and shade
every ten minutes ever since.  All these people were decently dressed;
the men generally in dark clothes, not so smartly as Americans on a
festal day, but so as not to be greatly different as regards dress.  They
were paler, smaller, less wholesome-looking and less intelligent, and, I
think, less noisy, than so many Yankees would have been.  The women and
girls differed much more from what American girls and women would be on a
pleasure-excursion, being so shabbily dressed, with no kind of smartness,
no silks, nothing but cotton gowns, I believe, and ill-looking bonnets,--
which, however, was the only part of their attire that they seemed to
care about guarding from the rain.  As to their persons, they generally
looked better developed and healthier than the men; but there was a woful
lack of beauty and grace, not a pretty girl among them, all coarse and
vulgar.  Their bodies, it seems to me, are apt to be very long in
proportion to their limbs,--in truth, this kind of make is rather
characteristic of both sexes in England.  The speech of these folks, in
some instances, was so broad Lancashire that I could not well understand
it.



A WALK TO BEBBINGTON.


Rock Ferry, August 29th.--Yesterday we all took a walk into the country.
It was a fine afternoon, with clouds, of course, in different parts of
the sky, but a clear atmosphere, bright sunshine, and altogether a
Septembrish feeling.  The ramble was very pleasant, along the hedge-lined
roads in which there were flowers blooming, and the varnished holly,
certainly one of the most beautiful shrubs in the world, so far as
foliage goes.  We saw one cottage which I suppose was several hundred
years old.  It was of stone, filled into a wooden frame, the black-oak of
which was visible like an external skeleton; it had a thatched roof, and
was whitewashed.  We passed through a village,--higher Bebbington, I
believe,--with narrow streets and mean houses all of brick or stone, and
not standing wide apart from each other as in American country villages,
but conjoined.  There was an immense almshouse in the midst; at least, I
took it to be so.  In the centre of the village, too, we saw a
moderate-sized brick house, built in imitation of a castle with a tower
and turret, in which an upper and an under row of small cannon were
mounted,--now green with moss.  There were also battlements along the
roof of the house, which looked as if it might have been built eighty or
a hundred years ago.  In the centre of it there was the dial of a clock,
but the inner machinery had been removed, and the hands, hanging
listlessly, moved to and fro in the wind.  It was quite a novel symbol of
decay and neglect.  On the wall, close to the street, there were certain
eccentric inscriptions cut into slabs of stone, but I could make no sense
of them.  At the end of the house opposite the turret, we peeped through
the bars of an iron gate and beheld a little paved court-yard, and at the
farther side of it a small piazza, beneath which seemed to stand the
figure of a man.  He appeared well advanced in years, and was dressed in
a blue coat and buff breeches, with a white or straw hat on his head.
Behold, too, in a kennel beside the porch, a large dog sitting on his
hind legs, chained!  Also, close beside the gateway, another man, seated
in a kind of arbor!  All these were wooden images; and the whole
castellated, small, village-dwelling, with the inscriptions and the queer
statuary, was probably the whim of some half-crazy person, who has now,
no doubt, been long asleep in Bebbington churchyard.

The bell of the old church was ringing as we went along, and many
respectable-looking people and cleanly dressed children were moving
towards the sound.  Soon we reached the church, and I have seen nothing
yet in England that so completely answered my idea of what such a thing
was, as this old village church of Bebbington.

It is quite a large edifice, built in the form of a cross, a low peaked
porch in the side, over which, rudely cut in stone, is the date 1300 and
something.  The steeple has ivy on it, and looks old, old, old; so does
the whole church, though portions of it have been renewed, but not so as
to impair the aspect of heavy, substantial endurance, and long, long
decay, which may go on hundreds of years longer before the church is a
ruin.  There it stands, among the surrounding graves, looking just the
same as it did in Bloody Mary's days; just as it did in Cromwell's time.
A bird (and perhaps many birds) had its nest in the steeple, and flew in
and out of the loopholes that were opened into it.  The stone framework
of the windows looked particularly old.

There were monuments about the church, some lying flat on the ground,
others elevated on low pillars, or on cross slabs of stone, and almost
all looking dark, moss-grown, and very antique.  But on reading some of
the inscriptions, I was surprised to find them very recent; for, in fact,
twenty years of this climate suffices to give as much or more antiquity
of aspect, whether to gravestone or edifice, than a hundred years of our
own,--so soon do lichens creep over the surface, so soon does it blacken,
so soon do the edges lose their sharpness, so soon does Time gnaw away
the records.  The only really old monuments (and those not very old) were
two, standing close together, and raised on low rude arches, the dates on
which were 1684 and 1686.  On one a cross was rudely cut into the stone.
But there may have been hundreds older than this, the records on which
had been quite obliterated, and the stones removed, and the graves dug
over anew.  None of the monuments commemorate people of rank; on only one
the buried person was recorded as "Gent."

While we sat on  the flat slabs resting ourselves, several little girls,
healthy-looking and prettily dressed enough, came into the churchyard,
and began to talk and laugh, and to skip merrily from one tombstone to
another.  They stared very broadly at us, and one of them, by and by, ran
up to U. and J., and gave each of them a green apple, then they skipped
upon the tombstones again, while, within the church, we heard them
singing, sounding pretty much as I have heard it in our pine-built New
England meeting-houses.  Meantime the rector had detected the voices of
these naughty little girls, and perhaps had caught glimpses of them
through the windows; for, anon, out came the sexton, and, addressing
himself to us, asked whether there had been any noise or disturbance in
the churchyard.  I should not have borne testimony against these little
villagers, but S. was so anxious to exonerate our own children that she
pointed out these poor little sinners to the sexton, who forthwith turned
them out.  He would have done the same to us, no doubt, had my coat been
worse than it was; but, as the matter stood, his demeanor was rather
apologetic than menacing, when he informed us that the rector had sent
him.

We stayed a little longer, looking at the graves, some of which were
between the buttresses of the church and quite close to the wall, as if
the sleepers anticipated greater comfort and security the nearer they
could get to the sacred edifice.

As we went out of the churchyard, we passed the aforesaid little girls,
who were sitting behind the mound of a tomb, and busily babbling
together.  They called after us, expressing their discontent that we had
betrayed them to the sexton, and saying that it was not they who made the
noise.  Going homeward, we went astray in a green lane, that terminated
in the midst of a field, without outlet, so that we had to retrace a good
many of our footsteps.

Close to the wall of the church, beside the door, there was an ancient
baptismal font of stone.  In fact, it was a pile of roughly hewn stone
steps, five or six feet high, with a block of stone at the summit, in
which was a hollow about as big as a wash-bowl.  It was full of
rainwater.

The church seems to be St. Andrew's Church, Lower Bebbington, built in
1100.


September 1st.--To-day we leave the Rock Ferry Hotel, where we have spent
nearly four weeks.  It is a comfortable place, and we have had a good
table and have been kindly treated.  We occupied a large parlor,
extending through the whole breadth of the house, with a bow-window,
looking towards Liverpool, and adown the intervening river, and to
Birkenhead, on the hither side.  The river would be a pleasanter object,
if it were blue and transparent, instead of such a mud-puddly hue; also,
if it were always full to its brine; whereas it generally presents a
margin, and sometimes a very broad one, of glistening mud, with here and
there a small vessel aground on it.

Nevertheless, the parlor-window has given us a pretty good idea of the
nautical business of Liverpool; the constant objects being the little
black steamers puffing unquietly along, sometimes to our own ferry,
sometimes beyond it to Eastham, and sometimes towing a long string of
boats from Runcorn or otherwhere up the river, laden with goods, and
sometimes gallanting a tall ship in or out.  Some of these ships lie for
days together in the river, very majestic and stately objects, often with
the flag of the stars and stripes waving over them.  Now and then, after
a gale at sea, a vessel comes in with her masts broken short off in the
midst, and with marks of rough handling about the hull.  Once a week
comes a Cunard steamer, with its red funnel pipe whitened by the salt
spray; and, firing off cannon to announce her arrival, she moors to a
large iron buoy in the middle of the river, and a few hundred yards from
the stone pier of our ferry.  Immediately comes poring towards her a
little mail-steamer, to take away her mail-bags and such of the
passengers as choose to land; and for several hours afterwards the Cunard
lies with the smoke and steam coming out of her, as if she were smoking
her pipe after her toilsome passage across the Atlantic.  Once a
fortnight comes an American steamer of the Collins line; and then the
Cunard salutes her with cannon, to which the Collins responds, and moors
herself to another iron buoy, not far from the Cunard.  When they go to
sea, it is with similar salutes; the two vessels paying each other the
more ceremonious respect, because they are inimical and jealous of each
other.

Besides these, there are other steamers of all sorts and sizes, for
pleasure-excursions, for regular trips to Dublin, the Isle of Man, and
elsewhither; and vessels which are stationary, as floating lights, but
which seem to relieve one another at intervals; and small vessels, with
sails looking as if made of tanned leather; and schooners, and yachts,
and all manner of odd-looking craft, but none so odd as the Chinese junk.
This junk lies by our own pier, and looks as if it were copied from some
picture on an old teacup.  Beyond all these objects we see the other side
of the Mersey, with the delectably green fields opposite to us, while the
shore becomes more and more thickly populated, until about two miles off
we see the dense centre of the city, with the dome of the Custom House,
and steeples and towers; and, close to the water, the spire of St.
Nicholas; and above, and intermingled with the whole city scene, the
duskiness of the coal-smoke gushing upward.  Along the bank we perceive
the warehouses of the Albert dock, and the Queen's tobacco warehouses,
and other docks, and, nigher, to us, a shipyard or two.  In the evening
all this sombre picture gradually darkens out of sight, and in its place
appear only the lights of the city, kindling into a galaxy of earthly
stars, for a long distance, up and down the shore; and, in one or two
spots, the bright red gleam of a furnace, like the "red planet Mars"; and
once in a while a bright, wandering beam gliding along the river, as a
steamer cones or goes between us and Liverpool.



ROCK PARK.


September 2d.--We got into our new house in Rock Park yesterday.  It is
quite a good house, with three apartments, beside kitchen and pantry on
the lower floor; and it is three stories high, with four good chambers in
each story.  It is a stone edifice, like almost all the English houses,
and handsome in its design.  The rent, without furniture, would probably
have been one hundred pounds; furnished, it is one hundred and sixty
pounds.  Rock Park, as the locality is called, is private property, and
is now nearly covered with residences for professional people, merchants,
and others of the upper middling class; the houses being mostly built, I
suppose, on speculation, and let to those who occupy them.  It is the
quietest place imaginable, there being a police station at the entrance,
and the officer on duty allows no ragged or ill-looking person to pass.
There being a toll, it precludes all unnecessary passage of carriages;
and never were there more noiseless streets than those that give access
to these pretty residences.  On either side there is thick shrubbery,
with glimpses through it of the ornamented portals, or into the trim
gardens with smooth-shaven lawns, of no large extent, but still affording
reasonable breathing-space.  They are really an improvement on anything,
save what the very rich can enjoy, in America.  The former occupants of
our house (Mrs. Campbell and family) having been fond of flowers, there
are many rare varieties in the garden, and we are told that there is
scarcely a month in the year when a flower will not be found there.

The house is respectably, though not very elegantly, furnished.  It was a
dismal, rainy day yesterday, and we had a coal-fire in the sitting-room,
beside which I sat last evening as twilight came on, and thought, rather
sadly, how many times we have changed our home since we were married.  In
the first place, our three years at the Old Manse; then a brief residence
at Salem, then at Boston, then two or three years at Salem again; then at
Lenox, then at West Newton, and then again at Concord, where we imagined
that we were fixed for life, but spent only a year.  Then this farther
flight to England, where we expect to spend four years, and afterwards
another year or two in Italy, during all which time we shall have no real
home.  For, as I sat in this English house, with the chill, rainy English
twilight brooding over the lawn, and a coal-fire to keep me comfortable
on the first evening of September, and the picture of a stranger--the
dead husband of Mrs. Campbell--gazing down at me from above the
mantel-piece,--I felt that I never should be quite at home here.
Nevertheless, the fire was very comfortable to look at, and the shape of
the fireplace--an arch, with a deep cavity--was an improvement on the
square, shallow opening of an American coal-grate.


September 7th.--It appears by the annals of Liverpool, contained in
Gore's Directory, that in 1076 there was a baronial castle built by Roger
de Poictiers on the site of the present St. George's Church.  It was
taken down in 1721.  The church now stands at one of the busiest points
of the principal street of the city.  The old Church of St. Nicholas,
founded about the time of the Conquest, and more recently rebuilt, stood
within a quarter of a mile of the castle.

In 1150, Birkenhead Priory was founded on the Cheshire side of the
Mersey.  The monks used to ferry passengers across to Liverpool until
1282, when Woodside Ferry was established,--twopence for a horseman, and
a farthing for a foot-passenger.  Steam ferry-boats now cross to
Birkenhead, Monk's Ferry, and Woodside every ten minutes; and I believe
there are large hotels at all these places, and many of the business men
of Liverpool have residences in them.

In 1252 a tower was built by Sir John Stanley, which continued to be a
castle of defence to the Stanley family for many hundred years, and was
not finally taken down till 1820, when its site had become the present
Water Street, in the densest commercial centre of the city.

There appear to have been other baronial castles and residences in
different parts of the city, as a hall in old Hall Street, built by Sir
John de la More, on the site of which a counting-house now stands.  This
knightly family of De la More sometimes supplied mayors to the city, as
did the family of the Earls of Derby.

About 1582, Edward, Earl of Derby, maintained two hundred and fifty
citizens of Liverpool, fed sixty aged persons twice a day, and provided
twenty-seven hundred persons with meat, drink, and money every Good
Friday.

In 1644, Prince Rupert besieged the town for twenty-four days, and
finally took it by storm.  This was June 26th, and the Parliamentarians,
under Sir John Meldrum, repossessed it the following October.

In 1669 the Mayor of Liverpool kept an inn.

In 1730 there was only one carriage in town, and no stage-coach came
nearer than Warrington, the roads being impassable.

In 1734 the Earl of Derby gave a great entertainment in the tower.

In 1737 the Mayor was George Norton, a saddler, who frequently took, the
chair with his leather apron on.  His immediate predecessor seems to have
been the Earl of Derby, who gave the above-mentioned entertainment during
his mayoralty.  Where George's Dock now is, there used to be a battery of
fourteen eighteen-pounders for the defence of the town, and the old sport
of bull-baiting was carried on in that vicinity, close to the Church of
St. Nicholas.


September 12th.--On Saturday a young man was found wandering about in
West Derby, a suburb of Liverpool, in a state of insanity, and, being
taken before a magistrate, he proved to be an American.  As he seemed to
be in a respectable station of life, the magistrate sent the master of
the workhouse to me, in order to find out whether I would take the
responsibility of his expenses, rather than have him put in the
workhouse.  My clerk went to investigate the matter, and brought me his
papers.  His name proves to be ---- ------, belonging to ------,
twenty-five years of age.  One of the papers was a passport from our
legation in Naples; likewise there was a power of attorney from his
mother (who seems to have been married a second time) to dispose of some
property of hers abroad; a hotel bill, also, of some length, in which
were various charges for wine; and, among other evidences of low funds, a
pawnbroker's receipt for a watch, which he had pledged at five pounds.
There was also a ticket for his passage to America, by the screw steamer
Andes, which sailed on Wednesday last.  The clerk found him to the last
degree incommunicative; and nothing could be discovered from him but what
the papers disclosed.  There were about a dozen utterly unintelligible
notes among the papers, written by himself since his derangement.

I decided to put him into the insane hospital, where he now accordingly
is, and to-morrow (by which time he may be in a more conversable mood) I
mean to pay him a visit.

The clerk tells me that there is now, and has been for three years, an
American lady in the Liverpool almshouse, in a state of insanity.  She is
very accomplished, especially in music; but in all this time it has been
impossible to find out who she is, or anything about her connections or
previous life.  She calls herself Jenny Lind, and as for any other name
or identity she keeps her own secret.


September 14th.--It appears that Mr. ------ (the insane young gentleman)
being unable to pay his bill at the inn where he was latterly staying,
the landlord had taken possession of his luggage, and satisfied himself
in that way.  My clerk, at my request, has taken his watch out of pawn.
It proves to be not a very good one, though doubtless worth more than
five pounds, for which it was pledged.  The Governor of the Lunatic
Asylum wrote me yesterday, stating that the patient was in want of a
change of clothes, and that, according to his own account, he had left
his luggage at the American Hotel.  After office-hours, I took a cab, and
set out with my clerk, to pay a visit to the Asylum, taking the American
Hotel in our way.

The American Hotel is a small house, not at all such a one as American
travellers of any pretension would think of stopping at, but still very
respectable, cleanly, and with a neat sitting-room, where the guests
might assemble, after the American fashion.  We asked for the landlady,
and anon down she came, a round, rosy, comfortable-looking English dame
of fifty or thereabouts.  On being asked whether she knew a Mr. ------,
she readily responded that he had been there, but, had left no luggage,
having taken it away before paying his bill; and that she had suspected
him of meaning to take his departure without paying her at all.  Hereupon
she had traced him to the hotel before mentioned, where she had found
that he had stayed two nights,--but was then, I think, gone from thence.
Afterwards she encountered him again, and, demanding her due, went with
him to a pawnbroker's, where he pledged his watch and paid her.  This was
about the extent of the landlady's knowledge of the matter.  I liked the
woman very well, with her shrewd, good-humored, worldly, kindly
disposition.

Then we proceeded to the Lunatic Asylum, to which we were admitted by a
porter at the gate.  Within doors we found some neat and comely
servant-women, one of whom showed us into a handsome parlor, and took my
card to the Governor.  There was a large bookcase, with a glass front,
containing handsomely bound books, many of which, I observed, were of a
religious character.  In a few minutes the Governor came in, a
middle-aged man, tall, and thin for an Englishman, kindly and agreeable
enough in aspect, but not with the marked look of a man of force and
ability.  I should not judge from his conversation that he was an
educated man, or that he had any scientific acquaintance with the subject
of insanity.

He said that Mr. ------ was still quite incommunicative, and not in a
very promising state; that I had perhaps better defer seeing him for a
few days; that it would not be safe, at present, to send him home to
America without an attendant, and this was about all.  But on returning
home I learned from my wife, who had had a call from Mrs. Blodgett, that
Mrs. Blodgett knew Mr. ------ and his mother, who has recently been
remarried to a young husband, and is now somewhere in Italy.  They seemed
to have boarded at Mrs. Blodgett's house on their way to the Continent,
and within a week or two, an acquaintance and pastor of Mr. ------, the
Rev. Dr. ------, has sailed for America.  If I could only have caught
him, I could have transferred the care, expense, and responsibility of
the patient to him.  The Governor of the Asylum mentioned, by the way,
that Mr. ------ describes himself as having been formerly a midshipman in
the navy.

I walked through the St. James's cemetery yesterday.  It is a very pretty
place, dug out of the rock, having formerly, I believe, been a
stone-quarry.  It is now a deep and spacious valley, with graves and
monuments on its level and grassy floor, through which run gravel-paths,
and where grows luxuriant shrubbery.  On one of the steep sides of the
valley, hewn out of the rock, are tombs, rising in tiers, to the height
of fifty feet or more; some of them cut directly into the rock with
arched portals, and others built with stone.  On the other side the bank
is of earth, and rises abruptly, quite covered with trees, and looking
very pleasant with their green shades.  It was a warm and sunny day, and
the cemetery really had a most agreeable aspect.  I saw several
gravestones of Americans; but what struck me most was one line of an
epitaph on an English woman, "Here rests in peace a virtuous wife."  The
statue of Huskisson stands in the midst of the valley, in a kind of
mausoleum, with a door of plate-glass, through which you look at the dead
statesman's effigy.


September 22d.--. . . . Some days ago an American captain came to the
office, and said he had shot one of his men, shortly after sailing from
New Orleans, and while the ship was still in the river.  As he described
the event, he was in peril of his life from this man, who was an
Irishman; and he fired his pistol only when the man was coming upon him,
with a knife in one hand, and some other weapon of offence in the other,
while he himself was struggling with one or two more of the crew.  He was
weak at the time, having just recovered from the yellow fever.  The shots
struck the man in the pit of the stomach, and he lived only about a
quarter of an hour.  No magistrate in England has a right to arrest or
examine the captain, unless by a warrant from the Secretary of State, on
the charge of murder.  After his statement to me, the mother of the slain
man went to the police officer, and accused him of killing her son.  Two
or three days since, moreover, two of the sailors came before me, and
gave their account of the matter; and it looked very differently from
that of the captain.  According to them, the man had no idea of attacking
the captain, and was so drunk that he could not keep himself upright
without assistance.  One of these two men was actually holding him up
when the captain fired two barrels of his pistol, one immediately after
the other, and lodged two balls in the pit of his stomach.  The man sank
down at once, saying, "Jack, I am killed,"--and died very shortly.
Meanwhile the captain drove this man away, under threats of shooting him
likewise.  Both the seamen described the captain's conduct, both then and
during the whole voyage, as outrageous, and I do not much doubt that it
was so.  They gave their evidence like men who wished to tell the truth,
and were moved by no more than a natural indignation at the captain's
wrong.

I did not much like the captain from the first,--a hard, rough man, with
little education, and nothing of the gentleman about him, a red face and
a loud voice.  He seemed a good deal excited, and talked fast and much
about the event, but yet not as if it had sunk deeply into him.  He
observed that he "would not have had it happen for a thousand dollars,"
that being the amount of detriment which he conceives himself to suffer
by the ineffaceable blood-stain on his hand.  In my opinion it is little
short of murder, if at all; but what would be murder on shore is almost a
natural occurrence when done in such a hell on earth as one of these
ships, in the first hours of the voyage.  The men are then all drunk,--
some of them often in delirium tremens; and the captain feels no safety
for his life except in making himself as terrible as a fiend.  It is the
universal testimony that there is a worse set of sailors in these short
voyages between Liverpool and America than in any other trade whatever.

There is no probability that the captain will ever be called to account
for this deed.  He gave, at the time, his own version of the affair in
his log-book; and this was signed by the entire crew, with the exception
of one man, who had hidden himself in the hold in terror of the captain.
His mates will sustain his side of the question; and none of the sailors
would be within reach of the American courts, even should they be sought
for.


October 1st.--On Thursday I went with Mr. Ticknor to Chester by railway.
It is quite an indescribable old town, and I feel at last as if I had had
a glimpse of old England.  The wall encloses a large space within the
town, but there are numerous houses and streets not included within its
precincts.  Some of the principal streets pass under the ancient
gateways; and at the side there are flights of steps, giving access to
the summit.  Around the top of the whole wall, a circuit of about two
miles, there runs a walk, well paved with flagstones, and broad enough
for three persons to walk abreast.  On one side--that towards the
country--there is a parapet of red freestone three or four feet high.  On
the other side there are houses, rising up immediately from the wall, so
that they seem a part of it.  The height of it, I suppose, may be thirty
or forty feet, and, in some parts, you look down from the parapet into
orchards, where there are tall apple-trees, and men on the branches,
gathering fruit, and women and children among the grass, filling bags or
baskets.  There are prospects of the surrounding country among the
buildings outside the wall; at one point, a view of the river Dee, with
an old bridge of arches.  It is all very strange, very quaint, very
curious to see how the town has overflowed its barrier, and how, like
many institutions here, the ancient wall still exists, but is turned to
quite another purpose than what it was meant for,--so far as it serves
any purpose at all.  There are three or four towers in the course of the
circuit; the most interesting being one from the top of which King
Charles the First is said to have seen the rout of his army by the
Parliamentarians.  We ascended the short flight of steps that led up into
the tower, where an old man pointed out the site of the battle-field, now
thickly studded with buildings, and told us what we had already learned
from the guide-book.  After this we went into the cathedral, which I will
perhaps describe on some other occasion, when I shall have seen more of
it, and to better advantage.  The cloisters gave us the strongest
impression of antiquity; the stone arches being so worn and blackened by
time.  Still an American must always have imagined a better cathedral
than this.  There were some immense windows of painted glass, but all
modern.  In the chapter-house we found a coal-fire burning in a grate,
and a large heap of old books--the library of the cathedral--in a
discreditable state of decay,--mildewed, rotten, neglected for years.
The sexton told us that they were to be arranged and better ordered.
Over the door, inside, hung two failed and tattered banners, being those
of the Cheshire regiment.

The most utterly indescribable feature of Chester is the Rows, which
every traveller has attempted to describe.  At the height of several feet
above some of the oldest streets, a walk runs through the front of the
houses, which project over it.  Back of the walk there are shops; on the
outer side is a space of two or three yards, where the shopmen place
their tables, and stands, and show-cases; overhead, just high enough for
persons to stand erect, a ceiling.  At frequent intervals little narrow
passages go winding in among the houses, which all along are closely
conjoined, and seem to have no access or exit, except through the shops,
or into these narrow passages, where you can touch each side with your
elbows, and the top with your hand.  We penetrated into one or two of
them, and they smelt anciently and disagreeably.  At one of the doors
stood a pale-looking, but cheerful and good-natured woman, who told us
that she had come to that house when first married, twenty-one years
before, and had lived there ever since; and that she felt as if she had
been buried through the best years of her life.  She allowed us to peep
into her kitchen and parlor,--small, dingy, dismal, but yet not wholly
destitute of a home look.  She said that she had seen two or three
coffins in a day, during cholera times, carried out of that narrow
passage into which her door opened.  These avenues put me in mind of
those which run through ant-hills, or those which a mole makes
underground.  This fashion of Rows does not appear to be going out; and,
for aught I can see, it may last hundreds of years longer.  When a house
becomes so old as to be uutenantable, it is rebuilt, and the new one is
fashioned like the old, so far as regards the walk running through its
front.  Many of the shops are very good, and even elegant, and these Rows
are the favorite places of business in Chester.  Indeed, they have many
advantages, the passengers being sheltered from the rain, and there being
within the shops that dimmer light by which tradesmen like to exhibit
their wares.

A large proportion of the edifices in the Rows must be comparatively
modern; but there are some very ancient ones, with oaken frames visible
on the exterior.  The Row, passing through these houses, is railed with
oak, so old that it has turned black, and grown to be as hard as stone,
which it might be mistaken for, if one did not see where names and
initials have been cut into it with knives at some bygone period.
Overhead, cross-beams project through the ceiling so low as almost to hit
the head.  On the front of one of these buildings was the inscription,
"GOD'S PROVIDENCE IS MINE INHERITANCE," said to have been put there by
the occupant of the house two hundred years ago, when the plague spared
this one house only in the whole city.  Not improbably the inscription
has operated as a safeguard to prevent the demolition of the house
hitherto; but a shopman of an adjacent dwelling told us that it was soon
to be taken down.

Here and there, about some of the streets through which the Rows do not
run, we saw houses of very aged aspect, with steep, peaked gables.  The
front gable-end was supported on stone pillars, and the sidewalk passed
beneath.  Most of these old houses seemed to be taverns,--the Black Bear,
the Green Dragon, and such names.  We thought of dining at one of them,
but, on inspection, they looked rather too dingy and close, and of
questionable neatness.  So we went to the Royal Hotel, where we probably
fared just as badly at much more expense, and where there was a
particularly gruff and crabbed old waiter, who, I suppose, thought
himself free to display his surliness because we arrived at the hotel on
foot.  For my part, I love to see John Bull show himself.  I must go
again and again and again to Chester, for I suppose there is not a more
curious place in the world.

Mr. Ticknor, who has been staying at Rock Park with us since Tuesday, has
steamed away in the Canada this morning.  His departure seems to make me
feel more abroad, more dissevered from my native country, than before.


October 3d.--Saturday evening, at six, I went to dine with Mr. Aiken, a
wealthy merchant here, to meet two of the sons of Burns.  There was a
party of ten or twelve, Mr. Aiken and his two daughters included.  The
two sons of Burns have both been in the Indian army, and have attained
the ranks of Colonel and Major; one having spent thirty, and the other
twenty-seven years in India.  They are now old gentlemen of sixty and
upwards, the elder with a gray head, the younger with a perfectly white
one,--rather under than above the middle stature, and with a British
roundness of figure,--plain, respectable, intelligent-looking persons,
with quiet manners.  I saw no resemblance in either of them to any
portrait of their father.  After the ladies left the table, I sat next to
the Major, the younger of the two, and had a good deal of talk with him.
He seemed a very kindly and social man, and was quite ready to speak
about his father, nor was he at all reluctant to let it be seen how much
he valued the glory of being descended from the poet.  By and by, at Mr.
Aiken's instance, he sang one of Burns's songs,--the one about "Annie"
and the "rigs of barley."  He sings in a perfectly simple style, so that
it is little more than a recitative, and yet the effect is very good as
to humor, sense, and pathos.  After rejoining the ladies, he sang
another, "A posie for my ain dear May," and likewise "A man's a man for
a' that."  My admiration of his father, and partly, perhaps, my being an
American, gained me some favor with him, and he promised to give me what
he considered the best engraving of Burns, and some other remembrance of
him.  The Major is that son of Burns who spent an evening at Abbotsford
with Sir Walter Scott, when, as Lockhart writes, "the children sang the
ballads of their sires."  He spoke with vast indignation of a recent
edition of his father's works by Robert Chambers, in which the latter
appears to have wronged the poet by some misstatements.--I liked them
both and they liked me, and asked me to go and see there at Cheltenham,
where they reside.  We broke up at about midnight.

The members of this dinner-party were of the more liberal tone of
thinking here in Liverpool.  The Colonel and Major seemed to be of
similar principles; and the eyes of the latter glowed, when he sang his
father's noble verse, "The rank is but the guinea's stamp," etc.  It
would have been too pitiable if Burns had left a son who could not feel
the spirit of that verse.


October 8th.--Coning to my office, two or three mornings ago, I found
Mrs. ------, the mother of Mr. ------, the insane young man of whom I had
taken charge. She is a lady of fifty or thereabouts, and not very
remarkable anyway, nor particularly lady-like.  However, she was just
come off a rapid journey, having travelled from Naples, with three small
children, without taking rest, since my letter reached her.  A son (this
proved to be her new husband) of about twenty had come with her to the
Consulate.  She was, of course, infinitely grieved about the young man's
insanity, and had two or three bursts of tears while we talked the matter
over.  She said he was the hope of her life,--the best, purest, most
innocent child that ever was, and wholly free from every kind of vice.
But it appears that he had a previous attack of insanity, lasting three
months, about three years ago.

After I had told her all I knew about him, including my personal
observations at a visit a week or two since, we drove in a cab to the
Asylum.  It must have been a dismal moment to the poor lady, as we
entered the gateway through a tall, prison-like wall.  Being ushered into
the parlor, the Governor soon appeared, and informed us that Mr. ------
had had a relapse within a few days, and was not now so well as when I
saw him.  He complains of unjust confinement, and seems to consider
himself, if I rightly understand, under persecution for political
reasons.  The Governor, however, proposed to call him down, and I took my
leave, feeling that it would be indelicate to be present at his first
interview with his mother.  So here ended my guardianship of the poor
young fellow.

In the afternoon I called at the Waterloo Hotel, where Mrs. ------ was
staying, and found her in the coffee-room with the children.  She had
determined to take a lodging in the vicinity of the Asylum, and was going
to remove thither as soon as the children had had something to eat.  They
seemed to be pleasant and well-behaved children, and impressed me more
favorably than the mother, whom I suspect to be rather a foolish woman,
although her present grief makes her appear in a more respectable light
than at other times.  She seemed anxious to impress me with the
respectability and distinction of her connections in America, and I had
observed the same tendency in the insane patient, at my interview with
him.  However, she has undoubtedly a mother's love for this poor
shatterbrain, and this may weigh against the folly of her marrying an
incongruously youthful second husband, and many other follies.

This was day before yesterday, and I have heard nothing of her since.
The same day I had applications for assistance in two other domestic
affairs; one from an Irishman, naturalized in America, who wished me to
get him a passage thither, and to take charge of his wife and family
here, at my own private expense, until he could remit funds to carry them
across.  Another was from an Irishman, who had a power of attorney from a
countrywoman of his in America, to find and take charge of an infant whom
she had left in the Liverpool work-house, two years ago.  I have a great
mind to keep a list of all the business I am consulted about and employed
in.  It would be very curious.  Among other things, all penniless
Americans, or pretenders to Americanism, look upon me as their banker;
and I could ruin myself any week, if I had not laid down a rule to
consider every applicant for assistance an impostor until he prove
himself a true and responsible man,--which it is very difficult to do.
Yesterday there limped in a very respectable-looking old man, who
described himself as a citizen of Baltimore, who had been on a trip to
England and elsewhere, and, being detained longer than he expected, and
having had an attack of rheumatism, was now short of funds to pay his
passage home, and hoped that I would supply the deficiency.  He had quite
a plain, homely, though respectable manner, and, for aught I know, was
the very honestest man alive; but as he could produce no kind of proof of
his character and responsibility, I very quietly explained the
impossibility of my helping him.  I advised him to try to obtain a
passage on board of some Baltimore ship, the master of which might be
acquainted with him, or, at all events, take his word for payment, after
arrival.  This he seemed inclined to do, and took his leave.  There was a
decided aspect of simplicity about this old man, and yet I rather judge
him to be an impostor.

It is easy enough to refuse money to strangers and unknown people, or
whenever there may be any question about identity; but it will not be so
easy when I am asked for money by persons whom I know, but do not like to
trust.  They shall meet the eternal "No," however.


October 13th.--In Ormerod's history of Chester it is mentioned that
Randal, Earl of Chester, having made an inroad into Wales about 1225, the
Welshmen gathered in mass against him, and drove him into the castle of
Nothelert in Flintshire.  The Earl sent for succor to the Constable of
Chester, Roger Lacy, surnamed "Hell," on account of his fierceness.  It
was then fair-time at Chester, and the constable collected a
miscellaneous rabble of fiddlers, players, cobblers, tailors, and all
manner of debauched people, and led them to the relief of the Earl.  At
sight of this strange army the Welshmen fled; and forever after the Earl
assigned to the constable of Chester power over all fiddlers, shoemakers,
etc., within the bounds of Cheshire.  The constable retained for himself
and his heirs the control of the shoemakers; and made over to his own
steward, Dutton, that of the fiddlers and players, and for many hundreds
of years afterwards the Duttons of Dutton retained the power.  On
midsummer-day, they used to ride through Chester, attended by all the
minstrels playing on their several instruments, to the Church of St.
John, and there renew their licenses.  It is a good theme for a legend.
Sir Peter Leycester, writing in Charles the Second's time, copies the
Latin deed from the constable to Dutton; rightly translated, it seems to
mean "the magisterial power over all the lewd people . . . . in the whole
of Cheshire," but the custom grew into what is above stated.  In the time
of Henry VII., the Duttons claimed, by prescriptive right, that the
Cheshire minstrels should deliver them, at the feast of St. John, four
bottles of wine and a lance, and that each separate minstrel should pay
fourpence halfpenny. . . . .

Another account says Ralph Dutton was the constable's son-in-law, and "a
lusty youth."


October 19th.--Coming to the ferry this morning a few minutes before the
boat arrived from town, I went into the ferry-house, a small stone
edifice, and found there an Irishman, his wife and three children, the
oldest eight or nine years old, and all girls.  There was a good fire
burning in the room, and the family was clustered round it, apparently
enjoying the warmth very much; but when I went in both husband and wife
very hospitably asked me to come to the fire, although there was not more
than room at it for their own party.  I declined on the plea that I was
warm enough, and then the woman said that they were very cold, having
been long on the road.  The man was gray-haired and gray-bearded, clad in
an old drab overcoat, and laden with a huge bag, which seemed to contain
bedclothing or something of the kind.  The woman was pale, with a thin,
anxious, wrinkled face, but with a good and kind expression.  The
children were quite pretty, with delicate faces, and a look of patience
and endurance in them, but yet as if they had suffered as little as they
possibly could.  The two elder were cuddled up close to the father, the
youngest, about four years old, sat in its mother's lap, and she had
taken off its small shoes and stockings, and was warming its feet at the
fire.  Their little voices had a sweet and kindly sound as they talked in
low tones to their parents and one another.  They all looked very shabby,
and yet had a decency about them; and it was touching to see how they
made themselves at home at this casual fireside, and got all the comfort
they could out of the circumstances.  By and by two or three market-women
came in and looked pleasantly at them, and said a word or two to the
children.

They did not beg of me, as I supposed they would; but after looking at
them awhile, I pulled out a piece of silver, and handed it to one of the
little girls.  She took it very readily, as if she partly expected it,
and then the father and mother thanked me, and said they had been
travelling a long distance, and had nothing to subsist upon, except what
they picked up on the road.  They found it impossible to live in England,
and were now on their way to Liverpool, hoping to get a passage back to
Ireland, where, I suppose, extreme poverty is rather better off than
here.  I heard the little girl say that she should buy bread with the
money.  There is not much that can be caught in the description of this
scene; but it made me understand, better than before, how poor people
feel, wandering about in such destitute circumstances, and how they
suffer; and yet how they have a life not quite miserable, after all, and
how family love goes along with them.  Soon the boat arrived at the pier,
and we all went on board; and as I sat in the cabin, looking up through a
broken pane in the skylight, I saw the woman's thin face, with its
anxious, motherly aspect; and the youngest child in her arms, shrinking
from the chill wind, but yet not impatiently; and the eldest of the girls
standing close by with her expression of childish endurance, but yet so
bright and intelligent that it would evidently take but a few days to
make a happy and playful child of her.  I got into the interior of this
poor family, and understand, through sympathy, more of them than I can
tell.  I am getting to possess some of the English indifference as to
beggars and poor people; but still, whenever I come face to face with
them, and have any intercourse, it seems as if they ought to be the
better for me.  I wish, instead of sixpence, I had given the poor family
ten shillings, and denied it to a begging subscriptionist, who has just
fleeced me to that amount.  How silly a man feels in this latter
predicament!

I have had a good many visitors at the Consulate from the United States
within a short time,--among others, Mr. D. D. Barnard, our late minister
to Berlin, returning homeward to-day by the Arctic; and Mr. Sickles,
Secretary of Legation to London, a fine-looking, intelligent, gentlemanly
young man. . . . . With him came Judge Douglas, the chosen man of Young
America.  He is very short, extremely short, but has an uncommonly good
head, and uncommon dignity without seeming to aim at it, being free and
simple in manners.  I judge him to be a very able man, with the Western
sociability and free-fellowship.  Generally I see no reason to be ashamed
of my countrymen who come out here in public position, or otherwise
assuming the rank of gentlemen.


October 20th.--One sees incidents in the streets here, occasionally,
which could not be seen in an American city.  For instance, a week or two
since, I was passing a quiet-looking, elderly gentleman, when, all of a
sudden, without any apparent provocation, he uplifted his stick, and
struck a black-gowned boy a smart blow on the shoulders.  The boy looked
at him wofully and resentfully, but said nothing, nor can I imagine why
the thing was done.  In Tythebarne Street to-day I saw a woman suddenly
assault a man, clutch at his hair, and cuff him about the ears.  The man,
who was of decent aspect enough, immediately took to his heels, full
speed, and the woman ran after him, and, as far as I could discern the
pair, the chase continued.


October 22d.--At a dinner-party at Mr. Holland's last evening, a
gentleman, in instance of Charles Dickens's unweariability, said that
during some theatrical performances in Liverpool he acted in play and
farce, spent the rest of the night making speeches, feasting, and
drinking at table, and ended at seven o'clock in the morning by jumping
leap-frog over the backs of the whole company.

In Moore's diary he mentions a beautiful Guernsey lily having been given
to his wife, and says that the flower was originally from Guernsey.  A
ship from there had been wrecked on the coast of Japan, having many of
the lilies on board, and the next year the flowers appeared,--springing
up, I suppose, on the wave-beaten strand.

Wishing to send a letter to a dead man, who may be supposed to have gone
to Tophet,--throw it into the fire.

Sir Arthur Aston had his brains beaten out with his own wooden leg, at
the storming of Tredagh in Ireland by Cromwell.

In the county of Cheshire, many centuries ago, there lived a half-idiot,
named Nixon, who had the gift of prophecy, and made many predictions
about places, families, and important public events, since fulfilled.  He
seems to have fallen into fits of insensibility previous to uttering his
prophecies.

The family of Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering), of Bromborough, had an
ass's head for a crest.

"Richard Dawson, being sick of the plague, and perceiving he must die,
rose out of his bed and made his grave, and caused his nephew to cast
straw into the grave, which was not far from the house, and went and laid
him down in the said grave, and caused clothes to be laid upon him, and
so departed out of this world.  This he did because he was a strong man,
and heavier than his said nephew and a serving-wench were able to bury.
He died about the 24th of August.  Thus was I credibly told he did,
1625."  This was in the township of Malpas, recorded in the parish
register.

At Bickley Hall, taken down a few years ago, used to be shown the room
where the body of the Earl of Leicester was laid for a whole
twelvemonth,--1659 to 1660,--he having been kept unburied all that time,
owing to a dispute which of his heirs should pay his funeral expenses.


November 5th.--We all, together with Mr. Squarey, went to Chester last
Sunday, and attended the cathedral service.  A great deal of ceremony,
and not unimposing, but rather tedious before it was finished,--occupying
two hours or more.  The Bishop was present, but did nothing except to
pronounce the benediction.  In America the sermon is the principal thing;
but here all this magnificent ceremonial of prayer and chanted responses
and psalms and anthems was the setting to a short, meagre discourse,
which would not have been considered of any account among the elaborate
intellectual efforts of New England ministers.  While this was going on,
the light came through the stained glass windows and fell upon the
congregation, tingeing them with crimson.  After service we wandered
about the aisles, and looked at the tombs and monuments,--the oldest of
which was that of some nameless abbot, with a staff and mitre half
obliterated from his tomb, which was under a shallow arch on one side of
the cathedral.  There were also marbles on the walls, and lettered stones
in the pavement under our feet; but chiefly, if not entirely, of modern
date.  We lunched at the Royal Hotel, and then walked round the city
walls, also crossing the bridge of one great arch over the Dee, and
penetrating as far into Wales as the entrance of the Marquis of
Westminster's Park at Eaton.  It was, I think, the most lovely day as
regards weather that I have seen in England.

I passed, to-day, a man chanting a ballad in the street about a recent
murder, in a voice that had innumerable cracks in it, and was most
lugubrious.  The other day I saw a man who was reading in a loud voice
what seemed to be an account of the late riots and loss of life in Wigan.
He walked slowly along the street as he read, surrounded by a small crowd
of men, women, and children; and close by his elbow stalked a policeman,
as if guarding against a disturbance.


November 14th.--There is a heavy dun fog on the river and over the city
to-day, the very gloomiest atmosphere that ever I was acquainted with.
On the river the steamboats strike gongs or ring bells to give warning of
their approach.  There are lamps burning in the counting-rooms and
lobbies of the warehouses, and they gleam distinctly through the windows.

The other day, at the entrance of the market-house, I saw a woman sitting
in a small hand-wagon, apparently for the purpose of receiving alms.
There was no attendant at hand; but I noticed that one or two persons who
passed by seemed to inquire whether she wished her wagon to be moved.
Perhaps this is her mode of making progress about the city, by the
voluntary aid of boys and other people who help to drag her.  There is
something in this--I don't yet well know what--that has impressed me, as
if I could make a romance out of the idea of a woman living in this
manner a public life, and moving about by such means.


November 29th.--Mr. H. A. B. told me of his friend Mr. ------ (who was
formerly attache to the British Legation at Washington, and whom I saw at
Concord), that his father, a clergyman, married a second wife.  After the
marriage, the noise of a coffin being nightly carried down the stairs was
heard in the parsonage.  It could be distinguished when the coffin
reached a certain broad lauding and rested on it.  Finally, his father
had to remove to another residence.  Besides this, Mr. ------ had had
another ghostly experience,--having seen a dim apparition of an uncle at
the precise instant when the latter died in a distant place.  The attache
is a credible and honorable fellow, and talks of these matters as if he
positively believed them.  But Ghostland lies beyond the jurisdiction of
veracity.

In a garden near Chester, in taking down a summer-house, a tomb was
discovered beneath it, with a Latin inscription to the memory of an old
doctor of medicine, William Bentley, who had owned the place long ago,
and died in 1680.  And his dust and bones had lain beneath all the merry
times in the summer-house.


December 1st.--It is curious to observe how many methods people put in
practice here to pick up a halfpenny.  Yesterday I saw a man standing
bareheaded and barelegged in the mud and misty weather, playing on a
fife, in hopes to get a circle of auditors.  Nobody, however, seemed to
take any notice.  Very often a whole band of musicians will strike up,--
passing a hat round after playing a tune or two.  On board the ferry,
until the coldest weather began, there were always some wretched
musicians, with an old fiddle, an old clarinet, and an old verdigrised
brass bugle, performing during the passage, and, as the boat neared the
shore, sending round one of their number to gather contributions in the
hollow of the brass bugle.  They were a very shabby set, and must have
made a very scanty living at best.  Sometimes it was a boy with an
accordion, and his sister, a smart little girl, with a timbrel,--which,
being so shattered that she could not play on it, she used only to
collect halfpence in.  Ballad-singers, or rather chanters or croakers,
are often to be met with in the streets, but hand-organ players are not
more frequent than in our cities.

I still observe little girls and other children barelegged and barefooted
on the wet sidewalks.  There certainly never was anything so dismal as
the November weather has been; never any real sunshine; almost always a
mist; sometimes a dense fog, like slightly rarefied wool, pervading the
atmosphere.

An epitaph on a person buried on a hillside in Cheshire, together with
some others, supposed to have died of the plague, and therefore not
admitted into the churchyards:--

    "Think it not strange our bones ly here,
     Thine may ly thou knowst not where."
                               Elizabeth Hampson.

These graves were near the remains of two rude stone crosses, the purpose
of which was not certainly known, although they were supposed to be
boundary marks.  Probably, as the plague-corpses were debarred from
sanctified ground, the vicinity of these crosses was chosen as having a
sort of sanctity.

"Bang beggar,"--an old Cheshire term for a parish beadle.

Hawthorne Hall, Cheshire, Macclesfield Hundred, Parish of Wilmslow, and
within the hamlet of Morley.  It was vested at an early period in the
Lathoms of Irlam, Lancaster County, and passed through the Leighs to the
Pages of Earlshaw.  Thomas Leigh Page sold it to Mr. Ralph Bower of
Wilmslow, whose children owned it in 1817.  The Leighs built a chancel in
the church of Wilmslow, where some of them are buried, their arms painted
in the windows.  The hall is an "ancient, respectable mansion of brick."


December 2d.--Yesterday, a chill, misty December day, yet I saw a woman
barefooted in the street, not to speak of children.

Cold and uncertain as the weather is, there is still a great deal of
small trade carried on in the open air.  Women and men sit in the streets
with a stock of combs and such small things to sell, the women knitting
as if they sat by a fireside.  Cheap crockery is laid out in the street,
so far out that without any great deviation from the regular
carriage-track a wheel might pass straight through it.  Stalls of apples
are innumerable, but the apples are not fit for a pig.  In some streets
herrings are very abundant, laid out on boards.  Coals seem to be for
sale by the wheelbarrowful.  Here and there you see children with some
small article for sale,--as, for instance, a girl with two linen caps.  A
somewhat overladen cart of coal was passing along and some small quantity
of the coal fell off; no sooner had the wheels passed than several women
and children gathered to the spot, like hens and chickens round a handful
of corn, and picked it up in their aprons.  We have nothing similar to
these street-women in our country.


December 10th.--I don't know any place that brings all classes into
contiguity on equal ground so completely as the waiting-room at Rock
Ferry on these frosty days.  The room is not more than eight feet,
square, with walls of stone, and wooden benches ranged round them, and an
open stove in one corner, generally well furnished with coal.  It is
almost always crowded, and I rather suspect that many persons who have no
fireside elsewhere creep in here and spend the most comfortable part of
their day.

This morning, when I looked into the room, there were one or two
gentlemen and other respectable persons; but in the best place, close to
the fire, and crouching almost into it, was an elderly beggar, with the
raggedest of overcoats, two great rents in the shoulders of it disclosing
the dingy lining, all bepatched with various stuff covered with dirt, and
on his shoes and trousers the mud of an interminable pilgrimage.  Owing
to the posture in which he sat, I could not see his face, but only the
battered crown and rim of the very shabbiest hat that ever was worn.
Regardless of the presence of women (which, indeed, Englishmen seldom do
regard when they wish to smoke), he was smoking a pipe of vile tobacco;
but, after all, this was fortunate, because the man himself was not
personally fragrant.  He was terribly squalid,--terribly; and when I had
a glimpse of his face, it well befitted the rest of his development,--
grizzled, wrinkled, weather-beaten, yet sallow, and down-looking, with a
watchful kind of eye turning upon everybody and everything, meeting the
glances of other people rather boldly, yet soon shrinking away; a long
thin nose, a gray beard of a week's growth; hair not much mixed with
gray, but rusty and lifeless;--a miserable object; but it was curious to
see how he was not ashamed of himself, but seemed to feel that he was one
of the estates of the kingdom, and had as much right to live as other
men.  He did just as he pleased, took the best place by the fire, nor
would have cared though a nobleman were forced to stand aside for him.
When the steamer's bell rang, he shouldered a large and heavy pack, like
a pilgrim with his burden of sin, but certainly journeying to hell
instead of heaven.  On board he looked round for the best position, at
first stationing himself near the boiler-pipe; but, finding the deck damp
underfoot, he went to the cabin-door, and took his stand on the stairs,
protected from the wind, but very incommodiously placed for those who
wished to pass.  All this was done without any bravado or forced
impudence, but in the most quiet way, merely because he was seeking his
own comfort, and considered that he had a right to seek it.  It was an
Englishman's spirit; but in our country, I imagine, a beggar considers
himself a kind of outlaw, and would hardly assume the privileges of a man
in any place of public resort.  Here beggary is a system, and beggars are
a numerous class, and make themselves, in a certain way, respected as
such.  Nobody evinced the slightest disapprobation of the man's
proceedings.  In America, I think, we should see many aristocratic airs
on such provocation, and probably the ferry people would there have
rudely thrust the beggar aside; giving him a shilling, however, which no
Englishman would ever think of doing.  There would also have been a great
deal of fun made of his squalid and ragged figure; whereas nobody smiled
at him this morning, nor in any way showed the slightest disrespect.
This is good; but it is the result of a state of things by no means good.
For many days there has been a great deal of fog on the river, and the
boats have groped their way along, continually striking their bells,
while, on all sides, there are responses of bell and gong; and the
vessels at anchor look shadow-like as we glide past them, and the master
of one steamer shouts a warning to the master of another which he meets.
The Englishmen, who hate to run any risk without an equivalent object,
show a good deal of caution and timidity on these foggy days.

December 13th.--Chill, frosty weather; such an atmosphere as forebodes
snow in New England, and there has been a little here.  Yet I saw a
barefooted young woman yesterday.  The feet of these poor creatures have
exactly the red complexion of their hands, acquired by constant exposure
to the cold air.

At the ferry-room, this morning, was a small, thin, anxious-looking
woman, with a bundle, seeming in rather poor circumstances, but decently
dressed, and eying other women, I thought, with an expression of slight
ill-will and distrust; also, an elderly, stout, gray-haired woman, of
respectable aspect, and two young lady-like persons, quite pretty, one of
whom was reading a shilling volume of James's "Arabella Stuart."  They
talked to one another with that up-and-down intonation which English
ladies practise, and which strikes an unaccustomed ear as rather
affected, especially in women of size and mass.  It is very different
from an American lady's mode of talking: there is the difference between
color and no color; the tone variegates it.  One of these young ladies
spoke to me, making some remark about the weather,--the first instance I
have met with of a gentlewoman's speaking to an unintroduced gentleman.
Besides these, a middle-aged man of the lower class, and also a
gentleman's out-door servant, clad in a drab great-coat, corduroy
breeches, and drab cloth gaiters buttoned from the knee to the ankle.  He
complained to the other man of the cold weather; said that a glass of
whiskey, every half-hour, would keep a man comfortable; and, accidentally
hitting his coarse foot against one of the young lady's feet, said, "Beg
pardon, ma'am,"--which she acknowledged with a slight movement of the
head.  Somehow or other, different classes seem to encounter one another
in an easier manner than with us; the shock is less palpable.  I suppose
the reason is that the distinctions are real, and therefore need not be
continually asserted.

Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of
letting off their steam.

On board the Rock Ferry steamer, a gentleman coming into the cabin, a
voice addresses him from a dark corner, "How do you do, sir?"--"Speak
again!" says the gentleman.  No answer from the dark corner; and the
gentleman repeats, "Speak again!"  The speaker now comes out of the dark
corner, and sits down in a place where he can be seen.  "Ah!" cries the
gentleman, "very well, I thank you.  How do you do?  I did not recognize
your voice."  Observable, the English caution, shown in the gentleman's
not vouchsafing to say, "Very well, thank you!" till he knew his man.

What was the after life of the young man, whom Jesus, looking on,
"loved," and bade him sell all that he had, and give to the poor, and
take up his cross and follow him?  Something very deep and beautiful
might be made out of this.


December 31st.--Among the beggars of Liverpool, the hardest to encounter
is a man without any legs, and, if I mistake not, likewise deficient in
arms.  You see him before you all at once, as if he had sprouted halfway
out of the earth, and would sink down and reappear in some other place
the moment he has done with you.  His countenance is large, fresh, and
very intelligent; but his great power lies in his fixed gaze, which is
inconceivably difficult to bear.  He never once removes his eye from you
till you are quite past his range; and you feel it all the same, although
you do not meet his glance.  He is perfectly respectful; but the
intentness and directness of his silent appeal is far worse than any
impudence.  In fact, it is the very flower of impudence.  I would rather
go a mile about than pass before his battery.  I feel wronged by him, and
yet unutterably ashamed.  There must be great force in the man to produce
such an effect.  There is nothing of the customary squalidness of beggary
about him, but remarkable trimness and cleanliness.  A girl of twenty or
thereabouts, who vagabondizes about the city on her hands and knees,
possesses, to a considerable degree, the same characteristics.  I think
they hit their victims the more effectually from being below the common
level of vision.


January 3d, 1854.--Night before last there was a fall of snow, about
three or four inches, and, following it, a pretty hard frost.  On the
river, the vessels at anchor showed the snow along their yards, and on
every ledge where it could lie.  A blue sky and sunshine overhead, and
apparently a clear atmosphere close at hand; but in the distance a
mistiness became perceptible, obscuring the shores of the river, and
making the vessels look dim and uncertain.  The steamers were ploughing
along, smoking their pipes through the frosty air.  On the landing stage
and in the streets, hard-trodden snow, looking more like my New England
Home than anything I have yet seen.  Last night the thermometer fell as
low as 13 degrees, nor probably is it above 20 degrees to-day.  No such
frost has been known in England these forty years! and Mr. Wilding tells
me that he never saw so much snow before.


January 6th.--I saw, yesterday, stopping at a cabinet-maker's shop in
Church Street, a coach with four beautiful white horses, and a postilion
on each near-horse; behind, in the dicky, a footman; and on the box a
coachman, all dressed in livery.  The coach-panel bore a coat-of-arms
with a coronet, and I presume it must have been the equipage of the Earl
of Derby.  A crowd of people stood round, gazing at the coach and horses;
and when any of them spoke, it was in a lower tone than usual.  I doubt
not they all had a kind of enjoyment of the spectacle, for these English
are strangely proud of having a class above them.

Every Englishman runs to "The Times" with his little grievance, as a
child runs to his mother.

I was sent for to the police court the other morning, in the case of an
American sailor accused of robbing a shipmate at sea.  A large room, with
a great coal-fire burning on one side, and above it the portrait of Mr.
Rushton, deceased, a magistrate of many years' continuance.  A long
table, with chairs, and a witness-box.  One of the borough magistrates, a
merchant of the city, sat at the head of the table, with paper and pen
and ink before him; but the real judge was the clerk of the court, whose
professional knowledge and experience governed all the proceedings.  In
the short time while I was waiting, two cases were tried, in the first of
which the prisoner was discharged.  The second case was of a woman,--a
thin, sallow, hard-looking, careworn, rather young woman,--for stealing a
pair of slippers out of a shop: The trial occupied five minutes or less,
and she was sentenced to twenty-one days' imprisonment,--whereupon,
without speaking, she looked up wildly first into one policeman's face,
then into another's, at the same time wringing her hands with no theatric
gesture, but because her torment took this outward shape,--and was led
away.  The Yankee sailor was then brought up,--an intelligent, but
ruffian-like fellow,--and as the case was out of the jurisdiction of the
English magistrates, and as it was not worth while to get him sent over
to America for trial, he was forthwith discharged.  He stole a comforter.

If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so
that one age would be entirely unlike another.  The great conservative is
the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a
thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.


Monday, February 20th.--At the police court on Saturday, I attended the
case of the second mate and four seamen of the John and Albert, for
assaulting, beating, and stabbing the chief mate.  The chief mate has
been in the hospital ever since the assault, and was brought into the
court to-day to give evidence,--a man of thirty, black hair, black eyes,
a dark complexion, disagreeable expression; sallow, emaciated, feeble,
apparently in pain, one arm disabled.  He sat bent and drawn upward, and
had evidently been severely hurt, and was not yet fit to be out of bed.
He had some brandy-and-water to enable him to sustain himself.  He gave
his evidence very clearly, beginning (sailor-like) with telling in what
quarter the wind was at the time of the assault, and which sail was taken
in.  His testimony bore on one man only, at whom he cast a vindictive
look; but I think he told the truth as far as he knew and remembered it.
Of the prisoners the second mate was a mere youth, with long sandy hair,
and an intelligent and not unprepossessing face, dressed as neatly as a
three or four weeks' captive, with small, or no means, could well allow,
in a frock-coat, and with clean linen,--the only linen or cotton shirt in
the company.  The other four were rude, brutish sailors, in flannel or
red-baize shirts.  Three of them appeared to give themselves little
concern; but the fourth, a red-haired and red-bearded man,--Paraman, by
name,--evidently felt the pressure of the case upon himself.  He was the
one whom the mate swore to have given him the first blow; and there was
other evidence of his having been stabbed with a knife.  The captain of
the ship, the pilot, the cook, and the steward, all gave their evidence;
and the general bearing of it was, that the chief mate had a devilish
temper, and had misused the second mate and crew,--that the four seamen
had attacked him, and that Paraman had stabbed him; while all but the
steward concurred in saying that the second mate had taken no part in the
affray.  The steward, however, swore to having seen him strike the chief
mate with a wooden marlinspike, which was broken by the blow.  The
magistrate dismissed all but Paraman, whom I am to send to America for
trial.  In my opinion the chief mate got pretty nearly what he deserved,
under the code of natural justice.  While business was going forward, the
magistrate, Mr. Mansfield, talked about a fancy ball at which he had been
present the evening before, and of other matters grave and gay.  It was
very informal; we sat at the table, or stood with our backs to the fire;
policemen came and went; witnesses were sworn on the greasiest copy of
the Gospels I ever saw, polluted by hundreds and thousands of perjured
kisses; and for hours the prisoners were kept standing at the foot of the
table, interested to the full extent of their capacity, while all others
were indifferent.  At the close of the case, the police officers and
witnesses applied to me about their expenses.

Yesterday I took a walk with my wife and two children to Bebbington
Church.  A beautifully sunny morning.  My wife and U. attended church, J.
and I continued our walk.  When we were at a little distance from the
church, the bells suddenly chimed out with a most cheerful sound, and
sunny as the morning.  It is a pity we have no chimes of bells, to give
the churchward summons, at home.  People were standing about the ancient
church-porch and among the tombstones.  In the course of our walk, we
passed many old thatched cottages, built of stone, and with what looked
like a cow-house or pigsty at one end, making part of the cottage; also
an old stone farm-house, which may have been a residence of gentility in
its day.  We passed, too, a small Methodist chapel, making one of a row
of low brick edifices.  There was a sound of prayer within.  I never saw
a more unbeautiful place of worship; and it had not even a separate
existence for itself, the adjoining tenement being an alehouse.

The grass along the wayside was green, with a few daisies.  There was
green holly in the hedges, and we passed through a wood, up some of the
tree-trunks of which ran clustering ivy.


February 23d.--There came to see me the other day a young gentleman with
a mustache and a blue cloak, who announced himself as William Allingham,
and handed me a copy of his poems, a thin volume, with paper covers,
published by Routledge.  I thought I remembered hearing his name, but had
never seen any of his works.  His face was intelligent, dark, pleasing,
and not at all John-Bullish.  He said that he had been employed in the
Customs in Ireland, and was now going to London to live by literature,--
to be connected with some newspaper, I imagine.  He had been in London
before, and was acquainted with some of the principal literary people,--
among others, Tennyson and Carlyle.  He seemed to have been on rather
intimate terms with Tennyson.  We talked awhile in my dingy and dusky
Consulate, and he then took leave.  His manners are good, and he appears
to possess independence of mind.

Yesterday I saw a British regiment march down to George's Pier, to embark
in the Niagara for Malta.  The troops had nothing very remarkable about
them; but the thousands of ragged and squalid wretches, who thronged the
pier and streets to gaze on them, were what I had not seen before in such
masses.  This was the first populace I have beheld; for even the Irish,
on the other side of the water, acquire a respectability of aspect.  John
Bull is going with his whole heart into the Turkish war.  He is very
foolish.  Whatever the Czar may propose to himself, it is for the
interest of democracy that he should not be easily put down.  The
regiment, on its way to embark, carried the Queen's colors, and, side by
side with them, the banner of the 28th,--yellow, with the names of the
Peninsular and other battles in which it had been engaged inscribed on it
in a double column.  It is a very distinguished regiment; and Mr. Henry
Bright mentioned as one of its distinctions, that Washington had formerly
been an officer in it.  I never heard of this.


February 27th.--We walked to Woodside in the pleasant forenoon, and
thence crossed to Liverpool.  On our way to Woodside, we saw the remains
of the old Birkenhead Priory, built of the common red freestone, much
time-worn, with ivy creeping over it, and birds evidently at hone in its
old crevices.  These ruins are pretty extensive, and seem to be the
remains of a quadrangle.  A handsome modern church, likewise of the same
red freestone, has been built on part of the site occupied by the Priory;
and the organ was sounding within, while we walked about the premises.
On some of the ancient arches, there were grotesquely carved stone faces.
The old walls have been sufficiently restored to make them secure,
without destroying their venerable aspect.  It is a very interesting
spot; and so much the more so because a modern town, with its brick and
stone houses, its flags and pavements, has sprung up about the ruins,
which were new a thousand years ago.  The station of the Chester railway
is within a hundred yards.  Formerly the monks of this Priory kept the
only ferry that then existed on the Mersey.

At a dinner at Mr. Bramley Moore's a little while ago, we had a
prairie-hen from the West of America.  It was a very delicate bird, and a
gentleman carved it most skilfully to a dozen guests, and had still a
second slice to offer to them.

Aboard the ferry-boat yesterday, there was a laboring man eating oysters.
He took them one by one from his pocket in interminable succession,
opened them with his jack-knife, swallowed each one, threw the shell
overboard, and then sought for another.  Having concluded his meal, he
took out a clay tobacco-pipe, filled it, lighted it with a match, and
smoked it,--all this, while the other passengers were looking at him, and
with a perfect coolness and independence, such as no single man can ever
feel in America.  Here a man does not seem to consider what other people
will think of his conduct, but only whether it suits his own convenience
to do so and so.  It may be the better way.

A French military man, a veteran of all Napoleon's wars, is now living,
with a false leg and arm, both movable by springs, false teeth, a false
eye, a silver nose with a flesh-colored covering, and a silver plate
replacing part of the skull.  He has the cross of the Legion of Honor.


March 18th.--On Saturday I went with Mr. B---- to the Dingle, a pleasant
domain on the banks of the Mersey almost opposite to Rock Ferry.  Walking
home, we looked into Mr. Thorn's Unitarian Chapel, Mr. B----'s family's
place of worship.  There is a little graveyard connected with the chapel,
a most uninviting and unpicturesque square of ground, perhaps thirty or
forty yards across, in the midst of back fronts of city buildings.  About
half the space was occupied by flat tombstones, level with the ground,
the remainder being yet vacant.  Nevertheless, there were perhaps more
names of men generally known to the world on these few tombstones than in
any other churchyard in Liverpool,--Roscoe, Blanco White, and the Rev.
William Enfield, whose name has a classical sound in my ears, because,
when a little boy, I used to read his "Speaker" at school.  In the vestry
of the chapel there were many books, chiefly old theological works, in
ancient print and binding, much mildewed and injured by the damp.  The
body of the chapel is neat, but plain, and, being not very large, has a
kind of social and family aspect, as if the clergyman and his people must
needs have intimate relations among themselves.  The Unitarian sect in
Liverpool have, as a body, great wealth and respectability.

Yesterday I walked with my wife and children to the brow of a hill,
overlooking Birkenhead and Tranmere, and commanding a fine view of the
river, and Liverpool beyond.  All round about new and neat residences for
city people are springing up, with fine names,--Eldon Terrace, Rose
Cottage, Belvoir Villa, etc., etc., with little patches of ornamented
garden or lawn in front, and heaps of curious rock-work, with which the
English are ridiculously fond of adorning their front yards.  I rather
think the middling classes--meaning shopkeepers, and other
respectabilities of that level--are better lodged here than in America;
and, what I did not expect, the houses are a great deal newer than in our
new country!  Of course, this can only be the case in places
circumstanced like Liverpool and its suburbs.  But, scattered among these
modern villas, there are old stone cottages of the rudest structure, and
doubtless hundreds of years old, with thatched roofs, into which the
grass has rooted itself, and now looks verdant.  These cottages are in
themselves as ugly as possible, resembling a large kind of pigsty; but
often, by dint of the verdure on their thatch and the shrubbery
clustering about them, they look picturesque.

The old-fashioned flowers in the gardens of New England--blue-bells,
crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and many others--appear to be wild flowers
here on English soil.  There is something very touching and pretty in
this fact, that the Puritans should have carried their field and hedge
flowers, and nurtured theme in their gardens, until, to us, they seem
entirely the product of cultivation.


March 16th.--Yesterday, at the coroner's court, attending the inquest on
a black sailor who died on board an American vessel, after her arrival at
this port.  The court-room is capable of accommodating perhaps fifty
people, dingy, with a pyramidal skylight above, and a single window on
one side, opening into a gloomy back court.  A private room, also lighted
with a pyramidal skylight, is behind the court-room, into which I was
asked, and found the coroner, a gray-headed, grave, intelligent, broad,
red-faced man, with an air of some authority, well mannered and
dignified, but not exactly a gentleman,--dressed in a blue coat, with a
black cravat, showing a shirt-collar above it.  Considering how many and
what a variety of cases of the ugliest death are constantly coming before
him, he was much more cheerful than could be expected, and had a kind of
formality and orderliness which I suppose balances the exceptionalities
with which he has to deal.  In the private room with him was likewise the
surgeon, who professionally attends the court.  We chatted about suicide
and such matters,--the surgeon, the coroner, and I,--until the American
case was ready, when we adjourned to the court-room, and the coroner
began the examination.  The American captain was a rude, uncouth
Down-Easter, about thirty years old, and sat on a bench, doubled and bent
into an indescribable attitude, out of which he occasionally straightened
himself, all the time toying with a ruler, or some such article.  The
case was one of no interest; the man had been frost-bitten, and died from
natural causes, so that no censure was deserved or passed upon the
captain.  The jury, who had been examining the body, were at first
inclined to think that the man had not been frostbitten, but that his
feet had been immersed in boiling water; but, on explanation by the
surgeon, readily yielded their opinion, and gave the verdict which the
coroner put into their mouths, exculpating the captain from all blame.
In fact, it is utterly impossible that a jury of chance individuals
should not be entirely governed by the judgment of so experienced and
weighty a man as the coroner.  In the court-room were two or three police
officers in uniform, and some other officials, a very few idle
spectators, and a few witnesses waiting to be examined.  And while the
case was going forward, a poor-looking woman came in, and I heard her, in
an undertone, telling an attendant of a death that had just occurred.
The attendant received the communication in a very quiet and
matter-of-course way, said that it should be attended to, and the woman
retired.

THE DIARY OF A CORONER would be a work likely to meet with large popular
acceptance.  A dark passageway, only a few yards in extent, leads from
the liveliest street in Liverpool to this coroner's court-room, where all
the discussion is about murder and suicide.  It seems, that, after a
verdict of suicide, the corpse can only be buried at midnight, without
religious rites.

"His lines are cast in pleasant places,"--applied to a successful angler.

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.  You
may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at
all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming
to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter.  It proves
however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused
through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each,
and vanishes with the final one, which you supposed would introduce you
to the hidden pearl.


March 23d.--Mr. B. and I took a cab Saturday afternoon, and drove out of
the city in the direction of Knowsley.  On our way we saw many
gentlemen's or rich people's places, some of them dignified with the
title of Halls,--with lodges at their gates, and standing considerably
removed from the road.  The greater part of them were built of brick,--a
material with which I have not been accustomed to associate ideas of
grandeur; but it was much in use here in Lancashire, in the Elizabethan
age,--more, I think, than now.  These suburban residences, however, are
of much later date than Elizabeth's time.  Among other places, Mr. B.
called at the Hazels, the residence of Sir Thomas Birch, a kinsman of
his.  It is a large brick mansion, and has old trees and shrubbery about
it, the latter very fine and verdant,--hazels, holly, rhododendron, etc.
Mr. B. went in, and shortly afterwards Sir Thomas Birch came out,--a very
frank and hospitable gentleman,--and pressed me to enter and take
luncheon, which latter hospitality I declined.

His house is in very nice order.  He had a good many pictures, and,
amongst them, a small portrait of his mother, painted by Sir Thomas
Lawrence, when a youth.  It is unfinished, and when the painter was at
the height of his fame, he was asked to finish it.  But Lawrence, after
looking at the picture, refused to retouch it, saying that there was a
merit in this early sketch which he could no longer attain.  It was
really a very beautiful picture of a lovely woman.

Sir Thomas Birch proposed to go with us and get us admittance into
Knowsley Park, where we could not possibly find entrance without his aid.
So we went to the stables, where the old groom had already shown
hospitality to our cabman, by giving his horse some provender, and
himself some beer.  There seemed to be a kindly and familiar sort of
intercourse between the old servant and the Baronet, each of them, I
presume, looking on their connection as indissoluble.

The gate-warden of Knowsley Park was an old woman, who readily gave us
admittance at Sir Thomas Birch's request.  The family of the Earl of
Derby is not now at the Park.  It was a very bad time of year to see it;
the trees just showing the earliest symptoms of vitality, while whole
acres of ground were covered with large, dry, brown ferns,--which I
suppose are very beautiful when green.  Two or three hares scampered out
of these ferns, and sat on their hind legs looking about them, as we
drove by.  A sheet of water had been drawn off, in order to deepen its
bed.  The oaks did not seem to me so magnificent as they should be in an
ancient noble property like this.  A century does not accomplish so much
for a tree, in this slow region, as it does in ours.  I think, however,
that they were more individual and picturesque, with more character in
their contorted trunks; therein somewhat resembling apple-trees.  Our
forest-trees have a great sameness of character, like our people,--
because one and the other grow too closely.

In one part of the Park we came to a small tower, for what purpose I know
not, unless as an observatory; and near it was a marble statue on a high
pedestal.  The statue had been long exposed to the weather, and was
overgrown and ingrained with moss and lichens, so that its classic beauty
was in some sort gothicized.  A half-mile or so from this point, we saw
the mansion of Kuowsley, in the midst of a very fine prospect, with a
tolerably high ridge of hills in the distance.  The house itself is
exceedingly vast, a front and two wings, with suites of rooms, I suppose,
interminable.  The oldest part, Sir Thomas Birch told us, is a tower of
the time of Henry VII.  Nevertheless, the effect is not overwhelming,
because the edifice looks low in proportion to its great extent over the
ground; and besides, a good deal of it is built of brick, with white
window-frames, so that, looking at separate parts, I might think them
American structures, without the smart addition of green Venetian blinds,
so universal with us.  Portions, however, were built of red freestone;
and if I had looked at it longer, no doubt I should have admired it more.
We merely drove round it from the rear to the front.  It stands in my
memory rather like a college or a hospital, than as the ancestral
residence of a great English noble.

We left the Park in another direction, and passed through a part of Lord
Sefton's property, by a private road.

By the by, we saw half a dozen policemen, in their blue coats and
embroidered collars, after entering Knowsley Park; but the Earl's own
servants would probably have supplied their place, had the family been at
home.  The mansion of Croxteth, the seat of Lord Sefton, stands near the
public road, and, though large, looked of rather narrow compass after
Knowsley.

The rooks were talking together very loquaciously in the high tops of the
trees near Sir Thomas Birch's house, it being now their building-time.
It was a very pleasant sound, the noise being comfortably softened by the
remote height.  Sir Thomas said that more than half a century ago the
rooks used to inhabit another grove of lofty trees, close in front of the
house; but being noisy, and not altogether cleanly in their habits, the
ladies of the family grew weary of them and wished to remove them.
Accordingly, the colony was driven away, and made their present
settlement in a grove behind the house.  Ever since that time not a rook
has built in the ancient grove; every year, however, one or another pair
of young rooks attempt to build among the deserted tree-tops, but the old
rooks tear the new nest to pieces as often as it is put together.  Thus,
either the memory of aged individual rooks or an authenticated tradition
in their society has preserved the idea that the old grove is forbidden
and inauspicious to them.

A soil of General Arnold, named William Fitch Arnold, and born in 1794,
now possesses the estate of Little Messenden Abbey, Bucks County, and is
a magistrate for that county.  He was formerly Captain of the 19th
Lancers.  He has now two sons and four daughters.  The other three sons
of General Arnold, all older than this one, and all military men, do not
appear to have left children; but a daughter married to Colonel Phipps,
of the Mulgrave family, has a son and two daughters.  I question whether
any of our true-hearted Revolutionary heroes have left a more prosperous
progeny than this arch-traitor.  I should like to know their feelings
with respect to their ancestor.


April 3d.--I walked with J-----, two days ago, to Eastham, a village on
the road to Chester, and five or six miles from Rock Ferry.  On our way
we passed through a village, in the centre of which was a small stone
pillar, standing on a pedestal of several steps, on which children were
sitting and playing.  I take it to have been an old Catholic cross; at
least, I know not what else it is.  It seemed very ancient.  Eastham is
the finest old English village I have seen, with many antique houses, and
with altogether a rural and picturesque aspect, unlike anything in
America, and yet possessing a familiar look, as if it were something I
had dreamed about.  There were thatched stone cottages intermixed with
houses of a better kind, and likewise a gateway and gravelled walk, that
perhaps gave admittance to the Squire's mansion.  It was not merely one
long, wide street, as in most New England villages, but there were
several crooked ways, gathering the whole settlement into a pretty small
compass.  In the midst of it stood a venerable church of the common red
freestone, with a most reverend air, considerably smaller than that of
Bebbington, but more beautiful, and looking quite as old.  There was ivy
on its spire and elsewhere.  It looked very quiet and peaceful, and as if
it had received the people into its low arched door every Sabbath for
many centuries.  There were many tombstones about it, some level with the
ground, some raised on blocks of stone, on low pillars, moss-grown and
weather-worn; and probably these were but the successors of other stones
that had quite crumbled away, or been buried by the accumulation of dead
men's dust above them.  In the centre of the churchyard stood an old
yew-tree, with immense trunk, which was all decayed within, so that it is
a wonder how the tree retains any life,--which, nevertheless, it does.
It was called "the old Yew of Eastham," six hundred years ago!

After passing through the churchyard, we saw the village inn on the other
side.  The doors were fastened, but a girl peeped out of the window at
us, and let us in, ushering us into a very neat parlor.  There was a
cheerful fire in the grate, a straw carpet on the floor, a mahogany
sideboard, and a mahogany table in the middle of the room; and, on the
walls, the portraits of mine host (no doubt) and of his wife and
daughters,--a very nice parlor, and looking like what I might have found
in a country tavern at home, only this was an ancient house, and there is
nothing at home like the glimpse, from the window, of the church, and its
red, ivy-grown tower.  I ordered some lunch, being waited on by the girl,
who was very neat, intelligent, and comely,--and more respectful than a
New England maid.  As we came out of the inn, some village urchins left
their play, and ran to me begging, calling me "Master!"  They turned at
once from play to begging, and, as I gave them nothing, they turned to
their play again.

This village is too far from Liverpool to have been much injured as yet
by the novelty of cockney residences, which have grown up almost
everywhere else, so far as I have visited.  About a mile from it,
however, is the landing-place of a steamer (which runs regularly, except
in the winter months), where a large, new hotel is built.  The grounds
about it are extensive and well wooded.  We got some biscuits at the
hotel, and I gave the waiter (a splendid gentleman in black) four
halfpence, being the surplus of a shilling.  He bowed and thanked me very
humbly.  An American does not easily bring his mind to the small measure
of English liberality to servants; if anything is to be given, we are
ashamed not to give more, especially to clerical-looking persons, in
black suits and white neckcloths.

I stood on the Exchange at noon, to-day, to see the 18th Regiment, the
Connaught Rangers, marching down to embark for the East.  They were a
body of young, healthy, and cheerful-looking men, and looked greatly
better than the dirty crowd that thronged to gaze at them.  The royal
banner of England, quartering the lion, the leopard, and the harp, waved
on the town-house, and looked gorgeous and venerable.  Here and there a
woman exchanged greetings with an individual soldier, as he marched
along, and gentlemen shook hands with officers with whom they happened to
be acquainted.  Being a stranger in the land, it seemed as if I could see
the future in the present better than if I had been an Englishman; so I
questioned with myself how many of these ruddy-cheeked young fellows,
marching so stoutly away, would ever tread English ground again.  The
populace did not evince any enthusiasm, yet there could not possibly be a
war to which the country could assent more fully than to this.  I
somewhat doubt whether the English populace really feels a vital interest
in the nation.

Some years ago, a piece of rude marble sculpture, representing St. George
and the Dragon, was found over the fireplace of a cottage near Rock
Ferry, on the road to Chester.  It was plastered over with pipe-clay, and
its existence was unknown to the cottagers, until a lady noticed the
projection and asked what it was.  It was supposed to have originally
adorned the walls of the Priory at Birkenhead.  It measured fourteen and
a half by nine inches, in which space were the heads of a king and queen,
with uplifted hands, in prayer; their daughters also in prayer, and
looking very grim; a lamb, the slain dragon, and St. George, proudly
prancing on what looks like a donkey, brandishing a sword over his head.

The following is a legend inscribed on the inner margin of a curious old
box:--

    "From Birkenhead into Hilbree
     A squirrel might leap from tree to tree."

I do not know where Hilbree is; but all round Birkenhead a squirrel would
scarcely find a single tree to climb upon.  All is pavement and brick
buildings now.


Good Friday.--The English and Irish think it good to plant on this day,
because it was the day when our Saviour's body was laid in the grave.
Seeds, therefore, are certain to rise again.

At dinner the other day, Mrs. ------ mentioned the origin of Franklin's
adoption of the customary civil dress, when going to court as a
diplomatist.  It was simply that his tailor had disappointed him of his
court suit, and he wore his plain one with great reluctance, because he
had no other.  Afterwards, gaining great success and praise by his
mishap, he continued to wear it from policy.

The grandmother of Mrs. ------ died fifty years ago, at the age of
twenty-eight.  She had great personal charms, and among them a head of
beautiful chestnut hair.  After her burial in the family tomb, the coffin
of one of her children was laid on her own, so that the lid seems to have
decayed, or been broken from this cause; at any rate, this was the case
when the tomb was opened about a year ago.  The grandmother's coffin was
then found to be filled with beautiful, glossy, living chestnut ringlets,
into which her whole substance seems to have been transformed, for there
was nothing else but these shining curls, the growth of half a century in
the tomb.  An old man, with a ringlet of his youthful mistress treasured
on his heart, might be supposed to witness this wonderful thing.

Madam ------, who is now at my house, and very infirm, though not old,
was once carried to the grave, and on the point of being buried.  It was
in Barbary, where her husband was Consul-General.  He was greatly
attached to her, and told the pall-bearers at the grave that he must see
her once more.  When her face was uncovered, he thought he discerned
signs of life, and felt a warmth.  Finally she revived, and for many
years afterwards supposed the funeral procession to have been a dream;
she having been partially conscious throughout, and having felt the wind
blowing on her, and lifting the shroud from her feet,--for I presume she
was to be buried in Oriental style, without a coffin.  Long after, in
London, when she was speaking of this dream, her husband told her the
facts, and she fainted away.  Whenever it is now mentioned, her face
turns white.  Mr. ------, her son, was born on shipboard, on the coast of
Spain, and claims four nationalities,--those of Spain, England, Ireland,
and the United States; his father being Irish, his mother a native of
England, himself a naturalized citizen of the United States, and his
father having registered his birth and baptism in a Catholic church of
Gibraltar, which gives him Spanish privileges.  He has hereditary claims
to a Spanish countship.  His infancy was spent in Barbary, and his lips
first lisped in Arabic.  There has been an unsettled and wandering
character in his whole life.

The grandfather of Madam ------, who was a British officer, once
horsewhipped Paul Jones,--Jones being a poltroon.  How singular it is
that the personal courage of famous warriors should be so often called in
question!


May 20th.--I went yesterday to a hospital to take the oath of a mate to a
protest.  He had met with a severe accident by a fall on shipboard.  The
hospital is a large edifice of red freestone, with wide, airy passages,
resounding with footsteps passing through them.  A porter was waiting in
the vestibule.  Mr. Wilding and myself were shown to the parlor, in the
first instance,--a neat, plainly furnished room, with newspapers and
pamphlets lying on the table and sofas.  Soon the surgeon of the house
came,--a brisk, alacritous, civil, cheerful young man, by whom we were
shown to the apartment where the mate was lying.  As we went through the
principal passage, a man was borne along in a chair looking very pale,
rather wild, and altogether as if he had just been through great
tribulation, and hardly knew as yet whereabouts he was.  I noticed that
his left arm was but a stump, and seemed done up in red baize,--at all
events it was of a scarlet line.  The surgeon shook his right hand
cheerily, and he was carried on.  This was a patient who had just had his
arm cut off.  He had been a rough person apparently, but now there was a
kind of tenderness about him, through pain and helplessness.

In the chamber where the mate lay, there were seven beds, all of them
occupied by persons who had met with accidents.  In the centre of the
room was a stationary pine table, about the length of a man, intended, I
suppose, to stretch patients upon for necessary operations.  The
furniture of the beds was plain and homely.  I thought that the faces of
the patients all looked remarkably intelligent, though they were
evidently men of the lower classes.  Suffering had educated them morally
and intellectually.  They gazed curiously at Mr. Wilding and me, but
nobody said a word.  In the bed next to the mate lay a little boy with a
broken thigh.  The surgeon observed that children generally did well with
accidents; and this boy certainly looked very bright and cheerful.  There
was nothing particularly interesting about the mate.

After finishing our business, the surgeon showed us into another room of
the surgical ward, likewise devoted to cases of accident and injury.  All
the beds were occupied, and in two of them lay two American sailors who
had recently been stabbed.  They had been severely hurt, but were doing
very well.  The surgeon thought that it was a good arrangement to have
several cases together, and that the patients kept up one another's
spirits,--being often merry together.  Smiles and laughter may operate
favorably enough from bed to bed; but dying groans, I should think, must
be somewhat of a discouragement.  Nevertheless, the previous habits and
modes of life of such people as compose the more numerous class of
patients in a hospital must be considered before deciding this matter.
It is very possible that their misery likes such bedfellows as it here
finds.

As we were taking our leave, the surgeon asked us if we should not like
to see the operating-room; and before we could reply he threw open the
door, and behold, there was a roll of linen "garments rolled in blood,"--
and a bloody fragment of a human arm!  The surgeon glanced at me, and
smiled kindly, but as if pitying my discomposure.

Gervase Elwes, son of Sir Gervase Elwes, Baronet, of Stoke, Suffolk,
married Isabella, daughter of Sir Thomas Hervey, Knight, and sister of
the first Earl of Bristol.  This Gervase died before his father, but left
a son, Henry, who succeeded to the Baronetcy.  Sir Henry died without
issue, and was succeeded by his sister's son, John Maggott Twining, who
assumed the name of Elwes.  He was the famous miser, and must have had
Hawthorne blood in him, through his grandfather, Gervase, whose mother
was a Hawthorne.  It was to this Gervase that my ancestor, William
Hawthorne, devised some land in Massachusetts, "if he would come over,
and enjoy it."  My ancestor calls him his nephew.


June 12th.--Barry Cornwall, Mr. Procter, called on me a week or more ago,
but I happened not to be in the office.  Saturday last he called again,
and as I had crossed to Rock Park he followed me thither.  A plain,
middle-sized, English-looking gentleman, elderly, with short, white hair,
and particularly quiet in his manners.  He talks in a somewhat low tone
without emphasis, scarcely distinct.  His head has a good outline, and
would look well in marble.  I liked him very well.  He talked
unaffectedly, showing an author's regard to his reputation, and was
evidently pleased to hear of his American celebrity.  He said that in his
younger days he was a scientific pugilist, and once took a journey to
have a sparring encounter with the Game-Chicken.  Certainly, no one would
have looked for a pugilist in this subdued old gentleman.  He is now
Commissioner of Lunacy, and makes periodical circuits through the
country, attending to the business of his office.  He is slightly deaf,
and this may be the cause of his unaccented utterance,--owing to his not
being able to regulate his voice exactly by his own ear.  He is a good
man, and much better expressed by his real name, Procter, than by his
poetical one, Barry Cornwall. . . . . He took my hand in both of his at
parting. . . . .


June 17th.--At eleven, at this season (and how much longer I know not),
there is still a twilight.  If we could only have such dry, deliciously
warm evenings as we used to have in our own land, what enjoyment there
might be in these interminable twilights!  But here we close the
window-shutters, and make ourselves cosey by a coal-fire.

All three of the children, and, I think, my wife and myself, are going
through the hooping-cough.  The east-wind of this season and region is
most horrible.  There have been no really warm days; for though the
sunshine is sometimes hot, there is never any diffused heat throughout
the air.  On passing from the sunshine into the shade, we immediately
feel too cool.


June 20th.--The vagabond musicians about town are very numerous.  On
board the steam ferry-boats, I have heretofore spoken of them.  They
infest them from May to November, for very little gain apparently.  A
shilling a day per man must be the utmost of their emolument.  It is
rather sad to see somewhat respectable old men engaged in this way, with
two or three younger associates.  Their instruments look much the worse
for wear, and even my unmusical ear can distinguish more discord than
harmony.  They appear to be a very quiet and harmless people.  Sometimes
there is a woman playing on a fiddle, while her husband blows a wind
instrument.  In the streets it is not unusual to find a band of half a
dozen performers, who, without any provocation or reason whatever, sound
their brazen instruments till the houses re-echo.  Sometimes one passes a
man who stands whistling a tune most unweariably, though I never saw
anybody give him anything.  The ballad-singers are the strangest, from
the total lack of any music in their cracked voices.  Sometimes you see a
space cleared in the street, and a foreigner playing, while a girl--
weather-beaten, tanned, and wholly uncomely in face and shabby in attire
dances ballets.  The common people look on, and never criticise or treat
any of these poor devils unkindly or uncivilly; but I do not observe that
they give them anything.

A crowd--or, at all events, a moderate-sized group--is much more easily
drawn together here than with us.  The people have a good deal of idle
and momentary curiosity, and are always ready to stop when another person
has stopped, so as to see what has attracted his attention.  I hardly
ever pause to look at a shop-window, without being immediately incommoded
by boys and men, who stop likewise, and would forthwith throng the
pavement if I did not move on.


June 30th.--If it is not known how and when a man dies, it makes a ghost
of him for many years thereafter, perhaps for centuries.  King Arthur is
an example; also the Emperor Frederic, and other famous men, who were
thought to be alive ages after their disappearance.  So with private
individuals.  I had an uncle John, who went a voyage to sea about the
beginning of the War of 1812, and has never returned to this hour.  But
as long as his mother lived, as many as twenty years, she never gave up
the hope of his return, and was constantly hearing stories of persons
whose description answered to his.  Some people actually affirmed that
they had seen him in various parts of the world.  Thus, so far as her
belief was concerned, he still walked the earth.  And even to this day I
never see his name, which is no very uncommon one, without thinking that
this may be the lost uncle.

Thus, too, the French Dauphin still exists, or a kind of ghost of him;
the three Tells, too, in the cavern of Uri.


July 6th.--Mr. Cecil, the other day, was saying that England could
produce as fine peaches as any other country.  I asked what was the
particular excellence of a peach, and he answered, "Its cooling and
refreshing quality, like that of a melon!"  Just think of this idea of
the richest, most luscious, of all fruits!  But the untravelled
Englishman has no more idea of what fruit is than of what sunshine is; he
thinks he has tasted the first and felt the last, but they are both alike
watery.  I heard a lady in Lord Street talking about the "broiling sun,"
when I was almost in a shiver.  They keep up their animal heat by means
of wine and ale, else they could not bear this climate.


July 19th.--A week ago I made a little tour in North Wales with Mr.
Bright.  We left Birkenhead by railway for Chester at two o'clock; thence
for Bangor; thence by carriage over the Menai bridge to Beaumaris.  At
Beaumaris, a fine old castle,--quite coming up to my idea of what an old
castle should be.  A gray, ivy-hung exterior wall, with large round
towers at intervals; within this another wall, the place of the
portcullis between; and again, within the second wall the castle itself,
with a spacious green court-yard in front.  The outer wall is so thick
that a passage runs in it all round the castle, which covers a space of
three acres.  This passage gives access to a chapel, still very perfect,
and to various apartments in the towers,--all exceedingly dismal, and
giving very unpleasant impressions of the way in which the garrison of
the castle lived.  The main castle is entirely roofless, but the hall and
other rooms are pointed out by the guide, and the whole is tapestried
with abundant ivy, so that my impression is of gray walls, with here and
there a vast green curtain; a carpet of green over the floors of halls
and apartments; and festoons around all the outer battlement, with an
uneven and rather perilous foot-path running along the top.  There is a
fine vista through the castle itself, and the two gateways of the two
encompassing walls.  The passage within the wall is very rude, both
underfoot and on each side, with various ascents and descents of rough
steps,--sometimes so low that your head is in danger; and dark, except
where a little light comes through a loophole or window in the thickness
of the wall.  In front of the castle a tennis-court was fitted up, by
laying a smooth pavement on the ground, and casing the walls with tin or
zinc, if I recollect aright.  All this was open to the sky; and when we
were there, some young men of the town were playing at the game.  There
are but very few of these tennis-courts in England; and this old castle
was a very strange place for one.

The castle is the property of Sir Richard Bulkely, whose seat is in the
vicinity, and who owns a great part of the island of Anglesea, on which
Beaumaris lies.  The hotel where we stopped was the Bulkely Arms, and Sir
Richard has a kind of feudal influence in the town.

In the morning we walked along a delightful road, bordering on the Menai
Straits, to Bangor Ferry.  It was really a very pleasant road, overhung
by a growth of young wood, exceedingly green and fresh.  English trees
are green all about their stems, owing to the creeping plants that
overrun them.  There were some flowers in the hedges, such as we
cultivate in gardens.  At the ferry, there was a whitewashed cottage; a
woman or two, some children, and a fisherman-like personage, walking to
and fro before the door.  The scenery of the strait is very beautiful and
picturesque, and directly opposite to us lay Bangor,--the strait being
here almost a mile across.  An American ship from Boston lay in the
middle of it.  The ferry-boat was just putting off for the Bangor side,
and, by the aid of a sail, soon neared the shore.

At Bangor we went to a handsome hotel, and hired a carriage and two
horses for some Welsh place, the name of which I forget; neither can I
remember a single name of the places through which we posted that day,
nor could I spell them if I heard them pronounced, nor pronounce them if
I saw them spelt.  It was a circuit of about forty miles, bringing us to
Conway at last.  I remember a great slate-quarry; and also that many of
the cottages, in the first part of our drive, were built of blocks of
slate.  The mountains were very bold, thrusting themselves up abruptly in
peaks,--not of the dumpling formation, which is somewhat too prevalent
among the New England mountains.  At one point we saw Snowdon, with its
bifold summit.  We also visited the smaller waterfall (this is a
translation of an unpronounceable Welsh name), which is the largest in
Wales.  It was a very beautiful rapid, and the guide-book considers it
equal in sublimity to Niagara.  Likewise there were one or two lakes
which the guide-book greatly admired, but which to me, who remembered a
hundred sheets of blue water in New England, seemed nothing more than
sullen and dreary puddles, with bare banks, and wholly destitute of
beauty.  I think they were nowhere more than a hundred yards across.  But
the hills were certainly very good, and, though generally bare of trees,
their outlines thereby were rendered the stronger and more striking.

Many of the Welsh women, particularly the older ones, wear black beaver
hats, high-crowned, and almost precisely like men's.  It makes them look
ugly and witchlike.  Welsh is still the prevalent language, and the only
one spoken by a great many of the inhabitants.  I have had Welsh people
in my office, on official business, with whom I could not communicate
except through an interpreter.

At some unutterable village we went into a little church, where we saw an
old stone image of a warrior, lying on his back, with his hands clasped.
It was the natural son (if I remember rightly) of David, Prince of Wales,
and was doubtless the better part of a thousand years old.  There was
likewise a stone coffin of still greater age; some person of rank and
renown had mouldered to dust within it, but it was now open and empty.
Also, there were monumental brasses on the walls, engraved with portraits
of a gentleman and lady in the costumes of Elizabeth's time.  Also, on
one of the pews, a brass record of some persons who slept in the vault
beneath; so that, every Sunday, the survivors and descendants kneel and
worship directly over their dead ancestors.  In the churchyard, on a flat
tombstone, there was the representation of a harp.  I supposed that it
must be the resting-place of a bard; but the inscription was in memory of
a merchant, and a skilful manufacturer of harps.

This was a very delightful town.  We saw a great many things which it is
now too late to describe, the sharpness of the first impression being
gone; but I think I can produce something of the sentiment of it
hereafter.

We arrived at Conway late in the afternoon, to take the rail for Chester.
I must see Conway, with its old gray wall and its unrivalled castle,
again.  It was better than Beaumaris, and I never saw anything more
picturesque than the prospect from the castle-wall towards the sea.  We
reached Chester at 10 P. M.  The next morning, Mr. Bright left for
Liverpool before I was awake.  I visited the Cathedral, where the organ
was sounding, sauntered through the Rows, bought some playthings for the
children, and left for home soon after twelve.


Liverpool, August 8th.--Visiting the Zoological Gardens the other day
with J-----, it occurred to me what a fantastic kind of life a person
connected with them might be depicted as leading,--a child, for instance.
The grounds are very extensive, and include arrangements for all kinds of
exhibitions calculated to attract the idle people of a great city.  In
one enclosure is a bear, who climbs a pole to get cake and gingerbread
from the spectators.  Elsewhere, a circular building, with compartments
for lions, wolves, and tigers.  In another part of the garden is a colony
of monkeys, the skeleton of an elephant, birds of all kinds.  Swans and
various rare water-fowl were swimming on a piece of water, which was
green, by the by, and when the fowls dived they stirred up black mud.  A
stork was parading along the margin, with melancholy strides of its long
legs, and came slowly towards its, as if for companionship.  In one
apartment was an obstreperously noisy society of parrots and macaws, most
gorgeous and diversified of hue.  These different colonies of birds and
beasts were scattered about in various parts of the grounds, so that you
came upon them unexpectedly.  Also, there were archery and
shooting-grounds, and a sewing.  A theatre, also, at which a rehearsal
was going on,--we standing at one of the doors, and looking in towards the
dusky stage where the company, in their ordinary dresses, were rehearsing
something that had a good deal of dance and action in it.  In the open
air there was an arrangement of painted scenery representing a wide
expanse of mountains, with a city at their feet, and before it the sea,
with actual water, and large vessels upon it, the vessels having only the
side that would be presented to the spectator.  But the scenery was so
good that at a first casual glance I almost mistook it for reality.
There was a refreshment-room, with drinks and cakes and pastry, but, so
far as I saw, no substantial victual.  About in the centre of the garden
there was an actual, homely-looking, small dwelling-house, where perhaps
the overlookers of the place live.  Now this might be wrought, in an
imaginative description, into a pleasant sort of a fool's paradise, where
all sorts of unreal delights should cluster round some suitable
personage; and it would relieve, in a very odd and effective way, the
stern realities of life on the outside of the garden-walls.  I saw a
little girl, simply dressed, who seemed to have her habitat within the
grounds.  There was also a daguerreotypist, with his wife and family,
carrying on his business in a shanty, and perhaps having his home in its
inner room.  He seemed to be an honest, intelligent, pleasant young man,
and his wife a pleasant woman; and I had J-----'s daguerreotype taken for
three shillings, in a little gilded frame.  In the description of the
garden, the velvet turf, of a charming verdure, and the shrubbery and
shadowy walks and large trees, and the slopes and inequalities of ground,
must not he forgotten.  In one place there was a maze and labyrinth,
where a person might wander a long while in the vain endeavor to get out,
although all the time looking at the exterior garden, over the low hedges
that border the walks of the maze.  And this is like the inappreciable
difficulties that often beset us in life.

I will see it again before long, and get some additional record of it.


August 10th.--We went to the Isle of Man, a few weeks ago, where S-----
and the children spent a fortnight.  I spent two Sundays with them.

I never saw anything prettier than the little church of Kirk Madden
there.  It stands in a perfect seclusion of shadowy trees,--a plain
little church, that would not be at all remarkable in another situation,
but is most picturesque in its solitude and bowery environment.  The
churchyard is quite full and overflowing with graves, and extends down
the gentle slope of a hill, with a dark mass of shadow above it.  Some of
the tombstones are flat on the ground, some erect, or laid horizontally
on low pillars or masonry.  There were no very old dates on any of these
stones; for the climate soon effaces inscriptions, and makes a stone of
fifty years look as old as one of five hundred,--unless it be slate, or
something harder than the usual red freestone.  There was an old Runic
monument, however, near the centre of the churchyard, that had some
strange sculpture on it, and an inscription still legible by persons
learned in such matters.  Against the tower of the church, too, there is
a circular stone, with carving on it, said to be of immemorial antiquity.
There is likewise a tall marble monument, as much as fifty feet high,
erected some years ago to the memory of one of the Athol family by his
brother-officers of a local regiment of which he was colonel.  At one of
the side-entrances of the church, and forming the threshold within the
thickness of the wall, so that the feet of all who enter must tread on
it, is a flat tombstone of somebody who felt himself a sinner, no doubt,
and desired to be thus trampled upon.  The stone is much worn.

The structure is extremely plain inside and very small.  On the walls,
over the pews, are several monumental sculptures,--a quite elaborate one
to a Colonel Murray, of the Coldstreamn Guards; his military profession
being designated by banners and swords in marble.--Another was to a
farmer.

On one side of the church-tower there was a little penthouse, or
lean-to,--merely a stone roof, about three or four feet high, and
supported by a single pillar, beneath which was once deposited the bier.

I have let too much time pass before attempting to record my impressions
of the Isle of Man; but, as regards this church, no description can come
up to its quiet beauty, its seclusion, and its every requisite for an
English country church.

Last Sunday I went to Eastham, and, entering the churchyard, sat down on
a tombstone under the yew-tree which has been known for centuries as the
Great Tree of Eastham.  Some of the village people were sitting on the
graves near the door; and an old woman came towards me, and said, in a
low, kindly, admonishing tone, that I must not let the sexton see me,
because he would not allow any one to be there in sacrament-time.  I
inquired why she and her companions were there, and she said they were
waiting for the sacrament.  So I thanked her, gave her a sixpence, and
departed.  Close under the eaves, I saw two upright stones, in memory of
two old servants of the Stanley family,--one over ninety, and the other
over eighty years of age.

August 12th.--J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park yesterday.  There is a
large ornamental gateway to the Park, and the grounds within are neatly
laid out, with borders of shrubbery.  There is a sheet of water, with
swans and other aquatic fowl, which swim about, and are fed with dainties
by the visitors.  Nothing can be more beautiful than a swan.  It is the
ideal of a goose,--a goose beautified and beatified.  There were not a
great many visitors, but some children were dancing on the green, and a
few lover-like people straying about.  I think the English behave better
than the Americans at similar places.

There was a camera-obscure, very wretchedly indistinct.  At the
refreshment-room were ginger-beer and British wines.


August 21st.--I was in the Crown Court on Saturday, sitting in the
sheriff's seat.  The judge was Baron ------, an old gentleman of sixty,
with very large, long features.  His wig helped him to look like some
strange kind of animal,--very queer, but yet with a sagacious, and, on
the whole, beneficent aspect.  During the session some mischievous young
barrister occupied himself with sketching the judge in pencil; and, being
handed about, it found its way to me.  It was very like and very
laughable, but hardly caricatured.  The judicial wig is an exceedingly
odd affair; and as it covers both ears, it would seem intended to prevent
his Lordship, and justice in his person, from hearing any of the case on
either side, that thereby he may decide the better.  It is like the old
idea of blindfolding the statue of Justice.

It seems to me there is less formality, less distance between the judge,
jury, witnesses, and bar, in the English courts than in our own.  The
judge takes a very active part in the trial, constantly asking a question
of the witness on the stand, making remarks on the conduct of the trial,
putting in his word on all occasions, and allowing his own sense of the
matter in hand to be pretty plainly seen; so that, before the trial is
over, and long before his own charge is delivered, he must have exercised
a very powerful influence over the minds of the jury.  All this is done,
not without dignity, yet in a familiar kind of way.  It is a sort of
paternal supervision of the whole matter, quite unlike the cold awfulness
of an American judge.  But all this may be owing partly to the personal
characteristics of Baron ------.  It appeared to me, however, that, from
the closer relations of all parties, truth was likely to be arrived at
and justice to be done.  As an innocent man, I should not be afraid to be
tried by Baron ------.



EATON HALL.


August 24th.--I went to Eaton Hall yesterday with my wife and Mr. G. P.
Bradford, via Chester.  On our way, at the latter place, we visited St.
John's Church.  It is built of the same red freestone as the cathedral,
and looked exceedingly antique, and venerable; this kind of stone, from
its softness, and its liability to be acted upon by the weather, being
liable to an early decay.  Nevertheless, I believe the church was built
above a thousand years ago,--some parts of it, at least,--and the surface
of the tower and walls is worn away and hollowed in shallow sweeps by the
hand of Time.  There were broken niches in several places, where statues
had formerly stood.  All, except two or three, had fallen or crumbled
away, and those which remained were much damaged.  The face and details
of the figure were almost obliterated.  There were many gravestones round
the church, but none of them of any antiquity.  Probably, as the names
become indistinguishable on the older stones, the graves are dug over
again, and filled with new occupants and covered with new stones, or
perhaps with the old ones newly inscribed.

Closely connected with the church was the clergyman's house, a
comfortable-looking residence; and likewise in the churchyard, with
tombstones all about it, even almost at the threshold, so that the
doorstep itself might have been a tombstone, was another house, of
respectable size and aspect.  We surmised that this might be the sexton's
dwelling, but it proved not to be so; and a woman, answering our knock,
directed us to the place where he might be found.  So Mr. Bradford and I
went in search of him, leaving S----- seated on a tombstone.  The sexton
was a jolly-looking, ruddy-faced man, a mechanic of some sort,
apparently, and he followed us to the churchyard with much alacrity.  We
found S----- standing at a gateway, which opened into the most ancient,
and now quite ruinous, part of the church, the present edifice covering
much less ground than it did some centuries ago.  We went through this
gateway, and found ourselves in an enclosure of venerable walls, open to
the sky, with old Norman arches standing about, beneath the loftiest of
which the sexton told us the high altar used to stand.  Of course, there
were weeds and ivy growing in the crevices, but not so abundantly as I
have seen them elsewhere.  The sexton pointed out a piece of a statue
that had once stood in one of the niches, and which he himself, I think,
had dug up from several feet below the earth; also, in a niche of the
walls, high above our heads, he showed us an ancient wooden coffin, hewn
out of a solid log of oak, the hollow being made rudely in the shape of a
human figure.  This too had been dug up, and nobody knew how old it was.
While we looked at all this solemn old trumpery, the curate, quite a
young man, stood at the back door of his house, elevated considerably
above the ruins, with his young wife (I presume) and a friend or two,
chatting cheerfully among themselves.  It was pleasant to see them there.
After examining the ruins, we went inside of the church, and found it a
dim and dusky old place, quite paved over with tombstones, not an inch of
space being left in the aisles or near the altar, or in any nook or
corner, uncovered by a tombstone.  There were also mural monuments and
escutcheons, and close against the wall lay the mutilated statue of a
Crusader, with his legs crossed, in the style which one has so often read
about.  The old fellow seemed to have been represented in chain armor;
but he had been more battered and bruised since death than even during
his pugnacious life, and his nose was almost knocked away.  This figure
had been dug up many years ago, and nobody knows whom it was meant to
commemorate.

The nave of the church is supported by two rows of Saxon pillars, not
very lofty, but six feet six inches (so the sexton says) in diameter.
They are covered with plaster, which was laid on ages ago, and is now so
hard and smooth that I took the pillars to be really composed of solid
shafts of gray stone.  But, at one end of the church, the plaster had
been removed from two of the pillars, in order to discover whether they
were still sound enough to support the building; and they prove to be
made of blocks of red freestone, just as sound as when it came from the
quarry; for though this stone soon crumbles in the open air, it is as
good as indestructible when sheltered from the weather.  It looked very
strange to see the fresh hue of these two pillars amidst the dingy
antiquity of the rest of the structure.

The body of the church is covered with pews, the wooden enclosures of
which seemed of antique fashion.  There were also modern stoves; but the
sexton said it was very cold there, in spite of the stoves.  It had, I
must say, a disagreeable odor pervading it, in which the dead people of
long ago had doubtless some share,--a musty odor, by no means amounting
to a stench, but unpleasant, and, I should think, unwholesome.  Old
wood-work, and old stones, and antiquity of all kinds, moral and
physical, go to make up this smell.  I observed it in the cathedral, and
Chester generally has it, especially under the Rows.  After all, the
necessary damp and lack of sunshine, in such a shadowy old church as
this, have probably more to do with it than the dead people have;
although I did think the odor was particularly strong over some of the
tombstones.  Not having shillings to give the sexton, we were forced to
give him half a crown.

The Church of St. John is outside of the city walls.  Entering the East
gate, we walked awhile under the Rows, bought our tickets for Eaton Hall
and its gardens, and likewise some playthings for the children; for this
old city of Chester seems to me to possess an unusual number of
toy-shops.  Finally we took a cab, and drove to the Hall, about four
miles distant, nearly the whole of the way lying through the wooded Park.
There are many sorts of trees, making up a wilderness, which looked not
unlike the woods of our own Concord, only less wild.  The English oak is
not a handsome tree, being short and sturdy, with a round, thick mass of
foliage, lying all within its own bounds.  It was a showery day.  Had
there been any sunshine, there might doubtless have been many beautiful
effects of light and shadow in these woods.  We saw one or two herds of
deer, quietly feeding, a hundred yards or so distant.  They appeared to
be somewhat wilder than cattle, but, I think, not much wilder than sheep.
Their ancestors have probably been in a half-domesticated state,
receiving food at the hands of man, in winter, for centuries.  There is a
kind of poetry in this, quite as much as if they were really wild deer,
such as their forefathers were, when Hugh Lupus used to hunt them.

Our miserable cab drew up at the steps of Eaton Hall, and, ascending
under the portico, the door swung silently open, and we were received
very civilly by two old men,--one, a tall footman in livery; the other,
of higher grade, in plain clothes.  The entrance-hall is very spacious,
and the floor is tessellated or somehow inlaid with marble.  There was
statuary in marble on the floor, and in niches stood several figures in
antique armor, of various dates; some with lances, and others with
battle-axes and swords.  There was a two-handed sword, as much as six
feet long; but not nearly so ponderous as I have supposed this kind of
weapon to be, from reading of it.  I could easily have brandished it.

I don't think I am a good sight-seer; at least, I soon get satisfied with
looking at the sights, and wish to go on to the next.

The plainly dressed old man now led us into a long corridor, which goes,
I think, the whole length of the house, about five hundred feet, arched
all the way, and lengthened interminably by a looking-glass at the end,
in which I saw our own party approaching like a party of strangers.  But
I have so often seen this effect produced in dry-goods stores and
elsewhere, that I was not much impressed.  There were family portraits
and other pictures, and likewise pieces of statuary, along this arched
corridor; and it communicated with a chapel with a scriptural
altar-piece, copied from Rubens, and a picture of St. Michael and the
Dragon, and two, or perhaps three, richly painted windows.  Everything
here is entirely new and fresh, this part having been repaired, and never
yet inhabited by the family.  This brand-newness makes it much less
effective than if it had been lived in; and I felt pretty much as if I
were strolling through any other renewed house.  After all, the utmost
force of man can do positively very little towards making grand things or
beautiful things.  The imagination can do so much more, merely on
shutting one's eyes, that the actual effect seems meagre; so that a new
house, unassociated with the past, is exceedingly unsatisfactory,
especially when you have heard that the wealth mud skill of man has here
done its best.  Besides, the rooms, as we saw them, did not look by any
means their best, the carpets not being down, and the furniture being
covered with protective envelopes.  However, rooms cannot be seen to
advantage by daylight; it being altogether essential to the effect, that
they should be illuminated by artificial light, which takes them somewhat
out of the region of bare reality.  Nevertheless, there was undoubtedly
great splendor, for the details of which I refer to the guide-book.
Among the family portraits, there was one of a lady famous for her
beautiful hand; and she was holding it up to notice in the funniest way,
--and very beautiful it certainly was.  The private apartments of the
family were not shown us.  I should think it impossible for the owner of
this house to imbue it with his personality to such a degree as to feel
it to be his home.  It must be like a small lobster in a shell much too
large for him.

After seeing what was to be seen of the rooms, we visited the gardens, in
which are noble conservatories and hot-houses, containing all manner of
rare and beautiful flowers, and tropical fruits.  I noticed some large
pines, looking as if they were really made of gold.  The gardener
(under-gardener I suppose he was) who showed this part of the spectacle
was very intelligent as well as kindly, and seemed to take an interest in
his business.  He gave S----- a purple everlasting flower, which will
endure a great many years, as a memento of our visit to Eaton Hall.
Finally, we took a view of the front of the edifice, which is very fine,
and much more satisfactory than the interior,--and returned to Chester.

We strolled about under the unsavory Rows, sometimes scudding from side
to side of the street, through the shower; took lunch in a confectioner's
shop, and drove to the railway station in time for the three-o'clock
train.  It looked picturesque to see two little girls, hand in hand,
racing along the ancient passages of the Rows; but Chester has a very
evil smell.

At the railroad station, S----- saw a small edition of "Twice-Told
Tales," forming a volume of the Cottage Library; and, opening it, there
was the queerest imaginable portrait of myself,--so very queer that we
could not but buy it.  The shilling edition of "The Scarlet Letter" and
"Seven Gables" are at all the book-stalls and shop-windows; but so is
"The Lamplighter," and still more trashy books.


August 26th.--All past affairs, all home conclusions, all people whom I
have known in America and meet again here, are strangely compelled to
undergo a new trial.  It is not that they suffer by comparison with
circumstances of English life and forms of English manhood or womanhood;
but, being free from my old surroundings, and the inevitable prejudices
of home, I decide upon them absolutely.

I think I neglected to record that I saw Miss Martineau a few weeks
since.  She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but
withal she has so kind, cheerful, and intelligent a face that she is
pleasanter to look at than most beauties.  Her hair is of a decided gray,
and she does not shrink from calling herself old.  She is the most
continual talker I ever heard; it is really like the babbling of a brook,
and very lively and sensible too; and all the while she talks, she moves
the bowl of her ear-trumpet from one auditor to another, so that it
becomes quite an organ of intelligence and sympathy between her and
yourself.  The ear-trumpet seems a sensible part of her, like the
antennae of some insects.  If you have any little remark to make, you
drop it in; and she helps you to make remarks by this delicate little
appeal of the trumpet, as she slightly directs it towards you; and if you
have nothing to say, the appeal is not strong enough to embarrass you.
All her talk was about herself and her affairs; but it did not seem like
egotism, because it was so cheerful and free from morbidness.  And this
woman is an Atheist, and thinks that the principle of life will become
extinct when her body is laid in the grave!  I will not think so; were it
only for her sake.  What! only a few weeds to spring out of her
mortality, instead of her intellect and sympathies flowering and fruiting
forever!


September 13th.--My family went to Rhyl last Thursday, and on Saturday I
joined them there, in company with O'Sullivan, who arrived in the Behama
from Lisbon that morning.  We went by way of Chester, and found S-----
waiting for us at the Rhyl station.  Rhyl is a most uninteresting place,
--a collection of new lodging-houses and hotels, on a long sand-beach,
which the tide leaves bare almost to the horizon.  The sand is by no
means a marble pavement, but sinks under the foot, and makes very heavy
walking; but there is a promenade in front of the principal range of
houses, looking on the sea, whereon we have rather better footing.
Almost all the houses were full, and S----- had taken a parlor and two
bedrooms, and is living after the English fashion, providing her own
table, lights, fuel, and everything.  It is very awkward to our American
notions; but there is an independence about it, which I think must make
it agreeable on better acquaintance.  But the place is certainly
destitute of attraction, and life seems to pass very heavily.  The
English do not appear to have a turn for amusing themselves.

Sunday was a bright and hot day, and in the forenoon I set out on a walk,
not well knowing whither, over a very dusty road, with not a particle of
shade along its dead level.  The Welsh mountains were before me, at the
distance of three or four miles,--long ridgy hills, descending pretty
abruptly upon the plain; on either side of the road, here and there, an
old whitewashed, thatched stone cottage, or a stone farm-house, with an
aspect of some antiquity.  I never suffered so much before, on this side
of the water, from heat and dust, and should probably have turned back
had I not espied the round towers and walls of an old castle at some
distance before me.  Having looked at a guide-book, previously to setting
out, I knew that this must be Rhyddlan Castle, about three miles from
Rhyl; so I plodded on, and by and by entered an antiquated village, on
one side of which the castle stood.  This Welsh village is very much like
the English villages, with narrow streets and mean houses or cottages,
built in blocks, and here and there a larger house standing alone;
everything far more compact than in our rural villages, and with no
grassy street-margin nor trees; aged and dirty also, with dirty children
staring at the passenger, and an undue supply of mean inns; most, or many
of the men in breeches, and some of the women, especially the elder ones,
in black beaver hats.  The streets were paved with round pebbles, and
looked squalid and ugly.

The children and grown people stared lazily at me as I passed, but showed
no such alert and vivacious curiosity as a community of Yankees would
have done.  I turned up a street that led me to the castle, which looked
very picturesque close at hand,--more so than at a distance, because the
towers and walls have not a sufficiently broken outline against the sky.
There are several round towers at the angles of the wall very large in
their circles, built of gray stone, crumbling, ivy-grown, everything that
one thinks of in an old ruin.  I could not get into the inner space of
the castle without climbing over a fence, or clambering down into the
moat; so I contented myself with walking round it, and viewing it from
the outside.  Through the gateway I saw a cow feeding on the green grass
in the inner court of the castle.  In one of the walls there was a large
triangular gap, where perhaps the assailants had made a breach.  Of
course there were weeds on the ruinous top of the towers, and along the
summit of the wall.  This was the first castle built by Edward I. in
Wales, and he resided here during the erection of Conway Castle, and here
Queen Eleanor gave birth to a princess.  Some few years since a meeting
of Welsh bards was held within it.

After viewing it awhile, and listening to the babble of some children who
lay on the grass near by, I resumed my walk, and, meeting a Welshman in
the village street, I asked him my nearest way back to Rhyl.  "Dim
Sassenach," said he, after a pause.  How odd that an hour or two on the
railway should have brought me amongst a people who speak no English!
Just below the castle, there is an arched stone bridge over the river
Clwyd, and the best view of the edifice is from hence.  It stands on a
gentle eminence, commanding the passage of the river, and two twin round
towers rise close beside one another, whence, I suppose, archers have
often drawn their bows against the wild Welshmen, on the river-banks.
Behind was the line of mountains; and this was the point of defence
between the hill country and the lowlands.  On the bridge stood a good
many idle Welshmen, leaning over the parapet, and looking at some small
vessels that had come up the river from the sea.  There was the frame of
a new vessel on the stocks near by.

As I returned, on my way home, I again inquired my way of a man in
breeches, who, I found, could speak English very well.  He was kind, and
took pains to direct me, giving me the choice of three ways, viz. the one
by which I came, another across the fields, and a third by the embankment
along the river-side.  I chose the latter, and so followed the course of
the Clwyd, which is very ugly, with a tidal flow and wide marshy banks.
On its farther side was Rhyddlan marsh, where a battle was fought between
the Welsh and Saxons a thousand years ago.  I have forgotten to mention
that the castle and its vicinity was the scene of the famous battle of
the fiddlers, between De Blandeville, Earl of Chester, and the Welsh,
about the time of the Conqueror.



CONWAY CASTLE.


September 13th.--On Monday we went with O'Sullivan to Conway by rail.
Certainly this must be the most perfect specimen of a ruinous old castle
in the whole world; it quite fills up one's idea.  We first walked round
the exterior of the wall, at the base of which are hovels, with dirty
children playing about them, and pigs rambling along, and squalid women
visible in the doorways; but all these things melt into the
picturesqueness of the scene, and do not harm it.  The whole town of
Conway is built in what was once the castle-yard, and the whole circuit
of the wall is still standing in a delightful state of decay.  At the
angles, and at regular intervals, there are round towers, having half
their circle on the outside of the walls, and half within.  Most of these
towers have a great crack pervading them irregularly from top to bottom;
the ivy hangs upon them,--the weeds grow on the tops.  Gateways, three or
four of them, open through the walls, and streets proceed from them into
the town.  At some points, very old cottages or small houses are close
against the sides, and, old as they are, they must have been built after
the whole structure was a ruin.  In one place I saw the sign of an
alehouse painted on the gray stones of one of the old round towers.  As
we entered one of the gates, after making the entire circuit, we saw an
omnibus coming down the street towards us, with its horn sounding.
Llandudno was its place of destination; and, knowing no more about it
than that it was four miles off, we took our seats.  Llandudno is a
watering-village at the base of the Great Orme's Head, at the mouth of
the Conway River.  In this omnibus there were two pleasant-looking girls,
who talked Welsh together,--a guttural, childish kind of a babble.
Afterwards we got into conversation with them, and found them very
agreeable.  One of them was reading Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy."  On
reaching Llandudno, S----- waited at the hotel, while O'Sullivan, U----,
and I ascended the Great Orme's Head.  There are copper-mines here, and
we heard of a large cave, with stalactites, but did not go so far as
that.  We found the old shaft of a mine, however, and threw stones down
it, and counted twenty before we heard them strike the bottom.  At the
base of the Head, on the side opposite the village, we saw a small church
with a broken roof, and horizontal gravestones of slate within the stone
enclosure around it.  The view from the hill was most beautiful,--a blue
summer sea, with the distant trail of smoke from a steamer, and many
snowy sails; in another direction the mountains, near and distant, some
of them with clouds below their peaks.

We went to one of the mines which are still worked, and boys came running
to meet us with specimens of the copper ore for sale.  The miners were
not now hoisting ore from the shaft, but were washing and selecting the
valuable fragments from great heaps of crumbled stone and earth.  All
about this spot there are shafts and well-holes, looking fearfully deep
and black, and without the slightest protection, so that we might just as
easily have walked into them as not.  Having examined these matters
sufficiently, we descended the hill towards the village, meeting parties
of visitors, mounted on donkeys, which is a much more sensible way of
ascending in a hot day than to walk.  On the sides and summit of the hill
we found yellow gorse,--heath of two colors, I think, and very
beautiful,--and here and there a harebell.  Owing to the long-continued
dry weather, the grass was getting withered and brown, though not so much
so as on American hill-pastures at this season.  Returning to the
village, we all went into a confectioner's shop, and made a good
luncheon.  The two prettiest young ladies whom I have seen in England
came into the shop and ate cakes while we were there.  They appeared to
be living together in a lodging-house, and ordered some of their
housekeeping articles from the confectioner.

Next we went into the village bazaar,--a sort of tent or open shop, full
of knick-knacks and gewgaws, and bought some playthings for the children.
At half past one we took our seats in the omnibus, to return to Conway.

We had as yet only seen the castle wall and the exterior of the castle;
now we were to see the inside.  Right at the foot of it an old woman has
her stand for the sale of lithographic views of Conway and other places;
but these views are ridiculously inadequate, so that we did not buy any
of them.  The admittance into the castle is by a wooden door of modern
construction, and the present seneschal is, I believe, the sexton of a
church.  He remembered me as having been there a month or two ago; and
probably, considering that I was already initiated, or else because he
had many other visitors, he left us to wander about the castle at will.
It is altogether impossible to describe Conway Castle.  Nothing ever can
have been so perfect in its own style, and for its own purposes, when it
was first built; and now nothing else can be so perfect as a picture of
ivy-grown, peaceful ruin.  The banqueting-hall, all open to the sky and
with thick curtains of ivy tapestrying the walls, and grass and weeds
growing on the arches that overpass it, is indescribably beautiful.  The
hearthstones of the great old fireplaces, all about the castle, seem to
be favorite spots for weeds to grow.  There are eight large round towers,
and out of four of them, I think, rise smaller towers, ascending to a
much greater height, and once containing winding staircases, all of which
are now broken, and inaccessible from below, though, in at least one of
the towers, the stairs seemed perfect, high aloft.  It must have been the
rudest violence that broke down these stairs; for each step was a thick
and heavy slab of stone, built into the wall of the tower.  There is no
such thing as a roof in any part; towers, hall, kitchen, all are open to
the sky.  One round tower, directly overhanging the railway, is so
shattered by the falling away of the lower part, that you can look quite
up into it and through it, while sitting in the cars; and yet it has
stood thus, without falling into complete ruin, for more than two hundred
years.  I think that it was in this tower that we found the castle oven,
an immense cavern, big enough to bake bread for an army.  The railway
passes exactly at the base of the high rock, on which this part of the
castle is situated, and goes into the town through a great arch that has
been opened in the castle wall.  The tubular bridge across the Conway has
been built in a style that accords with the old architecture, and I
observed that one little sprig of ivy had rooted itself in the new
structure.

There are numberless intricate passages in the thickness of the castle
walls, forming communications between tower and tower,--damp, chill
passages, with rough stone on either hand, darksome, and very likely
leading to dark pitfalls.  The thickness of the walls is amazing; and the
people of those days must have been content with very scanty light, so
small were the apertures,--sometimes merely slits and loopholes,
glimmering through many feet of thickness of stone.  One of the towers
was said to have been the residence of Queen Eleanor; and this was better
lighted than the others, containing an oriel-window, looking out of a
little oratory, as it seemed to be, with groined arches and traces of
ornamental sculpture, so that we could dress up some imperfect image of a
queenly chamber, though the tower was roofless and floorless.  There was
another pleasant little windowed nook, close beside the oratory, where
the Queen might have sat sewing or looking down the river Conway at the
picturesque headlands towards the sea.  We imagined her stately figure in
antique robes, standing beneath the groined arches of the oratory.  There
seem to have been three chambers, one above another, in these towers, and
the one in which was the embowed window was the middle one.  I suppose
the diameter of each of these circular rooms could not have been more
than twenty feet on the inside.  All traces of wood-work and iron-work
are quite gone from the whole castle.  These are said to have been taken
away by a Lord Conway in the reign of Charles II.  There is a grassy
space under the windows of Queen Eleanor's tower,--a sort of outwork of
the castle, where probably, when no enemy was near, the Queen used to
take the open air in summer afternoons like this.  Here we sat down on
the grass of the ruined wall, and agreed that nothing in the world could
be so beautiful and picturesque as Conway Castle, and that never could
there have been so fit a time to see it as this sunny, quiet, lovely
afternoon.  Sunshine adapts itself to the character of a ruin in a
wonderful way; it does not "flout the ruins gray," as Scott says, but
sympathizes with their decay, and saddens itself for their sake.  It
beautifies the ivy too.

We saw, at the corner of this grass-plot around Queen Eleanor's tower, a
real trunk of a tree of ivy, with so stalwart a stem, and such a vigorous
grasp of its strong branches, that it would be a very efficient support
to the wall, were it otherwise inclined to fall.  O that we could have
ivy in America!  What is there to beautify us when our time of ruin
comes?

Before departing, we made the entire circuit of the castle on its walls,
and O'Sullivan and I climbed by a ladder to the top of one of the towers.
While there, we looked down into the street beneath, and saw a
photographist preparing to take a view of the castle, and calling out to
some little girl in some niche or on some pinnacle of the walls to stand
still that he might catch her figure and face.  I think it added to the
impressiveness of the old castle, to see the streets and the
kitchen-gardens and the homely dwellings that had grown up within the
precincts of this feudal fortress, and the people of to-day following
their little businesses about it.  This does not destroy the charm; but
tourists and idle visitors do impair it.  The earnest life of to-day,
however, petty and homely as it may be, has a right to its place
alongside of what is left of the life of other days; and if it be vulgar
itself, it does not vulgarize the scene.  But tourists do vulgarize it;
and I suppose we did so, just like others.

We took the train back to Rhyl, where we arrived at about four o'clock,
and, having dined, we again took the rail for Chester, and thence to Rock
Park (that is, O'Sullivan and I), and reached home at about eleven
o'clock.

Yesterday, September 13th, I began to wear a watch from Bennet's, 65
Cheapside, London.  W. C. Bennet warrants it as the best watch which they
can produce.  If it prove as good and as durable as he prophesies, J-----
will find it a perfect time-keeper long after his father has done with
Time.  If I had not thought of his wearing it hereafter, I should have
been content with a much inferior one.  No. 39,620.


September 20th.--I went back to Rhyl last Friday in the steamer.  We
arrived at the landing-place at nearly four o'clock, having started at
twelve, and I walked thence to our lodgings, 18 West Parade.  The
children and their mother were all gone out, and I sat some time in our
parlor before anybody came.  The next morning I made an excursion in the
omnibus as far as Ruthin, passing through Rhyddlan, St. Asaph, Denbigh,
and reaching Ruthin at one o'clock.  All these are very ancient places.
St. Asaph has a cathedral which is not quite worthy of that name, but is
a very large and stately church in excellent repair.  Its square
battlemented tower has a very fine appearance, crowning the clump of
village houses on the hill-top, as you approach from Rhyddlan.  The
ascent of the hill is very steep; so it is at Denbigh and at Ruthin,--the
steepest streets, indeed, that I ever climbed.  Denbigh is a place of
still more antique aspect than St. Asaph; it looks, I think, even older
than Chester, with its gabled houses, many of their windows opening on
hinges, and their fronts resting on pillars, with an open porch beneath.
The castle makes an admirably ruinous figure on the hill, higher than the
village.  I had come hither with the purpose of inspecting it, but as it
began to rain just then, I concluded to get into the omnibus and go to
Ruthin.  There was another steep ascent from the commencement of the long
street of Ruthin, till I reached the market-place, which is of nearly
triangular shape, and an exceedingly old-looking place.  Houses of stone
or plastered brick; one or two with timber frames; the roofs of an uneven
line, and bulging out or sinking in; the slates moss-grown.  Some of them
have two peaks and even three in a row, fronting on the streets, and
there is a stone market-house with a table of regulations.  In this
market-place there is said to be a stone on which King Arthur beheaded
one of his enemies; but this I did not see.  All these villages were very
lively, as the omnibus drove in; and I rather imagine it was market-day
in each of them,--there being quite a bustle of Welsh people.  The old
women came round the omnibus courtesying and intimating their willingness
to receive alms,--witch-like women, such as one sees in pictures or reads
of in romances, and very unlike anything feminine in America.  Their
style of dress cannot have changed for centuries.  It was quite
unexpected to me to hear Welsh so universally and familiarly spoken.
Everybody spoke it.  The omnibus-driver could speak but imperfect
English; there was a jabber of Welsh all through the streets and
market-places; and it flowed out with a freedom quite different from the
way in which they expressed themselves in English.  I had had an idea
that Welsh was spoken rather as a freak and in fun than as a native
language; it was so strange to find another language the people's actual
and earnest medium of thought within so short a distance of England.  But
English is scarcely more known to the body of the Welsh people than to
the peasantry of France.  However, they sometimes pretend to ignorance,
when they might speak it fairly enough.

I took luncheon at the hotel where the omnibus stopped, and then went to
search out the castle.  It appears to have been once extensive, but the
remains of it are now very few, except a part of the external wall.
Whatever other portion may still exist, has been built into a modern
castellated mansion, which has risen within the wide circuit of the
fortress,--a handsome and spacious edifice of red freestone, with a high
tower, on which a flag was flying.  The grounds were well laid out in
walks, and really I think the site of the castle could not have been
turned to better account.  I am getting tired of antiquity.  It is
certainly less interesting in the long run than novelty; and so I was
well content with the fresh, warm, red hue of the modern house, and the
unworn outline of its walls, and its cheerful, large windows; and was
willing that the old ivy-grown ruins should exist now only to contrast
with the modernisms.  These ancient walls, by the by, are of immense
thickness.  There is a passage through the interior of a portion of them,
the width from this interior passage to the outer one being fifteen feet
on one side, and I know not how much on the other.

It continued showery all day; and the omnibus was crowded.  I had chosen
the outside from Rhyl to Denbigh, but, all the rest of the journey,
imprisoned myself within.  On our way home, an old lady got into the
omnibus,--a lady of tremendous rotundity; and as she tumbled from the
door to the farthest part of the carriage, she kept advising all the rest
of the passengers to get out.  "I don't think there will be much rain,
gentlemen," quoth she, "you'll be much more comfortable on the outside."
As none of us complied, she glanced along the seats.  "What! are you all
Saas'uach?" she inquired.  As we drove along, she talked Welsh with great
fluency to one of the passengers, a young woman with a baby, and to as
many others as could understand her.  It has a strange, wild sound, like
a language half blown away by the wind.  The lady's English was very
good; but she probably prided herself on her proficiency in Welsh.  My
excursion to-day had been along the valley of the Clwyd, a very rich and
fertile tract of country.

The next day we all took a long walk on the beach, picking up shells.

On Monday we took an open carriage and drove to Rhyddlan; whence we sent
back the carriage, meaning to walk home along the embankment of the river
Clwyd, after inspecting the castle.  The fortress is very ruinous, having
been dismantled by the Parliamentarians.  There are great gaps,--two, at
least, in the walls that connect the round towers, of which there were
six, one on each side of a gateway in front, and the same at a gateway
towards the river, where there is a steep descent to a wall and square
tower, at the water-side.  Great pains and a great deal of gunpowder must
have been used in converting this castle into a ruin.  There were one or
two fragments lying where they had fallen more than two hundred years
ago, which, though merely a conglomeration of small stones and mortar,
were just as hard as if they had been solid masses of granite.  The
substantial thickness of the walls is composed of these agglomerated
small stones and mortar, the casing being hewn blocks of red freestone.
This is much worn away by the weather, wherever it has been exposed to
the air; but, under shelter, it looks as if it might have been hewn only
a year or two ago.  Each of the round towers had formerly a small
staircase turret rising beside and ascending above it, in which a warder
might be posted, but they have all been so battered and shattered that it
is impossible for an uninstructed observer to make out a satisfactory
plan of then.  The interior of each tower was a small room, not more than
twelve or fifteen feet across; and of these there seem to have been three
stories, with loop-holes for archery and not much other light than what
came through them.  Then there are various passages and nooks and corners
and square recesses in the stone, some of which must have been intended
for dungeons, and the ugliest and gloomiest dungeons imaginable, for they
could not have had any light or air.  There is not, the least, splinter
of wood-work remaining in any part of the castle,--nothing but bare
stone, and a little plaster in one or two places, on the wall.  In the
front gateway we looked at the groove on each side, in which the
portcullis used to rise and fall; and in each of the contiguous round
towers there was a loop-hole, whence an enemy on the outer side of the
portcullis might be shot through with an arrow.

The inner court-yard is a parallelogram, nearly a square, and is about
forty-five of my paces across.  It is entirely grass-grown, and vacant,
except for two or three trees that have been recently set out, and which
are surrounded with palings to keep away the cows that pasture in and
about the place.  No window looks from the walls or towers into this
court-yard; nor are there any traces of buildings having stood within the
enclosure, unless it be what looks something like the flue of a chimney
within one of the walls.  I should suppose, however, that there must have
been, when the castle was in its perfect state, a hall, a kitchen, and
other commodious apartments and offices for the King and his train, such
as there were at Conway and Beaumaris.  But if so, all fragments have
been carried away, and all hollows of the old foundations scrupulously
filled up.  The round towers could not have comprised all the
accommodation of the castle.  There is nothing more striking in these
ruins than to look upward from the crumbling base, and see flights of
stairs, still comparatively perfect, by which you might securely ascend
to the upper heights of the tower, although all traces of a staircase
have disappeared below, and the upper portion cannot be attained.  On
three sides of the fortress is a moat, about sixty feet wide, and cased
with stone.  It was probably of great depth in its day, but it is now
partly filled up with earth, and is quite dry and grassy throughout its
whole extent.  On the inner side of the moat was the outer wall of the
castle, portions of which still remain.  Between the outer wall and the
castle itself the space is also about sixty feet.

The day was cloudy and lowering, and there were several little
spatterings of rain, while we rambled about.  The two children ran
shouting hither and thither, and were continually clambering into
dangerous places, racing along ledges of broken wall.  At last they
altogether disappeared for a good while; their voices, which had
heretofore been plainly audible, were hushed, nor was there any answer
when we began to call them, while making ready for our departure.  But
they finally appeared, coming out of the moat, where they had been
picking and eating blackberries,--which, they said, grew very plentifully
there, and which they were very reluctant to leave.  Before quitting the
castle, I must not forget the ivy, which makes a perfect tapestry over a
large portion of the walls.

We walked about the village, which is old and ugly; small, irregular
streets, contriving to be intricate, though there are few of them; mean
houses, joining to each other.  We saw, in the principal one, the
parliament house in which Edward I. gave a Charter, or allowed rights of
some kind to his Welsh subjects.  The ancient part of its wall is
entirely distinguishable from what has since been built upon it.

Thence we set out to walk along the embankment, although the sky looked
very threatening.  The wind, however, was so strong, and had such a full
sweep at us, on the top of the bank, that we decided on taking a path
that led from it across the moor.  But we soon had cause to repent of
this; for, which way soever we turned, we found ourselves cut off by a
ditch or a little stream; so that here we were, fairly astray on Rhyddlan
moor, the old battle-field of the Saxons and Britons, and across which, I
suppose, the fiddlers and mountebanks had marched to the relief of the
Earl of Chester.  Anon, too, it began to shower; and it was only after
various leaps and scramblings that we made our way to a large farm-house,
and took shelter under a cart-shed.  The back of the house to which we
gained access was very dirty and ill-kept; some dirty children peeped at
us as we approached, and nobody had the civility to ask us in; so we took
advantage of the first cessation of the shower to resume our way.  We
were shortly overtaken by a very intelligent-looking and civil man, who
seemed to have come from Rhyddlan, and said he was going to Rhyl.  We
followed his guidance over stiles and along hedge-row paths which we
never could have threaded rightly by ourselves.

By and by our kind guide had to stop at an intermediate farm; but he gave
us full directions how to proceed, and we went on till it began to shower
again pretty briskly, and we took refuge in a little bit of old stone
cottage, which, small as it was, had a greater antiquity than any mansion
in America.  The door was open, and as we approached, we saw several
children gazing at us; and their mother, a pleasant-looking woman, who
seemed rather astounded at the visit that was about to befall her, tried
to draw a tattered curtain over a part of her interior, which she fancied
even less fit to be seen than the rest.  To say the truth, the house was
not at all better than a pigsty; and while we sat there, a pig came
familiarly to the door, thrust in his snout, and seemed surprised that he
should he driven away, instead of being admitted as one of the family.
The floor was of brick; there was no ceiling, but only the peaked gable
overhead.  The room was kitchen, parlor, and, I suppose, bedroom for the
whole family; at all events, there was only the tattered curtain between
us and the sleeping accommodations.  The good woman either could not or
would not speak a word of English, only laughing when S----- said, "Dim
Sassenach?" but she was kind and hospitable, and found a chair for each
of us.  She had been making some bread, and the dough was on the dresser.
Life with these people is reduced to its simplest elements.  It is only a
pity that they cannot or do not choose to keep themselves cleaner.
Poverty, except in cities, need not be squalid.  When the shower abated a
little, we gave all the pennies we had to the children, and set forth
again.  By the by, there were several colored prints stuck up against the
walls, and there was a clock ticking in a corner and some paper-hangings
pinned upon the slanting roof.

It began to rain again before we arrived at Rhyl, and we were driven into
a small tavern.  After staying there awhile, we set forth between the
drops; but the rain fell still heavier, so that we were pretty well
damped before we got to our lodgings.  After dinner, I took the rail for
Chester and Rock Park, and S----- and the children and maid followed the
next day.


September 22d.--I dined on Wednesday evening at Mr. John Heywood's,
Norris Green.  Mr. Mouckton Mimes and lady were of the company.  Mr.
Mimes is a very agreeable, kindly man, resembling Longfellow a good deal
in personal appearance; and he promotes, by his genial manners, the same
pleasant intercourse which is so easily established with Longfellow.  He
is said to be a very kind patron of literary men, and to do a great deal
of good among young and neglected people of that class.  He is considered
one of the best conversationists at present in society: it may very well
be so; his style of talking being very simple and natural, anything but
obtrusive, so that you might enjoy its agreeableness without suspecting
it.  He introduced me to his wife (a daughter of Lord Crewe), with whom
and himself I had a good deal of talk.  Mr. Milnes told me that he owns
the land in Yorkshire, whence some of the pilgrims of the Mayflower
emigrated to Plymouth, and that Elder Brewster was the Postmaster of the
village. . . . . He also said that in the next voyage of the Mayflower,
after she carried the Pilgrims, she was employed in transporting a cargo
of slaves from Africa,--to the West Indies, I suppose.  This is a queer
fact, and would be nuts for the Southerners.

Mem.--An American would never understand the passage in Bunyan about
Christian and Hopeful going astray along a by-path into the grounds of
Giant Despair,--from there being no stiles and by-paths in our country.


September 26th.--On Saturday evening my wife and I went to a soiree given
by the Mayor and Mrs. Lloyd at the Town Hall to receive the Earl of
Harrowby.  It was quite brilliant, the public rooms being really
magnificent, and adorned for the occasion with a large collection of
pictures, belonging to Mr. Naylor.  They were mostly, if not entirely, of
modern artists,--of Turner, Wilkie, Landseer, and others of the best
English painters.  Turner's seemed too ethereal to have been done by
mortal hands.

The British Scientific Association being now in session here, many
distinguished strangers were present.


September 29th.--Mr. Monekton Milnes called on me at the Consulate day
before yesterday.  He is pleasant and sensible.  Speaking of American
politicians, I remarked that they were seldom anything but politicians,
and had no literary or other culture beyond their own calling.  He said
the case was the same in England, and instanced Sir ------, who once
called on him for information when an appeal had been made to him
respecting two literary gentlemen.  Sir ------ had never heard the names
of either of these gentlemen, and applied to Mr. Milnes as being somewhat
conversant with the literary class, to know whether they were
distinguished and what were their claims.  The names of the two literary
men were James Sheridan Knowles and Alfred Tennyson.


October 5th.--Yesterday I was present at a dejeuner on board the James
Barnes, on occasion of her coming under the British flag, having been
built for the Messrs. Barnes by Donald McKay of Boston.  She is a
splendid vessel, and magnificently fitted up, though not with consummate
taste.  It would be worth while that ornamental architects and
upholsterers should study this branch of art, since the ship-builders
seem willing to expend a good deal of money on it.  In fact, I do not see
that there is anywhere else so much encouragement to the exercise of
ornamental art.  I saw nothing to criticise in the solid and useful
details of the ship; the ventilation, in particular, being free and
abundant, so that the hundreds of passengers who will have their berths
between decks, and at a still lower depth, will have good air and enough
of it.

There were four or five hundred persons, principally Liverpool merchants
and their wives, invited to the dejeuner; and the tables were spread
between decks, the berths for passengers not being yet put in.  There was
not quite light enough to make the scene cheerful, it being an overcast
day; and, indeed, there was an English plainness in the arrangement of
the festal room, which might have been better exchanged for the flowery
American taste, which I have just been criticising.  With flowers, and
the arrangement of flags, we should have made something very pretty of
the space between decks; but there was nothing to hide the fact that in a
few days hence there would be crowded berths and sea-sick steerage
passengers where we were now feasting.  The cheer was very good,--cold
fowl and meats; cold pies of foreign manufacture very rich, and of
mysterious composition; and champagne in plenty, with other wines for
those who liked them.

I sat between two ladies, one of them Mrs. ------, a pleasant young
woman, who, I believe, is of American provincial nativity, and whom I
therefore regarded as half a countrywoman.  We talked a good deal
together, and I confided to her my annoyance at the prospect of being
called up to answer a toast; but she did not pity me at all, though she
felt, much alarm about her husband, Captain ------, who was in the same
predicament.  Seriously, it is the most awful part of my official duty,--
this necessity of making dinner-speeches at the Mayor's, and other public
or semi-public tables.  However, my neighborhood to Mrs. ------ was good
for me, inasmuch as by laughing over the matter with her came to regard
it in a light and ludicrous way; and so, when the time actually came, I
stood up with a careless dare-devil feeling.  The chairman toasted the
president immediately after the Queen, and did me the honor to speak of
myself in a most flattering manner, something like this: "Great by his
position under the Republic,--greater still, I am bold to say, in the
Republic of letters!"  I made no reply at all to this; in truth, I forgot
all about it when I began to speak, and merely thanked the company in
behalf of the President, and my countrymen, and made a few remarks with
no very decided point to them.  However, they cheered and applauded, and
I took advantage of the applause to sit down, and Mrs. ------ informed me
that I had succeeded admirably.  It was no success at all, to be sure;
neither was it a failure, for I had aimed at nothing, and I had exactly
hit it.  But after sitting down, I was conscious of an enjoyment in
speaking to a public assembly, and felt as if I should like to rise
again.  It is something like being under fire,--a sort of excitement, not
exactly pleasure, but more piquant than most pleasures.  I have felt this
before, in the same circumstances; but, while on my legs, my impulse is
to get through with my remarks and sit down again as quickly as possible.
The next speech, I think, was by Rev. Dr. ------, the celebrated Arctic
gentleman, in reply to a toast complimentary to the clergy.  He turned
aside from the matter in hand, to express his kind feelings towards
America, where he said he had been most hospitably received, especially
at Cambridge University.  He also made allusions to me, and I suppose it
would have been no more than civil in me to have answered with a speech
in acknowledgment, but I did not choose to make another venture, so
merely thanked him across the corner of the table, for he sat near me.
He is a venerable-looking, white-haired gentleman, tall and slender, with
a pale, intelligent, kindly face.

Other speeches were made; but from beginning to end there was not one
breath of eloquence, nor even one neat sentence; and I rather think that
Englishmen would purposely avoid eloquence or neatness in after-dinner
speeches.  It seems to be no part of their object.  Yet any Englishman
almost, much more generally than Americans, will stand up and talk on in
a plain way, uttering one rough, ragged, and shapeless sentence after
another, and will have expressed himself sensibly, though in a very rude
manner, before he sits down.  And this is quite satisfactory to his
audience, who, indeed, are rather prejudiced against the man who speaks
too glibly.

The guests began to depart shortly after three o'clock.  This morning I
have seen two reports of my little speech,--one exceedingly incorrect;
another pretty exact, but not much to my taste, for I seem to have left
out everything that would have been fittest to say.


October 6th.--The people, for several days, have been in the utmost
anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation about Sebastopol,--and
all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it
had fallen.  This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public
visage is somewhat grim, in consequence.  I am glad of it.  In spite of
his actual sympathies, it is impossible for a true American to be
otherwise than glad.  Success makes an Englishman intolerable; and,
already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous
conclusion of the war, The Times had begun to throw out menaces against
America.  I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and,
in the mean time, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all
parties.  An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he
does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of
himself.  It is rather touching to an observer to see how much the
universal heart is in this matter,--to see the merchants gathering round
the telegraphic messages, posted on the pillars of the Exchange
news-room, the people in the street who cannot afford to buy a paper
clustering round the windows of the news-offices, where a copy is pinned
up,--the groups of corporals and sergeants at the recruiting rendezvous,
with a newspaper in the midst of them and all earnest and sombre, and
feeling like one man together, whatever their rank.  I seem to myself
like a spy or a traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I
neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in
full confidence of sympathy.  Their heart "knoweth its own bitterness,"
and as for me, being a stranger and all alien, I "intermeddle not with
their joy."


October 9th.--My ancestor left England in 1630.  I return in 1853.  I
sometimes feel as if I myself had been absent these two hundred and
twenty-three years, leaving England just emerging from the feudal system,
and finding it, on my return, on the verge of republicanism.  It brings
the two far-separated points of time very closely together, to view the
matter thus.


October 16th.--A day or two ago arrived the sad news of the loss of the
Arctic by collision with a French steamer off Newfoundland, and the loss
also of three or four hundred people.  I have seldom been more affected
by anything quite alien from my personal and friendly concerns, than by
the death of Captain Luce and his son.  The boy was a delicate lad, and
it is said that he had never been absent from his mother till this time,
when his father had taken him to England to consult a physician about a
complaint in his hip.  So his father, while the ship was sinking, was
obliged to decide whether he would put the poor, weakly, timorous child
on board the boat, to take his hard chance of life there, or keep him to
go down with himself and the ship.  He chose the latter; and within half
an hour, I suppose, the boy was among the child-angels.  Captain Luce
could not do less than die, for his own part, with the responsibility of
all those lost lives upon him.  He may not have been in the least to
blame for the calamity, but it was certainly too heavy a one for him to
survive.  He was a sensible man, and a gentleman, courteous, quiet, with
something almost melancholy in his address and aspect.  Oftentimes he has
come into my inner office to say good-by before his departures, but I
cannot precisely remember whether or no he took leave of me before this
latest voyage.  I never exchanged a great many words with him; but those
were kind ones.


October 19th.--It appears to be customary for people of decent station,
but in distressed circumstances, to go round among their neighbors and
the public, accompanied by a friend, who explains the case.  I have been
accosted in the street in regard to one of these matters; and to-day
there came to my office a grocer, who had become security for a friend,
and who was threatened with an execution,--with another grocer for
supporter and advocate.  The beneficiary takes very little active part in
the affair, merely looking careworn, distressed, and pitiable, and
throwing in a word of corroboration, or a sigh, or an acknowledgment, as
the case may demand.  In the present instance, the friend, a young,
respectable-looking tradesman, with a Lancashire accent, spoke freely and
simply of his client's misfortunes, not pressing the case unduly, but
doing it full justice, and saying, at the close of the interview, that it
was no pleasant business for himself.  The broken grocer was an elderly
man, of somewhat sickly aspect.  The whole matter is very foreign to
American habits.  No respectable American would think of retrieving his
affairs by such means, but would prefer ruin ten times over; no friend
would take up his cause; no public would think it worth while to prevent
the small catastrophe.  And yet the custom is not without its good side
as indicating a closer feeling of brotherhood, a more efficient sense of
neighborhood, than exists among ourselves, although, perhaps, we are more
careless of a fellow-creature's ruin, because ruin with us is by no means
the fatal and irretrievable event that it is in England.

I am impressed with the ponderous and imposing look of an English legal
document,--an assignment of real estate in England, for instance,--
engrossed on an immense sheet of thickest paper, in a formal hand,
beginning with "This Indenture" in German text, and with occasional
phrases of form, breaking out into large script,--very long and
repetitious, fortified with the Mayor of Manchester's seal, two or three
inches in diameter, which is certified by a notary-public, whose
signature, again, is to have my consular certificate and official seal.


November 2d.--A young Frenchman enters, of gentlemanly aspect, with a
grayish cloak or paletot overspreading his upper person, and a handsome
and well-made pair of black trousers and well-fitting boots below.  On
sitting down, he does not throw off nor at all disturb the cloak.  Eying
him more closely, one discerns that he has no shirt-collar, and that what
little is visible of his shirt-bosom seems not to be of to-day nor of
yesterday,--perhaps not even of the day before.  His manner is not very
good; nevertheless, he is a coxcomb and a jackanapes.  He avers himself a
naturalized citizen of America, where he has been tutor in several
families of distinction, and has been treated like a son.  He left
America on account of his health, and came near being tutor in the Duke
of Norfolk's family, but failed for lack of testimonials; he is
exceedingly capable and accomplished, but reduced in funds, and wants
employment here, of the means of returning to America, where he intends
to take a situation under government, which he is sure of obtaining.  He
mentioned a quarrel which he had recently had with an Englishman in
behalf of America, and would have fought a duel had such been the custom
of the country.  He made the Englishman foam at the mouth, and told him
that he had been twelve years at a military school, and could easily kill
him.  I say to him that I see little or no prospect of his getting
employment here, but offer to inquire whether any situation, as clerk or
otherwise, can be obtained for him in a vessel returning to America, and
ask his address.  He has no address.  Much to my surprise, he takes his
leave without requesting pecuniary aid, but hints that he shall call
again.  He is a very disagreeable young fellow, like scores of others who
call on me in the like situation.  His English is very good for a
Frenchman, and he says he speaks it the least well of five languages.  He
has been three years in America, and obtained his naturalization papers,
he says, as a special favor, and by means of strong interest.  Nothing is
so absolutely odious as the sense of freedom and equality pertaining to
an American grafted on the mind of a native of any other country in the
world.  A naturalized citizen is HATEFUL.  Nobody has a right to our
ideas, unless born to them.


November 9th.--I lent the above Frenchman a small sum; he advertised for
employment as a teacher; and he called this morning to thank me for my
aid, and says Mr. C------ has engaged him for his children, at a guinea a
week, and that he has also another engagement.  The poor fellow seems to
have been brought to a very low ebb.  He has pawned everything, even to
his last shirt, save the one he had on, and had been living at the rate
of twopence a day.  I had procured him a chance to return to America, but
he was ashamed to go back in such poor circumstances, and so determined
to seek better fortune here.  I like him better than I did,--partly, I
suppose, because I have helped him.


November 14th.--The other day I saw an elderly gentleman walking in Dale
Street, apparently in a state of mania; for as he limped along (being
afflicted with lameness) he kept talking to himself, and sometimes
breaking out into a threat against some casual passenger.  He was a very
respectable-looking man; and I remember to have seen him last summer, in
the steamer, returning from the Isle of Man, where he had been staying at
Castle Mona.  What a strange and ugly predicament it would be for a
person of quiet habits to be suddenly smitten with lunacy at noonday in a
crowded street, and to walk along through a dim maze of extravagances,--
partly conscious of then, but unable to resist the impulse to give way to
them!  A long-suppressed nature might be represented as bursting out in
this way, for want of any other safety-valve.

In America, people seem to consider the government merely as a political
administration; and they care nothing for the credit of it, unless it be
the administration of their own political party.  In England, all people,
of whatever party, are anxious for the credit of their rulers.  Our
government, as a knot of persons, changes so entirely every four years,
that the institution has come to be considered a temporary thing.

Looking at the moon the other evening, little R----- said, "It blooms out
in the morning!" taking the moon to be the bud of the sun.

The English are a most intolerant people.  Nobody is permitted, nowadays,
to have any opinion but the prevalent one.  There seems to be very little
difference between their educated and ignorant classes in this respect;
if any, it is to the credit of the latter, who do not show tokens of such
extreme interest in the war.  It is agreeable, however, to observe how
all Englishmen pull together,--how each man comes forward with his little
scheme for helping on the war,--how they feel themselves members of one
family, talking together about their common interest, as if they were
gathered around one fireside; and then what a hearty meed of honor they
award to their soldiers!  It is worth facing death for.  Whereas, in
America, when our soldiers fought as good battles, with as great
proportionate loss, and far more valuable triumphs, the country seemed
rather ashamed than proud of them.

Mrs. Heywood tells me that there are many Catholics among the lower
classes in Lancashire and Cheshire,--probably the descendants of
retainers of the old Catholic nobility and gentry, who are more numerous
in these shires than in other parts of England.  The present Lord
Sefton's grandfather was the first of that race who became Protestant.


December 25th.--Commodore P------ called to see me this morning,--a
brisk, gentlemanly, offhand, but not rough, unaffected and sensible man,
looking not so elderly as he ought, on account of a very well made wig.
He is now on his return from a cruise in the East Indian seas, and goes
home by the Baltic, with a prospect of being very well received on
account of his treaty with Japan.  I seldom meet with a man who puts
himself more immediately on conversable terms than the Commodore.  He
soon introduced his particular business with me,--it being to inquire
whether I would recommend some suitable person to prepare his notes and
materials for the publication of an account of his voyage.  He was good
enough to say that he had fixed upon me, in his own mind, for this
office; but that my public duties would of course prevent me from
engaging in it.  I spoke of Herman Melville, and one or two others; but
he seems to have some acquaintance with the literature of the day, and
did not grasp very cordially at any name that I could think of; nor,
indeed, could I recommend any one with full confidence.  It would be a
very desirable task for a young literary man, or, for that matter, for an
old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed
theme than Japan.

This is a most beautiful day of English winter; clear and bright, with
the ground a little frozen, and the green grass along the waysides at
Rock Ferry sprouting up through the frozen pools of yesterday's rain.
England is forever green.  On Christmas day, the children found
wall-flowers, pansies, and pinks in the garden; and we had a beautiful
rose from the garden of the hotel grown in the open air.  Yet one is
sensible of the cold here, as much as in the zero atmosphere of America.
The chief advantage of the English climate is that we are not tempted to
heat our rooms to so unhealthy a degree as in New England.

I think I have been happier this Christmas than ever before,--by my own
fireside, and with my wife and children about me,--more content to enjoy
what I have,--less anxious for anything beyond it in this life.

My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of
life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare
favorably with it.  For a long, long while, I have occasionally been
visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have
dreamed it ever since I have been in England.  It is, that I am still at
college,--or, sometimes, even at school,--and there is a sense that I
have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such
progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them
with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of
it, even when awake.  This dream, recurring all through these twenty or
thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which
I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody
moved onward, and left me behind.  How strange that it should come now,
when I may call myself famous and prosperous!--when I am happy, too!


January 3d, 1855.--The progress of the age is trampling over the
aristocratic institutions of England, and they crumble beneath it.  This
war has given the country a vast impulse towards democracy.  The nobility
will never hereafter, I think, assume or be permitted to rule the nation
in peace, or command armies in war, on any ground except the individual
ability which may appertain to one of their number, as well as to a
commoner.  And yet the nobles were never positively more noble than now;
never, perhaps, so chivalrous, so honorable, so highly cultivated; but,
relatively to the rest of the world, they do not maintain their old
place.  The pressure of the war has tested and proved this fact, at home
and abroad.  At this moment it would be an absurdity in the nobles to
pretend to the position which was quietly conceded to them a year ago.
This one year has done the work of fifty ordinary ones; or, more
accurately, it has made apparent what has long been preparing itself.


January 6th.--The American ambassador called on me to-day and stayed a
good while,--an hour or two.  He is visiting at Mr. William Browne's, at
Richmond Hill, having come to this region to bring his niece, who is to
be bride's-maid at the wedding of an American girl.  I like Mr. ------.
He cannot exactly be called gentlemanly in his manners, there being a
sort of rusticity about him; moreover, he has a habit of squinting one
eye, and an awkward carriage of his head; hut, withal, a dignity in his
large person, and a consciousness of high position and importance, which
gives him ease and freedom.  Very simple and frank in his address, he may
be as crafty as other diplomatists are said to be; but I see only good
sense and plainness of speech,--appreciative, too, and genial enough to
make himself conversable.  He talked very freely of himself and of other
public people, and of American and English affairs.  He returns to
America, he says, next October, and then retires forever from public
life, being sixty-four years of age, and having now no desire except to
write memoirs of his times, and especially of the administration of Mr.
Polk.  I suggested a doubt whether the people would permit him to retire;
and he immediately responded to my hint as regards his prospects for the
Presidency.  He said that his mind was fully made up, and that he would
never be a candidate, and that he had expressed this decision to his
friends in such a way as to put it out of his own power to change it.  He
acknowledged that he should have been glad of the nomination for the
Presidency in 1852, but that it was now too late, and that he was too
old,--and, in short, he seemed to be quite sincere in his nolo
episcopari; although, really, he is the only Democrat, at this moment,
whom it would not be absurd to talk of for the office.  As he talked, his
face flushed, and he seemed to feel inwardly excited.  Doubtless, it was
the high vision of half his lifetime which he here relinquished.  I
cannot question that he is sincere; but, of course, should the people
insist upon having him for President, he is too good a patriot to refuse.
I wonder whether he can have had any object in saying all this to me.  He
might see that it would be perfectly natural for me to tell it to General
Pierce.  But it is a very vulgar idea,--this of seeing craft and
subtlety, when there is a plain and honest aspect.


January 9th.--I dined at Mr. William Browne's (M. P.) last, evening with
a large party.  The whole table and dessert service was of silver.
Speaking of Shakespeare, Mr. ------ said that the Duke of Somerset, who
is now nearly fourscore, told him that the father of John and Charles
Kemble had made all possible research into the events of Shakespeare's
life, and that he had found reason to believe that Shakespeare attended a
certain revel at Stratford, and, indulging too much in the conviviality
of the occasion, he tumbled into a ditch on his way home, and died there!
The Kemble patriarch was an aged man when he communicated this to the
Duke; and their ages, linked to each other; would extend back a good way;
scarcely to the beginning of the last century, however.  If I mistake
not, it was from the traditions of Stratford that Kemble had learned the
above.  I do not remember ever to have seen it in print,--which is most
singular.

Miss L---- has an English rather than an American aspect,--being of
stronger outline than most of our young ladies, although handsomer than
English women generally, extremely self-possessed and well poised without
affectation or assumption, but quietly conscious of rank, as much so as
if she were an Earl's daughter.  In truth, she felt pretty much as an
Earl's daughter would do towards the merchants' wives and daughters who
made up the feminine portion of the party.

I talked with her a little, and found her sensible, vivacious, and
firm-textured, rather than soft and sentimental.  She paid me some
compliments; but I do not remember paying her any.

Mr. J-----'s daughters, two pale, handsome girls, were present.  One of
them is to be married to a grandson of Mr. ------, who was also at the
dinner.  He is a small young man, with a thin and fair mustache, . . . .
and a lady who sat next me whispered that his expectations are 6,000
pounds per annum.  It struck me, that, being a country gentleman's son,
he kept himself silent and reserved, as feeling himself too good for this
commercial dinner-party; but perhaps, and I rather think so, he was
really shy and had nothing to say, being only twenty-one, and therefore
quite a boy among Englishmen.  The only man of cognizable rank present,
except Mr. ------ and the Mayor of Liverpool, was a Baronet, Sir Thomas
Birch.


January 17th.--S---- and I were invited to be present at the wedding of
Mr. J-------'s daughter this morning, but we were also bidden to the
funeral services of Mrs. G------, a young American lady; and we went to
the "house of mourning," rather than to the "house of feasting."  Her
death was very sudden.  I crossed to Rock Ferry on Saturday, and met her
husband in the boat.  He said his wife was rather unwell, and that he had
just been sent for to see her; but he did not seem at all alarmed.  And
yet, on reaching home, he found her dead!  The body is to be conveyed to
America, and the funeral service was read over her in her house, only a
few neighbors and friends being present.  We were shown into a darkened
room, where there was a dim gaslight burning, and a fire glimmering, and
here and there a streak of sunshine struggling through the drawn
curtains.  Mr. G------ looked pale, and quite overcome with grief,--this,
I suppose, being his first sorrow,--and he has a young baby on his hands,
and no doubt, feels altogether forlorn in this foreign land.  The
clergyman entered in his canonicals, and we walked in a little procession
into another room, where the coffin was placed.

Mr. G------ sat down and rested his head on the coffin: the clergyman
read the service; then knelt down, as did most of the company, and prayed
with great propriety of manner, but with no earnestness,--and we
separated.

Mr. G------ is a small, smooth, and pretty young man, not emphasized in
any way; but grief threw its awfulness about him to-day in a degree which
I should not have expected.


January 20th.--Mr. Steele, a gentleman of Rock Ferry, showed me this
morning a pencil-case formerly belonging to Dr. Johnson.  It is six or
seven inches long, of large calibre, and very clumsily manufactured of
iron, perhaps plated in its better days, but now quite bare.  Indeed, it
looks as rough as an article of kitchen furniture.  The intaglio on the
end is a lion rampant.  On the whole, it well became Dr. Johnson to have
used such a stalwart pencil-case.  It had a six-inch measure on a part of
it, so that it must have been at least eight inches long.  Mr. Steele
says he has seen a cracked earthen teapot, of large size, in which Miss
Williams used to make tea for Dr. Johnson.

God himself cannot compensate us for being born for any period short of
eternity.  All the misery endured here constitutes a claim for another
life, and, still more, all the happiness; because all true happiness
involves something more than the earth owns, and needs something more
than a mortal capacity for the enjoyment of it.

After receiving an injury on the head, a person fancied all the rest of
his life that he heard voices flouting, jeering, and upbraiding him.


February 19th.--I dined with the Mayor at the Town Hall last Friday
evening.  I sat next to Mr. W. J------, an Irish-American merchant, who
is in very good standing here.  He told me that he used to be very well
acquainted with General Jackson, and that he was present at the street
fight between him and the Bentons, and helped to take General Jackson off
the ground.  Colonel Benton shot at him from behind; but it was Jesse
Benton's ball that hit him and broke his arm.  I did not understand him
to infer any treachery or cowardice from the circumstance of Colonel
Benton's shooting at Jackson from behind, but, suppose it occurred in the
confusion and excitement of a street fight.  Mr. W. J------ seems to
think that, after all, the reconciliation between the old General and
Benton was merely external, and that they really hated one another as
before.  I do not think so.

These dinners of the Mayors are rather agreeable than otherwise, except
for the annoyance, in my case, of being called up to speak to a toast,
and that is less disagreeable than at first.  The suite of rooms at the
Town House is stately and splendid, and all the Mayors, as far as I have
seen, exercise hospitality in a manner worthy of the chief magistrates of
a great city.  They are supposed always to spend much more than their
salary (which is 2,000 pounds) in these entertainments.  The town
provides the wines, I am told, and it might be expected that they should
be particularly good,--at least, those which improve by age, for a
quarter of a century should be only a moderate age for wine from the
cellars of centuries-long institutions, like a corporate borough.  Each
Mayor might lay in a supply of the best vintage he could find, and trust
his good name to posterity to the credit of that wine; and so he would be
kindly and warmly remembered long after his own nose had lost its
rubicundity.  In point of fact, the wines seem to be good, but not
remarkable.  The dinner was good, and very handsomely served, with
attendance enough, both in the hall below--where the door was wide open
at the appointed hour, notwithstanding the cold--and at table; some
being in the rich livery of the borough, and some in plain clothes.
Servants, too, were stationed at various points from the hall to the
reception-room; and the last one shouted forth the name of the entering
guest.  There were, I should think, about fifty guests at this dinner.
Two bishops were present.  The Bishops of Chester and New South Wales,
dressed in a kind of long tunics, with black breeches and silk stockings,
insomuch that I first fancied they were Catholics.  Also Dr. McNeil, in a
stiff-collared coat, looking more like a general than a divine.  There
were two officers in blue uniforms; and all the rest of us were in black,
with only two white waistcoats,--my own being one,--and a rare sprinkling
of white cravats.  How hideously a man looks in them!  I should like to
have seen such assemblages as must have gathered in that reception-room,
and walked with stately tread to the dining-hall, in times past, the
Mayor and other civic dignitaries in their robes, noblemen in their state
dresses, the Consul in his olive-leaf embroidery, everybody in some sort
of bedizenment,--and then the dinner would have been a magnificent
spectacle, worthy of the gilded hall, the rich table-service, and the
powdered and gold-laced servitors.  At a former dinner I remember seeing
a gentleman in small-clothes, with a dress-sword; but all formalities of
the kind are passing away.  The Mayor's dinners, too, will no doubt be
extinct before many years go by.  I drove home from the Woodside Ferry in
a cab with Bishop Burke and two other gentlemen.  The Bishop is nearly
seven feet high.

After writing the foregoing account of a civic banquet, where I ate
turtle-soup, salmon, woodcock, oyster patties, and I know not what else,
I have been to the News-room and found the Exchange pavement densely
thronged with people of all ages and of all manner of dirt and rags.
They were waiting for soup-tickets, and waiting very patiently too,
without outcry or disturbance, or even sour looks,--only patience and
meekness in their faces.  Well, I don't know that they have a right to he
impatient of starvation; but, still there does seem to be an insolence of
riches and prosperity, which one day or another will have a downfall.
And this will be a pity, too.

On Saturday I went with my friend Mr. Bright to Otterpool and to Larkhill
to see the skaters on the private waters of those two seats of gentlemen;
and it is a wonder to behold--and it is always a new wonder to me--how
comfortable Englishmen know how to make themselves; locating their
dwellings far within private grounds, with secure gateways and porters'
lodges, and the smoothest roads and trimmest paths, and shaven lawns, and
clumps of trees, and every bit of the ground, every hill and dell, made
the most of for convenience and beauty, and so well kept that even winter
cannot cause disarray; and all this appropriated to the same family for
generations, so that I suppose they come to believe it created
exclusively and on purpose for them.  And, really, the result is good and
beautiful.  It is a home,--an institution which we Americans have not;
but then I doubt whether anybody is entitled to a home in this world, in
so full a sense.

The day was very cold, and the skaters seemed to enjoy themselves
exceedingly.  They were, I suppose, friends of the owners of the grounds,
and Mr. Bright said they were treated in a jolly way, with hot luncheons.
The skaters practise skating more as an art, and can perform finer
manoeuvres on the ice, than our New England skaters usually can, though
the English have so much less opportunity for practice.  A beggar-woman
was haunting the grounds at Otterpool, but I saw nobody give her
anything.  I wonder how she got inside of the gate.

Mr. W. J------ spoke of General Jackson as having come from the same part
of Ireland as himself, and perhaps of the same family.  I wonder whether
he meant to say that the General was born in Ireland,--that having been
suspected in America.


February 21st.--Yesterday two companies of work-people came to our house
in Rock Park, asking assistance, being out of work and with no resource
other than charity.  There were a dozen or more in each party.  Their
deportment was quiet and altogether unexceptionable,--no rudeness, no
gruffness, nothing of menace.  Indeed, such demonstrations would not have
been safe, as they were followed about by two policemen; but they really
seem to take their distress as their own misfortune and God's will, and
impute it to nobody as a fault.  This meekness is very touching, and
makes one question the more whether they have all their rights.  There
have been disturbances, within a day or two, in Liverpool, and shops have
been broken open and robbed of bread and money; but this is said to have
been done by idle vagabonds, and not by the really hungry work-people.
These last submit to starvation gently and patiently, as if it were an
every-day matter with them, or, at least, nothing but what lay fairly
within their horoscope.  I suppose, in fact, their stomachs have the
physical habit that makes hunger not intolerable, because customary.  If
they had been used to a full meat diet, their hunger would be fierce,
like that of ravenous beasts; but now they are trained to it.

I think that the feeling of an American, divided, as I am, by the ocean
from his country, has a continual and immediate correspondence with the
national feeling at home; and it seems to be independent of any external
communication.  Thus, my ideas about the Russian war vary in accordance
with the state of the public mind at home, so that I am conscious
whereabouts public sympathy is.


March 7th.--J----- and I walked to Tranmere, and passed an old house
which I suppose to be Tranmere Hall.  Our way to it was up a hollow lane,
with a bank and hedge on each side, and with a few thatched stone
cottages, centuries old, their ridge-poles crooked and the stones
time-worn, scattered along.  At one point there was a wide, deep well,
hewn out of the solid red freestone, and with steps, also hewn in solid
rock, leading down to it.  These steps were much hollowed by the feet of
those who had come to the well; and they reach beneath the water, which
is very high.  The well probably supplied water to the old cotters and
retainers of Tranmere Hall five hundred years ago.  The Hall stands on
the verge of a long hill which stretches behind Tranmere and as far as
Birkenhead.

It is an old gray stone edifice, with a good many gables, and windows
with mullions, and some of them extending the whole breadth of the gable.
In some parts of the house, the windows seem to have been built up;
probably in the days when daylight was taxed.  The form of the Hall is
multiplex, the roofs sloping down and intersecting one another, so as to
make the general result indescribable.  There were two sun-dials on
different sides of the house, both the dial-plates of which were of
stone; and on one the figures, so far as I could see, were quite worn
off, but the gnomon still cast a shadow over it in such a way that I
could judge that it was about noon.  The other dial had some half-worn
hour-marks, but no gnomon.  The chinks of the stones of the house were
very weedy, and the building looked quaint and venerable; but it is now
converted into a farm-house, with the farm-yard and outbuildings closely
appended.  A village, too, has grown up about it, so that it seems out of
place among modern stuccoed dwellings, such as are erected for tradesmen
and other moderate people who have their residences in the neighborhood
of a great city.  Among these there are a few thatched cottages, the
homeliest domiciles that ever mortals lived in, belonging to the old
estate.  Directly across the street is a Wayside Inn, "licensed to sell
wine, spirits, ale, and tobacco."  The street itself has been laid out
since the land grew valuable by the increase of Liverpool and Birkenhead;
for the old Hall would never have been built on the verge of a public
way.


March 27th.--I attended court to day, at St. George's Hall, with my wife,
Mr. Bright, and Mr. Channing, sitting in the High Sheriff's seat.  It was
the civil side, and Mr. Justice Cresswell presided.  The lawyers, as far
as aspect goes, seemed to me inferior to an American bar, judging from
their countenances, whether as intellectual men or gentlemen.  Their wigs
and gowns do not impose on the spectator, though they strike him as an
imposition.  Their date is past.  Mr. Warren, of the "Ten Thousand a
Year," was in court,--a pale, thin, intelligent face, evidently a nervous
man, more unquiet than anybody else in court,--always restless in his
seat, whispering to his neighbors, settling his wig, perhaps with an idea
that people single him out.

St. George's Hall--the interior hall itself, I mean--is a spacious,
lofty, and most rich and noble apartment, and very satisfactory.  The
pavement is made of mosaic tiles, and has a beautiful effect.


April 7th.--I dined at Mr. J. P. Heywood's on Thursday, and met there Mr.
and Mrs. ------ of Smithell's Hall.  The Hall is an old edifice of some
five hundred years, and Mrs. ------ says there is a bloody footstep at
the foot of the great staircase.  The tradition is that a certain martyr,
in Bloody Mary's time, being examined before the occupant of the Hall,
and committed to prison, stamped his foot, in earnest protest against the
injustice with which he was treated.  Blood issued from his foot, which
slid along the stone pavement, leaving a long footmark, printed in blood.
And there it has remained ever since, in spite of the scrubbings of all
succeeding generations.  Mrs. ------ spoke of it with much solemnity,
real or affected.  She says that they now cover the bloody impress with a
carpet, being unable to remove it.  In the History of Lancashire, which I
looked at last night, there is quite a different account,--according to
which the footstep is not a bloody one, but is a slight cavity or
inequality in the surface of the stone, somewhat in the shape of a man's
foot with a peaked shoe.  The martyr's name was George Marsh.  He was a
curate, and was afterwards burnt.  Mrs. ------ asked me to go and see the
Hall and the footmark; and as it is in Lancashire, and not a great way
off, and a curious old place, perhaps I may.


April 12th.--The Earl of ------, whom I saw the other day at St. George's
Hall, has a somewhat elderly look,--a pale and rather thin face, which
strikes one as remarkably short, or compressed from top to bottom.
Nevertheless, it has great intelligence, and sensitiveness too, I should
think, but a cold, disagreeable expression.  I should take him to be a
man of not very pleasant temper,--not genial.  He has no physical
presence nor dignity, yet one sees him to be a person of rank and
consequence.  But, after all, there is nothing about him which it need
have taken centuries of illustrious nobility to produce, especially in a
man of remarkable ability, as Lord ------ certainly is.  S-----, who
attended court all through the Hapgood trial, and saw Lord ------ for
hours together every day, has come to conclusions quite different from
mine.  She thinks him a perfectly natural person, without any assumption,
any self-consciousness, any scorn of the lower world.  She was delighted
with his ready appreciation and feeling of what was passing around him,--
his quick enjoyment of a joke,--the simplicity and unaffectedness of his
emotion at whatever incidents excited his interest,--the genial
acknowledgment of sympathy, causing him to look round and exchange
glances with those near him, who were not his individual friends, but
barristers and other casual persons.  He seemed to her all that a
nobleman ought to be, entirely simple and free from pretence and
self-assertion, which persons of lower rank can hardly help bedevilling
themselves with.  I saw him only for a very few moments, so cannot put my
observation against hers, especially as I was influenced by what I had
heard the Liverpool people say of him.

I do not know whether I have mentioned that the handsomest man I have
seen in England was a young footman of Mr. Heywood's.  In his rich
livery, he was a perfect Joseph Andrews.

In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have carried away
with him a family secret, whereby it was in his power, had he so chosen,
to have brought about the ruin of the family.  This secret he transmits
to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited throughout all the
intervening generations.  At last, the hero of the Romance comes to
England, and finds, that, by means of this secret, he still has it in his
power to procure the downfall of the family.  It would be something
similar to the story of Meleager, whose fate depended on the firebrand
that his mother had snatched from the flames.


April 24th.--On Saturday I was present at a dejeuner on board the Donald
McKay; the principal guest being Mr. Layard, M. P.  There were several
hundred people, quite filling the between decks of the ship, which was
converted into a saloon for the occasion.  I sat next to Mr. Layard, at
the head of the table, and so had a good opportunity of seeing and
getting acquainted with him.  He is a man in early middle age,--of middle
stature, with an open, frank, intelligent, kindly face.  His forehead is
not expansive, but is prominent in the perceptive regions, and retreats a
good deal.  His mouth is full,--I liked him from the first.  He was very
kind and complimentary to me, and made me promise to go and see him in
London.

It would have been a very pleasant entertainment, only that my pleasure
in it was much marred by having to acknowledge a toast, in honor of the
President.  However, such things do not trouble me nearly so much as they
used to do, and I came through it tolerably enough.  Mr. Layard's speech
was the great affair of the day.  He speaks with much fluency (though he
assured me that he had to put great force upon himself to speak
publicly), and, as he warms up, seems to engage with his whole moral and
physical man,--quite possessed with what he has to say.  His evident
earnestness and good faith make him eloquent, and stand him instead of
oratorical graces.  His views of the position of England and the
prospects of the war were as dark as well could be; and his speech was
exceedingly to the purpose, full of common-sense, and with not one word
of clap-trap.  Judging from its effect upon the audience, he spoke the
voice of the whole English people,--although an English Baronet, who sat
next below me, seemed to dissent, or at least to think that it was not
exactly the thing for a stranger to hear.  It concluded amidst great
cheering.  Mr. Layard appears to be a true Englishman, with a moral force
and strength of character, and earnestness of purpose, and fulness of
common-sense, such as have always served England's turn in her past
successes; but rather fit for resistance than progress.  No doubt, he is
a good and very able man; but I question whether he could get England out
of the difficulties which he sees so clearly, or could do much better
than Lord Palmerston, whom he so decries.


April 25th.--Taking the deposition of sailors yesterday, in a case of
alleged ill-usage by the officers of a vessel, one of the witnesses was
an old seaman of sixty.  In reply to some testimony of his, the captain
said, "You were the oldest man in the ship, and we honored you as such."
The mate also said that he never could have thought of striking an old
man like that.  Indeed, the poor old fellow had a kind of dignity and
venerableness about him, though he confessed to having been drunk, and
seems to have been a mischief-maker, what they call a sea-preacher,--
promoting discontent and grumbling.  He must have been a very handsome
man in his youth, having regular features of a noble and beautiful cast.
His beard was gray; but his dark hair had hardly a streak of white, and
was abundant all over his head.  He was deaf, and seemed to sit in a kind
of seclusion, unless when loudly questioned or appealed to.  Once he
broke forth from a deep silence thus, "I defy any man!" and then was
silent again.  It had a strange effect, this general defiance, which he
meant, I suppose, in answer to some accusation that he thought was made
against him.  His general behavior throughout the examination was very
decorous and proper; and he said he had never but once hitherto been
before a consul, and that was in 1819, when a mate had ill-used him, and,
"being a young man then, I gave him a beating,"--whereupon his face
gleamed with a quiet smile, like faint sunshine on an old ruin.  "By many
a tempest has his beard been shook"; and I suppose he must soon go into a
workhouse, and thence, shortly, to his grave.  He is now in a hospital,
having, as the surgeon certifies, some ribs fractured; but there does not
appear to have been any violence used upon him aboard the ship of such a
nature as to cause this injury, though he swears it was a blow from a
rope, and nothing else.  What struck me in the case was the respect and
rank that his age seemed to give him, in the view of the officers; and
how, as the captain's expression signified, it lifted him out of his low
position, and made him a person to be honored.  The dignity of his manner
is perhaps partly owing to the ancient mariner, with his long experience,
being an oracle among the forecastle men.


May 3d.--It rains to-day, after a very long period of east-wind and dry
weather.  The east-wind here, blowing across the island, seems to be the
least damp of all the winds; but it is full of malice and mischief, of an
indescribably evil temper, and stabs one like a cold, poisoned dagger.  I
never spent so disagreeable a spring as this, although almost every day
for a month has been bright.


Friday, May 11th.--A few weeks ago, a sailor, a most pitiable object,
came to my office to complain of cruelty from his captain and mate.  They
had beaten him shamefully, of which he bore grievous marks about his face
and eyes, and bruises on his head and other parts of his person: and
finally the ship had sailed, leaving him behind.  I never in my life saw
so forlorn a fellow, so ragged, so wretched; and even his wits seemed to
have been beaten out of him, if perchance he ever had any.  He got an
order for the hospital; and there he has been, off and on, ever since,
till yesterday, when I received a message that he was dying, and wished
to see the Consul; so I went with Mr. Wilding to the hospital.  We were
ushered into the waiting-room,--a kind of parlor, with a fire in the
grate, and a centre-table, whereon lay one or two medical journals, with
wood engravings; and there was a young man, who seemed to be an official
of the house, reading.  Shortly the surgeon appeared,--a brisk, cheerful,
kindly sort of person, whom I have met there on previous visits.  He told
us that the man was dying, and probably would not be able to communicate
anything, but, nevertheless, ushered us up to the highest floor, and into
the room where he lay.  It was a large, oblong room, with ten or twelve
beds in it, each occupied by a patient.  The surgeon said that the
hospital was often so crowded that they were compelled to lay some of the
patients on the floor.  The man whom we came to see lay on his bed in a
little recess formed by a projecting window; so that there was a kind of
seclusion for him to die in.  He seemed quite insensible to outward
things, and took no notice of our approach, nor responded to what was
said to him,--lying on his side, breathing with short gasps,--his
apparent disease being inflammation of the chest, although the surgeon
said that he might be found to have sustained internal injury by bruises.
he was restless, tossing his head continually, mostly with his eyes shut,
and much compressed and screwed up, but sometimes opening them; and then
they looked brighter and darker than when I first saw them.  I think his
face was not at any time so stupid as at his first interview with me; but
whatever intelligence he had was rather inward than outward, as if there
might be life and consciousness at a depth within, while as to external
matters he was in a mist.  The surgeon felt his wrist, and said that
there was absolutely no pulsation, and that he might die at any moment,
or might perhaps live an hour, but that there was no prospect of his
being able to communicate with me.  He was quite restless, nevertheless,
and sometimes half raised himself in bed, sometimes turned himself quite
over, and then lay gasping for an instant.  His woollen shirt being
thrust up on his arm, there appeared a tattooing of a ship and
anchor, and other nautical emblems, on both of them, which another
sailor-patient, on examining them, said must have been done years ago.
This might be of some importance, because the dying man had told me, when
I first saw him, that he was no sailor, but a farmer, and that, this
being his first voyage, he had been beaten by the captain for not doing a
sailor's duty, which he had had no opportunity of learning.  These
sea-emblems indicated that he was probably a seaman of some years'
service.

While we stood in the little recess, such of the other patients as were
convalescent gathered near the foot of the bed; and the nurse came and
looked on, and hovered about us,--a sharp-eyed, intelligent woman of
middle age, with a careful and kind expression, neglecting nothing that
was for the patient's good, yet taking his death as coolly as any other
incident in her daily business.  Certainly, it was a very forlorn
death-bed; and I felt--what I have heretofore been inclined to doubt--
that it might, be a comfort to have persons whom one loves, to go with us
to the threshold of the other world, and leave us only when we are fairly
across it.  This poor fellow had a wife and two children on the other
side of the water.

At first he did not utter any sound; but by and by he moaned a little,
and gave tokens of being more sensible to outward concerns,--not quite so
misty and dreamy as hitherto.  We had been talking all the while--myself
in a whisper, but the surgeon in his ordinary tones--about his state,
without his paying any attention.  But now the surgeon put his mouth down
to the man's face and said, "Do you know that you are dying?"  At this
the patient's head began to move upon the pillow; and I thought at first
that it was only the restlessness that he had shown all along; but soon
it appeared to be an expression of emphatic dissent, a negative shake of
the head.  He shook it with all his might, and groaned and mumbled, so
that it was very evident how miserably reluctant he was to die.  Soon
after this he absolutely spoke.  "O, I want you to get me well!  I want
to get away from here!" in a groaning and moaning utterance.  The
surgeon's question had revived him, but to no purpose; for, being told
that the Consul had come to see him, and asked whether he had anything to
communicate, he said only, "O, I want him to get me well!" and the whole
life that was left in him seemed to be unwillingness to die.  This did
not last long; for he soon relapsed into his first state, only with his
face a little more pinched and screwed up, and his eyes strangely sunken.
And lost in his head; and the surgeon said that there would be no use in
my remaining.  So I took my leave.  Mr. Wilding had brought a deposition
of the man's evidence, which he had clearly made at the Consulate, for
him to sign, and this we left with the surgeon, in case there should be
such an interval of consciousness and intelligence before death as to
make it possible for him to sign it.  But of this there is no
probability.

I have just received a note from the hospital, stating that the sailor,
Daniel Smith, died about three quarters of an hour after I saw him.


May 18th.--The above-mentioned Daniel Smith had about him a bundle of
letters, which I have examined.  They are all very yellow, stained with
sea-water, smelling of bad tobacco-smoke, and much worn at the folds.
Never were such ill-written letters, nor such incredibly fantastic
spelling.  They seem to be from various members of his family,--most of
them from a brother, who purports to have been a deck-hand in the
coasting and steamboat trade between Charleston and other ports; others
from female relations; one from his father, in which he inquires how long
his son has been in jail, and when the trial is to come on,--the offence,
however, of which he was accused, not being indicated.  But from the
tenor of his brother's letters, it would appear that he was a small
farmer in the interior of South Carolina, sending butter, eggs, and
poultry to be sold in Charleston by his brother, and receiving the
returns in articles purchased there.  This was his own account of
himself; and he affirmed, in his deposition before me, that he had never
had any purpose of shipping for Liverpool, or anywhere else; but that,
going on board the ship to bring a man's trunk ashore, he was compelled
to remain and serve as a sailor.  This was a hard fate, certainly, and a
strange thing to happen in the United States at this day,--that a free
citizen should be absolutely kidnapped, carried to a foreign country,
treated with savage cruelty during the voyage, and left to die on his
arrival.  Yet all this has unquestionably been done, and will probably go
unpunished.

The seed of the long-stapled cotton, now cultivated in America, was sent
there in 1786 from the Bahama Islands, by some of the royalist refugees,
who had settled there.  The inferior short-stapled cotton had been
previously cultivated for domestic purposes.  The seeds of every other
variety have been tried without success.  The kind now grown was first
introduced into Georgia.  Thus to the refugees America owes as much of
her prosperity as is due to the cotton-crops, and much of whatever harm
is to result from slavery.


May 22d.--Captain J------ says that he saw, in his late voyage to
Australia and India, a vessel commanded by an Englishman, who had with
him his wife and thirteen children.  This ship was the home of the
family, and they had no other.  The thirteen children had all been born
on board, and had been brought up on board, and knew nothing of dry land,
except by occasionally setting foot on it.

Captain J------ is a very agreeable specimen of the American shipmaster,
--a pleasant, gentlemanly man, not at all refined, and yet with fine and
honorable sensibilities.  Very easy in his manners and conversation, yet
gentle,--talking on freely, and not much minding grammar; but finding a
sufficient and picturesque expression for what he wishes to say; very
cheerful and vivacious; accessible to feeling, as yesterday, when talking
about the recent death of his mother.  His voice faltered, and the tears
came into his eyes, though before and afterwards he smiled merrily, and
made us smile; fond of his wife, and carrying her about the world with
him, and blending her with all his enjoyments; an excellent and sagacious
man of business; liberal in his expenditure; proud of his ship and flag;
always well dressed, with some little touch of sailor-like flashiness,
but not a whit too much; slender in figure, with a handsome face, and
rather profuse brown beard and whiskers; active and alert; about
thirty-two.  A daguerreotype sketch of any conversation of his would do
him no justice, for its slang, its grammatical mistakes, its mistaken
words (as "portable" for "portly"), would represent a vulgar man, whereas
the impression he leaves is by no means that of vulgarity; but he is a
character quite perfect within itself, fit for the deck and the cabin,
and agreeable in the drawing-room, though not amenable altogether to its
rules.  Being so perfectly natural, he is more of a gentleman for those
little violations of rule, which most men, with his opportunities, might
escape.

The men whose appeals to the Consul's charity are the hardest to be
denied are those who have no country,---Hungarians, Poles, Cubans,
Spanish-Americans, and French republicans.  All exiles for liberty come
to me, if the representative of America were their representative.
Yesterday, came an old French soldier, and showed his wounds; to-day, a
Spaniard, a friend of Lopez,--bringing his little daughter with him.  He
said he was starving, and looked so.  The little girl was in good
condition enough, and decently dressed.--May 23d.


May 30th.--The two past days have been Whitsuntide holidays; and they
have been celebrated at Tranmere in a manner very similar to that of the
old "Election" in Massachusetts, as I remember it a good many years ago,
though the festival has now almost or quite died out.  Whitsuntide was
kept up on our side of the water, I am convinced, under pretence of
rejoicings at the election of Governor.  It occurred at precisely the
same period of the year,--the same week; the only difference being, that
Monday and Tuesday are the Whitsun festival days, whereas, in
Massachusetts, Wednesday was "Election day," and the acme of the
merry-making.

I passed through Tranmere yesterday forenoon, and lingered awhile to see
the sports.  The greatest peculiarity of the crowd, to my eye, was that
they seemed not to have any best clothes, and therefore had put on no
holiday suits,--a grimy people, as at all times, heavy, obtuse, with
thick beer in their blood.  Coarse, rough-complexioned women and girls
were intermingled, the girls with no maiden trimness in their attire,
large and blowsy.  Nobody seemed to have been washed that day.  All the
enjoyment was of an exceedingly sombre character, so far as I saw it,
though there was a richer variety of sports than at similar festivals in
America.  There were wooden horses, revolving in circles, to be ridden a
certain number of rounds for a penny; also swinging cars gorgeously
painted, and the newest named after Lord Raglan; and four cars balancing
one another, and turned by a winch; and people with targets and rifles,--
the principal aim being to hit an apple bobbing on a string before the
target; other guns for shooting at the distance of a foot or two, for a
prize of filberts; and a game much in fashion, of throwing heavy sticks
at earthen mugs suspended on lines, three throws for a penny.  Also,
there was a posture-master, showing his art in the centre of a ring of
miscellaneous spectators, and handing round his bat after going through
all his attitudes.  The collection amounted to only one halfpenny, and,
to eke it out, I threw in three more.  There were some large booths with
tables placed the whole length, at which sat men and women drinking and
smoking pipes; orange-girls, a great many, selling the worst possible
oranges, which had evidently been boiled to give them a show of
freshness.  There were likewise two very large structures, the walls made
of boards roughly patched together, and rooted with canvas, which seemed
to have withstood a thousand storms.  Theatres were there, and in front
there were pictures of scenes which were to be represented within; the
price of admission being twopence to one theatre, and a penny to the
other.  But, small as the price of tickets was, I could not see that
anybody bought them.  Behind the theatres, close to the board wall, and
perhaps serving as the general dressing-room, was a large windowed wagon,
in which I suppose the company travel and live together.  Never, to my
imagination, was the mysterious glory that has surrounded theatrical
representation ever since my childhood brought down into such dingy
reality as this.  The tragedy queens were the same coarse and homely
women and girls that surrounded me on the green.  Some of the people had
evidently been drinking more than was good for them; but their
drunkenness was silent and stolid, with no madness in it.  No ebullition
of any sort was apparent.


May 31st.--Last Sunday week, for the first time, I heard the note of the
cuckoo.  "Cuck-oo--cuck-oo" it says, repeating the word twice, not in a
brilliant metallic tone, but low and flute-like, without the excessive
sweetness of the flute,--without an excess of saccharine juice in the
sound.  There are said to be always two cuckoos seen together.  The note
is very soft and pleasant.  The larks I have not yet heard in the sky;
though it is not infrequent to hear one singing in a cage, in the streets
of Liverpool.

Brewers' draymen are allowed to drink as much of their master's beverage
as they like, and they grow very brawny and corpulent, resembling their
own horses in size, and presenting, one would suppose, perfect pictures
of physical comfort and well-being.  But the least bruise, or even the
hurt of a finger, is liable to turn to gangrene or erysipelas, and become
fatal.

When the wind blows violently, however clear the sky, the English say,
"It is a stormy day."  And, on the other hand, when the air is still, and
it does not actually rain, however dark and lowering the sky may be, they
say, "The weather is fine!"


June 2d.--The English women of the lower classes have a grace of their
own, not seen in each individual, but nevertheless belonging to their
order, which is not to be found in American women of the corresponding
class.  The other day, in the police court, a girl was put into the
witness-box, whose native graces of this sort impressed me a good deal.
She was coarse, and her dress was none of the cleanest, and nowise smart.
She appeared to have been up all night, too, drinking at the Tranmere
wake, and had since ridden in a cart, covered up with a rug.  She
described herself as a servant-girl, out of place; and her charm lay in
all her manifestations,--her tones, her gestures, her look, her way of
speaking and what she said, being so appropriate and natural in a girl of
that class; nothing affected; no proper grace thrown away by attempting
to appear lady-like,--which an American girl would have attempted,--and
she would also have succeeded in a certain degree.  If each class would
but keep within itself, and show its respect for itself by aiming at
nothing beyond, they would all be more respectable.  But this kind of
fitness is evidently not to be expected in the future; and something else
must be substituted for it.

These scenes at the police court are often well worth witnessing.  The
controlling genius of the court, except when the stipendiary magistrate
presides, is the clerk, who is a man learned in the law.  Nominally the
cases are decided by the aldermen, who sit in rotation, but at every
important point there comes a nod or a whisper from the clerk; and it is
that whisper which sets the defendant free or sends him to prison.
Nevertheless, I suppose the alderman's common-sense and native shrewdness
are not without their efficacy in producing a general tendency towards
the right; and, no doubt, the decisions of the police court are quite as
often just as those of any other court whatever.

June 11th.--I walked with J----- yesterday to Bebington Church.  When I
first saw this church, nearly two years since, it seemed to me the
fulfilment of my ideal of an old English country church.  It is not so
satisfactory now, although certainly a venerable edifice.  There used
some time ago to be ivy all over the tower; and at my first view of it,
there was still a little remaining on the upper parts of the spire.  But
the main roots, I believe, were destroyed, and pains were taken to clear
away the whole of the ivy, so that now it is quite bare,--nothing but
homely gray stone, with marks of age, but no beauty.  The most curious
thing about the church is the font.  It is a massive pile, composed of
five or six layers of freestone in an octagon shape, placed in the angle
formed by the projecting side porch and the wall of the church, and
standing under a stained-glass window.  The base is six or seven feet
across, and it is built solidly up in successive steps, to the height of
about six feet,--an octagonal pyramid, with the basin of the font
crowning the pile hewn out of the solid stone, and about a foot in
diameter and the same in depth.  There was water in it from the recent
rains,--water just from heaven, and therefore as holy as any water it
ever held in old Romish times.  The aspect of this aged font is extremely
venerable, with moss in the basin and all over the stones; grass, and
weeds of various kinds, and little shrubs, rooted in the chinks of the
stones and between the successive steps.

At each entrance of Rock Park, where we live, there is a small Gothic
structure of stone, each inhabited by a policeman and his family; very
small dwellings indeed, with the main apartment opening directly
out-of-doors; and when the door is open, one can see the household fire,
the good wife at work, perhaps the table set, and a throng of children
clustering round, and generally overflowing the threshold.  The policeman
walks about the Park in stately fashion, with his silver-laced blue
uniform and snow-white gloves, touching his hat to gentlemen who reside
in the Park.  In his public capacity he has rather an awful aspect, but
privately he is a humble man enough, glad of any little job, and of old
clothes for his many children, or, I believe, for himself.  One of the
two policemen is a shoemaker and cobbler.  His pay, officially, is
somewhere about a guinea a week.

The Park, just now, is very agreeable to look at, shadowy with trees and
shrubs, and with glimpses of green leaves and flower-gardens through the
branches and twigs that line the iron fences.  After a shower the
hawthorn blossoms are delightfully fragrant.  Golden tassels of the
laburnum are abundant.

I may have mentioned elsewhere the traditional prophecy, that, when the
ivy should reach the top of Bebbington spire, the tower was doomed to
fall.  It lies still, therefore, a chance of standing for centuries.  Mr.
Turner tells me that the font now used is inside of the church, but the
one outside is of unknown antiquity, and that it was customary, in
papistical time, to have the font without the church.

There is a little boy often on board the Rock Ferry steamer with an
accordion,--an instrument I detest; but nevertheless it becomes tolerable
in his hands, not so much for its music, as for the earnestness and
interest with which he plays it.  His body and the accordion together
become one musical instrument on which his soul plays tunes, for he sways
and vibrates with the music from head to foot and throughout his frame,
half closing his eyes and uplifting his face, as painters represent St.
Cecilia and other famous musicians; and sometimes he swings his accordion
in the air, as if in a perfect rapture.  After all, my ears, though not
very nice, are somewhat tortured by his melodies, especially when
confined within the cabin.  The boy is ten years old, perhaps, and rather
pretty; clean, too, and neatly dressed, very unlike all other street and
vagabond children whom I have seen in Liverpool.  People give him their
halfpence more readily than to any other musicians who infest the boat.

J-----, the other day, was describing a soldier-crab to his mother, he
being much interested in natural history, and endeavoring to give as
strong an idea as possible of its warlike characteristics, and power to
harm those who molest it.  Little R----- sat by, quietly listening and
sewing, and at last, lifting her head, she remarked, "I hope God did not
hurt himself, when he was making him!"



LEAMINGTON.


June 21st.--We left Rock Ferry and Liverpool on Monday the 18th by the
rail for this place; a very dim and rainy day, so that we had no pleasant
prospects of the country; neither would the scenery along the Great
Western Railway have been in any case very striking, though sunshine
would have made the abundant verdure and foliage warm and genial.  But a
railway naturally finds its way through all the common places of a
country, and is certainly a most unsatisfactory mode of travelling, the
only object being to arrive.  However, we had a whole carriage to
ourselves, and the children enjoyed the earlier part of the journey very
much.  We skirted Shrewsbury, and I think I saw the old tower of a church
near the station, perhaps the same that struck Falstaff's "long hour."
As we left the town I saw the Wrekin, a round, pointed hill of regular
shape, and remembered the old toast, "To all friends round the Wrekin!"
As we approached Birmingham, the country began to look somewhat
Brummagemish, with its manufacturing chimneys, and pennons of flame
quivering out of their tops; its forges, and great heaps of mineral
refuse; its smokiness and other ugly symptoms.  Of Birmingham itself we
saw little or nothing, except the mean and new brick lodging-houses, on
the outskirts of the town.  Passing through Warwick, we had a glimpse of
the castle,--an ivied wall and two turrets, rising out of imbosoming
foliage; one's very idea of an old castle.  We reached Leamington at a
little past six, and drove to the Clarendon Hotel,--a very spacious and
stately house, by far the most splendid hotel I have yet seen in England.
The landlady, a courteous old lady in black, showed my wife our rooms,
and we established ourselves in an immensely large and lofty parlor, with
red curtains and ponderous furniture, perhaps a very little out of date.
The waiter brought me the book of arrivals, containing the names of all
visitors for from three to five years back.  During two years I estimated
that there had been about three hundred and fifty persons only, and while
we were there, I saw nobody but ourselves to support the great hotel.
Among the names were those of princes, earls, countesses, and baronets;
and when the people of the house heard from R-----'s nurse that I too was
a man of office, and held the title of Honorable in my own country, they
greatly regretted that I entered myself as plain "Mister" in the book.
We found this hotel very comfortable, and might doubtless have made it
luxurious, had we chosen to go to five times the expense of similar
luxuries in America; but we merely ordered comfortable things, and so
came off at no very extravagant rate,--and with great honor, at all
events, in the estimation of the waiter.

During the afternoon we found lodgings, and established ourselves in them
before dark.

This English custom of lodgings, of which we had some experience at Rhyl
last year, has its advantages; but is rather uncomfortable for strangers,
who, in first settling themselves down, find that they must undertake all
the responsibility of housekeeping at an instant's warming, and cannot
get even a cup of tea till they have made arrangements with the grocer.
Soon, however, there comes a sense of being at home, and by our exclusive
selves, which never can be attained at hotels nor boarding-houses.  Our
house is well situated and respectably furnished, with the dinginess,
however, which is inseparable from lodging-houses,--as if others had used
these things before and would use them again after we had gone,--a
well-enough adaptation, but a lack of peculiar appropriateness; and I
think one puts off real enjoyment from a sense of not being truly fitted.


July 1st.--On Friday I took the rail with J----- for Coventry.  It was a
bright and very warm day, oppressively so, indeed; though I think that
there is never in this English climate the pervading warmth of an
American summer day.  The sunshine may be excessively hot, but an
overshadowing cloud or the shade of a tree or of a building at once
affords relief; and if the slightest breeze stirs, you feel the latent
freshness of the air.

Coventry is some nine or ten miles from Leamington.  The approach to it
from the railway presents nothing very striking,--a few church-towers,
and one or two tall steeples; and the houses first seen are of modern and
unnoticeable aspect.  Getting into the interior of the town, however, you
find the streets very crooked, and some of them very narrow.  I saw one
place where it seemed possible to shake hands from one jutting storied
old house to another.  There were whole streets of the same kind of
houses, one story impending over another, such as used to be familiar to
me in Salem, and in some streets of Boston.  In fact, the whole aspect of
the town--its irregularity and continual indirectness--reminded me very
much of Boston, as I used to see it, in rare visits thither, when a
child.

These Coventry houses, however, many of them, are much larger than any of
similar style that I have seen elsewhere, and they spread into greater
bulk as they ascend, by means of one story jutting over the other.
Probably the New-Englanders continued to follow this fashion of
architecture after it had been abandoned in the mother country.  The old
house built, by Philip English, in Salem, dated about 1692; and it was in
this style,--many gabled, and impending.  Here the edifices of such
architecture seem to be Elizabethan, and of earlier date.  A woman in
Stratford told us that the rooms, very low on the ground-floor, grew
loftier from story to story to the attic.  The fashion of windows, in
Coventry, is such as I have not hitherto seen.  In the highest story, a
window of the ordinary height extends along the whole breadth of the
house, ten, fifteen, perhaps twenty feet, just like any other window of a
commonplace house, except for this inordinate width.  One does not easily
see what the inhabitants want of so much window-light; but the fashion is
very general, and in modern houses, or houses that have been modernized,
this style of window is retained.  Thus young people who grow up amidst
old people contract quaint and old-fashioned manners and aspect.

I imagine that these ancient towns--such as Chester and Stratford,
Warwick and Coventry--contain even a great deal more antiquity than meets
the eye.  You see many modern fronts; but if you peep or penetrate
inside, you find an antique arrangement,--old rafters, intricate
passages, and ancient staircases, which have put on merely a new outside,
and are likely still to prove good for the usual date of a new house.
They put such an immense and stalwart ponderosity into their frameworks,
that I suppose a house of Elizabeth's time, if renewed, has at least an
equal chance of durability with one that is new in every part.  All the
hotels in Coventry, so far as I noticed them, are old, with new fronts;
and they have an archway for the admission of vehicles into the
court-yard, and doors opening into the rooms of the building on each side
of the arch.  Maids and waiters are seen darting across the arched
passage from door to door, and it requires a guide (in my case, at least)
to show you the way to the coffee-room or the bar.  I have never been up
stairs in any of them, but can conceive of infinite bewilderment of
zigzag corridors between staircase and chamber.

It was fair-day in Coventry, and this gave what no doubt is an unusual
bustle to the streets.  In fact, I have not seen such crowded and busy
streets in any English town; various kinds of merchandise being for sale
in the open air, and auctioneers disposing of miscellaneous wares, pretty
much as they do at musters and other gatherings in the United States.
The oratory of the American auctioneer, however, greatly surpasses that
of the Englishman in vivacity and fun.  But this movement and throng,
together with the white glow of the sun on the pavements, make the scene,
in my recollection, assume an American aspect, and this is strange in so
antique and quaint a town as Coventry.

We rambled about without any definite aim, but found our way, I believe,
to most of the objects that are worth seeing.  St. Michael's Church was
most magnificent,--so old, yet enduring; so huge, so rich; with such
intricate minuteness in its finish, that, look as long as you will at it,
you can always discover something new directly before your eyes.  I
admire this in Gothic architecture,--that you cannot master it all at
once, that it is not a naked outline; but, as deep and rich as human
nature itself, always revealing new ideas.  It is as if the builder had
built himself and his age up into it, and as if the edifice had life.
Grecian temples are less interesting to me, being so cold and
crystalline.  I think this is the only church I have seen where there are
any statues still left standing in the niches of the exterior walls.  We
did not go inside.  The steeple of St. Michael's is three hundred and
three feet high, and no doubt the clouds often envelop the tip of the
spire.  Trinity, another church with a tall spire, stands near St.
Michael's, but did not attract me so much; though I, perhaps, might have
admired it equally, had I seen it first or alone.  We certainly know
nothing of church-building in America, and of all English things that I
have seen, methinks the churches disappoint me least.  I feel, too, that
there is something much more wonderful in them than I have yet had time
to know and experience.

In the course of the forenoon, searching about everywhere in quest of
Gothic architecture, we found our way into St. Mary's Hall.  The doors
were wide open; it seemed to be public,--there was a notice on the wall
desiring visitors to give nothing to attendants for showing it, and so we
walked in.  I observed, in the guide-books, that we should have obtained
an order for admission from some member of the town council; but we had
none, and found no need of it.  An old woman, and afterwards an old man,
both of whom seemed to be at home on the premises, told us that we might
enter, and troubled neither themselves nor us any further.

St. Mary's Hall is now the property of the Corporation of Coventry, and
seems to be the place where the Mayor and Council hold their meetings.
It was built by one of the old guilds or fraternities of merchants and
tradesmen  The woman shut the kitchen door when I approached, so that I
did not see the great fireplaces and huge cooking-utensils which are said
to be there.  Whether these are ever used nowadays, and whether the Mayor
of Coventry gives such hospitable banquets as the Mayor of Liverpool, I
do not know.

We went to the Red Lion, and had a luncheon of cold lamb and cold
pigeon-pie.  This is the best way of dining at English hotels,--to call
the meal a luncheon, in which case you will get as good or better a
variety than if it were a dinner, and at less than half the cost.  Having
lunched, we again wandered about town, and entered a quadrangle of gabled
houses, with a church, and its churchyard on one side.  This proved to be
St. John's Church, and a part of the houses were the locality of Bond's
Hospital, for the reception of ten poor men, and the remainder was
devoted to the Bablake School.  Into this latter I peered, with a real
American intrusiveness, which I never found in myself before, but which I
must now assume, or miss a great many things which I am anxious to see.
Running along the front of the house, under the jut of the impending
story, there was a cloistered walk, with windows opening on the
quadrangle.  An arched oaken door, with long iron hinges, admitted us
into a school-room about twenty feet square, paved with brick tiles, blue
and red.  Adjoining this there is a larger school-room which we did not
enter, but peeped at, through one of the inner windows, from the
cloistered walk.  In the room which we entered, there were seven
scholars' desks, and an immense arched fireplace, with seats on each
side, under the chimney, on  a stone slab resting on a brick pedestal.
The opening of the fireplace was at least twelve feet in width.  On one
side of the room were pegs for fifty-two boys' hats and clothes, and
there was a boy's coat, of peculiar cut, hanging on a peg, with the
number "50" in brass upon it.  The coat looked ragged and shabby.  An old
school-book was lying on one of the desks, much tattered, and without a
title; but it seemed to treat wholly of Saints' days and festivals of the
Church.  A flight of stairs, with a heavy balustrade of carved oak,
ascended to a gallery, about eight or nine feet from the lower floor,
which runs along two sides of the room, looking down upon it.  The room
is without a ceiling, and rises into a peaked gable, about twenty feet
high.  There is a large clock in it, and it is lighted by two windows,
each about ten feet wide,--one in the gallery, and the other beneath it.
Two benches or settles, with backs, stood one on each side of the
fireplace.  An old woman in black passed through the room while I was
making my observations, and looked at me, but said nothing.  The school
was founded in 1563, by Thomas Whealby, Mayor of Coventry; the revenue is
about 900 pounds, and admits children of the working-classes at eleven
years old, clothes and provides for them, and finally apprentices them
for seven years.  We saw some of the boys playing in the quadrangle,
dressed in long blue coats or gowns, with cloth caps on their heads.  I
know not how the atmosphere of antiquity, and massive continuance
from age to age, which was the charm to me in this scene of a
charityschool-room, can be thrown over it in description.  After noting
down these matters, I looked into the quiet precincts of Bond's Hospital,
which, no doubt, was more than equally interesting; but the old men were
lounging about or lolling at length, looking very drowsy, and I had not
the heart nor the face to intrude among them.  There is something
altogether strange to an American in these charitable institutions,--in
the preservation of antique modes and customs which is effected by them,
insomuch that, doubtless, without at all intending it, the founders have
succeeded in preserving a model of their own long-past age down into the
midst of ours, and how much later nobody can know.

We were now rather tired, and went to the railroad, intending to go home;
but we got into the wrong train, and were carried by express, with
hurricane speed, to Bradon, where we alighted, and waited a good while
for the return train to Coventry.  At Coventry again we had more than an
hour to wait, and therefore wandered wearily up into the city, and took
another look at its bustling streets, in which there seems to be a good
emblem of what England itself really is,--with a great deal of antiquity
in it, and which is now chiefly a modification of the old.  The new
things are based and supported on the sturdy old things, and often
limited and impeded by them; but this antiquity is so massive that there
seems to be no means of getting rid of it without tearing society to
pieces.


July 2d.--To-day I shall set out on my return to Liverpool, leaving my
family here.



TO THE LAKES.


July 4th.--I left Leamington on Monday, shortly after twelve, having been
accompanied to the railway station by U---- and J-----, whom I sent away
before the train started.  While I was waiting, a rather gentlemanly,
well-to-do, English-looking man sat down by me, and began to talk of the
Crimea, of human affairs in general, of God and his Providence, of the
coming troubles of the world, and of spiritualism, in a strange free way
for an Englishman, or, indeed, for any man.  It was easy to see that he
was an enthusiast of some line or other.  He being bound for Birmingham
and I for Rugby, we soon had to part; but he asked my name, and told me
his own, which I did not much attend to, and immediately forgot.

[Here follows a long account of a visit to Lichfield and Uttoxeter,
condensed in "Our Old Home."]


July 6th.--The day after my arrival, by way of Lichfield and Uttoxeter,
at Liverpool, the door of the Consulate opened, and in came the very
sociable personage who accosted me at the railway station at Leamington.
He was on his way towards Edinburgh, to deliver a course of lectures or a
lecture, and had called, he said, to talk with me about spiritualism,
being desirous of having the judgment of a sincere mind on the subject.
In his own mind, I should suppose, he is past the stage of doubt and
inquiry; for he told me that in every action of his life he is governed
by the counsels received from the spiritual world through a medium.  I
did not inquire whether this medium (who is a small boy) had suggested
his visit to me.  My remarks to him were quite of a sceptical character
in regard to the faith to which he had surrendered himself.  He has
formerly lived in America, and had had a son born there.  He gave me a
pamphlet written by himself, on the cure of consumption and other
diseases by antiseptic remedies.  I hope he will not bore me any more,
though he seems to be a very sincere and good man; but these enthusiasts
who adopt such extravagant ideas appear to one to lack imagination,
instead of being misled by it, as they are generally supposed to be.



NEWBY BRIDGE.--FOOT OF WINDERMERE.


July 13th.--I left Liverpool on Saturday last, by the London and
Northwestern Railway, for Leamington, spent Sunday there, and started on
Monday for the English lakes, with the whole family.  We should not have
taken this journey just now, but I had an official engagement which it
was convenient to combine with a pleasure-excursion.  The first night we
arrived at Chester, and put up at the Albion Hotel, where we found
ourselves very comfortable.  We took the rail at twelve the next day, and
went as far as Milnethorpe station, where we engaged seats in an
old-fashioned stage-coach, and came to Newby Bridge.  I suppose there are
not many of these coaches now running on any road in Great Britain; but
this appears to be the genuine machine, in all respects, and especially
in the round, ruddy coachman, well moistened with ale, good-natured,
courteous, and with a proper sense of his dignity and important position.
U----, J-----, and I mounted atop, S-----, nurse, and R----- got inside,
and we bowled off merrily towards the hearts of the hills.  It was more
than half past nine when we arrived at Newby Bridge, and alighted at the
Swan Hotel, where we now are.

It is a very agreeable place: not striking as to scenery, but with a
pleasant rural aspect.  A stone bridge of five arches crosses the river
Severn (which is the communication between Windermere Lake and Morecambe
Bay) close to the house, which sits low--and well sheltered in the lap of
hills,--an old-fashioned inn, where the landlord and his people have a
simple and friendly way of dealing with their guests, and yet provide
them with all sorts of facilities for being comfortable.  They load our
supper and breakfast tables with trout, cold beef, ham, toast, and
muffins; and give us three fair courses for dinner, and excellent wine,
the cost of all which remains to be seen.  This is not one of the
celebrated stations among the lakes; but twice a day the stage-coach
passes from Milnethorpe towards Ulverton, and twice returns, and three
times a little steamer passes to and fro between our hotel and the head
of the lake.  Young ladies, in broad-brimmed hats, stroll about, or row
on the river in the light shallops, of which there are abundance;
sportsmen sit on the benches under the windows of the hotel, arranging
their fishing-tackle; phaetons and post-chaises, with postilions in
scarlet jackets and white breeches, with one high-topped boot, and the
other leathered far up on the leg to guard against friction between the
horses, dash up to the door.  Morning and night comes the stage-coach,
and we inspect the outside passengers, almost face to face with us, from
our parlor-windows, up one pair of stairs.  Little boys, and J----- among
them, spend hours on hours fishing in the clear, shallow river for the
perch, chubs, and minnows that may be seen flashing, like gleams of light
over the flat stones with which the bottom is paved.  I cannot answer for
the other boys, but J----- catches nothing.

There are a good many trees on the hills and roundabout, and pleasant
roads loitering along by the gentle river-side, and it has been so sunny
and warm since we came here that we shall have quite a genial
recollection of the place, if we leave it before the skies have time to
frown.  The day after we came, we climbed a high and pretty steep hill,
through a path shadowed with trees and shrubbery, up to a tower, from the
summit of which we had a wide view of mountain scenery and the greater
part of Windermere.  This lake is a lovely little pool among the hills,
long and narrow, beautifully indented with tiny bays and headlands; and
when we saw it, it was one smile (as broad a smile as its narrowness
allowed) with really brilliant sunshine.  All the scenery we have yet met
with is in excellent taste, and keeps itself within very proper bounds,--
never getting too wild and rugged to shock the sensibilities of
cultivated people, as American scenery is apt to do.  On the rudest
surface of English earth, there is seen the effect of centuries of
civilization, so that you do not quite get at naked Nature anywhere.  And
then every point of beauty is so well known, and has been described so
much, that one must needs look through other people's eyes, and feels as
if he were seeing a picture rather than a reality.  Man has, in short,
entire possession of Nature here, and I should think young men might
sometimes yearn for a fresher draught.  But an American likes it.



FURNESS ABBEY.


Yesterday, July 12th, we took a phaeton and went to Furness Abbey,--a
drive of about sixteen miles, passing along the course of the Leam to
Morecambe Bay, and through Ulverton and other villages.  These villages
all look antique, and the smallest of them generally are formed of such
close, contiguous clusters of houses, and have such narrow and crooked
streets, that they give you an idea of a metropolis in miniature.  The
houses along the road (of which there are not many, except in the
villages) are almost invariably old, built of stone, and covered with a
light gray plaster; generally they have a little flower-garden in front,
and, often, honeysuckles, roses, or some other sweet and pretty rustic
adornment, are flowering over the porch.  I have hardly had such images
of simple, quiet, rustic comfort and beauty, as from the look of these
houses; and the whole impression of our winding and undulating road,
bordered by hedges, luxuriantly green, and not too closely clipped,
accords with this aspect.  There is nothing arid in an English landscape;
and one cannot but fancy that the same may be true of English rural life.
The people look wholesome and well-to-do,--not specimens of hard, dry,
sunburnt muscle, like our yeomen,--and are kind and civil to strangers,
sometimes making a little inclination of the head in passing.  Miss
Martineau, however, does not seem to think well of their mental and moral
condition.

We reached Furness Abbey about twelve.  There is a railway station close
by the ruins; and a new hotel stands within the precincts of the abbey
grounds; and continually there is the shriek, the whiz, the rumble, the
bell-ringing, denoting the arrival of the trains; and passengers alight,
and step at once (as their choice may be) into the refreshment-room, to
get a glass of ale or a cigar,--or upon the gravelled paths of the lawn,
leading to the old broken walls and arches of the abbey.  The ruins are
extensive, and the enclosure of the abbey is stated to have covered a
space of sixty-five acres.  It is impossible to describe them.  The most
interesting part is that which was formerly the church, and which, though
now roofless, is still surrounded by walls, and retains the remnants of
the pillars that formerly supported the intermingling curves of the
arches.  The floor is all overgrown with grass, strewn with fragments and
capitals of pillars.  It was a great and stately edifice, the length of
the nave and choir having been nearly three hundred feet, and that of the
transept more than half as much.  The pillars along the nave were
alternately a round, solid one and a clustered one.  Now, what remains of
some of them is even with the ground; others present a stump just high
enough to form a seat; and others are, perhaps, a man's height from the
ground,--and all are mossy, and with grass and weeds rooted into their
chinks, and here and there a tuft of flowers, giving its tender little
beauty to their decay.  The material of the edifice is a soft red stone,
and it is now extensively overgrown with a lichen of a very light gray
line, which, at a little distance, makes the walls look as if they had
long ago been whitewashed, and now had partially returned to their
original color.  The arches of the nave and transept were noble and
immense; there were four of them together, supporting a tower which has
long since disappeared,--arches loftier than I ever conceived to have
been made by man.  Very possibly, in some cathedral that I have seen, or
am yet to see, there may be arches as stately as these; but I doubt
whether they can ever show to such advantage in a perfect edifice as they
do in this ruin,--most of them broken, only one, as far as I recollect,
still completing its sweep.  In this state they suggest a greater majesty
and beauty than any finished human work can show; the crumbling traces of
the half-obliterated design producing somewhat of the effect of the first
idea of anything admirable, when it dawns upon the mind of an artist or a
poet,--an idea which, do what he may, he is sure to fall short of in his
attempt to embody it.

In the middle of the choir is a much-dilapidated monument of a
cross-legged knight (a crusader, of course) in armor, very rudely
executed; and, against the wall, lie two or three more bruised and
battered warriors, with square helmets on their heads and visors down.
Nothing can be uglier than these figures; the sculpture of those days
seems to have been far behind the architecture.  And yet they knew how to
put a grotesque expression into the faces of their images, and we saw
some fantastic shapes and heads at the lower points of arches which would
do to copy into Punch.  In the chancel, just at the point below where the
high altar stands, was the burial-place of the old Barons of Kendal.  The
broken crusader, perhaps, represents one of them; and some of their
stalwart bones might be found by digging down.  Against the wall of the
choir, near the vacant space where the altar was, are some stone seats
with canopies richly carved in stone, all quite perfectly preserved,
where the priests used to sit at intervals, during the celebration of
mass.  Conceive all these shattered walls, with here and there an arched
door, or the great arched vacancy of a window; these broken stones and
monuments scattered about; these rows of pillars up and down the nave;
these arches, through which a giant might have stepped, and not needed to
bow his head, unless in reverence to the sanctity of the place,--conceive
it all, with such verdure and embroidery of flowers as the gentle, kindly
moisture of the English climate procreates on all old things, making them
more beautiful than new,--conceive it with the grass for sole pavement of
the long and spacious aisle, and the sky above for the only roof.  The
sky, to be sure, is more majestic than the tallest of those arches; and
yet these latter, perhaps, make the stronger impression of sublimity,
because they translate the sweep of the sky to our finite comprehension.
It was a most beautiful, warm, sunny day, and the ruins had all the
pictorial advantage of bright light and deep shadows.  I must not forget
that birds flew in and out among the recesses, and chirped and warbled,
and made themselves at home there.  Doubtless, the birds of the present
generation are the posterity of those who first settled in the ruins,
after the Reformation; and perhaps the old monks of a still earlier day
may have watched them building about the abbey, before it was a ruin at
all.

We had an old description of the place with us, aided by which we traced
out the principal part of the edifice, such as the church, as already
mentioned, and, contiguous to this, the Chapter-house, which is better
preserved than the church; also the kitchen, and the room where the monks
met to talk; and the range of wall, where their cells probably were.  I
never before had given myself the trouble to form any distinct idea of
what an abbey or monastery was,--a place where holy rites were daily and
continually to be performed, with places to eat and sleep contiguous and
convenient, in order that the monks might always be at hand to perform
those rites.  They lived only to worship, and therefore lived under the
same roof with their place of worship, which, of course, was the
principal object in the edifice, and hallowed the whole of it.  We
found, too, at one end of the ruins, what is supposed to have been a
school-house for the children of the tenantry or villeins of the abbey.
All round this room is a bench of stone against the wall, and the
pedestal also of the master's seat.  There are, likewise, the ruins of
the mill; and the mill-stream, which is just as new as ever it was, still
goes murmuring and babbling, and passes under two or three old bridges,
consisting of a low gray arch overgrown with grass and shrubbery.  That
stream was the most fleeting and vanishing thing about the ponderous and
high-piled abbey; and yet it has outlasted everything else, and might
still outlast another such edifice, and be none the worse for wear.

There is not a great deal of ivy upon the walls, and though an ivied wall
is a beautiful object, yet it is better not to have too much,--else it is
but one wall of unbroken verdure, on which you can see none of the
sculptural ornaments, nor any of the hieroglyphics of Time.  A sweep of
ivy here and there, with the gray wall everywhere showing through, makes
the better picture; and I think that nothing is so effective as the
little bunches of flowers, a mere handful, that grow in spots where the
seeds have been carried by the wind ages ago.

I have made a miserable botch of this description; it is no description,
but merely an attempt to preserve something of the impression it made on
me, and in this I do not seem to have succeeded at all.  I liked the
contrast between the sombreness of the old walls, and the sunshine
falling through them, and gladdening the grass that floored the aisles;
also, I liked the effect of so many idle and cheerful people, strolling
into the haunts of the dead monks, and going babbling about, and peering
into the dark nooks; and listening to catch some idea of what the
building was from a clerical-looking personage, who was explaining it to
a party of his friends.  I don't know how well acquainted this gentleman
might be with the subject; but he seemed anxious not to impart his
knowledge too extensively, and gave a pretty direct rebuff to an honest
man who ventured an inquiry of him.  I think that the railway, and the
hotel within the abbey grounds, add to the charm of the place.  A
moonlight solitary visit might be very good, too, in its way; but I
believe that one great charm and beauty of antiquity is, that we view it
out of the midst of quite another mode of life; and the more perfectly
this can be done, the better.  It can never be done more perfectly than
at Furness Abbey, which is in itself a very sombre scene, and stands,
moreover, in the midst of a melancholy valley, the Saxon name of which
means the Vale of the Deadly Nightshade.

The entrance to the stable-yard of the hotel is beneath a pointed arch of
Saxon architecture, and on one side of this stands an old building,
looking like a chapel, but which may have been a porter's lodge.  The
Abbot's residence was in this quarter; and the clerical personage, before
alluded to, spoke of these as the oldest part of the ruins.

About half a mile on the hither side of the abbey stands the village of
Dalton, in which is a castle built on a Roman foundation, and which was
afterwards used by the abbots (in their capacity of feudal lords) as a
prison.  The abbey was founded about 1027 by King Stephen, before he came
to the throne; and the faces of himself and of his queen are still to be
seen on one of the walls.

We had a very agreeable drive home (our drive hither had been
uncomfortably sunny and hot), and we stopped at Ulverton to buy a pair of
shoes for J----- and some drawing-books and stationery.  As we passed
through the little town in the morning, it was all alive with the bustle
and throng of the weekly market; and though this had ceased on our
return, the streets still looked animated, because the heat of the day
drew most of the population, I should imagine, out of doors.  Old men
look very antiquated here in their old-fashioned coats and breeches,
sunning themselves by the wayside.

We reached home somewhere about eight o'clock,--home I see I have called
it; and it seems as homelike a spot as any we have found in England,--the
old inn, close by the bridge, beside the clear river, pleasantly
overshadowed by trees.  It is entirely English, and like nothing that one
sees in America; and yet.  I feel as if I might have lived here a long
while ago, and had now come back because I retained pleasant
recollections of it.  The children, too, make themselves at home.  J-----
spends his time from morning to night fishing for minnows or trout, and
catching nothing at all, and U---- and R----- have been riding between
fields and barn in a hay-cart.  The roads give us beautiful walks along
the river-side, or wind away among the gentle hills; and if we had
nothing else to look at in these walks, the hedges and stone fences would
afford interest enough, so many and pretty are the flowers, roses,
honeysuckles, and other sweet things, and so abundantly does the moss and
ivy grow among the old stones of the fences, which would never have a
single shoot of vegetation on them in America till the very end of time.
But here, no sooner is a stone fence built, than Nature sets to work to
make it a part of herself.  She adopts it and adorns it, as if it were
her own child.  A little sprig of ivy may be seen creeping up the side,
and clinging fast with its many feet; a tuft of grass roots itself
between two of the stones, where a little dust from the road has been
moistened into soil for it: a small bunch of fern grows in another such
crevice; a deep, soft, green moss spreads itself over the top and all
along the sides of the fence; and wherever nothing else will grow,
lichens adhere to the stones and variegate their lines.  Finally, a great
deal of shrubbery is sure to cluster along its extent, and take away all
hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God
had had at least as much to do with it as man.  The trunks of the trees,
too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation.  Parasitical is an unkind
phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist
here between one plant and another; the strong thing--being always ready
to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty,
so that both are the richer,--as in the case of ivy and woodbine,
clustering up the trunk of a tall tree, and adding Corinthian grace to
its lofty beauty.

Mr. W------, our landlord, has lent us a splendid work with engravings,
illustrating the antiquities of Furness Abbey.  I gather from it that the
hotel must have been rebuilt or repaired from an old manor-house, which
was itself erected by a family of Prestons, after the Reformation, and
was a renewal from the Abbot's residence.  Much of the edifice probably,
as it exists now, may have been part of the original one; and there are
bas-reliefs of Scripture subjects, sculptured in stone, and fixed in the
wall of the dining-room, which have been there since the Abbot's time.
This author thinks that what we had supposed to be the school-house (on
the authority of an old book) was really the building for the reception
of guests, with its chapel.  He says that the tall arches in the church
are sixty feet high.  The Earl of Burlington, I believe, is the present
proprietor of the abbey.



THE LAKES.


July 16th.--On Saturday, we left Newby Bridge, and came by steamboat up
Windermere Lake to Lowwood Hotel, where we now are.  The foot of the lake
is just above Newby Bridge, and it widens from that point, but never to
such a breadth that objects are not pretty distinctly visible from shore
to shore.  The steamer stops at two or three places in the course of its
voyage, the principal one being Bowness, which has a little bustle and
air of business about it proper to the principal port of the lake.  There
are several small yachts, and many skiffs rowing about.  The banks are
everywhere beautiful, and the water, in one portion, is strewn with
islands; few of which are large enough to be inhabitable, but they all
seem to be appropriated, and kept in the neatest order.  As yet, I have
seen no wildness; everything is perfectly subdued and polished and imbued
with human taste, except, indeed, the outlines of the hills, which
continue very much the same as God made them.  As we approached the head
of the lake, the congregation of great hills in the distance became very
striking.  The shapes of these English mountains are certainly far more
picturesque than those which I have seen in Eastern America, where their
summits are almost invariably rounded, as I remember them.  They are
great hillocks, great bunches of earth, similar to one another in their
developments.  Here they have variety of shape, rising into peaks,
falling in abrupt precipices, stretching along in zigzag outlines, and
thus making the most of their not very gigantic masses, and producing a
remarkable effect.

We arrived at the Lowwood Hotel, which is very near the head of the lake,
not long after two o'clock.  It stands almost on the shore of Windermere,
with only a green lawn between,--an extensive hotel, covering a good deal
of ground; but low, and rather village-inn-like than lofty.  We found the
house so crowded as to afford us no very comfortable accommodations,
either as to parlor or sleeping-rooms, and we find nothing like the
home-feeling into which we at once settled down at Newby Bridge.  There
is a very pretty vicinity, and a fine view of mountains to the northwest,
sitting together in a family group, sometimes in full sunshine, sometimes
with only a golden gleam on one or two of them, sometimes all in a veil
of cloud, from which here and there a great, dusky head raises itself,
while you are looking at a dim obscurity.  Nearer, there are high, green
slopes, well wooded, but with such decent and well-behaved wood as you
perceive has grown up under the care of man; still no wildness, no
ruggedness,--as how should there be, when, every half-mile or so, a
porter's lodge or a gentleman's gateway indicates that the whole region
is used up for villas.  On the opposite shore of the lake there is a
mimic castle, which I suppose I might have mistaken for a real one two
years ago.  It is a great, foolish toy of gray stone.

A steamboat comes to the pier as many as six times a day, and
stage-coaches and omnibuses stop at the door still oftener, communicating
with Ambleside and the town of Windermere, and with the railway, which
opens London and all the world to us.  We get no knowledge of our
fellow-guests, all of whom, like ourselves, live in their own circles,
and are just as remote from us as if the lake lay between.  The only
words I have spoken since arriving here have been to my own family or to
a waiter, save to one or two young pedestrians who met me on a walk, and
asked me the distance to Lowwood Hotel.  "Just beyond here," said I, and
I might stay for months without occasion to speak again.

Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked to Ambleside,--distant barely two
miles.  It is a little town, chiefly of modern aspect, built on a very
uneven hillside, and with very irregular streets and lanes, which
bewilder the stranger as much as those of a larger city.  Many of the
houses look old, and are probably the cottages and farm-houses which
composed the rude village a century ago; but there are stuccoed shops and
dwellings, such as may have been built within a year or two; and three
hotels, one of which has the look of a good old village inn; and the
others are fashionable or commercial establishments.  Through the midst
of the village comes tumbling and rumbling a mountain streamlet, rushing
through a deep, rocky dell, gliding under an old stone inch, and turning,
when occasion calls, the great block of a water-mill.  This is the only
very striking feature of the village,--the stream taking its rough
pathway to the lake as it used to do before the poets had made this
region fashionable.

In the evening, just before eight o'clock, I took a walk alone, by a road
which goes up the hill, back of our hotel, and which I supposed might be
the road to the town of Windermere.  But it went up higher and higher,
and for the mile or two that it led me along, winding up, I saw no traces
of a town; but at last it turned into a valley between two high ridges,
leading quite away from the lake, within view of which the town of
Windermere is situated.  It was a very lonely road, though as smooth,
hard, and well kept as any thoroughfare in the suburbs of a city; hardly
a dwelling on either side, except one, half barn, half farm-house, and
one gentleman's gateway, near the beginning of the road, and another more
than a mile above.  At, two or three points there were stone barns, which
are here built with great solidity.  At one place there was a painted
board, announcing that a field of five acres was to be sold, and
referring those desirous of purchasing to a solicitor in London.  The
lake country is but a London suburb.  Nevertheless, the walk was lonely
and lovely; the copses and the broad hillside, the glimpses of the lake,
the great misty company of pikes and fells, beguiled me into a sense of
something like solitude; and the bleating of the sheep, remote and near,
had a like tendency.  Gaining the summit of the hill, I had the best view
of Windermere which I have yet attained,--the best, I should think, that
can be had, though, being towards the south, it brings the softer instead
of the more striking features of the landscape into view.  But it shows
nearly the whole extent of the lake, all the way from Lowwood, beyond
Newby Bridge, and I think there can hardly be anything more beautiful in
the world.  The water was like a strip and gleam of sky, fitly set among
lovely slopes of earth.  It was no broader than many a river, and yet you
saw at once that it could be no river, its outline being so different
from that of a running stream, not straight nor winding, but stretching
to one side or the other, as the shores made room for it.

This morning it is raining, and we are not very comfortable nor
contented, being all confined to our little parlor, which has a broken
window, against which I have pinned The Times to keep out the chill damp
air.  U---- has been ill, in consequence of having been overheated at
Newby Bridge.  We have no books, except guide-books, no means of
amusement, nothing to do.  There are no newspapers, and I shall remember
Lowwood not very agreeably.  As far as we are concerned, it is a
scrambling, ill-ordered hotel, with insufficient attendance, wretched
sleeping-accommodations, a pretty fair table, but German-silver forks
and spoons; our food does not taste very good, and yet there is really no
definite fault to be found with it.

Since writing the above, I have found the first volume of Sir Charles
Grandison, and two of G. P. R. James's works, in the coffee-room.  The
days pass heavily here, and leave behind them a sense of having answered
no very good purpose.  They are long enough, at all events, for the sun
does not set till after eight o'clock, and rises I know not when.  One of
the most remarkable distinctions between England and the United States is
the ignorance into which we fall of whatever is going on in the world the
moment we get away from the great thoroughfares and centres of life.  In
Leamington we heard no news from week's end to week's end, and knew not
where to find a newspaper; and here the case is neither better nor worse.
The rural people really seem to take no interest in public affairs; at
all events, they have no intelligence on such subjects.  It is possible
that the cheap newspapers may, in time, find their way into the cottages,
or, at least, into the country taverns; but it is not at all so now.  If
they generally know that Sebastopol is besieged, it is the extent of
their knowledge.  The public life of America is lived through the mind
and heart of every man in it; here the people feel that they have nothing
to do with what is going forward, and, I suspect, care little or nothing
about it.  Such things they permit to be the exclusive concern of the
higher classes.

In front of our hotel, on the lawn between us and the lake, there are two
trees, which we have hitherto taken to be yews; but on examining them
more closely, I find that they are pine-trees, and quite dead and dry,
although they have the aspect of dark rich life.  But this is caused by
the verdure of two great ivy-vines, which have twisted round them like
gigantic snakes, and, clambering up and throttling the life out of them,
have put out branches, and made crowns of thick green leaves, so that, at
a little distance, it is quite impossible not to take them for genuine
trees.  The trunks of the ivy-vines must be more than a foot in
circumference, and one feels they have stolen the life that belonged to
the pines.  The dead branches of one of the pines stick out horizontally
through the ivy-boughs.  The other shows nothing but the ivy, and in
shape a good deal resembles a poplar.  When the pine trunks shall have
quite crumbled away, the ivy-stems will doubtless have gained sufficient
strength to sustain themselves independently.


July 19th.--Yesterday S----- went down the lake in the steamboat to take
U----, baby, and nurse to Newby Bridge, while the three rest of us should
make a tour through the lake region.  After mamma's departure, and when I
had finished some letters, J----- and I set out on a walk, which finally
brought us to Bowness, through much delightful shade of woods, and past
beautiful rivulets or brooklets, and up and down many hills.  This chief
harbor of the lakes seemed alive and bustling with tourists, it being a
sunny and pleasant day, so that they were all abroad, like summer
insects.  The town is a confused and irregular little place, of very
uneven surface.  There is an old church in it, and two or three large
hotels.  We stayed there perhaps half an hour, and then went to the pier,
where shortly a steamer arrived, with music sounding,--on the deck of
which, with her back to us, sat a lady in a gray travelling-dress.
J----- cried out, "Mamma! mamma!" to which the lady deigned no notice,
but, he repeating it, she turned round, and was as much surprised, no
doubt, to see her husband and son, as if this little lake had been the
great ocean, and we meeting each other from opposite shores of it.  We
soon steamed back to Lowwood, and took a car thence for Rydal and
Grasmere, after a cold luncheon.  At Bowness I met Miss Charlotte
Cushman, who has been staying at the Lowwood Hotel with us since Monday,
without either party being aware of it.

Our road to Rydal lay through Ambleside, which is certainly a very pretty
town, and looks cheerfully in a sunny day.  We saw Miss Martineau's
residence, called "The Knoll," standing high up on a hillock, and having
at its foot a Methodist chapel, for which, or whatever place of Christian
worship, this good lady can have no occasion.  We stopped a moment in the
street below her house, and deliberated a little whether to call on her;
but concluded we would not.

After leaving Ambleside, the road winds in and out among the hills, and
soon brings us to a sheet (or napkin, rather than a sheet) of water,
which the driver tells us is Rydal Lake!  We had already heard that it
was but three quarters of a mile long, and one quarter broad; still, it
being an idea of considerable size in our minds, we had inevitably drawn
its ideal, physical proportions on a somewhat corresponding scale.  It
certainly did look very small; and I said, in my American scorn, that I
could carry it away easily in a porringer; for it is nothing more than a
grass-bordered pool among the surrounding hills which ascend directly
from its margin; so that one might fancy it, not, a permanent body of
water, but a rather extensive accumulation of recent rain.  Moreover, it
was rippled with a breeze, and so, as I remember it, though the sun
shone, it looked dull and sulky, like a child out of humor.  Now, the
best thing these small ponds can do is to keep perfectly calm and smooth,
and not attempt to show off any airs of their own, but content themselves
with serving as a mirror for whatever of beautiful or picturesque there
may be in the scenery around them.  The hills about Rydal Water are not
very lofty, but are sufficiently so as objects of every-day view,--
objects to live with; and they are craggier than those we have hitherto
seen, and bare of wood, which indeed would hardly grow on some of their
precipitous sides.

On the roadside, as we reach the foot of the lake, stands a spruce and
rather large house of modern aspect, but with several gables and much
overgrown with ivy,--a very pretty and comfortable house, built, adorned,
and cared for with commendable taste.  We inquired whose it was, and the
coachman said it was "Mr. Wordsworth's," and that "Mrs. Wordsworth was
still residing there."  So we were much delighted to have seen his abode,
and as we were to stay the night at Grasmere, about two miles farther on,
we determined to come back and inspect it as particularly as should be
allowable.  Accordingly, after taking rooms at Brown's Hotel, we drove
back in our return car, and, reaching the head of Rydal Water, alighted
to walk through this familiar scene of so many years of Wordsworth's
life.  We ought to have seen De Quincey's former residence and Hartley
Coleridge's cottage, I believe, on our way, but were not aware of it at
the time.  Near the lake there is a stone-quarry, and a cavern of some
extent, artificially formed, probably by taking out the stone.  Above the
shore of the lake, not a great way from Wordsworth's residence, there is
a flight of steps hewn in a rock and ascending to a rock seat where a
good view of the lake may be attained; and, as Wordsworth has doubtless
sat there hundreds of times, so did we ascend and sit down, and look at
the hills and at the flags on the lake's shore.

Reaching the house that had been pointed out to us as Wordsworth's
residence, we began to peer about at its front and gables, and over the
garden wall, on both sides of the road, quickening our enthusiasm as much
as we could, and meditating to pilfer some flower or ivy-leaf from the
house or its vicinity, to be kept as sacred memorials.  At this juncture
a man approached, who announced himself as the gardener of the place, and
said, too, that this was not Wordsworth's house at all, but the residence
of Mr. Ball, a Quaker gentleman; but that his ground adjoined
Wordsworth's, and that he had liberty to take visitors through the
latter.  How absurd it would have been if we had carried away ivy-leaves
and tender recollections from this domicile of a respectable Quaker!  The
gardener was an intelligent man, of pleasant, sociable, and respectful
address; and as we went along he talked about the poet, whom he had
known, and who, he said, was very familiar with the country people.  He
led us through Mr. Ball's grounds, up a steep hillside, by winding,
gravelled walks, with summer-houses at points favorable for them.  It was
a very shady and pleasant spot, containing about an acre of ground, and
all turned to good account by the manner of laying it out; so that it
seemed more than it really is.  In one place, on a small, smooth slab of
slate, let into a rock, there is an inscription by Wordsworth, which I
think I have read in his works, claiming kindly regards from those who
visit the spot after his departure, because many trees had been spared at
his intercession.  His own grounds, or rather his ornamental garden, is
separated from Mr. Ball's only by a wire fence, or some such barrier, and
the gates have no fastening, so that the whole appears like one
possession, and doubtless was so as regarded the poet's walks and
enjoyments.  We approached by paths so winding that I hardly know how the
house stands in relation to the road; but, after much circuity, we really
did see Wordsworth's residence,--an old house with an uneven ridge-pole,
built of stone, no doubt, but plastered over with some neutral tint,--a
house that would not have been remarkably pretty in itself, but so
delightfully situated, so secluded, so hedged about with shrubbery, and
adorned with flowers, so ivy-grown on one side, so beautified with the
personal care of him who lived in it and loved it, that it seemed the
very place for a poet's residence; and as if, while he lived so long in
it, his poetry had manifested itself in flowers, shrubbery, and ivy.  I
never smelt such a delightful fragrance of flowers as there was all
through the garden.  In front of the house there is a circular terrace of
two ascents, in raising which Wordsworth had himself performed much of
the labor; and here there are seats, from which we obtained a fine view
down the valley of the Rothay, with Windermere in the distance,--a view
of several miles, and which we did not suppose could be seen, after
winding among the hills so far from the lake.  It is very beautiful and
picture-like.  While we sat here, S----- happened to refer to the ballad
of little Barbara Lewthwaite, and J----- began to repeat the poem
concerning her, and the gardener said that "little Barbara" had died not
a great while ago, an elderly woman, leaving grown-up children behind
her.  Her marriage-name was Thompson, and the gardener believed there was
nothing remarkable in her character.

There is a summer-house at one extremity of the grounds, in deepest
shadow, but with glimpses of mountain views through trees which shut it
in, and which have spread intercepting boughs since Wordsworth died.  It
is lined with pine-cones, in a pretty way enough, but of doubtful taste.
I rather wonder that people of real taste should help Nature out, and
beautify her, or perhaps rather prettify her so much as they do,--opening
vistas, showing one thing, hiding another, making a scene picturesque,
whether or no.  I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there is
something false--a kind of humbug--in all this.  At any rate, the traces
of it do not contribute to my enjoyment, and, indeed, it ought to be done
so exquisitely as to leave no trace.  But I ought not to criticise in any
way a spot which gave me so much pleasure, and where it is good to think
of Wordsworth in quiet, past days, walking in his home-shadow of trees
which he knew, and training flowers, and trimming shrubs, and chanting in
an undertone his own verses up and down the winding walks.

The gardener gave J----- a cone from the summer-house, which had fallen
on the seat, and S----- got some mignonette, and leaves of laurel and ivy,
and we wended our way back to the hotel.  Wordsworth was not the owner of
this house; it being the property of Lady Fleming.  Mrs. Wordsworth still
lives there, and is now at home.

Five o'clock.---All day it has been cloudy and showery, with thunder now
and then; the mists hang low on the surrounding hills, adown which, at
various points, we can see the snow-white fall of little streamlets
("forces" they call them here) swollen by the rain.  An overcast day is
not so gloomy in the hill-country as in the lowlands; there are more
breaks, more transfusion of skylight through the gloom, as has been the
case to-day, and as I found in Lenox; we get better acquainted with
clouds by seeing at what height they be on the hillsides, and find that
the difference betwixt a fair day and a cloudy and rainy one is very
superficial, after all.  Nevertheless, rain is rain, and wets a man just
as much among the mountains as anywhere else; so we have been kept within
doors all day, till an hour or so ago, when J----- and I went down to the
village in quest of the post-office.

We took a path that leads from the hotel across the fields, and, coming
into a wood, crosses the Rothay by a one-arched bridge and passes the
village church.  The Rothay is very swift and turbulent to-day, and
hurries along with foam-specks on its surface, filling its banks from
brim to brim,--a stream perhaps twenty feet wide, perhaps more; for I am
willing that the good little river should have all it can fairly claim.
It is the St. Lawrence of several of these English lakes, through which
it flows, and carries off their superfluous waters.  In its haste, and
with its rushing sound, it was pleasant both to see and hear; and it
sweeps by one side of the old churchyard where Wordsworth lies buried,---
the side where his grave is made.  The church of Grasmere is a very plain
structure, with a low body, on one side of which is a small porch with a
pointed arch.  The tower is square and looks ancient; but the whole is
overlaid with plaster of a buff or pale yellow hue.  It was originally
built, I suppose, of rough shingly stones, as many of the houses
hereabouts are now, and, like many of them, the plaster is used to give a
finish.  We found the gate of the churchyard wide open; and the grass was
lying on the graves, having probably been mowed yesterday.  It is but a
small churchyard, and with few monuments of any pretension in it, most of
them being slate headstones, standing erect.  From the gate at which we
entered, a distinct foot-track leads to the corner nearest the riverside,
and I turned into it by a sort of instinct, the more readily as I saw a
tourist-looking man approaching from that point, and a woman looking
among the gravestones.  Both of these persons had gone by the time I came
up, so that J----- and I were left to find Wordsworth's grave all by
ourselves.

At this corner of the churchyard there is a hawthorn bush or tree, the
extremest branches of which stretch as far as where Wordsworth lies.
This whole corner seems to be devoted to himself and his family and
friends; and they all lie very closely together, side by side, and head
to foot, as room could conveniently be found.  Hartley Coleridge lies a
little behind, in the direction of the church, his feet being towards
Wordsworth's head, who lies in the row of those of his own blood.  I
found out Hartley Coleridge's grave sooner than Wordsworth's; for it is
of marble, and, though simple enough, has more of sculptured device about
it, having been erected, as I think the inscription states, by his
brother and sister.  Wordsworth has only the very simplest slab of slate,
with "William Wordsworth" and nothing else upon it.  As I recollect it,
it is the midmost grave of the row.  It is or has been well grass-grown,
but the grass is quite worn away from the top, though sufficiently
luxuriant at the sides.  It looks as if people had stood upon it, and so
does the grave next to it, which I believe is one of his children.  I
plucked some grass and weeds from it, and as he was buried within so few
years they may fairly be supposed to have drawn their nutriment from his
mortal remains, and I gathered them from just above his head.  There is
no fault to be found with his grave,--within view of the hills, within
sound of the river, murmuring near by,--no fault except that he is
crowded so closely with his kindred; and, moreover, that, being so old a
churchyard, the earth over him must all have been human once.  He might
have had fresh earth to himself; but he chose this grave deliberately.
No very stately and broad-based monument can ever be erected over it
without infringing upon, covering, and overshadowing the graves, not only
of his family, but of individuals who probably were quite disconnected
with him.  But it is pleasant to think and know--were it but on the
evidence of this choice of a resting-place--that he did not care for a
stately monument.

After leaving the churchyard, we wandered about in quest of the
post-office, and for a long time without success.  This little town of
Grasmere seems to me as pretty a place as ever I met with in my life.  It
is quite shut in by hills that rise up immediately around it, like a
neighborhood of kindly giants.  These hills descend steeply to the verge
of the level on which the village stands, and there they terminate at
once, the whole site of the little town being as even as a floor.  I call
it a village; but it is no village at all,--all the dwellings standing
apart, each in its own little domain, and each, I believe, with its own
little lane leading to it, independently of the rest.  Most of these are
old cottages, plastered white, with antique porches, and roses and other
vines trained against them, and shrubbery growing about them; and some
are covered with ivy.  There are a few edifices of more pretension and of
modern build, but not so strikingly so as to put the rest out of
countenance.  The post-office, when we found it, proved to be an ivied
cottage, with a good deal of shrubbery round it, having its own pathway,
like the other cottages.  The whole looks like a real seclusion, shut out
from the great world by these encircling hills, on the sides of which,
whenever they are not too steep, you see the division lines of property,
and tokens of cultivation,--taking from them their pretensions to savage
majesty, but bringing them nearer to the heart of man.

Since writing the above, I have been again with S----- to see
Wordsworth's grave, and, finding the door of the church open, we went in.
A woman and little girl were sweeping at the farther end, and the woman
came towards us out of the cloud of dust which she had raised.  We were
surprised at the extremely antique appearance of the church.  It is
paved with bluish-gray flagstones, over which uncounted generations have
trodden, leaving the floor as well laid as ever.  The walls are very
thick, and the arched windows open through them at a considerable
distance above the floor.  There is no middle aisle; but first a row of
pews next either wall, and then an aisle on each side of the pews,
occupying the centre of the church,--then, two side aisles, but no
middle one.  And down through the centre or the church runs a row of
five arches, very rude and round-headed, all of rough stone, supported
by rough and massive pillars, or rather square, stone blocks, which
stand in the pews, and stood in the same places probably, long before
the wood of those pews began to grow. Above this row of arches is
another row, built upon the same mass of stone, and almost as broad, but
lower; and on this upper row rests the framework, the oaken beams, the
black skeleton of the roof.  It is a very clumsy contrivance for
supporting the roof, and if it were modern, we certainly should condemn
it as very ugly; but being the relic of a simple age it comes in well
with the antique simplicity of the whole structure. The roof goes up,
barn-like, into its natural angle, and all the rafters and cross-beams
are visible.  There is an old font; and in the chancel is a niche,
where (judging from a similar one in Furness Abbey) the holy water used
to be placed for the priest's use while celebrating mass.  Around the
inside of the porch is a stone bench, against the wall, narrow and
uneasy, but where a great many people had sat, who now have found
quieter resting-places.

The woman was a very intelligent-looking person, not of the usual English
ruddiness, but rather thin and somewhat pale, though bright, of aspect.
Her way of talking was very agreeable.  She inquired if we wished to see
Wordsworth's monument, and at once showed it to us,--a slab of white
marble fixed against the upper end of the central row of stone arches,
with a pretty long inscription, and a profile bust, in bas-relief, of his
aged countenance.  The monument, is placed directly over Wordsworth's
pew, and could best be seen and read from the very corner seat where he
used to sit.  The pew is one of those occupying the centre of the church,
and is just across the aisle from the pulpit, and is the best of all for
the purpose of seeing and hearing the clergyman, and likewise as
convenient as any, from its neighborhood to the altar.  On the other side
of the aisle, beneath the pulpit, is Lady Fleming's pew.  This and one or
two others are curtained, Wordsworth's was not.  I think I can bring up
his image in that corner seat of his pew--a white-headed, tall, spare
man, plain in aspect--better than in any other situation.  The woman said
that she had known him very well, and that he had made some verses on a
sister of hers.  She repeated the first lines, something about a lamb,
but neither S----- nor I remembered them.

On the walls of the chancel there are monuments to the Flemings, and
painted escutcheons of their arms; and along the side walls also, and on
the square pillars of the row of arches, there are other monuments,
generally of white marble, with the letters of the inscription blackened.
On these pillars, likewise, and in many places in the walls, were hung
verses from Scripture, painted on boards.  At one of the doors was a
poor-box,--an elaborately carved little box, of oak, with the date 1648,
and the name of the church--St. Oswald's--upon it.  The whole interior of
the edifice was plain, simple, almost to grimness,--or would have been
so, only that the foolish church-wardens, or other authority, have washed
it over with the same buff color with which they have overlaid the
exterior.  It is a pity; it lightens it up, and desecrates it greatly,
especially as the woman says that there were formerly paintings on the
walls, now obliterated forever.  I could have stayed in the old church
much longer, and could write much more about it, but there must be an end
to everything.  Pacing it from the farther end to the elevation before
the altar, I found that it was twenty-five paces long.

On looking again at the Rothay, I find I did it some injustice; for at
the bridge, in its present swollen state, it is nearer twenty yards than
twenty feet across.  Its waters are very clear, and it rushes along with
a speed which is delightful to see, after an acquaintance with the muddy
and sluggish Avon and Leam.

Since tea I have taken a stroll from the hotel in a different direction
from heretofore, and passed the Swan Inn, where Scott used to go daily to
get a draught of liquor, when he was visiting Wordsworth, who had no wine
nor other inspiriting fluid in his house.  It stands directly on the
wayside,--a small, whitewashed house, with an addition in the rear that
seems to have been built since Scott's time.  On the door is the painted
sign of a swan, and the name "Scott's Swan Hotel."  I walked a
considerable distance beyond it, but, a shower cooling up, I turned back,
entered the inn, and, following the mistress into a snug little room, was
served with a glass of bitter ale.  It is a very plain and homely inn,
and certainly could not have satisfied Scott's wants if he had required
anything very far-fetched or delicate in his potations.  I found two
Westmoreland peasants in the room, with ale before them.  One went away
almost immediately; but the other remained, and, entering into
conversation with him, he told me that he was going to New Zealand, and
expected to sail in September.  I announced myself as an American, and he
said that a large party had lately gone from hereabouts to America; but
he seemed not to understand that there was any distinction between Canada
and the States.  These people had gone to Quebec.  He was a very civil,
well-behaved, kindly sort of person, of a simple character, which I took
to belong to the class and locality, rather than to himself individually.
I could not very well understand all that he said, owing to his
provincial dialect; and when he spoke to his own countrymen, or to the
women of the house, I really could but just catch a word here and there.
How long it takes to melt English down into a homogeneous mass!  He told
me that there was a public library in Grasmere to which he has access in
common with the other inhabitants, and a reading-room connected with it,
where he reads The Times in the evening.  There was no American smartness
in his mind.  When I left the house, it was showering briskly; but the
drops quite ceased, and the clouds began to break away before I reached
my hotel, and I saw the new moon over my right shoulder.


July 21st.--We left Grasmere yesterday, after breakfast; it being a
delightful morning, with some clouds, but the cheerfullest sunshine on
great part of the mountainsides and on ourselves.  We returned, in the
first place, to Ambleside, along the border of Grasmere Lake, which would
be a pretty little piece of water, with its steep and high surrounding
hills, were it not that a stubborn and straight-lined stone fence,
running along the eastern shore, by the roadside, quite spoils its
appearance.  Rydal Water, though nothing can make a lake of it, looked
prettier and less diminutive than at the first view; and, in fact, I find
that it is impossible to know accurately how any prospect or other thing
looks, until after at least a second view, which always essentially
corrects the first.  This, I think, is especially true in regard to
objects which we have heard much about, and exercised our imagination
upon; the first view being a vain attempt to reconcile our idea with the
reality, and at the second we begin to accept the thing for what it
really is.  Wordsworth's situation is really a beautiful one; and Nab
Scaur behind his house rises with a grand, protecting air.  We passed
Nab's cottage, in which De Quincey formerly lived, and where Hartley
Coleridge lived and died.  It is a small, buff-tinted, plastered stone
cottage, immediately on the roadside, and originally, I should think, of
a very humble class; but it now looks as if persons of taste might some
time or other have sat down in it, and caused flowers to spring up about
it.  It is very agreeably situated under the great, precipitous hill, and
with Rydal Water close at band, on the other side of the road.  An
advertisement of lodgings to let was put up on this cottage.

I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as England--
this part of England, at least--on a fine summer morning.  It makes one
think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal
verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages,--not
cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor; such nice
villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for comfort and
beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and
after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel
as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to
overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against
their walls, and thus live for the future in another sense than we
Americans do.  And the climate helps them out, and makes everything
moist, and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and arid, as
human life and vegetable life is so apt to be with us.  Certainly,
England can present a more attractive face than we can; even in its
humbler modes of life, to say nothing of the beautiful lives that might
be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose gateways, with
broad, smooth gravelled drives leading through them, one sees every mile
or two along the road, winding into some proud seclusion.  All this is
passing away, and society most assume new relations; but there is no harm
in believing that there has been something very good in English life,--
good for all classes while the world was in a state out of which these
forms naturally grew.

Passing through Ambleside, our phaeton and pair turned towards Ullswater,
which we were to reach through the Pass of Kirkstone.  This is some three
or four miles from Ambleside, and as we approached it the road kept
ascending higher and higher, the hills grew more bare, and the country
lost its soft and delightful verdure.  At last the road became so steep
that J----- and I alighted to walk.  This is the aspiring road that
Wordsworth speaks of in his ode; it passes through the gorge of
precipitous hills,--or almost precipitous,--too much so for even the
grass to grow on many portions, which are covered with gray smugly
stones; and I think this pass, in its middle part, must have looked just
the same when the Romans marched through it as it looks now.  No trees
could ever have grown on the steep hillsides, whereon even the English
climate can generate no available soil.  I do not know that I have seen
anything more impressive than the stern gray sweep of these naked
mountains, with nothing whatever to soften or adorn them.  The notch of
the White Mountains, as I remember it in my youthful days, is more
wonderful and richly picturesque, but of quite a different character.

About the centre and at the highest point of the pass stands an old stone
building of mean appearance, with the usual sign of an alehouse,
"Licensed to retail foreign spirits, ale, and tobacco," over the door,
and another small sign, designating it as the highest inhabitable house
in England.  It is a chill and desolate place for a residence.  They keep
a visitor's book here, and we recorded our names in it, and were not
too sorry to leave the mean little hovel, smelling as it did of
tobacco-smoke, and possessing all other characteristics of the humblest
alehouse on the level earth.

The Kirkstone, which gives the pass its name, is not seen in approaching
from Ambleside, until some time after you begin to descend towards
Brothers' Water.  When the driver first pointed it out, a little way up
the hill on our left, it looked no more than a bowlder of a ton or two in
weight, among a hundred others nearly as big; and I saw hardly any
resemblance to a church or church-spire, to which the fancies of past
generations have likened it.  As we descended the pass, however, and left
the stone farther and farther behind, it continued to show itself, and
assumed a more striking and prominent aspect, standing out clearly
relieved against the sky, so that no traveller would fail to observe it,
where there are so few defined objects to attract notice, amid the naked
monotony of the stern hills; though, indeed, if I had taken it for any
sort of an edifice, it would rather have been for a wayside inn or a
shepherd's hut than for a church.  We lost sight of it, and again beheld
it more and more brought out against the sky, by the turns of the road,
several times in the course of our descent.  There is a very fine view of
Brothers' Water, shut in by steep hills, as we go down Kirkstone Pass.

At about half past twelve we reached Patterdale, at the foot of
Ullswater, and here took luncheon.  The hotels are mostly very good all
through this region, and this deserved that character.  A black-coated
waiter, of more gentlemanly appearance than most Englishmen, yet taking a
sixpence with as little scruple as a lawyer would take his fee; the
mistress, in lady-like attire, receiving us at the door, and waiting upon
us to the carriage-steps; clean, comely housemaids everywhere at hand,--
all appliances, in short, for being comfortable, and comfortable, too,
within one's own circle.  And, on taking leave, everybody who has done
anything for you, or who might by possibility have done anything, is to
be feed.  You pay the landlord enough, in all conscience; and then you
pay all his servants, who have been your servants for the time.  But, to
say the truth, there is a degree of the same kind of annoyance in an
American hotel, although it is not so much an acknowledged custom.  Here,
in the houses where attendance is not charged in the bill, no wages are
paid by the host to those servants--chambermaid, waiter, and boots--who
come into immediate contact with travellers.  The drivers of the cars,
phaetons, and flys are likewise unpaid, except by their passengers, and
claim threepence a mile with the same sense of right as their masters in
charging for the vehicles and horses.  When you come to understand this
claim, not as an appeal to your generosity, but as an actual and
necessary part of the cost of the journey, it is yielded to with a more
comfortable feeling; and the traveller has really option enough, as to
the amount which he will give, to insure civility and good behavior on
the driver's part.

Ullswater is a beautiful lake, with steep hills walling it about, so
steep, on the eastern side, that there seems hardly room for a road to
run along the base.  We passed up the western shore, and turned off from
it about midway, to take the road towards Keswick.  We stopped, however,
at Lyulph's Tower, while our chariot went on up a hill, and took a guide
to show us the way to Airey Force,--a small cataract, which is claimed as
private property, and out of which, no doubt, a pretty little revenue is
raised.  I do not think that there can be any rightful appropriation, as
private property, of objects of natural beauty.  The fruits of the land,
and whatever human labor can produce from it, belong fairly enough to the
person who has a deed or a lease; but the beautiful is the property of
him who can hive it and enjoy it.  It is very unsatisfactory to think of
a cataract under lock and key.  However, we were shown to Airey Force by
a tall and graceful mountain-maid, with a healthy cheek, and a step that
had no possibility of weariness in it.  The cascade is an irregular
streak of foamy water, pouring adown a rude shadowy glen.  I liked well
enough to see it; but it is wearisome, on the whole, to go the rounds of
what everybody thinks it necessary to see.  It makes me a little ashamed.
It is somewhat as if we were drinking out of the same glass, and eating
from the same dish, as a multitude of other people.

Within a few miles of Keswick, we passed along at the foot of Saddleback,
and by the entrance of the Vale of St. John, and down the valley, on one
of the slopes, we saw the Enchanted Castle.  Thence we drove along by the
course of the Greta, and soon arrived at Keswick, which lies at the base
of Skiddaw, and among a brotherhood of picturesque eminences, and is
itself a compact little town, with a market-house, built of the old
stones of the Earl of Derwentwater's ruined castle, standing in the
centre,--the principal street forking into two as it passes it.  We
alighted at the King's Arms, and went in search of Southey's residence,
which we found easily enough, as it lies just on the outskirts of the
town.  We inquired of a group of people, two of whom, I thought, did not
seem to know much about the matter; but the third, an elderly man,
pointed it out at once,--a house surrounded by trees, so as to be seen
only partially, and standing on a little eminence, a hundred yards or so
from the road.

We went up a private lane that led to the rear of the place, and so
penetrated quite into the back-yard without meeting anybody,--passing a
small kennel, in which were two hounds, who gazed at us, but neither
growled nor wagged their tails.  The house is three stories high, and
seems to have a great deal of room in it, so as not to discredit its
name, "Greta Hall,"--a very spacious dwelling for a poet.  The windows
were nearly all closed; there were no signs of occupancy, but a general
air of neglect.  S-----, who is bolder than I in these matters, ventured
through what seemed a back garden gate, and I soon heard her in
conversation with some man, who now presented himself, and proved to be a
gardener.  He said he had formerly acted in that capacity for Southey,
although a gardener had not been kept by him as a regular part of his
establishment.  This was an old man with an odd crookedness of legs, and
strange, disjointed limp.  S----- had told him that we were Americans, and
he took the idea that we had come this long distance, over sea and land,
with the sole purpose of seeing Southey's residence, so that he was
inclined to do what he could towards exhibiting it.  This was but little;
the present occupant (a Mr. Radday, I believe the gardener called him)
being away, and the house shut up.

But he showed us about the grounds, and allowed us to peep into the
windows of what had been Southey's library, and into those of another of
the front apartments, and showed us the window of the chamber in the
rear, in which Southey died.  The apartments into which we peeped looked
rather small and low,--not particularly so, but enough to indicate an old
building.  They are now handsomely furnished, and we saw over one of the
fireplaces an inscription about Southey; and in the corner of the same
room stood a suit, of bright armor.  It is taller than the country-houses
of English gentlemen usually are, and it is even stately.  All about, in
front, beside it and behind, there is a great profusion of trees, most of
which were planted by Southey, who came to live here more than fifty
years ago, and they have, of course, grown much more shadowy now than he
ever beheld them; for he died about fourteen years since.  The grounds
are well laid out, and neatly kept, with the usual lawn and gravelled
walks, and quaint little devices in the ornamental way.  These may be of
later date than Southey's time.  The gardener spoke respectfully of
Southey, and of his first wife, and observed that "it was a great loss to
the neighborhood when that family went down."

The house stands directly above the Greta, the murmur of which is audible
all about it; for the Greta is a swift little river, and goes on its way
with a continual sound, which has both depth and breadth.  The gardener
led us to a walk along its banks, close by the Hall, where he said
Southey used to walk for hours and hours together.  He might, indeed, get
there from his study in a moment.  There are two paths, one above the
other, well laid out on the steep declivity of the high bank; and there
is such a very thick shade of oaks and elms, planted by Southey himself
over the bank, that all the ground and grass were moist, although it had
been a sunny day.  It is a very sombre walk; not many glimpses of the sky
through those dense boughs.  The Greta is here, perhaps, twenty yards
across, and very dark of hue, and its voice is melancholy and very
suggestive of musings and reveries; but I should question whether it were
favorable to any settled scheme of thought.  The gardener told us that
there used to be a pebbly beach on the margin of the river, and that it
was Southey's habit to sit and write there, using a tree of peculiar
shape for a table.  An alteration in the current of the river has swept
away the beach, and the tree, too, has fallen.  All these things were
interesting to me, although Southey was not, I think, a picturesque man,
--not one whose personal character takes a strong hold on the
imagination.  In these walks he used to wear a pair of shoes heavily
clamped with iron; very ponderous they must have been, from the
particularity with which the gardener mentioned them.

The gardener took leave of us at the front entrance of the grounds, and,
returning to the King's Arms, we ordered a one-horse fly for the fall of
Lodore.  Our drive thither was along the banks of Derwentwater, and it is
as beautiful a road, I imagine, as can be found in England or anywhere
else.  I like Derwentwater the best of all the lakes, so far as I have
yet seen them.  Skiddaw lies at the head of a long even ridge of
mountains, rising into several peaks, and one higher than the rest.  On
the eastern side there are many noble eminences, and on the west, along
which we drove, there is a part of the way a lovely wood, and nearly the
whole distance a precipitous range of lofty cliffs, descending sheer down
without any slope, except what has been formed in the lapse of ages by
the fall of fragments, and the washing down of smaller stones.  The
declivity thus formed along the base of the cliffs is in some places
covered with trees or shrubs; elsewhere it is quite bare and barren.  The
precipitous parts of the cliffs are very grand; the whole scene, indeed,
might be characterized as one of stern grandeur with an embroidery of
rich beauty, without lauding it too much.  All the sternness of it is
softened by vegetative beauty wherever it can possibly be thrown in; and
there is not here, so strongly as along Windermere, evidence that human
art has been helping out Nature.  I wish it were possible to give any
idea of the shapes of the hills; with these, at least, man has nothing to
do, nor ever will have anything to do.  As we approached the bottom of
the lake, and of the beautiful valley in which it lies, we saw one hill
that seemed to crouch down like a Titanic watch-dog, with its rear
towards the spectator, guarding the entrance to the valley.  The great
superiority of these mountains over those of New England is their variety
and definiteness of shape, besides the abundance everywhere of water
prospects, which are wanting among our own hills.  They rise up
decidedly, and each is a hill by itself, while ours mingle into one
another, and, besides, have such large bases that you can tell neither
where they begin nor where they end.  Many of these Cumberland mountains
have a marked vertebral shape, so that they often look like a group of
huge lions, lying down with their backs turned toward each other.  They
slope down steeply from narrow ridges; hence their picturesque seclusions
of valleys and dales, which subdivide the lake region into so many
communities.  Our hills, like apple-dumplings in a dish, have no such
valleys as these.

There is a good inn at Lodore,--a small, primitive country inn, which has
latterly been enlarged and otherwise adapted to meet the convenience of
the guests brought thither by the fame of the cascade; but it is still a
country inn, though it takes upon itself the title of hotel.

We found pleasant rooms here, and established ourselves for the night.
From this point we have a view of the beautiful lake, and of Skiddaw at
the head of it.  The cascade is within three or four minutes' walk,
through the garden gate, towards the cliff, at the base of which the inn
stands.  The visitor would need no other guide than its own voice, which
is said to be audible sometimes at the distance of four miles.  As we
were coming from Keswick, we caught glimpses of its white foam high up
the precipice; and it is only glimpses that can be caught anywhere,
because there is no regular sheet of falling water.  Once, I think, it
must have fallen abruptly over the edge of the long line of precipice
that here extends along parallel with the shore of the lake; but, in the
course of time, it has gnawed and sawed its way into the heart of the
cliff,--this persistent little stream,--so that now it has formed a rude
gorge, adown which it hurries and tumbles in the wildest way, over the
roughest imaginable staircase.  Standing at the bottom of the fall, you
have a far vista sloping upward to the sky, with the water everywhere as
white as snow, pouring and pouring down, now on one side of the gorge,
now on the other, among immense bowlders, which try to choke its passage.
It does not attempt to leap over these huge rocks, but finds its way in
and out among then, and finally gets to the bottom after a hundred
tumbles.  It cannot be better described than in Southey's verses, though
it is worthy of better poetry than that.  After all, I do not know that
the cascade is anything more than a beautiful fringe to the grandeur of
the scene; for it is very grand,--this fissure through the cliff,--with a
steep, lofty precipice on the right hand, sheer up and down, and on the
other hand, too, another lofty precipice, with a slope of its own ruin on
which trees and shrubbery have grown.  The right-hand precipice, however,
has shelves affording sufficient hold for small trees, but nowhere does
it slant.  If it were not for the white little stream falling gently
downward, and for the soft verdure upon either precipice, and even along
the very pathway of the cascade, it would be a very stern vista up that
gorge.

I shall not try to describe it any more.  It has not been praised too
much, though it may have been praised amiss.  I went thither again in the
morning, and climbed a good way up, through the midst of its rocky
descent, and I think I could have reached the top in this way.  It is
remarkable that the bounds of the water, from one step of its broken
staircase to another, give an impression of softness and gentleness; but
there are black, turbulent pools among the great bowlders, where the
stream seems angry at the difficulties which it meets with.  Looking
upward in the sunshine, I could see a rising mist, and I should not
wonder if a speck of rainbow were sometimes visible.  I noticed a small
oak in the bed of the cascade, and there is a lighter vegetation
scattered about.

At noon we took a car for Portinscale, and drove back along the road to
Keswick, through which we passed, stopping to get a perhaps of letters at
the post-office, and reached Portinscale, which is a mile from Keswick.
After dinner we walked over a bridge, and through a green lane, to the
church where Southey is buried.  It is a white church, of Norman
architecture, with a low, square tower.  As we approached, we saw two
persons entering the portal, and, following them in, we found the sexton,
who was a tall, thin old man, with white hair, and an intelligent,
reverent face, showing the edifice to a stout, red-faced, self-important,
good-natured John Bull of a gentleman.  Without any question on our part,
the old sexton immediately led us to Southey's monument, which is placed
in a side aisle, where there is not breadth for it to stand free of the
wall; neither is it in a very good light.  But, it seemed to me a good
work of art,--a recumbent figure of white marble, on a couch, the drapery
of which he has drawn about him,--being quite enveloped in what may be a
shroud.  The sculptor has not intended to represent death, for the figure
lies on its side, and has a book in its hand, and the face is lifelike,
and looks full of expression,--a thin, high-featured, poetic face, with a
finely proportioned head and abundant hair.  It represents Southey
rightly, at whatever age he died, in the full maturity of manhood, when
he was strongest and richest.  I liked the statue, and wished that it lay
in a broader aisle, or in the chancel, where there is an old tomb of a
knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family, who have held the place of honor
long enough to yield it now to a poet.  Southey's sculptor was Lough.  I
must not forget to mention that John Bull, climbing on a bench, to get a
better view of the statue, tumbled off with a racket that resounded
irreverently through the church.

The old, white-headed, thin sexton was a model man of his class, and
appeared to take a loving and cheerful interest in the building, and in
those who, from age to age, have worshipped and been buried there.  It is
a very ancient and interesting church.  Within a few years it has been
thoroughly repaired as to the interior, and now looks as if it might
endure ten more centuries; and I suppose we see little that is really
ancient, except the double row of Norman arches, of light freestone, that
support the oaken beams and rafters of the roof.  All the walls, however,
are venerable, and quite preserve the identity of the edifice.  There is
a stained-glass window of modern manufacture, and in one of the side
windows, set amidst plain glass, there is a single piece, five hundred
years old, representing St. Anthony, very finely executed, though it
looks a little faded.  Along the walls, on each side, between the arched
windows, there are marble slabs affixed, with inscriptions to the
memories of those who used to occupy the seats beneath.  I remember none
of great antiquity, nor any old monument, except that in the chancel,
over the knight and lady of the Ratcliffe family.  This consists of a
slab of stone, on four small stone pillars, about two feet high.  The
slab is inlaid with a brass plate, on which is sculptured the knight in
armor, and the lady in the costume of Elizabeth's time, exceedingly well
done and well preserved, and each figure about eighteen inches in length.
The sexton showed us a rubbing of them on paper.  Under the slab, which,
supported by the low stone pillars, forms a canopy for them, lie two
sculptured figures of stone, of life size, and at full length,
representing the same persons; but I think the sculptor was hardly equal
in his art to the engraver.

The most-curious antique relic in the church is the font.  The bowl is
very capacious, sufficiently so to admit of the complete immersion of a
child of two or three months old.  On the outside, in several
compartments, there are bas-reliefs of Scriptural and symbolic subjects,
--such as the tree of life, the word proceeding out of God's mouth, the
crown of thorns,--all in the quaintest taste, sculptured by some hand of
a thousand years ago, and preserving the fancies of monkish brains, in
stone.  The sexton was very proud of this font and its sculpture, and
took a kindly personal interest, in showing it; and when we had spent as
much time as we could inside, he led us to Southey's grave in the
churchyard.  He told us that he had known Southey long and well, from
early manhood to old age; for he was only twenty-nine when he came to
Keswick to reside.  He had known Wordsworth too, and Coleridge, and
Lovell; and he had seen Southey and Wordsworth walking arm in arm
together in that churchyard.  He seemed to revere Southey's memory, and
said that he had been much lamented, and that as many as a hundred people
came to the churchyard when he was buried.  He spoke with great praise of
Mrs. Southey, his first wife, telling of her charity to the poor, and how
she was a blessing to the neighborhood; but he said nothing in favor of
the second Mrs. Southey, and only mentioned her selling the library, and
other things, after her husband's death, and going to London.  Yet I
think she was probably a good woman, and meets with less than justice
because she took the place of another good woman, and had not time and
opportunity to prove herself as good.  As for Southey himself, my idea
is, that few better or more blameless men have ever lived; but he seems
to lack color, passion, warmth, or something that should enable me to
bring him into close relation with myself.  The graveyard where his body
lies is not so rural and picturesque as that where Wordsworth is buried;
although Skiddaw rises behind it, and the Greta is murmuring at no very
great distance away.  But the spot itself has a somewhat bare and bold
aspect, with no shadow of trees, no shrubbery.

Over his grave there is a ponderous, oblong block of slate, a native
mineral of this region, as hard as iron, and which will doubtless last
quite as long as Southey's works retain any vitality in English
literature.  It is not a monument fit for a poet.  There is nothing airy
or graceful about it,--and, indeed, there cannot he many men so solid and
matter-of-fact as to deserve a tomb like that.  Wordsworth's grave is
much better, with only a simple headstone, and the grass growing over his
mortality, which, for a thousand years, at least, it never can over
Southey's.  Most of the monuments are of this same black slate, and some
erect headstones are curiously sculptured, and seem to have been recently
erected.

We now returned to the hotel, and took a car for the valley of St. John.
The sky seemed to portend rain in no long time, and Skiddaw had put on
his cap; but the people of the hotel and the driver said that there would
be no rain this afternoon, and their opinion proved correct.  After
driving a few miles, we again cane within sight of the Enchanted Castle.
It stands rather more than midway adown the declivity of one of the
ridges that form the valley to the left, as you go southward, and its
site would have been a good one for a fortress, intended to defend the
lower entrance of this mountain defile.  At a proper distance, it looks
not unlike the gray dilapidation of a Gothic castle, which has been
crumbling and crumbling away for ages, until Time might be supposed to
have imperceptibly stolen its massive pile from man, and given it back to
Nature; its towers and battlements and arched entrances being so much
defaced and decayed that all the marks of human labor had nearly been
obliterated, and the angles of the hewn stone rounded away, while mosses
and weeds and bushes grow over it as freely as over a natural ledge of
rocks.  It is conceivable that in some lights, and in some states of the
atmosphere, a traveller, at the entrance of the valley, might really
imagine that he beheld a castle here; but, for myself, I must acknowledge
that it required a willing fancy to make me see it.  As we drew nearer,
the delusion did not immediately grow less strong; but, at length, we
found ourselves passing at the foot of the declivity, and, behold! it was
nothing but an enormous ledge of rock, coming squarely out of the
hillside, with other parts of the ledge cropping out in its vicinity.
Looking back, after passing, we saw a knoll or hillock, of which the
castled rock is the bare face.  There are two or three stone cottages
along the roadside, beneath the magic castle, and within the enchanted
ground.  Scott, in the Bridal of Triermain, locates the castle in the
middle of the valley, and makes King Arthur ride around it, which any
mortal would have great difficulty in doing.  This vale of St. John has
very striking scenery.  Blencathra shuts it in to the northward, lying
right across the entrance; and on either side there are lofty crags and
declivities, those to the west being more broken and better wooded than
the ridge to the eastward, which stretches along for several miles,
steep, high, and bare, producing only grass enough for sheep pasture,
until it rises into the dark brow of Helvellyn.  Adown this ridge, seen
afar, like a white ribbon, comes here and there a cascade, sending its
voice before it, which distance robs of all its fury, and makes it the
quietest sound in the world; and while you see the foamy leap of its
upper course a mile or two away, you may see and hear the selfsame little
brook babbling through a field, and passing under the arch of a rustic
bridge beneath your feet.  It is a deep seclusion, with mountains and
crags on all sides.

About a mile beyond the castle we stopped at a little wayside inn, the
King's Head, and put up for the night.  This, I believe, is the only inn
which I have found in England--the only one where I have eaten and slept
--that does not call itself a hotel.  It is very primitive in its
arrangements,--a long, low, whitewashed, unadorned, and ugly cottage of
two stories.  At one extremity is a barn and cow-house, and next to these
the part devoted to the better class of guests, where we had our parlor
and chambers, contiguous to which is the kitchen and common room, paved
with flagstones,--and, lastly, another barn and stable; all which
departments are not under separate roofs, but under the same long
contiguity, and forming the same building.  Our parlor opens immediately
upon the roadside, without any vestibule.  The house appears to be of
some antiquity, with beams across the low ceilings; but the people made
us pretty comfortable at bed and board, and fed us with ham and eggs,
veal-steaks, honey, oatcakes, gooseberry-tarts, and such cates and
dainties,--making a moderate charge for all.  The parlor was adorned with
rude engravings.  I remember only a plate of the Duke of Wellington, at
three stages of his life; and there were minerals, delved, doubtless, out
of the hearts of the mountains, upon the mantel-piece.  The chairs were
of an antiquated fashion, and had very capacious seats.  We were waited
upon by two women, who looked and acted not unlike the countryfolk of New
England,--say, of New Hampshire,--except that these may have been more
deferential.

While we remained here, I took various walks to get a glimpse of
Helvellyn, and a view of Thirlmere,--which is rather two lakes than one,
being so narrow at one point as to be crossed by a foot-bridge.  Its
shores are very picturesque, coming down abruptly upon it, and broken
into crags and prominences, which view their shaggy faces in its mirror;
and Helvellyn slopes steeply upward, from its southern shore, into the
clouds.  On its eastern bank, near the foot-bridge, stands Armboth House,
which Miss Martineau says is haunted; and I saw a painted board at the
entrance of the road which leads to it advertising lodgings there.  The
ghosts, of course, pay nothing for their accommodations.

At noon, on the day after our arrival, J----- and I went to visit the
Enchanted Castle; and we were so venturesome as to turn aside from the
road, and ascend the declivity towards its walls, which indeed we hoped
to surmount.  It proved a very difficult undertaking, the site of the
fortress being much higher and steeper than we had supposed; but we did
clamber upon what we took for the most elevated portion, when lo! we
found that we had only taken one of the outworks, and that there was a
gorge of the hill betwixt us and the main walls; while the citadel rose
high above, at more than twice the elevation which we had climbed.
J----- wished to go on, and I allowed him to climb, till he appeared to
have reached so steep and lofty a height that he looked hardly bigger
than a monkey, and I should not at all have wondered had he come rolling
down to the base of the rock where I sat.  But neither did he get
actually within the castle, though he might have done so but for a high
stone fence, too difficult for him to climb, which runs from the rock
along the hillside.  The sheep probably go thither much oftener than any
other living thing, and to them we left the castle of St. John, with a
shrub waving from its battlements, instead of a banner.

After dinner we ordered a car for Ambleside, and while it was getting
ready, I went to look at the river of St. John, which, indeed, flows
close beside our inn, only just across the road, though it might well be
overlooked unless you specially sought for it.  It is a brook brawling
over the stones, very much as brooks do in New England, only we never
think of calling them rivers there.  I could easily have made a leap from
shore to shore, and J----- scrambled across on no better footing than a
rail.  I believe I have complained of the want of brooks in other parts
of England, but there is no want of them here, and they are always
interesting, being of what size they may.

We drove down the valley, and gazed at the vast slope of Helvellyn, and
at Thirlmere beneath it, and at Eagle's Crag and Raven's Crag, which
beheld themselves in it, and we cast many a look behind at Blencathra,
and that noble brotherhood of mountains out of the midst of which we
came.  But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed
to me that I had eaten a score of mountains, and quaffed as many lakes,
all in the space of two or three days,--and the natural consequence was a
surfeit.  There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I
should not have been glad to spend a month; but, by flitting so quickly
from one point to another, I lost all the more recondite beauties, and
had come away without retaining even the surface of much that I had seen.
I am slow to feel,--slow, I suppose, to comprehend, and, like the
anaconda, I need to lubricate any object a great deal before I can
swallow it and actually make it my own.  Yet I shall always enjoy having
made this journey, and shall wonder the more at England, which
comprehends so much, such a rich variety, within its narrow bounds.  If
England were all the world, it still would have been worth while for the
Creator to have made it, and mankind would have had no cause to find
fault with their abode; except that there is not room enough for so many
as might be happy here.

We left the great inverted arch of the valley behind us, looking back as
long as we could at Blencathra, and Skiddaw over its shoulder, and the
clouds were gathering over them at our last glimpse.  Passing by Dummail
Raise (which is a mound of stones over an old British king), we entered
Westmoreland, and soon had the vale of Grasmere before us, with the
church where Wordsworth lies, and Nab Scaur and Rydal Water farther on.
At Ambleside we took another car for Newby Bridge, whither we drove along
the eastern shore of Windermere.  The superb scenery through which we had
been passing made what we now saw look tame, although a week ago we
should have thought it more than commonly interesting.  Hawkshead is the
only village on our road,--a small, whitewashed old town, with a
whitewashed old Norman church, low, and with a low tower, on the same
pattern with others that we have seen hereabouts.  It was between seven
and eight o'clock when we reached Newby Bridge, and heard U----'s voice
greeting us, and saw her head, crowned with a wreath of flowers, looking
down at us, out of the window of our parlor.

And to-day, July 23d, I have written this most incomplete and
unsatisfactory record of what we have done and seen since Wednesday last.
I am pretty well convinced that all attempts at describing scenery,
especially mountain scenery, are sheer nonsense.  For one thing, the
point of view being changed, the whole description, which you made up
from the previous point of view, is immediately falsified.  And when you
have done your utmost, such items as those setting forth the scene in a
play,--"a mountainous country, in the distance a cascade tumbling over a
precipice, and in front a lake; on one side an ivy-covered cottage,"--
this dry detail brings the matter before one's mind's eyes more
effectually than all the art of word-painting.


July 27th.--We are still at Newby Bridge, and nothing has occurred of
remarkable interest, nor have we made any excursions, beyond moderate
walks.  Two days have been rainy, and to-day there is more rain.  We find
such weather as tolerable here as it would probably be anywhere; but it
passes rather heavily with the children,--and for myself, I should prefer
sunshine.  Though Mr. White's books afford me some entertainment,
especially an odd volume of Ben Jonson's plays, containing "Volpone,"
"The Alchemist," "Bartholomew Fair," and others.  "The Alchemist" is
certainly a great play.  We watch all arrivals and other events from our
parlor window,--a stage-coach driving up four times in the twenty-four
hours, with its forlorn outsiders, all saturated with rain; the steamer,
from the head of the lake, landing a crowd of passengers, who stroll up
to the hotel, drink a glass of ale, lean over the parapet of the bridge,
gaze at the flat stones which pave the bottom of the Liver, and then
hurry back to the steamer again; cars, phaetons, horsemen, all damped and
disconsolate.  There are a number of young men staying at the hotel, some
of whom go forth in all the rain, fishing, and come back at nightfall,
trudging heavily, but with creels on their backs that do not seem very
heavy.  Yesterday was fair, and enlivened us a good deal.  Returning from
a walk in the forenoon, I found a troop of yeomanry cavalry in the
stable-yard of the hotel.  They were the North Lancashire Regiment, and
were on their way to Liverpool for the purpose of drill.  Not being old
campaigners, their uniforms and accoutrements were in so much the finer
order, all bright, and looking span-new, and they themselves were a body
of handsome and stalwart young men; and it was pleasant to look at their
helmets, and red jackets and carbines, and steel scabbarded swords, and
gallant steeds,--all so martial in aspect,--and to know that they were
only play-soldiers, after all, and were never likely to do nor suffer any
warlike mischief.  By and by their bugles sounded, and they trotted away,
wheeling over the ivy-grown stone bridge, and disappearing behind the
trees on the Milnethorpe road.  Our host comes forth from the bar with a
bill, which he presents to an orderly-sergeant.  He, the host, then tells
me that he himself once rode many years, a trooper, in this regiment, and
that all his comrades were larger men than himself.  Yet Mr. Thomas White
is a good-sized man, and now, at all events, rather overweight for a
dragoon.

Yesterday came one of those bands of music that seem to itinerate
everywhere about the country.  It consisted of a young woman who played
the harp, a bass-viol player, a fiddler, a flutist, and a bugler, besides
a little child, of whom, I suppose, the woman was the mother.  They sat
down on a bench by the roadside, opposite the house, and played several
tunes, and by and by the waiter brought them a large pitcher of ale,
which they quaffed with apparent satisfaction; though they seemed to be
foreigners by their mustachios and sallow hue, and would perhaps have
preferred a vinous potation.  One would like to follow these people
through their vagrant life, and see them in their social relations, and
overhear their talk with each other.  All vagrants are interesting; and
there is a much greater variety of them here than in America,--people who
cast themselves on Fortune, and take whatever she gives without a
certainty of anything.  I saw a travelling tinker yesterday,--a man with
a leather apron, and a string of skewers hung at his girdle, and a pack
over his shoulders, in which, no doubt, were his tools and materials of
trade.

It is remarkable what a natural interest everybody feels in fishing.  An
angler from the bridge immediately attracts a group to watch his luck.
It is the same with J-----, fishing for minnows, on the platform near
which the steamer lands its passengers.  By the by, U---- caught a minnow
last evening, and, immediately after, a good-sized perch,--her first
fish.


July 30th.--We left Newby Bridge, all of us, on Saturday, at twelve
o'clock, and steamed up the lake to Ambleside; a pretty good day as to
weather, but with a little tendency to shower.  There was nothing new on
the lake, and no new impressions, as far as I can remember.  At
Ambleside, S----- and nurse went shopping, after which we took a carriage
for Grasmere, and established ourselves at Brown's Hotel.  I find that my
impressions from our previous sight of all these scenes do not change on
revision.  They are very beautiful; but, if I must say it, I am a little
weary of them.  We soon tire of things which we visit merely by way of
spectacle, and with which we have no real and permanent connection.  In
such cases we very quickly wish the spectacle to be taken away, and
another substituted; at all events I do not care about seeing anything
more of the English lakes for at least a year.

Perhaps a part of my weariness is owing to the hotel-life which we lead.
At an English hotel the traveller feels as if everybody, from the
landlord downward, united in a joint and individual purpose to fleece
him, because all the attendants who come in contact with him are to be
separately considered.  So, after paying, in the first instance, a very
heavy bill, for what would seem to cover the whole indebtedness, there
remain divers dues still to be paid, to no trifling amount, to the
landlord's servants,--dues not to be ascertained, and which you never can
know whether you have properly satisfied.  You can know, perhaps, when
you have less than satisfied them, by the aspect of the waiter, which I
wish I could describe, not disrespectful in the slightest degree, but a
look of profound surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he
nevertheless pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not know it,
or could not believe his eyesight;--all this, however, with the most
quiet forbearance, a Christian-like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong
and insult; and finally, all in a moment's space indeed, he quits you and
goes about his other business.  If you have given him too much, you are
made sensible of your folly by the extra amount of his gratitude, and the
bows with which he salutes you from the doorstep.  Generally, you cannot
very decidedly say whether you have been right or wrong; but, in almost
all cases, you decidedly feel that you have been fleeced.  Then the
living at the best of English hotels, so far as my travels have brought
me acquainted with them, deserves but moderate praise, and is especially
lacking in variety.  Nothing but joints, joints, joints; sometimes,
perhaps, a meat-pie, which, if you eat it, weighs upon your conscience,
with the idea that you have eaten the scraps of other people's dinners.
At the lake hotels, the fare is lamb and mutton and grout,--the latter
not always fresh, and soon tired of.  We pay like nabobs, and are
expected to be content with plain mutton.

We spent the day yesterday at Grasmere, in quiet walks about the hotel;
and at a little past six in the afternoon, I took my departure in the
stage-coach for Windermere.  The coach was greatly overburdened with
outside passengers,--fifteen in all, besides the four insiders, and one
of the fifteen formed the apex of an immense pile of luggage on the top.
It seems to me miraculous that we did not topple over, the road being so
hilly and uneven, and the driver, I suspect, none the steadier for his
visits to all the tap-rooms along the route from Cockermouth.  There was
a tremendous vibration of the coach now and then; and I saw that, in case
of our going over, I should be flung headlong against the high stone
fence that bordered most of the road.  In view of this I determined to
muffle my head in the folds of my thick shawl at the moment of overturn,
and as I could do no better for myself, I awaited my fate with
equanimity.  As far as apprehension goes, I had rather travel from Maine
to Georgia by rail, than from Grasmere to Windermere by stage-coach.

At Lowwood, the landlady espied me from the window, and sent out a large
packet that had arrived by mail; but as it was addressed to some person
of the Christian name of William, I did not venture to open it.  She
said, also, that a gentleman had been there, who very earnestly desired
to see me, and I have since had reason to suppose that this was
Allingham, the poet.  We arrived at Windermere at half past seven, and
waited nearly an hour for the train to start.  I took a ticket for
Lancaster, and talked there about the war with a gentleman in the
coffee-room, who took me for an Englishman, as most people do nowadays,
and I heard from him--as you may from all his countrymen--an expression
of weariness and dissatisfaction with the whole business.  These fickle
islanders!  How differently they talked a year ago!  John Bull sees now
that he never was in a worse predicament in his life; and yet it would
not take much to make him roar as bellicosely as ever.  I went to bed at
eleven, and slept unquietly on feathers.

I had purposed to rise betimes, and see the town of Lancaster before
breakfast.  But here I reckoned without my host; for, in the first place,
I had no water for my ablutions, and my boots were not brushed; and so I
could not get down stairs till the hour I named for my coffee and chops;
and, secondly, the breakfast was delayed half an hour, though promised
every minute.  In fine, I had but just time to take a hasty walk round
Lancaster Castle, and see what I could of the town on my way,--a not very
remarkable town, built of stone, with taller houses than in the middle
shires of England, narrow streets up and down an eminence on which the
castle is situated, with the town immediately about it.  The castle is a
satisfactory edifice, but so renovated that the walls look almost
entirely modern, with the exception of the fine old front, with the
statue of an armed warrior, very likely John of Gaunt himself, in a niche
over the Norman arch of the entrance.  Close beside the castle stands an
old church.

The train left Lancaster at half past nine, and reached Liverpool at
twelve, over as flat and uninteresting a country as I ever travelled.  I
have betaken myself to the Rock Ferry Hotel, where I am as comfortable as
I could be anywhere but at home; but it is rather comfortless to think of
hone as three years off, and three thousand miles away.  With what a
sense of utter weariness, not fully realized till then, we shall sink
down on our own threshold, when we reach it.  The moral effect of being
without a settled abode is very wearisome.

Our coachman from Grasmere to Windermere looked like a great beer-barrel,
oozy with his proper liquor.  I suppose such solid soakers never get
upset.



THE LAUNCH.


August 2d.--Mr. ------ has urged me very much to go with his father and
family to see the launch of a great ship which has been built for their
house, and afterwards to partake of a picnic; so, on Tuesday morning I
presented myself at the landing-stage, and met the party, to take passage
for Chester.  It was a showery morning, and looked wofully like a rainy
day; but nothing better is to be expected in England; and, after all,
there is seldom such a day that you cannot glide about pretty securely
between the drops of rain.  This, however, did not turn out one of those
tolerable days, but grew darker and darker, and worse and worse; and was
worst of all when we had passed about six miles beyond Chester, and were
just on the borders of Wales, on the hither side of the river Dee, where
the ship was to be launched.  Here the train stopped, and absolutely
deposited our whole party of excursionists, under a heavy shower, in the
midst of a muddy potato-field, whence we were to wade through mud and
mire to the ship-yard, almost half a mile off.  Some kind Christian, I
know not whom, gave me half of his umbrella, and half of his cloak, and
thereby I got to a shed near the ship, without being entirely soaked
through.

The ship had been built on the banks of the Dee, at a spot where it is
too narrow for her to be launched directly across, and so she lay
lengthwise of the river, and was so arranged as to take the water
parallel with the stream.  She is, for aught I know, the largest ship in
the world; at any rate, longer than the Great Britain,--an iron-screw
steamer,--and looked immense and magnificent, and was gorgeously dressed
out in flags.  Had it been a pleasant day, all Chester and half Wales
would have been there to see the launch; and, in spite of the rain, there
were a good many people on the opposite shore, as well as on our side;
and one or two booths, and many of the characteristics of a fair,--that
is to say, men and women getting intoxicated without any great noise and
confusion.

The ship was expected to go off at about twelve o'clock, and at that
juncture all Mr. ------'s friends assembled under the bows of the ship,
where we were a little sheltered from the rain by the projection of that
part of the vessel over our heads.  The bottle of port-wine with which
she was to be christened was suspended from the bows to the platform
where we stood by a blue ribbon; and the ceremony was to be performed by
Mrs. ------, who, I could see, was very nervous in anticipation of the
ceremony.  Mr. ------ kept giving her instructions in a whisper, and
showing her how to throw the bottle; and as the critical moment
approached, he took hold of it along with her.  All this time we were
waiting in momentary expectation of the ship going off, everything being
ready, and only the touch of a spring, as it were, needed to make her
slide into the water.  But the chief manager kept delaying a little
longer, and a little longer; though the pilot on board sent to tell him
that it was time she was off.  "Yes, yes; but I want as much water as I
can get," answered the manager; and so he held on till, I suppose, the
tide had raised the river Dee to its very acme of height.  At last the
word was given; the ship began slowly to move; Mrs. ------ threw the
bottle against the bow with a spasmodic effort that dashed it into a
thousand pieces, and diffused the fragrance of the old port all around,
where it lingered several minutes.  I did not think that there could have
been such a breathless moment in an affair of this kind.

The ship moved majestically down toward the river; and unless it were
Niagara, I never saw anything grander and more impressive than the motion
of this mighty mass as she departed from us.  We on the platform, and
everybody along both shores of the Dee, took off our hats in the rain,
waved handkerchiefs, cheered, shouted,--"Beautiful!"  "What a noble
launch!"  "Never was so fair a sight!"--and, really, it was so grand,
that calm, majestic movement, that I felt the tears come into my eyes.
The wooden pathway adown which she was gliding began to smoke with the
friction; when all at once, when we expected to see her plunge into the
Dee, she came to a full stop.  Mr. ------, the father of my friend, a
gentleman with white hair, a dark, expressive face, bright eyes, and an
Oriental cast of features, immediately took the alarm.  A moment before
his countenance had been kindled with triumph; but now he turned pale as
death, and seemed to grow ten years older while I was looking at him.
Well he might, for his noble ship was stuck fast in the land of the Dee,
and without deepening the bed of the river, I do not see how her vast
iron hulk is ever to be got out.

[This steamer was afterwards successfully floated off on the 29th of the
same month.]

There was no help for it.  A steamboat was hitched on to the stranded
vessel, but broke two or three cables without stirring her an inch.  So,
after waiting long after we had given up all hope, we went to the office
of the ship-yard, and there took a lunch; and still the rain was pouring,
pouring, pouring, and I never experienced a blacker affair in all my
days.  Then we had to wait a great while for a train to take us back, so
that it was almost five o'clock before we arrived at Chester, where I
spent an hour in rambling about the old town, under the Rows; and on the
walls, looking down on the treetops, directly under my feet, and through
their thick branches at the canal, which creeps at the base, and at the
cathedral; walking under the dark intertwining arches of the cloisters,
and looking up at the great cathedral tower, so wasted away externally by
time and weather that it looks, save for the difference of color between
white snow and red freestone, like a structure of snow, half dissolved by
several warm days.

At the lunch I met with a graduate of Cambridge (England), tutor of a
grandson of Percival, with his pupil (Percival, the assassinated
minister, I mean).  I should not like this position of tutor to a young
Englishman; it certainly has an ugly twang of upper servitude.  I
observed that the tutor gave his pupil the best seat in the railway
carriage, and in all respects provided for his comfort before thinking of
his own; and this, not as a father does for his child, out of love, but
from a sense of place and duty, which I did not quite see how a gentleman
could consent to feel.  And yet this Mr. C------ was evidently a
gentleman, and a quiet, intelligent, agreeable, and, no doubt, learned
man.  K------ being mentioned, Mr. C------ observed that he had known him
well at college, having been his contemporary there.  He did not like
him, however,--thought him a "dangerous man," as well as I could gather;
he thinks there is some radical defect in K------'s moral nature, a lack
of sincerity; and, furthermore, he believes him to be a sensualist in his
disposition, in support of which view he said Mr. K------ had made
drawings, such as no pure man could have made, or could allow himself to
show or look at.  This was the only fact which Mr. C------ adduced,
bearing on his opinion of K------; otherwise, it seemed to be one of
those early impressions which a collegian gets of his fellow-students,
and which he never gets rid of, whatever the character of the person may
turn out to be in after years.  I have judged several persons in this
way, and still judge them so, though the world has cone to very different
conclusions.  Which is right?--the world, which has the man's whole
mature life on its side; or his early companion, who has nothing for it
but some idle passages of his youth?

Mr. M------ remarked of newspaper reporters, that they may be known at
all celebrations, and of any public occasion, by the enormous quantity of
luncheon they eat.


August 12th.--Mr. B------ dined with us at the Rock Ferry Hotel the day
before yesterday.  Speaking of Helvellyn, and the death of Charles Cough,
about whom Wordsworth and Scott have both sung, Mr. B------ mentioned a
version of that story which rather detracts from the character of the
faithful dog.

But somehow it lowers one's opinion of human nature itself, to be
compelled so to lower one's standard of a dog's nature.  I don't intend
to believe the disparaging story, but it reminds me of the story of the
New-Zealander who was asked whether he loved a missionary who had been
laboring for his soul and those of his countrymen.  "To be sure I loved
him.  Why, I ate a piece of him for my breakfast this morning!"

For the last week or two I have passed my time between the hotel and the
Consulate, and a weary life it is, and one that leaves little of profit
behind it.  I am sick to death of my office,--brutal captains and brutal
sailors; continual complaints of mutual wrong, which I have no power to
set right, and which, indeed, seem to have no right on either side; calls
of idleness or ceremony from my travelling countrymen, who seldom know
what they are in search of at the commencement of their tour, and never
have attained any desirable end at the close of it; beggars, cheats,
simpletons, unfortunates, so mixed up that it is impossible to
distinguish one from another, and so, in self-defence, the Consul
distrusts them all. . . . .

At the hotel, yesterday, there was a large company of factory people from
Preston, who marched up from the pier with a band of military music
playing before them.  They spent the day in the gardens and ball-room of
the hotel, dancing and otherwise merry-making; but I saw little of them,
being at the Consulate.  Towards evening it drizzled, and the assemblage
melted away gradually; and when the band marched down to the pier, there
were few to follow, although one man went dancing before the musicians,
flinging out his arms, and footing it with great energy and
gesticulation.  Some young women along the road likewise began to
dance as the music approached.

Thackeray has a dread of servants, insomuch that he hates to address
them, or to ask them for anything.  His morbid sensibility, in this
regard, has perhaps led him to study and muse upon them, so that he may
be presumed to have a more intimate knowledge of this class than any
other man.

Carlyle dresses so badly, and wears such a rough outside, that the
flunkies are rude to him at gentlemen's doors.

In the afternoon J----- and I took a walk towards Tranmere Hall, and
beyond, as far as Oxton.  This part of the country, being so near
Liverpool and Birkenhead, is all sprinkled over with what they call
"Terraces," "Bellevues," and other pretty names for semi-detached villas
("Recluse Cottage" was one) for a somewhat higher class.  But the old,
whitewashed stone cottage is still frequent, with its roof of slate or
thatch, which perhaps is green with weeds or grass.  Through its open
door, you see that it has a pavement of flagstones, or perhaps of red
freestone; and hogs and donkeys are familiar with the threshold.  The
door always opens directly into the kitchen, without any vestibule; and,
glimpsing in, you see that a cottager's life must be the very plainest
and homeliest that ever was lived by men and women.  Yet the flowers
about the door often indicate a native capacity for the beautiful; but
often there is only a pavement of round stones or of flagstones, like
those within.  At one point where there was a little bay, as it were, in
the hedge fence, we saw something like a small tent or wigwam,--an arch
of canvas three or four feet high, and open in front, under which sat a
dark-complexioned woman and some children.  The woman was sewing, and I
took them for gypsies.


August 17th.--Yesterday afternoon J----- and I went to Birkenhead Park,
which I have already described. . . . . It so happened that there was a
large school spending its holiday there; a school of girls of the lower
classes, to the number of a hundred and fifty, who disported themselves
on the green, under the direction of the schoolmistresses and of an old
gentleman.  It struck me, as it always has, to observe how the lower
orders of this country indicate their birth and station by their aspect
and features.  In America there would be a good deal of grace and beauty
among a hundred and fifty children and budding girls, belonging to
whatever rank of life.  But here they had universally a most plebeian
look,--stubbed, sturdy figures, round, coarse faces, snub-noses,--the
most evident specimens of the brown bread of human nature.  They looked
wholesome and good enough, and fit to sustain their rough share of life;
but it would have been impossible to make a lady out of any one of them.
Climate, no doubt, has most to do with diffusing a slender elegance over
American young-womanhood; but something, perhaps, is also due to the
circumstance of classes not being kept apart there as they are here: they
interfuse, amid the continual ups and downs of our social life; and so,
in the lowest stations of life, you may see the refining influence of
gentle blood.  At all events, it is only necessary to look at such an
assemblage of children as I saw yesterday, to be convinced that birth and
blood do produce certain characteristics.  To be sure, I have seen no
similar evidence in England or elsewhere of old gentility refining and
elevating the race.

These girls were all dressed in black gowns, with white aprons and
neckerchiefs, and white linen caps on their heads,--a very dowdyish
attire, and well suited to their figures.  I saw only two of their
games,--in one, they stood in a circle, while two of their number chased
one another within and without the ring of girls, which opened to let the
fugitive pass, but closed again to impede the passage of the pursuer.
The other was blind-man's-buff on a new plan: several of the girls,
sometimes as many as twenty, being blinded at once, and pursuing a single
one, who rang a hand-bell to indicate her whereabouts.  This was very
funny; the bell-girl keeping just beyond their reach, and drawing them
after her in a huddled group, so that they sometimes tumbled over one
another and lay sprawling.  I think I have read of this game in Strutt's
"English Sports and Pastimes."

We walked from the Park home to Rock Ferry, a distance of three or four
miles,--a part of which was made delightful by a foot-path, leading us
through fields where the grass had just been mown, and others where the
wheat harvest was commenced.  The path led us into the very midst of the
rural labor that was going forward; and the laborers rested a moment to
look at us; in fact, they seemed to be more willing to rest than American
laborers would have been.  Children were loitering along this path or
sitting down beside it; and we met one little maid, passing from village
to village, intent on some errand.  Reaching Tranmere, I went into an
alehouse, nearly opposite the Hall, and called for a glass of ale.  The
doorstep before the house, and the flagstone floor of the entry and
tap-room, were chalked all over in corkscrew lines,--an adornment that
gave an impression of care and neatness, the chalked lines being
evidently freshly made.  It was a low, old-fashioned room ornamented with
a couple of sea-shells, and an earthen-ware figure on the mantel-piece;
also with advertisements of Allsop's ale, and other drinks, and with a
pasteboard handbill of "The Ancient Order of Foresters"; any member of
which, paying sixpence weekly, is entitled to ten shillings per week, and
the attendance of a first-rate physician in sickness, and twelve pounds
to be paid to his friends in case of death.  Any member of this order,
when travelling, is sure (says the handbill) to meet with a brother
member to lend him a helping hand, there being nearly three thousand
districts of this order, and more than a hundred and nine thousand
members in Great Britain, whence it has extended to Australia, America,
and other countries.

Looking up at the gateway of Tranmere Hall, I discovered an inscription
on the red freestone lintel, and, though much time-worn, I succeeded in
reading it.  "Labor omnia vincit. 1614."  There were likewise some
initials which I could not satisfactorily make out.  The sense of this
motto would rather befit the present agricultural occupants of the house
than the idle gentlefolks who built and formerly inhabited it.



SMITHELL'S HALL.


August 25th.--On Thursday I went by invitation to Smithell's Hall in
Bolton le Moors to dine and spend the night.  The Hall is two or three
miles from the town of Bolton, where I arrived by railway from Liverpool,
and which seems to be a pretty large town, though the houses are
generally modern, or with modernized fronts of brick or stucco.  It is a
manufacturing town, and the tall brick chimneys rise numerously in the
neighborhood, and are so near Smithell's Hall that I suspect the
atmosphere is somewhat impregnated with their breath.  Mr. ------ can
comfort himself with the rent which he receives from the factories
erected upon his own grounds; and I suppose the value of his estate has
greatly increased by the growth of manufactories; although, unless he
wish to sell it, I do not see what good this can do him.

Smithell's Hall is one of the oldest residences of England, and still
retains very much the aspect that it must have had several centuries ago.
The house formerly stood around all four sides of a quadrangle, enclosing
a court, and with an entrance through an archway.  One side of this
quadrangle was removed in the time of the present Mr. ------'s father,
and the front is now formed by the remaining three sides.  They look
exceedingly ancient and venerable, with their range of gables and lesser
peaks.  The house is probably timber-framed throughout, and is overlaid
with plaster, and its generally light line is painted with a row of
trefoils in black, producing a very quaint effect.  The wing, forming one
side of the quadrangle, is a chapel, and has been so from time
immemorial; and Mr. ------ told me that he had a clergyman, and even a
bishop, in his own diocese.  The drawing-room is on the opposite side of
the quadrangle; and through an arched door, in the central portion, there
is a passage to the rear of the house.  It is impossible to describe such
an old rambling edifice as this, or to get any clear idea of its plan,
even by going over it, without the aid of a map.  Mr. ------ has added
some portions, and altered others, but with due regard to harmony with
the original structure, and the great body of it is still mediaeval.

The entrance-hall opens right upon the quadrangular court; and is a
large, low room, with a settle of carved old oak, and other old oaken
furniture,--a centre-table with periodicals and newspapers on it,--some
family pictures on the walls,--and a large, bright coal-fire in the
spacious grate.  The fire is always kept up, throughout summer and
winter, and it seemed to me an excellent plan, and rich with cheerful
effects; insuring one comfortable place, and that the most central in the
house, whatever may be the inclemency of the weather.  It was a cloudy,
moist, showery day, when I arrived; and this fire gave me the brightest
and most hospitable smile, and took away any shivery feeling by its mere
presence.  The servant showed me thence into a low-studded dining-room,
where soon Mrs. ------ made her appearance, and, after some talk, brought
me into the billiard-room, opening from the hall, where Mr. ------ and a
young gentleman were playing billiards, and two ladies looking on.  After
the game was finished, Mr. ------ took me round to see the house and
grounds.

The peculiarity of this house is what is called "The Bloody Footstep."
In the time of Bloody Mary, a Protestant clergyman--George Marsh by name
--was examined before the then proprietor of the Hall, Sir Roger Barton,
I think, and committed to prison for his heretical opinions, and was
ultimately burned at the stake.  As his guards were conducting him from
the justice-room, through the stone-paved passage that leads from front
to rear of Smithell's Hall, he stamped his foot upon one of the
flagstones in earnest protestation against the wrong which he was
undergoing.  The foot, as some say, left a bloody mark in the stone;
others have it, that the stone yielded like wax under his foot, and that
there has been a shallow cavity ever since.  This miraculous footprint is
still extant; and Mrs. ------ showed it to me before her husband took me
round the estate.  It is almost at the threshold of the door opening from
the rear of the house, a stone two or three feet square, set among
similar ones, that seem to have been worn by the tread of many
generations.  The footprint is a dark brown stain in the smooth gray
surface of the flagstone; and, looking sidelong at it, there is a shallow
cavity perceptible, which Mrs. ------ accounted for as having been worn
by people setting their feet just on this place, so as to tread the very
spot, where the martyr wrought the miracle.  The mark is longer than any
mortal foot, as if caused by sliding along the stone, rather than sinking
into it; and it might be supposed to have been made by a pointed shoe,
being blunt at the heel, and decreasing towards the toe.  The
blood-stained version of the story is more consistent with the appearance
of the mark than the imprint would be; for if the martyr's blood oozed
out through his shoe and stocking, it might have made his foot slide
along the stone, and thus have lengthened the shape.  Of course it is all
a humbug,--a darker vein cropping up through the gray flagstone; but, it
is probably a fact, and, for aught I know, may be found in Fox's Book of
Martyrs, that George Marsh underwent an examination in this house [There
is a full and pathetic account of the examination and martyrdom of George
Marsh in the eleventh section of Fox's Book of Martyrs, as I have just
found (June 9, 1867).  He went to Smithell's hall, among other places, to
be questioned by Mr. Barton.--ED.]; and the tradition may have connected
itself with the stone within a short time after the martyrdom; or,
perhaps, when the old persecuting knight departed this life, and Bloody
Mary was also dead, people who had stood at a little distance from the
Hall door, and had seen George Marsh lift his hand and stamp his foot
just at this spot,--perhaps they remembered this action and gesture, and
really believed that Providence had thus made an indelible record of it
on the stone; although the very stone and the very mark might have lain
there at the threshold hundreds of years before.  But, even if it had
been always there, the footprint might, after the fact, be looked upon as
a prophecy, from the time when the foundation of the old house was laid,
that a holy and persecuted man should one day set his foot here, on the
way that was to lead him to the stake.  At any rate, the legend is a good
one.

Mrs. ------ tells me that the miraculous stone was once taken up from the
pavement, and flung out of doors, where it remained many years; and in
proof of this, it is cracked quite across at one end.  This is a pity,
and rather interferes with the authenticity, if not of the stone itself,
yet of its position in the pavement.  It is not far from the foot of the
staircase, leading up to Sir Roger Barton's examination-room, whither we
ascended, after examining the footprint.  This room now opens sideways on
the Chapel, into which it looks down, and which is spacious enough to
accommodate a pretty large congregation.  On one of the walls of the
Chapel there is a marble tablet to the memory of one of the present
family,--Mr.------'s father, I suppose; he being the first of the name
who possessed the estate.  The present owners, however, seem to feel
pretty much the same pride in the antiquity and legends of the house as
if it had come down to them in an unbroken succession of their own
forefathers.  It has, in reality, passed several times from one family to
another, since the Conquest.

Mr. ------ led me through a spacious old room, which was formerly
panelled with carved oak, but which is converted into a brew-house, up a
pair of stairs, into the garret of one of the gables, in order to show me
the ancient framework of the house.  It is of oak, and preposterously
ponderous,--immense beams and rafters, which no modern walls could
support,--a gigantic old skeleton, which architects say must have stood a
thousand years; and, indeed, it is impossible to ascertain the date of
the original foundation, though it is known to have been repaired and
restored between five and six centuries ago.  Of course, in the lapse of
ages, it must continually have been undergoing minor changes, but without
at all losing its identity.  Mr. ------ says that this old oak wood,
though it looks as strong and as solid as ever, has really lost its
strength, and that it would snap short off, on application of any force.

After this we took our walk through the grounds, which are well wooded,
though the trees will bear no comparison with those which I have seen in
the midland parts of England.  It takes, I suspect, a much longer time
for trees to attain a good size here than in America; and these trees, I
think Mr. ------ told me, were principally set out by himself.  He is
upwards of sixty,--a good specimen of the old English country-gentleman,
sensible, loving his land and his trees and his dogs and his game, doing
a little justice-business, and showing a fitness for his position; so
that you feel satisfied to have him keep it.  He was formerly a member of
Parliament.  I had met him before at dinner at Mrs. H------'s. . . . . He
took pleasure in showing me his grounds, through which he has laid out a
walk, winding up and down through dells and over hillocks, and now and
then crossing a rustic bridge; so that you have an idea of quite an
extensive domain.

Beneath the trees there is a thick growth of ferns, serving as cover for
the game.  A little terrier-dog, who had hitherto kept us company, all at
once disappeared; and soon afterwards we heard the squeak of some poor
victim in the cover, whereupon Mr. ------ set out with agility, and ran
to the rescue.--By and by the terrier came back with a very guilty look.
From the wood we passed into the open park, whence we had a distant view
of the house; and, returning thither, we viewed it in other aspects, and
on all sides.  One portion of it is occupied by Mr. ------'s gardener,
and seems not to have been repaired, at least as to its exterior, for a
great many years,--showing the old wooden frame, painted black, with
plaster in the interstices; and broad windows, extending across the whole
breadth of the rooms, with hundreds of little diamond-shaped panes of
glass.  Before dinner I was shown to my room, which opens from an ancient
gallery, lined with oak, and lighted by a row of windows along one side
of the quadrangle.  Along this gallery are the doors of several
sleeping-chambers, one of which--I think it is here--is called "The Dead
Man's Chamber."  It is supposed to have been the room where the corpses
of persons connected with the household used to be laid out.  My own room
was called "The Beam Chamber," from am immense cross-beam that projects
from the ceiling, and seems to be an entire tree, laid across, and left
rough-hewn, though at present it is whitewashed.  The but of the tree
(for it diminishes from one end of the chamber to the other) is nearly
two feet square, in its visible part.

We dined, at seven o'clock, in a room some thirty-five or forty feet
long, and proportionably broad, all panelled with the old carved oak
which Mr. ------ took from the room which he had converted into a
brew-house.  The oak is now of a very dark brown hue, and, being highly
polished, it produces a sombre but rich effect.  It is supposed to be of
the era of Henry the Seventh, and when I examined it the next morning, I
found it very delicately and curiously wrought.  There are carved
profiles of persons in the costume of the times, done with great skill;
also foliage, intricate puzzles of intersecting lines, sacred devices,
anagrams, and, among others, the device of a bar across a tun, indicating
the name of Barton.  Most of the carving, however, is less elaborate and
intricate than these specimens, being in a perpendicular style, and on
one pattern.  Before the wood grew so very dark, the beauty of the work
must have been much more easily seen than now, as to particulars, though
I hardly think that the general effect could have been better; at least,
the sombre richness that overspreads the entire square of the room is
suitable to such an antique house.  An elaborate Gothic cornice runs
round the whole apartment.  The sideboard and other furniture are of
Gothic patterns, and, very likely, of genuine antiquity; but the
fireplace is perhaps rather out of keeping, being of white marble with
the arms of this family sculptured on it.

Though hardly sunset when we sat down to dinner, yet, it being an
overcast day, and the oaken room so sombre, we had candles burning on
the table; and, long before dinner was over, the candle-light was all the
light we had.  It is always pleasanter to dine by artificial light.
Mrs. ------'s dinner was a good one, and Mr. ------'s wines were very
good.  I had Mrs. ------ on one side, and another lady on the other
side. . . . .

After dinner there were two card-parties formed in the dining-room, at
one of which there was a game of Vingt-et-un, and at the other a game of
whist, at which Mrs. ------ and I lost several shillings to a Mrs. Halton
and Mr. Gaskell. . . . . After finishing our games at cards, Mrs. Halton
drove off in a pony-chaise to her own house; the other ladies retired,
and the gentlemen sat down to chat awhile over the hall fire,
occasionally sipping a glass of wine-and-water, and finally we all went
off to our rooms.  It was past twelve o'clock when I composed myself to
sleep, and I could not have slept long, when a tremendous clap of thunder
woke me just in time to see a vivid flash of lightning.  I saw no ghosts,
though Mrs. ------ tells me there is one, which makes a disturbance,
unless religious services are regularly kept up in the Chapel.

In the morning, before breakfast, we had prayers, read by Mr. ------, in
the oak dining-room, all the servants coming in, and everybody kneeling
down.  I should like to know how much true religious feeling is indicated
by this regular observance of religious rites in English families.  In
America, if people kneel down to pray, it is pretty certain that they
feel a genuine interest in the matter, and their daily life is supposed
to be in accordance with their devotions.  If an American is an infidel,
he knows it; but an Englishman is often so without suspecting it,--being
kept from that knowledge by this formality of family prayer, and his
other regularities of external worship. . . . .

There was a parrot in a corner of the dining-room, and, when prayers were
over, Mrs. ------ praised it very highly for having been so silent; it
being Poll's habit, probably, to break in upon the sacred exercises with
unseemly interjections and remarks.  While we were at breakfast, Poll
began to whistle and talk very vociferously, and in a tone and with
expressions that surprised me, till I learned that the bird is usually
kept in the kitchen and servants' hall, and is only brought into the
dining-room at prayer-time and breakfast.  Thus its mouth is full of
kitchen talk, which flows out before the gentlefolks with the queerest
effect.

After breakfast I examined the carvings of the room.  Mr. ------ has
added to its decorations the coats of arms of all the successive
possessors of the house, with those of the families into which they
married, including the Ratcliffes, Stanleys, and others.  From the
dining-room I passed into the library, which contains books enough to
make a rainy day pass pleasantly.  I remember nothing else that I need to
record; and as I sat by the hall fire, talking with Mr. Gaskell, at about
eleven o'clock, the butler brought me word that a fly, which I had
bespoken, was ready to convey me to the railway.  I took leave of
Mrs. ------, her last request being that I would write a ghost-story
for her house,--and drove off.



SHREWSBURY


September 5th.--Yesterday we all of us set forth from Rock Ferry at half
past twelve, and reached Shrewsbury between three and four o'clock, and
took up our quarters at the Lion Hotel.  We found Shrewsbury situated on
an eminence, around which the Severn winds, making a peninsula of it,
quite densely covered by the town.  The streets ascend, and curve about,
and intersect each other with the customary irregularity of these old
English towns, so that it is quite impossible to go directly to any given
point, or for a stranger to find his way to a place which he wishes to
reach, though, by what seems a singular good fortune, the sought-for
place is always offering itself when least expected.  On this account I
never knew such pleasant walking as in old streets like those of
Shrewsbury.  And there are passages opening under archways, and winding
up between high edifices, very tempting to the explorer, and generally
leading to some court, or some queer old range of buildings or piece of
architecture, which it would be the greatest pity to miss seeing.  There
was a delightful want of plan in the laying out of these ancient towns.
In fact, they never were laid out at all, nor were restrained by any plan
whatever, but grew naturally, with streets as eccentric as the pathway of
a young child toddling about the floor.

The first curious thing we particularly noticed, when we strolled out
after dinner, was the old market-house, which stands in the midst of an
oblong square; a gray edifice, elevated on pillars and arches, and with
the statue of an armed knight, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, in a
central niche, in its front.  The statue is older than the market-house,
having been moved thither from one of the demolished towers of the city
wall in 1795.  The market-house was erected in 1595.  There are other
curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of architecture about this
building; and the houses that stand about the square are, many of them,
very striking specimens of what dwelling-houses used to be in Elizabeth's
time, and earlier.  I have seen no such stately houses, in that style, as
we found here in Shrewsbury.  There were no such fine ones in Coventry,
Stratford, Warwick, Chester, nor anywhere else where we have been.  Their
stately height and spaciousness seem to have been owing to the fact that
Shrewsbury was a sort of metropolis of the country round about, and
therefore the neighboring gentry had their town-houses there, when London
was several days' journey off, instead of a very few hours; and, besides,
it was once much the resort of kings, and the centre-point of great
schemes of war and policy.  One such house, formerly belonging to a now
extinct family, that of Ireland, rises to the height of four stories, and
has a front consisting of what look like four projecting towers.  There
are ranges of embowered windows, one above another, to the full height of
the house, and these are surmounted by peaked gables.  The people of
those times certainly did not deny themselves light; and while
window-glass was an article of no very remote introduction, it was
probably a point of magnificence and wealthy display to have enough of
it.  One whole side of the room must often have been formed by the
window.  This Ireland mansion, as well as all the rest of the old houses
in Shrewsbury, is a timber house,--that is, a skeleton of oak, filled up
with brick, plaster, or other material, and with the beams of the timber
marked out with black paint; besides which, in houses of any pretension,
there are generally trefoils, and other Gothic-looking ornaments,
likewise painted black.  They have an indescribable charm for me,--the
more, I think, because they are wooden; but, indeed, I cannot tell why it
is that I like them so well, and am never tired of looking at them.  A
street was a development of human life, in the days when these houses
were built, whereas a modern street is but the cold plan of an architect,
without individuality or character, and without the human emotion which a
man kneads into the walls which he builds on a scheme of his own.

We strolled to a pleasant walk under a range of trees, along the shore of
the Severn.  It is called the Quarry Walk.  The Severn is a pretty river,
the largest, I think (unless it be such an estuary as the Mersey), that I
have met with in England; that is to say, about a fair stone's-throw
across.  It is very gentle in its course, and winds along between grassy
and sedgy banks, with a good growth of weeds in some part of its current.
It has one stately bridge, called the English Bridge, of several arches,
and, as we sauntered along the Quarry Walk, we saw a ferry where the boat
seemed to be navigated across by means of a rope, stretched from bank to
bank of the river.  After leaving the Quarry Walk, we passed an old tower
of red freestone, the only one remaining of those formerly standing at
intervals along the whole course of the town wall; and we also went along
what little is now left of the wall itself.  And thence, through the
irregular streets, which gave no account of themselves, we found our way,
I know not how, back to our hotel.  It is an uncheerful old hotel, which
takes upon itself to be in the best class of English country hotels, and
charges the best price; very dark in the lower apartments, pervaded with
a musty odor, but provided with a white-neckclothed waiter, who spares no
ceremony in serving the joints of mutton.

J----- and I afterwards walked forth again, and went this time to the
castle, which stands exactly above the railway station.  A path, from its
breadth quite a street, leads up to the arched gateway; but we found a
board, giving notice that these are private grounds, and no strangers
admitted; so that we only passed through the gate a few steps, and looked
about us, and retired, on perceiving a man approaching us through the
trees and shrubbery.  A private individual, it seems, has burrowed in
this old warlike den, and turned the keep, and any other available
apartment, into a modern dwelling, and laid out his pleasure-grounds
within the precincts of the castle wall, which allows verge enough for
the purpose.  The ruins have been considerably repaired.  This castle was
built at various times, the keep by Edward I., and other portions at an
earlier period, and it stands on the isthmus left by the Severn in its
wandering course about the town.  The Duke of Cleveland now owns it.  I
do not know who occupies it.

In the course of this walk, we passed St. Mary's Church,--a very old
church indeed, no matter how old, but say, eight hundred or a thousand
years.  It has a very tall spire, and the spire is now undergoing
repairs; and, seeing the door open, I went into the porch, but found no
admission further.  Then, walking around it, through the churchyard, we
saw that all the venerable Gothic windows--one of them grand in size--
were set with stained glass, representing coats of arms and ancient
armor, and kingly robes, and saints with glories about their heads, and
Scriptural people; but all of these, as far as our actual perception was
concerned, quite colorless, and with only a cold outline, dimly filled
up.  Yet, had we been within the church, and had the sunlight been
streaming through, what a warm, rich, gorgeous, roseate, golden life
would these figures have showed!

In the churchyard, close upon the street, so that its dust must be
continually scattered over the spot, I saw a heavy gray tombstone, with a
Latin inscription, purporting that Bishop Butler, the author of the
Analogy, in his lifetime had chosen this as a burial-place for himself
and his family.  There is a statue of him within the church.  From the
top of the spire a man, above a hundred years ago, attempted to descend,
by means of a rope, to the other side of the Severn; but the rope broke,
and he fell in his midway flight, and was killed.  It was an undertaking
worthy of Sam Patch.  There is a record of the fact on the outside of the
tower.

I remember nothing more that we saw yesterday; but, before breakfast,
J----- and I sallied forth again, and inspected the gateway and interior
court of the Council House,--a very interesting place, both in itself and
for the circumstances connected with it, it having been the place where
the councillors for the Welsh marches used to reside during their annual
meetings; and Charles the First also lived here for six weeks in 1612.
James II. likewise held his court here in 1687.  The house was originally
built in 1501,--that is, the Council House itself,--the gateway, and the
house through which it passes, being of as late date as 1620.  This
latter is a fine old house, in the usual style of timber architecture,
with the timber lines marked out, and quaint adornments in black paint;
and the pillars of the gateway which passes beneath the front chamber are
of curiously carved oak, which has probably stood the action of English
atmosphere better than marble would have done.  Passing through this
gateway, we entered a court, and saw some old buildings more or less
modernized, but without destroying their aged stateliness, standing round
three sides of it, with arched entrances and bow-windows, and windows in
the roofs, and peaked gables, and all the delightful irregularity and
variety that these houses have, and which make them always so fresh,--and
with so much detail that every minute you see something heretofore
unseen.  It must have been no unfit residence for a king and his court,
when those three sides of the square, all composing one great fantastic
house, were in their splendor.  The square itself, too, must have been a
busy and cheerful scene, thronged with attendants, guests, horses, etc.

After breakfast, we all walked out, and, crossing the English Bridge,
looked at the Severn over its parapet.  The river is here broader than
elsewhere, and very shallow, and has an island covered with bushes, about
midway across.  Just over the bridge we saw a church, of red freestone,
and evidently very ancient.  This is the Church of the Holy Cross, and is
a portion of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. John, which formerly covered
ten acres of ground.  We did not have time to go into the church; but the
windows and other points of architecture, so far as we could discern
them, and knew how to admire them, were exceedingly venerable and
beautiful.  On the other side of the street, over a wide space, there are
other remains of the old abbey; and the most interesting was a stone
pulpit, now standing in the open air, seemingly in a garden, but which
originally stood in the refectory of the abbey, and was the station
whence one of the monks read to his brethren at their meals.  The pulpit
is much overgrown with ivy.  We should have made further researches among
these remains, though they seem now to be in private grounds; but a large
mastiff came nut of his kennel, and, approaching us to the length of his
iron chain, began barking very fiercely.  Nor had we time to see half
that we would gladly have seen and studied here and elsewhere about
Shrewsbury.  It would have been very interesting to have visited
Hotspur's and Falstaff's battle-field, which is four miles from the town;
too distant, certainly, for Falstaff to have measured the length of the
fight by Shrewsbury clock.  There is now a church, built there by Henry
IV., and said to cover the bones of those slain in the battle.

Returning into the town, we penetrated some narrow lanes, where, as the
old story goes, people might almost shake hands across from the top
windows of the opposite houses, impending towards each other.  Emerging
into a wider street, at a spot somewhat more elevated than other parts of
the town, we went into a shop to buy some Royal Shrewsbury cakes, which
we had seen advertised at several shop windows.  They are a very rich
cake, with plenty of eggs, sugar, and butter, and very little flour.

A small public building of stone, of modern date, was close by; and
asking the shopwoman what it was, she said it was the Butter Cross, or
market for butter, eggs, and poultry.  It is a remarkable site, for here,
in ancient times, stood a stone cross, where heralds used to make
proclamation, and where criminals of state used to be executed.  David,
the last of the Welsh princes, was here cruelly put to death by Edward
I., and many noblemen were beheaded on this spot, after being taken
prisoners in the battle of Shrewsbury.

I can only notice one other memorable place in Shrewsbury, and that is
the Raven Inn, where Farquhar wrote his comedy of "The Recruiting
Officer" in 1701.  The window of the room in which he wrote is said to
look into the inn yard, and I went through the arched entrance to see if
I could distinguish it.  The hostlers were currying horses in the yard,
and so stared at me that I gave but the merest glance.  The Shrewsbury
inns have not only the customary names of English inns,--as the Lion, the
Stag,--but they have also the carved wooden figures of the object named,
whereas, in all other towns, the name alone remains.

We left Shrewsbury at half past ten, and arrived in London at about four
in the afternoon.



LONDON.


September 7th.--On Wednesday, just before dusk, J----- and I walked
forth, for the first time, in London.  Our lodgings are in George Street,
Hanover Square, No. 21; and St. George's Church, where so many marriages
in romance and in fashionable life have been celebrated, is a short
distance below our house, in the same street.  The edifice seems to be of
white marble, now much blackened with London smoke, and has a Grecian
pillared portico.  In the square, just above us, is a statue of William
Pitt.  We went down Bond Street, and part of Regent Street, just
estraying a little way from our temporary nest, and taking good account
of landmarks and corners, so as to find our way readily back again.  It
is long since I have had such a childish feeling; but all that I had
heard and felt about the vastness of London made it seem like swimming in
a boundless ocean, to venture one step beyond the only spot I knew.  My
first actual impression of London was of stately and spacious streets,
and by no means so dusky and grimy as I had expected,--not merely in the
streets about this quarter of the town, which is the aristocratic
quarter, but in all the streets through which we had passed from the
railway station.  If I had not first been so imbued with the smoke and
dinginess of Liverpool, I should doubtless have seen a stronger contrast
betwixt dusky London and the cheerful glare of our American cities.
There are no red bricks here; all are of a dark hue, and whatever of
stone or stucco has been white soon clothes itself in mourning.

Yesterday forenoon I went out alone, and plunged headlong into London,
and wandered about all day, without any particular object in view, but
only to lose myself for the sake of finding myself unexpectedly among
things that I had always read and dreamed about.  The plan was perfectly
successful, for, besides vague and unprofitable wanderings, I saw, in the
course of the day, Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Whitehall, the two new
Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross, St. Paul's, the, Strand, Fleet
Street, Cheapside, Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, the Haymarket, and a
great many other places, the names of which were classic in my memory.  I
think what interests me most here, is the London of the writers of Queen
Anne's age,--whatever Pope, The Spectator, De Foe, and down as late as
Johnson and Goldsmith, have mentioned.  The Monument, for instance, which
is of no great height nor beauty compared with that on Bunker Hill,
charmed me prodigiously.  St. Paul's appeared to me unspeakably grand and
noble, and the more so from the throng and bustle continually going on
around its base, without in the least disturbing the sublime repose of
its great dome, and, indeed, of all its massive height and breadth.
Other edifices may crowd close to its foundation, and people may tramp as
they like about it; but still the great cathedral is as quiet and serene
as if it stood in the middle of Salisbury Plain.  There cannot be
anything else in its way so good in the world as just this effect of St.
Paul's in the very heart and densest tumult of London.  I do not know
whether the church is built of marble, or of whatever other white or
nearly white material; but in the time that it has been standing there,
it has grown black with the smoke of ages, through which there are
nevertheless gleams of white, that make a most picturesque impression on
the whole.  It is much better than staring white; the edifice would not
be nearly so grand without this drapery of black.

I did not find these streets of the old city so narrow and irregular as I
expected.  All the principal ones are sufficiently broad, and there are
few houses that look antique, being, I suppose, generally modern-fronted,
when not actually of modern substance.  There is little or no show or
pretension in this part of London; it has a plain, business air,--an air
of homely, actual life, as of a metropolis of tradesmen, who have been
carrying on their traffic here, in sober earnest, for hundreds of years.
You observe on the sign-boards, "Established ninety years in Threadneedle
Street," "Established in 1109,"--denoting long pedigrees of silk-mercers
and hosiers,--De Foe's contemporaries still represented by their
posterity, who handle the hereditary yardstick on the same spot.

I must not forget to say that I crossed the Thames over a bridge which, I
think, is near Charing Cross.  Afterwards, I found my way to London
Bridge, where there was a delightful density of throng.  The Thames is
not so wide and majestic as I had imagined,--nothing like the Mersey, for
example.  As a picturesque object, however, flowing through the midst of
a city, it would lose by any increase of width.

Omnibuses are a most important aid to wanderers about London.  I reached
home, well wearied, about six o'clock.  In the course of the day, I had
seen one person whom I knew,--Mr. Clarke, to whom Henry B------
introduced me, when we went to see the great ship launched on the Dee.
This, I believe, was in Regent Street.  In that street, too, I saw a
company of dragoons, beautifully mounted, and defensively armed, in brass
helmets and steel cuirasses, polished to the utmost excess of splendor.
It was a pretty sight.  At one of the public edifices, on each side of
the portal, sat a mounted trooper similarly armed, and with his carbine
resting on his knee, just as motionless as a statue.  This, too, as a
picturesque circumstance, was very good, and really made an impression on
me with respect to the power and stability of the government, though I
could not help smiling at myself for it.  But then the thought, that for
generations an armed warrior has always sat just there, on his war-steed,
and with his weapon in his hand, is pleasant to the imagination,--
although it is questionable whether his carbine be loaded; and, no doubt,
if the authorities had any message to send, they would choose some other
messenger than this heavy dragoon,--the electric wire, for instance.
Still, if he and his horse were to be withdrawn from their post, night or
day (for I suppose the sentinels are on duty all night), it seems as if
the monarchy would be subverted, and the English constitution crumble
into rubbish; and, in honest fact, it will signify something like that,
when guard is relieved there for the last time.


September 8th.--Yesterday forenoon S-----, the two eldest children, and I
went forth into London streets, and proceeded down Regent Street, and
thence to St. James's Park, at the entrance of which is a statue of
somebody,--I forget whom.  On the very spacious gravel-walks, covering
several acres, in the rear of the Horse Guards, some soldiers were going
through their exercise; and, after looking at them awhile, we strolled
through the Park, alongside of a sheet of water, in which various kinds
of ducks, geese, and rare species of waterfowl were swimming.  There was
one swan of immense size, which moved about among the lesser fowls like a
stately, full-rigged ship among gunboats.  By and by we found ourselves
near what we since have discovered to be Buckingham Palace,--a long
building, in the Italian style, but of no impressiveness, and which one
soon wearies of looking at.  The Queen having gone to Scotland the day
before, the palace now looked deserted, although there was a one-horse
cab, of shabby aspect, standing at the principal front, where doubtless
the carriages of princes and the nobility draw up.  There is a fountain
playing before the palace, and water-fowl love to swim under its
perpetual showers.  These ducks and geese are very tame, and swim to the
margin of the pond to be fed by visitors, looking up at you with great
intelligence.

S----- asked a man in a sober suit of livery (of whom we saw several
about the Park), whose were some of the large mansions which we saw, and
he pointed out Stafford House, the residence of the Duke of Sutherland,
--a very noble edifice, much more beautiful than the palace, though not
so large; also the house of the Earl of Ellesmere, and residences of
other noblemen.  This range of mansions, along the park, from the spot
whence we viewed them, looks very much like Beacon Street, in Boston,
bordering on the Common, allowing for a considerable enlargement of
scale in favor of the Park residences.  The Park, however, has not the
beautiful elms that overshadow Boston Common, nor such a pleasant
undulation of surface, nor the fine off-view of the country, like that
across Charles River.  I doubt whether London can show so delightful a
spot as that Common, always excepting the superiority of English lawns,
which, however, is not so evident in the London parks, there being less
care bestowed on the grass than I should have expected.

From this place we wandered into what I believe to be Hyde Park,
attracted by a gigantic figure on horseback, which loomed up in the
distance.  The effect of this enormous steed and his rider is very grand,
seen in the misty atmosphere.  I do not understand why we did not see St.
James's Palace, which is situated, I believe, at the extremity of the
same range of mansions of which Stafford House is the opposite end.  From
the entrance of Hyde Park, we seem to have gone along Piccadilly, and,
making two or three turns, and getting bewildered, I put S----- and the
children into a cab, and sent them home.  Continuing my wanderings, I
went astray among squares of large aristocratic-looking edifices, all
apparently new, with no shops among them, some yet unfinished, and the
whole seeming like a city built for a colony of gentlefolks, who might be
expected to emigrate thither in a body.  It was a dreary business to
wander there, turning corner after corner, and finding no way of getting
into a less stately and more genial region.  At last, however, I passed
in front of the Queen's Mews, where sentinels were on guard, and where a
jolly-looking man, in a splendidly laced scarlet coat and white-topped
boots, was lounging at the entrance.  He looked like the prince of grooms
or coachmen. . . . .

The corner of Hyde Park was within a short distance, and I took a Hansom
at the cab-stand there, and drove to the American Despatch Agency, 26
Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, having some documents of state to be
sent by to-day's steamer.  The business of forwarding despatches to
America, and distributing them to the various legations and consulates in
Europe, must be a pretty extensive one; for Mr. Miller has a large
office, and two clerks in attendance.

From this point I went through Covent Garden Market, and got astray in
the city, so that I can give no clear account of my afternoon's
wanderings.  I passed through Holborn, however, and I think it was from
that street that I passed through an archway (which I almost invariably
do, when I see one), and found myself in a very spacious, gravelled
square, surrounded on the four sides by a continuous edifice of dark
brick, very plain, and of cold and stern aspect.  This was Gray's Inn,
all tenanted by a multitude of lawyers.  Passing thence, I saw
"Furnival's Inn" over another archway, but, being on the opposite side of
the street, I did not go thither.  In Holborn, still, I went through
another arched entrance, over which was "Staples Inn," and here likewise
seemed to be offices; but, in a court opening inwards from this, there
was a surrounding seclusion of quiet dwelling-houses, with beautiful
green shrubbery and grass-plots in the court, and a great many sunflowers
in full bloom.  The windows were open; it was a lovely summer afternoon,
and I have a sense that bees were humming in the court, though this may
have been suggested by my fancy, because the sound would have been so
well suited to the scene.  A boy was reading at one of the windows.
There was not a quieter spot in England than this, and it was very
strange to have drifted into it so suddenly out of the bustle and rumble
of Holborn; and to lose all this repose as suddenly, on passing through
the arch of the outer court.  In all the hundreds of years since London
was built, it has not been able to sweep its roaring tide over that
little island of quiet.  In Holborn I saw the most antique-looking houses
that I have yet met with in London, but none of very remarkable aspect.

I think I must have been under a spell of enchantment to-day, connecting
me with St. Paul's; for, trying to get away from it by various avenues, I
still got bewildered, and again and again saw its great dome and
pinnacles before me.  I observe that the smoke has chiefly settled on the
lower part of the edifice, leaving its loftier portions and its spires
much less begrimed.  It is very beautiful, very rich.  I did not think
that anything but Gothic architecture could so have interested me.  The
statues, the niches, the embroidery, as it were, of sculpture traced
around it, produced a delightful effect.  In front of St. Paul's there is
a statue of Queen Anne, which looks rather more majestic, I doubt not,
than that fat old dame ever did.  St. Paul's churchyard had always been a
place of immense interest in my imagination.  It is merely the not very
spacious street, running round the base of the church,--at least, this
street is included in the churchyard, together with the enclosure
immediately about the church, sowed with tombstones.  I meant to look for
the children's book-shop, but forgot it, or neglected it, from not
feeling so much interest in a thing near at hand as when it seemed
unattainable.

I watched a man tearing down the brick wall of a house that did not
appear very old; but it surprised me to see how crumbly the brick-work
was, one stroke of his pick often loosening several bricks in a row.  It
is my opinion that brick houses, after a moderate term of years, stand
more by habit and courtesy than through any adhesive force of the old
mortar.

I recommenced my wanderings; but I remember nothing else particularly
claiming to be mentioned, unless it be Paternoster Row,--a little,
narrow, darksome lane, in which, it being now dusk in that density of the
city, I could not very well see what signs were over the doors.  In this
street, or thereabouts, I got into an omnibus, and, being set down near
Regent's Circus, reached home well wearied.


September 9th.--Yesterday, having some tickets to the Zoological Gardens,
we went thither with the two eldest children.  It was a most beautiful
sunny day, the very perfection of English weather,--which is as much as
to say, the best weather in the world, except, perhaps, some few days in
an American October.  These gardens are at the end of Regent's Park,
farthest from London, and they are very extensive; though, I think, not
quite worthy of London,--not so good as one would expect them to be,--not
so fine and perfect a collection of beasts, birds, and fishes, as one
might fairly look for, when the greatest metropolis of the world sets out
to have such a collection at all.--My idea was, that here every living
thing was provided for, in the way best suited to its nature and habits,
and that the refinement of civilization had here restored a garden of
Eden, where all the animal kingdom had regained a happy home.  This is
not quite the case; though, I believe, the creatures are as comfortable
as could he expected, and there are certainly a good many strange beasts
here.  The hippopotamus is the chief treasure of the collection,--an
immense, almost misshapen, mass of flesh.  At this moment I do not
remember anything that interested me except a sick monkey,--a very large
monkey, and elderly he seemed to be.  His keeper brought him some
sweetened apple and water, and some tea; for the monkey had quite lost
his appetite, and refused all ordinary diet.  He came, however, quite
eagerly, and smelt of the tea and apple, the keeper exhorting him very
tenderly to eat.  But the poor monkey shook his head slowly, and with the
most pitiable expression, at the same time extending his hand to take the
keeper's, as if claiming his sympathy and friendship.  By and by the
keeper (who is rather a surly fellow) essayed harsher measures, and
insisted that the monkey should eat what had been brought for him, and
hereupon ensued somewhat of a struggle, and the tea was overturned upon
the straw of the bed.  Then the keeper scolded him, and, seizing him by
one arm, drew him out of his little bedroom into the larger cage, upon
which the wronged monkey began a loud, dissonant, reproachful chatter,
more expressive of a sense of injury than any words could be.

Observing the spectators in front of the cage, he seemed to appeal to
them, and addressed his chatter thitherward, and stretched out his long,
lean arm and black hand between the bars, as if claiming the grasp of any
one friend he might have in the whole world.  He was placable, however;
for when the keeper called him in a gentler tone, he hobbled towards him
with a very stiff and rusty movement, and the scene closed with their
affectionately hugging one another.  But I fear the poor monkey will die.
In a future state of being, I think it will be one of my inquiries, in
reference to the mysteries of the present state, why monkeys were made.
The Creator could not surely have meant to ridicule his own work.  It
might rather be fancied that Satan had perpetrated monkeys, with a
malicious purpose of parodying the masterpiece of creation!

The Aquarium, containing, in some of its compartments, specimens of the
animal and vegetable life of the sea, and, in others, those of the fresh
water, was richly worth inspecting; but not nearly so perfect as it might
be.  Now I think we have a right to claim, in a metropolitan
establishment of this kind, in all its departments, a degree of
perfection that shall quite outdo the unpractised thought of any man on
that particular subject.

There were a good many well-dressed people and children in the gardens,
Saturday being a fashionable day for visiting them.  One great amusement
was feeding some bears with biscuits and cakes, of which they seemed
exceedingly fond.  One of the three bears clambered to the top of a high
pole, whence he invited the spectators to hand him bits of cake on the
end of a stick, or to toss them into his mouth, which he opened widely
for that purpose.  Another, apparently an elderly bear, not having skill
nor agility for these gymnastics, sat on the ground, on his hinder end,
groaning most pitifully.  The third took what stray bits he could get,
without earning them by any antics.

At four o'clock there was some music from the band of the First
Life-Guards, a great multitude of chairs being set on the greensward in
the sunshine and shade, for the accommodation of the auditors.  Here we
had the usual exhibition of English beauty, neither superior nor
otherwise to what I have seen in other parts of England.  Before the
music was over, we walked slowly homeward, along beside Regent's Park,
which is very prettily laid out, but lacks some last touch of richness
and beauty; though, after all, I do not well see what more could be done
with grass, trees, and gravel-walks.  The children, especially J-----,
who had raced from one thing to another all day long, grew tired; so we
put them into a cab, and walked slowly through Portland Place, where are
a great many noble mansions, yet no very admirable architecture; none
that possessed, nor that ever can possess, the indefinable charm of some
of those poor old timber houses in Shrewsbury.  The art of domestic
architecture is lost.  We can rear stately and beautiful dwellings
(though we seldom do), but they do not seem proper to the life of man, in
the same way that his shell is proper to the lobster; nor, indeed, is the
mansion of the nobleman proper to him, in the same kind and degree, that
a hut is proper to a peasant.

From Portland Place we passed into Regent Street, and soon reached home.


September 10th.--Yesterday forenoon we walked out with the children,
intending for Charing Cross; but, missing our way, as usual, we went down
a rather wide and stately street, and saw before us an old brick edifice
with a pretty extensive front, over which rose a clock-tower,--the whole
dingy, and looking both gloomy and mean.  There was an arched entrance
beneath the clock-tower, at which two Guardsmen, in their bear-skin caps,
were stationed as sentinels; and from this circumstance, and our having
some guess at the locality, we concluded the old brick building to be St.
James's Palace.  Otherwise we might have taken it for a prison, or for a
hospital, which, in truth, it was at first intended for.  But, certainly,
there are many paupers in England who live in edifices of far more
architectural pretension externally than this principal palace of the
English sovereigns.

Seeing other people go through the archway, we also went, meeting no
impediment from the sentinels, and found ourselves in a large paved
court, in the centre of which a banner was stuck down, with a few
soldiers standing near it.  This flag was the banner of the regiment of
guards on duty.  The aspect of the interior court was as naked and dismal
as the outside, the brick being of that dark hue almost universal in
England.  On one side of the court there was a door which seemed to give
admission to a chapel, into which several persons went, and probably we
might have gone too, had we liked.  From this court, we penetrated into
at least two or three others; for the palace is very extensive, and all
of it, so far as I could see, on the same pattern,--large, enclosed
courts, paved, and quite bare of grass, shrubbery, or any beautiful
thing,--dark, stern, brick walls, without the slightest show of
architectural beauty, or even an ornament over the square, commonplace
windows, looking down on those forlorn courts.  A carriage-drive passes
through it, if I remember aright, from the principal front, emerging by
one of the sides; and I suppose that the carriages roll through the
palace, at the levees and drawing-rooms.  There was nothing to detain us
here any long time, so we went from court to court, and came out through
a side-opening.  The edifice is battlemented all round, and this, with
somewhat of fantastic in the shape of the clock-tower, is the only
attempt at ornament in the whole.

Then we skirted along St. James's Park, passing Marlborough House,--a red
brick building,--and a very long range of stone edifices, which, whether
they were public or private, one house or twenty, we knew not.  We
ascended the steps of the York column, and soon reached Charing Cross and
Trafalgar Square, where there are more architectural monuments than in
any other one place in London; besides two fountains, playing in large
reservoirs of water, and various edifices of note and interest.

Northumberland House, now, and for a long while, the town residence of
the Percys, stands on the Strand side,--over the entrance a lion, very
spiritedly sculptured, flinging out his long tail.  On another side of
the square is Morley's Hotel, exceedingly spacious, and looking more
American than anything else in the hotel line that I have seen here.

The Nelson monument, with Lord Nelson, in a cocked hat, on its top, is
very grand in its effect.  All about the square there were sundry
loungers, people looking at the bas-reliefs on Nelson's Column, children
paddling in the reservoirs of the fountains; and, it being a sunny day,
it was a cheerful and lightsome, as well as an impressive scene.  On
second thoughts, I do not know but that London should have a far better
display of architecture and sculpture than this, on its finest site, and
in its very centre; for, after all, there is nothing of the very best.
But I missed nothing at the time.

In the afternoon S----- and I set out to attend divine service in
Westminster Abbey.  On our way thither we passed through Pall Mall, which
is full of club-houses, and we were much struck with the beauty of the
one lately erected for the Carleton Club.  It is built of a buff-colored
or yellowish stone, with pillars or pilasters of polished Aberdeen
granite, wonderfully rich and beautiful; and there is a running border of
sculptured figures all round the upper part of the building, besides
other ornament and embroidery, wherever there was room or occasion for
it.  It being an oblong square, the smooth and polished aspect in this
union of two rich colors in it,--this delicacy and minuteness of finish,
this lavish ornament--made me think of a lady's jewel-box; and if it
could be reduced to the size of about a foot square, or less, it would
make the very prettiest one that ever was seen.  I question whether it
have any right to be larger than a jewel-box; but it is certainly a most
beautiful edifice.  We turned down Whitehall, at the head of which, over
the very spot where the Regicides were executed, stands the bronze
equestrian statue of Charles I.,--the statue that was buried under the
earth during the whole of Cromwell's time, and emerged after the
Restoration.  We saw the Admiralty and the Horse-Guards, and, in front of
the latter, the two mounted sentinels, one of whom was flirting and
laughing with some girls.  On the other side of the street stands the
Banqueting-House, built by Inigo Jones; from a window of which King
Charles stepped forth, wearing a kingly head, which, within a few minutes
afterwards, fell with a dead thump on the scaffold.  It was nobly done,--
and nobly suffered.  How rich is history in the little space around this
spot!

I find that the day after I reached London, I entirely passed by
Westminster Abbey without knowing it, partly because my eyes were
attracted by the gaudier show of the new Houses of Parliament, and partly
because this part of the Abbey has been so much repaired and renewed that
it has not the marks of age.  Looking at its front, I now found it very
grand and venerable; but it is useless to attempt a description: these
things are not to be translated into words; they can be known only by
seeing them, and, until seen, it is well to shape out no idea of them.
Impressions, states of mind, produced by noble spectacles of whatever
kind, are all that it seems worth while to attempt reproducing with the
pen.

After coming out of the Abbey, we looked at the two Houses of Parliament,
directly across the way,--an immense structure, and certainly most
splendid, built of a beautiful warm-colored stone.  The building has a
very elaborate finish, and delighted me at first; but by and by I began
to be sensible of a weariness in the effect, a lack of variety in the
plan and ornament, a deficiency of invention; so that instead of being
more and more interested the longer one looks, as is the case with an old
Gothic edifice, and continually reading deeper into it, one finds that
one has seen all in seeing a little piece, and that the magnificent
palace has nothing better to show one or to do for one.  It is wonderful
how the old weather-stained and smoke-blackened Abbey shames down this
brand-newness; not that the Parliament houses are not fine objects to
look at, too.

Yesterday morning we walked to Charing Cross, with U---- and J-----, and
there took a cab to the Tower, driving thither through the Strand, Fleet
Street, past St. Paul's, and amid all the thickest throng of the city.  I
have not a very distinct idea of the Tower, but remember that our cab
drove within an outer gate, where we alighted at a ticket-office; the old
royal fortress being now a regular show-place, at sixpence a head,
including the sight of armory and crown-jewels.  We saw about the gate
several warders or yeomen of the guard, or beefeaters, dressed in scarlet
coats of antique fashion, richly embroidered with golden crowns, both on
the breast and back, and other royal devices and insignia; so that they
looked very much like the kings on a pack of cards, or regular trumps, at
all events.  I believe they are old soldiers, promoted to this position
for good conduct.  One of them took charge of us, and when a sufficient
number of visitors had collected with us, he led us to see what very
small portion of the Tower is shown.

There is a great deal of ground within the outer precincts; and it has
streets and houses and inhabitants and a church within it; and, going up
and down behind the warder, without any freedom to get acquainted with
the place by strolling about, I know little more about it than when I
went in,--only recollecting a mean and disagreeable confusion of brick
walls, barracks, paved courts, with here and there a low bulky turret, of
rather antique aspect, and, in front of one of the edifices, a range of
curious old cannon, lying on the ground, some of them immensely large and
long, and beautifully wrought in brass.  I observed by a plan, however,
that the White Tower, containing the armory, stands about in the centre
of the fortress, and that it is a square, battlemented structure, having
a turret at each angle.  We followed the warder into the White Tower, and
there saw, in the first place, a long gallery of mounted knights, and men
at arms, which has been so often described that when I wish to recall it
to memory I shall turn to some other person's account of it.  I was much
struck, however, with the beautiful execution of a good many of the suits
of armor, and the exquisite detail with which they were engraved.  The
artists of those days attained very great skill, in this kind of
manufacture.  The figures of the knights, too, in full array, undoubtedly
may have shown a combination of stateliness and grace which heretofore I
have not believed in,--not seeing how it could be compatible with iron
garments.  But it is quite incomprehensible how, in the time of the
heaviest armor, they could strike a blow, or possess any freedom of
movement, except such as a turtle is capable of; and, in truth, they are
said not to have been able to rise up when overthrown.  They probably
stuck out their lances, and rode straight at the enemy, depending upon
upsetting him by their mass and weight.  In the row of knights is Henry
VIII.; also Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, who must have been an
immensely bulky man; also, a splendid suit of armor, gilded all over,
presented by the city of London to Charles I.; also, two or three suits
of boys' armor, for the little princes of the House of Stuart.  They
began to wear these burdens betimes, in order that their manhood might be
the more tolerant of them.  We went through this gallery so hastily that
it would have been about as well not to have seen it at all.

Then we went up a winding stair to another room, containing armor and
weapons, and beautiful brass cannon, that appeared to have been for
ornament rather than use, some of them being quite covered with embossed
sculpture, marvellously well wrought.  In this room was John of Gaunt's
suit, indicating a man seven feet high, and the armor seems to bear the
marks of much wear; but this may be owing to great scrubbing, throughout
the centuries since John of Gaunt died.  There, too, we saw the cloak in
which Wolfe fell, on the Plains of Abraham,--a coarse, faded, threadbare,
light-colored garment, folded up under a glass case.  Many other things
we might have seen, worthy of being attended to, had there been time to
look at them.

Following into still another room, we were told that this was Sir Walter
Raleigh's apartment, while confined in the Tower, so that it was within
these walls that he wrote the History of the World.  The room was
formerly lighted by lancet windows, and must have been very gloomy; but,
if he had the whole length of it to himself, it was a good space to walk
and meditate in.  On one side of the apartment is a low door, giving
admittance, we were told, to the cell where Raleigh slept; so we went in,
and found it destitute of any window, and so dark that we could not
estimate its small extent except by feeling about.  At the threshold of
this sleeping-kennel, there were one or two inscriptions, scratched in
the wall, but not, I believe, by Raleigh.

In this apartment, among a great many other curious things, are shown the
devilish instruments of torture which the Spaniards were bringing to
England in their Armada; and, at the end of the room, sits Queen
Elizabeth on horseback, in her high ruff and faded finery.  Very likely
none of these clothes were ever on her actual person.  Here, too, we saw
a headsman's block,--not that on which Raleigh was beheaded, which I
would have given gold to see, but the one which was used for the Scotch
Lords Kilmarnock, Lovat, and others, executed on account of the Rebellion
of 1745.  It is a block of oak, about two feet high, with a large knot in
it, so that it would not easily be split by a blow of the axe; hewn and
smoothed in a very workmanlike way, and with a hollow to accommodate the
head and shoulders on each side.  There were two or three very strong
marks of the axe in the part over which the neck lay, and several smaller
cuts; as if the first stroke nearly severed the head, and then the
chopping off was finished by smaller blows, as we see a butcher cutting
meat with his cleaver.  A headsman's axe was likewise shown us,--its date
unknown.

In the White Tower we were shown the Regalia, under a glass, and within
an iron cage.  Edward the Confessor's golden staff was very finely
wrought; and there were a great many pretty things; but I have a
suspicion, I know not why, that these are not the real jewels,--at least,
that such inestimable ones as the Koh-i-noor (or however it is spelt) are
less freely exhibited.

The warder then led us into a paved court, which he said was the place of
execution of all royal personages and others, who, from motives of fear
or favor, were beheaded privately.  Raleigh was among these, and so was
Anne Boleyn.  We then followed to the Beauchamp Tower, where many state
prisoners of note were confined, and where, on the walls of one of the
chambers, there are several inscriptions and sculptures of various
devices, done by the prisoners,--and very skilfully done, too, though
perhaps with no better instrument than an old nail.  These poor wretches
had time and leisure enough to spend upon their work.  This chamber is
lighted by small lancet windows, pierced at equal intervals round the
circle of the Beauchamp Tower; and it contains a large, square fireplace,
in which is now placed a small modern stove.  We were hurried away,
before we could even glance at the inscriptions, and we saw nothing else,
except the low, obscure doorway in the Bloody Tower, leading to the
staircase, under which were found the supposed bones of the little
princes; and lastly, the round, Norman arch, opening to the water
passage, called the Traitor's Gate.  Finally, we ate some cakes and buns
in the refreshment-room connected with the ticket-office, and then left
the fortress.  The ancient moat, by the way, has been drained within a
few years, and now forms a great hollow space, with grassy banks, round
about the citadel.

We now wished to see the Thames, and therefore threaded our way along
Thames Street, towards London Bridge, passing through a fish-market,
which I suppose to be the actual Billingsgate, whence originated all the
foul language in England.  Under London Bridge there is a station for
steamers running to Greenwich and Woolwich.  We got on board one of
these, not very well knowing, nor much caring, whither it might take us,
and steamed down the river, which is bordered with the shabbiest,
blackest, ugliest, meanest buildings: it is the back side of the town;
and, in truth, the muddy tide of the Thames deserves to see no better.
There was a great deal of shipping in the river, and many steamers, and
it was much more crowded than the Mersey, where all the ships go into
docks; but the vessels were not so fine.  By and by we reached Greenwich,
and went ashore there, proceeding up from the quay, past beer-shops and
eating-houses in great numbers and variety.  Greenwich Hospital is here a
very prominent object, and after passing along its extensive front,
facing towards the river, we entered one of the principal gates, as we
found ourselves free to do.

We now left the hospital, and steamed back to London Bridge, whence we
went up into the city, and, to finish the labors of the day, ascended the
Monument.  This seems to be still a favorite adventure with the cockneys;
for we heard one woman, who went up with us, saying that she had been
thinking of going up all her life, and another said that she had gone up
thirty years ago.  There is an iron railing, or rather a cage, round the
top, through which it would be impossible for people to force their way,
in order to precipitate themselves, as six persons have heretofore done.
There was a mist over London, so that we did not gain a very clear view,
except of the swarms of people running about, like ants, in the streets
at the foot of the Monument.

Descending, I put S----- and the children into a cab, and I myself
wandered about the city.  Passing along Fleet Street, I turned in through
an archway, which I rightly guessed to be the entrance to the Temple.  It
is a very large space, containing many large, solemn, and serious
edifices of dark brick, and no sooner do you pass under the arch than all
the rumble and bustle of London dies away at once; and it seems as if a
person might live there in perfect quiet, without suspecting that it was
not always a Sabbath.  People appear to have their separate residences
here; but I do not understand what is the economy of their lives.  Quite
in the deepest interior of this region, there is a large garden,
bordering on the Thames, along which it has a gravel-walk, and benches
where it would be pleasant to sit.  On one edge of the garden, there is
some scanty shrubbery, and flowers of no great brilliancy; and the
greensward, with which the garden is mostly covered, is not particularly
rich nor verdant.

Emerging from the Temple, I stopped at a tavern in the Strand, the waiter
of which observed to me, "They say Sebastopol is taken, sir!"  It was
only such an interesting event that could have induced an English waiter
to make a remark to a stranger, not called for in the way of business.

The best view we had of the town--in fact, the only external view, and
the only time we really saw the White Tower--was from the river, as we
steamed past it.  Here the high, square, battlemented White Tower, with
the four turrets at its corners, rises prominently above all other parts
of the fortress.


September 13th.--Mr. ------, the American Minister, called on me on
Tuesday, and left his card; an intimation that I ought sooner to have
paid my respects to him; so yesterday forenoon I set out to find his
residence, 56 Harley Street.  It is a street out of Cavendish Square, in
a fashionable quarter, although fashion is said to be ebbing away from
it.  The ambassador seems to intend some little state in his
arrangements; but, no doubt, the establishment compares shabbily enough
with those of the legations of other great countries, and with the houses
of the English aristocracy.  A servant, not in livery, or in a very
unrecognizable one, opened the door for me, and gave my card to a sort of
upper attendant, who took it in to Mr. ------.  He had three gentlemen
with him, so desired that I should be ushered into the office of the
legation, until he should be able to receive me.  Here I found a clerk or
attache, Mr. M------, who has been two or three years on this side of the
water; an intelligent person, who seems to be in correspondence with the
New York Courier and Enquirer.  By and by came in another American to get
a passport for the Continent, and soon the three gentlemen took leave of
the ambassador, and I was invited to his presence.

The tall, large figure of Mr. ------ has a certain air of state and
dignity; he carries his head in a very awkward way, but still looks like
a man of long and high authority, and, with his white hair, is now quite
venerable.  There is certainly a lack of polish, a kind of rusticity,
notwithstanding which you feel him to be a man of the world.  I should
think he might succeed very tolerably in English society, being heavy and
sensible, cool, kindly, and good-humored, with a great deal of experience
of life.  We talked about various matters, politics among the rest; and
he observed that if the President had taken the advice which he gave him
in two long letters, before his inauguration, he would have had a
perfectly quiet and successful term of office.  The advice was, to form a
perfectly homogeneous cabinet of Union men, and to satisfy the extremes
of the party by a fair distribution of minor offices; whereas he formed
his cabinet of extreme men, on both sides, and gave the minor offices to
moderate ones.  But the antislavery people, surely, had no representative
in the cabinet.  Mr. ------ further observed, that he thought the
President had a fair chance of re-nomination, for that the South could
not, in honor, desert him; to which I replied that the South had been
guilty of such things heretofore.  Mr. ------ thinks that the next
Presidential term will be more important and critical, both as to our
foreign relations and internal affairs, than any preceding one,--which I
should judge likely enough to be the case, although I heard the sane
prophecy often made respecting the present term.

The ambassador dined with us at Rock Park a year or two ago, and I then
felt, and always feel, as if he were a man of hearty feeling and
simplicity, and certainly it would be unjust to conclude otherwise,
merely from the fact (very suspicious, it is true) of his having been a
life-long politician.  After we had got through a little matter of
business (respecting a young American who has enlisted at Liverpool), the
Minister rang his bell, and ordered another visitor to be admitted; and
so I took my leave.  In the other room I found the Secretary of
Legation,--a tall, slender man of about forty, with a small head and
face,--gentlemanly enough, sensible, and well informed, yet I should
judge, not quite up to his place.  There was also a Dr. B------ from
Michigan present, and I rather fancy the ambassador is quite as much
bored with visitors as the consul at Liverpool.  Before I left the
office, Mr. ------ came in with Miss Sarah Clarke on his arm.  She had
come thither to get her passport vised; and when her business was
concluded, we went out together.

She was going farther towards the West End, and I into the city; so we
soon parted, and I lost myself among the streets and squares, arriving at
last at Oxford Street, though even then I did not know whether my face
were turned cityward or in the opposite direction.  Crossing Regent
Street, however, I became sure of my whereabout, and went on through
Holborn, and sought hither and thither for Grace Church Street, in order
to find the American Consul, General Campbell; for I needed his aid to
get a bank post-bill cashed.  But I could not find the street, go where I
would; so at last I went to No. 65 Cheapside, and introduced myself to
Mr. ------, whom I already knew by letter, and by a good many of his
poems, which he has sent me, and by two excellent watches, which I bought
of him.  This establishment, though it has the ordinary front of dingy
brick, common to buildings in the city, looks like a time-long stand, the
old shop of a London tradesman, with a large figure of a watch over the
door, a great many watches (and yet no gorgeous show of them) in the
window, a low, dark front shop, and a little room behind, where there was
a chair or two.  Mr. ------ is a small, slender young man, quite
un-English in aspect, with black, curly hair, a thin, dark, colorless
visage, very animated and of quick expression, with a nervous
temperament. . . . . He dismounted from a desk when my card was handed
to him, and turned to me with a vivid, glad look of recognition.

We talked, in the first place, about poetry and such matters, about
England and America, and the nature and depth of their mutual dislike,
and, of course, the slavery question came up, as it always does, in one
way or another.  Anon, I produced my bank post-bill; and Mr. ------
kindly engaged to identify me at the bank, being ready to swear to me, he
said, on the strength of my resemblance to my engraved portrait.  So we
set out for the Bank of England, and, arriving there, were directed to
the proper clerk, after much inquiry; but he told us that the bill was
not yet due, having been drawn at seven days, and having two still to
run,--which was the fact.  As I was almost shillingless, Mr. ------ now
offered to cash it for me.  He is very kind and good. . . . . Arriving at
his shop again, he went out to procure the money, and soon returned with
it.  At my departure he gave me a copy of a new poem of his, entitled
"Verdicts," somewhat in the manner of Lowell's satire. . . . . Mr. ------
resides now at Greenwich, whither he hoped I would come and see him on my
return to London.  Perhaps I will, for I like him.  It seems strange to
see an Englishman with so little physical ponderosity and obtuseness of
nerve.

After parting from him, it being three o'clock or thereabouts, I resumed
my wanderings about the city, of which I never weary as long as I can put
one foot before the other.

Seeing that the door of St. Paul's, under one of the semicircular
porches, was partially open, I went in, and found that the afternoon
service was about to be performed; so I remained to hear it, and to see
what I could of the cathedral.  What a total and admirable contrast
between this and a Gothic church! the latter so dim and mysterious, with
its various aisles, its intricacy of pointed arches, its dark walls and
columns and pavement, and its painted glass windows, bedimming even what
daylight might otherwise get into its eternal evening.  But this
cathedral was full of light, and light was proper to it.  There were no
painted windows, no dim recesses, but a wide and airy space beneath the
dome; and even through the long perspective of the nave there was no
obscurity, but one lofty and beautifully rounded arch succeeding to
another, as far as the eye could reach.  The walls were white, the
pavement constructed of squares of gray and white marble.  It is a most
grand and stately edifice, and its characteristic stems to be to continue
forever fresh and new; whereas such a church as Westminster Abbey must
have been as venerable as it is now from the first day when it grew to be
an edifice at all.  How wonderful man is in his works!  How glad I am
that there can be two such admirable churches, in their opposite styles,
as St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey!

The organ was played while I was there, and there was an anthem
beautifully chanted by voices that came from afar off and remotely above,
as if out of a sunny sky.  Meanwhile I looked at such monuments as were
near; chiefly those erected to military or naval men,--Picton, General
Ponsonby, Lord St. Vincent, and others; but against one of the pillars
stands a statue of Dr. Johnson,--a noble and thoughtful figure, with a
development of muscle befitting an athlete.  I doubt whether sculptors do
not err in point of taste, by making all their statues models of physical
perfection, instead of expressing by them the individual character and
habits of the man.  The statue in the market-place at Lichfield has more
of the homely truth of Johnson's actual personality than this.

St. Paul's, as yet, is by no means crowded with monuments; there is,
indeed, plenty of room for a mob of the illustrious, yet to come.  But it
seems to me that the character of the edifice would be injured by
allowing the monuments to be clustered together so closely as at
Westminster, by incrusting the walls with them, or letting the statues
throng about the pedestals of columns.  There must be no confusion in
such a cathedral as this, and I question whether the effect will ever be
better than it is now, when each monument has its distinct place, and as
your eye wanders around, you are not distracted from noting each marble
man, in his niche against the wall, or at the base of a marble pillar.
Space, distance, light, regularity, are to be preserved, even if the
result should be a degree of nakedness.

I saw Mr. Appleton of the Legation, and Dr. Brown, on the floor of the
cathedral.  They were about to go over the whole edifice, and had engaged
a guide for that purpose; but, as I intend to go thither again with
S-----, I did not accompany them, but went away the quicker that one of
the gentlemen put on his hat, and I was ashamed of being seen in company
with a man who could wear his hat in a cathedral.  Not that he meant any
irreverence; but simply felt that he was in a great public building,--as
big, nearly, as all out of doors,--and so forgot that it was a
consecrated place of worship.  The sky is the dome of a greater cathedral
than St. Paul's, and built by a greater architect than Sir Christopher
Wren, and yet we wear our hats unscrupulously beneath it.

I remember no other event of importance, except that I penetrated into a
narrow lane or court, either in the Strand or Fleet Street, where was a
tavern, calling itself the "Old Thatched House," and purporting to have
been Nell Gwyn's dairy.  I met with a great many alleys and obscure
archways, in the course of the day's wanderings.


September 14th.--Yesterday, in the earlier part of the day, it poured
with rain, and I did not go out till five o'clock in the afternoon; nor
did I then meet with anything interesting.  I walked through Albemarle
Street, for the purpose of looking at Murray's shop, but missed it
entirely, at my first inquisition.  The street is one of hotels,
principally, with only a few tradesmen's shops, and has a quiet,
aristocratic aspect.  On my return, down the other sidewalk, I did
discover the famous publisher's locality; but merely by the name
"Mr. Murray," engraved on a rather large brass plate, such as doctors
use, on the door.  There was no sign of a book, nor of its being a place
of trade in any way; and I should have taken the house to be, if not a
private mansion, then a lawyer's office.

At seven o'clock S-----, U----, and I went to dine with Mr. R---- S------
in Portland Place. . . . . Mr. S------'s house is a very fine one, and he
gave us a very quiet, elegant, and enjoyable dinner, in much better taste
and with less fuss than some others we have attended elsewhere.  Mr.
S------ is a friend of Thackeray, and, speaking of the last number
of The Newcomes,--so touching that nobody can read it aloud without
breaking down,--he mentioned that Thackeray himself had read it to James
Russell Lowell and William Story in a cider-cellar!  I read all the
preceding numbers of The Newcomes to my wife, but happened not to have
an opportunity to read this last, and was glad of it,--knowing that my
eyes would fill, and my voice quiver.  Mr. S------ likes Thackeray, and
thinks him a good fellow.  Mr. S------ has a--or I don't know but I ought
better to say the--beautiful full-length picture of Washington by Stuart,
and I was proud to see that noblest face and figure here in England.  The
picture of a man beside whom, considered physically, any English nobleman
whom I have seen would look like common clay.

Speaking of Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to
his own pathos, and compare it with my emotions, when I read the last
scene of The Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it,--tried to
read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up
and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm.  But I was in a very
nervous state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion,
while writing it, for many months.  I think I have never overcome my own
adamant in any other instance.

Tumblers, hand-organists, puppet-showmen, bagpipers, and all such vagrant
mirth-makers, are very numerous in the streets of London.  The other day,
passing through Fleet Street, I saw a crowd filling up a narrow court,
and high above their heads a tumbler, standing on his head, on the top of
a pole, that reached as high as the third story of the neighboring
Houses.  Sliding down the pole head foremost, he disappeared out of my
sight.  A multitude of Punches go the mounds continually.  Two have
passed through Hanover Street, where we reside, this morning.  The first
asked two shillings for his performance; so we sent him away.  The second
demanded, in the first place, half a crown; but finally consented to take
a shilling, and gave us the show at that price, though much maimed in its
proportions.  Besides the spectators in our windows, he had a little
crowd on the sidewalk, to whom he went round for contributions, but I did
not observe that anybody gave him so much as a halfpenny.  It is strange
to see how many people are aiming at the small change in your pocket.  In
every square a beggar-woman meets you, and turns back to follow your steps
with her miserable murmur.  At the street-crossings there are old men or
little girls with their brooms; urchins propose to brush your boots; and
if you get into a cab, a man runs to open the door for you, and touches
his hat for a fee, as he closes it again.


September 15th.--It was raining yesterday, and I kept within doors till
after four o'clock, when J----- and I took a walk into the city.  Seeing
the entrance to Clement's Inn, we went through it, and saw the garden,
with a kneeling bronze figure in it; and when just in the midst of the
Inn, I remembered that Justice Shallow was of old a student there.  I do
not well understand these Inns of Court, or how they differ from other
places.  Anybody seems to be free to reside in them, and a residence does
not seem to involve any obligation to study law, or to have any
connection therewith.  Clement's Inn consists of large brick houses,
accessible by narrow lanes and passages, but, by some peculiar privilege
or enchantment, enjoying a certain quiet and repose, though in close
vicinity to the noisiest part of the city.  I got bewildered in the
neighborhood of St. Paul's, and, try how I might to escape from it, its
huge dusky dome kept showing itself before me, through one street and
another.  In my endeavors to escape it, I at one time found myself in St.
John's Street, and was in hopes to have seen the old St. John's gate, so
familiar for above a century on the cover of the Gentleman's Magazine.
But I suppose it is taken down, for we went through the entire street, I
think, and saw no trace of it.  Either afterwards or before this we came
upon Smithfield, a large irregular square, filled up with pens for
cattle, of which, however, there were none in the market at that time.  I
leaned upon a post, at the western end of the square, and told J----- how
the martyrs had been burnt at Smithfield in Bloody Mary's days.  Again we
drifted back to St. Paul's; and, at last, in despair of ever getting out
of this enchanted region, I took a Hansom cab to Charing Cross, whence we
easily made our way home.



LIVERPOOL.


September 16th.--I took the ten-o'clock train yesterday morning from the
Euston station, and arrived at Liverpool at about five, passing through
the valley of Trent, without touching at Birmingham.  English scenery, on
the tracks, is the tamest of the tame, hardly a noticeable hill breaking
the ordinary gentle undulation of the landscape, but still the verdure
and finish of the fields and parks make it worth while to throw out a
glance now and then, as you rush by.  Few separate houses are seen, as in
America; but sometimes a village, with the square, gray, battlemented
tower of its Norman church, and rows of thatched cottages, reminding one
of the clustered mud-nests of swallows, under the eaves of a barn; here
and there a lazy little river, like the Trent; perhaps, if you look
sharply where the guide-book indicates, the turrets of an old castle in
the distance; perhaps the great steeple and spires of a cathedral;
perhaps the tall chimney of a manufactory; but, on the whole, the
traveller comes to his journey's end unburdened with a single new idea.
I observe that the harvest is not all gathered in as yet, and this
rainy weather must look very gloomy to the farmer.  I saw gleaners,
yesterday, in the stubble-fields.  There were two gentlemen in the same
railway-carriage with me, and we did not exchange half a dozen words the
whole day.

I am here, established at Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house, which I find
quite full; insomuch that she had to send one of her sea-captains to
sleep in another house, in order to make room for me.  It is exclusively
American society: four shipmasters, and a doctor from Pennsylvania, who
has been travelling a year on the Continent, and who seems to be a man of
very active intelligence, interested in everything, and especially in
agriculture. . . . . He asserted that we are fifty years ahead of England
in agricultural science, and that he could cultivate English soil to far
better advantage than English farmers do, and at vastly less expense.
Their tendency to cling to old ideas, which retards them in everything
else, keeps them behindhand in this matter too.  Really, I do not know
any other place in England where a man can be made so sensible that he
lives in a progressive world as here in Mrs. Blodgett's boarding-house.

The captains talk together about their voyages, and how they manage with
their unruly mates and crews; and how freights are in America, and the
prospects of business; and of equinoctial gales, and the qualities of
different ships, and their commanders, and how crews, mates, and masters
have all deteriorated since their remembrance. . . . . But these men are
alive, and talk of real matters, and of matters which they know.  The
shipmasters who come to Mrs. Blodgett's are favorable specimens of their
class; being all respectable men, in the employ of good houses, and
raised by their capacity to the command of first-rate ships.  In my
official intercourse with them, I do not generally see their best side;
as they are seldom before me except as complainants, or when summoned to
answer to some complaint made by a seaman.  But hearing their daily talk,
and listening to what is in their minds, and their reminiscences of what
they have gone through, one becomes sensible that they are men of energy
and ability, fit to be trusted, and retaining a hardy sense of honor, and
a loyalty to their own country, the stronger because they have compared
it with many others.  Most of them are gentlemen, too, to a certain
extent,--some more than others, perhaps; and none to a very exquisite
point, or, if so, it is none the better for them as sailors or as men.


September 17th.--It is singular to feel a sense of my own country
returning upon me with the intercourse of the people whom I find
here. . . . .

The doctor is much the most talkative of our company, and sometimes bores
me thereby; though he seldom says anything that is not either instructive
or amusing.  He tells a curious story of Prince Albert, and how he avails
himself of American sharp-shooting.  During the doctor's tour in
Scotland, which he has just finished, he became acquainted with one of
the Prince's attaches, who invited him very earnestly to join his Royal
highness's party, promising him a good gun, and a keeper to load it for
him, two good dogs, besides as many cigars as he could smoke and as much
wine as he could drink, on the condition that whatever game he shot
should be the Prince's.  "The Prince," said the attache, "is very fond of
having Americans in his shooting-parties, on  account of their being such
excellent shots; and there was one with him last year who shot so
admirably that his Royal Highness himself left off shooting in utter
astonishment."  The attache offered to introduce the doctor to the
Prince, who would be certain to receive him very graciously. . . . .

I think, perhaps, we talk of kings and queens more at our table than
people do at other tables in England; not, of course, that we like them
better, or admire them more, but that they are curiosities.  Yet I would
not say that the doctor may not be susceptible on the point of royal
attentions; for he told us with great complacency how emphatically, on
two or three occasions, Louis Napoleon had returned his bow, and the last
time had turned and made some remark (evidently about the doctor) to the
Empress. . . . .

I ought not to omit mentioning that he has been told in France that he
personally resembles the Emperor, and I suspect he is trying to heighten
the resemblance by training his mustache on the pattern of that which
adorns the imperial upper lip.  He is a genuine American character,
though modified by a good deal of travel; a very intelligent man, full of
various ability, with eyes all over him for any object of interest,--a
little of the bore, sometimes,--quick to appreciate character, with a
good deal of tact, gentlemanly in his manners, but yet lacking a deep and
delicate refinement.  Not but that Americans are as capable of this last
quality as other people are; but what with the circumstances amid which
we grow up, and the peculiar activity of our minds, we certainly do often
miss it.  By the by, he advanced a singular proposition the other
evening, namely, that the English people do not so well understand
comfort, or attain it so perfectly in their domestic arrangements, as we
do.  I thought he hardly supported this opinion so satisfactorily as some
of his other new ideas.

I saw in an American paper yesterday, that an opera, still unfinished,
had been written on the story of The Scarlet Letter, and that several
scenes of it had been performed successfully in New York.  I should think
it might possibly succeed as an opera, though it would certainly fail as
a play.



LONDON.


September 24th.--On Saturday, at half past three o'clock, I left
Liverpool by the London and Northwest Railway for London.  Mrs.
Blodgett's table had been thinned by several departures during the
week. . . . . My mind had been considerably enlivened, and my sense of
American superiority renewed, by intercourse with these people; and there
is no danger of one's intellect becoming a standing pool in such society.
I think better of American shipmasters, too, than I did from merely
meeting them in my office.  They keep up a continual discussion of
professional matters, and of all things having any reference to their
profession; the laws of insurance, the rights of vessels in foreign
ports, the authority and customs of vessels of war with regard to
merchantmen, etc.,--with stories and casual anecdotes of their
sea-adventures, gales, shipwrecks, icebergs, and collisions of vessels,
and hair-breadth escapes.  Their talk runs very much on the sea, and on
the land as connected with the sea; and their interest does not seem to
extend very far beyond the wide field of their professional concerns.

Nothing remarkable occurred on the journey to London.  The greater part
of the way there were only two gentlemen in the same compartment with me;
and we occupied each our corner, with little other conversation than in
comparing watches at the various stations.  I got out of the carriage
only once, at Rugby, I think, and for the last seventy or eighty miles
the train did not stop.  There was a clear moon the latter part of the
journey, and the mist lay along the ground, looking very much like a
surface of water.  We reached London at about ten, and I found S-----
expecting me.

Yesterday the children went with Fanny to the Zoological Gardens; and,
after sending them off, S----- and I walked to Piccadilly, and there took
a cab for Kensington Gardens.  It was a delightful day,--the best of all
weather, the real English good weather,--more like an Indian summer than
anything else within my experience; a mellow sunshine, with great warmth
in it,--a soft, balmy air, with a slight haze through it.  If the sun
made us a little too warm, we had but to go into the shade to be
immediately refreshed.  The light of these days is very exquisite, so
gently bright, without any glare,--a veiled glow.  In short, it is the
kindliest mood of Nature, and almost enough to compensate for chill and
dreary months.  Moreover, there is more of such weather here than the
English climate has ever had credit for.

Kensington Gardens form an eminently beautiful piece of artificial
woodland and park scenery.  The old palace of Kensington, now inhabited
by the Duchess of Inverness, stands at one extremity; an edifice of no
great mark, built of brick, covering much ground, and low in proportion
to its extent.  In front of it, at a considerable distance, there is a
sheet of water; and in all directions there are vistas of wide paths
among noble trees, standing in groves, or scattered in clumps; everything
being laid out with free and generous spaces, so that you can see long
streams of sunshine among the trees, and there is a pervading influence
of quiet and remoteness.  Tree does not interfere with tree; the art of
man is seen conspiring with Nature, as if they had consulted together how
to make a beautiful scene, and had taken ages of quiet thought and tender
care to accomplish it.  We strolled slowly along these paths, and
sometimes deviated from them, to walk beneath the trees, many of the
leaves of which lay beneath our feet, yellow and brown, and with a
pleasant smell of vegetable decay.  These were the leaves of
chestnut-trees; the other trees (unless elms) have yet, hardly begun to
shed their foliage, although you can discern a sober change of line in
the woodland masses; and the trees individualize themselves by assuming
each its own tint, though in a very modest way.  If they could have
undergone the change of an American autumn, it would have been like
putting on a regal robe.  Autumn often puts one on in America, but it is
apt to be very ragged.

There were a good many well-dressed people scattered through the
grounds,--young men and girls, husbands with their wives and children,
nursery-maids and little babes playing about in the grass.  Anybody might
have entered the gardens, I suppose; but only well-dressed people were
there not, of the upper classes, but shop-keepers, clerks, apprentices,
and respectability of that sort.  It is pleasant to think that the people
have the freedom, and therefore the property, of parks like this, more
beautiful and stately than a nobleman can keep to himself.  The extent of
Kensington Gardens, when reckoned together with Hyde Park, from which it
is separated only by a fence of iron rods, is very great, comprising
miles of greensward and woodland.  The large artificial sheet of water,
called the Serpentine River, lies chiefly in Hyde Park, but comes
partly within the precincts of the gardens.  It is entitled to
honorable mention among the English lakes, being larger than some that
are world-celebrated,--several miles long, and perhaps a stone's-throw
across in the widest part.  It forms the paradise of a great many ducks
of various breeds, which are accustomed to be fed by visitors, and come
flying from afar, touching the water with their wings, and quacking
loudly when bread or cake is thrown to them.  I bought a bun of a little
hunchbacked man, who kept a refreshment-stall near the Serpentine, and
bestowed it pied-meal on these ducks, as we loitered along the bank.  We
left the park by another gate, and walked homeward, till we came to
Tyburnia, and saw the iron memorial which marks where the gallows used to
stand.  Thence we turned into Park Lane, then into Upper Grosvenor
Street, and reached Hanover Square sooner than we expected.

In the evening I walked forth to Charing Cross, and thence along the
Strand and Fleet Street, where I made no new discoveries, unless it were
the Mitre Tavern.  I mean to go into it some day.  The streets were much
thronged, and there seemed to be a good many young people,--lovers, it is
to be hoped,--who had spent the day together, and were going innocently
home.  Perhaps so,--perhaps not.


September 25th.--Yesterday forenoon J----- and I walked out, with no very
definite purpose; but, seeing a narrow passageway from the Strand down to
the river, we went through it, and gained access to a steamboat, plying
thence to London Bridge.  The fare was a halfpenny apiece, and the boat
almost too much crowded for standing-room.  This part of the river
presents the water-side of London in a rather pleasanter aspect than
below London Bridge,--the Temple, with its garden, Somerset House,--and
generally, a less tumble-down and neglected look about the buildings;
although, after all, the metropolis does not see a very stately face in
its mirror.  I saw Alsatia betwixt the Temple and Blackfriar's Bridge.
Its precincts looked very narrow, and not particularly distinguishable,
at this day, from the portions of the city on either side of it.  At
London Bridge we got aboard of a Woolwich steamer, and went farther down
the river, passing the Custom-House and the Tower, the only prominent
objects rising out of the dreary range of shabbiness which stretches
along close to the water's edge.

From this remote part of London we walked towards the heart of the city;
and, as we went, matters seemed to civilize themselves by degrees, and
the streets grew crowded with cabs, omnibuses, drays, and carts.  We
passed, I think, through Whitechapel, and, reaching St. Paul's, got into
an omnibus, and drove to Regent Street, whence it was but a step or two
home.

In the afternoon, at four o'clock, S----- and I went to call on the
American Ambassador and Miss L------.  The lady was not at home, but we
went in to see Mr. ------ and were shown into a stately drawing-room, the
furniture of which was sufficiently splendid, but rather the worse for
wear,--being hired furniture, no doubt.  The ambassador shortly appeared,
looking venerable, as usual,--or rather more so than usual,--benign, and
very pale.  His deportment towards ladies is highly agreeable and
prepossessing, and he paid very kind attention to S-----, thereby quite
confirming her previous good feeling towards him.  She thinks that he is
much changed since she saw him last, at dinner, at our house,--more
infirm, more aged, and with a singular depression in his manner.  I, too,
think that age has latterly come upon him with great rapidity.  He said
that Miss L------ was going home on the 6th of October, and that he
himself had long purposed going, but had received despatches which
obliged him to put off his departure.  The President, he said, had just
written, requesting him to remain till April, but this he was determined
not to do.  I rather think that he does really wish to return, and not
for any ambitious views concerning the Presidency, but from an old man's
natural desire to be at home, and among his own people.

S----- spoke to him about an order from the Lord Chamberlain for
admission to view the two Houses of Parliament; and the ambassador drew
from his pocket a colored silk handkerchief, and made a knot in it, in
order to remind himself to ask the Lord Chamberlain.  The homeliness of
this little incident has a sort of propriety and keeping with much of
Mr. ------'s manner, but I would rather not have him do so before English
people.  He arranged to send a close carriage for us to come and see him
socially this evening.  After leaving his house we drove round Hyde Park,
and thence to Portland Place, where we left cards for Mrs. Russell
Sturgis; thence into Regent's Park, thence home.  U---- and J-----
accompanied us throughout these drives, but remained in the carriage
during our call on Mr. ------.  In the evening I strolled out, and walked
as far as St. Paul's,--never getting enough of the bustle of London,
which may weary, but can never satisfy me.  By night London looks wild
and dreamy, and fills me with a sort of pleasant dread.  It was a clear
evening, with a bright English moon,--that is to say, what we Americans
should call rather dim.


September 26th.--Yesterday, at eleven, I walked towards Westminster
Abbey, and as I drew near the Abbey bells were clamorous for joy, chiming
merrily, musically, and, obstreperously,--the most rejoicing sound that
can be conceived; and we ought to have a chime of bells in every American
town and village, were it only to keep alive the celebration of the
Fourth of July.  I conjectured that there might have been another victory
over the Russians, that perhaps the northern side of Sebastopol had
surrendered; but soon I saw the riddle that these merry bells were
proclaiming.  There were a great many private carriages, and a large
concourse of loungers and spectators, near the door of the church that
stands close under the eaves of the Abbey.  Gentlemen and ladies, gayly
dressed, were issuing forth, carriages driving away, and others drawing
up to the door in their turn; and, in short, a marriage had just been
celebrated in the church, and this was the wedding-party.  The last time
I was there, Westminster was flinging out its great voice of joy for a
national triumph; now, for the happy union of two lovers.  What a mighty
sympathizer is this old Abbey!

It is pleasant to recognize the mould and fashion of English features
through the marble of many of the statues and busts in the Abbey, even
though they may be clad in Roman robes.  I am inclined to think them, in
many cases, faithful likenesses; and it brings them nearer to the mind,
to see these original sculptures,--you see the man at but one remove, as
if you caught his image in a looking-glass.  The bust of Gay seemed to me
very good,--a thoughtful and humorous sweetness in the face.  Goldsmith
has as good a position as any poet in the Abbey, his bust and tablet
filling the pointed arch over a door that seems to lead towards the
cloisters.  No doubt he would have liked to be assured of so conspicuous
a place.  There is one monument to a native American, "Charles Wragg,
Esq., of South Carolina,"--the only one, I suspect, in Westminster Abbey,
and he acquired this memorial by the most un-American of qualities, his
loyalty to his king.  He was one of the refugees leaving America in 1777,
and being shipwrecked on his passage the monument was put up by his
sister.  It is a small tablet with a representation of Mr. Wragg's
shipwreck at the base.  Next to it is the large monument of Sir
Cloudesley Shovel, which I think Addison ridicules,--the Admiral, in a
full-bottomed wig and Roman dress, but with a broad English face,
reclining with his head on his hand, and looking at you with great
placidity.  I stood at either end of the nave, and endeavored to take in
the full beauty and majesty of the edifice; but apparently was not in a
proper state of mind, for nothing came of it.  It is singular how like an
avenue of overarching trees are these lofty aisles of a cathedral.

Leaving the Abbey about one o'clock, I walked into the city as far
as Grace Church Street, and there called on the American Consul,
General ------, who had been warmly introduced to me last year by a
letter from the President.  I like the General; a kindly and honorable
man, of simple manners and large experience of life.  Afterwards I called
on Mr. Oakford, an American connected in business with Mr. Crosby, from
whom I wanted some information as to the sailing of steamers from
Southampton to Lisbon.  Mr. Crosby was not in town. . . . .

At eight o'clock Mr. ------ sent his carriage, according to previous
arrangement, to take us to spend the evening socially.  Miss L------
received us with proper cordiality, and looked quite becomingly,--more
sweet and simple in aspect than when I have seen her in full dress.
Shortly the ambassador appeared, and made himself highly agreeable; not
that he is a brilliant conversationist, but his excellent sense and
good-humor, and all that he has seen and been a part of, are sufficient
resources to draw upon.  We talked of the Queen, whom he spoke of with
high respect; . . . . of the late Czar, whom he knew intimately while
minister to Russia,--and he quite confirms all that has been said about
the awful beauty of his person.  Mr. ------'s characterization of him was
quite favorable; he thought better of his heart than most people, and
adduced his sports with a school of children,--twenty of whom, perhaps,
he made to stand rigidly in a row, like so many bricks,--then, giving one
a push, would laugh obstreperously to see the whole row tumble down.  He
would lie on his back, and allow the little things to scramble over him.
His Majesty admitted Mr. ------ to great closeness of intercourse, and
informed him of a conspiracy which was then on foot for the Czar's
murder.  On the evening, when the assassination was to take place, the
Czar did not refrain from going to the public place where it was to be
perpetrated, although, indeed, great precautions had been taken to
frustrate the schemes of the conspirators.  Mr. ------ said, that, in
case the plot had succeeded, all the foreigners, including himself, would
likewise have been murdered, the native Russians having a bitter hatred
against foreigners.  He observed that he had been much attached to the
Czar, and had never joined in the English abuse of him.  His sympathies,
however, are evidently rather English than Russian, in this war.
Speaking of the present emperor, he said that Lord Heytebury, formerly
English ambassador in Russia, lately told him that he complimented the
Czar Nicholas on the good qualities of his son, saying that he was
acknowledged by all to be one of the most amiable youths in the world.
"Too amiable, I fear, for his position," answered the Czar.  "He has too
much of his mother in him."


September 27th.--Yesterday, much earlier than English people ever do such
things, General ------ made us a call on his way to the Consulate, and
sat talking a stricken hour or thereabouts.  Scarcely had he gone when
Mrs. Oakford and her daughter came.  After sitting a long while, they
took U---- to their house, near St. John's Wood, to spend the night.  I
had been writing my journal and official correspondence during such
intervals as these calls left me; and now, concluding these businesses,
S-----, J-----, and I went out and took a cab for the terminus of the
Crystal Palace Railway, whither we proceeded over Waterloo Bridge, and
reached the palace not far from three o'clock.  It was a beautifully
bright day, such as we have in wonderful succession this month.  The
Crystal Palace gleamed in the sunshine; but I do not think a very
impressive edifice can be built of glass,--light and airy, to be sure,
but still it will be no other than an overgrown conservatory.  It is
unlike anything else in England; uncongenial with the English character,
without privacy, destitute of mass, weight, and shadow, unsusceptible of
ivy, lichens, or any mellowness from age.

The train of carriages stops within the domain of the palace, where there
is a long ascending corridor up into the edifice.  There was a very
pleasant odor of heliotrope diffused through the air; and, indeed, the
whole atmosphere of the Crystal Palace is sweet with various
flower-scents, and mild and balmy, though sufficiently fresh and cool.
It would be a delightful climate for invalids to spend the winter in; and
if all England could be roofed over with glass, it would be a great
improvement on its present condition.

The first thing we did, before fairly getting into the palace, was to sit
down in a large ante-hall, and get some bread and butter and a pint of
Bass's pale ale, together with a cup of coffee for S-----.  This was the
best refreshment we could find at that spot; but farther within we found
abundance of refreshment-rooms, and John Bull and his wife and family at
fifty little round tables, busily engaged with cold fowl, cold beef, ham,
tongue, and bottles of ale and stout, and half-pint decanters of sherry.
The English probably eat with more simple enjoyment than any other
people; not ravenously, as we often do, and not exquisitely and
artificially, like the French, but deliberately and vigorously, and with
due absorption in the business, so that nothing good is lost upon
them. . . . . It is remarkable how large a feature the refreshment-rooms
make in the arrangements of the Crystal Palace.

The Crystal Palace is a gigantic toy for the English people to play with.
The design seems to be to reproduce all past ages, by representing the
features of their interior architecture, costume, religion, domestic
life, and everything that can be expressed by paint and plaster; and,
likewise, to bring all climates and regions of the earth within these
enchanted precincts, with their inhabitants and animals in living
semblance, and their vegetable productions, as far as possible, alive and
real.  Some part of the design is already accomplished to a wonderful
degree.  The Indian, the Egyptian, and especially the Arabian, courts are
admirably executed.  I never saw or conceived anything so gorgeous as the
Alhambra.  There are Byzantine and mediaeval representations, too,--
reproductions of ancient apartments, decorations, statues from tombs,
monuments, religious and funereal,--that gave me new ideas of what
antiquity has been.  It takes down one's overweening opinion of the
present time, to see how many kinds of beauty and magnificence have
heretofore existed, and are now quite passed away and forgotten; and to
find that we, who suppose that, in all matters of taste, our age is the
very flower-season of the time,--that we are poor and meagre as to many
things in which they were rich.  There is nothing gorgeous now.  We live
a very naked life.  This was the only reflection I remember making, as we
passed from century to century, through the succession of classic,
Oriental, and mediaeval courts, adown the lapse of time,--seeing all
these ages in as brief a space as the Wandering Jew might glance along
them in his memory.  I suppose a Pompeian house with its courts and
interior apartments was as faithfully shown as it was possible to do it.
I doubt whether I ever should feel at home in such a house.

In the pool of a fountain, of which there are several beautiful ones
within the palace, besides larger ones in the garden before it, we saw
tropical plants growing,--large water-lilies of various colors, some
white, like our Concord pond-lily, only larger, and more numerously
leafed.  There were great circular green leaves, lying flat on the water,
with a circumference equal to that of a centre-table.  Tropical trees,
too, varieties of palm and others, grew in immense pots or tubs, but
seemed not to enjoy themselves much.  The atmosphere must, after all, be
far too cool to bring out their native luxuriance; and this difficulty
can never be got over at a less expense than that of absolutely stewing
the visitors and attendants.  Otherwise, it would be very practicable to
have all the vegetable world, at least, within these precincts.

The palace is very large, and our time was short, it being desirable to
get home early; so, after a stay of little more than two hours, we took
the rail back again, and reached Hanover Square at about six.  After tea
I wandered forth, with some thought of going to the theatre, and, passing
the entrance of one, in the Strand, I went in, and found a farce in
progress.  It was one of the minor theatres, very minor indeed; but the
pieces, so far as I saw them, were sufficiently laughable.  There were
some Spanish dances, too, very graceful and pretty.  Between the plays a
girl from the neighboring saloon came to the doors of the boxes, offering
lemonade and ginger-beer to the occupants.  A person in my box took a
glass of lemonade, and shared it with a young lady by his side, both
sipping out of the same glass.  The audience seemed rather heavy,--not
briskly responsive to the efforts of the performers, but good-natured,
and willing to be pleased, especially with some patriotic dances, in
which much waving and intermingling of the French and English flags was
introduced.  Theatrical performances soon weary me of late years; and I
came away before the curtain rose on the concluding piece.


September 28th.--8---- and I walked to Charing Cross yesterday forenoon,
and there took a Hansom cab to St. Paul's Cathedral.  It had been a
thick, foggy morning, but had warmed and brightened into one of the
balmiest and sunniest of noons.  As we entered the cathedral, the long
bars of sunshine were falling from its upper windows through the great
interior atmosphere, and were made visible by the dust, or mist, floating
about in it.  It is a grand edifice, and I liked it quite as much as on
my first view of it, although a sense of coldness and nakedness is felt
when we compare it with Gothic churches.  It is more an external work
than the Gothic churches are, and is not so made out of the dim, awful,
mysterious, grotesque, intricate nature of man.  But it is beautiful and
grand.  I love its remote distances, and wide, clear spaces, its airy
massiveness; its noble arches, its sky-like dome, which, I think, should
be all over light, with ground-glass, instead of being dark, with only
diminutive windows.

We walked round, looking at the monuments, which are so arranged, at the
bases of columns and in niches, as to coincide with the regularity of the
cathedral, and be each an additional ornament to the whole, however
defective individually as works of art.  We thought that many of these
monuments were striking and impressive, though there was a pervading
sameness of idea,--a great many Victorys and Valors and Britannias, and a
great expenditure of wreaths, which must have cost Victory a considerable
sum at any florist's whom she patronizes.  A very great majority of the
memorials are to naval and military men, slain in Bonaparte's wars; men
in whom one feels little or no interest (except Picton, Abercrombie,
Moore, Nelson, of course, and a few others really historic), they having
done nothing remarkable, save having been shot, nor shown any more brains
than the cannonballs that killed them.  All the statues have the dust of
years upon then, strewn thickly in the folds of their marble garments,
and on any limb stretched horizontally, and on their noses, so that the
expression is much obscured.  I think the nation might employ people to
brush away the dust from the statues of its heroes.  But, on the whole,
it is very fine to look through the broad arches of the cathedral, and
see, at the foot of some distant pillar, a group of sculptured figures,
commemorating some man and deed that (whether worth remembering or not)
the nation is so happy as to reverence.  In Westminster Abbey, the
monuments are so crowded, and so oddly patched together upon the walls,
that they are ornamental only in a mural point of view; and, moreover,
the quaint and grotesque taste of many of them might well make the
spectator laugh,--an effect not likely to be produced by the monuments in
St. Paul's.  But, after all, a man might read the walls of the Abbey day
after day with ever-fresh interest, whereas the cold propriety of the
cathedral would weary him in due time.

We did not ascend to the galleries and other points of interest aloft,
nor go down into the vaults, where Nelson's sarcophagus is shown, and
many monuments of the old Gothic cathedral, which stood on this site,
before the great fire.  They say that these lower regions are comfortably
warm and dry; but as we walked round in front, within the iron railing of
the churchyard, we passed an open door, giving access to the crypt, and
it breathed out a chill like death upon us.

It is pleasant to stand in the centre of the cathedral, and hear the
noise of London, loudest all round this spot,--how it is calmed into a
sound as proper to be heard through the aisles as the tones of its own
organ.  If St. Paul's were to be burnt again (having already been bunt
and risen three or four times since the sixth century), I wonder whether
it would ever be rebuilt in the same spot!  I doubt whether the city and
the nation are so religious as to consecrate their midmost heart for the
site of a church, where land would be so valuable by the square inch.

Coming from the cathedral, we went through Paternoster Row, and saw Ave
Mary Lane; all this locality appearing to have got its nomenclature from
monkish personages.  We now took a cab for the British Museum, but found
this to be one of the days on which strangers are not admitted; so we
slowly walked into Oxford Street, and then strolled homeward, till,
coming to a sort of bazaar, we went in and found a gallery of pictures.
This bazaar proved to be the Pantheon, and the first picture we saw in
the gallery was Haydon's Resurrection of Lazarus,--a great height and
breadth of canvas, right before you as you ascend the stairs.  The face
of Lazarus is very awful, and not to be forgotten; it is as true as if
the painter had seen it, or had been himself the resurrected man and felt
it; but the rest of the picture signified nothing, and is vulgar and
disagreeable besides.  There are several other pictures by Haydon in this
collection,--the Banishment of Aristides, Nero with his Harp, and the
Conflagration of Rome; but the last is perfectly ridiculous, and all of
them are exceedingly unpleasant.  I should be sorry to live in a house
that contained one of them.  The best thing of Haydon was a hasty dash of
a sketch for a small, full-length portrait of Wordsworth, sitting on the
crag of a mountain.  I doubt whether Wordsworth's likeness has ever been
so poetically brought out.  This gallery is altogether of modern
painters, and it seems to be a receptacle for pictures by artists who can
obtain places nowhere else,--at least, I never heard of their names
before.  They were very uninteresting, almost without exception, and yet
some of the pictures were done cleverly enough.  There is very little
talent in this world, and what there is, it seems to me, is pretty well
known and acknowledged.  We don't often stumble upon geniuses in obscure
corners.

Leaving the gallery, we wandered through the rest of the bazaar, which is
devoted to the sale of ladies' finery, jewels, perfumes, children's toys,
and all manner of small and pretty rubbish. . . . . In the evening I
again sallied forth, and lost myself for an hour or two; at last
recognizing my whereabouts in Tottenham Court Road.  In such quarters of
London it seems to be the habit of people to take their suppers in the
open air.  You see old women at the corners, with kettles of hot water
for tea or coffee; and as I passed a butcher's open shop, he was just
taking out large quantities of boiled beef, smoking hot.  Butchers'
stands are remarkable for their profuse expenditure of gas; it belches
forth from the pipes in great flaring jets of flame, uncovered by any
glass, and broadly illuminating the neighborhood.  I have not observed
that London ever goes to bed.


September 29th.--Yesterday we walked to the British Museum.  A sentinel
or two kept guard before the gateway of this extensive edifice in Great
Russell Street, and there was a porter at the lodge, and one or two
policemen lounging about, but entrance was free, and we walked in without
question.  Officials and policemen were likewise scattered about the
great entrance-hall, none of whom, however, interfered with us; so we
took whatever way we chose, and wandered about at will.  It is a
hopeless, and to me, generally, a depressing business to go through an
immense multifarious show like this, glancing at a thousand things, and
conscious of some little titillation of mind from them, but really taking
in nothing, and getting no good from anything.  One need not go beyond
the limits of the British Museum to be profoundly accomplished in all
branches of science, art, and literature; only it would take a lifetime
to exhaust it in any one department; but to see it as we did, and with no
prospect of ever seeing it more at leisure, only impressed me with the
truth of the old apothegm, "Life is short, and Art is long."  The fact
is, the world is accumulating too many materials for knowledge.  We do
not recognize for rubbish what is really rubbish; and under this head
might be reckoned very many things one sees in the British Museum; and,
as each generation leaves its fragments and potsherds behind it, such
will finally be the desperate conclusion of the learned.

We went first among some antique marbles,--busts, statues, terminal gods,
with several of the Roman emperors among them.  We saw here the bust
whence Haydon took his ugly and ridiculous likeness of Nero,--a foolish
thing to do.  Julius Caesar was there, too, looking more like a modern
old man than any other bust in the series.  Perhaps there may be a
universality in his face, that gives it this independence of race and
epoch.  We glimpsed along among the old marbles,--Elgin and others, which
are esteemed such treasures of art;--the oddest fragments, many of them
smashed by their fall from high places, or by being pounded to pieces by
barbarians, or gnawed away by time; the surface roughened by being rained
upon for thousands of years; almost always a nose knocked off; sometimes
a headless form; a great deficiency of feet and hands,--poor, maimed
veterans in this hospital of incurables.  The beauty of the most perfect
of them must be rather guessed at, and seen by faith, than with the
bodily eye; to look at the corroded faces and forms is like trying to see
angels through mist and cloud.  I suppose nine tenths of those who seem
to be in raptures about these fragments do not really care about them;
neither do I.  And if I were actually moved, I should doubt whether it
were by the statues or by my own fancy.

We passed, too, through Assyrian saloons and Egyptian saloons,--all full
of monstrosities and horrible uglinesses, especially the Egyptian, and
all the innumerable relics that I saw of them in these saloons, and among
the mummies, instead of bringing me closer to them, removed me farther
and farther; there being no common ground of sympathy between them and
us.  Their gigantic statues are certainly very curious.  I saw a hand and
arm up to the shoulder fifteen feet in length, and made of some stone
that seemed harder and heavier than granite, not having lost its polish
in all the rough usage that it has undergone.  There was a fist on a
still larger scale, almost as big as a hogshead.  Hideous, blubber-lipped
faces of giants, and human shapes with beasts' heads on them.  The
Egyptian controverted Nature in all things, only using it as a groundwork
to depict, the unnatural upon.  Their mummifying process is a result of
this tendency.  We saw one very perfect mummy,--a priestess, with
apparently only one more fold of linen betwixt us and her antique flesh,
and this fitting closely to her person from head to foot, so that we
could see the lineaments of her face and the shape of her limbs as
perfectly as if quite bare.  I judge that she may have been very
beautiful in her day,--whenever that was.  One or two of the poor thing's
toes (her feet were wonderfully small and delicate) protruded from the
linen, and, perhaps, not having been so perfectly embalmed, the flesh had
fallen away, leaving only some little bones.  I don't think this young
woman has gained much by not turning to dust in the time of the Pharaohs.
We also saw some bones of a king that had been taken out of a pyramid; a
very fragmentary skeleton.  Among the classic marbles I peeped into an
urn that once contained the ashes of dead people, and the bottom still
had an ashy hue.  I like this mode of disposing of dead bodies; but it
would be still better to burn them and scatter the ashes, instead of
hoarding them up,--to scatter them over wheat-fields or flowerbeds.

Besides these antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian
animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also
specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,--
the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,--till I wished that
the whole Past might be swept away, and each generation compelled to bury
and destroy whatever it had produced, before being permitted to leave the
stage.  When we quit a house, we are expected to make it clean for the
next occupant; why ought we not to leave a clean world for the next
generation?  We did not see the library of above half a million of
volumes; else I suppose I should have found full occasion to wish that
burnt and buried likewise.  In truth, a greater part of it is as good as
buried, so far as any readers are concerned.  Leaving the Museum, we
sauntered home.  After a little rest, I set out for St. John's Wood, and
arrived thither by dint of repeated inquiries.  It is a pretty suburb,
inhabited by people of the middling class.  U---- met me joyfully, but
seemed to have had a good time with Mrs. Oakford and her daughter; and,
being pressed to stay to tea, I could not well help it.  Before tea I sat
talking with Mrs. Oakford and a friend of hers, Miss Clinch, about the
Americans and the English, especially dwelling on the defects of the
latter,--among which we reckoned a wretched meanness in money
transactions, a lack of any embroidery of honor and liberality in their
dealings, so that they require close watching, or they will be sure to
take you at advantage.  I hear this character of them from Americans on
all hands, and my own experience confirms it as far as it goes, not
merely among tradespeople, but among persons who call themselves
gentlefolks.  The cause, no doubt, or one cause, lies in the fewer
chances of getting money here, the closer and sharper regulation of all
the modes of life; nothing being left to liberal and gentlemanly
feelings, except fees to servants.  They are not gamblers in England, as
we to some extent are; and getting their money painfully, or living
within an accurately known income, they are disinclined to give up so
much as a sixpence that they can possibly get.  But the result is, they
are mean in petty things.

By and by Mr. Oakford came in, well soaked with the heaviest shower that
I ever knew in England, which had been rattling on the roof of the little
side room where we sat, and had caught him on the outside of the omnibus.
At a little before eight o'clock I came home with U---- in a cab,--the
gaslight glittering on the wet streets through which we drove, though the
sky was clear overhead.


September 30th.--Yesterday, a little before twelve, we took a cab, and
went to the two Houses of Parliament,--the most immense building,
methinks, that ever was built; and not yet finished, though it has now
been occupied for years.  Its exterior lies hugely along the ground, and
its great unfinished tower is still climbing towards the sky; but the
result (unless it be the riverfront, which I have not yet seen) seems not
very impressive.  The interior is much more successful.  Nothing can be
more magnificent and gravely gorgeous than the Chamber of Peers,--a large
oblong hall, panelled with oak, elaborately carved, to the height of
perhaps twenty feet.  Then the balustrade of the gallery runs around the
hall, and above the gallery are six arched windows on each side, richly
painted with historic subjects.  The roof is ornamented and gilded, and
everywhere throughout there is embellishment of color and carving on the
broadest scale, and, at the same time, most minute and elaborate; statues
of full size in niches aloft; small heads of kings, no bigger than a
doll; and the oak is carved in all parts of the panelling as faithfully
as they used to do it in Henry VII's time,--as faithfully and with as
good workmanship, but with nothing like the variety and invention which I
saw in the dining-room of Smithell's Hall.  There the artist wrought with
his heart and head; but much of this work, I suppose, was done by
machinery.  Be that as it may, it is a most noble and splendid apartment,
and, though so fine, there is not a touch of finery; it glistens and
glows with even a sombre magnificence, owing to the rich, deep lines, and
the dim light, bedimmed with rich colors by coming through the painted
windows.  In arched recesses, that serve as frames, at each end of the
hall, there are three pictures by modern artists from English history;
and though it was not possible to see them well as pictures, they adorned
and enriched the walls marvellously as architectural embellishments.  The
Peers' seats are four rows of long sofas on each side, covered with red
morocco; comfortable seats enough, but not adapted to any other than a
decorously exact position.  The woolsack is between these two divisions
of sofas, in the middle passage of the floor,--a great square seat,
covered with scarlet, and with a scarlet cushion set up perpendicularly
for the Chancellor to lean against.  In front of the woolsack there is
another still larger ottoman, on which he might be at full length,--for
what purpose intended, I know not.  I should take the woolsack to be not
a very comfortable seat, though I suppose it was originally designed to
be the most comfortable one that could be contrived, in view of the
Chancellor's much sitting.

The throne is the first object you see on entering the hall, being close
to the door; a chair of antique form, with a high, peaked back, and a
square canopy above, the whole richly carved and quite covered with
burnished gilding, besides being adorned with rows of rock crystals,--
which seemed to me of rather questionable taste.

It is less elevated above the floor than one imagines it ought to be.
While we were looking at it, I saw two Americans,--Western men, I should
judge,--one of them with a true American slouch, talking to the policeman
in attendance, and describing our Senate Chamber in contrast with the
House of Lords.  The policeman smiled and ah-ed, and seemed to make as
courteous and liberal responses as he could.  There was quite a mixed
company of spectators, and, I think, other Americans present besides the
above two and ourselves.  The Lord Chamberlain's tickets appear to be
distributed with great impartiality.  There were two or three women of
the lower middle class, with children or babies in arms, one of whom
lifted up its voice loudly in the House of Peers.

We next, after long contemplating this rich hall, proceeded through
passages and corridors to a great central room, very beautiful, which
seems to be used for purposes of refreshment, and for electric
telegraphs; though I should not suppose this could be its primitive and
ultimate design.  Thence we went into the House of Commons, which is
larger than the Chamber of Peers, and much less richly ornamented, though
it would have appeared splendid had it come first in order.  The
speaker's chair, if I remember rightly, is loftier and statelier than the
throne itself.  Both in this hall and in that of the Lords, we were at
first surprised by the narrow limits within which the great ideas of the
Lords and Commons of England are physically realized; they would seem to
require a vaster space.  When we hear of members rising on opposite sides
of the House, we think of them as but dimly discernible to their
opponents, and uplifting their voices, so as to be heard afar; whereas
they sit closely enough to feel each other's spheres, to note all
expression of face, and to give the debate the character of a
conversation.  In this view a debate seems a much more earnest and real
thing than as we read it in a newspaper.  Think of the debaters meeting
each other's eyes, their faces flushing, their looks interpreting their
words, their speech growing into eloquence, without losing the
genuineness of talk!  Yet, in fact, the Chamber of Peers is ninety feet
long and half as broad, and high, and the Chamber of Commons is still
larger.

Thence we went to Westminster Hall, through a gallery with statues on
each side,--beautiful statues too, I thought; seven of them, of which
four were from the times of the civil wars,--Clarendon, Falkland,
Hampden, Selden, Somers, Mansfield, and Walpole.  There is room for more
in this corridor, and there are niches for hundreds of their marble
brotherhood throughout the edifice; but I suppose future ages will have
to fill the greater part of them.  Yet I cannot help imagining that this
rich and noble edifice has more to do with the past than with the future;
that it is the glory of a declining empire; and that the perfect bloom of
this great stone flower, growing out of the institutions of England,
forbodes that they have nearly lived out their life.  It sums up all.
Its beauty and magnificence are made out of ideas that are gone by.

We entered Westminster Hall (which is incorporated into this new edifice,
and forms an integral part of it) through a lofty archway, whence a
double flight of broad steps descends to the stone pavement.  After the
elaborate ornament of the rooms we had just been viewing, this venerable
hall looks extremely simple and bare,--a gray stone floor, gray and naked
stone walls, but a roof sufficiently elaborate, its vault being filled
with carved beams and rafters of chestnut, very much admired and wondered
at for the design and arrangement.  I think it would have pleased me more
to have seen a clear vaulted roof, instead of this intricacy of wooden
points, by which so much skylight space is lost.  They make (be it not
irreverently said) the vast and lofty apartment look like the ideal of an
immense barn.  But it is a noble space, and all without the support of a
single pillar.  It is about eighty of my paces from the foot of the steps
to the opposite end of the hall, and twenty-seven from side to side; very
high, too, though not quite proportionately to its other dimensions.  I
love it for its simplicity and antique nakedness, and deem it worthy to
have been the haunt and home of History through the six centuries since
it was built.  I wonder it does not occur to modern ingenuity to make a
scenic representation, in this very hall, of the ancient trials for life
or death, pomps, feasts, coronations, and every great historic incident
in the lives of kings, Parliaments, Protectors, and all illustrious men,
that have occurred here.  The whole world cannot show another hall such
as this, so tapestried with recollections of whatever is most striking in
human annals.

Westminster Abbey being just across the street, we went thither from the
hall, and sought out the cloisters, which we had not yet visited.  They
are in excellent preservation,--broad walks, canopied with intermingled
arches of gray stone, on which some sort of lichen, or other growth of
ages (which seems, however, to have little or nothing vegetable in it),
has grown.  The pavement is entirely made of flat tombstones, inscribed
with half-effaced names of the dead people beneath; and the wall all
round bears the marble tablets which give a fuller record of their
virtues.  I think it was from a meditation in these cloisters that
Addison wrote one of his most beautiful pieces in the Spectator.  It is a
pity that this old fashion of a cloistered walk is not retained in our
modern edifices; it was so excellent for shelter and for shade during a
thoughtful hour,--this sombre corridor beneath an arched stone roof, with
the central space of richest grass, on which the sun might shine or the
shower fall, while the monk or student paced through the prolonged
archway of his meditations.

As we came out from the cloisters, and walked along by the churchyard of
the Abbey, a woman came begging behind us very earnestly.  "A bit of
bread," she said, "and I will give you a thousand blessings!  Hunger is
hard to bear.  O kind gentleman and kind lady, a penny for a bit of
bread!  It is a hard thing that gentlemen and ladies should see poor
people wanting bread, and make no difference whether they are good or
bad."  And so she followed us almost all round the Abbey, assailing our
hearts in most plaintive terms, but with no success; for she did it far
too well to be anything but an impostor, and no doubt she had breakfasted
better, and was likely to have a better dinner, than ourselves.  And yet
the natural man cries out against the philosophy that rejects beggars.
It is a thousand to one that they are impostors, but yet we do ourselves
a wrong by hardening our hearts against them.  At last, without turning
round, I told her that I should give her nothing,--with some asperity,
doubtless, for the effort to refuse creates a bitterer repulse than is
necessary.  She still followed us a little farther, but at last gave it
up, with a deep groan.  I could not have performed this act of heroism on
my first arrival from America.

Whether the beggar-woman had invoked curses on us, and Heaven saw fit to
grant some slight response, I know not, but it now began to rain on my
wife's velvet; so I put her and J----- into a cab, and hastened to
ensconce myself in Westminster Abbey while the shower should last.
Poets' Corner has never seemed like a strange place to me; it has been
familiar from the very first; at all events, I cannot now recollect the
previous conception, of which the reality has taken the place.  I seem
always to have known that somewhat dim corner, with the bare brown
stone-work of the old edifice aloft, and a window shedding down its light
on the marble busts and tablets, yellow with time, that cover the three
walls of the nook up to a height of about twenty feet.  Prior's is the
largest and richest monument.  It is observable that the bust and
monument of Congreve are in a distant part of the Abbey.  His duchess
probably thought it a degradation to bring a gentleman among the beggarly
poets.

I walked round the aisles, and paced the nave, and came to the conclusion
that Westminster Abbey, both in itself and for the variety and interest
of its monuments, is a thousand times preferable to St. Paul's.  There is
as much difference as between a snow-bank and a chimney-corner in their
relation to the human heart.  By the by, the monuments and statues in the
Abbey seem all to be carefully dusted.

The shower being over, I walked down into the city, where I called on Mr.
B------ and left S-----'s watch to be examined and put in order.  He told
me that he and his brother had lately been laying out and letting a piece
of land at Blackheath, that had been left them by their father, and that
the ground-rent would bring them in two thousand pounds per annum.  With
such an independent income, I doubt whether any American would consent to
be anything but a gentleman,--certainly not an operative watchmaker.  How
sensible these Englishmen are in some things!

Thence I went at a venture, and lost myself, of course.  At one part of
my walk I came upon St. Luke's Hospital, whence I returned to St. Paul's,
and thence along Fleet Street and the Strand.  Contiguous to the latter
is Holywell Street,--a narrow lane, filled up with little bookshops and
bookstalls, at some of which I saw sermons and other works of divinity,
old editions of classics, and all such serious matters, while at stalls
and windows close beside them (and, possibly, at the same stalls) there
were books with title-pages displayed, indicating them to be of the most
indecent kind.


October 2d.--Yesterday forenoon I went with J----- into the city to 67
Grace Church Street, to get a bank post-note cashed by Mr. Oakford, and
afterwards to the offices of two lines of steamers, in Moorgate Street
and Leadenhall Street.  The city was very much thronged.  It is a marvel
what sets so many people a going at all hours of the day.  Then it is to
be considered that these are but a small portion of those who are doing
the business of the city; much the larger part being occupied in offices
at desks, in discussions of plans of enterprise, out of sight of the
public, while these earnest hurriers are merely the froth in the pot.

After seeing the steam-officials, we went to London Bridge, which always
swarms with more passengers than any of the streets.  Descending the
steps that lead to the level of the Thames, we took passage in a boat
bound up the river to Chelsea, of which there is one starting every ten
minutes, the voyage being of forty minutes' duration.  It began to
sprinkle a little just as we started; but after a slight showeriness,
lasting till we had passed Westminster Bridge, the day grew rather
pleasant.

At Westminster Bridge we had a good view of the river-front of the two
Houses of Parliament, which look very noble from this point,--a long and
massive extent, with a delightful promenade for the legislative people
exactly above the margin of the river.  This is certainly a magnificent
edifice, and yet I doubt whether it is so impressive as it might and
ought to have been made, considering its immensity.  It makes no more
impression than you can well account to yourself for, and you rather
wonder that it does not make more.  The reason must be that the architect
has not "builded better than he knew."  He felt no power higher and wiser
than himself, making him its instrument.  He reckoned upon and contrived
all his effects with malice aforethought, and therefore missed the
crowning glory,--that being a happiness which God, out of his pure grace,
mixes up with only the simple-hearted, best efforts of men.


October 3d.--I again went into the city yesterday forenoon, to settle
about the passages to Lisbon, taking J----- with me.  From Hungerford
Bridge we took the steamer to London Bridge, that being an easy and
speedy mode of accomplishing distances that take many footsteps through
the crowded thoroughfares.  After leaving the steamer-office, we went
back through the Strand, and, crossing Waterloo Bridge, walked a good way
on to the Surrey side of the river; a coarse, dingy, disagreeable suburb,
with shops apparently for country produce, for old clothes, second-hand
furniture, for ironware, and other things bulky and inelegant.  How many
scenes and sorts of life are comprehended within London!  There was much
in the aspect of these streets that reminded me of a busy country village
in America on an immensely magnified scale.

Growing rather weary anon, we got into an omnibus, which took us as far
as the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which J----- wished very much to see.
They proved to be a rather poor place of suburban amusement; poor, at
least, by daylight, their chief attraction for the public consisting in
out-of-door representations of battles and sieges.  The storming of
Sebastopol (as likewise at the Cremorne Gardens) was advertised for the
evening, and we saw the scenery of Sebastopol, painted on a vast scale,
in the open air, and really looking like miles and miles of hill and
water; with a space for the actual manoeuvring of ships on a sheet of
real water in front of the scene, on which some ducks were now swimming
about, in place of men-of-war.  The climate of England must often
interfere with this sort of performance; and I can conceive of nothing
drearier for spectators or performers than a drizzly evening.  Convenient
to this central spot of entertainment there were liquor and refreshment
rooms, with pies and cakes.  The menagerie, though the ostensible staple
of the gardens, is rather poor and scanty; pretty well provided with
lions and lionesses, also one or two giraffes, some camels, a polar
bear,--who plunged into a pool of water for bits of cake,--and two black
bears, who sat on their haunches or climbed poles; besides a wilderness
of monkeys, some parrots and macaws, an ostrich, various ducks, and other
animal and ornithological trumpery; some skins of snakes so well stuffed
that I took them for living serpents till J----- discovered the
deception, and an aquarium, with a good many common fishes swimming among
sea-weed.

The garden is shaded with trees, and set out with greensward and
gravel-walks, from which the people were sweeping the withered autumnal
leaves, which now fall every day.  Plaster statues stand here and there,
one of them without a head, thus disclosing the hollowness of the trunk;
there were one or two little drizzly fountains, with the water dripping
over the rock-work, of which the English are so fond; and the buildings
for the animals and other purposes had a flimsy, pasteboard aspect of
pretension.  The garden was in its undress; few visitors, I suppose,
coming hither at this time of day,--only here and there a lady and
children, a young man and girl, or a couple of citizens, loitering about.
I take pains to remember these small items, because they suggest the
day-life or torpidity of what may look very brilliant at night.  These
corked-up fountains, slovenly greensward, cracked casts of statues,
pasteboard castles, and duck-pond Bay of Balaclava then shining out in
magic splendor, and the shabby attendants whom we saw sweeping and
shovelling probably transformed into the heroes of Sebastopol.

J----- thought it a delightful place; but I soon grew very weary, and
came away about four o'clock, and, getting into a city omnibus, we
alighted on the hither side of Blackfriar's Bridge.  Turning into Fleet
Street, I looked about for a place to dine at, and chose the Mitre
Tavern, in memory of Johnson and Boswell.  It stands behind a front of
modern shops, through which is an archway, giving admittance into a
narrow court-yard, which, I suppose, was formerly open to Fleet Street.
The house is of dark brick, and, comparing it with other London edifices,
I should take it to have been at least refronted since Johnson's time;
but within, the low, sombre coffee-room which we entered might well
enough have been of that era or earlier.  It seems to be a good, plain,
respectable inn; and the waiter gave us each a plate of boiled beef, and,
for dessert, a damson tart, which made up a comfortable dinner.  After
dinner, we zigzagged homeward through Clifford's link passage, Holborn,
Drury Lane, the Strand, Charing Cross, Pall Mall, and Regent Street; but
I remember only an ancient brick gateway as particularly remarkable.  I
think it was the entrance to Lincoln's Inn.  We reached home at about
six.

There is a woman who has several times passed through this Hanover
Street, in which we live, stopping occasionally to sing songs under the
windows; and last evening, between nine and ten o'clock, she came and
sang "Kathleen O'Moore" richly and sweetly.  Her voice rose up out of the
dim, chill street, and made our hearts throb in unison with it as we sat
in our comfortable drawing-room.  I never heard a voice that touched me
more deeply.  Somebody told her to go away, and she stopped like a
nightingale suddenly shot; but, finding that S----- wished to know
something about her, Fanny and one of the maids ran after her, and
brought her into the hall.  It seems she was educated to sing at the
opera, and married an Italian opera-singer, who is now dead; lodging in a
model lodging-house at threepence a night, and being a penny short
to-night, she tried this method, in hope of getting this penny.  She
takes in plain sewing when she can get any, and picks up a trifle about
the street by means of her voice, which, she says, was once sweet, but
has now been injured by the poorness of her living.  She is a pale woman,
with black eyes, Fanny says, and may have been pretty once, but is not so
now.  It seems very strange, that with such a gift of Heaven, so
cultivated, too, as her voice is, making even an unsusceptible heart
vibrate like a harp-string, she should not have had an engagement among
the hundred theatres and singing-rooms of London; that she should throw
away her melody in the streets for the mere chance of a penury, when
sounds not a hundredth part so sweet are worth from other lips purses of
gold.


October 5th.--It rained almost all day on Wednesday, so that I did not go
out till late in the afternoon, and then only took a stroll along Oxford
Street and Holborn, and back through Fleet Street and the Strand.
Yesterday, at a little after ten, I went to the ambassador's to get my
wife's passport for Lisbon.  While I was talking with the clerk,
Mr. ------ made his appearance in a dressing-gown, with a morning
cheerfulness and alacrity in his manner.  He was going to Liverpool with
his niece, who returns to America by the steamer of Saturday.  She has
had a good deal of success in society here; being pretty enough to be
remarked among English women, and with cool, self-possessed, frank, and
quiet manners, which look very like the highest breeding.

I next went to Westminster Abbey, where I had long promised myself
another quiet visit; for I think I never could be weary of it; and when I
finally leave England, it will be this spot which I shall feel most
unwilling to quit forever.  I found a party going through the seven
chapels (or whatever their number may be), and again saw those stately
and quaint old tombs,--ladies and knights stretched out on marble slabs,
or beneath arches and canopies of stone, let into the walls of the Abbey,
reclining on their elbows, in ruff and farthingale or riveted armor, or
in robes of state, once painted in rich colors, of which only a few
patches of scarlet now remain; bearded faces of noble knights, whose
noses, in many cases, had been smitten off; and Mary, Queen of Scots, had
lost two fingers of her beautiful hands, which she is clasping in prayer.
There must formerly have been very free access to these tombs; for I
observed that all the statues (so far as I examined them) were scratched
with the initials of visitors, some of the names being dated above a
century ago.  The old coronation-chair, too, is quite covered, over the
back and seat, with initials cut into it with pocket-knives, just as
Yankees would do it; only it is not whittled away, as would have been its
fate in our hands.  Edward the Confessor's shrine, which is chiefly of
wood, likewise abounds in these inscriptions, although this was esteemed
the holiest shrine in England, so that pilgrims still come to kneel and
kiss it.  Our guide, a rubicund verger of cheerful demeanor, said that
this was true in a few instances.

There is a beautiful statue in memory of Horace Walpole's mother; and I
took it to be really a likeness, till the verger said that it was a copy
of a statue which her son had admired in Italy, and so had transferred it
to his mother's grave.  There is something characteristic in this mode of
filial duty and honor.  In all these chapels, full of the tombs and
effigies of kings, dukes, arch-prelates, and whatever is proud and
pompous in mortality, there is nothing that strikes me more than the
colossal statue of plain Mr. Watt, sitting quietly in a chair, in St.
Paul's Chapel, and reading some papers.  He dwarfs the warriors and
statesmen; and as to the kings, we smile at them.  Telford is in another
of the chapels.  This visit to the chapels was much more satisfactory
than my former one; although I in vain strove to feel it adequately, and
to make myself sensible how rich and venerable was what I saw.  This
realization must come at its own time, like the other happinesses of
life.  It is unaccountable that I could not now find the seat of Sir
George Downing's squire, though I examined particularly every seat on
that side of Henry VII's Chapel, where I before found it.  I must try
again. . . . .


October 6th.--Yesterday was not an eventful day.  I took J----- with me
to the city, called on Mr. Sturgis at the Barings' House, and got his
checks for a bank post-note.  The house is at 8 Bishopsgate Street,
Within.  It has no sign of any kind, but stands back from the street,
behind an iron-grated fence.  The firm appears to occupy the whole
edifice, which is spacious, and fit for princely merchants.  Thence I
went and paid for the passages to Lisbon (32 pounds) at the Peninsular
Steam Company's office, and thence to call on General ------.  I forgot
to mention, that, first of all, I went to Mr. B------'s, whom I found
kind and vivacious as usual.  It now rained heavily, and, being still
showery when we came to Cheapside again, we first stood under an archway
(a usual resort for passengers through London streets), and then betook
ourselves to sanctuary, taking refuge in St. Paul's Cathedral.  The
afternoon service was about to begin, so, after looking at a few of the
monuments, we sat down in the choir, the richest and most ornamented part
of the cathedral, with screens or partitions of oak, cunningly carved.
Small white-robed choristers were flitting noiselessly about, making
preparations for the service, which by and by began.  It is a beautiful
idea, that, several times in the course of the day, a man can slip out of
the thickest throng and bustle of London into this religious atmosphere,
and hear the organ, and the music of young, pure voices; but, after all,
the rites are lifeless in our day.  We found, on emerging, that we had
escaped a very heavy shower, and it still sprinkled and misted as we went
homeward through Holborn and Oxford Street.



SOUTHAMPTON


October 11th.--We all left London on Sunday morning, between ten and
eleven, from the Waterloo station, and arrived in Southampton about two,
without meeting with anything very remarkable on the way.  We put up at
Chapple's Castle Hotel, which is one of the class styled "commercial,"
and, though respectable, not such a one as the nobility and gentry
usually frequent.  I saw little difference in the accommodation, except
that young women attended us instead of men,--a pleasant change.  It was
a showery day, but J----- and I walked out to see the shore and the town
and the docks, and, if possible, the ship in which S----- was to sail.
The most noteworthy object was the remains of an old castle, near the
water-side; the square, gray, weed grown, weird keep of which shows some
modern chimney-pots above its battlements, while remaining portions of
the fortress are made to seem as one of the walls for coal-depots, and
perhaps for small dwellings.  The English characteristically patch new
things into old things in this manner, materially, legally,
constitutionally, and morally.  Walking along the pier, we observed some
pieces of ordnance, one of which was a large brass cannon of Henry
VIII.'s time, about twelve feet long, and very finely made.  The bay of
Southampton presents a pleasant prospect, and I believe it is the great
rendezvous of the yacht-club.  Old and young seafaring people were
strolling about, and lounging at corners, just as they do on Sunday
afternoons in the minor seaports of America.

From the shore we went up into the town, which is handsome, and of a
cheerful aspect, with streets generally wide and well paved,--a cleanly
town, not smoke-begrimed.  The houses, if not modern, are, at least with
few exceptions, new fronted.  We saw one relic of antiquity,--a fine
mediaeval gateway across the principal street, much more elevated than
the gates of Chester, with battlements at the top, and a spacious
apartment over the great arch for the passage of carriages, and the
smaller one on each side for foot-passengers.  There were two statues in
armor or antique costume on the hither side of the gateway, and two old
paintings on the other.  This, so far as I know, is the only remnant of
the old wall of Southampton.

On Monday the morning was bright, alternating with a little showeriness.
U----, J-----, and I went into the town to do some shopping before the
steamer should sail; and a little after twelve we drove down to the dock.
The Madeira is a pleasant-looking ship enough, not very large, but
accommodating, I believe, about seventy passengers.  We looked at my
wife's little stateroom, with its three berths for herself and the two
children; and then sat down in the saloon, and afterwards on deck, to
spend the irksome and dreary hour or two before parting.  Many of the
passengers seemed to be Portuguese, undersized, dark, mustachioed people,
smoking cigars.  John Bull was fairly represented too. . . . . U---- was
cheerful, and R----- seemed anxious to get off.  Poor Fanny was
altogether cast down, and shed tears, either from regret at leaving her
native land, or dread of sea-sickness, or general despondency, being a
person of no spring of spirits.  I waited till the captain came on board,
--a middle-aged or rather elderly man, with a sensible expression, but,
methought, with a hard, cold eye, to whom I introduced my wife,
recommending her to his especial care, as she was unattended by any
gentleman; and then we thought it best to cut short the parting scene.
So we bade one another farewell; and, leaving them on the deck of the
vessel, J----- and I returned to the hotel, and, after dining at the
table d'hote, drove down to the railway.  This is the first great
parting that we have ever had.

It was three o'clock when we left Southampton.  In order to get to
Worcester, where we were to spend the night, we strode, as it were, from
one line of railway to another, two or three times, and did not arrive at
our journey's end till long after dark.

At Worcester we put ourselves into the hands of a cabman, who drove us to
the Crown Hotel,--one of the old-fashioned hotels, with an entrance
through an arched passage, by which vehicles were admitted into the
inn-yard, which has also an exit, I believe, into another street.  On one
side of the arch was the coffee-room, where, after looking at our
sleeping-chambers on the other side of the arch, we had some cold
pigeon-pie for supper, and for myself a pint of ale.

It should be mentioned, that, in the morning, before embarking S----- and
the children on board the steamer, I saw a fragment of a rainbow among
the clouds, and remembered the old adage bidding "sailors take warning."
In the afternoon, as J----- and I were railing from Southampton, we saw
another fragmentary rainbow, which, by the same adage, should be the
"sailor's delight."  The weather has rather tended to confirm the first
omen, but the sea-captains tell me that the steamer must have gone beyond
the scope of these winds.



WORCESTER.


October 14th.---In the morning of Tuesday, after breakfast in the
coffee-room, J----- and I walked about to see the remarkables of
Worcester.  It is not a particularly interesting city, compared with
other old English cities; the general material of the houses being red
brick, and almost all modernized externally, whatever may be the age of
their original framework.  We saw a large brick jail in castellated
style, with battlements,--a very barren and dreary-looking edifice;
likewise, in the more central part of the town, a Guildhall with a
handsome front, ornamented with a statue of Queen Anne above the
entrance, and statues of Charles I. and Charles II. on either side of the
door, with the motto, "Floreat semper civitas fidelis."  Worcester seems
to pride itself upon its loyalty.  We entered the building, and in the
large interior hall saw some old armor hanging on the wall at one end,--
corselets, helmets, greaves, and a pair of breeches of chain mail.  An
inscription told us that these suits of armor had been left by Charles I.
after the battle of Worcester, and presented to the city at a much later
date by a gentleman of the neighborhood.  On the stone floor of the hall,
under the armor, were two brass cannon, one of which had been taken from
the French in a naval battle within the present century; the other was a
beautiful piece, bearing, I think, the date of 1632, and manufactured in
Brussels for the Count de Burgh, as a Latin inscription testified.  This
likewise was a relic of the battle of Worcester, where it had been lost
by Charles.  Many gentlemen--connected with the city government, I
suppose--were passing through the hall; and, looking through its interior
doors, we saw stately staircases and council-rooms panelled with oak or
other dark wood.  There seems to be a good deal of state in the
government of these old towns.

Worcester Cathedral would have impressed me much had I seen it earlier;
though its aspect is less venerable than that of Chester or Lichfield,
having been faithfully renewed and repaired, and stone-cutters and masons
were even now at work on the exterior.  At our first visit, we found no
entrance; but coming again at ten o'clock, when the service was to begin,
we found the door open, and the chorister-boys, in their white robes,
standing in the nave and aisles, with elder people in the same garb, and
a few black-robed ecclesiastics and an old verger.  The interior of the
cathedral has been covered with a light-colored paint at some recent
period.  There is, as I remember, very little stained glass to enrich and
bedim the light; and the effect produced is a naked, daylight aspect,
unlike what I have seen in any other Gothic cathedral.  The plan of the
edifice, too, is simple; a nave and side aisles, with great clustered
pillars, from which spring the intersecting arches; and, somehow or
other, the venerable mystery which I have found in Westminster Abbey and
elsewhere does not lurk in these arches and behind these pillars.  The
choir, no doubt, is richer and more beautiful; but we did not enter it.
I remember two tombs, with recumbent figures on there, between the
pillars that divide the nave from the side aisles, and there were also
mural monuments,--one, well executed, to an officer slain in the
Peninsular war, representing him falling from his horse; another by a
young widow to her husband, with an inscription of passionate grief, and
a record of her purpose finally to sleep beside him.  He died in 1803.  I
did not see on the monument any record of the consummation of her
purpose; and so perhaps she sleeps beside a second husband.  There are
more antique memorials than these two on the wall, and I should have been
interested to examine them; but the service was now about to begin in the
choir, and at the far-off end of the nave the old verger waved his hand
to banish us from the cathedral.  At the same time he moved towards us,
probably to say that he would show it to us after service; but having
little time, and being so moderately impressed with what I had already
seen, I took my departure, and so disappointed the old man of his
expected shilling or half-crown.  The tomb of King John is somewhere in
this cathedral.

We renewed our rambles through the town, and, passing the Museum of the
Worcester Natural History Society, I yielded to J-----'s wish to go in.
There are three days in the week, I believe, on which it is open to the
public; but this being one of the close days, we were admitted on payment
of a shilling.  It seemed a very good and well-arranged collection in
most departments of Natural History, and J-----, who takes more interest
in these matters than I do, was much delighted.  We were left to examine
the hall and galleries quite at our leisure.  Besides the specimens of
beasts, birds, shells, fishes, minerals, fossils, insects, and all other
natural things before the flood and since, there was a stone bearing a
Roman inscription, and various antiquities, coins, and medals, and
likewise portraits, some of which were old and curious.

Leaving the museum, we walked down to the stone bridge over the Severn,
which is here the largest river I have seen in England, except, of
course, the Mersey and the Thames.  A flight of steps leads from the
bridge down to a walk along the river-side, and this we followed till we
reached the spot where an angler was catching chubs and dace, under the
walls of the bishop's palace, which here faces the river.  It seems to be
an old building, but with modern repairs and improvements.  The angler
had pretty good success while we were looking at him, drawing out two or
three silvery fish, and depositing them in his basket, which was already
more than half full.  The Severn is not a transparent stream, and looks
sluggish, but has really movement enough to carry the angler's float
along pretty fast.  There were two vessels of considerable size (that is,
as large as small schooners) lying at the bridge.  We now passed under an
old stone archway, through a lane that led us from the river-side up past
the cathedral, whence a gentleman and lady were just emerging, and the
verger was closing the door behind them.

We returned to our hotel, and ordered luncheon,--some cold chicken, cold
ham, and ale, and after paying the bill (about fifteen shillings, to
which I added five shillings for attendance) we took our departure in a
fly for the railway.  The waiter (a young woman), chambermaid, and boots,
all favored us with the most benign and deferential looks at parting,
whence it was easy to see that I had given them more than they had any
claim to receive.  Nevertheless, this English system of fees has its good
side, and I never travel without finding the advantage of it, especially
on railways, where the officials are strictly forbidden to take fees, and
where, in consequence, a fee secures twice as much good service as
anywhere else.  Be it recorded, that I never knew an Englishman to refuse
a shilling,--or, for that matter, a halfpenny.

From Worcester we took tickets to Wolverhampton, and thence to
Birkenhead.  It grew dark before we reached Chester, and began to rain;
and when we got to Birkenhead it was a pitiless, pelting storm, under
which, on the deck of the steamboat, we crossed the detestable Mersey,
two years' trial of which has made me detest it every day more and more.
It being the night of rejoicing for the taking of Sebastopol and the
visit of the Duke of Cambridge, we found it very difficult to get a cab
on the Liverpool side; but after much waiting in the rain, and afterwards
in one of the refreshment-rooms, on the landing stage, we took a Hansom
and drove off.  The cloudy sky reflected the illuminations, and we saw
some gas-lighted stars and other devices, as we passed, very pretty, but
much marred by the wind and rain.  So we finally arrived at Mrs.
Blodgett's, and made a good supper of ham and cold chicken, like our
luncheon, after which, wet as we were, and drizzling as the weather was,
and though it was two hours beyond his bedtime, I took J----- out to see
the illuminations.  I wonder what his mother would have said.  But the
boy must now begin to see life and to feel it.

There was a crowd of people in the street; such a crowd that we could
hardly make a passage through them, and so many cabs and omnibuses that
it was difficult to cross the ways.  Some of the illuminations were very
brilliant; but there was a woful lack of variety and invention in the
devices.  The star of the garter, which kept flashing out from the
continual extinguishment of the wind and rain,--V and A, in capital
letters of light,--were repeated a hundred times; as were loyal and
patriotic mottoes,--crowns formed by colored lamps.  In some instances a
sensible tradesman had illuminated his own sign, thereby at once
advertising his loyalty and his business.  Innumerable flags were
suspended before the houses and across the streets, and the crowd plodded
on, silent, heavy, and without any demonstration of joy, unless by the
discharge of pistols close at one's ear.  The rain, to be sure, was quite
sufficient to damp any joyous ebullition of feeling; but the next day,
when the rain had ceased, and when the streets were still thronged with
people, there was the same heavy, purposeless strolling from place to
place, with no more alacrity of spirit than while it rained.  The English
do not know how to rejoice; and, in their present circumstances, to say
the truth, have not much to rejoice for.  We soon came home; but I
believe it was nearly, if not quite, eleven.

At Mrs. Blodgett's, Mr. Archer (surgeon to some prison or house of
correction here in Liverpool) spoke of an attorney who many years ago
committed forgery, and, being apprehended, took a dose of prussic acid.
Mr. Archer came with the stomach-pump, and asked the patient how much
prussic acid he had taken.  "Sir," he replied, attorney-like, "I decline
answering that question!"  He recovered, and afterwards arrived at great
wealth in New South Wales.


November 14th.--At dinner at Mr. Bright's, a week or two ago, Mr.
Robertson Gladstone spoke of a magistrate of Liverpool, many years since,
Sir John ------.  Of a morning, sitting on the bench in the police court,
he would take five shillings out of his pocket and say, "Here, Mr. Clerk,
so much for my fine.  I was drunk last night!"  Mr. Gladstone witnessed
this personally.


November 16th.--I went to the North Hospital yesterday, to take the
deposition of a dying man as to his ill treatment by the second and third
mates of the ship Assyria, on the voyage from New Orleans.  This hospital
is a very gloomy place, with its wide bleak entries and staircases, which
may be very good for summer weather, but which are most congenial at this
bleak November season.  I found the physicians of the house laughing and
talking very cheerfully with Mr. Wilding, who had preceded me.  We went
forthwith, up two or three pairs of stairs, to the ward where the sick
man lay, and where there were six or eight other beds, in almost each of
which was a patient,--narrow beds, shabbily furnished.  The man whom I
came to see was the only one who was not perfectly quiet; neither was he
very restless.  The doctor, informing him of my presence, intimated that
his disease might be lethal, and that I was come to hear what he had to
say as to the causes of his death.  Afterwards, a Testament was sought
for, in order to swear him, and I administered the oath, and made him
kiss the book.  He then (in response to Mr. Wilding's questions) told how
he had been beaten and ill-treated, hanged and thwacked, from the moment
he came on board, to which usage he ascribed his death.  Sometimes his
senses seemed to sink away, so that I almost thought him dead; but by and
by the questions would appear to reach him, and bring him back, and he
went on with his evidence, interspersing it, however, with dying groans,
and almost death rattles.  In the midst of whatever he was saying, he
often recurred to a sum of four dollars and a half, which he said he had
put into the hands of the porter of the hospital, and which he wanted to
get back.  Several times he expressed his wish to return to America (of
which he was not a native), and, on the whole, I do not think he had any
real sense of his precarious condition, notwithstanding that he assented
to the doctor's hint to that effect.  He sank away so much at one time,
that they brought him wine in a tin cup, with a spout to drink out of,
and he mustered strength to raise himself in his bed and drink; then
hemmed, with rather a disappointed air, as if it did not stimulate and
refresh him, as drink ought to do.  When he had finished his evidence
(which Mr. Wilding took down in writing from his mouth), he marked his
cross at the foot of the paper, and we ceased to torment him with further
question.  His deposition will probably do no good, so far as the
punishment of the persons implicated is concerned; for he appears to have
come on board in a sickly state, and never to have been well during the
passage.  On a pallet, close by his bed, lay another seaman of the same
ship, who had likewise been abused by the same men, and bore more
ostensible marks of ill usage than this man did, about the head and face.
There is a most dreadful state of things aboard our ships.  Hell itself
can be no worse than some of them, and I do pray that some New-Englander
with the rage of reform in him may turn his thoughts this way.  The
first step towards better things--the best practicable step for the
present--is to legalize flogging on shipboard; thereby doing away with
the miscellaneous assaults and batteries, kickings, fisticuffings,
ropes'-endings, marline-spikings, which the inferior officers continually
perpetrate, as the only mode of keeping up anything like discipline.  As
in many other instances, philanthropy has overshot itself by the
prohibition of flogging, causing the captain to avoid the responsibility
of solemn punishment, and leave his mates to make devils of themselves,
by habitual and hardly avoidable ill treatment of the seamen.

After I left the dying sailor, his features seemed to contract and grow
sharp.  Some young medical students stood about the bed, watching death
creep upon him, and anticipating, perhaps, that in a day or two they
would have the poor fellow's body on the dissecting-table.  Dead
patients, I believe, undergo this fate, unless somebody chooses to pay
their funeral expenses; but the captain of the Assyria (who seems to be
respectable and kind-hearted, though master of a floating hell) tells me
that he means to bury the man at his own cost.  This morning there is a
note from the surgeon of the hospital, announcing his death, and likewise
the dangerous state of his shipmate whom I saw on the pallet beside him.

Sea-captains call a dress-coat a "claw-hammer."


November 22d.--I went on board the ship William Lapscott, lying in the
river, yesterday, to take depositions in reference to a homicide
committed in New York.  I sat on a sofa in the cabin, and Mr. Wilding at
a table, with his writing-materials before him, and the crew were
summoned, one by one,--rough, piratical-looking fellows, contrasting
strongly with the gewgaw cabin in which I received them.  There is no
such finery on land as in the cabin of one of these ships in the
Liverpool trade, finished off with a complete panelling of rosewood,
mahogany, and bird's-eye maple, polished and varnished, and gilded along
the cornices and the edges of the panels.  It is all a piece of elaborate
cabinet-work; and one does not altogether see why it should be given to
the gales, and the salt-sea atmosphere, to be tossed upon the waves, and
occupied by a rude shipmaster in his dreadnaught clothes, when the
fairest lady in the land has no such boudoir.  A telltale compass hung
beneath the skylight, and a clock was fastened near it, and ticked
loudly.  A stewardess, with the aspect of a woman at home, went in and
out of the cabin, about her domestic calls.  Through the cabin door (it
being a house on deck) I could see the arrangement of the ship.

The first sailor that I examined was a black-haired, powerful fellow, in
an oil-skin jacket, with a good face enough, though he, too, might have
been taken for a pirate.  In the affray in which the homicide occurred,
he had received a cut across the forehead, and another slantwise across
his nose, which had quite cut it in two, on a level with the face, and
had thence gone downward to his lower jaw.  But neither he nor any one
else could give any testimony elucidating the matter into which I had
come to inquire.  A seaman had been stabbed just before the vessel left
New York, and had been sent on shore and died there.  Most of these men
were in the affray, and all of then were within a few yards of the spot
where it occurred; but those actually present all pleaded that they were
so drunk that the whole thing was now like a dream, with no distinct
images; and, if any had been sober, they took care to know nothing that
could inculpate any individual.  Perhaps they spoke truth; they certainly
had a free and honest-like way of giving their evidence, as if their only
object was to tell all the truth they knew.  But I rather think, in the
forecastle, and during the night-watches, they have whispered to one
another a great deal more than they told me, and have come to a pretty
accurate conclusion as to the man who gave the stab.

While the examination proceeded, there was a drawing of corks in a side
closet; and, at its conclusion, the captain asked us to stay to dinner,
but we excused ourselves, and drank only a glass of wine.  The captain
apologized for not joining us, inasmuch as he had drunk no wine for the
last seventeen years.  He appears to be a particularly good and
trustworthy man, and is the only shipmaster whom I have met with, who
says that a crew can best be governed by kindness.  In the inner closet
there was a cage containing two land-birds, who had come aboard him,
tired almost to death, three or four hundred miles from shore; and he had
fed them and been tender of them, from a sense of what was due to
hospitality.  He means to give them to J-----.


November 28th.--I have grown wofully aristocratic in my tastes, I fear,
since coming to England; at all events, I am conscious of a certain
disgust at going to dine in a house with a small entrance-hall and a
narrow staircase, parlor with chintz curtains, and all other arrangements
on a similar scale.  This is pitiable.  However, I really do not think I
should mind these things, were it not for the bustle, the affectation,
the intensity, of the mistress of the house.  It is certain that a woman
in England is either decidedly a lady or decidedly not a lady.  There
seems to be no respectable medium.  Bill of fare: broiled soles, half of
a roast pig, a haricot of mutton, stewed oysters, a tart, pears, figs,
with sherry and port wine, both good, and the port particularly so.  I
ate some pig, and could hardly resist the lady's importunities to eat
more; though to my fancy it tasted of swill,--had a flavor of the pigsty.
On the parlor table were some poor editions of popular books,
Longfellow's poems and others.  The lady affects a literary taste, and
bothered me about my own productions.

A beautiful subject for a romance, or for a sermon, would be the
subsequent life of the young man whom Jesus bade to sell all he had and
give to the poor; and he went away sorrowful, and is not recorded to have
done what he was bid.


December 11th.--This has been a foggy morning and forenoon, snowing a
little now and then, and disagreeably cold.  The sky is of an
inexpressibly dreary, dun color.  It is so dark at times that I have to
hold my book close to my eyes, and then again it lightens up a little.
On the whole, disgustingly gloomy; and thus it has been for a long while
past, although the disagreeableness seems to be very near the earth, and
just above the steeples and house-tops very probably there may be a
bright, sunshiny day.  At about twelve there is a faint glow of sunlight,
like the gleaming reflection from a not highly polished copper kettle.


December 26th.--On Christmas eve and yesterday, there were little
branches of mistletoe hanging in several parts of the house, in the
kitchen, the entries, the parlor, and the smoking-room,--suspended from
the gas-fittings.  The maids of the house did their utmost to entrap the
gentlemen boarders, old and young; under the privileged places, and there
to kiss them, after which they were expected to pay a shilling.  It is
very queer, being customarily so respectful, that they should assume this
license now, absolutely trying to pull the gentlemen into the kitchen by
main force, and kissing the harder and more abundantly the more they were
resisted.  A little rosy-checked Scotch lass--at other times very modest
--was the most active in this business.  I doubt whether any gentleman
but myself escaped.  I heard old Mr. S------ parleying with the maids
last evening, and pleading his age; but he seems to have met with no
mercy, for there was a sound of prodigious smacking immediately
afterwards.  J----- was assaulted, and fought, most vigorously; but was
outrageously kissed,--receiving some scratches, moreover, in the
conflict.  The mistletoe has white, wax-looking berries, and dull green
leaves, with a parasitical stem.

Early in the morning of Christmas day, long before daylight, I heard
music in the street, and a woman's voice, powerful and melodious, singing
a Christmas hymn.  Before bedtime I presume one half of England, at a
moderate calculation, was the worse for liquor.

The market-houses, at this season, show the national taste for heavy
feeding,--carcasses of prize oxen, immensely fat, and bulky; fat sheep,
with their woolly heads and tails still on, and stars and other devices
ingeniously wrought on the quarters; fat pigs, adorned with flowers, like
corpses of virgins; hares, wild-fowl, geese, ducks, turkeys; and green
boughs and banners suspended about the stalls,--and a great deal of dirt
and griminess on the stone floor of the market-house, and on the persons
of the crowd.

There are some Englishmen whom I like,--one or two for whom I might say I
have an affection; but still there is not the same union between us as if
they were Americans.  A cold, thin medium intervenes betwixt our most
intimate approaches.  It puts me in mind of Alnaschar and his princess,
with the cold steel blade of his scimitar between them.  Perhaps if I
were at home I might feel differently; but in a foreign land I can never
forget the distinction between English and American.


January 1st, 1856.--Last night, at Mrs. Blodgett's, we sat up till twelve
o'clock to open the front door, and let the New Year in.  After the
coming guest was fairly in the house, the back door was to be opened, to
let the Old Year out; but I was tired, and did not wait for the latter
ceremony.  When the New Year made its entrance, there was a general
shaking of hands, and one of the shipmasters said that it was customary
to kiss the ladies all round; but to my great satisfaction, we did not
proceed to such extremity.  There was singing in the streets, and many
voices of people passing, and when twelve had struck, all the bells of
the town, I believe, rang out together.  I went up stairs, sad and
lonely, and, stepping into J-----'s little room, wished him a Happy New
Year, as he slept, and many of them.

To a cool observer, a country does not show to best advantage during a
time of war.  All its self-conceit is doubly visible, and, indeed, is
sedulously kept uppermost by direct appeals to it.  The country must be
humbugged, in order to keep its courage up.

Sentiment seems to me more abundant in middle-aged ladies in England than
in the United States.  I don't know how it may be with young ladies.

The shipmasters bear testimony to the singular delicacy of common sailors
in their behavior in the presence of women; and they say that this good
trait is still strongly observable even in the present race of seamen,
greatly deteriorated as it is.  On shipboard, there is never an
indecorous word or unseemly act said or done by sailors when a woman can
be cognizant of it; and their deportment in this respect differs greatly
from that of landsmen of similar position in society.  This is
remarkable, considering that a sailor's female acquaintances are usually
and exclusively of the worst kind, and that his intercourse with them has
no relation whatever to morality or decency.  For this very reason, I
suppose, he regards a modest woman as a creature divine and to be
reverenced.


January 16th.---I have suffered wofully from low spirits for some time
past; and this has not often been the case since I grew to be a man, even
in the least auspicious periods of my life.  My desolate bachelor
condition, I suppose, is the cause.  Really, I have no pleasure in
anything, and I feel my tread to be heavier, and my physical movement
more sluggish, than in happier times.  A weight is always upon me.  My
appetite is not good.  I sleep ill, lying awake till late at night, to
think sad thoughts and to imagine sombre things, and awaking before light
with the same thoughts and fancies still in my mind.  My heart sinks
always as I ascend the stairs to my office, from a dim augury of ill news
from Lisbon that I may perhaps hear,--of black-sealed letters, or some
such horrors.  Nothing gives me any joy.  I have learned what the
bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it
but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"--I can
perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own
torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart.  I am like an
uprooted plant, wilted and drooping.  Life seems so purposeless as not to
be worth the trouble of carrying it on any further.

I was at a dinner, the other evening, at Mr. B------'s, where the
entertainment was almost entirely American,--New York oysters, raw,
stewed, and fried; soup of American partridges, particularly good; also
terrapin soup, rich, but not to my taste; American pork and beans, baked
in Yankee style; a noble American turkey, weighing thirty-one pounds;
and, at the other end of the table, an American round of beef, which the
Englishmen present allowed to be delicious, and worth a guinea an ounce.
I forget the other American dishes, if there were any more,--O yes!
canvas-back ducks, coming on with the sweets, in the usual English
fashion.  We ought to have had Catawba wine; but this was wanting,
although there was plenty of hock, champagne, sherry, madeira, port, and
claret.  Our host is a very jolly man, and the dinner was a merrier and
noisier one than any English dinner within my experience.


February 8th.--I read to-day, in the little office-Bible (greasy with
perjuries) St. Luke's account of the agony, the trial, the crucifixion,
and the resurrection; and how Christ appeared to the two disciples, on
their way to Emmaus, and afterwards to a company of disciples.  On both
these latter occasions he expounded the Scriptures to them, and showed
the application of the old prophecies to himself; and it is to be
supposed that he made them fully, or at least sufficiently, aware what
his character was,--whether God, or man, or both, or something between,
together with all other essential points of doctrine.  But none of this
doctrine or of these expositions is recorded, the mere facts being most
simply stated, and the conclusion to which he led them, that, whether God
himself, or the Son of God, or merely the Son of man, he was, at all
events, the Christ foretold in the Jewish Scriptures.  This last,
therefore, must have been the one essential point.


February 18th.--On Saturday there called on me an elderly Robinson-Crusoe
sort of man, Mr. H------, shipwright, I believe, of Boston, who has
lately been travelling in the East.  About a year ago he was here, after
being shipwrecked on the Dutch coast, and I assisted him to get home.
Again, I have supplied him with five pounds, and my credit for an outside
garment.  He is a spare man, with closely cropped gray, or rather white
hair, close-cropped whiskers fringing round his chin, and a close-cropped
white mustache, with his under lip and a portion of his chin bare
beneath,--sunburnt and weather-worn.  He has been in Syria and Jerusalem,
through the Desert, and at Sebastopol; and says he means to get Ticknor
to publish his travels, and the story of his whole adventurous life, on
his return home.  A free-spoken, confiding, hardy, religious, unpolished,
simple, yet world-experienced man; very talkative, and boring me with
longer visits than I like.  He has brought home, among other curiosities,
"a lady's arm," as he calls it, two thousand years old,--a piece of a
mummy, of course; also some coins, one of which, a gold coin of
Vespasian, he showed me, and said he bought it of an Arab of the desert.
The Bedouins possess a good many of these coins, handed down immemorially
from father to son, and never sell them unless compelled by want.  He had
likewise a Hebrew manuscript of the Book of Ruth, on a parchment roll,
which was put into his care to be given to Lord Haddo.

He was at Sebastopol during the siege, and nearly got his head knocked
off by a cannon-ball.  His strangest statement is one in reference to
Lord Raglan.  He says that an English officer told him that his Lordship
shut himself up, desiring not to be disturbed, as he needed sleep.  When
fifteen hours had gone by, his attendants thought it time to break open
the door; and Lord Raglan was found dead, with a bottle of strychnine by
the bedside.  The affair, so far as the circumstances indicated suicide,
was hushed up, and his death represented as a natural one.  The English
officer seems to have been an unscrupulous fellow, jesting thus with the
fresh memory of his dead commander; for it is impossible to believe a
word of the story.  Even if Lord Raglan had wished for death, he would
hardly have taken strychnine, when there were so many chances of being
honorably shot.  In Wood's Narrative of the Campaign, it is stated that
he died surrounded by the members of his staff, after having been for
some time ill.  It appears, however, by the same statement, that no
serious apprehensions had been entertained, until, one afternoon, he shut
himself in, desiring not to be disturbed till evening.  After two or
three hours he called Lord Burghersh,--"Frank, Frank!" and was found to
be almost in a state of collapse, and died that evening.  Mr. H------'s
story might very well have been a camp rumor.

It seems to me that the British Ministry, in its notion of a
life-peerage, shows an entire misunderstanding of what makes people
desire the peerage.  It is not for the immediate personal distinction;
but because it removes the peer and his consanguinity from the common
rank of men, and makes a separate order of them, as if they should grow
angelic.  A life-peer is but a mortal amid the angelic throng.


February 28th.--I went yesterday with Mrs. ------ and another lady, and
Mr. M------, to the West Derby Workhouse. . . . .

[Here comes in the visit to the West Derby Workhouse, which was made the
subject of a paper in Our Old Home, called "Outside Glimpses of English
Poverty."  As the purpose in publishing these passages from the private
note-books is to give to those who ask for a memoir of Mr. Hawthorne
every possible incident recorded by himself which shows his character and
nature, the editor thinks it proper to disclose the fact that Mr.
Hawthorne was himself the gentleman of that party who took up in his arms
the little child, so fearfully repulsive in its condition.  And it seems
better to quote his own words in reference to it, than merely to say it
was he.

Under date February 28, 1856.

"After this, we went to the ward where the children were kept, and, on
entering this, we saw, in the first place, two or three unlovely and
unwholesome little imps, who were lazily playing together.  One of them
(a child about six years old, but I know not whether girl or boy)
immediately took the strangest fancy for me.  It was a wretched, pale,
half-torpid little thing, with a humor in its eyes which the Governor
said was the scurvy.  I never saw, till a few moments afterwards, a child
that I should feel less inclined to fondle.

But this little, sickly, humor-eaten fright prowled around me, taking
hold of my skirts, following at my heels, and at last held up its hands,
smiled in my face, and, standing directly before me, insisted on my
taking it up!  Not that it said a word, for I rather think it was
underwitted, and could not talk; but its face expressed such perfect
confidence that it was going to be taken up and made much of, that it was
impossible not to do it.  It was as if God had promised the child this
favor on my behalf, and that I must needs fulfil the contract.  I held my
undesirable burden a little while; and, after setting the child down, it
still followed me, holding two of my fingers and playing with them, just
as if it were a child of my own.  It was a foundling, and out of all
human kind it chose me to be its father!  We went up stairs into another
ward; and, on coming down again, there was this same child waiting for
me, with a sickly smile round its defaced mouth, and in its dim red
eyes. . . . . I never should have forgiven myself if I had repelled its
advances."--ED.]

After leaving the workhouse, we drove to Norris Green; and Mrs. ------
showed me round the grounds, which are very good and nicely kept.  O
these English homes, what delightful places they are!  I wonder how many
people live and die in the workhouse, having no other home, because other
people have a great deal more home than enough. . . . . We had a very
pleasant dinner, and Mr. M------ and I walked back, four miles and a
half, to Liverpool, where we arrived just before midnight.

Why did Christ curse the fig-tree?  It was not in the least to blame; and
it seems most unreasonable to have expected it to bear figs out of
season.  Instead of withering it away, it would have been as great a
miracle, and far more beautiful, and, one would think, of more beneficent
influence, to have made it suddenly rich with ripe fruit.  Then, to be
sure, it might have died joyfully, having answered so good a purpose.  I
have been reminded of this miracle by the story of a man in Heywood, a
town in Lancashire, who used such horribly profane language that a
plane-tree in front of his cottage is said to have withered away from
that hour.  I can draw no moral from the incident of the fig-tree, unless
it be that all things perish from the instant when they cease to answer
some divine purpose.


March 6th.--Yesterday I lunched on board Captain Russell's ship, the
Princeton.  These daily lunches on shipboard might answer very well the
purposes of a dinner; being, in fact, noontide dinners, with soup, roast
mutton, mutton-chops, and a macaroni pudding,--brandy, port and sherry
wines.  There were three elderly Englishmen at table, with white heads,
which, I think, is oftener the predicament of elderly heads here than in
America.  One of these was a retired Custom-House officer, and the other
two were connected with shipping in some way.  There is a satisfaction in
seeing Englishmen eat and drink, they do it so heartily, and, on the
whole, so wisely,--trusting so entirely that there is no harm in good
beef and mutton, and a reasonable quantity of good liquor; and these
three hale old men, who had acted on this wholesome faith for so long,
were proofs that it is well on earth to live like earthly creatures.  In
America, what squeamishness, what delicacy, what stomachic apprehension,
would there not be among three stomachs of sixty or seventy years'
experience!  I think this failure of American stomachs is partly owing to
our ill usage of our digestive powers, and partly to our want of faith in
them.

After lunch, we all got into an omnibus, and went to the Mersey Iron
Foundry, to see the biggest piece of ordnance in the world, which is
almost finished.  The overseer of the works received us, and escorted us
courteously throughout the establishment; which is very extensive, giving
employment to a thousand men, what with night-work and day-work.  The big
gun is still on the axle, or turning-machine, by means of which it has
been bored.  It is made entirely of wrought and welded iron, fifty tons
of which were originally used; and the gun, in its present state, bored
out and smoothed away, weighs nearly twenty-three tons.  It has, as yet,
no trunnions, and does not look much like a cannon, but only a huge iron
cylinder, immensely solid, and with a bore so large that a young man of
nineteen shoved himself into it, the whole length, with a light, in order
to see whether it is duly smooth and regular.  I suppose it will have a
better effect, as to the impression of size, when it is finished,
polished, mounted, aid fully equipped, after the fashion of ordinary
cannon.  It is to throw a ball of three hundred pounds' weight five
miles, and woe be to whatever ship or battlement shall bear the brunt!

After inspecting the gun we went through other portions of the
establishment, and saw iron in various stages of manufacture.  I am not
usually interested in manufacturing processes, being quite unable to
understand them, at least in cotton-machinery and the like; but here
there were such exhibitions of mighty strength, both of men and machines,
that I had a satisfaction in looking on.  We saw lumps of iron, intensely
white-hot, and in all but a melting state, passed through rollers of
various size and pressure, and speedily converted into long bars, which
came curling and waving out of the rollers like great red ribbons, or
like fiery serpents wriggling out of Tophet; and finally, being
straightened out, they were laid to cool in heaps.  Trip-hammers are very
pleasant things to look at, working so massively as they do, and yet so
accurately; chewing up the hot iron, as it were, and fashioning it into
shape, with a sort of mighty and gigantic gentleness in their mode of
action.  What great things man has contrived, and is continually
performing!  What a noble brute he is!

Also, I found much delight in looking at the molten iron, boiling and
bubbling in the furnace, and sometimes slopping over, when stirred by the
attendant.  There were numberless fires on all sides, blinding us with
their intense glow; and continually the pounding strokes of huge hammers,
some wielded by machinery and others by human arms.  I had a respect for
these stalwart workmen, who seemed to be near kindred of the machines
amid which they wrought,--mighty men, smiting stoutly, and looking into
the fierce eyes of the furnace fearlessly, and handling the iron at a
temperature which would have taken the skin off from ordinary fingers.
They looked strong, indeed, but pale; for the hot atmosphere in which
they live cannot but be deleterious, and I suppose their very strength
wears them quickly out.  But I would rather live ten years as an
iron-smith than fifty as a tailor.

So much heat can be concentrated into a mass of iron, that a lump a foot
square heats all the atmosphere about it, and burns the face at a
considerable distance.  As the trip-hammer strikes the lump, it seems
still more to intensify the heat by squeezing it together, and the fluid
iron oozes out like sap or juice.

"He was ready for the newest fashions!"--this expression was used by Mrs.
Blodgett in reference to Mr. ------ on his first arrival in England, and
it is a very tender way of signifying that a person is rather poorly off
as to apparel.


March 15th.--Mr. ------, our new ambassador, arrived on Thursday
afternoon by the Atlantic, and I called at the Adelphi Hotel, after
dinner, to pay him my respects.  I found him and his family at
supper. . . . . They seem to be plain, affable people. . . . . The
ambassador is a venerable old gentleman, with a full head of perfectly
white hair, looking not unlike an old-fashioned wig; and this, together
with his collarless white neckcloth and his brown coat, gave him
precisely such an aspect as one would expect in a respectable person of
pre-revolutionary days.  There was a formal simplicity, too, in his
manners, that might have belonged to the same era.  He must have been a
very handsome man in his youthful days, and is now comely, very erect,
moderately tall, not overburdened with flesh; of benign and agreeable
address, with a pleasant smile; but his eyes, which are not very large,
impressed me as sharp and cold.  He did not at all stamp himself upon me
as a man of much intellectual or characteristic vigor.  I found no such
matter in his conversation, nor did I feel it in the indefinable way by
which strength always makes itself acknowledged.  B------, though,
somehow, plain and uncouth, yet vindicates himself as a large man of the
world, able, experienced, fit to handle difficult circumstances of life;
dignified, too, and able to hold his own in any society.  Mr. ------ has
a kind of venerable dignity; but yet, if a person could so little respect
himself as to insult him, I should say that there was no innate force in
Mr. ------ to prevent it.  It is very strange that he should have made so
considerable a figure in public life, filling offices that the strongest
men would have thought worthy of their highest ambition.  There must be
something shrewd and sly under his apparent simplicity; narrow, cold,
selfish, perhaps.  I fancied these things in his eyes.  He has risen in
life by the lack of too powerful qualities, and by a certain tact, which
enables him to take advantage of circumstances and opportunities, and
avail himself of his unobjectionableness, just at the proper time.  I
suppose he must be pronounced a humbug, yet almost or quite an innocent
one.  Yet he is a queer representative to be sent from brawling and
boisterous America at such a critical period.  It will be funny if
England sends him back again, on hearing the news of ------'s dismissal.
Mr. ------ gives me the impression of being a very amiable man in his own
family.  He has brought his son with him, as Secretary of Legation,--a
small young man, with a little mustache.  It will be a feeble embassy.

I called again the next morning, and introduced Mrs. ------, who, I
believe, accompanied the ladies about town.  This simplicity in
Mr. ------'s manner puzzles and teases me; for, in spite of it, there was
a sort of self-consciousness, as if he were being looked at,--as if he
were having his portrait taken.



LONDON.


March 22d.--Yesterday,--no, day before yesterday,--I left Liverpool for
London by rail, from the Lime Street station.  The journey was a dull and
monotonous one, as usual.  Three passengers were in the same carriage
with me at starting; but they dropped off; and from Rugby I was alone.
We reached London after ten o'clock; and I took a cab for St. James's
Place, No.  32, where I found Mr. B------ expecting me.  He had secured a
bedroom for me at this lodging-house, and I am to be free of his
drawing-room during my stay.  We breakfasted at nine, and then walked
down to his counting-room, in Old Broad Street, in the city.  It being a
dim, dingy morning, London looked very dull, the more so as it was Good
Friday, and therefore the streets were comparatively thin of people and
vehicles, and had on their Sunday aspect.  If it were not for the human
life and bustle of London, it would be a very stupid place, with a heavy
and dreary-monotony of unpicturesque streets.  We went up Bolt Court,
where Dr. Johnson used to live; and this was the only interesting site we
saw.  After spending some time in the counting-room, while Mr. ------
read his letters, we went to London Bridge, and took the steamer for
Waterloo Bridge, with partly an intent to go to Richmond, but the day was
so damp and dusky that we concluded otherwise.  So we came home,
visiting, on our way, the site of Covent Garden Theatre, lately burnt
down.  The exterior walls still remain perfect, and look quite solid
enough to admit of the interior being renewed, but I believe it is
determined to take them down.

After a slight lunch and a glass of wine, we walked out, along
Piccadilly, and to Hyde Park, which already looks very green, and where
there were a good many people walking and driving, and rosy-faced
children at play.  Somehow or other the shine and charm are gone from
London, since my last visit; and I did not very much admire, nor feel
much interested in anything.  We returned (and I, for my part, was much
wearied) in time for dinner at five.  The evening was spent at home in
various talk, and I find Mr. ------ a very agreeable companion, and a
young man of thought and information, with a self-respecting character,
and I think him a safe person to live with.

This St. James's Place is in close vicinity to St. James's Palace, the
gateway and not very splendid front of which we can see from the corner.
The club-houses and the best life of the town are near at hand.  Addison,
before his marriage, used to live in St. James's Place, and the house
where Mr. Rogers recently died is up the court, not that this latter
residence excites much interest in my mind.  I remember nothing else very
noteworthy in this first day's experience, except that on Sir Watkins
Williams Wynn's door, not far from this house, I saw a gold knocker,
which is said to be unscrewed every night lest it should be stolen.  I
don't know whether it be really gold; for it did not look so bright as
the generality of brass ones.  I received a very good letter from J-----
this morning.  He was to go to Mr. Bright's at Sandhays yesterday, and
remain till Monday.

After writing the above, I walked along the Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate
Hill and Cheapside to Wood Street,--a very narrow street, insomuch that
one has to press close against the wall to escape being grazed when a
cart is passing.  At No. 77 I found the place of business of Mr. Bennoch,
who came to see me at Rock Ferry with Mr. Jerdan, not long after my
arrival in England.  I found him in his office; but he did not at first
recognize me, so much stouter have I grown during my residence in
England,--a new man, as he says.  Mr. Bennoch is a kindly, frank, very
good man, and was bounteous in his plans for making my time pass
pleasantly.  We talked of ------, from whom he has just received a
letter, and who says he will fight for England in case of a war.  I let
Bennoch know that I, at least, should take the other side.

After arranging to go to Greenwich Fair, and afterwards to dine with
Bennoch, I left him and went to Mr. ------'s office, and afterwards
strayed forth again, and crossed London Bridge.  Thence I rambled rather
drearily along through several shabby and uninteresting streets on the
other side of the Thames; and the dull streets in London are really the
dullest and most disheartening in the world.  By and by I found my way to
Southwark Bridge, and so crossed to Upper Thames Street, which was
likewise very stupid, though I believe Clenman's paternal house in
"Little Dorrit" stands thereabouts. . . . . Next, I got into Ludgate
Hill, near St. Paul's, and being quite foot-weary, I took a Paddington
omnibus, and rode up into Regent Street, whence I came home.


March 24th.--Yesterday being a clear day for England, we determined upon
an expedition to Hampton Court; so walked out betimes towards the
Waterloo station; but first crossed the Thames by Westminster Bridge, and
went to Lambeth Palace.  It stands immediately on the bank of the river,
not far above the bridge.  We merely walked round it, and saw only an old
stone tower or two, partially renewed with brick, and a high connecting
wall, within which appeared gables and other portions of the palace, all
of an ancient plan and venerable aspect, though evidently much patched up
and restored in the course of the many ages since its foundation.  There
is likewise a church, part of which looks old, connected with the palace.
The streets surrounding it have many gabled houses, and a general look of
antiquity, more than some other parts of London.

We then walked to the Waterloo station, on the same side of the river;
and at twenty minutes past one took the rail for Hampton Court, distant
some twelve or fifteen miles.  On arriving at the terminus, we beheld
Hampton Palace, on the other side of the Thames,--an extensive structure,
with a front of red brick, long and comparatively low, with the great
Hall which Wolsey built rising high above the rest.  We crossed the river
(which is here but a narrow stream) by a stone bridge.  The entrance to
the palace is about half a quarter of a mile from the railway, through
arched gates, which give a long perspective into the several quadrangles.
These quadrangles, one beyond another, are paved with stone, and
surrounded by the brick walls of the palace, the many windows of which
look in upon them.  Soldiers were standing sentinel at the exterior
gateways, and at the various doors of the palace; but they admitted
everybody without question and without fee.  Policemen, or other
attendants, were in most of the rooms, but interfered with no one; so
that, in this respect, it was one of the pleasantest places to visit that
I have found in England.  A good many people, of all classes, were
strolling through the apartments.

We first went into Wolsey's great Hall, up a most spacious staircase, the
walls and ceiling of which were covered with an allegorical fresco by
Verrio, wonderfully bright and well preserved; and without caring about
the design or execution, I greatly liked the brilliancy of the colors.
The great Hall is a most noble and beautiful room, above a hundred feet
long and sixty high and broad.  Most of the windows are of stained or
painted glass, with elaborate designs, whether modern or ancient I know
not, but certainly brilliant in effect.  The walls, from the floor to
perhaps half their height, are covered with antique tapestry, which,
though a good deal faded, still retains color enough to be a very
effective adornment, and to give an idea of how rich a mode of decking a
noble apartment this must have been.  The subjects represented were from
Scripture, and the figures seemed colossal.  On looking closely at this
tapestry, you could see that it was thickly interwoven with threads of
gold, still glistening.  The windows, except one or two that are long, do
not descend below the top of this tapestry, and are therefore twenty or
thirty feet above the floor; and this manner of lighting a great room
seems to add much to the impressiveness of the enclosed space.  The roof
is very magnificent, of carved oak, intricately and elaborately arched,
and still as perfect to all appearance as when it was first made.  There
are banners, so fresh in their hues, and so untattered, that I think they
must be modern, suspended along beneath the cornice of the hall, and
exhibiting Wolsey's arms and badges.  On the whole, this is a perfect
sight, in its way.

Next to the hall there is a withdrawing-room, more than seventy feet
long, and twenty-five feet high.  The walls of this apartment, too, are
covered with ancient tapestry, of allegorical design, but more faded than
that of the hall.  There is also a stained-glass window; and a marble
statue of Venus on a couch, very lean and not very beautiful; and some
cartoons of Carlo Cignani, which have left no impression on  my memory;
likewise, a large model of a splendid palace of some East Indian nabob.

I am not sure, after all, that Verrio's frescoed grand staircase was not
in another part of the palace; for I remember that we went from it
through an immensely long suite of apartments, beginning with the
Guard-chamber.  All these rooms are wainscoted with oak, which looks new,
being, I believe, of the date of King William's reign.  Over many of the
doorways, or around the panels, there are carvings in wood by Gibbons,
representing wreaths of flowers, fruit, and foliage, the most perfectly
beautiful that can be conceived; and the wood being of a light hue
(lime-wood, I believe), it has a fine effect on the dark oak panelling.
The apartments open one beyond another, in long, long, long succession,--
rooms of state, and kings' and queens' bedchambers, and royal closets
bigger than ordinary drawing-rooms, so that the whole suite must be half
a mile, or it may be a mile, in extent.  From the windows you get views
of the palace-grounds, broad and stately walks, and groves of trees, and
lawns, and fountains, and the Thames and adjacent country beyond.  The
walls of all these rooms are absolutely covered with pictures, including
works of all the great masters, which would require long study before a
new eye could enjoy them; and, seeing so many of them at once, and having
such a nothing of time to look at them all, I did not even try to see any
merit in them.  Vandyke's picture of Charles I., on a white horse beneath
an arched gateway, made more impression on me than any other, and as I
recall it now, it seems as if I could see the king's noble, melancholy
face, and armed form, remembered not in picture, but in reality.  All Sir
Peter Lely's lewd women, and Kneller's too, were in these rooms; and the
jolly old stupidity of George III. and his family, many times repeated;
and pictures by Titian, Rubens, and other famous hands, intermixed with
many by West, which provokingly drew the eye away from their betters.  It
seems to me that a picture, of all other things, should be by itself;
whereas people always congregate them in galleries.  To endeavor really
to see them, so arranged, is like trying to read a hundred poems at
once,--a most absurd attempt.  Of all these pictures, I hardly recollect
any so well as a ridiculous old travesty of the Resurrection and Last
Judgment, where the dead people are represented as coming to life at the
sound of the trumpet,--the flesh re-establishing itself on the bones, one
man picking up his skull, and putting it on his shoulders,--and all
appearing greatly startled, only half awake, and at a loss what to do
next.  Some devils are dragging away the damned by the heels and on
sledges, and above sits the Redeemer and some angelic and sainted people,
looking complacently down upon the scene!

We saw, in one of the rooms, the funeral canopy beneath which the Duke of
Wellington lay in state,--very gorgeous, of black velvet embroidered with
silver and adorned with escutcheons; also, the state bed of Queen Anne,
broad, and of comfortable appearance, though it was a queen's,--the
materials of the curtains, quilt, and furniture, red velvet, still
brilliant in hue; also King William's bed and his queen Mary's, with
enormously tall posts, and a good deal the worse for time and wear.

The last apartment we entered was the gallery containing Raphael's
cartoons, which I shall not pretend to admire nor to understand.  I can
conceive, indeed, that there is a great deal of expression in them, and
very probably they may, in every respect, deserve all their fame; but on
this point I can give no testimony.  To my perception they were a series
of very much faded pictures, dimly seen (for this part of the palace was
now in shadow), and representing figures neither graceful nor beautiful,
nor, as far as I could discern, particularly grand.  But I came to them
with a wearied mind and eye; and also I had a previous distaste to them
through the medium of engravings.

But what a noble palace, nobly enriched, is this Hampton Court!  The
English government does well to keep it up, and to admit the people
freely into it, for it is impossible for even a Republican not to feel
something like awe--at least a profound respect--for all this state, and
for the institutions which are here represented, the sovereigns whose
moral magnificence demands such a residence; and its permanence, too,
enduring from age to age, and each royal generation adding new splendors
to those accumulated by their predecessors.  If one views the matter in
another way, to be sure, we may feel indignant that such dolt-heads,
rowdies, and every way mean people, as many of the English sovereigns
have been, should inhabit these stately halls, contrasting its splendors
with their littleness; but, on the whole, I readily consented within
myself to be impressed for a moment with the feeling that royalty has its
glorious side.  By no possibility can we ever have such a place in
America.

Leaving Hampton Court at about four o'clock, we walked through Bushy
Park,--a beautiful tract of ground, well wooded with fine old trees,
green with moss, all up their twisted trunks,--through several villages,
Twickenham among the rest, to Richmond.  Before entering Twickenham, we
passed a lath-and-plaster castellated edifice, much time-worn, and with
the plaster peeling off from the laths, which I fancied might be Horace
Walpole's toy-castle.  Not that it really could have been; but it was
like the image, wretchedly mean and shabby, which one forms of such a
place, in its decay.  From Hampton Court to the Star and Garter, on
Richmond Hill, is about six miles.  After glancing cursorily at the
prospect, which is famous, and doubtless very extensive and beautiful if
the English mistiness would only let it be seen, we took a good dinner in
the large and handsome coffee-room of the hotel, and then wended our way
to the rail-station, and reached home between eight and nine o'clock.  We
must have walked not far from fifteen miles in the course of the day.


March 25th.--Yesterday, at one o'clock, I called by appointment on Mr.
Bennoch, and lunched with him and his partners and clerks.  This lunch
seems to be a legitimate continuation of the old London custom of the
master living at the same table with his apprentices.  The meal was a
dinner for the latter class.  The table was set in an upper room of the
establishment; and the dinner was a large joint of roast mutton, to which
ten people sat down, including a German silk-merchant as a guest besides
myself.  Mr. Bennoch was at the head of the table, and one of his
partners at the foot.  For the apprentices there was porter to drink, and
for the partners and guests some sparkling Moselle, and we had a
sufficient dinner with agreeable conversation.  Bennoch said that
G. G------ used to be very fond of these lunches while in England.

After lunch, Mr. Bennoch took me round the establishment, which is quite
extensive, occupying, I think, two or three adjacent houses, and
requiring more.  He showed me innumerable packages of ribbons, and other
silk manufactures, and all sorts of silks, from the raw thread to the
finest fabrics.  He then offered to show me some of the curiosities of
old London, and took me first to Barber-Surgeons' Hall, in Monkwell
Street.  It was at this place that the first anatomical studies were
instituted in England.  At the time of its foundation, the Barbers and
Surgeons were one company; but the latter, I believe, are now the
exclusive possessors of the Hall.  The edifice was built by Inigo Jones,
and the principal room is a fine one, with finely carved wood-work on the
ceiling and walls.  There is a skylight in the roof, letting down a
sufficient radiance on the long table beneath, where, no doubt, dead
people have been dissected, and where, for many generations, it has been
the custom of the society to hold its stated feasts.  In this room hangs
the most valuable picture by Holbein now in existence, representing the
company of Barber-Surgeons kneeling before Henry VIII., and receiving
their charter from his hands.  The picture is about six feet square.  The
king is dressed in scarlet, and quite fulfils one's idea of his aspect.
The Barber-Surgeons, all portraits, are an assemblage of grave-looking
personages, in dark costumes.  The company has refused five thousand
pounds for this unique picture; and the keeper of the Hall told me that
Sir Robert Peel had offered a thousand pounds for liberty to take out
only one of the heads, that of a person named Pen, he conditioning to
have a perfect fac-simile painted in.  I did not see any merit in this
head over the others.

Beside this great picture hung a most exquisite portrait by Vandyke; an
elderly, bearded man, of noble and refined countenance, in a rich, grave
dress.  There are many other pictures of distinguished men of the
company, in long past times, and of some of the kings and great people of
England, all darkened with age, and producing a rich and sombre effect,
in this stately old hall.  Nothing is more curious in London than these
ancient localities and customs of the City Companies,--each trade and
profession having its own hall, and its own institutions.  The keeper
next showed us the plate which is used at the banquets.

I should like to be present at one of these feasts.  I saw also an old
vellum manuscript, in black-letter, which appeared to be a record of the
proceedings of the company; and at the end there were many pages ruled
for further entries, but none had been made in the volume for the last
three or four hundred years.

I think it was in the neighborhood of Barber-Surgeons' Hall, which stands
amid an intricacy of old streets, where I should never have thought of
going, that I saw a row of ancient almshouses, of Elizabethan structure.
They looked wofully dilapidated.  In front of one of them was an
inscription, setting forth that some worthy alderman had founded this
establishment for the support of six poor men; and these six, or their
successors, are still supported, but no larger number, although the value
of the property left for that purpose would now suffice for a much larger
number.

Then Mr. Bennoch took me to Cripplegate, and, entering the door of a
house, which proved to be a sexton's residence, we passed by a side
entrance into the church-porch of St. Giles, of which the sexton's house
seems to be an indivisible contiguity.  This is a very ancient church,
that escaped the great fire of London.  The galleries are supported by
arches, the pillars of which are cased high upwards with oak; but all
this oaken work and the oaken pews are comparatively modern, though so
solid and dark that they agree well enough with the general effect of the
church.  Proceeding to the high altar, we found it surrounded with many
very curious old monuments and memorials, some in carved oak, some in
marble; grim old worthies, mostly in the costume of Queen Elizabeth's
time.  Here was the bust of Speed, the historian; here was the monument
of Fox, author of The Book of Martyrs.  High up on the wall, beside the
altar, there was a black wooden coffin, and a lady sitting upright within
it, with her hands clasped in prayer, it being her awakening moment at
the Resurrection.  Thence we passed down the centre aisle, and about
midway we stopped before a marble bust, fixed against one of the pillars.
And this was the bust of Milton!  Yes, and Milton's bones lay beneath our
feet; for he was buried under the pew over the door of which I was
leaning.  The bust, I believe, is the original of the one in Westminster
Abbey.

Treading over the tombstones of the old citizens of London, both in the
aisles and the porch, and within doors and without, we went into the
churchyard, one side of which is fenced in by a portion of London Wall,
very solid, and still high, though the accumulation of human dust has
covered much of its base.  This is the most considerable portion now
remaining of the ancient wall of London.  The sexton now asked us to go
into the tower of the church, that he might show us the oldest part of
the structure, and we did so, and, looking down from the organ gallery, I
saw a woman sitting alone in the church, waiting for the rector, whose
ghostly consolation, I suppose, she needed.

This old church-tower was formerly lighted by three large windows,--one
of them of very great size; but the thrifty church-wardens of a
generation or two ago had built them up with brick, to the great
disfigurement of the church.  The sexton called my attention to the
organ-pipe, which is of sufficient size, I believe, to admit three men.

From Cripplegate we went to Milton Street (as it is now called), through
which we walked for a very excellent reason; for this is the veritable
Grub Street, where my literary kindred of former times used to
congregate.  It is still a shabby-looking street, with old-fashioned
houses, and inhabited chiefly by people of the poorer classes, though not
by authors.  Next we went to Old Broad Street, and, being joined by
Mr. B------, we set off for London Bridge, turning out of our direct
course to see London stone in Watling Street.  This famous stone appears
now to be built into the wall of St. Swithin's Church, and is so encased
that you can only see and touch the top of it through a circular hole.
There are one or two long cuts or indentations in the top, which are said
to have been made by Jack Cade's sword when he struck it against the
stone.  If so, his sword was of a redoubtable temper.  Judging by what I
saw, London stone was a rudely shaped and unhewn post.

At the London Bridge station, we took the rail for Greenwich, and, it
being only about five miles off, we were not long in reaching the town.
It was Easter Monday; and during the first three days of Easter, from
time immemorial, a fair has been held at Greenwich, and this was what we
had come to see.

[This fair is described in Our Old Home, in "A Loudon Suburb."]

Reaching Mr. Bennoch's house, we found it a pretty and comfortable one,
and adorned with many works of art; for he seems to be a patron of art
and literature, and a warm-hearted man, of active benevolence and vivid
sympathies in many directions.  His face shows this.  I have never seen
eyes of a warmer glow than his.  On the walls of one room there were a
good many sketches by Haydon, and several artists' proofs of fine
engravings, presented by persons to whom he had been kind.  In the
drawing-room there was a marble bust of Mrs. ------, and one, I think, of
himself, and one of the Queen, which Mr. Bennoch said was very good, and
it is unlike any other I have seen.  It is intended as a gift, from a
number of subscribers, to Miss Nightingale.  Likewise a crayon sketch of
------, looking rather morbid and unwholesome, as the poor lady really
is.  Also, a small picture of Mr. Bennoch in a military dress, as an
officer, probably of city-horse.  By and by came in a young gentleman,
son of Haydon, the painter of high art, and one or two ladies staying in
the house, and anon Mrs. ------.  And so we went in to dinner.

Bennoch is an admirable host, and warms his guests like a household fire
by the influence of his kindly face and glowing eyes, and by such
hospitable demeanor as best suits this aspect.  After the cloth was
removed, came in Mr. Newton Crosland, a young man who once called on me
in Liverpool,--the husband of a literary lady, formerly Camilla Toulmin.
The lady herself was coming to spend the evening.  The husband (and I
presume the wife) is a decided believer in spiritual manifestations.  We
talked of politics and spiritualism and literature; and before we rose
from table, Mr. Bennoch drank the health of the ladies, and especially of
Mrs. ------, in terms very kind towards her and me.  I responded in her
behalf as well as I could, and left it to Mr. Bowman, as a bachelor, to
respond for the ladies generally,--which he did briefly, toasting
Mrs. B------.

We had heard the sound of the piano in the drawing-room for some time,
and now adjourning thither, I had the pleasure to be introduced to Mrs.
Newton Crosland,--a rather tall, thin, pale, and lady-like person,
looking, I thought, of a sensitive character.  She expressed in a low
tone and quiet way great delight at seeing my distinguished self! for she
is a vast admirer of The Scarlet Letter, and especially of the character
of Hester; indeed, I remember seeing a most favorable criticism of the
book from her pen, in one of the London magazines. . . . .

At eleven o'clock Mrs. Crosland entered the tiniest pony-carriage, and
set forth for her own residence, with a lad walking at the pony's head,
and carrying a lantern. . . . .


March 26th.--Yesterday was not a very eventful day.  After writing in my
journal I went out at twelve, and visited, for the first time, the
National Gallery.  It is of no use for me to criticise pictures, or to
try to describe them, but I have an idea that I might acquire a taste,
with a little attention to the subject, for I find I already begin to
prefer some pictures to others.  This is encouraging.  Of those that I
saw yesterday, I think I liked several by Murillo best.  There were a
great many people in the gallery, almost entirely of the middle, with a
few of the lower classes; and I should think that the effect of the
exhibition must at least tend towards refinement.  Nevertheless, the only
emotion that I saw displayed was in broad grins on the faces of a man and
two women, at sight of a small picture of Venus, with a Satyr peeping at
her with an expression of gross animal delight and merriment.  Without
being aware of it, this man and the two women were of that same Satyr
breed.

If I lived in London, I would endeavor to educate myself in this and
other galleries of art; but as the case stands, it would be of no use.  I
saw two of Turner's landscapes; but did not see so much beauty in them as
in some of Claude's.  A view of the grand canal in Venice, by Canaletto,
seemed to me wonderful,--absolutely perfect,--a better reality, for I
could see the water of the canal moving and dimpling; and the palaces and
buildings on each side were quite as good in their way.

Leaving the gallery, I walked down into the city, and passed through
Smithfield, where I glanced at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. . . . . Then I
went into St. Paul's, and walked all round the great cathedral, looking,
I believe, at every monument on the floor.  There is certainly nothing
very wonderful in any of them, and I do wish it would not so generally
happen that English warriors go into battle almost nude; at least, we
must suppose so, from their invariably receiving their death-wounds in
that condition.  I will not believe that a sculptor or a painter is a man
of genius unless he can wake the nobleness of his subject, illuminate and
transfigure any given pattern of coat and breeches.  Nevertheless, I
never go into St. Paul's without being impressed anew with the grandeur
of the edifice, and the general effect of these same groups of statuary
ranged in their niches and at the bases of the pillars as adornments of
the cathedral.

Coming homeward, I went into the enclosure of the Temple, and near the
entrance saw "Dr. Johnson's staircase" printed over a doorway; so I not
only looked in, but went up the first flight, of some broad, well-worn
stairs, passing my hand over a heavy, ancient, broken balustrade, on
which, no doubt, Johnson's hand had often rested.  It was here that
Boswell used to visit him, in their early acquaintance.  Before my lunch,
I had gone into Bolt Court, where he died.

This morning there have been letters from Mr. Wilding, enclosing an
invitation to me to be one of the stewards of the anniversary dinner of
the Literary Fund.

No, I thank you, gentlemen!


March 27th.--Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the
British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair.  It quite crushes a
person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a
weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin
marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime,
and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into
building-stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust two thousand
years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many
successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them.
The present is burdened too much with the past.  We have not time, in our
earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately
around us; yet we heap up these old shells, out of which human life has
long emerged, casting them off forever.  I do not see how future ages are
to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that
will be continually made to it.

After leaving the Museum, I went to see Bennoch, and arrange with him our
expedition of to-day; and he read me a letter from Topper, very earnestly
inviting me to come and spend a night or two with him.  Then I wandered
about the city, and was lost in the vicinity of Holborn; so that for a
long while I was under a spell of bewilderment, and kept returning, in
the strangest way, to the same point in Lincoln's Inn Fields. . . . .

Mr. Bowman and I went to the Princess's Theatre in the evening.  Charles
Kean performed in Louis XI. very well indeed,--a thoughtful and highly
skilled actor,--much improved since I saw him, many years ago, in
America.



ALDERSHOTT CAMP.


April 1st.--After my last date on Thursday, I visited the National
Gallery.  At three o'clock, having packed a travelling-bag, I went to
Bennoch's office, and lunched with him; and at about five we took the
rail from the Waterloo station for Aldershott Camp.  At Tamborough we
were cordially received by Lieutenant Shaw, of the North Cork Rifles, and
were escorted by him, in a fly, to his quarters.  The camp is a large
city, composed of numberless wooden barracks, arranged in regular
streets, on a wide, bleak heath, with an extensive and dreary prospect on
all sides.  Lieutenant Shaw assigned me one room in his hut, and Bennoch
another, and made us as comfortable as kind hospitality could; but the
huts are very small, and the rooms have no size at all; neither are they
air-tight, and the sharp wind whistles in at the crevices; and, on the
whole, of all discomfortable places, I am inclined to reckon Aldershott
Camp the most so.  I suppose the government has placed the camp on that
windy heath, and built such wretched huts, for the very purpose of
rendering life as little desirable as may be to the soldiers, so that
they should throw it away the more willingly.

At seven o'clock we dined at the regimental mess, with the officers of
the North Cork.  The mess-room is by far the most endurable place to be
found in camp.  The hut is large, and the mess-room is capable of
receiving between thirty and forty guests, besides the officers of the
regiment, when a great dinner-party is given.  As I saw it, the whole
space was divided into a dining-room and two anterooms by red curtains
drawn across; and the second anteroom seems to be a general rendezvous
for the officers, where they meet at all times, and talk, or look over
the newspapers and the army-register, which constitute the chief of their
reading.  The Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel of the regiment received
Bennoch and me with great cordiality, as did all the other officers, and
we sat down to a splendid dinner.

All the officers of the regiment are Irishmen, and all of them, I
believe, men of fortune; and they do what they can towards alleviating
their hardships in camp by eating and drinking of the best that can be
obtained of all good things.  The table service and plate were as fine as
those in any nobleman's establishment; the dishes numerous and admirably
got up; and the wines delectable and genuine,--as they had need to be;
for there is a great consumption of them.  I liked these Irish officers
exceedingly;--not that it would be possible to live long among them
without finding existence a bore; for they have no thought, no
intellectual movement, no ideas, that I was aware of, beyond horses,
dogs, drill, garrisons, field-days, whist, wine, cigars, and all that
kind of thing; yet they were really gentlemen living on the best terms
with one another,--courteous, kind, most hospitable, with a rich Irish
humor, softened down by social refinements,--not too refined either, but
a most happy sort of behavior, as natural as that of children, and with a
safe freedom that made one feel entirely at my ease.  I think well of the
Irish gentlemen, for their sakes; and I believe I might fairly attribute
to Lieutenant-Colonel Stowell (next whom I sat) a higher and finer
cultivation than the above description indicates.  Indeed, many of them
may have been capable of much more intellectual intercourse than that of
the mess-table; but I suppose it would not have been in keeping with
their camp life, nor suggested by it.  Several of the elder officers were
men who had been long in the army; and the Colonel--a bluff, hearty old
soldier, with a profile like an eagle's head and beak--was a veteran of
the Peninsula, and had a medal on his breast with clasps for three famous
battles besides that of Waterloo.

The regimental band played during dinner, and the Lieutenant-Colonel
apologized to me for its not playing "Hail Columbia," the tune not coning
within their musical accomplishments.  It was no great matter, however;
for I should not have distinguished it from any other tune; but, to do me
what honor was possible, in the way of national airs, the band was
ordered to play a series of negro melodies, and I was entirely satisfied.
It is really funny that the "wood-notes wild" of those poor black slaves
should have been played in a foreign laud as an honorable compliment to
one of their white countrymen.

After dinner we played whist, and then had some broiled bones for supper,
and finally went home to our respective huts not much earlier than four
o'clock.  But I don't wonder these gentlemen sit up as long as they can
keep their eyes open; for never was there anything so utterly comfortless
as their camp-beds.  They are really worse than the bed of honor, no
wider, no softer, no warmer, and affording not nearly so sound sleep.
Indeed, I got hardly any sleep at all, and almost as soon as I did close
my eyes, the bugles sounded, and the drums beat reveille, and from that
moment the camp was all astir; so I pretty soon uprose, and went to the
mess-room for my breakfast, feeling wonderfully fresh and well,
considering what my night had been.

Long before this, however, this whole regiment, and all the other
regiments, marched off to take part in a general review, and Bennoch and
I followed, as soon as we had eaten a few mutton-chops.  It was a bright,
sunshiny day; but with a strong east-wind, as piercing and pitiless as
ever blew; and this wide, undulating plain of Aldershott seemed just the
place where the east-wind was at home.  Still, it acted, on the whole,
like an invigorating cordial; and whereas in pleasanter circumstances I
should have lain down, and gone to sleep, I now felt as if I could do
without sleep for a month.

In due time we found out the place of the North Cork Regiment in the
general battle-array, and were greeted as old comrades by the Colonel and
other officers.  Soon the soldiers (who, when we first reached them, were
strolling about, or standing at ease) were called into order; and anon we
saw a group of mounted officers riding along the lines, and among them a
gentleman in a civilian's round hat, and plain frock and trousers, riding
on a white horse.  This group of riders turned the front of the regiment,
and then passed along the rear, coming close to where we stood; and as
the plainly dressed gentleman rode by, he bent towards me, and I tried to
raise my hat, but did not succeed very well, because the fierce wind had
compelled me to jam it tightly upon my head.  The Duke of Cambridge (for
this was he) is a comely-looking gentlemanly man, of bluff English face,
with a great deal of brown beard about it.  Though a pretty tall man, he
appears, on  horseback, broad and round in proportion to his height.  I
looked at him with a certain sort of interest, and a feeling of kindness;
for one does feel kindly to whatever human being is anywise marked out
from the rest, unless it be by his disagreeable qualities.

The troops, from twelve to fifteen thousand, now fell into marching
order, and went to attack a wood, where we were to suppose the enemy to
be stationed.  The sham-fight seemed to me rather clumsily managed, and
without any striking incident or result.  The officers had prophesied,
the night before, that General K------, commanding in the camp, would
make a muddle of it; and probably he did.  After the review, the Duke of
Cambridge with his attendant officers took their station, and all the
regiments marched in front of him, saluting as they passed.  As each
colonel rode by, and as the banner of each regiment was lowered, the Duke
lifted his hat.

The most splendid effect of this parade was the gleam of the sun upon the
long line of bayonets,--the sheen of all that steel appearing like a
wavering fringe of light upon the dark masses of troops below.  It was
very fine.  But I was glad when all was done, and I could go back to the
mess-room, whither I carried an excellent appetite for luncheon.  After
this we walked about the camp,--looked at some model tents, inspected the
arrangements and modes of living in the huts of the privates; and thus
gained more and more adequate ideas of the vile uncomfortableness of a
military life.  Finally, I went to the anteroom and turned over the
regimental literature,--a peerage and baronetage,--an army and militia
register, a number of the Sporting Magazine, and one of the United
Service, while Bennoch took another walk.  Before dinner we both tried to
catch a little nap by way of compensation for last night's deficiencies;
but, for my part, the attempt was fruitless.

The dinner was as splendid and as agreeable as that of the evening
before; and I believe it was nearly two o'clock when Bennoch and I bade
farewell to our kind entertainers.  For my part I fraternized with these
military gentlemen in a way that augurs the very best things for the
future peace of the two countries.  They all expressed the warmest
sympathies towards America and it was easy to judge from their
conversation that there is no real friendliness on the part of the
military towards the French.  The old antipathy is just as strong as
ever,--stronger than ever, perhaps, on account of the comparatively more
brilliant success of the French in this Russian war.  So, with most
Christian sentiments of peace and brotherly love, we returned to our hut,
and lay down, each in his narrow bed.

Early in the morning the drums and bugles began the usual bedevilment;
and shortly after six I dressed, and we had breakfast at the mess-room,
shook hands with Lieutenant Shaw (our more especial host), and drove off
to the railway station at Ash.

I know not whether I have mentioned that the villages neighboring to the
camp have suffered terribly as regards morality from the vicinity of the
soldiers.  Quiet old English towns, that till within a little time ago
had kept their antique simplicity and innocence, have now no such thing
as female virtue in them, so far as the lower classes are concerned.
This is expressing the matter too strongly, no doubt; but there is too
much truth in it, nevertheless; and one of the officers remarked that
even ladies of respectability had grown much more free in manners and
conversation than at first.  I have heard observations similar to this
from a Nova-Scotian, in reference to the moral influence of soldiers when
stationed in the provinces.



WOOTON.


Wooton stands in a hollow, near the summit of one of the long swells that
here undulate over the face of the country.  There is a good deal of wood
behind it, as should be the case with the residence of the author of the
Sylva; but I believe few, if any, of these trees are known to have been
planted by John Evelyn, or even to have been coeval with his time.  The
house is of brick, partly ancient, and consists of a front and two
projecting wings, with a porch and entrance in the centre.  It has a
desolate, meagre aspect, and needs something to give it life and stir and
jollity.  The present proprietor is of the old Evelyn family, and is now
one of the two members of Parliament for Surrey; but he is a very shy and
retiring man, unmarried, sees little company, and seems either not to
know how to make himself comfortable or not to care about it.  A servant
told us that Mr. ------ had just gone out, but Tupper, who is apparently
on intimate terms with him, thought it best that we should go into the
house, while he went in search of the master.  So the servant ushered us
through a hall,--where were many family pictures by Lely, and, for aught
I know, by Vandyke, and by Kneller, and other famous painters,--up a
grand staircase, and into the library, the inner room of which contained
the ponderous volumes which John Evelyn used to read.  Nevertheless, it
was a room of most barren aspect, without a carpet on the floor, with
pine bookcases, with a common whitewashed ceiling, with no luxurious
study-chairs, and without a fire.  There was an open folio on the table,
and a sheet of manuscript that appeared to have been recently written.  I
took down a book from the shelves (a volume of annals, connected with
English history), and Tupper afterwards told us that this one single
volume, for its rarity, was worth either two or three hundred pounds.
Against one of the windows of this library there grows a magnolia-tree,
with a very large stem, and at least fifty years old.

Mrs. Tupper and I waited a good while, and then Bennoch and Tupper came
back, without having found Mr. ------.  Tupper wished very much to show
the prayer-book used by King Charles at his execution, and some curious
old manuscript volumes; but the servant said that his master always kept
these treasures locked up, and trusted the key to nobody.  We therefore
had to take our leave without seeing them; and I have not often entered a
house that one feels to be more forlorn than Wooton,--although we did
have a glimpse of a dining-room, with a table laid for three or four
guests, and looking quite brilliant with plate and glass and snowy
napery.  There was a fire, too, in this one room.  Mr. ------ is making
extensive alterations in the house, or has recently done so, and this is
perhaps one reason of its ungenial meagreness and lack of finish.

Before our departure from Wooton, Tupper had asked me to leave my card
for Mr. ------; but I had no mind to overstep any limit of formal
courtesy in dealing with an Englishman, and therefore declined.  Tupper,
however, on his own responsibility, wrote his name, Bennoch's, and mine
on a piece of paper, and told the servant to show them to Mr. ------.  We
soon had experience of the good effect of this; for we had scarcely got
back before somebody drove up to Tupper's door, and one of the girls,
looking out, exclaimed that there was Mr. ------ himself, and another
gentleman.  He had set out, the instant he heard of our call, to bring
the three precious volumes for me to see.  This surely was most kind; a
kindness which I should never have dreamed of expecting from a shy,
retiring man like Mr. ------.

So he and his friend were ushered into the dining-room, and introduced.
Mr. ------ is a young-looking man, dark, with a mustache, rather small,
and though he has the manners of a man who has seen the world, it
evidently requires an effort in him to speak to anybody; and I could see
his whole person slightly writhing itself, as it were, while he addressed
me.  This is strange in a man of his public position, member for the
county, necessarily mixed up with life in many forms, the possessor of
sixteen thousand pounds a year, and the representative of an ancient
name.  Nevertheless, I liked him, and felt as if I could become
intimately acquainted with him, if circumstances were favorable; but, at
a brief interview like this, it was hopeless to break through two great
reserves; so I talked more with his companion--a pleasant young man,
fresh from college, I should imagine--than with Mr. ------ himself.

The three books were really of very great interest.  One was an octavo
volume of manuscript in John Evelyn's own hand, the beginning of his
published diary, written as distinctly as print, in a small, clear
character.  It can be read just as easily as any printed book.  Another
was a Church of England prayer-book, which King Charles used on the
scaffold, and which was stained with his sacred blood, and underneath are
two or three lines in John Evelyn's hand, certifying this to be the very
book.  It is an octavo, or small folio, and seems to have been very
little used, scarcely opened, except in one spot; its leaves elsewhere
retaining their original freshness and elasticity.  It opens most readily
at the commencement of the common service; and there, on the left-hand
page, is a discoloration, of a yellowish or brownish hue, about two
thirds of an inch large, which, two hundred years ago and a little more,
was doubtless red.  For on that page had fallen a drop of King Charles's
blood.

The other volume was large, and contained a great many original letters,
written by the king during his troubles.  I had not time to examine them
with any minuteness, and remember only one document, which Mr. ------
pointed out, and which had a strange pathos and pitifulness in it.  It
was a sort of due-bill, promising to pay a small sum for beer, which had
been supplied to his Majesty, so soon as God should enable him, or the
distracted circumstances of his kingdom make it possible,--or some
touching and helpless expression of that kind.  Prince Hal seemed to
consider it an unworthy matter, that a great prince should think of "that
poor creature, small beer," at all; but that a great prince should not be
able to pay for it is far worse.

Mr. ------ expressed his regret that I was not staying longer in this
part of the country, as he would gladly have seen me at Wooten, and he
succeeded in saying something about my books; and I hope I partly
succeeded in showing him that I was very sensible of his kindness in
letting me see those relics.  I cannot say whether or no I expressed it
sufficiently.  It is better with such a man, or, indeed, with any man, to
say too little than too much; and, in fact, it would have been indecorous
in me to take too much of his kindness to my own share, Bennoch being
likewise in question.

We had a cup of coffee, and then took our leave; Tupper accompanying us
part way down the village street, and bidding us an affectionate
farewell.



BATTLE ABBEY.


Bennoch and I recommenced our travels, and, changing from one railway to
another, reached Tunbridge Wells at nine or ten in the evening. . . . .
The next day was spent at Tunbridge Wells, which is famous for a
chalybeate spring, and is a watering-place of note, most healthily
situated on a high, breezy hill, with many pleasant walks in the
neighborhood. . . . . From Tunbridge Wells we transported ourselves to
Battle,--the village in which is Battle Abbey.  It is a large village,
with many antique houses and some new ones; and in its principal street,
on one side, with a wide, green space before it, you see the gray,
embattled, outer wall, and great, square, battlemented entrance tower
(with a turret at each corner), of the ancient Abbey.  It is the perfect
reality of a Gothic battlement and gateway, just as solid and massive as
when it was first built, though hoary and venerable with the many
intervening centuries.  There are only two days in the week on which
visitors are allowed entrance, and this was not one of them.
Nevertheless, Bennoch was determined to get in, and he wished me to send
Lady Webster my card with his own; but this I utterly refused, for the
honor of America and for my own honor; because I will not do anything to
increase the reputation we already have as a very forward people.
Bennoch, however, called at a bookshop on the other side of the street,
near the gateway of the castle; and making friends, as he has a
marvellous tact in doing, with the bookseller, the latter offered to take
in his card to the housekeeper, and see if Lady Webster would not relax
her rule in our favor.  Meanwhile, we went into the old church of Battle,
which was built in Norman times, though subsequently to the Abbey.  As we
entered the church door, the bell rang for joy at the news of peace,
which had just been announced by the London papers.

The church has been whitewashed in modern times, and does not look so
venerable as it ought, with its arches and pillared aisles.  In the
chancel stands a marble tomb, heavy, rich, and elaborate, on the top of
which lie the broken-nosed statues of Sir Anthony Browne and his lady,
who were the Lord and Lady of Battle Abbey in Henry VIII.'s time.  The
knight is in armor, and the lady in stately garb, and (save for their
broken noses) they are in excellent preservation.  The pavement of the
chancel and aisles is all laid with tombstones, and on two or three of
these there were engraved brasses, representing knights in armor, and
churchmen, with inscriptions in Latin.  Some of them are very old.  On
the walls, too, there are various monuments, principally of dignitaries
connected with the Abbey.  Two hatchments, in honor of persons recently
dead, were likewise suspended in the chancel.  The best pew of the church
is, of course, that of the Webster family.  It is curtained round,
carpeted, furnished with chairs and footstools, and more resembles a
parlor than a pew; especially as there is a fireplace in one of the
pointed archways, which I suppose has been bricked up in order to form
it.  On the opposite side of the aisle is the pew of some other magnate,
containing a stove.  The rest of the parishioners have to keep themselves
warm with the fervor of their own piety.  I have forgotten what else was
interesting, except that we were shown a stone coffin, recently dug up,
in which was hollowed a place for the head of the corpse.

Returning to the bookshop, we found that Lady Webster had sent her
compliments, and would be very happy to have us see the Abbey.  How
thoroughly kind these English people can be when they like, and how often
they like to be so!

We lost no time in ringing the bell at the arched entrance, under the
great tower, and were admitted by an old woman who lives, I believe, in
the thickness of the wall.  She told us her room used to be the prison of
the Abbey, and under the great arch she pointed to a projecting beam,
where she said criminals used to be hanged.

At two of the intersecting points of the arches, which form the roof of
the gateway, were carved faces of stone, said to represent King Harold
and William the Conqueror.  The exterior wall, of which this tower is the
gateway, extends far along the village street, and encloses a very large
space, within which stands the mansion, quite secluded from unauthorized
visitors, or even from the sight of those without, unless it be at very
distant eyeshot.

We rang at the principal door of the edifice (it is under a deep arch, in
the Norman style, but of modern date), and a footman let its in, and then
delivered us over to a respectable old lady in black.  She was a
Frenchwoman by birth, but had been very long in the service of the
family, and spoke English almost without an accent; her French blood
being indicated only by her thin and withered aspect, and a greater
gentility of manner than would have been seen in an Englishwoman of
similar station.  She ushered us first into a grand and noble hall, the
arched and carved oaken roof of which ascended into the gable.  It was
nearly sixty feet long, and its height equal to its length,--as stately a
hall, I should imagine, as is anywhere to be found in a private mansion.
It was lighted, at one end, by a great window, beneath which, occupying
the whole breadth of the hall, hung a vast picture of the Battle of
Hastings; and whether a good picture or no, it was a rich adornment of
the hall.  The walls were wainscoted high upward with oak: they were
almost covered with noble pictures of ancestry, and of kings and great
men, and beautiful women; there were trophies of armor hung aloft; and
two armed figures, one in brass mail, the other in bright steel, stood on
a raised dais, underneath the great picture.  At the end of the hall,
opposite the picture, a third of the way up towards the roof, was a
gallery.  All these things that I have enumerated were in perfect
condition, without rust, untouched by decay or injury of any kind; but
yet they seemed to belong to a past age, and were mellowed, softened in
their splendor, a little dimmed with time,--toned down into a venerable
magnificence.  Of all domestic things that I have seen in England, it
satisfied me most.

Then the Frenchwoman showed us into various rooms and offices, most of
which were contrived out of the old abbey-cloisters, and the vaulted
cells and apartments in which the monks used to live.  If any house be
haunted, I should suppose this might be.  If any church-property bring a
curse with it, as people say, I do not see how the owners of Battle Abbey
can escape it, taking possession of and dwelling in these holy precincts,
as they have done, and laying their kitchen hearth with the stones of
overthrown altars.  The Abbey was first granted, I believe, to Sir
Anthony Browne, whom I saw asleep with his lady in the church.  It was
his first wife.  I wish it had been his second; for she was Surrey's
Geraldine.  The posterity of Sir Anthony kept the place till 1719, and
then sold it to the Websters, a family of Baronets, who are still the
owners and occupants.  The present proprietor is Sir Augustus Webster,
whose mother is the lady that so kindly let us into the Abbey.

Mr. Bennoch gave the nice old French lady half a crown, and we next went
round among the ruined portions of the Abbey, under the gardener's
guidance.  We saw two ivied towers, insulated from all other ruins; and
an old refectory, open to the sky, and a vaulted crypt, supported by
pillars; and we saw, too, the foundation and scanty remains of a chapel,
which had been long buried out of sight of man, and only dug up within
present memory,--about forty years ago.  There had always been a
tradition that this was the spot where Harold had planted his standard,
and where his body was found after the battle; and the discovery of the
ruined chapel confirmed the tradition.

I might have seen a great deal more, had there been time; and I have
forgotten much of what I did see; but it is an exceedingly interesting
place.  There is an avenue of old yew-trees, which meet above like a
cloistered arch; and this is called the Monks' Walk.  I rather think they
were ivy, though growing unsupported.

As we were retiring, the gardener suddenly stopped, as if he were
alarmed, and motioned to us to do the same, saying, "I believe it is my
lady!"  And so it was,--a tall and stately lady in black, trimming shrubs
in the garden.  She bowed to us very graciously,--we raised our hats, and
thus we met and parted without more ado.  As we went through the arch of
the entrance tower, Bennoch gave the old female warder a shilling, and
the gardener followed us to get half a crown.



HASTINGS.


We took a fly and driver from the principal hotel of Battle, and drove
off for Hastings, about seven miles distant.  Hastings is now a famous
watering and sea-bathing place, and seems to be well sheltered from the
winds, though open to the sea, which here stretches off towards France.
We climbed a high and steep hill, terraced round its base with streets of
modern lodging-houses, and crowned on its summit with the ruins of a
castle, the foundation of which was anterior to the Conquest.  This
castle has no wall towards the sea, the precipice being too high and
sheer to admit of attack on that side.  I have quite exhausted my
descriptive faculty for the present, so shall say nothing of this old
castle, which indeed (the remains being somewhat scanty and scraggling)
is chiefly picturesque and interesting from its bold position on such a
headlong hill.

Clambering down on another side from that of our ascent, we entered
the town of Hastings, which seems entirely modern, and made up of
lodging-houses, shops, hotels, parades, and all such makings up of
watering-places generally.  We took a delightful warm bath, washing off
all weariness and naughtiness, and coming out new men.  Then we walked to
St. Leonard's,--a part of Hastings, I believe, but a mile or two from the
castle, and there called at the lodgings of two friends of Bennoch.

These were Mr. Martin, the author of Bon Gaultier's ballads, and his
wife, the celebrated actress, Helen Faucett.  Mr. Martin is a barrister,
a gentleman whose face and manners suited me at once; a simple, refined,
sincere, not too demonstrative person.  His wife, too, I liked; a tall,
dark, fine, and lady-like woman, with the simplest manners, that give no
trouble at all, and so must be perfect.  With these two persons I felt
myself, almost in a moment, on friendly terms, and in true accord, and so
I talked, I think, more than I have at any time since coming to London.

We took a pleasant lunch at their house; and then they walked with us to
the railway station, and there they took leave of Bennoch affectionately
and of me hardly less so; for, in truth, we had grown to be almost
friends in this very little while.  And as we rattled away, I said to
Bennoch earnestly, "What good people they are!"--and Bennoch smiled, as
if he had known perfectly well that I should think and say so.  And thus
we rushed onward to London; and I reached St. James's Place between nine
and ten o'clock, after a very interesting tour, the record of which I
wish I could have kept as we went along, writing each day's history
before another day's adventures began.


END OF VOL. I.






PASSAGES FROM THE ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS

OF

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE


VOL. II.




PASSAGES FROM HAWTHORNE'S ENGLISH NOTE-BOOKS.



LONDON.--MILTON-CLUB DINNER.


April 4th, 1856.--On Tuesday I went to No. 14 Ludgate Hill, to dine with
Bennoch at the Milton Club; a club recently founded for dissenters,
nonconformists, and people whose ideas, religious or political, are not
precisely in train with the establishment in church and state.  I was
shown into a large reading-room, well provided with periodicals and
newspapers, and found two or three persons there; but Bennoch had not yet
arrived.  In a few moments, a tall gentleman with white hair came in,--a
fine and intelligent-looking man, whom I guessed to be one of those who
were to meet me.  He walked about, glancing at the periodicals; and soon
entered Mr. Tupper, and, without seeing me, exchanged warm greetings with
the white-haired gentleman.  "I suppose," began Mr. Tupper, "you have
come to meet--"  Now, conscious that my name was going to be spoken, and
not knowing but the excellent Mr. Tupper might say something which he
would not, quite like me to overhear, I advanced at once, with
outstretched hand, and saluted him.  He expressed great joy at the
recognition, and immediately introduced me to Mr. Hall.

The dining-room was pretty large and lofty, and there were sixteen guests
at table, most of them authors, or people connected with the press; so
that the party represented a great deal of the working intellect of
London at this present day and moment,--the men whose plays, whose songs,
whose articles, are just now in vogue.  Mr. Tom Taylor was one of the
very few whose writings I had known anything about.  He is a tall,
slender, dark young man, not English-looking, and wearing colored
spectacles, so that I should readily have taken him for an American
literary man.  I did not have much opportunity of talking with him, nor
with anybody else, except Dr. ------, who seemed a shrewd, sensible man,
with a certain slight acerbity of thought.  Mr. Herbert Ingram, recently
elected member of Parliament, was likewise present, and sat on Bennoch's
left.

It was a very good dinner, with an abundance of wine, which Bennoch sent
round faster than was for the next day's comfort of his guests.  It is
singular that I should thus far have quite forgotten W------ H--------,
whose books I know better than those of any other person there.  He is a
white-headed, stout, firm-looking, and rather wrinkled-faced old
gentleman, whose temper, I should imagine, was not the very sweetest in
the world.  There is all abruptness, a kind of sub-acidity, if not
bitterness, in his address; he seemed not to be, in short, so genial as I
should have anticipated from his books.

As soon as the cloth was removed, Bennoch, without rising from his chair,
made a speech in honor of his eminent and distinguished guest, which
illustrious person happened to be sitting in the selfsame chair that I
myself occupied.  I have no recollection of what he said, nor of what I
said in reply, but I remember that both of us were cheered and applauded
much more than the occasion deserved.  Then followed about fifty other
speeches; for every single individual at table was called up (as Tupper
said, "toasted and roasted"), and, for my part, I was done entirely brown
(to continue T-----'s figure).  Everybody said something kind, not a word
or idea of which can I find in my memory.  Certainly, if I never get any
more praise in my life, I have had enough of it for once.  I made another
little bit of a speech, too, in response to something that was said in
reference to the present difficulties between England and America, and
ended, as a proof that I deemed war impossible, with drinking success to
the British army, and calling on Lieutenant Shaw, of the Aldershott Camp,
to reply.  I am afraid I must have said something very wrong, for the
applause was vociferous, and I could hear the gentlemen whispering about
the table, "Good!" "Good!" "Yes, he is a fine fellow,"--and other such
ill-earned praises; and I took shame to myself, and held my tongue
(publicly) the rest of the evening.  But in such cases something must be
allowed to the excitement of the moment, and to the effect of kindness
and goodwill, so broadly and warmly displayed; and even a sincere man
must not be held to speak as if he were under oath.

We separated, in a blessed state of contentment with one another, at
about eleven; and (lest I should starve before morning) I went with Mr.
D------ to take supper at his house in Park Lane.  Mr. D------ is a pale
young gentleman, of American aspect, being a West-Indian by birth.  He is
one of the principal writers of editorials for the Times.  We were
accompanied in the carriage by another gentleman, Mr. M------, who is
connected with the management of the same paper.  He wrote the letters
from Scutari, which drew so much attention to the state of the hospitals.
Mr. D------ is the husband of the former Miss ------, the actress, and
when we reached his house, we found that she had just come home from the
theatre, and was taking off her stage-dress.  Anon she came down to the
drawing-room,--a seemingly good, simple, and intelligent lady, not at all
pretty, and, I should think, older than her husband.  She was very kind
to me, and told me that she had read one of my books--The House of the
Seven Gables--thirteen years ago; which I thought remarkable, because I
did not write it till eight or nine years afterwards.

The principal talk during supper (which consisted of Welsh-rabbit and
biscuits, with champagne and sodawater) was about the Times, and the two
contributors expressed vast admiration of Mr. ------, who has the chief
editorial management of the paper.  It is odd to find how little we
outsiders know of men who really exercise a vast influence on affairs,
for this Mr. ------ is certainly of far more importance in the world than
a minister of state.  He writes nothing himself; but the character of the
Times seems to depend upon his intuitive, unerring judgment; and if ever
he is absent from his post, even for a day or two, they say that the
paper immediately shows it.  In reply to my questions, they appeared to
acknowledge that he was a man of expediency, but of a very high
expediency, and that he gave the public the very best principles which it
was capable of receiving.  Perhaps it may be so: the Times's articles are
certainly not written in so high a moral vein as might be wished; but
what they lack in height they gain in breadth.  Every sensible man in
England finds his own best common-sense there; and, in effect, I think
its influence is wholesome.

Apropos of public speaking, Dr. ------ said that Sir Lytton Bulwer asked
him (I think the anecdote was personal to himself) whether he felt his
heart beat when he was going to speak.  "Yes."  "Does your voice frighten
you?"  "Yes."  "Do all your ideas forsake you?"  "Yes."  "Do you wish the
floor to open and swallow you?"  "Yes."  "Why, then, you'll make an
orator!"  Dr. ------  told of Canning, too, how once, before rising to
speak in the House of Commons, he bade his friend feel his pulse, which
was throbbing terrifically.  "I know I shall make one of my best
speeches," said Canning, "because I'm in such an awful funk!"  President
Pierce, who has a great deal of oratorical power, is subject to a similar
horror and reluctance.



REFORM-CLUB DINNER.


April 5th.--On Thursday, at eight o'clock, I went to the Reform Club, to
dine with Dr. ------.  The waiter admitted me into a great basement hall,
with a tessellated or mosaic or somehow figured floor of stone, and
lighted from a dome of lofty height.  In a few minutes Dr. ------
appeared, and showed me about the edifice, which is very noble and of a
substantial magnificence that was most satisfactory to behold,--no
wood-work imitating better materials, but pillars and balustrades of
marble, and everything what it purports to be.  The reading-room is very
large, and luxuriously comfortable, and contains an admirable library:
there are rooms and conveniences for every possible purpose; and whatever
material for enjoyment a bachelor may need, or ought to have, he can
surely find it here, and on such reasonable terms that a small income
will do as much for him as a far greater one on any other system.

In a colonnade, on the first floor, surrounding the great basement hall,
there are portraits of distinguished reformers, and black niches for
others yet to come.  Joseph Hume, I believe, is destined to fill one of
these blanks; but I remarked that the larger part of the portraits,
already hung up, are of men of high rank,--the Duke of Sussex, for
instance; Lord Durham, Lord Grey; and, indeed, I remember no commoner.
In one room, I saw on the wall the fac-simile, so common in the United
States, of our Declaration of Independence.

Descending again to the basement hall, an elderly gentleman came in, and
was warmly welcomed by Dr. ------.  He was a very short man, but with
breadth enough, and a back excessively bent,--bowed almost to deformity;
very gray hair, and a face and expression of remarkable briskness and
intelligence.  His profile came out pretty boldly, and his eyes had the
prominence that indicates, I believe, volubility of speech, nor did he
fail to talk from the instant of his appearance; and in the tone of his
voice, and in his glance, and in the whole man, there was something
racy,--a flavor of the humorist.  His step was that of an aged man, and
he put his stick down very decidedly at every footfall; though as he
afterwards told me that he was only fifty-two, he need not yet have been
infirm.  But perhaps he has had the gout; his feet, however, are by no
means swollen, but unusually small.  Dr. ------ introduced him as Mr.
Douglas Jerrold, and we went into the coffee-room to dine.

The coffee-room occupies one whole side of the edifice, and is provided
with a great many tables, calculated for three or four persons to dine
at; and we sat down at one of these, and Dr. ------ ordered some
mulligatawny soup, and a bottle of white French wine.  The waiters in the
coffee-room are very numerous, and most of them dressed in the livery of
the Club, comprising plush breeches and white-silk stockings; for these
English Reformers do not seem to include Republican simplicity of manners
in their system.  Neither, perhaps, is it anywise essential.

After the soup, we had turbot, and by and by a bottle of Chateau Margaux,
very delectable; and then some lambs' feet, delicately done, and some
cutlets of I know not what peculiar type; and finally a ptarmigan, which
is of the same race of birds as the grouse, but feeds high up towards the
summits of the Scotch mountains.  Then some cheese, and a bottle of
Chambertin.  It was a very pleasant dinner, and my companions were both
very agreeable men; both taking a shrewd, satirical, yet not ill-natured,
view of life and people, and as for Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he often
reminded me of E---- C------, in the richer veins of the latter, both by
his face and expression, and by a tincture of something at once wise and
humorously absurd in what he said.  But I think he has a kinder, more
genial, wholesomer nature than E----, and under a very thin crust of
outward acerbity I grew sensible of a very warm heart, and even of much
simplicity of character in this man, born in London, and accustomed
always to London life.

I wish I had any faculty whatever of remembering what people say; but,
though I appreciate anything good at the moment, it never stays in my
memory; nor do I think, in fact, that anything definite, rounded,
pointed, separable, and transferable from the general lump of
conversation was said by anybody.  I recollect that they laughed at
Mr. ------, and at his shedding a tear into a Scottish river, on occasion
of some literary festival. . . . . They spoke approvingly of Bulwer, as
valuing his literary position, and holding himself one of the brotherhood
of authors; and not so approvingly of Charles Dickens, who, born a
plebeian, aspires to aristocratic society.  But I said that it was easy
to condescend, and that Bulwer knew he could not put off his rank, and
that he would have all the advantages of it in spite of his authorship.
We talked about the position of men of letters in England, and they said
that the aristocracy hated and despised and feared them; and I asked why
it was that literary men, having really so much power in their hands,
were content to live unrecognized in the State.

Douglas Jerrold talked of Thackeray and his success in America, and said
that he himself purposed going and had been invited thither to lecture.
I asked him whether it was pleasant to a writer of plays to see them
performed; and he said it was intolerable, the presentation of the
author's idea being so imperfect; and Dr. ------ observed that it was
excruciating to hear one of his own songs sung.  Jerrold spoke of the
Duke of Devonshire with great warmth, as a true, honest, simple, most
kind-hearted man, from whom he himself had received great courtesies and
kindnesses (not, as I understood, in the way of patronage or essential
favors); and I (Heaven forgive me!) queried within myself whether this
English reforming author would have been quite so sensible of the Duke's
excellence if his Grace had not been a duke.  But indeed, a nobleman, who
is at the same time a true and whole-hearted man, feeling his brotherhood
with men, does really deserve some credit for it.

In the course of the evening, Jerrold spoke with high appreciation of
Emerson; and of Longfellow, whose Hiawatha he considered a wonderful
performance; and of Lowell, whose Fable for Critics he especially
admired.  I mentioned Thoreau, and proposed to send his works to Dr.
------, who, being connected with the Illustrated News, and otherwise a
writer, might be inclined to draw attention to then.  Douglas Jerrold
asked why he should not have them too.  I hesitated a little, but as he
pressed me, and would have an answer, I said that I did not feel quite so
sure of his kindly judgment on Thoreau's books; and it so chanced that I
used the word "acrid" for lack of a better, in endeavoring to express my
idea of Jerrold's way of looking at men and books.  It was not quite what
I meant; but, in fact, he often is acrid, and has written pages and
volumes of acridity, though, no doubt, with an honest purpose, and from a
manly disgust at the cant and humbug of the world.  Jerrold said no more,
and I went on talking with Dr. ------; but, in a minute or two, I became
aware that something had gone wrong, and, looking at Douglas Jerrold,
there was an expression of pain and emotion on his face.  By this time a
second bottle of Burgundy had been opened (Clos Vougeot, the best the
Club could produce, and far richer than the Chambertin), and that warm
and potent wine may have had something to do with the depth and vivacity
of Mr. Jerrold's feelings.  But he was indeed greatly hurt by that little
word "acrid."  "He knew," he said, "that the world considered him a sour,
bitter, ill-natured man; but that such a man as I should have the sane
opinion was almost more than he could bear."  As he spoke, he threw out
his arms, sank back in his seat, and I was really a little apprehensive
of his actual dissolution into tears.  Hereupon I spoke, as was good
need, and though, as usual, I have forgotten everything I said, I am
quite sure it was to the purpose, and went to this good fellow's heart,
as it came warmly from my own.  I do remember saying that I felt him to
be as genial as the glass of Burgundy which I held in my hand; and I
think that touched the very right spot; for he smiled, and said he was
afraid the Burgundy was better than he, but yet he was comforted.  Dr.
------ said that he likewise had a reputation for bitterness; and I
assured him, if I might venture to join myself to the brotherhood of two
such men, that I was considered a very ill-natured person by many people
in my own country.  Douglas Jerrold said he was glad of it.

We were now in sweetest harmony, and Jerrold spoke more than it would
become me to repeat in praise of my own books, which he said he admired,
and he found the man more admirable than his books!  I hope so,
certainly.

We now went to the Haymarket Theatre, where Douglas Jerrold is on the
free list; and after seeing a ballet by some Spanish dancers, we
separated, and betook ourselves to our several homes.  I like Douglas
Jerrold very much.


April 8th.--On Saturday evening, at ten o'clock, I went to a supper-party
at Mr. D------'s, and there met five or six people,--Mr. Faed, a young
and distinguished artist; Dr. Eliotson, a dark, sombre, taciturn,
powerful-looking man, with coal-black hair, and a beard as black,
fringing round his face; Mr. Charles Reade, author of Christie Johnstone
and other novels, and many plays,--a tall man, more than thirty,
fair-haired, and of agreeable talk and demeanor.

On April 6th, I went to the Waterloo station, and there meeting Bennoch
and Dr. ------, took the rail for Woking, where we found Mr. Hall's
carriage waiting to convey us to Addlestone, about five miles off.  On
arriving we found that Mr. and Mrs. Hall had not yet returned from
church.  Their place is an exceedingly pretty one, and arranged in very
good taste.  The house is not large; but is filled, in every room, with
fine engravings, statuettes, ingenious prettinesses or beautifulnesses in
the way of flower-stands, cabinets, and things that seem to have bloomed
naturally out of the characters of its occupants.  There is a
conservatory connected with the drawing-room, and enriched with lovely
plants, one of which has a certain interest as being the plant on which
Coleridge's eyes were fixed when he died.  This conservatory is likewise
beautified with several very fine casts of statues by modern sculptors,
among which was the Greek Slave of Powers, which my English friends
criticised as being too thin and meagre; but I defended it as in
accordance with American ideas of feminine beauty.  From the conservatory
we passed into the garden, but did not minutely examine it, knowing that
Mr. Hall would wish to lead us through it in person.  So, in the mean
time, we took a walk in the neighborhood, over stiles and along by-paths,
for two or three miles, till we reached the old village of Chertsey.  In
one of its streets stands an ancient house, gabled, and with the second
story projecting over the first, and bearing an inscription to the
purport that the poet Cowley had once resided, and, I think, died there.
Thence we passed on till we reached a bridge over the Thames, which at
this point, about twenty-five miles from London, is a narrow river, but
looks clean and pure, and unconscious what abominations the city sewers
will pour into it anon.  We were caught in two or three showers in the
course of our walk; but got back to Firfield without being very much
wetted.

Our host and hostess had by this time returned from church, and Mrs. Hall
came frankly and heartily to the door to greet us, scolding us (kindly)
for having got wet. . . . . I liked her simple, easy, gentle, quiet
manners, and I liked her husband too.

He has a wide and quick sympathy, and expresses it freely. . . . . The
world is the better for him.

The shower being now over, we went out upon the beautiful lawn before his
house, where there were a good many trees of various kinds, many of which
have been set out by persons of great or small distinction, and are
labelled with their names.  Thomas Moore's name was appended to one;
Maria Edgeworth's to another; likewise Fredrika Bremer's, Jenny Lind's;
also Grace Greenwood's, and I know not whose besides.  This is really a
pleasant method of enriching one's grounds with memorials of friends, nor
is there any harm in making a shrubbery of celebrities.  Three holes were
already dug, and three new trees lay ready to be planted, and for me
there was a sumach to plant,--a tree I never liked; but Mr. Hall said
that they had tried to dig up a hawthorn, but found it clung too fast to
the soil.  So, since better might not be, and telling Mr. Hall that I
supposed I should have a right to hang myself on this tree whenever I
chose, I seized a spade, and speedily shovelled in a great deal of dirt;
and there stands my sumach, an object of interest to posterity!  Bennoch
also and Dr. ------ set out their trees, and indeed, it was in some sense
a joint affair, for the rest of the party held up each tree, while its
godfather shovelled in the earth; but, after all, the gardener had more
to do with it than we.  After this important business was over, Mr. Hall
led us about his rounds, which are very nicely planned and ordered; and
all this he has bought, and built, and laid out, from the profits of his
own and his wife's literary exertions.

We dined early, and had a very pleasant dinner, and, after the cloth was
removed, Mr. Hall was graciously pleased to drink my health, following it
with a long tribute to my genius.  I answered briefly; and one half of my
short speech was in all probability very foolish. . . . .

After the ladies (there were three, one being a girl of seventeen, with
rich auburn hair, the adopted daughter of the Halls) had retired, Dr.
------ having been toasted himself, proposed Mrs. Hall's health.

I did not have a great deal of conversation with Mrs. Hall; but enough to
make me think her a genuine and good woman, unspoilt by a literary
career, and retaining more sentiment than even most girls keep beyond
seventeen.  She told me that it had been the dream of her life to see
Longfellow and myself! . . . . Her dream is half accomplished now, and,
as they say Longfellow is coming over this summer, the remainder may soon
be rounded out.  On taking leave, our kind hosts presented me with some
beautiful flowers, and with three volumes of a work, by themselves, on
Ireland; and Dr. ------ was favored also with some flowers, and a plant
in a pot, and Bennoch too had his hands full, . . . . and we went on our
way rejoicing.

[Here follows an account of the Lord Mayor's dinner, taken mostly for Our
Old Home; but I think I will copy this more exact description of the lady
mentioned in "Civic Banquets."--ED.]

. . . . My eyes were mostly drawn to a young lady, who sat nearly
opposite me, across the table.  She was, I suppose, dark, and yet not
dark, but rather seemed to be of pure white marble, yet not white; but
the purest and finest complexion, without a shade of color in it, yet
anything but sallow or sickly.  Her hair was a wonderful deep
raven-black, black as night, black as death; not raven-black, for that
has a shiny gloss, and hers had not, but it was hair never to be painted
nor described,--wonderful hair, Jewish hair.  Her nose had a beautiful
outline, though I could see that it was Jewish too; and that, and all her
features, were so fine that sculpture seemed a despicable art beside her,
and certainly my pen is good for nothing.  If any likeness could be
given, however; it must be by sculpture, not painting.  She was slender
and youthful, and yet had a stately and cold, though soft and womanly
grace; and, looking at her, I saw what were the wives of the old
patriarchs in their maiden or early-married days,--what Judith was, for,
womanly as she looked, I doubt, not she could have slain a man in a just
cause,--what Bathsheba was, only she seemed to have no sin in her,--
perhaps what Eve was, though one could hardly think her weak enough to
eat the apple. . . . . Whether owing to distinctness of race, my sense
that she was a Jewess, or whatever else, I felt a sort of repugnance,
simultaneously with my perception that she was an admirable creature.



THE HOUSE OF COMMONS.


At ten o'clock the next day [after the Lord Mayor's dinner] I went to
lunch with Bennoch, and afterwards accompanied him to one of the
government offices in Downing Street.  He went thither, not on official
business, but on a matter connected with a monument to Miss Mitford, in
which Mr. Harness, a clergyman and some sort of a government clerk, is
interested.  I gathered from this conversation that there is no great
enthusiasm about the monumental affair among the British public.  It
surprised me to hear allusions indicating that Miss Mitford was not the
invariably amiable person that her writings would suggest; but the whole
drift of what they said tended, nevertheless, towards the idea that she
was an excellent and generous person, loved most by those who knew her
best.

From Downing Street we crossed over and entered Westminster Hall, and
passed through it, and up the flight of steps at its farthest end, and
along the avenue of statues, into the vestibule of the House of Commons.
It was now somewhat past five, and we stood at the inner entrance of the
House, to see the members pass in, Bennoch pointing out to me the
distinguished ones.  I was not much impressed with the appearance of the
members generally; they seemed to me rather shabbier than English
gentlemen usually, and I saw or fancied in many of them a certain
self-importance, as they passed into the interior, betokening them to be
very full of their dignity.  Some of them looked more American--more like
American politicians--than most Englishmen do.  There was now and then a
gray-headed country gentleman, the very type of stupidity; and two or
three city members came up and spoke to Bennoch, and showed themselves
quite as dull, in their aldermanic way, as the country squires. . . . .
Bennoch pointed out Lord John Russell, a small, very short, elderly
gentleman, in a brown coat, and so large a hat--not large of brim, but
large like a peck-measure--that I saw really no face beneath it.  By and
by came a rather tall, slender person, in a black frock-coat, buttoned
up, and black pantaloons, taking long steps, but I thought rather feebly
or listlessly.  His shoulders were round, or else he had a habitual stoop
in them.  He had a prominent nose, a thin face, and a sallow, very sallow
complexion; . . . . and had I seen him in America I should have taken him
for a hard-worked editor of a newspaper, weary and worn with night-labor
and want of exercise,--aged before his time.  It was Disraeli, and I
never saw any other Englishman look in the least like him; though, in
America, his appearance would not attract notice as being unusual.  I do
not remember any other noteworthy person whom we saw enter; in fact, the
House had already been some time in session, and most of the members were
in their places.

We were to dine at the Refectory of the House with the new member for
Boston; and, meanwhile, Bennoch obtained admittance for us into the
Speaker's gallery, where we had a view of the members, and could hear
what was going on.  A Mr. Muntz was speaking on the Income Tax, and he
was followed by Sir George Cornewall Lewis and others; but it was all
very uninteresting, without the slightest animation or attempt at
oratory,--which, indeed, would have been quite out of place.  We saw Lord
Palmerston; but at too great a distance to distinguish anything but a
gray head.  The House had daylight in it when we entered, and for some
time afterwards; but, by and by, the roof, which I had taken to be a
solid and opaque ceiling, suddenly brightened, and showed itself to be
transparent; a vast expanse of tinted and figured glass, through which
came down a great, mild radiance on the members below.

The character of the debate, however, did not grow more luminous or
vivacious; so we went down into the vestibule, and there waited for
Mr. ------, who soon came and led us into the Refectory.  It was very
much like the coffee-room of a club.  The strict rule forbids the
entrance of any but members of Parliament; but it seems to be winked at,
although there is another room, opening beyond this, where the law of
seclusion is strictly enforced.

The dinner was good, not remarkably so, but good enough,--a soup, some
turbot or salmon, cutlets, and I know not what else, and claret, sherry,
and port; for, as Mr. ------ said, "he did not wish to be stingy."
Mr. ------ is a self-made man, and a strong instance of the difference
between the Englishman and the American, when self-made, and without
early education.  He is no more a gentleman now than when he began life,
--not a whit more refined, either outwardly or inwardly; while the
American would have been, after the same experience, not distinguishable
outwardly, and perhaps as refined within, as nine tenths of the gentlemen
born, in the House of Commons.  And, besides, an American comes naturally
to any distinctions to which success in life may bring him; he takes them
as if they were his proper inheritance, and in no wise to be wondered at.
Mr. ------, on the other hand, took evidently a childish delight in his
position, and felt a childish wonder in having arrived at it; nor did it
seem real to him, after all. . . . .

We again saw Disraeli, who has risen from the people by modes perhaps
somewhat like those of Mr. ------.  He came and stood near our table,
looking at the bill of fare, and then sat down on the opposite side of
the room with another gentleman, and ate his dinner.  The story of his
marriage does him much credit; and indeed I am inclined to like Disraeli,
as a man who has made his own place good among a hostile aristocracy, and
leads instead of following them.

From the House of Commons we went to Albert Smith's exhibition, or
lecture, of the ascent of Mont Blanc, to which Bennoch had orders.  It
was very amusing, and in some degree instructive.  We remained in the
saloon at the conclusion of the lecture; and when the audience had
dispersed, Mr. Albert Smith made his appearance. . . . .

Nothing of moment happened the next day, at least, not till two o'clock,
when I went with Mr. Bowman to Birch's eating-house (it is not Birch's
now, but this was the name of the original founder, who became an
alderman, and has long been dead) for a basin of turtle-soup.  It was
very rich, very good, better than we had at the Lord Mayor's, and the
best I ever ate.

In the evening, Mr. J. B. Davis, formerly our Secretary of Legation,
called to take us to dine at Mr. ------'s in Camden Town.  Mr. ------
calls his residence Vermont House; but it hardly has a claim to any
separate title, being one of the centre houses of a block.  I forget
whether I mentioned his calling on me.  He is a Vermonter, a graduate of
Yale College, who has been here several years, and has established a sort
of book brokerage, buying libraries for those who want them, and rare
works and editions for American collectors.  His business naturally
brings him into relations with literary people; and he is himself a
kindly and pleasant man.  On our arrival we found Mr. D------ and one of
his sisters already there; and soon came a Mr. Peabody, who, if I mistake
not, is one of the Salem Peabodys, and has some connection with the
present eminent London Mr. Peabody.  At any rate, he is a very sensible,
well-instructed, and widely and long travelled man.  Mr. Tom Taylor was
also expected; but, owing to some accident or mistake, he did not come
for above an hour, all which time our host waited. . . . . But Mr. Tom
Taylor, a wit, a satirist, and a famous diner out, is too formidable and
too valuable a personage to be treated cavalierly.

In the interim Mr. ------ showed us some rare old books, which he has in
his private collection, a black-letter edition of Chaucer, and other
specimens of the early English printers; and I was impressed, as I have
often been, with the idea that we have made few, if any, improvements in
the art of printing, though we have greatly facilitated the modes of it.
He showed us Dryden's translation of Virgil, with Dr. Johnson's autograph
in it and a large collection of Bibles, of all dates,--church Bibles,
family Bibles of the common translation, and older ones.  He says he has
written or is writing a history of the Bible (as a printed work, I
presume).  Many of these Bibles had, no doubt, been in actual and daily
use from generation to generation; but they were now all splendidly
bound, and were likewise very clean and smooth,--in fact, every leaf had
been cleansed by a delicate process, a part of which consisted in soaking
the whole book in a tub of water, during several days.  Mr. ------ is
likewise rich in manuscripts, having a Spanish document with the
signature of the son of Columbus; a whole little volume in Franklin's
handwriting, being the first specimen of it; and the original manuscripts
of many of the songs of Burns.  Among these I saw "Auld Lang Syne," and
"Bruce's Address to his Army."  We amused ourselves with these matters as
long as we could; but at last, as there was to be a party in the evening,
dinner could no longer be put off; so we took our seats at table, and
immediately afterwards Mr. Taylor made his appearance with his wife and
another lady.

Mr. Taylor is reckoned a brilliant conversationist; but I suppose he
requires somebody to draw him out and assist him; for I could hear
nothing that I thought very remarkable on this occasion.  He is not a
kind of man whom I can talk with, or greatly help to talk; so, though I
sat next to him, nothing came of it.  He told me some stories of his life
in the Temple,--little funny incidents, that he afterwards wrought into
his dramas; in short, a sensible, active-minded, clearly perceptive man,
with a humorous way of showing up men and matters. . . . . I wish I could
know exactly what the English style good conversation.  Probably it is
something like plum-pudding,--as heavy, but seldom so rich.

After dinner Mr. Tom Taylor and Mr. D------, with their respective
ladies, took their leave; but when we returned to the drawing-room, we
found it thronged with a good many people.  Mr. S. C. Hall was there with
his wife, whom I was glad to see again, for this was the third time of
meeting her, and, in this whirl of new acquaintances, I felt quite as if
she were an old friend.  Mr. William Howitt was also there, and
introduced me to his wife,--a very natural, kind, and pleasant lady; and
she presented me to one or two daughters.  Mr. Marston, the dramatist,
was also introduced to me; and Mr. Helps, a thin, scholarly, cold sort of
a man.  Dr. Mackay and his wife were there, too; and a certain Mr. Jones,
a sculptor,--a jolly, large, elderly person, with a twinkle in his eye.
Also a Mr. Godwin, who impressed me as quite a superior person,
gentlemanly, cultivated, a man of sensibility; but it is quite impossible
to take a clear imprint from any one character, where so many are stamped
upon one's notice at once.  This Mr. Godwin, as we were discussing
Thackeray, said that he is most beautifully tender and devoted to his
wife, whenever she can be sensible of his attentions.  He says that
Thackeray, in his real self, is a sweet, sad man.  I grew weary of so
many people, especially of the ladies, who were rather superfluous in
their oblations, quite stifling me, indeed, with the incense that they
burnt under my nose.  So far as I could judge, they had all been invited
there to see me.  It is ungracious, even hoggish, not to be gratified
with the interest they expressed in me; but then it is really a bore, and
one does not know what to do or say.  I felt like the hippopotamus, or--
to use a more modest illustration--like some strange insect imprisoned
under a tumbler, with a dozen eyes watching whatever I did.  By and by,
Mr. Jones, the sculptor, relieved me by standing up against the
mantel-piece, and telling an Irish story, not to two or three auditors,
but to the whole drawing-room, all attentive as to a set exhibition.  It
was very funny.

The next day after this I went with Mr. Bowman to call on our minister,
and found that he, and four of the ladies of his family, with his son,
had gone to the Queen's Drawing-room.  We lunched at the Wellington; and
spent an hour or more in looking out of the window of that establishment
at the carriages, with their pompous coachmen and footmen, driving to and
from the Palace of St. James, and at the Horse Guards, with their bright
cuirasses, stationed along the street. . . . . Then I took the rail for
Liverpool. . . . . While I was still at breakfast at the Waterloo, J-----
came in, ruddy-cheeked, smiling, very glad to see me, and looking, I
thought, a good deal taller than when I left him.  And so ended my London
excursion, which has certainly been rich in incident and character,
though my account of it be but meagre.



SCOTLAND.--GLASGOW.


May 10th.--Last Friday, May 2d, I took the rail, with Mr. Bowman, from
the Lime Street station, for Glasgow.  There was nothing of much interest
along the road, except that, when we got beyond Penrith, we saw snow on
the tops of some of the hills.  Twilight came on as we were entering
Scotland; and I have only a recollection of bleak and bare hills and
villages dimly seen, until, nearing Glasgow, we saw the red blaze of
furnace-lights at frequent iron-founderies.  We put up at the Queen's
Hotel, where we arrived about ten o'clock; a better hotel than I have
anywhere found in England,--new, well arranged, and with brisk
attendance.

In the morning I rambled largely about Glasgow, and found it to be
chiefly a modern-built city, with streets mostly wide and regular, and
handsome houses and public edifices of a dark gray stone.  In front of
our hotel, in an enclosed green space, stands a tall column surmounted by
a statue of Sir Walter Scott,--a good statue, I should think, as
conveying the air and personal aspect of the man.  There is a bronze
equestrian statue of the Queen in one of the streets, and one or two more
equestrian or other statues of eminent persons.  I passed through the
Trongate and the Gallow-Gate, and visited the Salt-Market, and saw the
steeple of the Tolbooth, all of which Scott has made interesting; and I
went through the gate of the University, and penetrated into its enclosed
courts, round which the College edifices are built.  They are not Gothic,
but of the age, I suppose, of James I.,--with odd-looking, conical-roofed
towers, and here and there the bust of a benefactor in niches round the
courts, and heavy stone staircases ascending from the pavement, outside
the buildings, all of dark gray granite, cold, hard, and venerable.  The
University stands in High Street, in a dense part of the town, and a very
old and shabby part, too.  I think the poorer classes of Glasgow excel
even those in Liverpool in the bad eminence of filth, uncombed and
unwashed children, drunkenness, disorderly deportment, evil smell, and
all that makes city poverty disgusting.  In my opinion, however, they are
a better-looking people than the English (and this is true of all
classes), more intelligent of aspect, with more regular features.  I
looked for the high cheek-bones, which have been attributed, as a
characteristic feature, to the Scotch, but could not find them.  What
most distinguishes them front the English is the regularity of the nose,
which is straight, or sometimes a little curved inward; whereas the
English nose has no law whatever, but disports itself in all manner of
irregularity.  I very soon learned to recognize the Scotch face, and when
not too Scotch, it is a handsome one.

In another part of the High Street, up a pretty steep slope, and on one
side of a public green, near an edifice which I think is a medical
college, stands St. Mungo's Cathedral.  It is hardly of cathedral
dimensions, though a large and fine old church.  The price of a ticket of
admittance is twopence; so small that it might be as well to make the
entrance free.  The interior is in excellent repair, with the nave and
side aisles, and clustered pillars, and intersecting arches, that belong
to all these old churches; and a few monuments along the walls.  I was
going away without seeing any more than this; but the verger, a friendly
old gentleman, with a hearty Scotch way of speaking, told me that the
crypts were what chiefly interested strangers; and so he guided me down
into the foundation-story of the church, where there is an intricacy and
entanglement of immensely massive and heavy arches, supporting the
structure above.  The view through these arches, among the great shafts
of the columns, was very striking.  In the central part is a monument; a
recumbent figure, if I remember rightly, but it is not known whom it
commemorates.  There is also a monument to a Scotch prelate, which seems
to have been purposely defaced, probably in Covenant times.  These
intricate arches were the locality of one of the scenes in "Rob Roy,"
when Rob gives Frank Osbaldistone some message or warning, and then
escapes from him into the obscurity behind.  In one corner is St. Mungo's
well, secured with a wooden cover; but I should not care to drink water
that comes from among so many old graves.

After viewing the cathedral, I got back to the hotel just in time to go
from thence to the steamer wharf, and take passage up the Clyde.  There
was nothing very interesting in this little voyage.  We passed many
small iron steamers, and some large ones; and green fields along the
river-shores, villas, villages, and all such suburban objects; neither am
I quite sure of the name of the place we landed at, though I think it was
Bowling.  Here we took the railway for Balloch; and the only place or
thing I remember during this transit was a huge bluff or crag, rising
abruptly from a river-side, and looking, in connection with its vicinity
to the Highlands, just such a site as would be taken for the foundation
of a castle.  On inquiry it turned out that this abrupt and double-headed
hill (for it has two summits, with a cleft between) is the site of
Dumbarton Castle, for ages one of the strongest fortresses in Scotland,
and still kept up as a garrisoned place.  At the distance and point of
view at which we passed it, the castle made no show.

Arriving at Balloch, we found it a small village, with no marked
features, and a hotel, where we got some lunch, and then we took a stroll
over the bridge across the Levers, while waiting for the steamer to take
us up Loch Lomond.  It was a beautiful afternoon, warm and sunny; and
after walking about a mile, we had a fine view of Loch Lomond, and of the
mountains around and beyond it,--Ben Lomond among the rest.  It is vain,
at a week's distance, to try to remember the shapes of mountains; so I
shall attempt no description of them, and content myself with saying that
they did not quite come up to my anticipations.  In due time we returned
to our hotel, and found in the coffee-room a tall, white-haired,
venerable gentleman, and a pleasant-looking young lady, his daughter.
They had been eating lunch, and the young lady helped her father on with
his outside garment, and his comforter, and gave him his stick, just as
any other daughter might do,--all of which I mention because he was a
nobleman; and, moreover, had engaged all the post-horses at the inn, so
that we could not continue our travels by land, along the side of Loch
Lomond, as we had first intended.  At four o'clock the railway train
arrived again, with a very moderate number of passengers, who (and we
among them) immediately embarked on board a neat little steamer which was
waiting for us.

The day was bright and cloudless; but there was a strong, cold breeze
blowing down the lake, so that it was impossible, without vast
discomfort, to stand in the bow of the steamer and look at the scenery.
I looked at it, indeed, along the sides, as we passed, and on our track
behind; and no doubt it was very fine; but from all the experience I have
had, I do not think scenery can be well seen from the water.  At any
rate, the shores of Loch Lomond have faded completely out of my memory;
nor can I conceive that they really were very striking.  At a year's
interval, I can recollect the cluster of hills around the head of Lake
Windermere; at twenty years' interval, I remember the shores of Lake
Champlain; but of the shores of this Scottish lake I remember nothing
except some oddly shaped rocks, called "The Cobbler and his Daughter," on
a mountain-top, just before we landed.  But, indeed, we had very
imperfect glimpses of the hills along the latter part of the course,
because the wind had grown so very cold that we took shelter below, and
merely peeped at Loch Lomond's sublimities from the cabin-windows.

The whole voyage up Loch Lomond is, I think, about thirty-two miles; but
we landed at a place called Tarbet, much short of the ultimate point.
There is here a large hotel; but we passed it, and walked onward a mile
or two to Arroquhar, a secluded glen among the hills, where is a new
hotel, built in the old manor-house style, and occupying the site of what
was once a castle of the chief of the MacFarlanes.  Over the portal is a
stone taken from the former house, bearing the date 1697.  There is a
little lake near the house, and the hills shut in the whole visible scene
so closely that there appears no outlet nor communication with the
external world; but in reality this little lake is connected with Loch
Long, and Loch Long is an arm of the sea; so that there is water
communication between Arroquhar and Glasgow.  We found this a very
beautiful place; and being quite sheltered from all winds that blew, we
strolled about late into the prolonged twilight, and admired the outlines
of the surrounding hills, and fancied resemblances to various objects in
the shapes of the crags against the evening sky.  The sun had not set
till nearly, if not quite, eight o'clock; and before the daylight had
quite gone, the northern lights streamed out, and I do not think that
there was much darkness over the glen of Arroquhar that night.  At all
events, before the darkness came, we withdrew into the coffee-room.

We had excellent beds and sleeping-rooms in this new hotel, and I
remember nothing more till morning, when we were astir betimes, and had
some chops for breakfast.  Then our host, Mr. Macregor, who is also the
host of our hotel at Glasgow, and has many of the characteristics of an
American landlord, claiming to be a gentleman and the equal of his
guests, took us in a drosky, and drove us to the shore of Loch Lomond, at
a point about four miles from Arroquhar.  The lake is here a mile and a
half wide, and it was our object to cross to Inversnaid, on the opposite
shore; so first we waved a handkerchief, and then kindled some straw on
the beach, in order to attract the notice of the ferryman at Inversnaid.
It was half an hour before our signals and shoutings resulted in the
putting off of a boat, with two oarsmen, who made the transit pretty
speedily; and thus we got across Loch Lomond.  At Inversnaid there is a
small hotel, and over the rock on which it stands a little waterfall
tumbles into the lake,--a very little one, though I believe it is
reckoned among the other picturesque features of the scene.

We were now in Rob Roy's country, and at the distance of a mile or so,
along the shore of the lake, is Rob Roy's cave, where he and his
followers are supposed to have made their abode in troublous times.
While lunch was getting ready, we again took the boat, and went thither.
Landing beneath a precipitous, though not very lofty crag, we clambered
up a rude pathway, and came to the mouth of the cave, which is nothing
but a fissure or fissures among some great rocks that have tumbled
confusedly together.  There is hardly anywhere space enough for half a
dozen persons to crowd themselves together, nor room to stand upright.
On the whole, it is no cave at all, but only a crevice; and, in the
deepest and darkest part, you can look up and see the sky.  It may have
sheltered Rob Roy for a night, and might partially shelter any Christian
during a shower.

Returning to the hotel, we started in a drosky (I do not know whether
this is the right name of the vehicle, or whether it has a right name,
but it is a carriage in which four persons sit back to back, two before
and two behind) for Aberfoyle.  The mountain-side ascends very steeply
from the inn door, and, not to damp the horse's courage in the outset, we
went up on foot.  The guide-book says that the prospect from the summit
of the ascent is very fine; but I really believe we forgot to turn round
and look at it.  All through our drive, however, we had mountain views in
plenty, especially of great Ben Lomond, with his snow-covered head, round
which, since our entrance into the Highlands, we had been making a
circuit.  Nothing can possibly be drearier than the mountains at this
season; bare, barren, and bleak, with black patches of withered heath
variegating the dead brown of the herbage on their sides; and as regards
trees the hills are perfectly naked.  There were no frightful precipices,
no boldly picturesque features, along our road; but high, weary slopes,
showing miles and miles of heavy solitude, with here and there a highland
hut, built of stone and thatched; and, in one place, an old gray, ruinous
fortress, a station of the English troops after the rebellion of 1715;
and once or twice a village of hills, the inhabitants of which, old and
young, ran to their doors to stare at us.  For several miles after we
left Inversnaid, the mountain-stream which makes the waterfall brawled
along the roadside.  All the hills are sheep-pastures, and I never saw
such wild, rough, ragged-looking creatures as the sheep, with their black
faces and tattered wool.  The little lambs were very numerous, poor
things, coming so early in the season into this inclement region; and it
was laughable to see how invariably, when startled by our approach, they
scampered to their mothers, and immediately began to suck.  It would seem
as if they sought a draught from the maternal udder, wherewith to fortify
and encourage their poor little hearts; but I suppose their instinct
merely drove them close to their dams, and, being there, they took
advantage of their opportunity.  These sheep must lead a hard life during
the winter; for they are never fed nor sheltered.

The day was sunless, and very uncomfortably cold; and we were not sorry
to walk whenever the steepness of the road gave us cause.  I do not
remember what o'clock it was, but not far into the afternoon, when we
reached the Baillie Nicol-Jarvie Inn at Aberfoyle; a scene which is much
more interesting in the pages of Rob Roy than we found it in reality.
Here we got into a sort of cart, and set out, over another hill-path, as
dreary as or drearier than the last, for the Trosachs.  On our way, we
saw Ben Venue, and a good many other famous Bens, and two or three lochs;
and when we reached the Trosachs, we should probably have been very much
enraptured if our eyes had not already been weary with other mountain
shapes.  But, in truth, I doubt if anybody ever does really see a
mountain, who goes for the set and sole purpose of seeing it.  Nature
will not let herself be seen in such cases.  You must patiently bide her
time; and by and by, at some unforeseen moment, she will quietly and
suddenly unveil herself, and for a brief space allow you to look right
into the heart of her mystery.  But if you call out to her peremptorily,
"Nature! unveil yourself this very moment!" she only draws her veil the
closer; and you may look with all your eyes, and imagine that you see all
that she can show, and yet see nothing.  Thus, I saw a wild and confused
assemblage of heights, crags, precipices, which they call the Trosachs,
but I saw them calmly and coldly, and was glad when the drosky was ready
to take us on to Callender.  The hotel at the Trosachs, by the by, is a
very splendid one, in the form of an old feudal castle, with towers and
turrets.  All among these wild hills there is set preparation for
enraptured visitants; and it seems strange that the savage features do
not subside of their own accord, and that there should still be cold
winds and snow on the top of Ben Lomond, and rocks and heather, and
ragged sheep, now that there are so many avenues by which the commonplace
world is sluiced in among the Highlands.  I think that this fashion of
the picturesque will pass away.

We drove along the shore of Lake Vennachar, and onward to Callender,
which I believe is either the first point in the Lowlands or the last in
the Highlands.  It is a large village on the river Teith.  We stopped
here to dine, and were some time in getting any warmth into our benumbed
bodies; for, as I said before, it was a very cold day.  Looking from the
window of the hotel, I saw a young man in Highland dress, with bare
thighs, marching through the village street towards the Lowlands, with a
martial and elastic step, as if he were going forth to conquer and occupy
the world.  I suppose he was a soldier who had been absent on leave,
returning to the garrison at Stirling.  I pitied his poor thighs, though
he certainly did not look uncomfortable.

After dinner, as dusk was coming on and we had still a long drive before
us (eighteen miles, I believe), we took a close carriage and two horses,
and set off for Stirling.  The twilight was too obscure to show many
things along the road, and by the time we drove into Stirling we could
but dimly see the houses in the long street in which stood our hotel.
There was a good fire in the coffee-room, which looked like a
drawing-room in a large old-fashioned mansion, and was hung round with
engravings of the portraits of the county members, and a master of
fox-hounds, and other pictures.  We made ourselves comfortable with some
tea, and retired early.

In the morning we were stirring betimes, and found Stirling to be a
pretty large town, of rather ancient aspect, with many gray stone houses,
the gables of which are notched on either side, like a flight of stairs.
The town stands on the slope of a hill, at the summit of which, crowning
a long ascent, up which the paved street reaches all the way to its gate,
is Stirling Castle.  Of course we went thither, and found free entrance,
although the castle is garrisoned by five or six hundred men, among whom
are barelegged Highlanders (I must say that this costume is very fine and
becoming, though their thighs did look blue and frost-bitten) and also
some soldiers of other Scotch regiments, with tartan trousers.  Almost
immediately on passing the gate, we found an old artillery-man, who
undertook to show us round the castle.  Only a small portion of it seems
to be of great antiquity.  The principal edifice within the castle wall
is a palace, that was either built or renewed by James VI.; and it is
ornamented with strange old statues, one of which is his own.  The old
Scottish Parliament House is also here.  The most ancient part of the
castle is the tower, where one of the Earls of Douglas was stabbed by a
king, and afterwards thrown out of the window.  In reading this story,
one imagines a lofty turret, and the dead man tumbling headlong from a
great height; but, in reality, the window is not more than fifteen or
twenty feet from the garden into which he fell.  This part of the castle
was burned last autumn; but is now under repair, and the wall of the
tower is still stanch and strong.  We went up into the chamber where the
murder took place, and looked through the historic window.

Then we mounted the castle wall, where it broods over a precipice of many
hundred feet perpendicular, looking down upon a level plain below, and
forth upon a landscape, every foot of which is richly studded with
historic events.  There is a small peep-hole in the wall, which Queen
Mary is said to have been in the habit of looking through.  It is a most
splendid view; in the distance, the blue Highlands, with a variety of
mountain outlines that I could have studied unweariably; and in another
direction, beginning almost at the foot of the Castle Hill, were the
Links of Forth, where, over a plain of miles in extent the river
meandered, and circled about, and returned upon itself again and again
and again, as if knotted into a silver chain, which it was difficult to
imagine to be all one stream.  The history of Scotland might be read from
this castle wall, as on a book of mighty page; for here, within the
compass of a few miles, we see the field where Wallace won the battle of
Stirling, and likewise the battle-field of Bannockburn, and that of
Falkirk, and Sheriffmuir, and I know not how many besides.

Around the Castle Hill there is a walk, with seats for old and infirm
persons, at points sheltered from the wind.  We followed it downward, and
I think we passed over the site where the games used to be held, and
where, this morning, some of the soldiers of the garrison were going
through their exercises.  I ought to have mentioned, that, passing
through the inner gateway of the castle, we saw the round tower, and
glanced into the dungeon, where the Roderic Dhu of Scott's poem was left
to die.  It is one of the two round towers, between which the portcullis
rose and fell.



EDINBURGH.--THE PALACE OF HOLYROOD.


At eleven o'clock we took the rail for Edinburgh, and I remember nothing
more, except that the cultivation and verdure of the country were very
agreeable, after our experience of Highland barrenness and desolation,
until we found the train passing close at the base of the rugged crag of
Edinburgh Castle.  We established ourselves at Queen's Hotel, in Prince's
Street, and then went out to view the city.  The monument to Sir Walter
Scott--a rather fantastic and not very impressive affair, I thought--
stands almost directly in front of a hotel.  We went along Prince's
Street, and thence, by what turns I know not, to the Palace of Holyrood,
which stands on a low and sheltered site, and is a venerable edifice.
Arthur's Seat rises behind it,--a high hill, with a plain between.  As we
drew near the Palace, Mr. Bowman, who has been here before, pointed out
the windows of Queen Mary's apartments, in a circular tower on the left
of the gateway.  On entering the enclosed quadrangle, we bought tickets
for sixpence each, admitting us to all parts of the Palace that are shown
to visitors; and first we went into a noble hall or gallery, a long and
stately room, hung with pictures of ancient Scottish kings; and though
the pictures were none of them authentic, they, at least, answer an
excellent purpose in the way of upholstery.  It was here that the young
Pretender gave the ball which makes one of the scenes in Waverley.

Thence we passed into the old historic rooms of the Palace,--Darnley's
and Queen Mary's apartments, which everybody has seen and described.
They are very dreary and shabby-looking rooms, with bare floors, and here
and there a piece of tapestry, faded into a neutral tint; and carved and
ornamented ceilings, looking shabbier than plain whitewash.  We saw Queen
Mary's old bedstead, low, with four tall posts,--and her looking-glass,
which she brought with her from France, and which has often reflected the
beauty that set everybody mad,--and some needlework and other womanly
matters of hers; and we went into the little closet where she was having
such a cosey supper-party with two or three friends, when the
conspirators broke in, and stabbed Rizzio before her face.  We saw, too,
the blood-stain at the threshold of the door in the next room, opening
upon the stairs.  The body of Rizzio was flung down here, and the
attendant told us that it lay in that spot all night.  The blood-stain
covers a large space,--much larger than I supposed,--and it gives the
impression that there must have been a great pool and sop of blood on all
the spot covered by Rizzio's body, staining the floor deeply enough never
to be washed out.  It is now of a dark brown hue; and I do not see why it
may not be the genuine, veritable stain.  The floor, thereabouts, appears
not to have been scrubbed much; for I touched it with my finger, and
found it slightly rough; but it is strange that the many footsteps should
not have smoothed it, in three hundred years.

One of the articles shown us in Queen Mary's apartments was the
breastplate supposed to have been worn by Lord Ruthven at the murder, a
heavy plate of iron, and doubtless a very uncomfortable waistcoat.



HOLYROOD ABBEY.


From the Palace, we passed into the contiguous ruin of Holyrood Abbey;
which is roofless, although the front, and some broken columns along the
nave, and fragments of architecture here and there, afford hints of a
magnificent Gothic church in bygone times.  It deserved to be
magnificent; for here have been stately ceremonials, marriages of kings,
coronations, investitures, before the high altar, which has now been
overthrown or crumbled away; and the floor--so far as there is any floor
--consists of tombstones of the old Scottish nobility.  There are
likewise monuments, bearing the names of illustrious Scotch families; and
inscriptions, in the Scotch dialect, on the walls.

In one of the front towers,--the only remaining one, indeed,--we saw the
marble tomb of a nobleman, Lord Belhaven, who is represented reclining on
the top,--with a bruised nose, of course.  Except in Westminster Abbey, I
do not remember ever to have seen an old monumental statue with the nose
entire.  In all political or religious outbreaks, the mob's first impulse
is to hit the illustrious dead on their noses.

At the other end of the Abbey, near the high altar, is the vault where
the old Scottish kings used to be buried; but, looking in through the
window, I saw only a vacant space,--no skull, nor bone, nor the least
fragment of a coffin.  In fact, I believe the royal dead were turned out
of their last home, on occasion of the Revolutionary movements, at the
accession of William III.



HIGH STREET AND THE GRASS-MARKET.


Quitting the Abbey and the Palace, we turned into the Canongate, and
passed thence into High Street, which, I think, is a continuation of the
Canongate; and being now in the old town of Edinburgh, we saw those
immensely tall houses, seven stories high, where the people live in
tiers, all the way from earth to middle air.  They were not so quaint and
strange looking as I expected; but there were some houses of very antique
individuality, and among them that of John Knox, which looks still in
good repair.  One thing did not in the least fall short of my
expectations,--the evil odor, for which Edinburgh has an immemorial
renown,--nor the dirt of the inhabitants, old and young.  The town, to
say the truth, when you are in the midst of it, has a very sordid, grimy,
shabby, upswept, unwashen aspect, grievously at variance with all poetic
and romantic associations.

From the High Street we turned aside into the Grass-Market, the scene of
the Porteous Mob; and we found in the pavement a cross on the site where
the execution of Porteous is supposed to have taken place.



THE CASTLE.


Returning thence to the High Street, we followed it up to the Castle,
which is nearer the town, and of more easy access from it, than I had
supposed.  There is a large court or parade before the castle gate, with
a parapet on the abrupt side of the hill, looking towards Arthur's Seat
and Salisbury Crags, mud overhanging a portion of the old town.  As we
leaned over this parapet, my nose was conscious of the bad odor of
Edinburgh, although the streets, whence it must have come, were hundreds
of feet below.  I have had some experience of this ugly smell in the poor
streets of Liverpool; but I think I never perceived it before crossing
the Atlantic.  It is the odor of an old system of life; the scent of the
pine forests is still too recent with us for it to be known in America.

The Castle of Edinburgh is free (as appears to be the case with all
garrisoned places in Great Britain) to the entrance of any peaceable
person.  So we went in, and found a large space enclosed within the
walls, and dwellings for officers, and accommodation for soldiers, who
were being drilled, or loitering about; and as the hill still ascends
within the external wall of the castle, we climbed to the summit, and
there found an old soldier whom we engaged to be our guide.  He showed us
Mons Meg, a great old cannon, broken at the breech, but still aimed
threateningly from the highest ramparts; and then he admitted us into an
old chapel, said to have been built by a Queen of Scotland, the sister of
Harold, King of England, and occupying the very highest part of the hill.
It is the smallest place of worship I ever saw, but of venerable
architecture, and of very solid construction.  The old soldier had not
much more to show us; but he pointed out the window whence one of the
kings of Scotland is said, when a baby, to have been lowered down, the
whole height of the castle, to the bottom of the precipice on which it
stands,--a distance of seven hundred feet.

After the soldier had shown us to the extent of his jurisdiction, we went
into a suite of rooms, in one of which I saw a portrait of Queen Mary,
which gave me, for the first time, an idea that she was really a very
beautiful woman.  In this picture she is wonderfully so,--a tender
womanly grace, which was none the less tender and graceful for being
equally imbued with queenly dignity and spirit.  It was too lovely a head
to be cut off.  I should be glad to know the authenticity of this
picture.

I do not know that we did anything else worthy of note, before leaving
Edinburgh.  There is matter enough, in and about the town, to interest
the visitor for a very long time; but when the visit is calculated on
such brevity as ours was, we get weary of the place, before even these
few hours come to an end.  Thus, for my part, I was not sorry when, in
the course of the afternoon, we took the rail for Melrose, where we duly
arrived, and put up at the George Inn.



MELROSE.


Melrose is a village of rather antique aspect, situated on the slope and
at the bottom of the Eildon Hills, which, from this point of view, appear
like one hill, with a double summit.  The village, as I said, has an old
look, though many of the houses have at least been refronted at some
recent date; but others are as ancient, I suppose, as the days when the
Abbey was in its splendor,--a rustic and peasant-like antiquity, however,
low-roofed, and straw-thatched.  There is an aged cross of stone in the
centre of the town.

Our first object, of course, was to see the Abbey, which stands just on
the outskirts of the village, and is attainable only by applying at a
neighboring house, the inhabitant of which probably supports himself, and
most comfortably, too, as a showman of the ruin.  He unlocked the wooden
gate, and admitted us into what is left of the Abbey, comprising only the
ruins of the church, although the refectory, the dormitories, and the
other parts of the establishment, formerly covered the space now occupied
by a dozen village houses.  Melrose Abbey is a very satisfactory ruin,
all carpeted along its nave and transepts with green grass; and there are
some well-grown trees within the walls.  We saw the window, now empty,
through which the tints of the painted glass fell on the tombstone of
Michael Scott, and the tombstone itself, broken in three pieces, but with
a cross engraven along its whole length.  It must have been the monument
of an old monk or abbot, rather than a wizard.  There, too, is still the
"marble stone" on which the monk and warrior sat them down, and which is
supposed to mark the resting-place of Alexander of Scotland.  There are
remains, both without and within the Abbey, of most curious and
wonderfully minute old sculpture,--foliage, in places where it is almost
impossible to see them, and where the sculptor could not have supposed
that they would be seen, but which yet are finished faithfully, to the
very veins of each leaf, in stone; and there is a continual variety of
this accurate toil.  On the exterior of the edifice there is equal
minuteness of finish, and a great many niches for statues; all of which,
I believe, are now gone, although there are carved faces at some points
and angles.  The graveyard around the Abbey is still the only one which
the village has, and is crowded with gravestones, among which I read the
inscription of one erected by Sir Walter Scott to the memory of Thomas
Pardy, one of his servants.  Some sable birds--either rooks or jackdaws--
were flitting about the ruins, inside and out.

Mr. Bowman and I talked about revisiting Melrose by moonlight; but,
luckily, there was to be no moon that evening.  I do not myself think
that daylight and sunshine make a ruin less effective than twilight or
moonshine.  In reference to Scott's description, I think he deplorably
diminishes the impressiveness of the scene by saying that the alternate
buttresses, seen by moonlight, look as if made of ebon and ivory.  It
suggests a small and very pretty piece of cabinet-work; not these gray,
rough walls, which Time has gnawed upon for a thousand years, without
eating them away.

Leaving the Abbey, we took a path or a road which led us to the river
Tweed, perhaps a quarter of a mile off; and we crossed it by a
foot-bridge,--a pretty wide stream, a dimpling breadth of transparent
water flowing between low banks, with a margin of pebbles.  We then
returned to our inn, and had tea, and passed a quiet evening by the
fireside.  This is a good, unpretentious inn; and its visitors' book
indicates that it affords general satisfaction to those who come here.

In the morning we breakfasted on broiled salmon, taken, no doubt, in the
neighboring Tweed.  There was a very coarse-looking man at table with us,
who informed us that he owned the best horse anywhere round the Eildon
Hills, and could make the best cast for a salmon, and catch a bigger fish
than anybody,--with other self-laudation of the same kind.  The waiter
afterwards told us that he was the son of an Admiral in the neighborhood;
and soon, his horse being brought to the door, we saw him mount and ride
away.  He sat on horseback with ease and grace, though I rather suspect,
early as it was, that he was already in his cups.  The Scotch seem to me
to get drunk at very unseasonable hours.  I have seen more drunken
people here than during all my residence in England, and, generally,
early in the day.  Their liquor, so far as I have observed, makes them
good-natured and sociable, imparting a perhaps needed geniality to their
cold natures.

After breakfast we took a drosky, or whatever these fore-and-aft-seated
vehicles are called, and set out for



DRYBURGH ABBEY,


three miles distant.  It was a cold though rather bright morning, with a
most shrewd and bitter wind, which blew directly in my face as I sat
beside the driver.  An English wind is bad enough, but methinks a Scotch
one, is rather worse; at any rate, I was half frozen, and wished Dryburgh
Abbey in Tophet, where it would have been warmer work to go and see it.
Some of the border hills were striking, especially the Cowden Knowe,
which ascends into a prominent and lofty peak.  Such villages as we
passed did not greatly differ from English villages.  By and by we came
to the banks of the Tweed, at a point where there is a ferry.  A carriage
was on the river-bank, the driver waiting beside it; for the people who
came in it had already been ferried across to see the Abbey.

The ferryman here is a young girl; and, stepping into the boat, she
shoved off, and so skilfully took advantage of the eddies of the stream,
which is here deep and rapid, that we were soon on the other side.  She
was by no means an uncomely maiden, with pleasant Scotch features, and a
quiet intelligence of aspect, gleaming into a smile when spoken to; much
tanned with all kinds of weather, and, though slender, yet so agile and
muscular that it was no shame for a man to let himself be rowed by her.

From the ferry we had a walk of half a mile, more or less, to a cottage,
where we found another young girl, whose business it is to show the
Abbey.  She was of another mould than the ferry-maiden,--a queer, shy,
plaintive sort of a body,--and answered all our questions in a low,
wailing tone.  Passing through an apple-orchard, we were not long in
reaching the Abbey, the ruins of which are much more extensive and more
picturesque than those of Melrose, being overrun with bushes and
shrubbery, and twined about with ivy, and all such vegetation as belongs,
naturally, to old walls.  There are the remains of the refectory, and
other domestic parts of the Abbey, as well as the church, and all in
delightful state of decay,--not so far gone but that we had bits of its
former grandeur in the columns and broken arches, and in some portions of
the edifice that still retain a roof.

In the chapter-house we saw a marble statue of Newton, wofully maltreated
by damps and weather; and though it had no sort of business there, it
fitted into the ruins picturesquely enough.  There is another statue,
equally unauthorized; both having been placed here by a former Earl of
Buchan, who seems to have been a little astray in his wits.

On one side of the church, within an arched recess, are the monuments of
Sir Walter Scott and his family,--three ponderous tombstones of Aberdeen
granite, polished, but already dimmed and dulled by the weather.  The
whole floor of the recess is covered by these monuments, that of Sir
Walter being the middle one, with Lady (or, as the inscription calls her,
Dame) Scott beyond him, next to the church wall, and some one of his sons
or daughters on the hither side.  The effect of his being buried here is
to make the whole of Dryburgh Abbey his monument.  There is another
arched recess, twin to the Scott burial-place, and contiguous to it, in
which are buried a Pringle family; it being their ancient place of
sepulture.  The spectator almost inevitably feels as if they were
intruders, although their rights here are of far older date than those of
Scott.

Dryburgh Abbey must be a most beautiful spot of a summer afternoon; and
it was beautiful even on this not very genial morning, especially when
the sun blinked out upon the ivy, and upon the shrubberied paths that
wound about the ruins.  I think I recollect the birds chirruping in this
neighborhood of it.  After viewing it sufficiently,--sufficiently for
this one time,--we went back to the ferry, and, being set across by the
same Undine, we drove back to Melrose.  No longer riding against the
wind, I found it not nearly so cold as before.  I now noticed that the
Eildon Hills, seen from this direction, rise from one base into three
distinct summits, ranged in a line.  According to "The Lay of the Last
Minstrel," they were cleft into this shape by the magic of Michael Scott.
Reaching Melrose . . . . without alighting, we set off for



ABBOTSFORD,


three miles off.  The neighborhood of Melrose, leading to Abbotsford, has
many handsome residences of modern build and very recent date,--suburban
villas, each with its little lawn and garden ground, such as we see in
the vicinity of Liverpool.  I noticed, too, one castellated house, of no
great size, but old, and looking as if its tower were built, not for
show, but for actual defence in the old border warfare.

We were not long in reaching Abbotsford.  The house, which is more
compact, and of considerably less extent than I anticipated, stands in
full view from the road, and at only a short distance from it, lower down
towards the river.  Its aspect disappointed me; but so does everything.
It is but a villa, after all; no castle, nor even a large manor-house,
and very unsatisfactory when you consider it in that light.  Indeed, it
impressed me, not as a real house, intended for the home of human
beings,--a house to die in or to be born in,--but as a plaything,--
something in the same category as Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill.  The
present owner seems to have found it insufficient for the actual purposes
of life; for he is adding a wing, which promises to be as extensive as
the original structure.

We rang at the front door (the family being now absent), and were
speedily admitted by a middle-aged or somewhat elderly man,--the butler,
I suppose, or some upper servant,--who at once acceded to our request to
be permitted to see the house.  We stepped from the porch immediately
into the entrance-hall; and having the great Hall of Battle Abbey in my
memory, and the ideal of a baronial hall in my mind, I was quite taken
aback at the smallness and narrowness and lowness of this; which,
however, is a very fine one, on its own little scale.  In truth, it is
not much more than a vestibule.  The ceiling is carved; and every inch of
the walls is covered with claymores, targets, and other weapons and
armor, or old-time curiosities, tastefully arranged, many of which, no
doubt, have a history attached to them,--or had, in Sir Walter's own
mind.  Our attendant was a very intelligent person, and pointed out much
that was interesting; but in such a multitudinous variety it was almost
impossible to fix the eye upon any one thing.  Probably the apartment
looked smaller than it really was, on account of being so wainscoted and
festooned with curiosities.  I remember nothing particularly, unless it
be the coal-grate in the fireplace, which was one formerly used by
Archbishop Sharpe, the prelate whom Balfour of Burley murdered.  Either
in this room or the next one, there was a glass case containing the suit
of clothes last worn by Scott,--a short green coat, somewhat worn, with
silvered buttons, a pair of gray tartan trousers, and a white hat.  It
was in the hall that we saw these things; for there too, I recollect,
were a good many walking-sticks that had been used by Scott, and the
hatchet with which he was in the habit of lopping branches from his
trees, as he walked among them.

From the hall we passed into the study;--a small room, lined with the
books which Sir Walter, no doubt, was most frequently accustomed to refer
to; and our guide pointed out some volumes of the Moniteur, which he used
while writing the history of Napoleon.  Probably these were the driest
and dullest volumes in his whole library.  About mid-height of the walls
of the study there is a gallery, with a short flight of steps for the
convenience of getting at the upper books.  A study-table occupied the
centre of the room, and at one end of the table stands an easy-chair,
covered with morocco, and with ample space to fling one's self back.  The
servant told me that I might sit down in this chair, for that Sir Walter
sat there while writing his romances, "and perhaps," quoth the man,
smiling, "you may catch some inspiration."  What a bitter word this would
have been if he had known me to be a romance-writer!  "No, I never shall
be inspired to write romances!" I answered, as if such an idea had never
occurred to me.  I sat down, however.  This study quite satisfied me,
being planned on principles of common-sense, and made to work in, and
without any fantastic adaptation of old forms to modern uses.

Next to the study is the library, an apartment of respectable size, and
containing as many books as it can hold, all protected by wire-work.  I
did not observe what or whose works were here; but the attendant showed
us one whole compartment full of volumes having reference to ghosts,
witchcraft, and the supernatural generally.  It is remarkable that Scott
should have felt interested in such subjects, being such a worldly and
earthly man as he was; but then, indeed, almost all forms of popular
superstition do clothe the ethereal with earthly attributes, and so make
it grossly perceptible.

The library, like the study, suited me well,--merely the fashion of the
apartment, I mean,--and I doubt not it contains as many curious volumes
as are anywhere to be met with within a similar space.  The drawing-room
adjoins it; and here we saw a beautiful ebony cabinet, which was
presented to Sir Walter by George IV.; and some pictures of much
interest,--one of Scott himself at thirty-five, rather portly, with a
heavy face, but shrewd eyes, which seem to observe you closely.  There is
a full-length of his eldest son, an officer of dragoons, leaning on his
charger; and a portrait of Lady Scott,--a brunette, with black hair and
eyes, very pretty, warm, vivacious, and un-English in her aspect.  I am
not quite sure whether I saw all these pictures in the drawing-room, or
some of them in the dining-room; but the one that struck me most--and
very much indeed--was the head of Mary, Queen of Scots, literally the
head cut off and lying on a dish.  It is said to have been painted by an
Italian or French artist, two days after her death.  The hair curls or
flows all about it; the face is of a death-like hue, but has an
expression of quiet, after much pain and trouble,--very beautiful, very
sweet and sad; and it affected me strongly with the horror and
strangeness of such a head being severed from its body.  Methinks I
should not like to have it always in the room with me.  I thought of the
lovely picture of Mary that I had seen at Edinburgh Castle, and reflected
what a symbol it would be,--how expressive of a human being having her
destiny in her own hands,--if that beautiful young Queen were painted as
carrying this dish, containing her own woful head, and perhaps casting a
curious and pitiful glance down upon it, as if it were not her own.

Also, in the drawing-room, there was a plaster cast of Sir Walter's face,
taken after death; the only one in existence, as our guide assured us.
It is not often that one sees a homelier set of features than this; no
elevation, no dignity, whether bestowed by nature or thrown over them by
age or death; sunken cheeks, the bridge of the nose depressed, and the
end turned up; the mouth puckered, and no chin whatever, or hardly any.
The expression was not calm and happy; but rather as if he were in a
perturbed slumber, perhaps nothing short of nightmare.  I wonder that the
family allow this cast to be shown,--the last record that there is of
Scott's personal reality, and conveying such a wretched and unworthy idea
of it.

Adjoining the drawing-room is the dining-room, in one corner of which,
between two windows, Scott died.  It was now a quarter of a century since
his death; but it seemed to me that we spoke with a sort of hush in our
voices, as if he were still dying here, or had but just departed.  I
remember nothing else in this room.  The next one is the armory, which is
the smallest of all that we had passed through; but its walls gleam with
the steel blades of swords, and the barrels of pistols, matchlocks,
firelocks, and all manner of deadly weapons, whether European or
Oriental; for there are many trophies here of East Indian warfare.  I saw
Rob Roy's gun, rifled and of very large bore; and a beautiful pistol,
formerly Claverhouse's; and the sword of Montrose, given him by King
Charles, the silver hilt of which I grasped.  There was also a superb
claymore, in an elaborately wrought silver sheath, made for Sir Walter
Scott, and presented to him by the Highland Society, for his services in
marshalling the clans when George IV. came to Scotland.  There were a
thousand other things, which I knew must be most curious, yet did not ask
nor care about them, because so many curiosities drive one crazy, and
fret one's heart to death.  On the whole, there is no simple and great
impression left by Abbotsford; and I felt angry and dissatisfied with
myself for not feeling something which I did not and could not feel.  But
it is just like going to a museum, if you look into particulars; and one
learns from it, too, that Scott could not have been really a wise man,
nor an earnest one, nor one that grasped the truth of life; he did but
play, and the play grew very sad toward its close.  In a certain way,
however, I understand his romances the better for having seen his house;
and his house the better for having read his romances.  They throw light
on one another.

We had now gone through all the show-rooms; and the next door admitted us
again into the entrance-hall, where we recorded our names in the
visitors' book.  It contains more names of Americans, I should judge,
from casting my eyes back over last year's record, than of all other
people in the world, including Great Britain.

Bidding farewell to Abbotsford, I cannot but confess a sentiment of
remorse for having visited the dwelling-place--as just before I visited
the grave of the mighty minstrel and romancer with so cold a heart and in
so critical a mood,--his dwelling-place and his grave whom I had so
admired and loved, and who had done so much for my happiness when I was
young.  But I, and the world generally, now look at him from a different
point of view; and, besides, these visits to the actual haunts of famous
people, though long dead, have the effect of making us sensible, in some
degree, of their human imperfections, as if we actually saw them alive.
I felt this effect, to a certain extent, even with respect to
Shakespeare, when I visited Stratford-on-Avon.  As for Scott, I still
cherish him in a warm place, and I do not know that I have any pleasanter
anticipation, as regards books, than that of reading all his novels over
again after we get back to the Wayside.

[This Mr. Hawthorne did, aloud to his family, the year following his
return to America.--ED.]

It was now one or two o'clock, and time for us to take the rail across
the borders.  Many a mile behind us, as we rushed onward, we could see
the threefold Eildon Hill, and probably every pant of the engine carried
us over some spot of ground which Scott has made fertile with poetry.
For Scotland--cold, cloudy, barren little bit of earth that it is--owes
all the interest that the world feels in it to him.  Few men have done so
much for their country as he.  However, having no guide-book, we were
none the wiser for what we saw out of the window of the rail-carriage;
but, now and then, a castle appeared, on a commanding height, visible for
miles round, and seemingly in good repair,--now, in some low and
sheltered spot, the gray walls of an abbey; now, on a little eminence,
the ruin of a border fortress, and near it the modern residence of the
laird, with its trim lawn and shrubbery.  We were not long in coming to


BERWICK,


a town which seems to belong both to England and Scotland, or perhaps is
a kingdom by itself, for it stands on both sides of the boundary river,
the Tweed, where it empties into the German Ocean.  From the railway
bridge we had a good view over the town, which looks ancient, with red
roofs on all the gabled houses; and it being a sunny afternoon, though
bleak and chill, the sea-view was very fine.  The Tweed is here broad,
and looks deep, flowing far beneath the bridge, between high banks.  This
is all that I can say of Berwick (pronounced Berrick), for though we
spent above an hour at the station waiting for the train, we were so long
in getting our dinner, that we had not time for anything else.  I
remember, however, some gray walls, that looked like the last remains of
an old castle, near the railway station.  We next took the train for



NEWCASTLE,


the way to which, for a considerable distance, lies within sight of the
sea; and in close vicinity to the shore we saw Holy Isle, on which are
the ruins of an abbey.  Norham Castle must be somewhere in this
neighborhood, on the English shore of the Tweed.  It was pretty late in
the afternoon--almost nightfall--when we reached Newcastle, over the
roofs of which, as over those of Berwick, we had a view from the railway,
and like Berwick, it was a congregation of mostly red roofs; but, unlike
Berwick (the atmosphere over which was clear and transparent), there came
a gush of smoke from every chimney, which made it the dimmest and
smokiest place I ever saw.  This is partly owing to the iron founderies
and furnaces; but each domestic chimney, too, was smoking on its own
account,--coal being so plentiful there, no doubt, that the fire is
always kept freshly heaped with it, reason or none.  Out of this
smoke-cloud rose tall steeples; and it was discernible that the town
stretched widely over an uneven surface, on the banks of the Tyne, which
is navigable up hither ten miles from the sea for pretty large vessels.

We established ourselves at the Station Hotel, and then walked out to see
something of the town; but I remember only a few streets of duskiness and
dinginess, with a glimpse of the turrets of a castle to which we could
not find our way.  So, as it was getting twilightish and very cold, we
went back to the hotel, which is a very good one, better than any one I
have seen in the South of England, and almost or quite as good as those
of Scotland.  The coffee-room is a spacious and handsome apartment,
adorned with a full-length portrait of Wellington, and other pictures,
and in the whole establishment there was a well-ordered alacrity and
liberal provision for the comfort of guests that one seldom sees in
English inns.  There are a good many American guests in Newcastle, and
through all the North.

An old Newcastle gentleman and his friend came into the smoking-room, and
drank three glasses of hot whiskey-toddy apiece, and were still going on
to drink more when we left them.  These respectable persons probably went
away drunk that night, yet thought none the worse of themselves or of one
another for it.  It is like returning to times twenty years gone by for a
New-Englander to witness such simplicity of manners.

The next morning, May 8th, I rose and breakfasted early, and took the
rail soon after eight o'clock, leaving Mr. Bowman behind; for he had
business in Newcastle, and would not follow till some hours afterwards.
There is no use in trying to make a narrative of anything that one sees
along an English railway.  All I remember of this tract of country is
that one of the stations at which we stopped for an instant is called
"Washington," and this is, no doubt, the old family place, where the De
Wessyngtons, afterwards the Washingtons, were first settled in England.
Before reaching York, first one old lady and then another (Quaker) lady
got into the carriage along with me; and they seemed to be going to York,
on occasion of some fair or celebration.  This was all the company I had,
and their advent the only incident.  It was about eleven o'clock when I
beheld York Cathedral rising huge above the old city, which stands on the
river Ouse, separated by it from the railway station, but communicating
by a ferry (or two) and a bridge.  I wandered forth, and found my way
over the latter into the ancient and irregular streets of



YORK,


crooked, narrow, or of unequal width, puzzling, and many of them bearing
the name of the particular gate in the old walls of the city to which
they lead.  There were no such fine, ancient, stately houses as some of
those in Shrewsbury were, nor such an aspect of antiquity as in Chester;
but still York is a quaint old place, and what looks most modern is
probably only something old, hiding itself behind a new front, as
elsewhere in England.

I found my way by a sort of instinct, as directly as possible, to



YORK MINSTER.


It stands in the midst of a small open space,--or a space that looks
small in comparison with the vast bulk of the cathedral.  I was not so
much impressed by its exterior as I have usually been by Gothic
buildings; because it is rectangular in its general outline and in its
towers, and seems to lack the complexity and mysterious plan which
perplexes and wonder-strikes me in most cathedrals.  Doubtless, however,
if I had known better how to admire it, I should have found it wholly
admirable.  At all events, it has a satisfactory hugeness.  Seeking my
way in, I at first intruded upon the Registry of Deeds, which occupies a
building patched up against the mighty side of the cathedral, and hardly
discernible, so small the one and so large the other.  I finally hit upon
the right door, and I felt no disappointment in my first glance around at
the immensity of enclosed space;--I see now in my mind's eye a dim length
of nave, a breadth in the transepts like a great plain, and such an airy
height beneath the central tower that a worshipper could certainly get a
good way towards heaven without rising above it.  I only wish that the
screen, or whatever they call it, between the choir and nave, could be
thrown down, so as to give us leave to take in the whole vastitude at
once.  I never could understand why, after building a great church, they
choose to sunder it in halves by this mid-partition.  But let me be
thankful for what I got, and especially for the height and massiveness of
the clustered pillars that support the arches on which rests the central
tower.  I remember at Furness Abbey I saw two tall pillars supporting a
broken arch, and thought it, the most majestic fragment of architecture
that could possibly be.  But these pillars have a nobler height, and
these arches a greater sweep.  What nonsense to try to write about a
cathedral!

There is a great, cold bareness and bleakness about the interior; for
there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of
ecclesiastical people.  I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of
their tombs; but there was a curious representation of a skeleton, at
full length, under the table-slab of one of the monuments.  The walls are
of a grayish hue, not so agreeable as the rich dark tint of the inside of
Westminster Abbey; but a great many of the windows are still filled with
ancient painted glass, the very small squares and pieces of which are
composed into splendid designs of saints and angels, and scenes from
Scripture.

There were a few watery blinks of sunshine out of doors, and whenever
these came through the old painted windows, some of the more vivid colors
were faintly thrown upon the pavement of the cathedral,--very faintly, it
is true; for, in the first place, the sunshine was not brilliant; and
painted glass, too, fades in the course of the ages, perhaps, like all
man's other works.  There were two or three windows of modern
manufacture, and far more magnificent, as to brightness of color and
material beauty, than the ancient ones; but yet they looked vulgar,
glaring, and impertinent in comparison, because such revivals or
imitations of a long-disused art cannot have the good faith and
earnestness of the originals.  Indeed, in the very coloring, I felt the
same difference as between heart's blood and a scarlet dye.  It is a
pity, however, that the old windows cannot be washed, both inside and
out, for now they have the dust of centuries upon them.

The screen or curtain between the nave and choir has eleven carved
figures, at full length, which appeared to represent kings, some of them
wearing crowns, and bearing sceptres or swords.  They were in wood, and
wrought by some Gothic hand.  These carvings, and the painted windows,
and the few monuments, are all the details that the mind can catch hold
of in the immensity of this cathedral; and I must say that it was a
dreary place on that cold, cloudy day.  I doubt whether a cathedral is a
sort of edifice suited to the English climate.  The first buildings of
the kind were probably erected by people who had bright and constant
sunshine, and who desired a shadowy awfulness--like that of a forest,
with its arched wood-paths--into which to retire in their religious
moments.

In America, on a hot summer's day, how delightful its cool and solemn
depths would be!  The painted windows, too, were evidently contrived, in
the first instance, by persons who saw how effective they would prove
when a vivid sun shone through them.  But in England, the interior of a
cathedral, nine days out of ten, is a vast sullenness, and as chill as
death and the tomb.  At any rate, it was so to-day, and so thought one of
the old vergers, who kept walking as briskly as he could along the width
of the transepts.  There were several of these old men when I first came
in, but they went off, all but this one, before I departed.  None of them
said a word to me, nor I to them; and admission to the Minster seems to
be entirely free.

After emerging from this great gloom, I wandered to and fro about York,
and contrived to go astray within no very wide space.  If its history be
authentic, it is an exceedingly old city, having been founded about a
thousand years before the Christian era.  There used to be a palace of
the Roman emperors here, and the Emperor Severus died here, as did some
of his successors; and Constantine the Great was born here.  I know not
what, if any, relics of those earlier times there may be; but York is
still partly surrounded with a wall, and has several gates, which the
city authorities take pains to keep in repair.  I grow weary in my
endeavor to find my way back to the railway, and inquired it of one of
the good people of York,--a respectable, courteous, gentlemanly person,--
and he told me to walk along the walls.  Then he went on a considerable
distance; but seemed to repent of not doing more for me; so he waited
till I came up, and, walking along by my side, pointed out the castle,
now the jail, and the place of execution, and directed me to the
principal gateway of the city, and instructed me how to reach the ferry.
The path along the wall leads, in one place, through a room over the arch
of a gateway,--a low, thick-walled, stone apartment, where doubtless the
gatekeeper used to lodge, and to parley with those who desired entrance.

I found my way to the ferry over the Ouse, according to this kind
Yorkist's instructions.  The ferryman told me that the fee for crossing
was a halfpenny, which seemed so ridiculously small that I offered him
more; but this unparalleled Englishman declined taking anything beyond
his rightful halfpenny.  This seems so wonderful to me that I can hardly
trust my own memory.

Reaching the station, I got some dinner, and at four o'clock, just as I
was starting, came Mr. Bowman, my very agreeable and sensible travelling
companion.  Our journeying together was ended here; for he was to keep on
to London, and I to return to Liverpool.  So we parted, and I took the
rail westward across England, through a very beautiful, and in some
degree picturesque, tract of country, diversified with hills, through the
valleys and vistas of which goes the railroad, with dells diverging from
it on either hand, and streams and arched bridges, and old villages, and
a hundred pleasant English sights.  After passing Rochdale, however, the
dreary monotony of Lancashire succeeded this variety.  Between nine and
ten o'clock I reached the Tithebarn station in Liverpool.  Ever since
until now, May 17th, I have employed my leisure moments in scribbling off
the journal of my tour; but it has greatly lost by not having been
written daily, as the scenes and occurrences were fresh.  The most
picturesque points can be seized in no other way, and the hues of the
affair fade as quickly as those of a dying dolphin; or as, according to
Audubon, the plumage of a dead bird.

One thing that struck me as much as anything else in the Highlands I had
forgotten to put down.  In our walk at Balloch, along the road within
view of Loch Lomond and the neighboring hills, it was a brilliant
sunshiny afternoon, and I never saw any atmosphere so beautiful as that
among the mountains.  It was a clear, transparent, ethereal blue, as
distinct as a vapor, and yet by no means vaporous, but a pure,
crystalline medium.  I have witnessed nothing like this among the
Berkshire hills nor elsewhere.

York is full of old churches, some of them very antique in appearance,
the stones weather-worn, their edges rounded by time, blackened, and with
all the tokens of sturdy and age-long decay; and in some of them I
noticed windows quite full of old painted glass, a dreary kind of minute
patchwork, all of one dark and dusty hue, when seen from the outside.
Yet had I seen them from the interior of the church, there doubtless
would have been rich and varied apparitions of saints, with their glories
round their heads, and bright-winged angels, and perhaps even the
Almighty Father himself, so far as conceivable and representable by human
powers.  It requires light from heaven to make them visible.  If the
church were merely illuminated from the inside,--that is, by what light a
man can get from his own understanding,--the pictures would be invisible,
or wear at best but a miserable aspect.



LIVERPOOL.


May 24th.--Day before yesterday I had a call at the Consulate from one of
the Potentates of the Earth,--a woolly-haired negro, rather thin and
spare, between forty and fifty years of age, plainly dressed; at the
first glimpse of whom, I could readily have mistaken him for some ship's
steward, seeking to enter a complaint of his captain.  However, this was
President Roberts, of Liberia, introduced by a note from Mrs. O'Sullivan,
whom he has recently met in Madeira.  I was rather favorably impressed
with him; for his deportment was very simple, and without any of the
flourish and embroidery which a negro might be likely to assume on
finding himself elevated from slavery to power.  He is rather shy,
reserved, at least, and undemonstrative, yet not harshly so,--in fine,
with manners that offer no prominent points for notice or criticism;
although I felt, or thought I felt, that his color was continually before
his mind, and that he walks cautiously among men, as conscious that every
new introduction is a new experiment.  He is not in the slightest degree
an interesting man (so far as I discovered in a very brief interview),
apart from his position and history; his face is not striking, nor so
agreeable as if it were jet black; but there may be miles and miles of
depth in him which I know nothing of.  Our conversation was of the most
unimportant character; for he had called merely to deliver the note, and
sat only a few minutes, during which he merely responded to my
observations, and originated no remarks.  Intelligence, discretion,
tact,-- these are probably his traits; not force of character and
independence.

The same day I took the rail from the Little Street station for



MANCHESTER,


to meet Bennoch, who had asked me thither to dine with him.  I had never
visited Manchester before, though now so long resident within twenty
miles of it; neither is it particularly worth visiting, unless for the
sake of its factories, which I did not go to see.  It is a dingy and
heavy town, with very much the aspect of Liverpool, being, like the
latter, built almost entirely within the present century.  I stopped at
the Albion Hotel, and, as Bennoch was out, I walked forth to view the
city, and made only such observations as are recorded above.  Opposite
the hotel stands the Infirmary,--a very large edifice, which, when
erected, was on the outskirts, or perhaps in the rural suburbs, of the
town, but it is now almost in its centre.  In the enclosed space before
it stands the statue of Peel, and sits a statue of Dr. Dalton, the
celebrated chemist, who was a native of Manchester.

Returning to the hotel, I sat down in the room where we were to dine, and
in due time Bennoch made his appearance, with the same glow and friendly
warmth in his face that I had left burning there when we parted in
London.  If this man has not a heart, then no man ever had.  I like him
inexpressibly for his heart and for his intellect, and for his flesh and
blood; and if he has faults, I do not know them, nor care to know them,
nor value him the less if I did know them.  He went to his room to dress;
and in the mean time a middle-aged, dark man, of pleasant aspect, with
black hair, black eyebrows, and bright, dark eyes came in, limping a
little, but not much.  He seemed not quite a man of the world, a little
shy in manner, yet he addressed me kindly and sociably.  I guessed him to
be Mr. Charles Swain, the poet, whom Mr. Bennoch had invited to dinner.
Soon came another guest whom Mr. Swain introduced to me as Mr. ------,
editor of the Manchester Examiner.  Then came Bennoch, who made us all
regularly acquainted, or took for granted that we were so; and lastly
appeared a Mr. W------, a merchant in Manchester, and a very intelligent
man; and the party was then complete.  Mr. Swain, the poet, is not a man
of fluent conversation; he said, indeed, very little, but gave me the
impression of amiability and simplicity of character, with much feeling.

Mr. W------ is a very sensible man.  He has spent two or three years in
America, and seems to have formed juster conclusions about us than most
of his countrymen do.  He is the only Englishman, I think, whom I have
met, who fairly acknowledges that the English do cherish doubt, jealousy,
suspicion, in short, an unfriendly feeling, towards the Americans.  It is
wonderful how every American, whatever class of the English he mingles
with, is conscious of this feeling, and how no Englishman, except this
sole Mr. W------, will confess it.  He expressed some very good ideas,
too, about the English and American press, and the reasons why the Times
may fairly be taken as the exponent of British feeling towards us, while
the New York Herald, immense as its circulation is, can be considered, in
no similar degree or kind, the American exponent.

We sat late at table, and after the other guests had retired, Bennoch and
I had some very friendly talk, and he proposed that on my wife's return
we should take up our residence in his house at Blackheath, while Mrs.
Bennoch and himself were absent for two months on a trip to Germany.  If
his wife and mine ratify the idea, we will do so.

The next morning we went out to see the Exchange, and whatever was
noticeable about the town.  Time being brief, I did not visit the
cathedral, which, I believe, is a thousand years old.  There are many
handsome shops in Manchester; and we went into one establishment, devoted
to pictures, engravings, and decorative art generally, which is most
perfect and extensive.  The firm, if I remember, is that of the Messrs.
Agnew, and, though originating here, they have now a house in London.
Here I saw some interesting objects, purchased by them at the recent sale
of the Rogers collection; among other things, a slight pencil and
water-color sketch by Raphael.  An unfinished affair, done in a moment,
as this must have been, seems to bring us closer to the hand that did it
than the most elaborately painted picture can.  Were I to see the
Transfiguration, Raphael would still be at the distance of centuries.
Seeing this little sketch, I had him very near me.  I know not why,--
perhaps it might be fancied that he had only laid down the pencil for an
instant, and would take it up again in a moment more.  I likewise saw a
copy of a handsome, illustrated edition of Childe Harold, presented by
old John Murray to Mr. Rogers, with an inscription on the fly-leaf,
purporting that it was a token of gratitude from the publisher, because,
when everybody else thought him imprudent in giving four hundred guineas
for the poem, Mr. Rogers told him it would turn out the best bargain he
ever made.

There was a new picture by Millais, the distinguished Pre-Raphaelite
artist, representing a melancholy parting between two lovers.  The lady's
face had a great deal of sad and ominous expression; but an old brick
wall, overrun with foliage, was so exquisitely and elaborately wrought
that it was hardly possible to look at the personages of the picture.
Every separate leaf of the climbing and clustering shrubbery was
painfully made out; and the wall was reality itself, with the
weather-stains, and the moss, and the crumbling lime between the bricks.
It is not well to be so perfect in the inanimate, unless the artist can
likewise make man and woman as lifelike, and to as great a depth, too, as
the Creator does.

Bennoch left town for some place in Yorkshire, and I for Liverpool.  I
asked him to come and dine with me at the Adelphi, meaning to ask two or
three people to meet him; but he had other engagements, and could not
spare a day at present, though he promises to come before long.

Dining at Mr. Rathbone's one evening last week (May 21st), it was
mentioned that



BORROW,


author of the Bible in Spain, is supposed to be of gypsy descent by the
mother's side.  Hereupon Mr. Martineau mentioned that he had been a
schoolfellow of Borrow, and though he had never heard of his gypsy blood,
he thought it probable, from Borrow's traits of character.  He said that,
Borrow had once run away from school, and carried with him a party of
other boys, meaning to lead a wandering life.

If an Englishman were individually acquainted with all our twenty-five
millions of Americans, and liked every one of them, and believed that
each man of those millions was a Christian, honest, upright, and kind, he
would doubt, despise, and hate them in the aggregate, however he might
love and honor the individuals.

Captain ------ and his wife Oakum; they spent all evening at Mrs.
B------'s.  The Captain is a Marblehead man by birth, not far from sixty
years old; very talkative and anecdotic in regard to his adventures;
funny, good-humored, and full of various nautical experience.  Oakum (it
is a nickname which he gives his wife) is an inconceivably tall woman,--
taller than he,--six feet, at least, and with a well-proportioned
largeness in all respects, but looks kind and good, gentle, smiling,--and
almost any other woman might sit like a baby on her lap.  She does not
look at all awful and belligerent, like the massive English women one
often sees.  You at once feel her to be a benevolent giantess, and
apprehend no harm from her.  She is a lady, and perfectly well mannered,
but with a sort of naturalness and simplicity that becomes her; for any
the slightest affectation would be so magnified in her vast personality
that it would be absolutely the height of the ridiculous.  This wedded
pair have no children, and Oakum has so long accompanied her husband on
his voyages that I suppose by this time she could command a ship as well
as he.  They sat till pretty late, diffusing cheerfulness all about them,
and then, "Come, Oakum," cried the Captain, "we must hoist sail!" and up
rose Oakum to the ceiling, and moved tower-like to the door, looking down
with a benignant smile on the poor little pygmy women about her.  "Six
feet," did I say?  Why, she must he seven, eight, nine; and, whatever be
her size, she is as good as she is big.


June 11th.--Monday night (9th), just as I was retiring, I received a
telegraphic message announcing my wife's arrival at



SOUTHAMPTON.


So, the next day, I arranged the consular business for an absence of ten
days, and set forth with J-----, and reached Birmingham, between eight
and nine, evening.  We put up at the Queen's Hotel, a very large
establishment, contiguous to the railway.  Next morning we left
Birmingham, and made our first stage to Leamington, where we had to wait
nearly an hour, which we spent in wandering through some of the streets
that had been familiar to us last year.  Leamington is certainly a
beautiful town, new, bright, clean, and as unlike as possible to the
business towns of England.  However, the sun was burning hot, and I could
almost have fancied myself in America.  From Leamington we took tickets
for Oxford, where we were obliged to make another stop of two hours; and
these we employed to what advantage we could, driving up into town, and
straying hither and thither, till J-----'s weariness weighed upon me, and
I adjourned with him to a hotel.  Oxford is an ugly old town, of crooked
and irregular streets, gabled houses, mostly plastered of a buff or
yellow hue; some new fronts; and as for the buildings of the University,
they seem to be scattered at random, without any reference to one
another.  I passed through an old gateway of Christ Church, and looked at
its enclosed square, and that is, in truth, pretty much all I then saw of
the University of Oxford.  From Christ Church we rambled along a street
that led us to a bridge across the Isis; and we saw many row-boats lying
in the river,--the lightest craft imaginable, unless it were an Indian
canoe.  The Isis is but a narrow stream, and with a sluggish current.  I
believe the students of Oxford are famous for their skill in rowing.

To me as well as to J----- the hot streets were terribly oppressive; so
we went into the Roebuck Hotel, where we found a cool and pleasant
coffee-room.  The entrance to this hotel is through an arch, opening from
High Street, and giving admission into a paved court, the buildings all
around being part of the establishment,--old edifices with pointed gables
and old-fashioned projecting windows, but all in fine repair, and wearing
a most quiet, retired, and comfortable aspect.  The court was set all
round with flowers, growing in pots or large pedestalled vases; on one
side was the coffee-room, and all the other public apartments, and the
other side seemed to be taken up by the sleeping-chambers and parlors of
the guests.  This arrangement of an inn, I presume, is very ancient, and
it resembles what I have seen in the hospitals, free schools, and other
charitable establishments in the old English towns; and, indeed, all
large houses were arranged on somewhat the same principle.

By and by two or three young men came in, in wide-awake hats, and loose,
blouse-like, summerish garments; and from their talk I found them to be
students of the University, although their topics of conversation were
almost entirely horses and boats.  One of them sat down to cold beef and
a tankard of ale; the other two drank a tankard of ale together, and went
away without paying for it,--rather to the waiter's discontent.  Students
are very much alike, all the world over, and, I suppose, in all time; but
I doubt whether many of my fellows at college would have gone off without
paying for their beer.

We reached Southampton between seven and eight o'clock.  I cannot write
to-day.


June 15th.--The first day after we reached Southampton was sunny and
pleasant; but we made little use of the fine weather, except that S-----
and I walked once along the High Street, and J----- and I took a little
ramble about town in the afternoon.  The next day there was a high and
disagreeable wind, and I did not once stir out of the house.  The third
day, too, I kept entirely within doors, it being a storm of wind and
rain.  The Castle Hotel stands within fifty yards of the water-side; so
that this gusty day showed itself to the utmost advantage,--the vessels
pitching and tossing at their moorings, the waves breaking white out of a
tumultuous gray surface, the opposite shore glooming mistily at the
distance of a mile or two; and on the hither side boatmen and seafaring
people scudding about the pier in waterproof clothes; and in the street,
before the hotel door, a cabman or two, standing drearily beside his
horse.  But we were sunny within doors.

Yesterday it was breezy, sunny, shadowy, showery; and we ordered a cab to
take us to Clifton Villa, to call on Mrs. ------, a friend of B------'s,
who called on us the day after our arrival.  Just, as we were ready to
start, Mrs. ------ again called, and accompanied us back to her house.
It is in Shirley, about two miles from Southampton pier, and is a
pleasant suburban villa, with a pretty ornamented lawn and shrubbery
about it.  Mrs. ------ is an instructress of young ladies; and at
B------'s suggestion, she is willing to receive us for two or three
weeks, during the vacation, until we are ready to go to London.  She
seems to be a pleasant and sensible woman, and to-morrow we shall decide
whether to go there.  There was nothing very remarkable in this drive;
and, indeed, my stay hereabouts thus far has been very barren of sights
and incidents externally interesting, though the inner life has been
rich.

Southampton is a very pretty town, and has not the dinginess to which I
have been accustomed in many English towns.  The High Street reminds me
very much of American streets in its general effect; the houses being
mostly stuccoed white or light, and cheerful in aspect, though doubtless
they are centuries old at heart.  The old gateway, which I presume I have
mentioned in describing my former visit to Southampton, stands across
High Street, about in the centre of the town, and is almost the only
token of antiquity that presents itself to the eye.


June 17th.--Yesterday morning, June 16th, S-----, Mrs. ------, and I took
the rail for Salisbury, where we duly arrived without any accident or
anything noticeable, except the usual verdure and richness of an English
summer landscape.  From the railway station we walked up into Salisbury,
with the tall spire (four hundred feet high) of the cathedral before our
eyes.  Salisbury is an antique city, but with streets more regular than I
have seen in most old towns, and the houses have a more picturesque
aspect than those of Oxford, for instance, where almost all are
mean-looking alike,--though I could hardly judge of Oxford on that hot,
weary day.  Through one or more of the streets there runs a swift, clear
little stream, which, being close to the pavement, and bordered with
stone, may be called, I suppose, a kennel, though possessing the
transparent purity of a rustic rivulet.  It is a brook in city garb.  We
passed under the pointed arch of a gateway, which stands in one of the
principal streets, and soon came in front of



THE CATHEDRAL.


I do not remember any cathedral with so fine a site as this, rising up
out of the centre of a beautiful green, extensive enough to show its full
proportions, relieved and insulated from all other patchwork and
impertinence of rusty edifices.  It is of gray stone, and looks as
perfect as when just finished, and with the perfection, too, that could
not have come in less than six centuries of venerableness, with a view to
which these edifices seem to have been built.  A new cathedral would lack
the last touch to its beauty and grandeur.  It needs to be mellowed and
ripened, like some pictures; although I suppose this awfulness of
antiquity was supplied, in the minds of the generation that built
cathedrals, by the sanctity which they attributed to them.  Salisbury
Cathedral is far more beautiful than that of York, the exterior of which
was really disagreeable to my eye; but this mighty spire and these
multitudinous gray pinnacles and towers ascend towards heaven with a kind
of natural beauty, not as if man had contrived them.  They might be
fancied to have grown up, just as the spires of a tuft of grass do, at
the same time that they have a law of propriety and regularity among
themselves.  The tall spire is of such admirable proportion that it does
not seem gigantic; and indeed the effect of the whole edifice is of
beauty rather than weight and massiveness.  Perhaps the bright, balmy
sunshine in which we saw it contributed to give it a tender glory, and to
soften a little its majesty.

When we went in, we heard the organ, the forenoon service being near
conclusion.  If I had never seen the interior of York Cathedral, I should
have been quite satisfied, no doubt, with the spaciousness of this nave
and these side aisles, and the height of their arches, and the girth of
these pillars; but with that recollection in my mind they fell a little
short of grandeur.  The interior is seen to disadvantage, and in a way
the builder never meant it to be seen; because there is little or no
painted glass, nor any such mystery as it makes, but only a colorless,
common daylight, revealing everything without remorse.  There is a
general light hue, moreover, like that of whitewash, over the whole of
the roof and walls of the interior, pillars, monuments, and all; whereas,
originally, every pillar was polished, and the ceiling was ornamented in
brilliant colors, and the light came, many-hued, through the windows, on
all this elaborate beauty, in lieu of which there is nothing now but
space.

Between the pillars that separate the nave from the side aisles, there
are ancient tombs, most of which have recumbent statues on them.  One of
these is Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, son of Fair Rosamond, in chain
mail; and there are many other warriors and bishops, and one cross-legged
Crusader, and on one tombstone a recumbent skeleton, which I have
likewise seen in two or three other cathedrals.  The pavement of the
aisles and nave is laid in great part with flat tombstones, the
inscriptions on which are half obliterated, and on the walls, especially
in the transepts, there are tablets, among which I saw one to the poet
Bowles, who was a canon of this cathedral.  The ecclesiastical
dignitaries bury themselves and monument themselves to the exclusion of
almost everybody else, in these latter times; though still, as of old,
the warrior has his place.  A young officer, slain in the Indian wars,
was memorialized by a tablet, and may be remembered by it, six hundred
years hence, as we now remember the old Knights and Crusaders.  It
deserves to be mentioned that I saw one or two noses still unbroken among
these recumbent figures.  Most of the antique statues, on close
examination, proved to be almost, entirely covered with names and
initials, scratched over the once polished surface.  The cathedral and
its relics must have been far less carefully watched, at some former
period, than now.

Between the nave and the choir, as usual, there is a screen that half
destroys the majesty of the building, by abridging the spectator of the
long vista which he might otherwise have of the whole interior at a
glance.  We peeped through the barrier, and saw some elaborate monuments
in the chancel beyond; but the doors of the screen are kept locked, so
that the vergers may raise a revenue by showing strangers through the
richest part of the cathedral.  By and by one of these vergers came
through the screen, with a gentleman and lady whom he was taking round,
and we joined ourselves to the party.  He showed us into the cloisters,
which had long been neglected and ruinous, until the time of Bishop
Dennison, the last prelate, who has been but a few years dead.  This
Bishop has repaired and restored the cloisters in faithful adherence to
the original plan; and they now form a most delightful walk about a
pleasant and verdant enclosure, in the centre of which sleeps good Bishop
Dennison, with a wife on either side of him, all three beneath broad flat
stones.  Most cloisters are darksome and grim; but these have a broad
paved walk beneath the vista of arches, and are light, airy, and
cheerful; and from one corner you can get the best possible view of the
whole height and beautiful proportion of the cathedral spire.  One side
of this cloistered walk seems to be the length of the nave of the
cathedral.  There is a square of four such sides; and of places for
meditation, grave, yet not too sombre, it seemed to me one of the best.
While we stayed there, a jackdaw was walking to and fro across the grassy
enclosure, and haunting around the good Bishop's grave.  He was clad in
black, and looked like a feathered ecclesiastic; but I know not whether
it were Bishop Dennison's ghost, or that of some old monk.

On one side of the cloisters, and contiguous to the main body of the
cathedral, stands the chapter-house.  Bishop Dennison had it much at
heart to repair this part of the holy edifice; and, if I mistake not, did
begin the work; for it had been long ruinous, and in Cromwell's time his
dragoons stationed their horses there.  Little progress, however, had
been made in the repairs when the Bishop died; and it was decided to
restore the building in his honor, and by way of monument to him.  The
repairs are now nearly completed; and the interior of this chapter-house
gave me the first idea, anywise adequate, of the splendor of these Gothic
church edifices.  The roof is sustained by one great central pillar of
polished marble,--small pillars clustered about a great central column,
which rises to the ceiling, and there gushes out with various beauty,
that overflows all the walls; as if the fluid idea had sprung out of that
fountain, and grown solid in what we see.  The pavement is elaborately
ornamented; the ceiling is to be brilliantly gilded and painted, as it
was of yore, and the tracery and sculptures around the walls are to be
faithfully renewed from what remains of the original patterns.

After viewing the chapter-house, the verger--an elderly man of grave,
benign manner, clad in black and talking of the cathedral and the
monuments as if he loved them--led us again into the nave of the
cathedral, and thence within the screen of the choir.  The screen is as
poor as possible,--mere barren wood-work, without the least attempt at
beauty.  In the chancel there are some meagre patches of old glass, and
some of modern date, not very well worth looking at.  We saw several
interesting monuments in this part of the cathedral,--one belonging to
the ducal family of Somerset, and erected in the reign of James I.; it is
of marble, and extremely splendid and elaborate, with kneeling figures
and all manner of magnificence,--more than I have seen in any monument
except that of Mary of Scotland in Westminster Abbey.  The more ancient
tombs are also very numerous, and among them that of the Bishop who
founded the cathedral.  Within the screen, against the wall, is erected a
monument, by Chantrey, to the Earl of Malmesbury; a full-length statue of
the Earl in a half-recumbent position, holding an open volume and looking
upward,--a noble work,--a calm, wise, thoughtful, firm, and not
unbenignant face.  Beholding its expression, it really was impossible not
to have faith in the high character of the individual thus represented;
and I have seldom felt this effect from any monumental bust or statue,
though I presume it is always aimed at.

I am weary of trying to describe cathedrals.  It is utterly useless;
there is no possibility of giving the general effect, or any shadow of
it, and it is miserable to put down a few items of tombstones, and a bit
of glass from a painted window, as if the gloom and glory of the edifice
were thus to be reproduced.  Cathedrals are almost the only things (if
even those) that have quite filled out my ideal here in this old world;
and cathedrals often make me miserable from my inadequacy to take them
wholly in; and, above all, I despise myself when I sit down to describe
them.

We now walked around the Close, which is surrounded by some of the
quaintest and comfortablest ecclesiastical residences that can be
imagined.  These are the dwelling-houses of the Dean and the canons, and
whatever other high officers compose the Bishop's staff; and there was
one large brick mansion, old, but not so ancient as the rest, which we
took to be the Bishop's palace.  I never beheld anything--I must say
again so cosey, so indicative of domestic comfort for whole centuries
together,--houses so fit to live in or to die in, and where it would be
so pleasant to lead a young wife beneath the antique portal, and dwell
with her till husband and wife were patriarchal,--as these delectable old
houses.  They belong naturally to the cathedral, and have a necessary
relation to it, and its sanctity is somehow thrown over them all, so that
they do not quite belong to this world, though they look full to
overflowing of whatever earthly things are good for man.  These are
places, however, in which mankind makes no progress; the rushing tumult
of human life here subsides into a deep, quiet pool, with perhaps a
gentle circular eddy, but no onward movement.  The same identical
thought, I suppose, goes round in a slow whirl from one generation to
another, as I have seen a withered leaf do in the vortex of a brook.  In
the front of the cathedral there is a most stately and beautiful tree,
which flings its verdure upward to a very lofty height; but far above it
rises the tall spire, dwarfing the great tree by comparison.

When the cathedral had sufficiently oppressed us with its beauty, we
returned to sublunary matters, and went wandering about Salisbury in
search of a luncheon, which we finally took in a confectioner's shop.
Then we inquired hither and thither, at various livery-stables, for a
conveyance to Stonehenge, and at last took a fly from the Lamb Hotel.
The drive was over a turnpike for the first seven miles, over a bare,
ridgy country, showing little to interest us.  We passed a party of seven
or eight men, in a coarse uniform dress, resembling that worn by convicts
and apparently under the guardianship of a stout, authoritative, yet
rather kindly-looking man with a cane.  Our driver said that they were
lunatics from a neighboring asylum, out for a walk.

Seven miles from Salisbury, we turned aside from the turnpike, and drove
two miles across Salisbury Plain, which is an apparently boundless extent
of unenclosed land, treeless and houseless.  It is not exactly a plain,
but a green sea of long and gentle swells and subsidences, affording
views of miles upon miles to a very far horizon.  We passed large flocks
of sheep, with the shepherds watching them; but the dogs seemed to take
most of the care of the flocks upon their own shoulders, and would
scamper to turn the sheep when they inclined to stray whither they should
not; and then arose a thousand-fold bleating, not unpleasant to the ear;
for it did not apparently indicate any fear or discomfort on the part of
the flock.  The sheep and lambs are all black-faced, and have a very
funny expression.  As we drove over the plain (my seat was beside the
driver), I saw at a distance a cluster of large gray stones, mostly
standing upright, and some of them slightly inclined towards each other,
--very irregular, and so far off forming no very picturesque or
noteworthy spectacle.  Of course I knew at once that this was



STONEHENGE,


and also knew that the reality was going to dwindle wofully within my
ideal, as almost everything else does.  When we reached the spot, we
found a picnic-party just finishing their dinner, on one of the
overthrown stones of the druidical temple; and within the sacred circle
an artist was painting a wretched daub of the scene, and an old shepherd
--the very Shepherd of Salisbury Plain sat erect in the centre of the
ruin.

There never was a ruder thing than Stonehenge made by mortal hands.  It
is so very rude that it seems as if Nature and man had worked upon it
with one consent, and so it is all the stranger and more impressive from
its rudeness.  The spectator wonders to see art and contrivance, and a
regular and even somewhat intricate plan, beneath all the uncouth
simplicity of this arrangement of rough stones; and certainly, whatever
was the intellectual and scientific advancement of the people who built
Stonehenge, no succeeding architects will ever have a right to triumph
over them; for nobody's work in after times is likely to endure till it
becomes a mystery as to who built it, and how, and for what purpose.
Apart from the moral considerations suggested by it, Stonehenge is not
very well worth seeing.  Materially, it is one of the poorest of
spectacles, and when complete, it must have been even less picturesque
than now,--a few huge, rough stones, very imperfectly squared, standing
on end, and each group of two supporting a third large stone on their
tops; other stones of the same pattern overthrown and tumbled one upon
another; and the whole comprised within a circuit of about a hundred feet
diameter; the short, sheep-cropped grass of Salisbury Plain growing among
all these uncouth bowlders.  I am not sure that a misty, lowering day
would not have better suited Stonehenge, as the dreary midpoint of the
great, desolate, trackless plain; not literally trackless, however, for
the London and Exeter Road passes within fifty yards of the ruins, and
another road intersects it.

After we had been there about an hour, there came a horseman within the
Druid's circle,--evidently a clerical personage by his white neckcloth,
though his loose gray riding pantaloons were not quite in keeping.  He
looked at us rather earnestly, and at last addressed Mrs. ------, and
announced himself as Mr. Hinchman,--a clergyman whom she had been trying
to find in Salisbury, in order to avail herself of him as a cicerone; and
he had now ridden hither to meet us.  He told us that the artist whom we
found here could give us more information than anybody about Stonehenge;
for it seems he has spent a great many years here, painting and selling
his poor sketches to visitors, and also selling a book which his father
wrote about the remains.  This man showed, indeed, a pretty accurate,
acquaintance with these old stones, and pointed out, what is thought to
be the altar-stone, and told us of some relation between this stone and
two other stones, and the rising of the sun at midsummer, which might
indicate that Stonehenge was a temple of solar worship.  He pointed out,
too, to how little depth the stones were planted in the earth, insomuch
that I have no doubt the American frosts would overthrow Stonehenge in a
single winter; and it is wonderful that it should have stood so long,
even in England.  I have forgotten what else he said; but I bought one of
his books, and find it a very unsatisfactory performance, being chiefly
taken up with an attempt to prove these remains to be an antediluvian
work, constructed, I think the author says, under the superintendence of
Father Adam himself!  Before our departure we were requested to write our
names in the album which the artist keeps for the purpose; and he pointed
out Ex-President Fillmore's autograph, and those of one or two other
Americans who have been here within a short time.  It is a very curious
life that this artist leads, in this great solitude, and haunting
Stonehenge like the ghost of a Druid; but he is a brisk little man, and
very communicative on his one subject.

Mr. Hinchman rode with us over the plain, and pointed out Salisbury
spire, visible close to Stonehenge.  Under his guidance we returned by a
different road from that which brought us thither,--and a much more
delightful one.  I think I never saw such continued sylvan beauty as this
road showed us, passing through a good deal of woodland scenery,--fine
old trees, standing each within its own space, and thus having full
liberty to outspread itself, and wax strong and broad for ages, instead
of being crowded, and thus stifled and emaciated, as human beings are
here, and forest-trees are in America.  Hedges, too, and the rich, rich
verdure of England; and villages full of picturesque old houses,
thatched, and ivied, or perhaps overrun with roses,--and a stately
mansion in the Elizabethan style; and a quiet stream, gliding onward
without a ripple from its own motion, but rippled by a large fish darting
across it; and over all this scene a gentle, friendly sunshine, not
ardent enough to crisp a single leaf or blade of grass.  Nor must the
village church be forgotten, with its square, battlemented tower, dating
back to the epoch of the Normans.  We called at a house where one of Mrs.
------'s pupils was residing with her aunt,--a thatched house of two
stories high, built in what was originally a sand-pit, but which, in the
course of a good many years, has been transformed into the most
delightful and homelike little nook almost that can be found in England.
A thatched cottage suggests a very rude dwelling indeed; but this had a
pleasant parlor and drawing-room, and chambers with lattice-windows,
opening close beneath the thatched roof; and the thatch itself gives an
air to the place as if it were a bird's nest, or some such simple and
natural habitation.  The occupants are an elderly clergyman, retired from
professional duty, and his sister; and having nothing else to do, and
sufficient means, they employ themselves in beautifying this sweet little
retreat,-- planting new shrubbery, laying out new walks around it, and
helping Nature to add continually another charm; and Nature is certainly
a more genial playfellow in England than in my own country.  She is
always ready to lend her aid to any beautifying purpose.

Leaving these good people, who were very hospitable, giving tea and
offering wine, we reached Salisbury in time to take the train for
Southampton.


June 18th.--Yesterday we left the Castle Hotel, after paying a bill of
twenty pounds for a little more than a week's board.  In America we could
not very well have lived so simply, but we might have lived luxuriously
for half the money.  This Castle Hotel was once an old Roman castle, the
landlord says, and the circular sweep of the tower is still seen towards
the street, although, being painted white, and built up with modern
additions, it would not be taken for an ancient structure.  There is a
dungeon beneath it, in which the landlord keeps his wine.

J----- and I, quitting the hotel, walked towards Shinley along the
water-side, leaving the rest of the family to follow in a fly.  There are
many traces, along the shore, of the fortifications by which Southampton
was formerly defended towards the water, and very probably their
foundations may be as ancient as Roman times.  Our hotel was no doubt
connected with this chain of defences, which seems to have consisted of a
succession of round towers, with a wall extending from one to another.
We saw two or three of these towers still standing, and likely to stand,
though ivy-grown and ruinous at the summit, and intermixed and even
amalgamated with pot-houses and mean dwellings; and often, through an
antique arch, there was a narrow doorway, giving access to the house of
some sailor or laborer or artisan, and his wife gossiping at it with her
neighbor, or his children playing about it.

After getting beyond the precincts of Southampton our walk was not very
interesting, except to J-----, who kept running down to the verge of the
water, looking for shells and sea-insects.


June 29th.--Yesterday, 28th, I left Liverpool from the Lime Street
station; an exceedingly hot day for England, insomuch that the rail
carriages were really uncomfortable.  I have now passed over the London
and Northwestern Railway so often that the northern part of it is very
wearisome, especially as it has few features of interest even to a new
observer.  At Stafford--no, at Wolverhampton--we diverged to a track
which I have passed over only once before.  We stopped an hour and a
quarter at Wolverhampton, and I walked up into the town, which is large
and old,--old, at least, in its plan, or lack of plan,--the streets being
irregular, and straggling over an uneven surface.  Like many of the
English towns, it reminds me of Boston, though dingier.  The sun was so
hot that I actually sought the shady sides of the streets; and this, of
itself, is one long step towards establishing a resemblance between an
English town and an American one.

English railway carriages seem to me more tiresome than any other; and I
suppose it is owing to the greater motion, arising from their more
elastic springs.  A slow train, too, like that which I was now in, is
more tiresome than a quick one, at least to the spirits, whatever it may
be to the body.  We loitered along through afternoon and evening,
stopping at every little station, and nowhere getting to the top of our
speed, till at last, in the late dusk, we reached



GLOUCESTER,


and I put up at the Wellington Hotel, which is but a little way from the
station.  I took tea and a slice or two of ham in the coffee-room, and
had a little talk with two people there; one of whom, on learning that I
was an American, said, "But I suppose you have now been in England some
time?"  He meant, finding me not absolutely a savage, that I must have
been caught a good while ago. . . . .

The next morning I went into the city, the hotel being on its outskirts,
and rambled along in search of the cathedral.  Some church-bells were
chiming and clashing for a wedding or other festal occasion, and I
followed the sound, supposing that it might proceed from the cathedral,
but this was not the case.  It was not till I had got to a bridge over
the Severn, quite out of the town, that I saw again its tower, and knew
how to shape my course towards it.

I did not see much that was strange or interesting in Gloucester.  It is
old, with a good many of those antique Elizabethan houses with two or
three peaked gables on a line together; several old churches, which
always cluster about a cathedral, like chickens round a hen; a hospital
for decayed tradesmen; another for bluecoat boys; a great many butcher's
shops, scattered in all parts of the town, open in front, with a counter
or dresser on which to display the meat, just in the old fashion of
Shakespeare's house.  It is a large town, and has a good deal of
liveliness and bustle, in a provincial way.  In short, judging by the
sheep, cattle, and horses, and the people of agricultural aspect that I
saw about the streets, I should think it must have been market-day.  I
looked here and there for the old Bell Inn, because, unless I
misremember, Fielding brings Tom Jones to this inn, while he and
Partridge were travelling together.  It is still extant; for, on my
arrival the night before, a runner from it had asked me to go thither;
but I forgot its celebrity at the moment.  I saw nothing of it in my
rambles about Gloucester, but at last I found



THE CATHEDRAL,


though I found no point from which a good view of the exterior can be
seen.

It has a very beautiful and rich outside, however, and a lofty tower,
very large and ponderous, but so finished off, and adorned with
pinnacles, and all manner of architectural devices,--wherewith these old
builders knew how to alleviate their massive structures,--that it seems
to sit lightly in the air.  The porch was open, and some workmen were
trundling barrows into the nave; so I followed, and found two young women
sitting just within the porch, one of whom offered to show me round the
cathedral.  There was a great dust in the nave, arising from the
operations of the workmen.  They had been laying a new pavement, and
scraping away the plaster, which had heretofore been laid over the
pillars and walls.  The pillars come out from the process as good as
new,--great, round, massive columns, not clustered like those of most
cathedrals; they are twenty-one feet in circumference, and support
semicircular arches.  I think there are seven of these columns, on each
side of the nave, which did not impress me as very spacious; and the dust
and racket of the work-people quite destroyed the effect which should
have been produced by the aisles and arches; so that I hardly stopped to
glance at this part, though I saw some mural monuments and recumbent
statues along the walls.

The choir is separated from the nave by the usual screen, and now by a
sail-cloth or something of that kind, drawn across, in order to keep out
the dust, while the repairs are going on.  When the young woman conducted
me hither, I was at once struck by the magnificent eastern window, the
largest in England, which fills, or looks vast enough to fill, all that
end of the cathedral,--a most splendid window, full of old painted glass,
which looked as bright as sunshine, though the sun was not really shining
through it.  The roof of the choir is of oak and very fine, and as much
as ninety feet high.  There are chapels opening from the choir, and
within them the monuments of the eminent people who built them, and of
benefactors or prelates, or of those otherwise illustrious in their day.
My recollection of what I saw here is very dim and confused; more so than
I anticipated.  I remember somewhere within the choir the tomb of Edward
II. with his effigy upon the top of it, in a long robe, with a crown on
his head, and a ball and sceptre in his hand; likewise, a statue of
Robert, son of the Conqueror, carved in Irish oak and painted.  He lolls
in an easy posture on his tomb, with one leg crossed lightly over the
other, to denote that he was a Crusader.  There are several monuments of
mitred abbots who formerly presided over the cathedral.  A Cavalier and
his wife, with the dress of the period elaborately represented, lie side
by side in excellent preservation; and it is remarkable that though their
noses are very prominent, they have come down from the past without any
wear and tear.  The date of the Cavalier's death is 1637, and I think his
statue could not have been sculptured until after the Restoration, else
he and his dame would hardly have come through Cromwell's time unscathed.
Here, as in all the other churches in England, Cromwell is said to have
stabled his horses, and broken the windows, and belabored the old
monuments.

There is one large and beautiful chapel, styled the Lady's Chapel, which
is, indeed, a church by itself, being ninety feet long, and comprising
everything that appertains to a place of worship.  Here, too, there are
monuments, and on the floor are many old bricks and tiles, with
inscriptions on them, or Gothic devices, and flat tombstones, with coats
of arms sculptured on them; as, indeed, there are everywhere else, except
in the nave, where the new pavement has obliterated them.  After viewing
the choir and the chapels, the young woman led me down into the crypts
below, where the dead persons who are commemorated in the upper regions
were buried.  The low ponderous pillars and arches of these crypts are
supposed to be older than the upper portions of the building.  They are
about as perfect, I suppose, as when new, but very damp, dreary, and
darksome; and the arches intersect one another so intricately, that, if
the girl had deserted me, I might easily have got lost there.  These are
chapels where masses used to be said for the souls of the deceased; and
my guide said that a great many skulls and bones had been dug up here.
No doubt a vast population has been deposited in the course of a thousand
years.  I saw two white skulls, in a niche, grinning as skulls always do,
though it is impossible to see the joke.  These crypts, or crypts like
these, are doubtless what Congreve calls the "aisles and monumental caves
of Death," in that passage which Dr. Johnson admired so much.  They are
very singular,--something like a dark shadow or dismal repetition of the
upper church below ground.

Ascending from the crypts, we went next to the cloisters, which are in a
very perfect state, and form an unbroken square about the green
grass-plot, enclosed within.  Here also it is said Cromwell stabled his
horses; but if so, they were remarkably quiet beasts, for tombstones,
which form the pavement, are not broken, nor cracked, nor bear any
hoof-marks.  All around the cloisters, too, the stone tracery that shuts
them in like a closed curtain, carefully drawn, remains as it was in the
days of the monks, insomuch that it is not easy to get a glimpse of the
green enclosure.  Probably there used to be painted glass in the larger
apertures of this stone-work; otherwise it is perfect.  These cloisters
are very different from the free, open, and airy ones of Salisbury; but
they are more in accordance with our notions of monkish habits; and even
at this day, if I were a canon of Gloucester, I would put that dim
ambulatory to a good use.  The library is adjacent to the cloisters, and
I saw some rows of folios and quartos.  I have nothing else to record
about the cathedral, though if I were to stay there a month, I suppose it
might then begin to be understood.  It is wicked to look at these solemn
old churches in a hurry.  By the by, it was not built in a hurry; but in
full three hundred years, having been begun in 1188 and only finished in
1498, not a great many years before Papistry began to go out of vogue in
England.

From Gloucester I took the rail for Basingstoke before noon.  The first
part of the journey was through an uncommonly beautiful tract of country,
hilly, but not wild; a tender and graceful picturesqueness,--fine, single
trees and clumps of trees, and sometimes wide woods, scattered over the
landscape, and filling the nooks of the hills with luxuriant foliage.
Old villages scattered frequently along our track, looking very peaceful,
with the peace of past ages lingering about them; and a rich, rural
verdure of antique cultivation everywhere.  Old country-seats--specimens
of the old English hall or manor-house--appeared on the hillsides, with
park-scenery surrounding the mansions; and the gray churches rose in the
midst of all the little towns.  The beauty of English scenery makes me
desperate, it is so impossible to describe it, or in any way to record
its impression, and such a pity to leave it undescribed; and, moreover, I
always feel that I do not get from it a hundredth or a millionth part of
the enjoyment that there really is in it, hurrying past it thus.  I was
really glad when we rumbled into a tunnel, piercing for a long distance
through a hill; and, emerging on the other side, we found ourselves in a
comparatively level and uninteresting tract of country, which lasted till
we reached Southampton.  English scenery, to be appreciated and to be
reproduced with pen and pencil, requires to be dwelt upon long, and to be
wrought out with the nicest touches.  A coarse and hasty brush is not the
instrument for such work.


July 6th.--Monday, June 30th, was a warm and beautiful day, and my wife
and I took a cab from Southampton and drove to



NETLEY ABBEY,


about three or four miles.  The remains of the Abbey stand in a sheltered
place, but within view of Southampton Water; and it is a most picturesque
and perfect ruin, all ivy-grown, of course, and with great trees where
the pillars of the nave used to stand, and also in the refectory and the
cloister court; and so much soil on the summit of the broken walls, that
weeds flourish abundantly there, and grass too; and there was a wild
rosebush, in full bloom, as much as thirty or forty feet from the ground.
S----- and I ascended a winding stair, leading up within a round tower,
the steps much foot-worn; and, reaching the top, we came forth at the
height where a gallery had formerly run round the church, in the
thickness of the wall.  The upper portions of the edifice were now
chiefly thrown down; but I followed a foot-path, on the top of the
remaining wall, quite to the western entrance of the church.  Since the
time when the Abbey was taken from the monks, it has been private
property; and the possessor, in Henry VIII.'s days, or subsequently,
built a residence for himself within its precincts out of the old
materials.  This has now entirely disappeared, all but some unsightly old
masonry, patched into the original walls.  Large portions of the ruin
have been removed, likewise, to be used as building-materials elsewhere;
and this is the Abbey mentioned, I think, by Dr. Watts, concerning which
a Mr. William Taylor had a dream while he was contemplating pulling it
down.  He dreamed that a part of it fell upon his head; and, sure enough,
a piece of the wall did come down and crush him.  In the nave I saw a
large mass of conglomerated stone that had fallen from the wall between
the nave and cloisters, and thought that perhaps this was the very mass
that killed poor Mr. Taylor.

The ruins are extensive and very interesting; but I have put off
describing them too long, and cannot make a distinct picture of them now.
Moreover, except to a spectator skilled in architecture, all ruined
abbeys are pretty much alike.  As we came away, we noticed some women
making baskets at the entrance, and one of them urged us to buy some of
her handiwork; for that she was the gypsy of Netley Abbey, and had lived
among the ruins these thirty years.  So I bought one for a shilling.  She
was a woman with a prominent nose, and weather-tanned, but not very
picturesque or striking.



TO BLACKHEATH.


On the 6th July, we left the Villa, with our enormous luggage, and took
our departure from Southampton by the noon train.  The main street of
Southampton, though it looks pretty fresh and bright, must be really
antique, there being a great many projecting windows, in the old-time
style, and these make the vista of the street very picturesque.  I have
no doubt that I missed seeing many things more interesting than the few
that I saw.  Our journey to London was without any remarkable incident,
and at the Waterloo station we found one of Mr. Bennoch's clerks, under
whose guidance we took two cabs for the East Kent station at London
Bridge, and there railed to Blackheath, where we arrived in the
afternoon.

On Thursday I went into London by one of the morning trains, and wandered
about all day,--visiting the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, the two latter of which I have already
written about in former journals.  On Friday, S-----, J-----, and I
walked over the heath, and through the Park to Greenwich, and spent some
hours in the Hospital.  The painted hall struck me much more than at my
first view of it; it is very beautiful indeed, and the effect of its
frescoed ceiling most rich and magnificent, the assemblage of glowing
hues producing a general result of splendor. . . . .

In the evening I went with Mr. and Mrs. ------ to a conversazione at Mrs.
Newton Crosland's, who lives on Blackheath. . . . . I met with one person
who interested me,--Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus; and I was surprised
to find myself already acquainted with him.  It is the same Mr. Bailey
whom I met a few months ago, when I first dined at Mr. -----'s,--a dark,
handsome, rather picturesque-looking man, with a gray beard, and dark
hair, a little dimmed with gray.  He is of quiet and very agreeable
deportment, and I liked him and believed in him. . . . . There is sadness
glooming out of him, but no unkindness nor asperity.  Mrs. Crosland's
conversazione was enriched with a supper, and terminated with a dance, in
which Mr. ------ joined with heart and soul, but Mrs. ------ went to
sleep in her chair, and I would gladly have followed her example if I
could have found a chair to sit upon.  In the course of the evening I had
some talk with a pale, nervous young lady, who has been a noted spiritual
medium.

Yesterday I went into town by the steamboat from Greenwich to London
Bridge, with a nephew of Mr. ------'s, and, calling at his place of
business, he procured us an order from his wine-merchants, by means of
which we were admitted into



THE WINE-VAULTS OF THE LONDON DOCKS.


We there found parties, with an acquaintance, who was going, with two
French gentlemen, into the vaults.  It is a good deal like going down
into a mine, each visitor being provided with a lamp at the end of a
stick; and following the guide along dismal passages, running beneath the
streets, and extending away interminably,--roughly arched overhead with
stone, from which depend festoons of a sort of black fungus, caused by
the exhalations of the wine.  Nothing was ever uglier than this fungus.
It is strange that the most ethereal effervescence of rich wine can
produce nothing better.

The first series of vaults which we entered were filled with port-wine,
and occupied a space variously estimated at from eleven to sixteen
acres,--which I suppose would hold more port-wine than ever was made.  At
any rate, the pipes and butts were so thickly piled that in some places
we could hardly squeeze past them.  We drank from two or three vintages;
but I was not impressed with any especial excellence in the wine.  We
were not the only visitors, for, far in the depths of the vault, we
passed a gentleman and two young ladies, wandering about like the ghosts
of defunct wine-bibhers, in a Tophet specially prepared for then.  People
employed here sometimes go astray, and, their lamps being extinguished,
they remain long in this everlasting gloom.  We went likewise to the
vaults of sherry-wine, which have the same characteristics as those just
described, but are less extensive.

It is no guaranty for the excellence or even for the purity of the wine,
that it is kept in these cellars, under the lock and key of the
government; for the merchants are allowed to mix different vintages,
according to their own pleasure, and to adulterate it as they like.  Very
little of the wine probably comes out as it goes in, or is exactly what
it pretends to be.  I went back to Mr. ------'s office, and we drove
together to make some calls jointly and separately.  I went alone to Mrs.
Heywood's; afterwards with Mr. ------ to the American minister's, whom we
found at home; and I requested of him, on the part of the Americans at
Liverpool, to tell me the facts about the American gentleman being
refused admittance to the Levee.  The ambassador did not seem to me to
make his point good for having withdrawn with the rejected guest.


July 9th. (Our wedding-day.)--We were invited yesterday evening to Mrs.
S. C. Hall's, where Jenny Lind was to sing; so we left Blackheath at
about eight o'clock in a brougham, and reached Ashley Place, as the dusk
was gathering, after nine.  The Halls reside in a handsome suite of
apartments, arranged on the new system of flats, each story constituting
a separate tenement, and the various families having an entrance-hall in
common.  The plan is borrowed from the Continent, and seems rather alien
to the traditionary habits of the English; though, no doubt, a good
degree of seclusion is compatible with it.  Mr. Hall received us with the
greatest cordiality before we entered the drawing-room.  Mrs. Hall, too,
greeted us with most kindly warmth.  Jenny Lind had not yet arrived; but
I found Dr. Mackay there, and I was introduced to Miss Catherine
Sinclair, who is a literary lady, though none of her works happen to be
known to me.  Soon the servant announced Madam Goldschmidt, and this
famous lady made her appearance, looking quite different from what I
expected.  Mrs. Hall established her in the inner drawing-room, where was
a piano and a harp; and shortly after, our hostess came to me, and said
that Madam Goldschmidt wished to be introduced to me.  There was a gentle
peremptoriness in the summons, that made it something like being
commanded into the presence of a princess; a great favor, no doubt, but
yet a little humbling to the recipient.  However, I acquiesced with due
gratitude, and was presented accordingly.  She made room for me on the
sofa, and I sat down, and began to talk.

Jenny Lind is rather tall,--quite tall, for a woman,--certainly no
beauty, but with sense and self-reliance in her aspect and manners.  She
was suffering under a severe cold, and seemed worn down besides, so
probably I saw her under disadvantages.  Her conversation is quite
simple, and I should have great faith in her sincerity; and there is
about her the manner of a person who knows the world, and has conquered
it.  She said something or other about The Scarlet Letter; and, on my
part, I paid her such compliments as a man could pay who had never heard
her sing. . . . . Her conversational voice is an agreeable one, rather
deep, and not particularly smooth.  She talked about America, and of our
unwholesome modes of life, as to eating and exercise, and of the
ill-health especially of our women; but I opposed this view as far as I
could with any truth, insinuating my opinion that we are about as healthy
as other people, and affirming for a certainty that we live longer.  In
good faith, so far as I have any knowledge of the matter, the women of
England are as generally out of health as those of America; always
something has gone wrong with them; and as for Jenny Lind, she looks wan
and worn enough to be an American herself.  This charge of ill-health is
almost universally brought forward against us nowadays,--and, taking the
whole country together, I do not believe the statistics will bear it out.

The rooms, which were respectably filled when we arrived, were now
getting quite full.  I saw Mr. Stevens, the American man of libraries,
and had some talk with him; and Durham, the sculptor; and Mr. and Mrs.
Hall introduced me to various people, some of whom were of note,--for
instance, Sir Emerson Tennent, a man of the world, of some parliamentary
distinction, wearing a star; Mr. Samuel Lover, a most good-natured,
pleasant Irishman, with a shining and twinkling visage; Miss Jewsbury,
whom I found very conversable.  She is known in literature, but not to
me.  We talked about Emerson, whom she seems to have been well acquainted
with while he was in England; and she mentioned that Miss Martineau had
given him a lock of hair; it was not her own hair, but a mummy's.

After our return, Mrs. ------ told us that Miss Jewsbury had written,
among other things, three histories, and as she asked me to introduce her
to S-----, and means to cultivate our acquaintance, it would be well to
know something of them.  We were told that she is now employed in some
literary undertaking of Lady Morgan's, who, at the age of ninety, is
still circulating in society, and is as brisk in faculties as ever.  I
should like to see her ladyship, that is, I should not be sorry to see
her; for distinguished people are so much on a par with others, socially,
that it would be foolish to be overjoyed at seeing anybody whomsoever.

Leaving out the illustrious Jenny Lind, I suspect that I was myself the
greatest lion of the evening; for a good many persons sought the felicity
of knowing me, and had little or nothing to say when that honor and
happiness was conferred on them.  It is surely very wrong and
ill-mannered in people to ask for an introduction unless they are
prepared to make talk; it throws too great an expense and trouble on the
wretched lion, who is compelled, on the spur of the moment, to convert a
conversable substance out of thin air, perhaps for the twentieth time
that evening.  I am sure I did not say--and I think I did not hear said--
one rememberable word in the course of this visit; though, nevertheless,
it was a rather agreeable one.  In due season ices and jellies were
handed about; and some ladies and gentlemen--professional, perhaps--were
kind enough to sing songs, and play on the piano and harp, while persons
in remote corners went on with whatever conversation they had in hand.
Then came supper; but there were so many people to go into the
supper-room that we could not all crowd thither together, and, coming
late, I got nothing but some sponge-cake and a glass of champagne,
neither of which I care for.  After supper, Mr. Lover sang some Irish
songs, his own in music and words, with rich, humorous effect, to which
the comicality of his face contributed almost as much as his voice and
words.  The Lord Mayor looked in for a little while, and though a
hard-featured Jew enough, was the most picturesque person there.


July 10th.--Mrs. Heywood had invited me to dinner last evening. . . . .
Her house is very finely situated, overlooking Hyde Park, and not a great
way from where Tyburn tree used to stand.  When I arrived, there were no
guests but Mr. and Mrs. D------; but by and by came Mr. Monckton Milnes
and lady, the Bishop of Lichfield, Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr. Ewart, M. P., Sir
Somebody Somerville, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrave, and others.  Mr. Milnes, whom
I had not seen for more than a year, greeted me very cordially, and so
did Mr. Taylor.  I took Mrs. Musgrave in to dinner.  She is an Irish
lady, and Mrs. Heywood had recommended her to me as being very
conversable; but I had a good deal more talk with Mrs. M------, with whom
I was already acquainted, than with her.  Mrs. M------ is of noble blood,
and therefore not snobbish,--quite unaffected, gentle, sweet, and easy to
get on with, reminding me of the best-mannered American women.  But how
can anything characteristic be said or done among a dozen people sitting
at table in full dress?  Speaking of full dress, the Bishop wore
small-clothes and silk stockings, and entered the drawing-room with a
three-cornered hat, which he kept flattened out under his arm.  He asked
the briefest blessing possible, and, sitting at the ultra end of the
table, I heard nothing further from him till he officiated as briefly
before the cloth was withdrawn.  Mrs. M------ talked about Tennyson, with
whom her husband was at the University, and whom he continues to know
intimately.  She says that he considers Maud his best poem.  He now lives
in the Isle of Wight, spending all the year round there, and has recently
bought the place on which he resides.  She was of opinion that he would
have been gratified by my calling on him, which I had wished to do, while
we were at Southampton; but this is a liberty which I should hardly
venture upon with a shy man like Tennyson,--more especially as he might
perhaps suspect me of doing it on the score of my own literary character.

But I should like much to see him  Mr. Tom Taylor, during dinner, made
some fun for the benefit of the ladies on either side of him.  I liked
him very well this evening.

When the ladies had not long withdrawn, and after the wine had once gone
round, I asked Mr. Heywood to make my apologies to Mrs. Heywood, and took
leave; all London lying betwixt me and the London Bridge station, where I
was to take the rail homeward.  At the station I found Mr. Bennoch, who
had been dining with the Lord Mayor to meet Sir William Williams, and we
railed to Greenwich, and reached home by midnight.  Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch
have set out on their Continental journey to-day,--leaving us, for a
little space, in possession of what will be more like a home than
anything that we shall hereafter find in England.

This afternoon I had taken up the fourth volume of Jerdan's
Autobiography,--wretched twaddle, though it records such constant and
apparently intimate intercourse with distinguished people,--and was
reading it, between asleep and awake, on the sofa, when Mr. Jerdan
himself was announced.  I saw him, in company with Mr. Bennoch, nearly
three years ago, at Rock Park, and wondered then what there was in so
uncouth an individual to get him so freely into polished society.  He now
looks rougher than ever,--time-worn, but not reverend; a thatch of gray
hair on his head; an imperfect set of false teeth; a careless apparel,
checked trousers, and a stick, for he had walked a mile or two from his
own dwelling.

I suspect--and long practice at the Consulate has made me keen-sighted--
that Mr. Jerdan contemplated some benefit from my purse; and, to the
extent of a sovereign or so, I would not mind contributing to his
comfort.  He spoke of a secret purpose of Mr. ------ and himself to
obtain me a degree or diploma in some Literary Institution,--what one I
know not, and did not ask; but the honor cannot be a high one, if this
poor old fellow can do aught towards it.  I am afraid he is a very
disreputable senior, but certainly not the less to be pitied on that
account; and there was something very touching in his stiff and infirm
movement, as he resumed his stick and took leave, waving me a courteous
farewell, and turning upon me a smile, grim with age, as he went down the
steps.  In that gesture and smile I fancied some trace of the polished
man of society, such as he may have once been; though time and hard
weather have roughened him, as they have the once polished marble pillars
which I saw so rude in aspect at Netley Abbey.

Speaking of Dickens last evening, Mr. ------ mentioned his domestic
tastes,--how he preferred home enjoyments to all others, and did not
willingly go much into society.  Mrs. ------, too, the other day told us
of his taking on himself all possible trouble as regards his domestic
affairs. . . . . There is a great variety of testimony, various and
varied, as to the character of Dickens.  I must see him before I finally
leave England.


July 13th.--On Friday morning (11th), at nine o'clock, I took the rail
into town to breakfast with Mr. Milnes.  As he had named a little after
ten as the hour, I could not immediately proceed to his house, and so
walked moderately over London Bridge and into the city, meaning to take a
cab from Charing Cross, or thereabouts.  Passing through some street or
other, contiguous to Cheapside, I saw in a court-yard the entrance to the
Guildhall, and stepped in to look at it.  It is a spacious hall, about
one hundred and fifty feet long, and perhaps half as broad, paved with
flagstones which look worn and some of them cracked across; the roof is
very lofty and was once vaulted, but has been shaped anew in modern
times.  There is a vast window partly filled with painted glass,
extending quite along each end of the hall, and a row of arched windows
on either side, throwing their light from far above downward upon the
pavement.  This fashion of high windows, not reaching within twenty or
thirty feet of the floor, serves to give great effect to the large
enclosed space of an antique hall.  Against the walls are several marble
monuments; one to the Earl of Chatham, a statue of white marble, with
various allegorical contrivances, fronting an obelisk or pyramid of dark
marble; and another to his son, William Pitt, of somewhat similar design
and of equal size; each of them occupying the whole space, I believe,
between pavement and ceiling.  There is likewise a statue of Beckford, a
famous Lord Mayor,--the most famous except Whittington, and that one who
killed Wat Tyler; and like those two, his fame is perhaps somewhat
mythological, though he lived and bustled within less than a century.  He
is said to have made a bold speech to the King; but this I will not
believe of any Englishman--at least, of any plebeian Englishman--until I
hear it.  But there stands his statue in the Guildhall in the act of
making his speech, as if the monstrous attempt had petrified him.

Lord Nelson, too, has a monument, and so, I think, has some other modern
worthy.  At one end of the hall, under one of the great painted windows,
stand three or four old statues of mediaeval kings, whose identities I
forget; and in the two corners of the opposite end are two gigantic
absurdities of painted wood, with grotesque visages, whom I quickly
recognized as Gog and Magog.  They stand each on a pillar, and seem to be
about fifteen feet high, and look like enormous playthings for the
children of giants; and it is strange to see them in this solemn old
hall, among the memorials of dead heroes and statesmen.  There is an
annual banquet in the Guildhall, given by the Lord Mayor and sheriffs,
and I believe it is the very acme of civic feasting.

After viewing the hall, as it still lacked something of ten, I continued
my walk through that entanglement of city streets, and quickly found
myself getting beyond my reckoning.  I cannot tell whither I went, but I
passed through a very dirty region, and I remember a long, narrow,
evil-odored street, cluttered up with stalls, in which were vegetables
and little bits of meat for sale; and there was a frowzy multitude of
buyers and sellers.  Still I blundered on, and was getting out of the
density of the city into broader streets, but still shabby ones, when,
looking at my watch, I found it to be past ten, and no cab-stand within
sight.  It was a quarter past when I finally got into one; and the driver
told me that it would take half an hour to go from thence to Upper Brook
Street; so that I was likely to exceed the license implied in Mr.
Milnes's invitation.  Whether I was quite beyond rule I cannot say; but
it did not lack more than ten minutes of eleven when I was ushered up
stairs, and I found all the company assembled.  However, it is of little
consequence, except that if I had come early, I should have been
introduced to many of the guests, whom now I could only know across the
table.  Mrs. Milnes greeted me very kindly, and Mr. Milnes came towards
me with an elderly gentleman in a blue coat and gray pantaloons,--with a
long, rather thin, homely visage, exceedingly shaggy eyebrows, though no
great weight of brow, and thin gray hair, and introduced me to the
Marquis of Lansdowne.  The Marquis had his right hand wrapped up in a
black-silk handkerchief; so he gave me his left, and, from some
awkwardness in meeting it, when I expected the right, I gave him only
three of my fingers,--a thing I never did before to any person, and it is
droll that I should have done it to a Marquis.  He addressed me with
great simplicity and natural kindness, complimenting me on my works, and
speaking about the society of Liverpool in former days.  Lord Lansdowne
was the friend of Moore, and has about him the aroma communicated by the
memories of many illustrious people with whom he has associated.

Mr. Ticknor, the Historian of Spanish Literature, now greeted me.  Mr.
Milnes introduced me to Mrs. Browning, and assigned her to me to conduct
into the breakfast-room.  She is a small, delicate woman, with ringlets
of dark hair, a pleasant, intelligent, and sensitive face, and a low,
agreeable voice.  She looks youthful and comely, and is very gentle and
lady-like.  And so we proceeded to the breakfast-room, which is hung
round with pictures; and in the middle of it stood a large round table,
worthy to have been King Arthur's, and here we seated ourselves without
any question of precedence or ceremony.  On one side of me was an elderly
lady, with a very fine countenance, and in the course of breakfast I
discovered her to be the mother of Florence Nightingale.  One of her
daughters (not Florence) was likewise present.  Mrs. Milnes, Mrs.
Browning, Mrs. Nightingale, and her daughter were the only ladies at
table; and I think there were as many as eight or ten gentlemen, whose
names--as I came so late--I was left to find out for myself, or to leave
unknown.

It was a pleasant and sociable meal, and, thanks to my cold beef and
coffee at home, I had no occasion to trouble myself much about the fare;
so I just ate some delicate chicken, and a very small cutlet, and a slice
of dry toast, and thereupon surceased from my labors.  Mrs. Browning and
I talked a good deal during breakfast, for she is of that quickly
appreciative and responsive order of women with whom I can talk more
freely than with any man; and she has, besides, her own originality,
wherewith to help on conversation, though, I should say, not of a
loquacious tendency.  She introduced the subject of spiritualism, which,
she says, interests her very much; indeed, she seems to be a believer.
Mr. Browning, she told me, utterly rejects the subject, and will not
believe even in the outward manifestations, of which there is such
overwhelming evidence.  We also talked of Miss Bacon; and I developed
something of that lady's theory respecting Shakespeare, greatly to the
horror of Mrs. Browning, and that of her next neighbor,--a nobleman,
whose name I did not hear.  On the whole, I like her the better for
loving the man Shakespeare with a personal love.  We talked, too, of
Margaret Fuller, who spent her last night in Italy with the Brownings;
and of William Story, with whom they have been intimate, and who, Mrs.
Browning says, is much stirred about spiritualism.  Really, I cannot help
wondering that so fine a spirit as hers should not reject the matter,
till, at least, it is forced upon her.  I like her very much.

Mrs. Nightingale had been talking at first with Lord Lansdowne, who sat
next her, but by and by she turned to nee, and began to speak of London
smoke   Then, there being a discussion about Lord Byron on the other side
of the table, she spoke to me about Lady Byron, whom she knows
intimately, characterizing her as a most excellent and exemplary person,
high-principled, unselfish, and now devoting herself to the care of her
two grandchildren,--their mother, Byron's daughter, being dead.  Lady
Byron, she says, writes beautiful verses.  Somehow or other, all this
praise, and more of the same kind, gave me an idea of an intolerably
irreproachable person; and I asked Mrs. Nightingale if Lady Byron were
warm-hearted.  With some hesitation, or mental reservation,--at all
events, not quite outspokenly,--she answered that she was.

I was too much engaged with these personal talks to attend much to what
was going on elsewhere; but all through breakfast I had been more and
more impressed by the aspect of one of the guests, sitting next to
Milnes.  He was a man of large presence,--a portly personage,
gray-haired, but scarcely as yet aged; and his face had a remarkable
intelligence, not vivid nor sparkling, but conjoined with great
quietude,--and if it gleamed or brightened at one time more than another,
it was like the sheen over a broad surface of sea.  There was a somewhat
careless self-possession, large and broad enough to be called dignity;
and the more I looked at him, the more I knew that he was a distinguished
person, and wondered who.  He might have been a minister of state; only
there is not one of them who has any right to such a face and presence.
At last,--I do not know how the conviction came,--but I became aware that
it was Macaulay, and began to see some slight resemblance to his
portraits.  But I have never seen any that is not wretchedly unworthy of
the original.  As soon as I knew him, I began to listen to his
conversation, but he did not talk a great deal, contrary to his usual
custom; for I am told he is apt to engross all the talk to himself.
Probably he may have been restrained by the presence of Ticknor, and Mr.
Palfrey, who were among his auditors and interlocutors; and as the
conversation seemed to turn much on American subjects, he could not well
have assumed to talk them down.  I am glad to have seen him,--a face fit
for a scholar, a man of the world, a cultivated intelligence.

After we left the table, and went into the library, Mr. Browning
introduced himself to me,--a younger man than I expected to see,
handsome, with brown hair.  He is very simple and agreeable in manner,
gently impulsive, talking as if his heart were uppermost.  He spoke of
his pleasure in meeting me, and his appreciation of my books; and--which
has not often happened to me--mentioned that The Blithedale Romance was
the one he admired most.  I wonder why.  I hope I showed as much pleasure
at his praise as he did at mine; for I was glad to see how pleasantly it
moved him.  After this, I talked with Ticknor and Miles, and with Mr.
Palfrey, to whom I had been introduced very long ago by George Hillard,
and had never seen him since.  We looked at some autographs, of which Mr.
Milnes has two or three large volumes.  I recollect a leaf from Swift's
Journal to Stella; a letter from Addison; one from Chatterton, in a most
neat and legible hand; and a characteristic sentence or two and signature
of Oliver Cromwell, written in a religious book.  There were many curious
volumes in the library, but I had not time to look at them.

I liked greatly the manners of almost all,--yes, as far as I observed,--
all the people at this breakfast, and it was doubtless owing to their
being all people either of high rank or remarkable intellect, or both.
An Englishman can hardly be a gentleman, unless he enjoy one or other of
these advantages; and perhaps the surest way to give him good manners is
to make a lord of him, or rather of his grandfather or great-grandfather.
In the third generation, scarcely sooner, he will be polished into
simplicity and elegance, and his deportment will be all the better for
the homely material out of which it is wrought and refined.  The Marquis
of Lansdowne, for instance, would have been a very commonplace man in the
common ranks of life; but it has done him good to be a nobleman.  Not
that his tact is quite perfect.  In going up to breakfast, he made me
precede him; in returning to the library, he did the same, although I
drew back, till he impelled me up the first stair, with gentle
persistence.  By insisting upon it, he showed his sense of condescension
much more than if, when he saw me unwilling to take precedence, he had
passed forward, as if the point were not worth either asserting or
yielding.  Heaven knows, it was in no humility that I would have trodden
behind him.  But he is a kind old man; and I am willing to believe of the
English aristocracy generally that they are kind, and of beautiful
deportment; for certainly there never can have been mortals in a position
more advantageous for becoming so.  I hope there will come a time when we
shall be so; and I already know a few Americans, whose noble and delicate
manners may compare well with any I have seen.

I left the house with Mr. Palfrey.  He has cone to England to make some
researches in the State Paper Office, for the purposes of a work which he
has in hand.  He mentioned to me a letter which he had seen, written from
New England in the time of Charles II. and referring to the order sent by
the minister of that day for the appearance of Governor Bellingham and my
ancestor on this side of the water.  The signature of this letter is an
anagram of my ancestor's name.  The letter itself is a very bold and able
one, controverting the propriety of the measure above indicated; and Mr.
Palfrey feels certain that it was written by my aforesaid ancestor.  I
mentioned my wish to ascertain the place in England whence the family
emigrated; and Mr. Palfrey took me to the Record Office, and introduced
me to Mr. Joseph Hunter,--a venerable and courteous gentleman, of
antiquarian pursuits.  The office was odorous of musty parchments,
hundreds of years old.  Mr. Hunter received me with great kindness, and
gave me various old records and rolls of parchment, in which to seek for
my family name; but I was perplexed with the crabbed characters, and soon
grew weary and gave up the quest.  He says that it is very seldom that an
American family, springing from the early settlers, can be satisfactorily
traced back to their English ancestry.


July 16th.--Monday morning I took the rail from Blackheath to London.  It
is a very pleasant place, Blackheath, and far more rural than one would
expect, within five or six miles of London,--a great many trees, making
quite a mass of foliage in the distance; green enclosures; pretty villas,
with their nicely kept lawns, and gardens, with grass-plots and flower
borders; and village streets, set along the sidewalks with ornamental
trees; and the houses standing a little back, and separated one from
another,--all this within what is called the Park, which has its
gateways, and the sort of semi-privacy with which I first became
acquainted at Rock Park.

From the London Bridge station I took a cab for Paddington, and then had
to wait above two hours before a train started for Birkenhead.  Meanwhile
I walked a little about the neighborhood, which is very dull and
uninteresting; made up of crescents and terraces, and rows of houses that
have no individuality, and second-rate shops,--in short, the outskirts of
the vast city, when it begins to have a kind of village character but no
rurality or sylvan aspect, as at Blackheath.  My journey, when at last we
started, was quite unmarked by incident, and extremely tedious; it being
a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest.  At about
ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and
detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it.
Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an
overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into
the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General
Armstrong. . . . . She expressed a hope that I might not see his
ghost,--nor have I, as yet.

Speaking of ghosts, Mr. H. A. B------ told me a singular story to-day of
an apparition that haunts the Times Office, in Printing-House Square.  A
Mr. W------ is the engineer of the establishment, and has his residence
in the edifice, which is built, I believe, on the site of Merchant
Taylor's school,--an old house that was no longer occupied for its
original purpose, and, being supposed haunted, was left untenanted.  The
father-in-law of Mr. W------, an old sea-captain, came on a visit to him
and his wife, and was put into their guest-chamber, where he passed the
night.  The next morning, assigning no very satisfactory reason, he cut
his visit short and went away.  Shortly afterwards, a young lady came to
visit the W------'s; but she too went away the next morning,--going first
to make a call, as she said, to a friend, and sending thence for her
trunks.  Mrs. W------ wrote to this young lady, asking an explanation.
The young lady replied, and gave a singular account of an apparition,--
how she was awakened in the night by a bright light shining through the
window, which was parallel to the bed; then, if I remember rightly, her
curtains were withdrawn, and a shape looked in upon her,--a woman's
shape, she called it; but it was a skeleton, with lambent flames playing
about its bones, and in and out among the ribs.  Other persons have since
slept in this chamber, and some have seen the shape, others not.  Mr.
W------ has slept there himself without seeing anything.  He has had
investigations by scientific people, apparently under the idea that the
phenomenon might have been caused by some of the Times's work-people,
playing tricks on the magic-lantern principle; but nothing satisfactory
has thus far been elucidated.  Mr. B------ had this story from Mrs.
Gaskell. . . . . Supposing it a ghost, nothing else is so remarkable as
its choosing to haunt the precincts of the Times newspaper.


July 29th.--On Saturday, 26th, I took the rail from the Lime Street
station for London, via the Trent Valley, and reached Blackheath in the
evening. . . . .

Sunday morning my wife and I, with J-----, railed into London, and drove
to the Essex Street Chapel, where Mr. Channing was to preach.  The Chapel
is the same where Priestley and Belsham used to preach,--one of the
plainest houses of worship I was ever in, as simple and undecorated as
the faith there inculcated.  They retain, however, all the form and
ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to
meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians.  There may be good sense in
this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a
stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings;
but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation,
especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot
attach much idea of sanctity to them.

[Here follows a long record of Mr. Hawthorne's visit to Miss Bacon,--
condensed in Our Old Hone, in the paper called "Recollections of a Gifted
Woman."]


August 2d.--On Wednesday (30th July) we went to Marlborough House to see
the Vernon gallery of pictures.  They are the works, almost entirely of
English artists of the last and present century, and comprise many famous
paintings; and I must acknowledge that I had more enjoyment of them than
of those portions of the National Gallery which I had before seen,--
including specimens of the grand old masters.  My comprehension has not
reached their height.  I think nothing pleased me more than a picture by
Sir David Wilkie,--The Parish Beadle, with a vagrant boy and a monkey in
custody; it is exceedingly good and true throughout, and especially the
monkey's face is a wonderful production of genius, condensing within
itself the whole moral and pathos of the picture.

Marlborough House was the residence of the Great Duke, and is to be that
of the Prince of Wales, when another place is found for the pictures.  It
adjoins St. James's Palace.  In its present state it is not a very
splendid mansion, the rooms being small, though handsomely shaped, with
vaulted ceilings, and carved white-marble fireplaces.  I left S----- here
after an hour or two, and walked forth into the hot and busy city with
J-----. . . . . I called at Routledge's bookshop, in hopes to make an
arrangement with him about Miss Bacon's business.  But Routledge himself
is making a journey in the north, and neither of the partners was there,
so that I shall have to go thither some other day.  Then we stepped into
St. Paul's Cathedral to cool ourselves, and it was delightful so to
escape from the sunny, sultry turmoil of Fleet Street and Ludgate, and
find ourselves at once in this remote, solemn, shadowy seclusion,
marble-cool.  O that we had cathedrals in America, were it only for the
sensuous luxury!  We strolled round the cathedral, and I delighted
J----- much by pointing out the monuments of three British generals, who
were slain in America in the last war,--the naughty and bloodthirsty
little man!  We then went to Guildhall, where I thought J----- would like
to see Gog and Magog; but he had never heard of those illustrious
personages, and took no interest in them. . . . . But truly I am grateful
to the piety of former times for raising this vast, cool canopy of marble
[St. Paul's] in the midst of the feverish city.  I wandered quite round
it, and saw, in a remote corner, a monument to the officers of the
Coldstream Guards, slain in the Crimea.  It was a mural tablet, with the
names of the officers on an escutcheon; and two privates of the Guards,
in marble bas-relief, were mourning over them.  Over the tablet hung two
silken banners, new and glossy, with the battles in which the regiment
has been engaged inscribed on them,--not merely Crimean but Peninsular
battles.  These banners will bang there till they drop away in tatters.

After thus refreshing myself in the cathedral, I went again to
Routledge's in Farrington Street, and saw one of the firm.  He expressed
great pleasure at seeing me, as indeed he might, having published and
sold, without any profit on my part, uncounted thousands of my books.  I
introduced the subject of Miss Bacon's work; and he expressed the utmost
willingness to do everything in his power towards bringing it before the
world, but thought that his firm--it being their business to publish for
the largest circle of readers--was not the most eligible for the
publication of such a book.  Very likely this may be so.  At all events,
however, I am to send him the manuscript, and he will at least give me
his advice and assistance in finding a publisher.  He was good enough to
express great regret that I had no work of my own to give him for
publication; and, truly, I regret it too, since, being a resident in
England, I could now have all the publishing privileges of a native
author.  He presented me with a copy of an illustrated edition of
Longfellow's Poems, and I took my leave.

Thence I went to the Picture Gallery at the British Institution, where
there are three rooms full of paintings by the first masters, the
property of private persons.  Every one of them, no doubt, was worth
studying for a long, long time; and I suppose I may have given, on an
average, a minute to each.  What an absurdity it would seem, to pretend
to read two or three hundred poems, of all degrees between an epic and a
ballad, in an hour or two!  And a picture is a poem, only requiring the
greater study to be felt and comprehended; because the spectator must
necessarily do much for himself towards that end.  I saw many beautiful
things,--among them some landscapes by Claude, which to the eye were like
the flavor of a rich, ripe melon to the palate.


August 7th.--Yesterday we took the rail for London, it being a fine,
sunny day, though not so very warm as many of the preceding days have
been. . . . . We went along Piccadilly as far as the Egyptian Hall.  It
is quite remarkable how comparatively quiet the town has become, now that
the season is over.  One can see the difference in all the region west of
Temple Bar; and, indeed, either the hot weather or some other cause seems
to have operated in assuaging the turmoil in the city itself.  I never
saw London Bridge so little thronged as yesterday.  At the Egyptian Hall,
or in the same edifice, there is a gallery of pictures, the property of
Lord Ward, who allows the public to see them, five days of the week,
without any trouble or restriction,--a great kindness on his Lordship's
part, it must be owned.  It is a very valuable collection, I presume,
containing specimens of many famous old masters; some of the early and
hard pictures by Raphael and his master and fellow-pupils,--very curious,
and nowise beautiful; a perfect, sunny glimpse of Venice, by Canaletto;
and saints, and Scriptural, allegorical, and mythological people, by
Titian, Guido, Correggio, and many more names than I can remember.  There
is likewise a dead Magdalen by Canova, and a Venus by the same, very
pretty, and with a vivid light of joyous expression in her face; . . . .
also Powers's Greek Slave, in which I see little beauty or merit; and two
or three other statues.

We then drove to Ashley Place, to call on Mrs. S. C. Hall, whom we found
at home.  In fact, Wednesday is her reception-day; although, as now
everybody is out of town, we were the only callers.  She is an agreeable
and kindly woman.  She told us that her husband and herself propose going
to America next year, and I heartily wish they may meet with a warm and
friendly reception.  I have been seldom more assured of the existence of
a heart than in her; also a good deal of sentiment.  She had been
visiting Bessie, the widow of Moore, at Sloperton, and gave S----- a rose
from his cottage.  Such things are very true and unaffected in her.  The
only wonder is that she has not lost such girlish freshness of feeling as
prompts them.  We did not see Mr. Hall, he having gone to the Crystal
Palace.

Taking our leave, we returned along Victoria Street--a new street,
penetrating through what was recently one of the worst parts of the town,
and now bordered with large blocks of buildings, in a dreary,
half-finished state, and left so for want of funds--till we came to
Westminster Abbey.  We went in and spent an hour there, wandering all
round the nave and aisles, admiring the grand old edifice itself, but
finding more to smile at than to admire in the monuments. . . . . The
interior view of the Abbey is better than can be described; the heart
aches, as one gazes at it, for lack of power and breadth enough to take
its beauty and grandeur in.  The effect was heightened by the sun shining
through the painted window in the western end, and by the bright sunshine
that came through the open portal, and lay on the pavement,--that space
so bright, the rest of the vast floor so solemn and sombre.  At the
western end, in a corner from which spectators are barred out, there is a
statue of Wordsworth, which I do not recollect seeing at any former
visit.  Its only companion in the same nook is Pope's friend, Secretary
Craggs.

Downing Street, that famous official precinct, took its name from Sir
George Downing, who was proprietor or lessee of property there.  He was a
native of my own old native town, and his descendants still reside
there,--collateral descendants, I suppose,--and follow the drygoods
business (drapers).


August 10th.--I journeyed to Liverpool via Chester. . . . . One sees a
variety of climate, temperature, and season in a ride of two hundred
miles, north and south, through England.  Near London, for instance, the
grain was reaped, and stood in sheaves in the stubble-fields, over which
girls and children might be seen gleaning; farther north, the golden, or
greenish-golden, crops were waving in the wind.  In one part of our way
the atmosphere was hot and dry; at another point it had been cooled and
refreshed by a heavy thunder-shower, the pools of which still lay
along our track.  It seems to me that local varieties of weather are
more common in this island, and within narrower precincts, than in
America. . . . . I never saw England of such a dusky and dusty green
before,--almost sunbrowned, indeed.  Sometimes the green hedges formed a
marked framework to a broad sheet of golden grain-field.  As we drew near
Oxford, just before reaching the station I had a good view of its domes,
towers, and spires,--better, I think, than when J----- and I rambled
through the town a month or two ago.

Mr. Frank Scott Haydon, of the Record Office, London, writes me that he
has found a "Henry Atte Hawthorne" on a roll which he is transcribing, of
the first Edward III.  He belonged to the Parish of Aldremeston, in the
hundred of Blakenhurste, Worcester County.


August 21st.--Yesterday, at twelve o'clock, I took the steamer for
Runcorn, from the pier-head.  In the streets, I had noticed that it was a
breezy day; but on the river there was a very stiff breeze from the
northeast, right ahead, blowing directly in our face the whole way; and
truly this river Mersey is never without a breeze, and generally in the
direction of its course,--an evil-tempered, unkindly, blustering wind,
that you cannot meet without being exasperated by it.  As it came
straight against us, it was impossible to find a shelter anywhere on
deck, except it were behind the stove-pipe; and, besides, the day was
overcast and threatening rain.

I have undergone very miserable hours on the Mersey, where, in the space
of two years, I voyaged thousands of miles,--and this trip to Runcorn
reminded me of them, though it was less disagreeable after more than a
twelvemonth's respite.  We had a good many passengers on board, most of
whom were of the second class, and congregated on the forward deck; more
women than men, I think, and some of them with their husbands and
children.  Several produced lunch and bottles, and refreshed themselves
very soon after we started.  By and by the wind became so disagreeable
that I went below, and sat in the cabin, only occasionally looking out,
to get a peep at the shores of the river, which I had never before seen
above Eastham.  However, they are not worth looking at; level and
monotonous, without trees or beauty of any kind,--here and there a
village, and a modern church, on the low ridge behind; perhaps, a
windmill, which the gusty day had set busily to work.  The river
continues very wide--no river indeed, but an estuary--during almost the
whole distance to Runcorn; and nearly at the end of our voyage we
approached some abrupt and prominent hills, which, many a time, I have
seen on my passages to Rock Ferry, looking blue and dim, and serving for
prophets of the weather; for when they can be distinctly seen adown the
river, it is a token of coming rain.  We met many vessels, and passed
many which were beating up against the wind, and which keeled over, so
that their decks must have dipped,--schooners and vessels that come from
the Bridgewater Canal.  We shipped a sea ourselves, which gave the
fore-deck passengers a wetting.

Before reaching Runcorn, we stopped to land some passengers at another
little port, where there was a pier and a lighthouse, and a church within
a few yards of the river-side,--a good many of the river-craft, too, in
dock, forming quite a crowd of masts.  About ten minutes' further
steaming brought us to Runcorn, where were two or three tall
manufacturing chimneys, with a pennant of black smoke from each; two
vessels of considerable size on the stocks; a church or two; and a
meagre, uninteresting, shabby, brick-built town, rising from the edge of
the river, with irregular streets,--not village-like, but paved, and
looking like a dwarfed, stunted city.  I wandered through it till I came
to a tall, high-pedestalled windmill on the outer verge, the vans of
which were going briskly round.  Thence retracing my steps, I stopped at
a poor hotel, and took lunch, and, finding that I was in time to take the
steamer back, I hurried on board, and we set sail (or steam) before
three.  I have heard of an old castle at Runcorn, but could discover
nothing of it.  It was well that I returned so promptly, for we had
hardly left the pier before it began to rain, and there was a heavy
downfall throughout the voyage homeward.  Runcorn is fourteen miles from
Liverpool, and is the farthest point to which a steamer runs.  I had
intended to come home by rail,--a circuitous route,--but the advice of
the landlady of the hotel, and the aspect of the weather, and a feeling
of general discouragement prevented me.

An incident in S. C. Hall's Ireland, of a stone cross, buried in
Cromwell's time, to prevent its destruction by his soldiers.  It was
forgotten, and became a mere doubtful tradition, but one old man had been
told by his father, and he by his father, etc., that it was buried near a
certain spot; and at last, two hundred years after the cross was buried,
the vicar of the parish dug in that spot and found it.  In my (English)
romance, an American might bring the tradition from over the sea, and so
discover the cross, which had been altogether forgotten.


August 24th.--Day before yesterday I took the rail for Southport,--a
cool, generally overcast day, with glimmers of faint sunshine.  The ride
is through a most uninteresting tract of country, at first, glimpses of
the river, with the thousands of masts in the docks; the dismal outskirts
of a great town, still spreading onward, with beginnings of streets, and
insulated brick buildings and blocks; farther on, a wide monotony of
level plain, and here and there a village and a church; almost always a
windmill in sight, there being plenty of breeze to turn its vans on this
windy coast.  The railway skirts along the sea the whole distance, but is
shut out from the sight of it by the low sand-hills, which seem to have
been heaped up by the waves.  There are one or two lighthouses on the
shore.  I have not seen a drearier landscape, even in Lancashire.

Reaching Southport at three, I rambled about, with a view to discover
whether it be a suitable residence for my family during September.  It is
a large village, or rather more than a village, which seems to be almost
entirely made up of lodging-houses, and, at any rate, has been built up
by the influx of summer visitors,--a sandy soil, level, and laid out with
well-paved streets, the principal of which are enlivened with bazaars,
markets, shops, hotels of various degrees, and a showy vivacity of
aspect.  There are a great many donkey-carriages,--large vehicles, drawn
by a pair of donkeys; bath-chairs, with invalid ladies; refreshment-rooms
in great numbers,--a place where everybody seems to be a transitory
guest, nobody at home.  The main street leads directly down to the
sea-shore, along which there is an elevated embankment, with a promenade
on the top, and seats, and the toll of a penny.  The shore itself, the
tide being then low, stretched out interminably seaward, a wide waste of
glistering sands; and on the dry border, people were riding on donkeys,
with the drivers whipping behind; and children were digging with their
little wooden spades; and there were donkey-carriages far out on the
sands,--a pleasant and breezy drive.  A whole city of bathing-machines
was stationed near the shore, and I saw others in the seaward distance.
The sea-air was refreshing and exhilarating, and if S----- needs a
seaside residence, I should think this might do as well as any other.

I saw a large brick edifice, enclosed within a wall, and with somewhat
the look of an almshouse or hospital; and it proved to be an Infirmary,
charitably established for the reception of poor invalids, who need
sea-air and cannot afford to pay for it.  Two or three of such persons
were sitting under its windows.  I do not think that the visitors of
Southport are generally of a very opulent class, but of the middle
rank, from Manchester and other parts of this northern region.  The
lodging-houses, however, are of sufficiently handsome style and
arrangement.



OXFORD.


[Mr. Hawthorne extracted from his recorded Oxford experiences his
excursion to Blenheim, but left his observations of the town itself
untouched,--and these I now transcribe.--ED.]


August 31st.--. . . . Yesterday we took the rail for London, and drove
across the city to the Paddington station, where we met Bennoch, and set
out with him for Oxford.  I do not quite understand the matter, but it
appears that we were expected guests of Mr. Spiers, a very hospitable
gentleman, and Ex-Mayor of Oxford, and a friend of Bennoch and of the
Halls.  Mr. S. C. Hall met us at the Oxford station, and under his
guidance we drove to a quiet, comfortable house in St. Giles Street,
where rooms had been taken for us.  Durham, the sculptor, is likewise of
the party.

After establishing ourselves at these lodgings, we walked forth to take a
preliminary glimpse of the city, and Mr. Hall, being familiar with the
localities, served admirably as a guide.  If I remember aright, I spoke
very slightingly of the exterior aspect of Oxford, as I saw it with
J----- during an hour or two's stay here, on my way to Southampton (to
meet S----- on her return from Lisbon).  I am bound to say that my
impressions are now very different; and that I find Oxford exceedingly
picturesque and rich in beauty and grandeur and in antique stateliness.
I do not remember very particularly what we saw,--time-worn fronts of
famous colleges and halls of learning everywhere about the streets, and
arched entrances; passing through which, we saw bits of sculpture from
monkish hands,--the most grotesque and ludicrous faces, as if the
slightest whim of these old carvers took shape in stone, the material
being so soft and manageable by them; an ancient stone pulpit in the
quadrangle of Maudlin College (Magdalen), one of only three now extant in
England; a splendid--no, not splendid, but dimly magnificent--chapel,
belonging to the same College, with painted windows of rare beauty, not
brilliant with diversified hues, but of a sombre tint.  In this chapel
there is an alabaster monument,--a recumbent figure of the founder's
father, as large as life,--which, though several centuries old, is as
well preserved as if fresh from the chisel.

In the High Street, which, I suppose, is the noblest old street in
England, Mr. Hall pointed out, the Crown Inn, where Shakespeare used to
spend the night, and was most hospitably welcomed by the pretty hostess
(the mother of Sir William Davenant) on his passage between Stratford and
London.  It is a three-story house, with other houses contiguous,--an old
timber mansion, though now plastered and painted of a yellowish line.
The ground-floor is occupied as a shoe-shop; but the rest of the house is
still kept as a tavern. . . . .

It is not now term time, and Oxford loses one of its most characteristic
features by the absence of the gownsmen; but still there is a good deal
of liveliness in the streets.  We walked as far as a bridge beyond
Maudlin College, and then drove homeward.

At six we went to dine with the hospitable Ex-Mayor, across the wide,
tree-bordered street; for his house is nearly opposite our lodgings.  He
is an intelligent and gentlemanly person, and was Mayor two years ago,
and has done a great deal to make peace between the University and
the town, heretofore bitterly inimical.  His house is adorned with
pictures and drawings, and he has an especial taste for art. . . . . The
dinner-table was decorated with pieces of plate, vases, and other things,
which were presented to him as tokens of public or friendly regard and
approbation of his action in the Mayoralty.  After dinner, too, he
produced a large silver snuff-box, which had been given him on the same
account; in fact, the inscription affirmed that it was one of five pieces
of plate so presented.  The vases are really splendid,--one of them two
feet high, and richly ornamented.  It will hold five or six bottles of
wine, and he said that it had been filled, and, I believe, sent round as
a loving-cup at some of his entertainments.  He cordially enjoys these
things, and his genuine benevolence produces all this excellent
hospitality. . . . . But Bennoch proposed a walk, and we set forth.  We
rambled pretty extensively about the streets, sometimes seeing the shapes
of old edifices dimly and doubtfully, it being an overcast night; or
catching a partial view of a gray wall, or a pillar, or a Gothic archway,
by lamplight. . . . . The clock had some time ago struck eleven, when we
were passing under a long extent of antique wall and towers, which were
those of Baliol College.  Mr. D------ led us into the middle of the
street, and showed us a cross, which was paved into it, on a level with
the rest of the road.  This was the spot where Latimer and Ridley and
another Bishop were martyred in Bloody Mary's time.  There is a memorial
to them in another street; but this, where I set my foot at nearly
midnight, was the very spot where their flesh burned to ashes, and their
bones whitened.  It has been a most beautiful morning, and I have seen
few pleasanter scenes than this street in which we lodge, with its
spacious breadth, its two rows of fine old trees, with sidewalks as wide
as the whole width of some streets; and, on the opposite side, the row of
houses, some of them ancient with picturesque gables, partially disclosed
through the intervening foliage. . . . . From our window we have a
slantwise glimpse, to the right, of the walls of St. John's College, and
the general aspect of St. Giles.  It is of an antiquity not to shame
those mediaeval halls.  Our own lodgings are in a house that seems
to be very old, with panelled walls, and beams across the ceilings,
lattice-windows in the chambers, and a musty odor such as old houses
inevitably have.  Nevertheless, everything is extremely neat, clean, and
comfortable; and in term time our apartments are occupied by a Mr.
Stebbing, whose father is known in literature by some critical writings,
and who is a graduate and an admirable scholar.  There is a bookcase of
five shelves, containing his books, mostly standard works, and indicating
a safe and solid taste.

After lunch to-day we (that is, Mrs. Hall, her adopted daughter, S-----,
and I, with the Ex-Mayor) set forth, in an open barouche, to see the
remarkables of Oxford, while the rest of the guests went on foot.  We
first drew up at New College (a strange name for such an old place, but
it was new some time since the Conquest), and went through its quiet and
sunny quadrangles, and into its sunny and shadowy gardens.  I am in
despair about the architecture and old edifices of these Oxford colleges,
it is so impossible to express them in words.  They are themselves--as
the architect left them, and as Time has modified and improved them--the
expression of an idea which does not admit of being otherwise expressed,
or translated into anything else.  Those old battlemented walls around
the quadrangles; many gables; the windows with stone pavilions, so very
antique, yet some of them adorned with fresh flowers in pots,--a very
sweet contrast; the ivy mantling the gray stone; and the infinite repose,
both in sunshine and shadow,--it is as if half a dozen bygone centuries
had set up their rest here, and as if nothing of the present time ever
passed through the deeply recessed archway that shuts in the College from
the street.  Not but what people have very free admittance; and many
parties of young men and girls and children came into the gardens while
we were there.

These gardens of New College are indescribably beautiful,--not gardens in
an American sense, but lawns of the richest green and softest velvet
grass, shadowed over by ancient trees, that have lived a quiet life here
for centuries, and have been nursed and tended with such care, and so
sheltered from rude winds, that certainly they must have been the
happiest of all trees.  Such a sweet, quiet, sacred, stately seclusion--
so age-long as this has been, and, I hope, will continue to be--cannot
exist anywhere else.  One side of the garden wall is formed by the
ancient wall of the city, which Cromwell's artillery battered, and which
still retains its pristine height and strength.  At intervals, there are
round towers that formed the bastions; that is to say, on the exterior
they are round towers, but within, in the garden of the College, they are
semicircular recesses, with iron garden-seats arranged round them.  The
loop-holes through which the archers and musketeers used to shoot still
pierce through deep recesses in the wall, which is here about six feet
thick.  I wish I could put into one sentence the whole impression of this
garden, but it could not be done in many pages.

We looked also at the outside of the wall, and Mr. Parker, deeply skilled
in the antiquities of the spot, showed us a weed growing,--here in little
sprigs, there in large and heavy festoons,--hanging plentifully downward
from a shallow root.  It is called the Oxford plant, being found only
here, and not easily, if at all, introduced anywhere else.  It bears a
small and pretty blue flower, not altogether unlike the forget-me-not,
and we took some of it away with us for a memorial.  We went into the
chapel of New College, which is in such fresh condition that I think it
must be modern; and yet this cannot be, since there are old brasses
inlaid into tombstones in the pavement, representing mediaeval
ecclesiastics and college dignitaries; and busts against the walls, in
antique garb; and old painted windows, unmistakable in their antiquity.
But there is likewise a window, lamentable to look at, which was painted
by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and exhibits strikingly the difference between
the work of a man who performed it merely as a matter of taste and
business, and what was done religiously and with the whole heart; at
least, it shows that the artists and public of the last age had no
sympathy with Gothic art.  In the chancel of this church there are more
painted windows, which I take to be modern, too, though they are in much
better taste, and have an infinitely better effect, than Sir Joshua's.
At any rate, with the sunshine through them, they looked very beautiful,
and tinted the high altar and the pavement with brilliant lines.

The sacristan opened a tall and narrow little recess in the wall of the
chancel, and showed it entirely filled with the crosier of William of
Wickham.  It appears to be made of silver gilt, and is a most rich and
elaborate relic, at least six feet high.  Modern art cannot, or does not,
equal the chasing and carving of this splendid crosier, which is enriched
with figures of saints and, apostles, and various Gothic devices,--very
minute, but all executed as faithfully as if the artist's salvation had
depended upon every notch he made in the silver. . . . .

Leaving New College, Bennoch and I, under Mr. Parker's guidance, walked
round Christ Church meadows, part of our way lying along the banks of the
Cherwell, which unites with the Isis to form the Thames, I believe.  The
Cherwell is a narrow and remarkably sluggish stream; but is deep in
spots, and capriciously so,--so that a person may easily step from
knee-deep to fifteen feet in depth.  A gentleman present used a queer
expression in reference to the drowning of two college men; he said "it
was an awkward affair."  I think this is equal to Longfellow's story of
the Frenchman who avowed himself very much "displeased" at the news of
his father's death.  At the confluence of the Cherwell and Isis we saw a
good many boats, belonging to the students of the various colleges; some
of them being very large and handsome barges, capable of accommodating a
numerous party, with room on board for dancing and merry-making.  Some of
them are calculated to be drawn by horses, in the manner of canal-boats;
others are propellable by oars.  It is practicable to perform the voyage
between Oxford and London--a distance of about one hundred and thirty
miles--in three days.  The students of Oxford are famous boatmen; there
is a constant rivalship, on this score, among the different colleges; and
annually, I believe, there is a match between Oxford and Cambridge.  The
Cambridge men beat the Oxonians in this year's trial.

On our return into the city, we passed through Christ Church, which, as
regards the number of students, is the most considerable college of the
University.  It has a stately dome; but my memory is confused with
battlements, towers, and gables, and Gothic staircases and cloisters.  If
there had been nothing else in Oxford but this one establishment, my
anticipations would not have been disappointed.  The bell was tolling for
worship in the chapel; and Mr. Parker told us that Dr. Pusey is a canon,
or in some sort of dignity, in Christ Church, and would soon probably
make his appearance in the quadrangle, on his way to chapel; so we walked
to and fro, waiting an opportunity to see him.  A gouty old dignitary, in
a white surplice, came hobbling along from one extremity of the court;
and by and by, from the opposite corner, appeared Dr. Pusey, also in a
white surplice, and with a lady by his side.  We met him, and I stared
pretty fixedly at him, as I well might; for he looked on the ground, as
if conscious that he would be stared at.  He is a man past middle life,
of sufficient breadth and massiveness, with a pale, intellectual, manly
face.  He was talking with the lady, and smiled, but not jollily.  Mr.
Parker, who knows him, says that he is a man of kind and gentle
affections.  The lady was his niece.

Thence we went through High Street and Broad Street, and passing by
Baliol College,--a most satisfactory pile and range of old towered and
gabled edifices,--we came to the cross on the pavement, which is supposed
to mark the spot where the bishops were martyred.  But Mr. Parker told us
the mortifying fact, that he had ascertained that this could not possibly
have been the genuine spot of martyrdom, which must have taken place at a
point within view, but considerably too far off to be moistened by any
tears that may be shed here.  It is too bad.  We concluded the rambles of
the day by visiting the gardens of St. John's College; and I desire, if
possible, to say even more in admiration of them than of those of New
College,--such beautiful lawns, with tall, ancient trees, and heavy
clouds of foliage, and sunny glimpses through archways of leafy branches,
where, to-day, we could see parties of girls, making cheerful contrast
with the sombre walls and solemn shade.  The world, surely, has not
another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever
to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one, to
comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.

At dinner, to-day, the golden vases were all ranged on the table, the
largest and central one containing a most magnificent bouquet of dahlias
and other bright-hued flowers.

On Tuesday, our first visit was to Christ Church, where we saw the large
and stately hall, above a hundred feet long by forty wide, and fifty to
the top of its carved oaken roof, which is ornamented with festoons, as
it were, and pendants of solid timber.  The walls are panelled with oak,
perhaps half-way upward, and above are the rows of arched windows on each
side; but, near the upper end, two great windows come nearly to the
floor.  There is a dais, where the great men of the College and the
distinguished guests sit at table, and the tables of the students are
arranged along the length of the hall.  All around, looking down upon
those who sit at meat, are the portraits of a multitude of illustrious
personages who were members of the learned fraternity in times past; not
a portrait being admitted there (unless it he a king, and I remember only
Henry VIII.) save those who were actually students on the foundation,
receiving the eleemosynary aid of the College.  Most of them were
divines; but there are likewise many statesmen, eminent during the last
three hundred years, and, among many earlier ones, the Marquis of
Wellesley and Canning.  It is an excellent idea, for their own glory, and
as examples to the rising generations, to have this multitude of men, who
have done good and great things, before the eyes of those who ought to do
as well as they, in their own time.  Archbishops, Prime Ministers, poets,
deep scholars,--but, doubtless, an outward success has generally been
their claim to this position, and Christ Church may have forgotten a
better man than the best of them.  It is not, I think, the tendency of
English life, nor of the education of their colleges, to lead young men
to high moral excellence, but to aim at illustrating themselves in the
sight of mankind.

Thence we went into the kitchen, which is arranged very much as it was
three centuries ago, with two immense fireplaces.  There was likewise a
gridiron, which, without any exaggeration, was large enough to have
served for the martyrdom of St. Lawrence.  The college dinners are good,
but plain, and cost the students one shilling and eleven pence each,
being rather cheaper than a similar one could be had at an inn.  There is
no provision for breakfast or supper in commons; but they can have these
meals sent to their rooms from the buttery, at a charge proportioned to
the dishes they order.  There seems to be no necessity for a great
expenditure on the part of Oxford students.

From the kitchen we went to the chapel, which is the cathedral of Oxford,
and well worth seeing, if there had not been so many other things to see.
It is now under repair, and there was a great heap of old wood-work and
panelling lying in one of the aisles, which had been stripped away from
some of the ancient pillars, leaving them as good as new.  There is a
shrine of a saint, with a wooden canopy over it; and some painted glass,
old and new; and a statue of Cyril Jackson, with a face of shrewdness and
insight; and busts, as mural monuments.

Our next visit was to



MERTON COLLEGE,


which, though not one of the great colleges, is as old as any of them,
and looks exceedingly venerable.  We were here received by a friend of
Mr. Spiers, in his academic cap, but without his gown, which is not worn,
except in term time.  He is a very civil gentleman, and showed us some
antique points of architecture,--such as a Norman archway, with a passage
over it, through which the Queen of Charles I. used to go to chapel; and
an edifice of the thirteenth century, with a stone roof, which is
considered to be very curious.

How ancient is the aspect of these college quadrangles! so gnawed by time
as they are, so crumbly, so blackened, and so gray where they are not
black,--so quaintly shaped, too, with here a line of battlement and there
a row of gables; and here a turret, with probably a winding stair inside;
and lattice-windows, with stone mullions, and little panes of glass set
in lead; and the cloisters, with a long arcade, looking upon the green or
pebbled enclosure.  The quality of the stone has a great deal to do with
the apparent antiquity.  It is a stone found in the neighborhood of
Oxford, and very soon begins to crumble and decay superficially, when
exposed to the weather; so that twenty years do the work of a hundred, so
far as appearances go.  If you strike one of the old walls with a stick,
a portion of it comes powdering down.  The effect of this decay is very
picturesque, and is especially striking, I think, on edifices of classic
architecture, such as some of the Oxford colleges are, greatly enriching
the Grecian columns, which look so cold when the outlines are hard and
distinct.  The Oxford people, however, are tired of this crumbly stone,
and when repairs are necessary, they use a more durable material, which
does not well assort with the antiquity into which it is intruded.

Mr. E------ showed us the library of Merton College.  It occupies two
sides of an old building, and has a very delightful fragrance of ancient
books.  The halls containing it are vaulted, and roofed with oak, not
carved and ornamented, but laid flat, so that they look very like a grand
and spacious old garret.  All along, there is a row of alcoves on each
side, with rude benches and reading-desks, in the simplest style, and
nobody knows how old.  The books look as old as the building.  The more
valuable were formerly chained to the bookcases; and a few of them have
not yet broken their chains.  It was a good emblem of the dark and
monkish ages, when learning was imprisoned in their cloisters, and
chained in their libraries, in the days when the schoolmaster had not yet
gone abroad.  Mr. E------ showed us a very old copy of the Bible; and a
vellum manuscript, most beautifully written in black-letter and
illuminated, of the works of Duns Scotus, who was a scholar of Merton
College.

He then showed us the chapel, a large part of which has been renewed and
ornamented with pictured windows and other ecclesiastical splendor, and
paved with encaustic tiles, according to the Puseyite taste of the day;
for Merton has adopted the Puseyite doctrines, and is one of their chief
strongholds in Oxford.  If they do no other good, they at least do much
for the preservation and characteristic restoration of the old English
churches; but perhaps, even here, there is as much antiquity spoiled as
retained.  In the portion of the chapel not yet restored, we saw the rude
old pavement, inlaid with gravestones, in some of which were brasses,
with the figures of the college dignitaries, whose dust slumbered
beneath; and I think it was here that I saw the tombstone of
Anthony-a-Wood, the gossiping biographer of the learned men of Oxford.

From the chapel we went into the college gardens, which are very
pleasant, and possess the advantage of looking out on the broad verdure
of Christ Church meadows and the river beyond.  We loitered here awhile,
and then went to Mr. ------'s rooms, to which the entrance is by a fine
old staircase.  They had a very comfortable, aspect,--a wainscoted parlor
and bedroom, as nice and cosey as a bachelor could desire, with a good
collection of theological books; and on a peg hung his gown, with a red
border about it, denoting him to be a proproctor.  He was kind enough to
order a lunch, consisting of bread and cheese, college ale, and a certain
liquor called "Archdeacon." . . . . We ate and drank, . . . . and,
bidding farewell to good Mr. E------, we pursued our way to the



RATCLIFFE LIBRARY.


This is a very handsome edifice, of a circular shape; the lower story
consisting altogether of arches, open on all sides, as if to admit
anybody to the learning here stored up.  I always see great beauty and
lightsomeness in these classic and Grecian edifices, though they seem
cold and intellectual, and not to have had their mortar moistened with
human life-blood, nor to have the mystery of human life in them, as
Gothic structures do.  The library is in a large and beautiful room, in
the story above the basement, and, as far as I saw, consisted chiefly or
altogether of scientific works.  I saw Silliman's Journal on one of the
desks, being the only trace of American science, or American learning or
ability in any department, which I discovered in the University of
Oxford.  After seeing the library, we went to the top of the building,
where we had an excellent view of Oxford and the surrounding country.
Then we went to the Convocation Hall, and afterwards to the theatre,
where S----- sat down in the Chancellor's chair, which is very broad, and
ponderously wrought of oak.  I remember little here, except the
amphitheatre of benches, and the roof, which seems to be supported by
golden ropes, and on the wall, opposite the door, some full-length
portraits, among which one of that ridiculous coxcomb, George IV., was
the most prominent.  These kings thrust themselves impertinently forward
by bust, statue, and picture, on all occasions, and it is not wise in
them to show their shallow foreheads among men of mind.



THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY.


Mr. Spiers tried to get us admittance to the Bodleian Library; but this
is just the moment when it is closed for the purpose of being cleaned; so
we missed seeing the principal halls of this library, and were only
admitted into what was called the Picture Gallery.  This, however,
satisfied all my desires, so far as the backs of books are concerned, for
they extend through a gallery, running round three sides of a quadrangle,
making an aggregate length of more than four hundred feet,--a solid array
of bookcases, full of books, within a protection of open iron-work.  Up
and down the gallery there are models of classic temples; and about
midway in its extent stands a brass statue of Earl Pembroke, who was
Chancellor of the University in James I's time; not in scholarly garb,
however, but in plate and mail, looking indeed like a thunderbolt of war.
I rapped him with my knuckles, and he seemed to be solid metal, though, I
should imagine, hollow at heart.  A thing which interested me very much
was the lantern of Guy Fawkes.  It was once tinned, no doubt, but is now
nothing but rusty iron, partly broken.  As this is called the Picture
Gallery, I must not forget the pictures, which are ranged in long
succession over the bookcases, and include almost all Englishmen whom the
world has ever heard of, whether in statesmanship or literature, I saw a
canvas on which had once been a lovely and unique portrait of Mary of
Scotland; but it was consigned to a picture-cleaner to be cleansed, and,
discovering that it was painted over another picture, he had the
curiosity to clean poor Mary quite away, thus revealing a wishy-washy
woman's face, which now hangs in the gallery.  I am so tired of seeing
notable things that I almost wish that whatever else is remarkable in
Oxford could he obliterated in some similar manner.

From the Bodleian we went to



THE TAYLOR INSTITUTE,


which was likewise closed; but the woman who had it in charge had
formerly been a servant of Mr. Spiers, and he so overpersuaded her that
she finally smiled and admitted us.  It would truly have been a pity to
miss it; for here, on the basement floor, are the original models of
Chantrey's busts and statues, great and small; and in the rooms above are
a far richer treasure,--a large collection of original drawings by
Raphael and Michael Angelo.  These are far better for my purpose than
their finished pictures,--that is to say, they bring me much closer to
the hands that drew them and the minds that imagined them.  It is like
looking into their brains, and seeing the first conception before it took
shape outwardly (I have somewhere else said about the same thing of such
sketches).  I noticed one of Raphael's drawings, representing the effect
of eloquence; it was a man speaking in the centre of a group, between
whose ears and the orator's mouth connecting lines were drawn.  Raphael's
idea must have been to compose his picture in such a way that their
auricular organs should not fail to be in a proper relation with the
eloquent voice; and though this relation would not have been individually
traceable in the finished picture, yet the general effect--that of deep
and entranced attention--would have been produced.

In another room there are some copies of Raphael's cartoons, and some
queer mediaeval pictures, as stiff and ugly as can well be conceived, yet
successful in telling their own story.  We looked a little while at
these, and then, thank Heaven! went home and dressed for dinner.  I can
write no more to-day.  Indeed, what a mockery it is to write at all!

[Here follows the drive to Cumnor Place, Stanton Harcourt, Nuneham
Courtney, Godstowe, etc.,--already published in Our Old Home.--ED.]


September 9th.--The morning after our excursion on the Thames was as
bright and beautiful as many preceding ones had been.  After breakfast
S----- and I walked a little about the town, and bought Thomas a Kempis,
in both French and English, for U----. . . . . Mr. De la Motte, the
photographer, had breakfasted with us, and Mr. Spiers wished him to take
a photograph of our whole party.  So, in the first place, before the rest
were assembled, he made an experimental group of such as were there; and
I did not like my own aspect very much.  Afterwards, when we were all
come, he arranged us under a tree in the garden,--Mr. and Mrs. Spiers,
with their eldest son, Mr. and Mrs. Hall and Fanny, Mr. Addison, my wife
and me,--and stained the glass with our figures and faces in the
twinkling of an eye; not S-----'s face, however, for she turned it away,
and left only a portion of her bonnet and dress,--and Mrs. Hall, too,
refused to countenance the proceeding.  But all the rest of us were
caught to the life, and I was really a little startled at recognizing
myself so apart from myself, and done so quickly too.

This was the last important incident of our visit to Oxford, except that
Mr. Spiers was again most hospitable at lunch.  Never did anybody attend
more faithfully to the comfort of his friends than does this good
gentleman.  But he has shown himself most kind in every possible way, and
I shall always feel truly grateful.  No better way of showing our sense
of his hospitality, and all the trouble he has taken for us (and our
memory of him), has occurred to us, than to present him with a set of my
Tales and Romances; so, by the next steamer, I shall write to Ticknor and
Fields to send them, elegantly bound, and S----- will emblazon his coat
of arms in each volume.  He accompanied us and Mr. and Mrs. Hall to the
railway station, and we left Oxford at two o'clock.

It had been a very pleasant visit, and all the persons whom we met were
kind and agreeable, and disposed to look at one another in a sunny
aspect.  I saw a good deal of Mr. Hall.  He is a thoroughly genuine man,
of kind heart and true affections, a gentleman of taste and refinement,
and full of humor.

On the Saturday after our return to Blackheath, we went to



HAMPTON COURT,


about which, as I have already recorded a visit to it, I need say little
here.  But I was again impressed with the stately grandeur of Wolsey's
great Hall, with its great window at each end, and one side window,
descending almost to the floor, and a row of windows on each side, high
towards the roof, and throwing down their many-colored light on the stone
pavement, and on the Gobelin tapestry, which must have been gorgeously
rich when the walls were first clothed with it.  I fancied, then, that no
modern architect could produce so fine a room; but oddly enough, in the
great entrance-hall of the Euston station, yesterday, I could not see how
this last fell very much short of Wolsey's Hall in grandeur.  We were
quite wearied in passing through the endless suites of rooms in Hampton
Court, and gazing at the thousands of pictures; it is too much for one
day,--almost enough for one life, in such measure as life can be bestowed
on pictures.  It would have refreshed us had we spent half the time in
wandering about the grounds, which, as we glimpsed at them from the
windows of the Palace, seemed very beautiful, though laid out with an
antique formality of straight lines and broad gravelled paths.  Before
the central window there is a beautiful sheet of water, and a fountain
upshooting itself and plashing into it, with a continuous and pleasant
sound.  How beautifully the royal robe of a monarchy is embroidered!
Palaces, pictures, parks!  They do enrich life; and kings and
aristocracies cannot keep these things to themselves, they merely take
care of them for others.  Even a king, with all the glory that can be
shed around him, is but the liveried and bedizened footman of his people,
and the toy of their delight.  I am very glad that I came to this country
while the English are still playing with such a toy.

Yesterday J----- and I left Blackheath, and reached Liverpool last night.
The rest of my family will follow in a few days; and so finishes our
residence in Bennoch's house, where I, for my part, have spent some of
the happiest hours that I have known since we left our American home.
It is a strange, vagabond, gypsy sort of life,--this that we are leading;
and I know not whether we shall finally be spoiled for any other, or
shall enjoy our quiet Wayside, as we never did before, when once we reach
it again.

The evening set in misty and obscure; and it was dark almost when J-----
and I arrived at the landing stage on our return.  I was struck with the
picturesque effect of the high tower and tall spire of St. Nicholas,
rising upward, with dim outline, into the duskiness; while midway of its
height the dial-plates of an illuminated clock blazed out, like two great
eyes of a giant.


September 13th.--On Saturday my wife, with all her train, arrived at Mrs.
B------'s; and on Tuesday--vagabonds as we are--we again struck our tent,
and set out for



SOUTHPORT.


I do not know what sort of character it will form in the children,--this
unsettled, shifting, vagrant life, with no central home to turn to,
except what we carry in ourselves.  It was a windy day, and, judging by
the look of the trees, on the way to Southport, it must be almost always
windy, and with the blast in one prevailing direction; for invariably
their branches, and the whole contour and attitude of the tree, turn from
seaward, with a strangely forlorn aspect.  Reaching Southport, we took an
omnibus, and under the driver's guidance came to our tall stone house,
fronting on the sands, and styled "Brunswick Terrace." . . . .

The English system of lodging-houses has its good points; but it is,
nevertheless, a contrivance for bearing the domestic cares of home about
with you whithersoever you go; and immediately you have to set about
producing your own bread and cheese.  However, Fanny took most of this
trouble off our hands, though there was inevitably the stiffness and
discomfort of a new housekeeping on the first day of our arrival; besides
that, it was cool, and the wind whistled and grumbled and eddied into the
chinks of the house.

Meanwhile, in all my experience of Southport, I have never yet seen the
sea, but only an interminable breadth of sands, looking pooly or plashy
in some places, and barred across with drier reaches of sand, but no
expanse of water.  It must be miles and miles, at low water, to the
veritable sea-shore.  We are about twenty miles north of Liverpool, on
the border of the Irish Sea; and Ireland and, I suppose, the Isle of Man
intervene betwixt us and the ocean, not much to our benefit; for the air
of the English coast, under ocean influences, is said to be milder than
when it comes across the land,--milder, therefore, above or below
Ireland, because then the Gulf Stream ameliorates it.

Betimes, the forenoon after our arrival, I had to take the rail to
Liverpool, but returned, a little after five, in the midst of a rain,--
still low water and interminable sands; still a dreary, howling blast.
We had a cheerful fireside, however, and should have had a pleasant
evening, only that the wind on the sea made us excessively drowsy.  This
morning we awoke to hear the wind still blustering, and blowing up
clouds, with fitful little showers, and soon blowing them away again, and
letting the brightest of sunshine fall over the plashy waste of sand.  We
have already walked forth on the shore with J----- and R-----, who pick
up shells, and dig wells in the sand with their little wooden spades;
but soon we saw a rainbow on the western sky, and then a shower came
spattering down upon us in good earnest.  We first took refuge under the
bridge that stretches between the two portions of the promenade; but as
there was a chill draught there, we made the best of our way home.  The
sun has now again come out brightly, though the wind is still tumbling a
great many clouds about the sky.


Evening.--Later, I walked out with U----, and, looking seaward, we saw
the foam and spray of the advancing tide, tossed about on the verge of
the horizon,--a long line, like the crests and gleaming helmets of an
army.  In about half an hour we found almost the whole waste of sand
covered with water, and white waves breaking out all over it; but, the
bottom being so nearly level, and the water so shallow, there was little
of the spirit and exultation of the sea in a strong breeze.  Of the long
line of bathing-machines, one after another was hitched to a horse, and
trundled forth into the water, where, at a long distance from shore, the
bathers found themselves hardly middle deep.


September 19th.--The wind grumbled and made itself miserable all last
night, and this morning it is still howling as ill-naturedly as ever, and
roaring and rumbling in the chimneys.  The tide is far out, but, from an
upper window, I fancied, at intervals, that I could see the plash of the
surf-wave on the distant limit of the sand; perhaps, however, it was only
a gleam on the sky.  Constantly there have been sharp spatters of rain,
hissing and rattling against the windows, while a little before or after,
or perhaps simultaneously, a rainbow, somewhat watery of texture, paints
itself on the western clouds.  Gray, sullen clouds hang about the sky, or
sometimes cover it with a uniform dulness; at other times, the portions
towards the sun gleam almost lightsomely; now, there may be an airy
glimpse of clear blue sky in a fissure of the clouds; now, the very
brightest of sunshine comes out all of a sudden, and gladdens everything.
The breadth of sands has a various aspect, according as there are pools,
or moisture enough to glisten, or a drier tract; and where the light
gleams along a yellow ridge or bar, it is like sunshine itself.
Certainly the temper of the day shifts; but the smiles come far the
seldomest, and its frowns and angry tears are most reliable.  By seven
o'clock pedestrians began to walk along the promenade, close buttoned
against the blast; later, a single bathing-machine got under way, by
means of a horse, and travelled forth seaward; but within what distance
it finds the invisible margin I cannot say,--at all events, it looks like
a dreary journey.  Just now I saw a sea-gull, wheeling on the blast,
close in towards the promenade.


September 21st.--Yesterday morning was bright, sunny and windy, and cool
and exhilarating.  I went to Liverpool at eleven, and, returning at five,
found the weather still bright and cool.  The temperature, methinks, must
soon diminish the population of Southport, which, judging from
appearances, must be mainly made up of temporary visitors.  There is a
newspaper, The Southport Visitor, published weekly, and containing a
register of all the visitants in the various hotels and lodging-houses.
It covers more than two sides of the paper, to the amount of some
hundreds.  The guests come chiefly from Liverpool, Manchester, and the
neighboring country-towns, and belong to the middle classes.  It is not a
fashionable watering-place.  Only one nobleman's name, and those of two
or three baronets, now adorn the list.  The people whom we see loitering
along the beach and the promenade have, at best, a well-to-do,
tradesmanlike air.  I do not find that there are any public amusements;
nothing but strolling on the sands, donkey-riding, or drives in
donkey-carts; and solitary visitors must find it a dreary place.  Yet one
or two of the streets are brisk and lively, and, being well thronged,
have a holiday aspect.  There are no carriages in town save donkey-carts;
some of which are drawn by three donkeys abreast, and are large enough to
hold a whole family.  These conveyances will take you far out on the
sands through wet and dry.  The beach is haunted by The Flying Dutchman,
--a sort of boat on wheels, schooner-rigged with sails, and which
sometimes makes pretty good speed, with a fair wind.

This morning we have been walking with J----- and R----- out over the
"ribbed sea sands," a good distance from shore.  Throughout the week, the
tides will be so low as not to cover the shallow basin of this bay, if a
bay it be.  The weather was sullen, with now and then a faint gleam of
sunshine, lazily tracing our shadows on the sand; the wind rather quieter
than on preceding days. . . . . In the sunshine the sands seem to be
frequented by great numbers of gulls, who begin to find the northern
climate too wintry.  You see their white wings in the sunlight, but they
become almost or quite invisible in the shade.  We shall soon have an
opportunity of seeing how a watering-place looks when the season is quite
over; for we have concluded to remain here till December, and everybody
else will take flight in a week or two.

A short time ago, in the evening, in a street of Liverpool, I saw a
decent man, of the lower orders, taken much aback by being roughly
brushed against by a rowdy fellow.  He looked after him, and exclaimed
indignantly, "Is that a Yankee?"  It shows the kind of character we have
here.


October 7th.--On Saturday evening, I gave a dinner to Bennoch, at the
Adelphi Hotel.  The chief point or characteristic of English customs was,
that Mr. Radley, our landlord, himself attended at table, and officiated
as chief waiter.  He has a fortune of 100,000 pounds,--half a million of
dollars,--and is an elderly man of good address and appearance.  In
America, such a man would very probably be in Congress; at any rate, he
would never conceive the possibility of changing plates, or passing round
the table with hock and champagne.  Some of his hock was a most rich and
imperial wine, such as can hardly be had on the Rhine itself.  There were
eight gentlemen besides Bennoch.

A donkey, the other day, stubbornly refusing to come out of a boat which
had brought him across the Mersey; at last, after many kicks had been
applied, and other persecutions of that kind, a man stepped forward,
addressing him affectionately, "Come along, brother,"--and the donkey
obeyed at once.


October 26th.--On Thursday, instead of taking the rail for Liverpool, I
set out, about eleven, for a long walk.  It was an overcast morning, such
as in New England would have boded rain; but English clouds are not
nearly so portentous as American in that respect.  Accordingly, the sun
soon began to peep through crevices, and I had not gone more than a mile
or two when it shone a little too warmly for comfort, yet not more than I
liked.  It was very much like our pleasant October days at home; indeed,
the climates of the two countries more nearly coincide during the present
month than at any other season of the year.  The air was almost perfectly
still; but once in a while it stirred, and breathed coolly in my face; it
is very delightful, this latent freshness, in a warm atmosphere.

The country about Southport has as few charms as it is possible for any
region to have.  In the close neighborhood of the shore, it is nothing
but sand-hillocks, covered with coarse grass; and this is the original
nature of the whole site on which the town stands, although it is now
paved, and has been covered with soil enough to make gardens, and to
nourish here and there a few trees.  A little farther inland the surface
seems to have been marshy, but has been drained by ditches across the
fields and along the roadside; and the fields are embanked on all sides
with parapets of earth which appear as if intended to keep out
inundations.  In fact, Holland itself cannot be more completely on a
level with the sea.  The only dwellings are the old, whitewashed stone
cottages, with thatched roofs, on the brown straw of which grow various
weeds and mosses, brightening it with green patches, and sprouting along
the ridgepole,--the homeliest hovels that ever mortals lived in, and
which they share with pigs and cows at one end.  Hens, too, run in and
out of the door.  One or two of these hovels bore signs, "Licensed to
sell beer, ale, and tobacco," and generally there were an old woman and
some children visible.  In all cases there was a ditch, full of water,
close at hand, stagnant, and often quite covered with a growth of
water-weeds,--very unwholesome, one would think, in the neighborhood of a
dwelling; and, in truth, the children and grown people did look pale.

In the fields, along the roadside, men and women were harvesting their
carrots and other root-crops, especially digging potatoes,--the
pleasantest of all farm labor, in my opinion, there being such a
continual interest in opening the treasures of each hill.  As I went on,
the country began to get almost imperceptibly less flat, and there was
some little appearance of trees.  I had determined to go to Ormskirk, but
soon got out of the way, and came to a little hamlet that looked antique
and picturesque, with its small houses of stone and brick, built, with
the one material and repaired with the other perhaps ages afterward.
Here I inquired my way of a woman, who told me, in broad Lancashire
dialect, "that I main go back, and turn to my left, till I came to a
finger-post"; and so I did, and found another little hamlet, the
principal object in which was a public-house, with a large sign,
representing a dance round a Maypole.  It was now about one o'clock; so I
entered, and, being ushered into what, I suppose, they called the
coffee-room, I asked for some cold neat and ale.  There was a jolly,
round, rather comely woman for a hostess, with a free, hospitable, yet
rather careless manner.

The coffee-room smelt rather disagreeably of bad tobacco-smoke, and was
shabbily furnished with an old sofa and flag-bottomed chairs, and adorned
with a print of "Old Billy," a horse famous for a longevity of about
sixty years; and also with colored engravings of old-fashioned
hunting-scenes, conspicuous with scarlet coats.  There was a very small
bust of Milton on the mantel-piece.  By and by the remains of an immense
round of beef, three quarters cut away, were put on the table; then some
smoking-hot potatoes; and finally the hostess told me that their own
dinner was just ready, and so she had brought me in some hot chops,
thinking I might prefer them to the cold meat.  I did prefer them; and
they were stewed or fried chops, instead of broiled, and were very
savory.  There was household bread too, and rich cheese, and a pint of
ale, home brewed, not very mighty, but good to quench thirst, and, by way
of condiment, some pickled cabbage; so, instead of a lunch, I made quite
a comfortable dinner.  Moreover, there was a cold pudding on the table,
and I called for a clean plate, and helped myself to some of it.  It was
of rice, and was strewn over, rather than intermixed, with some kinds of
berries, the nature of which I could not exactly make out.

I then set forth again.  It was still sunny and warm, and I walked more
slowly than before dinner; in fact, I did little more than lounge along,
sitting down, at last, on the stone parapet of a bridge.

The country grew more pleasant, more sylvan, and, though still of a level
character, not so drearily flat.  Soon appeared the first symptom that I
had seen of a gentleman's residence,--a lodge at a park gate, then a long
stretch of wall, with a green lawn, and afterwards an extent of wooded
land; then another gateway, with a neat lodge on each side of it, and,
lastly, another extent of wood.  The Hall or Mansion-house, however, was
nowhere apparent, being, doubtless, secluded deep and far within its
grounds.  I inquired of a boy who was the owner of the estate, and he
answered, "Mr. Scarisbrick"; and no doubt it is a family of local
eminence.

Along the road,--an old inn; some aged stone houses, built for merely
respectable occupants; a canal, with two canal-boats, heaped up with a
cargo of potatoes; two little girls, who were watching lest some cows
should go astray, and had their two little chairs by the roadside, and
their dolls and other playthings, and so followed the footsteps of the
cows all day long.  I met two boys, coming from Ormskirk, mounted on
donkeys, with empty panniers, on which they had carried vegetables to
market.  Finally, between two and three o'clock, I saw the great tower of
Ormskirk Church, with its spire, not rising out of the tower, but
sprouting up close beside it; and, entering the town, I directed my steps
first to this old church.



ORMSKIRK CHURCH.


It stands on a gentle eminence, sufficient to give it a good site, and
has a pavement of flat gravestones in front.  It is doubtless, as regards
its foundation, a very ancient church, but has not exactly a venerable
aspect, being in too good repair, and much restored in various parts; not
ivy-grown, either, though green with moss here and there.  The tower is
square and immensely massive, and might have supported a very lofty
spire; so that it is the more strange that what spire it has should be so
oddly stuck beside it, springing out of the church wall.  I should have
liked well enough to enter the church, as it is the burial-place of the
Earls of Derby, and perhaps may contain some interesting monuments; but
as it was all shut up, and even the iron gates of the churchyard closed
and locked, I merely looked at the outside.

From the church, a street leads to the market-place, in which I found a
throng of men and women, it being market-day; wares of various kinds,
tin, earthen, and cloth, set out on the pavements; droves of pigs; ducks
and fowls; baskets of eggs; and a man selling quack medicines,
recommending his nostrums as well as he could.  The aspect of the crowd
was very English,--portly and ruddy women; yeomen with small-clothes and
broad-brimmed hats, all very quiet and heavy and good-humored.  Their
dialect was so provincial that I could not readily understand more than
here and there a word.

But, after all, there were few traits that could be made a note of.  I
soon grew weary of the scene, and so I went to the railway station, and
waited there nearly an hour for the train to take me to Southport.
Ormskirk is famous for its gingerbread, which women sell to the railway
passengers at a sixpence for a rouleau of a dozen little cakes.


November 30th.--A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at
the Consulate, looking much as he used to do, and with his characteristic
gravity and reserve of manner. . . . . We soon found ourselves on pretty
much our former terms of sociability and confidence. . . . . He is thus
far on his way to Constantinople.  I do not wonder that he found it
necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of
toilsome pen-labor, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his
was.  I invited him to come and stay with us at Southport, as long as he
might remain in this vicinity, and accordingly he did come the next day.
. . . . On Wednesday we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in
a hollow among the sand-hills, sheltering ourselves from the high cool
wind.  Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and
futurity, and of everything else that lies beyond human ken. . . . . He
has a very high and noble nature, and is better worth immortality than
the most of us. . . . . On Saturday we went to Chester together.  I love
to take every opportunity of going to Chester; it being the one only
place, within easy reach of Liverpool, which possesses any old English
interest.

We went to



THE CATHEDRAL.


Its gray nave impressed me more than at any former visit.  Passing into
the cloisters, an attendant took possession of us, and showed us about.

Within the choir there is a profusion of very rich oaken carving, both on
the screen that separates it from the nave, and on the seats and walls;
very curious and most elaborate, and lavished (one would say) most
wastefully, where nobody would think of looking for it,--where, indeed,
amid the dimness of the cathedral, the exquisite detail of the
elaboration could not possibly be seen.  Our guide lighted some of the
gas-burners, of which there are many hundreds, to help us see them; but
it required close scrutiny, even then.  It must have been out of the
question, when the whole means of illumination were only a few smoky
torches or candles.  There was a row of niches, where the monks used to
stand, for four hours together, in the performance of some of their
services; and to relieve them a little, they were allowed partially to
sit on a projection of the seats, which were turned up in the niche for
that purpose; but if they grew drowsy, so as to fail to balance
themselves, the seat was so contrived as to slip down, thus bringing the
monk to the floor.  These projections on the seats are each and all of
them carved with curious devices, no two alike.  The guide showed us one,
representing, apparently, the first quarrel of a new-married couple,
wrought with wonderful expression.  Indeed, the artist never failed to
bring out his idea in the most striking manner,--as, for instance, Satan,
under the guise of a lion, devouring a sinner bodily; and again in the
figure of a dragon, with a man halfway down his gullet, the legs hanging
out.  The carver may not have seen anything grotesque in this, nor
intended it at all by way of joke; but certainly there would appear to be
a grim mirthfulness in some of the designs.  One does not see why such
fantasies should be strewn about the holy interior of a cathedral, unless
it were intended to contain everything that belongs to the heart of man,
both upward and downward.

In a side aisle of the choir, we saw a tomb, said to be that of the
Emperor Henry IV. of Germany, though on very indistinct authority.  This
is an oblong tomb, carved, and, on one side, painted with bright colors
and gilded.  During a very long period it was built and plastered into
the wall, and the exterior side was whitewashed; but, on being removed,
the inner side was found to have been ornamented with gold and color, in
the manner in which we now see it.  If this were customary with tombs, it
must have added vastly to the gorgeous magnificence, to which the painted
windows and polished pillars and ornamented ceilings contributed so much.
In fact, a cathedral in its fresh estate seems to have been like a
pavilion of the sunset, all purple and gold; whereas now it more
resembles deepest and grayest twilight.

Afterwards, we were shown into the ancient refectory, now used as the
city grammar-school, and furnished with the usual desks and seats for the
boys.  In one corner of this large room was the sort of pulpit or
elevated seat, with a broken staircase of stone ascending to it, where
one of the monks used to read to his brethren, while sitting at their
meals.  The desks were cut and carved with the scholars' knives, just as
they used to be in the school-rooms where I was a scholar.  Thence we
passed into the chapter-house, but, before that, we went through a small
room, in which Melville opened a cupboard, and discovered a dozen or two
of wine-bottles; but our guide told us that they were now empty, and
never were meant for jollity, having held only sacramental wine.  In the
chapter-house, we saw the library, some of the volumes of which were
antique folios.  There were two dusty and tattered banners hanging on the
wall, and the attendant promised to make us laugh by something that he
would tell us about them.  The joke was that these two banners had been
in the battle of Bunker Hill; and our countrymen, he said, always
smiled on hearing this.  He had discovered us to be Americans by the
notice we took of a mural tablet in the choir, to the memory of a
Lieutenant-Governor Clarke, of New York, who died in Chester before the
Revolution.  From the chapter-house he ushered us back into the nave,
ever and anon pointing out some portion of the edifice more ancient than
the rest, and when I asked him how he knew this, he said that he had
learnt it from the archaeologists, who could read off such things like a
book.  This guide was a lively, quick-witted man, who did his business
less by rote, and more with a vivacious interest, than any guide I ever
met.

After leaving the cathedral we sought out the Yacht Inn, near the
water-gate.  This was, for a long period of time, the principal inn of
Chester, and was the house at which Swift once put up, on his way to
Holyhead, and where he invited the clergy to come and sup with him.  We
sat down in a small snuggery, conversing with the landlord.  The Chester
people, according to my experience, are very affable, and fond of talking
with strangers about the antiquities and picturesque characteristics of
their town.  It partly lives, the landlord told us, by its visitors, and
many people spend the summer here on account of the antiquities and the
good air.  He showed us a broad, balustraded staircase, leading into a
large, comfortable, old-fashioned parlor, with windows looking on the
street and on the Custom House that stood opposite.  This was the room
where Swift expected to receive the clergy of Chester; and on one of the
window-panes were two acrid lines, written with the diamond of his ring,
satirizing those venerable gentlemen, in revenge for their refusing his
invitation.  The first line begins rather indistinctly; but the writing
grows fully legible, as it proceeds.

The Yacht Tavern is a very old house, in the gabled style.  The timbers
and framework are still perfectly sound.  In the same street is the
Bishop's house (so called as having been the residence of a prelate long
ago), which is covered with curious sculpture, representing Scriptural
scenes.  And in the same neighborhood is the county court, accessible by
an archway, through which we penetrated, and found ourselves in a
passage, very ancient and dusky, overlooked from the upper story by a
gallery, to which an antique staircase ascended, with balustrades and
square landing-places.  A printer saw us here, and asked us into his
printing-office, and talked very affably; indeed, he could have hardly
been more civil, if he had known that both Melville and I have given a
good deal of employment to the brethren of his craft.


December 15th.--An old gentleman has recently paid me a good many
visits,--a Kentucky man, who has been a good deal in England and Europe
generally without losing the freshness and unconventionality of his
earlier life.  He was a boatman, and afterwards captain of a steamer on
the Ohio and Mississippi; but has gained property, and is now the owner
of mines of coal and iron, which he is endeavoring to dispose of here in
England.  A plain, respectable, well-to-do-looking personage, of more
than seventy years; very free of conversation, and beginning to talk with
everybody as a matter of course; tall, stalwart, a dark face, with white
curly hair and keen eyes; and an expression shrewd, yet kindly and
benign.  He fought through the whole War of 1812, beginning with General
Harrison at the battle of Tippecanoe, which he described to me.  He says
that at the beginning of the battle, and for a considerable time, he
heard Tecumseh's voice, loudly giving orders.  There was a man named
Wheatley in the American camp, a strange, incommunicative person,--a
volunteer, making war entirely on his own book, and seeking revenge for
some relatives of his, who had been killed by the Indians.  In the midst
of the battle this Wheatley ran at a slow trot past R------ (my
informant), trailing his rifle, and making towards the point where
Tecumseh's voice was heard.  The fight drifted around, and R------ along
with it; and by and by he reached a spot where Wheatley lay dead, with
his head on Tecumseh's breast.  Tecumseh had been shot with a rifle, but,
before expiring, appeared to have shot Wheatley with a pistol, which he
still held in his hand.  R------ affirms that Tecumseh was flayed by the
Kentucky men on the spot, and his skin converted into razor-straps.  I
have left out the most striking point of the narrative, after all, as
R------ told it, viz. that soon after Wheatley passed him, he suddenly
ceased to hear Tecumseh's voice ringing through the forest, as he gave
his orders.  He was at the battle of New Orleans, and gave me the story
of it from beginning to end; but I remember only a few particulars in
which he was personally concerned.  He confesses that his hair bristled
upright--every hair in his head--when he heard the shouts of the British
soldiers before advancing to the attack.  His uncomfortable sensations
lasted till he began to fire, after which he felt no more of them.  It
was in the dusk of the morning, or a little before sunrise, when the
assault was made; and the fight lasted about two hours and a half, during
which R------ fired twenty-four times; and said he, "I saw my object
distinctly each time, and I was a good rifle-shot."  He was raising his
rifle to fire the twenty-fifth time, when an American officer, General
Carroll, pressed it down, and bade him fire no more.  "Enough is enough,"
quoth the General.  For there needed no more slaughter, the British being
in utter rout and confusion.  In this retreat many of the enemy would
drop down among the dead, then rise, run a considerable distance, and
drop again, thus confusing the riflemen's aim.  One fellow had thus got
about four hundred and fifty yards from the American line, and, thinking
himself secure, he made a derisive gesture.  "I'll have a shot at him
anyhow," cried a rifleman; so he fired, and the poor devil dropped.

R------ himself, with one of his twenty-four shots, hit a British
officer, who fell forward on his face, about thirty paces from our line,
and as the enemy were then retreating (they advanced and were repelled
two or three times) he ran out, and turned him over on his back.  The
officer was a man about thirty-eight, tall and fine-looking; his eyes
were wide open, clear and bright, and were fixed full on R------ with a
somewhat stern glance, but there was the sweetest and happiest smile over
his face that could be conceived.  He seemed to be dead;--at least,
R------ thinks that he did not really see him, fixedly as he appeared to
gaze.  The officer held his sword in his hand, and R------ tried in vain
to wrest it from him, until suddenly the clutch relaxed.  R------ still
keeps the sword hung up over his mantel-piece.  I asked him how the dead
man's aspect affected him.  He replied that he felt nothing at the time;
but that ever since, in all trouble, in uneasy sleep, and whenever he is
out of tune, or waking early, or lying awake at night, he sees this
officer's face, with the clear bright eyes and the pleasant smile, just
as distinctly as if he were bending over him.  His wound was in the
breast, exactly on the spot that R------ had aimed at, and bled
profusely.  The enemy advanced in such masses, he says, that it was
impossible not to hit them unless by purposely firing over their heads.

After the battle, R------ leaped over the rampart, and took a prisoner
who was standing unarmed in the midst of the slain, having probably
dropped down during the heat of the action, to avoid the hail-storm of
rifle-shots.  As he led him in, the prisoner paused, and pointed to an
officer who was lying dead beside his dead horse, with his foot still in
the stirrup.  "There lies our General," said he.  The horse had been
killed by a grape-shot, and Pakenham himself, apparently, by a
six-pounder ball, which had first struck the earth, covering him from
head to foot with mud and clay, and had then entered his side, and gone
upward through his breast.  His face was all besmirched with the moist
earth.  R------ took the slain General's foot out of the stirrup, and
then went to report his death.

Much more he told me, being an exceedingly talkative old man, and seldom,
I suppose, finding so good a listener as myself.  I like the man,--a
good-tempered, upright, bold and free old fellow; of a rough breeding,
but sufficiently smoothed by society to be of pleasant intercourse.  He
is as dogmatic as possible, having formed his own opinions, often on very
disputable grounds, and hardened in them; taking queer views of matters
and things, and giving shrewd and not ridiculous reasons for them; but
with a keen, strong sense at the bottom of his character.

A little while ago I met an Englishman in a railway carriage, who
suggests himself as a kind of contrast to this warlike and
vicissitudinous backwoodsman.  He was about the same age as R------, but
had spent, apparently, his whole life in Liverpool, and has long occupied
the post of Inspector of Nuisances,--a rather puffy and consequential
man; gracious, however, and affable, even to casual strangers like
myself.  The great contrast betwixt him and the American lies in the
narrower circuit of his ideas; the latter talking about matters of
history of his own country and the world,--glancing over the whole field
of politics, propounding opinions and theories of his own, and showing
evidence that his mind had operated for better or worse on almost all
conceivable matters; while the Englishman was odorous of his office,
strongly flavored with that, and otherwise most insipid.  He began his
talk by telling me of a dead body which he had lately discovered in a
house in Liverpool, where it had been kept about a fortnight by the
relatives, partly from want of funds for the burial, and partly in
expectation of the arrival of some friends from Glasgow.  There was a
plate of glass in the coffin-lid, through which the Inspector of
Nuisances, as he told me, had looked and seen the dead man's face in an
ugly state of decay, which he minutely described.  However, his
conversation was not altogether of this quality; for he spoke about
larks, and how abundant they are just now, and what a good pie they make,
only they must be skinned, else they will have a bitter taste.  We have
since had a lark-pie ourselves, and I believe it was very good in itself;
only the recollection of the Nuisance-man's talk was not a very agreeable
flavor.  A very racy and peculiarly English character might be made out
of a man like this, having his life-concern wholly with the disagreeables
of a great city.  He seemed to be a good and kindly person, too, but
earthy,--even as if his frame had been moulded of clay impregnated with
the draining of slaughter-houses.


December 21st.--On Thursday evening I dined for the first time with the
new Mayor at the Town Hall.  I wish to preserve all the characteristic
traits of such banquets, because, being peculiar to England, these
municipal feasts may do well to picture in a novel.  There was a big old
silver tobacco-box, nearly or quite as large round as an ordinary plate,
out of which the dignitaries of Liverpool used to fill their pipes, while
sitting in council or after their dinners.  The date "1690" was on the
lid.  It is now used as a snuff-box, and wends its way, from guest to
guest, round the table.  We had turtle, and, among other good things,
American canvasback ducks. . . . . These dinners are certainly a good
institution, and likely to be promotive of good feeling; the Mayor giving
them often, and inviting, in their turn, all the respectable and eminent
citizens of whatever political bias.  About fifty gentlemen were present
that evening.  I had the post of honor at the Mayor's right hand; and
France, Turkey, and Austria were toasted before the Republic, for, as the
Mayor whispered me, he must first get his allies out of the way.  The
Turkish Consul and the Austrian both made better English speeches than
any Englishman, during the evening; for it is inconceivable what
shapeless and ragged utterances Englishmen are content to put forth,
without attempting anything like a wholeness; but inserting a patch here
and a patch there, and finally getting out what they wish to say, indeed,
but in most disorganized guise. . . . . I can conceive of very high
enjoyment in making a speech; one is in such a curious sympathy with his
audience, feeling instantly how every sentence affects them, and
wonderfully excited and encouraged by the sense that it has gone to the
right spot.  Then, too, the imminent emergency, when a man is overboard,
and must sink or swim, sharpens, concentrates, and invigorates the mind,
and causes matters of thought and sentiment to assume shape and
expression, though, perhaps, it seemed hopeless to express them, just
before you rose to speak.  Yet I question much whether public speaking
tends to elevate the orator, intellectually or morally; the effort, of
course, being to say what is immediately received by the audience, and to
produce an effect on the instant.  I don't quite see how an honest man
can be a good and successful orator; but I shall hardly undertake to
decide the question on my merely post-prandial experience.

The Mayor toasted his guests by their professions,--the merchants, for
instance, the bankers, the solicitors,--and while one of the number
responded, his brethren also stood up, each in his place, thus giving
their assent to what he said.  I think the very worst orator was a major
of Artillery, who spoke in a meek, little, nervous voice, and seemed a
good deal more discomposed than probably he would have been in the face
of the enemy.  The first toast was "The Ladies," to which an old bachelor
responded.


December 31st.--Thus far we have come through the winter, on this bleak
and blasty shore of the Irish Sea, where, perhaps, the drowned body of
Milton's friend Lycidas might have been washed ashore more than two
centuries ago.  This would not be very likely, however, so wide a tract
of sands, never deeply covered by the tide, intervening betwixt us and
the sea.  But it is an excessively windy place, especially here on the
Promenade; always a whistle and a howl,--always an eddying gust through
the corridors and chambers,--often a patter of hail or rain or snow
against the windows; and in the long evenings the sounds outside are very
much as if we were on shipboard in mid-ocean, with the waves dashing
against the vessel's sides.  I go to town almost daily, starting at about
eleven, and reaching Southport again at a little past live; by which time
it is quite dark, and continues so till nearly eight in the morning.

Christmas time has been marked by few characteristics.  For a week or two
previous to Christmas day, the newspapers contained rich details
respecting market-stalls and butchers' shops,--what magnificent carcasses
of prize oxen and sheep they displayed. . . . .

The Christmas Waits came to us on Christmas eve, and on the day itself,
in the shape of little parties of boys or girls, singing wretched
doggerel rhymes, and going away well pleased with the guerdon of a penny
or two.  Last evening came two or three older choristers at pretty near
bedtime, and sang some carols at our door.  They were psalm tunes,
however.  Everybody with whom we have had to do, in any manner of
service, expects a Christmas-box; but, in most cases, a shilling is quite
a satisfactory amount.  We have had holly and mistletoe stuck up on the
gas-fixtures and elsewhere about the house.

On the mantel-piece in the coroner's court the other day, I saw corked
and labelled phials, which it may be presumed contained samples of
poisons that have brought some poor wretches to their deaths, either by
murder or suicide.  This court might be wrought into a very good and
pregnant description, with its grimy gloom illuminated by a conical
skylight, constructed to throw daylight down on corpses; its greasy
Testament covered over with millions of perjured kisses; the coroner
himself, whose life is fed on all kinds of unnatural death; its
subordinate officials, who go about scenting murder, and might be
supposed to have caught the scent in their own garments; its stupid,
brutish juries, settling round corpses like flies; its criminals, whose
guilt is brought face to face with them here, in closer contact than at
the subsequent trial.

O---- P------, the famous Mormonite, called on me a little while ago,--a
short, black-haired, dark-complexioned man; a shrewd, intelligent, but
unrefined countenance, excessively unprepossessing; an uncouth gait and
deportment; the aspect of a person in comfortable circumstances, and
decently behaved, but of a vulgar nature and destitute of early culture.
I think I should have taken him for a shoemaker, accustomed to reflect in
a rude, strong, evil-disposed way on matters of this world and the next,
as he sat on his bench.  He said he had been residing in Liverpool about
six months; and his business with me was to ask for a letter of
introduction that should gain him admittance to the British Museum, he
intending a visit to London.  He offered to refer me to respectable
people for his character; but I advised him to apply to Mr. Dallas, as
the proper person for his purpose.


March 1st, 1857.--On the night of last Wednesday week, our house was
broken into by robbers.  They entered by the back window of the
breakfast-room, which is the children's school-room, breaking or cutting
a pane of glass, so as to undo the fastening.  I have a dim idea of
having heard a noise through my sleep; but if so, it did not more than
slightly disturb me.  U---- heard it, she being at watch with R-----; and
J-----, having a cold, was also wakeful, and thought the noise was of
servants moving about below.  Neither did the idea of robbers occur to
U----.  J-----, however, hearing U---- at her mother's door, asking for
medicine for R-----, called out for medicine for his cold, and the thieves
probably thought we were bestirring ourselves, and so took flight.  In
the morning the servants found the hall door and the breakfast-room
window open; some silver cups and some other trifles of plate were gone
from the sideboard, and there were tokens that the whole lower part of
the house had been ransacked; but the thieves had evidently gone off in a
hurry, leaving some articles which they would have taken, had they been
more at leisure.

We gave information to the police, and an inspector and constable soon
came to make investigations, taking a list of the missing articles, and
informing themselves as to all particulars that could be known.  I did
not much expect ever to hear any more of the stolen property; but on
Sunday a constable came to request my presence at the police-office to
identify the lost things.  The thieves had been caught in Liverpool,
and some of the property found upon them, and some of it at a
pawnbroker's where they had pledged it.  The police-office is a small
dark room, in the basement story of the Town Hall of Southport; and over
the mantel-piece, hanging one upon another, there are innumerable
advertisements of robberies in houses, and on the highway,--murders, too,
and garrotings; and offences of all sorts, not only in this district, but
wide away, and forwarded from other police-stations.  Bring thus
aggregated together, one realizes that there are a great many more
offences than the public generally takes note of.  Most of these
advertisements were in pen and ink, with minute lists of the articles
stolen; but the more important were in print; and there, too, I saw the
printed advertisement of our own robbery, not for public circulation, but
to be handed about privately, among police-officers and pawnbrokers.  A
rogue has a very poor chance in England, the police being so numerous,
and their system so well organized.

In a corner of the police-office stood a contrivance for precisely
measuring the heights of prisoners; and I took occasion to measure
J-----, and found him four feet seven inches and a half high.  A set of
rules for the self-government of police-officers was nailed on the door,
between twenty and thirty in number, and composing a system of
constabulary ethics.  The rules would be good for men in almost any walk
of life; and I rather think the police-officers conform to them with
tolerable strictness.  They appear to be subordinated to one another on
the military plan.  The ordinary constable does not sit down in the
presence of his inspector, and this latter seems to be half a gentleman;
at least, such is the bearing of our Southport inspector, who wears a
handsome uniform of green and silver, and salutes the principal
inhabitants, when meeting them in the street, with an air of something
like equality.  Then again there is a superintendent, who certainly
claims the rank of a gentleman, and has perhaps been an officer in the
army.  The superintendent of this district was present on this occasion.

The thieves were brought down from Liverpool on Tuesday, and examined in
the Town Hall.  I had been notified to be present, but, as a matter of
courtesy, the police-officers refrained from calling me as a witness, the
evidence of the servants being sufficient to identify the property.  The
thieves were two young men, not much over twenty,--James and John
Macdonald, terribly shabby, dirty, jail-bird like, yet intelligent of
aspect, and one of them handsome.  The police knew them already, and they
seemed not much abashed by their position.  There were half a dozen
magistrates on the bench,--idle old gentlemen of Southport and the
vicinity, who lounged into the court, more as a matter of amusement than
anything else, and lounged out again at their own pleasure; for these
magisterial duties are a part of the pastime of the country gentlemen of
England.  They wore their hats on the bench.  There were one or two of
them more active than their fellows; but the real duty was done by the
Clerk of the Court.  The seats within the bar were occupied by the
witnesses, and around the great table sat some of the more respectable
people of Southport; and without the bar were the commonalty in great
numbers; for this is said to be the first burglary that has occurred here
within the memory of man, and so it has caused a great stir.

There seems to be a strong case against the prisoners.  A boy attached to
the railway testified to having seen them at Birchdale on Wednesday
afternoon, and directed them on their way to Southport; Peter Pickup
recognized them as having applied to him for lodgings in the course of
that evening; a pawnbroker swore to one of them as having offered my
top-coat for sale or pledge in Liverpool; and my boots were found on the
feet of one of them,--all this in addition to other circumstances of
pregnant suspicion.  So they were committed for trial at the Liverpool
assizes, to be holden some time in the present month.  I rather wished
them to escape.


February 27th.--Coming along the promenade, a little before sunset, I saw
the mountains of the Welsh coast shadowed very distinctly against the
horizon.  Mr. Channing told me that he had seen these mountains once or
twice during his stay at Southport; but, though constantly looking for
them, they have never before greeted my eyes in all the months that we
have spent here.  It is said that the Isle of Man is likewise discernible
occasionally; but as the distance must be between sixty and seventy
miles, I should doubt it.  How misty is England!  I have spent four years
in a gray gloom.  And yet it suits me pretty well.



TO YORK.


April 10th.--At Skipton.  My wife, J-----, and I left Southport to-day
for a short tour to York and its neighborhood.  The weather has been
exceedingly disagreeable for weeks past, but yesterday and to-day have
been pleasant, and we take advantage of the first glimpses of spring-like
weather.  We came by Preston, along a road that grew rather more
interesting as we proceeded to this place, which is about sixty miles
from Southport, and where we arrived between five and six o'clock.  First
of all, we got some tea; and then, as it was a pleasant sunset, we set
forth from our old-fashioned inn to take a walk.

Skipton is an ancient town, and has an ancient though well-repaired
aspect, the houses being built of gray stone, but in no picturesque
shapes; the streets well paved; the site irregular and rising gradually
towards Skipton Castle, which overlooks the town, as an old lordly castle
ought to overlook the feudal village which it protects.  The castle was
built shortly after the Conquest by Robert de Romeli, and was afterwards
the property and residence of the famous Cliffords.  We met an honest
man, as we approached the gateway, who kindly encouraged us to apply for
admittance, notwithstanding it was Good Friday; telling us how to find
the housekeeper, who would probably show us over the castle.  So we
passed through the gate, between two embattled towers; and in the castle
court we met a flock of young damsels, who had been rambling about the
precincts.  They likewise directed us in our search for the housekeeper,
and S-----, being bolder than I in such assaults on feudal castles, led
the way down a dark archway, and up an exterior stairway, and, knocking
at a door, immediately brought the housekeeper to a parley.

She proved to be a nowise awful personage, but a homely, neat, kindly,
intelligent, and middle-aged body.  She seemed to be all alone in this
great old castle, and at once consented to show us about,--being, no
doubt, glad to see any Christian visitors.  The castle is now the
property of Sir R. Tufton; but the present family do not make it their
permanent residence, and have only occasionally visited it.  Indeed, it
could not well be made an eligible or comfortable residence, according to
modern ideas; the rooms occupying the several stories of large round
towers, and looking gloomy and sombre, if not dreary,--not the less so
for what has been done to modernize them; for instance, modern
paper-hangings, and, in some of the rooms, marble fireplaces.  They need
a great deal more light and higher ceilings; and I rather imagine that
the warm, rich effect of glowing tapestry is essential to keep one's
spirit cheerful in these ancient rooms.  Modern paper-hangings are too
superficial and wishy-washy for the purpose.  Tapestry, it is true, there
is now, completely covering the walls of several of the rooms, but all
faded into ghastliness; nor could some of it have been otherwise than
ghastly, even in its newness, for it represented persons suffering
various kinds of torture, with crowds of monks and nuns looking on.  In
another room there was the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and
other subjects not to be readily distinguished in the twilight that was
gathering in these antique chambers.  We saw, too, some very old
portraits of the Cliffords and the Thanets, in black frames, and the
pictures themselves sadly faded and neglected.  The famous Countess Anne
of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery was represented on one of the leaves
of a pair of folding doors, and one of her husbands, I believe, on the
other leaf.  There was the picture of a little idiot lordling, who had
choked himself to death; and a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, who battered
this old castle, together with almost every other English or Welsh castle
that I ever saw or heard of.  The housekeeper pointed out the grove of
trees where his cannon were planted during the siege.  There was but
little furniture in the rooms; amongst other articles, an antique chair,
in which Mary, Queen of Scots, is said to have rested.

The housekeeper next took us into the part of the castle which has never
been modernized since it was repaired, after the siege of Cromwell.  This
is a dismal series of cellars above ground, with immensely thick walls,
letting in but scanty light, and dim staircases of stone; and a large
hall, with a vast fireplace, where every particle of heat must needs have
gone up chimney,--a chill and heart-breaking place enough.  Quite in the
midst of this part of the castle is the court-yard,--a space of some
thirty or forty feet in length and breadth, open to the sky, but shut
completely in on every side by the buildings of the castle, and paved
over with flat stones.  Out of this pavement, however, grows a yew-tree,
ascending to the tops of the towers, and completely filling, with its
branches and foliage, the whole open space between them.  Some small
birds--quite a flock of them--were twittering and fluttering among the
upper branches.  We went upward, through two or three stories of dismal
rooms,--among others, through the ancient guard-room,--till we came out
on the roof of one of the towers, and had a very fine view of an
amphitheatre of ridgy hills which shut in and seclude the castle and the
town.  The upper foliage was within our reach, close to the parapet of
the tower; so we gathered a few twigs as memorials.  The housekeeper told
us that the yew-tree is supposed to be eight hundred years old, and,
comparing it with other yews that I have seen, I should judge that it
must measure its antiquity by centuries, at all events.  It still seems
to be in its prime.

Along the base of the castle, on the opposite side to the entrance, flows
a stream, sending up a pleasant murmur from among the trees.  The
housekeeper said it was not a stream, but only a "wash," whatever that
may be; and I conjecture that it creates the motive-power of some
factory-looking edifices, which we saw on our first arrival at Skipton.

We now took our leave of the housekeeper, and came homeward to our inn,
where I have written the foregoing pages by a bright fire; but I think I
write better descriptions after letting the subject lie in my mind a day
or two.  It is too new to be properly dealt with immediately after coming
from the scene.

The castle is not at all crumbly, but in excellent repair, though so
venerable.  There are rooks cawing about the shapeless patches of their
nests, in the tops of the trees.  In the castle wall, as well as in the
round towers of the gateway, there seem to be little tenements, perhaps
inhabited by the servants and dependants of the family.  They looked in
very good order, with tokens of present domesticity about them.  The
whole of this old castle, indeed, was as neat as a new, small dwelling,
in spite of an inevitable musty odor of antiquity.


April 11th.--This morning we took a carriage and two horses, and set out
for



BOLTON PRIORY,


a distance of about six miles.  The morning was cool, with breezy clouds,
intermingled with sunshine, and, on the whole, as good as are nine tenths
of English mornings.  J----- sat beside the driver, and S----- and I in
the carriage, all closed but one window.  As we drove through Skipton,
the little town had a livelier aspect than yesterday when it wore its
Good Friday's solemnity; but now its market-place was thronged,
principally with butchers, displaying their meat under little movable
pent-houses, and their customers.  The English people really like to
think and talk of butcher's meat, and gaze at it with delight; and they
crowd through the avenues of the market-houses and stand enraptured round
a dead ox.

We passed along by the castle wall, and noticed the escutcheon of the
Cliffords or the Thanets carved in stone over the portal, with the motto
Desormais, the application of which I do not well see; these ancestral
devices usually referring more to the past, than to the future.  There is
a large old church, just at the extremity of the village, and just below
the castle, on the slope of the hill.  The gray wall of the castle
extends along the road a considerable distance, in good repair, with here
and there a buttress, and the semicircular bulge of a tower.

The scenery along the road was not particularly striking,--long slopes,
descending from ridges; a generally hard outline of country, with not
many trees, and those, as yet, destitute of foliage.  It needs to be
softened with a good deal of wood.  There were stone farm-houses, looking
ancient, and able to last till twice as old.  Instead of the hedges, so
universal in other parts of England, there were stone fences of good
height and painful construction, made of small stones, which I suppose
have been picked up out of the fields through hundreds of years.  They
reminded me of old Massachusetts, though very unlike our rude stone
walls, which, nevertheless, last longer than anything else we build.
Another New England feature was the little brooks, which here and there
flowed across our road, rippling over the pebbles, clear and bright.  I
fancied, too, an intelligence and keenness in some of the Yorkshire
physiognomies, akin to those characteristics in my countrymen's faces.

We passed an ancient, many-gabled inn, large, low, and comfortable,
bearing the name of the Devonshire House, as does our own hotel, for the
Duke of Devonshire is a great proprietor in these parts.  A mile or so
beyond, we came to a gateway, broken through what, I believe, was an old
wall of the Priory grounds; and here we alighted, leaving our driver to
take the carriage to the inn.  Passing through this hole in the wall, we
saw the ruins of the Priory at the bottom of the beautiful valley about a
quarter of a mile off; and, well as the monks knew how to choose the
sites of their establishments, I think they never chose a better site
than this,--in the green lap of protecting hills, beside a stream, and
with peace and fertility looking down upon it on every side.  The view
down the valley is very fine, and, for my part, I am glad that some
peaceable and comfort-loving people possessed these precincts for many
hundred years, when nobody else knew how to appreciate peace and comfort.

The old gateway tower, beneath which was formerly the arched entrance
into the domain of the Priory, is now the central part of a hunting-seat
of the Duke of Devonshire, and the edifice is completed by a wing of
recent date on each side.  A few hundred yards from this hunting-box are
the remains of the Priory, consisting of the nave of the old church,
which is still in good repair, and used as the worshipping-place of the
neighborhood (being a perpetual curacy of the parish of Skipton), and the
old ruined choir, roofless, with broken arches, ivy-grown, but not so
rich and rare a ruin as either Melrose, Netley, or Furness.  Its
situation makes its charm.  It stands near the river Wharfe,--a broad and
rapid stream, which hurries along between high banks, with a sound which
the monks must have found congenial to their slumberous moods.  It is a
good river for trout, too; and I saw two or three anglers, with their
rods and baskets, passing through the ruins towards its shore.  It was in
this river Wharfe that the boy of Egremont was drowned, at the Strid, a
mile or two higher up the stream.

In the first place, we rambled round the exterior of the ruins; but, as I
have said, they are rather bare and meagre in comparison with other
abbeys, and I am not sure that the especial care and neatness with which
they are preserved does not lessen their effect on the beholder.
Neglect, wildness, crumbling walls, the climbing and conquering ivy;
masses of stone lying where they fell; trees of old date, growing where
the pillars of the aisles used to stand,--these are the best points of
ruined abbeys.  But, everything here is kept with such trimness that it
gives you the idea of a petrifaction.  Decay is no longer triumphant; the
Duke of Devonshire has got the better of it.  The grounds around the
church and the ruins are still used for burial, and there are several
flat tombstones and altar tombs, with crosiers engraved or carved upon
them, which at first I took to be the memorials of bishops or abbots, and
wondered that the sculpture should still be so distinct.  On one,
however, I read the date 1850 and the name of a layman; for the
tombstones were all modern, the humid English atmosphere giving them
their mossy look of antiquity, and the crosier had been assumed only as a
pretty device.

Close beside the ruins there is a large, old stone farm-house, which must
have been built on the site of a part of the Priory,--the cells,
dormitories, refectory, and other portions pertaining to the monks' daily
life, I suppose, and built, no doubt, with the sacred stones.  I should
imagine it would be a haunted house, swarming with cowled spectres.  We
wished to see the interior of the church, and procured a guide from this
farm-house,--the sexton, probably,--a gray-haired, ruddy, cheery, and
intelligent man, of familiar though respectful address.  The entrance of
the church was undergoing improvement, under the last of the abbots, when
the Reformation occurred; and it has ever remained in an unfinished
state, till now it is mossy with age, and has a beautiful tuft of
wall-flowers growing on a ledge over the Gothic arch of the doorway.  The
body of the church is of much anterior date, though the oaken roof is
supposed to have been renewed in Henry VIII's time.  This, as I said
before, was the nave of the old Abbey church, and has a one-sided and
unbalanced aspect, there being only a single aisle, with its row of
sturdy pillars.  The pavement is covered with pews of old oak, very
homely and unornamental; on the side opposite the aisle there are two or
three windows of modern stained glass, somewhat gaudy and impertinent;
there are likewise some hatchments and escutcheons over the altar and
elsewhere.  On the whole, it is not an impressive interior; but, at any
rate, it had the true musty odor which I never conceived of till I came
to England,--the odor of dead men's decay, garnered up and shut in, and
kept from generation to generation; not disgusting nor sickening, because
it is so old, and of the past.

On one side of the altar there was a small square chapel,--or what had
once been a chapel, separated from the chancel by a partition about a
man's height, if I remember aright.  Our guide led us into it, and
observed that some years ago the pavement had been taken up in this spot,
for burial purposes; but it was found that it had already been used in
that way, and that the corpses had been buried upright.  Inquiring
further, I found that it was the Clapham family, and another that was
called Morley, that were so buried; and then it occurred to me that this
was the vault Wordsworth refers to in one of his poems,--the burial-place
of the Claphams and Mauleverers, whose skeletons, for aught I know, were
even then standing upright under our feet.  It is but a narrow place,
perhaps a square of ten feet.  We saw little or nothing else that was
memorable, unless it were the signature of Queen Adelaide in a visitors'
book.

On our way back to Skipton it rained and hailed, but the sun again shone
out before we arrived.  We took the train for Leeds at half past ten, and
arrived there in the afternoon, passing the ruined Abbey of Kirkstall on
our way.  The ruins looked more interesting than those of Bolton, though
not so delightfully situated, and now in the close vicinity of
manufactories, and only two or three miles from Leeds.  We took a dish of
soup, and spent a miserable hour in and about the railway station of
Leeds; whence we departed at four, and reached



YORK


in an hour or two.  We put up at the Black Swan, and before tea went out,
on the cool bright edge of evening, to get a glimpse of the cathedral,
which impressed me more grandly than when I first saw it, nearly a year
ago.  Indeed, almost any object gains upon me at the second sight.  I
have spent the evening in writing up my journal,--an act of real virtue.

After walking round the cathedral, we went up a narrow and crooked
street, very old and shabby, but with an antique house projecting as much
as a yard over the pavement on one side,--a timber house it seemed to be,
plastered over and stained yellow or buff.  There was no external door,
affording entrance into this edifice; but about midway of its front we
came to a low, Gothic, stone archway, passing right through the house;
and as it looked much time-worn, and was sculptured with untraceable
devices, we went through.  There was an exceedingly antique, battered,
and shattered pair of oaken leaves, which used doubtless to shut up the
passage in former times, and keep it secure; but for the last centuries,
probably, there has been free ingress and egress.  Indeed, the portal
arch may never have been closed since the Reformation.  Within, we found
a quadrangle, of which the house upon the street formed one side, the
others being composed of ancient houses, with gables in a row, all
looking upon the paved quadrangle, through quaint windows of various
fashion.  An elderly, neat, pleasant-looking woman now came in beneath
the arch, and as she had a look of being acquainted here, we asked her
what the place was; and she told us, that in the old Popish times the
prebends of the cathedral used to live here, to keep them from doing
mischief in the town.  The establishment, she said, was now called "The
College," and was let in rooms and small tenements to poor people.  On
consulting the York Guide, I find that her account was pretty correct;
the house having been founded in Henry VI.'s time, and called St.
William's College, the statue of the patron saint being sculptured over
the arch.  It was intended for the residence of the parsons and priests
of the cathedral, who had formerly caused troubles and scandals by living
in the town.

We returned to the front of the cathedral on our way homeward, and an old
man stopped us, to inquire if we had ever seen the Fiddler of York.  We
answered in the negative, and said that we had not time to see him now;
but the old gentleman pointed up to the highest pinnacle of the southern
front, where stood the Fiddler of York, one of those Gothic quaintnesses
which blotch the grandeur and solemnity of this and other cathedrals.


April 12th.--This morning was bleak and most ungenial; a chilly sunshine,
a piercing wind, a prevalence of watery cloud,--April weather, without
the tenderness that ought to be half revealed in it.  This is



EASTER SUNDAY,


and service at the cathedral commenced at half past ten; so we set out
betimes and found admittance into the vast nave, and thence into the
choir.  An attendant ushered S----- and J----- to a seat at a distance
from me, and then gave me a place in one of the stalls where the monks
used to sit or kneel while chanting the services.  I think these stalls
are now appropriated to the prebends.  They are of carved oaken wood,
much less elaborate and wonderfully wrought than those of Chester
Cathedral, where all was done with head and heart, each a separate
device, instead of cut, by machinery like this.  The whole effect of this
carved work, however, lining the choir with its light tracery and
pinnacles, is very fine.  The whole choir, from the roof downward, except
the old stones of the outer walls, is of modern renovation, it being but
a few years since this part of the cathedral was destroyed by fire.  The
arches and pillars and lofty roof, however, have been well restored; and
there was a vast east window, full of painted glass, which, if it be
modern, is wonderfully chaste and Gothic-like.  All the other windows
have painted glass, which does not flare and glare as if newly painted.
But the light, whitewashed aspect of the general interior of the choir
has a cold and dreary effect.  There is an enormous organ, all clad in
rich oaken carving, of similar pattern to that of the stalls.  It was
communion day, and near the high altar, within a screen, I saw the
glistening of the gold vessels wherewith the services were to be
performed.

The choir was respectably filled with a pretty numerous congregation,
among whom I saw some officers in full dress, with their swords by their
sides, and one, old white-bearded warrior, who sat near me, seemed very
devout at his religious exercises.  In front of me and on the
corresponding benches, on the other side of the choir, sat two rows of
white-robed choristers, twenty in all, and these, with some women;
performed the vocal part of the music.  It is not good to see musicians,
for they are sometimes coarse and vulgar people, and so the auditor loses
faith in any fine and spiritual tones that they may breathe forth.

The services of Easter Sunday comprehend more than the ordinary quantity
of singing and chanting; at all events, nearly an hour and a half were
thus employed, with some intermixture of prayers and reading of
Scriptures; and, being almost congealed with cold, I thought it would
never come to an end.  The spirit of my Puritan ancestors was mighty
within me, and I did not wonder at their being out of patience with all
this mummery, which seemed to me worse than papistry because it was a
corruption of it.  At last a canon gave out the text, and preached a
sermon about twenty minutes long,--the coldest, driest, most superficial
rubbish; for this gorgeous setting of the magnificent cathedral, the
elaborate music, and the rich ceremonies seem inevitably to take the life
out of the sermon, which, to be anything, must be all.  The Puritans
showed their strength of mind and heart by preferring a sermon an hour
and a half long, into which the preacher put his whole soul, and lopping
away all these externals, into which religious life had first leafed and
flowered, and then petrified.

After the service, while waiting for my wife in the nave, I was accosted
by a young gentleman who seemed to be an American, and whom I have
certainly seen before, but whose name I could not recollect.  This, he
said, was his first visit to York, and he was evidently inclined to join
me in viewing the curiosities of the place, but, not knowing his name, I
could not introduce him to my wife, and so made a parting salute.

After dinner, we set forth and took a promenade along the wall,
and a ramble through some of the crooked streets, noting the old,
jutting-storied houses, story above story, and the old churches, gnawed
like a bone by the tooth of Time, till we came suddenly to the Black Swan
before we expected it. . . . . I rather fancy that I must have observed
most of the external peculiarities at my former visit, and therefore need
not make another record of them in this journal.

In the course of our walk we saw a procession of about fifty
charity-school boys, in flat caps, each with bands under his chin, and a
green collar to his coat; all looking unjoyous, and as if they had no
home nor parents' love.  They turned into a gateway, which closed behind
them; and as the adjoining edifice seemed to be a public institution,--at
least, not private,--we asked what it was, and found it to be a hospital
or residence for Old Maiden ladies, founded by a gentlewoman of York; I
know not whether she herself is of the sisterhood.  It must be a very
singular institution, and worthy of intimate study, if it were possible
to make one's way within the portal.

After writing the above, J----- and I went out for another ramble before
tea; and, taking a new course, we came to a grated iron fence and
gateway, through which we could see the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey.  They
are very extensive, and situated quite in the midst of the city, and the
wall and then a tower of the Abbey seem to border more than one of the
streets.  Our walk was interesting, as it brought us unexpectedly upon
several relics of antiquity,--a loop-holed and battlemented gateway; and
at various points fragments of the old Gothic stone-work, built in among
more recent edifices, which themselves were old; grimness intermixed with
quaintness and grotesqueness; old fragments of religious or warlike
architecture mingled with queer domestic structures,--the general effect
sombre, sordid, and grimy; but yet with a fascination that makes us fain
to linger about such scenes, and come to them again.

We passed round the cathedral, and saw jackdaws fluttering round the
pinnacles, while the bells chimed the quarters, and little children
played on the steps under the grand arch of the entrance.  It is very
stately, very beautiful, this minster; and doubtless would be very
satisfactory, could I only know it long and well enough,--so rich as its
front is, even with almost all the niches empty of their statues; not
stern in its effect, which I suppose must be owing to the elaborate
detail with which its great surface is wrought all over, like the chasing
of a lady's jewel-box, and yet so grand!  There is a dwelling-house on
one side, gray with antiquity, which has apparently grown out of it like
an excrescence; and though a good-sized edifice, yet the cathedral is so
large that its vastness is not in the least deformed by it.  If it be a
dwelling-house, I suppose it is inhabited by the person who takes care of
the cathedral.  This morning, while listening to the tedious chanting and
lukewarm sermon, I depreciated the whole affair, cathedral and all; but
now I do more justice, at least to the latter, and am only sorry that its
noble echoes must follow at every syllable, and re-reverberate at the
commas and semicolons, such poor discourses as the canon's.  But, after
all, it was the Puritans who made the sermon of such importance in
religious worship as we New-Englanders now consider it; and we are absurd
in considering this magnificent church and all those embroidered
ceremonies only in reference to it.

Before going back to the hotel, I went again up the narrow and twisted
passage of College Street, to take another glance at St. William's
College.  I underestimated the projection of the front over the street;
it is considerably more than three feet, and is about eight or nine feet
above the pavement.  The little statue of St. William is an alto-relievo
over the arched entrance, and has an escutcheon of arms on each side, all
much defaced.  In the interior of the quadrangle, the houses have not
gables nor peaked fronts, but have peaked windows on the red-tiled roofs.
The doorway, opposite the entrance-arch, is rather stately; and on one
side is a large, projecting window, which is said to belong to the room
where the printing-press of Charles I. was established in the days of the
Parliament.



THE MINSTER.


Monday, April 13th.--This morning was chill, and, worse, it was showery,
so that our purposes to see York were much thwarted.  At about ten
o'clock, however, we took a cab, and drove to the cathedral, where we
arrived while service was going on in the choir, and ropes were put up as
barriers between us and the nave; so that we were limited to the south
transept, and a part of one of the aisles of the choir.  It was dismally
cold.  We crept cheerlessly about within our narrow precincts (narrow,
that is to say, in proportion to the vast length and breadth of the
cathedral), gazing up into the hollow height of the central tower, and
looking at a monumental brass, fastened against one of the pillars,
representing a beruffed lady of the Tudor times, and at the canopied tomb
of Archbishop de Grey, who ruled over the diocese in the thirteenth
century.  Then we went into the side aisle of the choir, where there were
one or two modern monuments; and I was appalled to find that a sermon was
being preached by the ecclesiastic of the day, nor were there any signs
of an imminent termination.  I am not aware that there was much pith in
the discourse, but there was certainly a good deal of labor and
earnestness in the preacher's mode of delivery; although, when he came to
a close, it appeared that the audience was not more than half a dozen
people.

The barriers being now withdrawn, we walked adown the length of the nave,
which did not seem to me so dim and vast as the recollection which I have
had of it since my visit of a year ago.  But my pre-imaginations and my
memories are both apt to play me false with all admirable things, and so
create disappointments for me, while perhaps the thing itself is really
far better than I imagine or remember it.  We engaged an old man, one of
the attendants pertaining to the cathedral, to be our guide, and he
showed us first the stone screen in front of the choir, with its
sculptured kings of England; and then the tombs in the north transept,--
one of a modern archbishop, and one of an ancient one, behind which the
insane person who set fire to the church a few years ago hid himself at
nightfall.  Then our guide unlocked a side door, and led us into the
chapter-house,--an octagonal hall, with a vaulted roof, a tessellated
floor, and seven arched windows of old painted glass, the richest that I
ever saw or imagined, each looking like an inestimable treasury of
precious stories, with a gleam and glow even in the sullen light of this
gray morning.  What would they be with the sun shining through them!
With all their brilliancy, moreover, they were as soft as rose-leaves.
I never saw any piece of human architecture so beautiful as this
chapter-house; at least, I thought so while I was looking at it, and
think so still; and it owed its beauty in very great measure to the
painted windows: I remember looking at these windows from the outside
yesterday, and seeing nothing but an opaque old crust of conglomerated
panes of glass; but now that gloomy mystery was radiantly solved.

Returning into the body of the cathedral, we next entered the choir,
where, instead of the crimson cushions and draperies which we had seen
yesterday, we found everything folded in black.  It was a token of
mourning for one of the canons, who died on Saturday night.  The great
east window, seventy-five feet high, and full of old painted glass in
many exquisitely wrought and imagined Scriptural designs, is considered
the most splendid object in the Minster.  It is a pity that it is
partially hidden from view, even in the choir, by a screen before the
high altar; but indeed, the Gothic architects seem first to imagine
beautiful and noble things, and then to consider how they may best be
partially screened from sight.  A certain secrecy and twilight effect
belong to their plan.

We next went round the side aisles of the choir, which contain many
interesting monuments of prelates, and a specimen of the very common
Elizabethan design of an old gentleman in a double ruff and trunk
breeches, with one of his two wives on either side of him, all kneeling
in prayer; and their conjoint children, in two rows, kneeling in the
lower compartments of the tomb.  We saw, too, a rich marble monument of
one of the Strafford family, and the tombstone of the famous Earl
himself,--a flat tombstone in the pavement of the aisle, covering the
vault where he was buried, and with four iron rings fastened into the
four corners of the stone whereby to lift it.

And now the guide led us into the vestry, where there was a good fire
burning in the grate, and it really thawed my heart, which was congealed
with the dismal chill of the cathedral.  Here we saw a good many curious
things,--for instance, two wooden figures in knightly armor, which had
stood sentinels beside the ancient clock before it was replaced by a
modern one; and, opening a closet, the guide produced an old iron helmet,
which had been found in a tomb where a knight had been buried in his
armor; and three gold rings and one brass one, taken out of the graves,
and off the finger-bones of mediaeval archbishops,--one of them with a
ruby set in it; and two silver-gilt chalices, also treasures of the
tombs; and a wooden head, carved in human likeness, and painted to the
life, likewise taken from a grave where an archbishop was supposed to
have been buried.  They found no veritable skull nor bones, but only this
block-head, as if Death had betrayed the secret of what the poor prelate
really was.  We saw, too, a canopy of cloth, wrought with gold threads,
which had been borne over the head of King James I., when he came to
York, on his way to receive the English Crown.  There were also some old
brass dishes, In which pence used to be collected in monkish times.  Over
the door of this vestry were hung two banners of a Yorkshire regiment,
tattered in the Peninsular wars, and inscribed with the names of the
battles through which they had been borne triumphantly; and Waterloo was
among them.  The vestry, I think, occupies that excrescential edifice
which I noticed yesterday as having grown out of the cathedral.

After looking at these things, we went down into the crypts, under the
choir.  These were very interesting, as far as we could see them; being
more antique than anything above ground, but as dark as any cellar.
There is here, in the midst of these sepulchral crypts, a spring of
water, said to be very pure and delicious, owing to the limestone through
which the rain that feeds its source is filtered.  Near it is a stone
trough, in which the monks used to wash their hands.

I do not remember anything more that we saw at the cathedral, and at noon
we returned to the Black Swan.  The rain still continued, so that S-----
could not share in any more of my rambles, but J----- and I went out
again, and discovered the Guildhall.  It is a very ancient edifice of
Richard II.'s time, and has a statue over the entrance which looks
time-gnawed enough to be of coeval antiquity, although in reality it is
only a representation of George II. in his royal robes.  We went in, and
found ourselves in a large and lofty hall, with an oaken roof and a stone
pavement, and the farther end was partitioned off as a court of justice.
In that portion of the hall the Judge was on the bench, and a trial was
going forward; but in the hither portion a mob of people, with their hats
on, were lounging and talking, and enjoying the warmth of the stoves.
The window over the judgment-seat had painted glass in it, and so, I
think, had some of the hall windows.  At the end of the hall hung a great
picture of Paul defending himself before Agrippa, where the Apostle
looked like an athlete, and had a remarkably bushy black beard.  Between
two of the windows hung an Indian bell from Burmah, ponderously thick and
massive.  Both the picture and the bell had been presented to the city as
tokens of affectionate remembrance by its children; and it is pleasant to
think that such failings exist in these old stable communities, and that
there are permanent localities where such gifts can be kept from
generation to generation.

At four o'clock we left the city of York, still in a pouring rain.  The
Black Swan, where we had been staying, is a good specimen of the old
English inn, sombre, quiet, with dark staircases, dingy rooms, curtained
beds,--all the possibilities of a comfortable life and good English fare,
in a fashion which cannot have been much altered for half a century.  It
is very homelike when one has one's family about him, but must be
prodigiously stupid for a solitary man.

We took the train for Manchester, over pretty much the same route that I
travelled last year.  Many of the higher hills in Yorkshire were white
with snow, which, in our lower region, softened into rain; but as we
approached Manchester, the western sky reddened, and gave promise of
better weather.  We arrived at nearly eight o'clock, and put up at the
Palatine Hotel.  In the evening I scrawled away at my journal till past
ten o'clock; for I have really made it a matter of conscience to keep a
tolerably full record of my travels, though conscious that everything
good escapes in the process.  In the morning we went out and visited the



MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL,


a particularly black and grimy edifice, containing some genuine old wood
carvings within the choir.  We stayed a good while, in order to see some
people married.  One couple, with their groomsman and bride's-maid, were
sitting within the choir; but when the clergyman was robed and ready,
there entered five other couples, each attended by groomsman and
bride's-maid.  They all were of the lower orders; one or two respectably
dressed, but most of them poverty-stricken,--the men in their ordinary
loafer's or laborer's attire, the women with their poor, shabby shawls
drawn closely about them; faded untimely, wrinkled with penury and care;
nothing fresh, virgin-like, or hopeful about them; joining themselves to
their mates with the idea of making their own misery less intolerable by
adding another's to it.  All the six couple stood up in a row before the
altar, with the groomsmen and bride's-maids in a row behind them; and
the clergyman proceeded to marry them in such a way that it almost
seemed to make every man and woman the husband and wife of every other.
However, there were some small portions of the service directed towards
each separate couple; and they appeared to assort themselves in their
own fashion afterwards, each one saluting his bride with a kiss.  The
clergyman, the sexton, and the clerk all seemed to find something funny
in this affair; and the woman who admitted us into the church smiled too,
when she told us that a wedding-party was waiting to be married.  But I
think it was the saddest thing we have seen since leaving home; though
funny enough if one likes to look at it from a ludicrous point of view.
This mob of poor marriages was caused by the fact that no marriage fee is
paid during Easter.

This ended the memorable things of our tour; for my wife and J----- left
Manchester for Southport, and I for Liverpool, before noon.


April 19th.--On the 15th, having been invited to attend at the laying of
the corner-stone of



MR. BROWNE'S FREE LIBRARY,


I went to the Town Hall, according to the programme, at eleven o'clock.
There was already a large number of people (invited guests, members of
the Historical Society, and other local associations) assembled in the
great hall-room, and one of these was delivering an address to Mr. Browne
as I entered.  Approaching the outer edge of the circle, I was met and
cordially greeted by Monckton Milnes, whom I like, and who always reminds
me of Longfellow, though his physical man is more massive.  While we were
talking together, a young man approached him with a pretty little
expression of surprise and pleasure at seeing him there.  He had a
slightly affected or made-up manner, and was rather a comely person.  Mr.
Milnes introduced him to me as Lord ------.  Hereupon, of course, I
observed him more closely; and I must say that I was not long in
discovering a gentle dignity and half-imperceptible reserve in his
manner; but still my first impression was quite as real as my second one.
He occupies, I suppose, the foremost position among the young men of
England, and has the fairest prospects of a high course before him;
nevertheless, he did not impress me as possessing the native qualities
that could entitle him to a high public career.  He has adopted public
life as his hereditary profession, and makes the very utmost of all his
abilities, cultivating himself to a determined end, knowing that he shall
have every advantage towards attaining his object.  His natural
disadvantages must have been, in some respects, unusually great; his
voice, for instance, is not strong, and appeared to me to have a more
positive defect than mere weakness.  Doubtless he has struggled manfully
against this defect; and it made me feel a certain sympathy, and, indeed,
a friendliness, for which he would not at all have thanked me, had he
known it.  I felt, in his person, what a burden it is upon human
shoulders, the necessity of keeping up the fame and historical importance
of an illustrious house; at least, when the heir to its honors has
sufficient intellect and sensibility to feel the claim that his country
and his ancestors and his posterity all have upon him.  Lord ------ is
fully capable of feeling these claims; but I would not care, methinks, to
take his position, unless I could have considerably more than his
strength.

In a little while we formed ourselves into a procession, four in a row,
and set forth from the Town Hall, through James Street, Lord Street, Lime
Street, all the way through a line of policemen and a throng of people;
and all the windows were alive with heads, and I never before was so
conscious of a great mass of humanity, though perhaps I may often have
seen as great a crowd.  But a procession is the best point of view from
which to see the crowd that collects together.  The day, too, was very
fine, even sunshiny, and the streets dry,--a blessing which cannot be
overestimated; for we should have been in a strange trim for the banquet,
had we been compelled to wade through the ordinary mud of Liverpool.  The
procession itself could not have been a very striking object.  In
America, it would have had a hundred picturesque and perhaps ludicrous
features,--the symbols of the different trades, banners with strange
devices, flower-shows, children, volunteer soldiers, cavalcades, and
every suitable and unsuitable contrivance; but we were merely a trail of
ordinary-looking individuals, in great-coats, and with precautionary
umbrellas.  The only characteristic or professional costume, as far as I
noticed, was that of the Bishop of Chester, in his flat cap and
black-silk gown; and that of Sir Henry Smith, the General of the
District, in full uniform, with a star and half a dozen medals on his
breast.  Mr. Browne himself, the hero of the day, was the plainest and
simplest man of all,--an exceedingly unpretending gentleman in black;
small, white-haired, pale, quiet, and respectable.  I rather wondered why
he chose to be the centre of all this ceremony; for he did not seem
either particularly to enjoy it, or to be at all incommoded by it, as a
more nervous and susceptible man might have been.

The site of the projected edifice is on one of the streets bordering on
St. George's Hall; and when we came within the enclosure, the
corner-stone, a large square of red freestone, was already suspended
over its destined place.  It has a brass plate let into it, with an
inscription, which will perhaps not be seen again till the present
English type has grown as antique as black-letter is now.  Two or three
photographs were now taken of the site, the corner-stone, Mr. Browne, the
distinguished guests, and the crowd at large; then ensued a prayer from
the Bishop of Chester, and speeches from Mr. Holme, Mr. Browne, Lord
------, Sir John Pakington, Sir Henry Smith, and as many others as there
was time for.  Lord ------ acquitted himself very creditably, though
brought out unexpectedly, and with evident reluctance.  I am convinced
that men, liable to be called on to address the public, keep a constant
supply of commonplaces in their minds, which, with little variation, can
be adapted to one subject about as well as to another; and thus they are
always ready to do well enough, though seldom to do particularly well.

From the scene of the corner-stone, we went to St. George's Hall, where a
drawing-room and dressing-room had been prepared for the principal
guests.  Before the banquet, I had some conversation with Sir James Kay
Shuttleworth, who had known Miss Bronte very intimately, and bore
testimony to the wonderful fidelity of Mrs. Gaskell's life of her.  He
seemed to have had an affectionate regard for her, and said that her
marriage promised to have been productive of great happiness; her husband
being not a remarkable man, but with the merit of an exceeding love for
her.

Mr. Browne now took me up into the gallery, which by this time was full
of ladies; and thence we had a fine view of the noble hall, with the
tables laid, in readiness for the banquet.  I cannot conceive of anything
finer than this hall: it needs nothing but painted windows to make it
perfect, and those I hope it may have one day or another.

At two o'clock we sat down to the banquet, which hardly justified that
name, being only a cold collation, though sufficiently splendid in its
way.  In truth, it would have been impossible to provide a hot dinner for
nine hundred people in a place remote from kitchens.  The principal table
extended lengthwise of the hall, and was a little elevated above the
other tables, which stretched across, about twenty in all.  Before each
guest, besides the bill of fare, was laid a programme of the expected
toasts, among which appeared my own name, to be proposed by Mr. Monckton
Milnes.  These things do not trouble me quite as much as they used,
though still it sufficed to prevent much of the enjoyment which I might
have had if I could have felt myself merely a spectator.  My left-hand
neighbor was Colonel Campbell of the Artillery; my right-hand one was Mr.
Picton, of the Library Committee; and I found them both companionable
men, especially the Colonel, who had served in China and in the Crimea,
and owned that he hated the French.  We did not make a very long business
of the eatables, and then came the usual toasts of ceremony, and
afterwards those more peculiar to the occasion, one of the first of which
was "The House of Stanley," to which Lord ------ responded.  It was a
noble subject, giving scope for as much eloquence as any man could have
brought to bear upon it, and capable of being so wrought out as to
develop and illustrate any sort of conservative or liberal tendencies
which the speaker might entertain.  There could not be a richer
opportunity for reconciling and making friends betwixt the old system of
society and the new; but Lord ------ did not seem to make anything of it.
I remember nothing that he said excepting his statement that the family
had been five hundred years connected with the town of Liverpool.  I wish
I could have responded to "The House of Stanley," and his Lordship could
have spoken in my behalf.  None of the speeches were remarkably good; the
Bishop of Chester's perhaps the best, though he is but a little man in
aspect, not at all filling up one's idea of a bishop, and the rest were
on an indistinguishable level, though, being all practised speakers, they
were less hum-y and ha-y than English orators ordinarily are.

I was really tired to death before my own turn came, sitting all that
time, as it were, on the scaffold, with the rope round my neck.  At last
Monckton Milnes was called up and made a speech, of which, to my dismay,
I could hardly hear a single word, owing to his being at a considerable
distance, on the other side of the chairman, and flinging his voice,
which is a bass one, across the hall, instead of adown it, in my
direction.  I could not distinguish one word of any allusions to my
works, nor even when he came to the toast, did I hear the terms in which
he put it, nor whether I was toasted on my own basis, or as representing
American literature, or as Consul of the United States.  At all events,
there was a vast deal of clamor; and uprose peers and bishop, general,
mayor, knights and gentlemen, everybody in the hall greeting me with all
the honors.  I had uprisen, too, to commence my speech; but had to sit
down again till matters grew more quiet, and then I got up, and proceeded
to deliver myself with as much composure as I ever felt at my own
fireside.  It is very strange, this self-possession and clear-sightedness
which I have experienced when standing before an audience, showing me my
way through all the difficulties resulting from my not having heard
Monckton Milnes's speech; and on since reading the latter, I do not see
how I could have answered it better.  My speech certainly was better
cheered than any other; especially one passage, where I made a colossus
of Mr. Browne, at which the audience grew so tumultuous in their applause
that they drowned my figure of speech before it was half out of my mouth.

After rising from table, Lord ------ and I talked about our respective
oratorical performances; and he appeared to have a perception that he is
not naturally gifted in this respect.  I like Lord ------, and wish that
it were possible that we might know one another better.  If a nobleman
has any true friend out of his own class, it ought to be a republican.
Nothing further of interest happened at the banquet, and the next morning
came out the newspapers with the reports of my speech, attributing to me
a variety of forms of ragged nonsense, which, poor speaker as I am, I was
quite incapable of uttering.


May 10th.--The winter is over, but as yet we scarcely have what ought to
be called spring; nothing but cold east-winds, accompanied with sunshine,
however, as east-winds generally are in this country.  All milder winds
seem to bring rain.  The grass has been green for a month,--indeed, it
has never been entirely brown,--and now the trees and hedges are
beginning to be in foliage.  Weeks ago the daisies bloomed, even in the
sandy grass-plot bordering on the promenade beneath our front windows;
and in the progress of the daisy, and towards its consummation, I saw the
propriety of Burns's epithet, "wee, modest, crimson-nipped flower,"--its
little white petals in the bud being fringed all round with crimson,
which fades into pure white when the flower blooms.  At the beginning of
this month I saw fruit-trees in blossom, stretched out flat against stone
walls, reminding me of a dead bird nailed against the side of a barn.
But it has been a backward and dreary spring; and I think Southport, in
the course of it, has lost its advantage over the rest of the Liverpool
neighborhood in point of milder atmosphere.  The east-wind feels even
rawer here than in the city.

Nevertheless, the columns, of the Southport Visitor begin to be well
replenished with the names of guests, and the town is assuming its aspect
of summer life.  To say the truth, except where cultivation has done its
utmost, there is very little difference between winter and summer in the
mere material aspect of Southport; there being nothing but a waste of
sand intermixed with plashy pools to seaward, and a desert of
sand-hillocks on the land side.  But now the brown, weather-hardened
donkey-women haunt people that stray along the reaches, and delicate
persons face the cold, rasping, ill-tempered blast on the promenade, and
children dig in the sands; and, for want of something better, it seems to
be determined that this shall be considered spring.

Southport is as stupid a place as I ever lived in; and I cannot but
bewail our ill fortune to have been compelled to spend so many months on
these barren sands, when almost every other square yard of England
contains something that would have been historically or poetically
interesting.  Our life here has been a blank.  There was, indeed, a
shipwreck, a month or two ago, when a large ship came ashore within a
mile from our windows; the larger portion of the crew landing safely on
the hither sands, while six or seven betook themselves to the boat, and
were lost in attempting to gain the shore, on the other side of the
Ribble.  After a lapse of several weeks, two or three of their drowned
bodies were found floating in this vicinity, and brought to Southport for
burial; so that it really is not at all improbable that Milton's Lycidas
floated hereabouts, in the rise and lapse of the tides, and that his
bones may still be whitening among the sands.

In the same gale that wrecked the above-mentioned vessel, a portion of a
ship's mast was driven ashore, after evidently having been a very long
time in and under water; for it was covered with great barnacles, and
torn sea-weed, insomuch that there was scarcely a bare place along its
whole length; clusters of sea-anemones were sticking to it, and I know
not what strange marine productions besides.  J----- at once recognized
the sea-anemones, knowing them by his much reading of Gosse's Aquarium;
and though they must now have been two or three days high and dry out of
water, he made an extempore aquarium out of a bowl, and put in above a
dozen of these strange creatures.  In a little while they bloomed out
wonderfully, and even seemed to produce young anemones; but, from some
fault in his management, they afterwards grew sickly and died.  S-----
thinks that the old storm-shattered mast, so studded with the growth of
the ocean depths, is a relic of the Spanish Armada which strewed its
wrecks along all the shores of England; but I hardly think it would have
taken three hundred years to produce this crop of barnacles and
sea-anemones.  A single summer might probably have done it.

Yesterday we all of us except R----- went to Liverpool to see the
performances of an American circus company.  I had previously been, a day
or two before, with J-----, and had been happy to perceive that the fact
of its being an American establishment really induced some slight
swelling of the heart within me.  It is ridiculous enough, to be sure,
but I like to find myself not wholly destitute of this noble weakness,
patriotism.  As for the circus, I never was fond of that species of
entertainment, nor do I find in this one the flash and glitter and whirl
which I remember in other American exhibitions.

[Here follow the visits to Lincoln and Boston, printed in Our Old Home.
--ED.]


May 27th.--We left Boston by railway at noon, and arrived in PETERBOROUGH
in about an hour and a quarter, and have put up at the Railway Hotel.
After dinner we walked into the town to see



THE CATHEDRAL,


of the towers and arches of which we had already had a glimpse from our
parlor window.

Our journey from Boston hitherward was through a perfectly level
country,--the fens of Lincolnshire,--green, green, and nothing else, with
old villages and farm-houses and old church-towers; very pleasant and
rather wearisomely monotonous.  To return to Peterborough.  It is a town
of ancient aspect; and we passed, on our way towards the market-place, a
very ancient-looking church, with a very far projecting porch, opening in
front and on each side through arches of broad sweep.  The street by
which we approached from our hotel led us into the market-place, which
had what looked like an old Guildhall on one side.  On the opposite side,
above the houses, appeared the towers of the cathedral, and a street
leads from the market-place to its front, through an arched gateway,
which used to be the external entrance to the abbey, I suppose, of which
the cathedral was formerly the church.  The front of the cathedral is
very striking, and unlike any other that I have seen; being formed by
three lofty and majestic arches in a row, with three gable peaks above
them, forming a sort of colonnade, within which is the western entrance
of the nave.  The towers are massive, but low in proportion to their
bulk.  There are no spires, but pinnacles and statues, and all the rich
detail of Gothic architecture, the whole of a venerable gray line.  It is
in perfect repair, and has not suffered externally, except by the loss of
multitudes of statues, gargoyles, and miscellaneous eccentricities of
sculpture, which used to smile, frown, laugh, and weep over the faces of
these old fabrics.

We entered through a side portal, and sat down on a bench in the nave,
and kept ourselves quiet; for the organ was sounding, and the choristers
were chanting in the choir.  The nave and transepts are very noble, with
clustered pillars and Norman arches, and a great height under the central
tower; the whole, however, being covered with plaster and whitewash,
except the roof, which is of painted oak.  This latter adornment has the
merit, I believe, of being veritably ancient; but certainly I should
prefer the oak of its native hue, for the effect of the paint is to make
it appear as if the ceiling were covered with imitation mosaic-work or an
oil-cloth carpet.

After sitting awhile, we were invited by a verger, who came from within
the screen, to enter the choir and hear the rest of the service.  We
found the choristers there in their white garments, and an audience of
half a dozen people, and had time to look at the interior of the choir.
All the carved wood-work of the tabernacle, the Bishop's throne, the
prebends' stalls, and whatever else, is modern; for this cathedral seems
to have suffered wofully from Cromwell's soldiers, who hacked at the old
oak, and hammered and pounded upon the marble tombs, till nothing of the
first and very few of the latter remain.  It is wonderful how suddenly
the English people lost their sense of the sanctity of all manner of
externals in religion, without losing their religion too.  The French, in
their Revolution, underwent as sudden a change; but they became pagans
and atheists, and threw away the substance with the shadow.

I suspect that the interior arrangement of the choir and the chancel has
been greatly modernized; for it is quite unlike anything that I have seen
elsewhere.  Instead of one vast eastern window, there are rows of windows
lighting the Lady Chapel, and seen through rows of arches in the screen
of the chancel; the effect being, whoever is to have the credit of it,
very rich and beautiful.  There is, I think, no stained glass in the
windows of the nave, though in the windows of the chancel there is some
of recent date, and from fragments of veritable antique.  The effect of
the whole interior is grand, expansive, and both ponderous and airy; not
dim, mysterious, and involved, as Gothic interiors often are, the
roundness and openness of the arches being opposed to this latter effect.

When the chanting came to a close, one verger took his stand at the
entrance of the choir, and another stood farther up the aisle, and then
the door of a stall opened, and forth came a clerical dignity of much
breadth and substance, aged and infirm, and was ushered out of the choir
with a great deal of ceremony.  We took him for the bishop, but he proved
to be only a canon.  We now engaged an attendant to show us through the
Lady Chapel and the other penetralia, which it did not take him long to
accomplish.  One of the first things he showed us was the tombstone, in
the pavement of the southern aisle, beneath which Mary, Queen of Scots,
had been originally buried, and where she lay for a quarter of a century,
till borne to her present resting-place in Westminster Abbey.  It is a
plain marble slab, with no inscription.  Near this, there was a Saxon
monument of the date 870, with sculpture in relief upon it,--the memorial
of an Abbot Hedda, who was killed by the Danes when they destroyed the
monastery that preceded the abbey and church.  I remember, likewise, the
recumbent figure of the prelate, whose face has been quite obliterated by
Puritanic violence; and I think that there is not a single tomb older
than the parliamentary wars, which has not been in like manner battered
and shattered, except the Saxon abbot's just mentioned.  The most
pretentious monument remaining is that of a Mr. Deacon, a gentleman of
George I.'s time, in wig and breeches, leaning on his elbow, and resting
one hand upon a skull.  In the north aisle, precisely opposite to that of
Queen Mary, the attendant pointed out to us the slab beneath which lie
the ashes of Catharine of Aragon, the divorced queen of Henry VIII.

In the nave there was an ancient font, a venerable and beautiful relic,
which has been repaired not long ago, but in such a way as not to lessen
its individuality.  This sacred vessel suffered especial indignity from
Cromwell's soldiers; insomuch that if anything could possibly destroy its
sanctity, they would have effected that bad end.  On the eastern wall of
the nave, and near the entrance, hangs the picture of old Scarlet, the
sexton who buried both Mary of Scotland and Catharine of Aragon, and not
only these two queens, but everybody else in Peterborough, twice over.  I
think one feels a sort of enmity and spite against these grave-diggers,
who live so long, and seem to contract a kindred and partnership with
Death, being boon companions with him, and taking his part against
mankind.

In a chapel or some side apartment, there were two pieces of tapestry
wretchedly faded, the handiwork of two nuns, and copied from two of
Raphael's cartoons.

We now emerged from the cathedral, and walked round its exterior,
admiring it to our utmost capacity, and all the more because we had not
heard of it beforehand, and expected to see nothing so huge, majestic,
grand, and gray.  And of all the lovely closes that I ever beheld, that
of Peterborough Cathedral is to me the most delightful; so quiet it is,
so solemnly and nobly cheerful, so verdant, so sweetly shadowed, and so
presided over by the stately minster, and surrounded by ancient and
comely habitations of Christian men.  The most enchanting place, the most
enviable as a residence in all this world, seemed to me that of the
Bishop's secretary, standing in the rear of the cathedral, and bordering
on the churchyard; so that you pass through hallowed precincts in order
to come at it, and find it a Paradise, the holier and sweeter for the
dead men who sleep so near.  We looked through the gateway into the lawn,
which really seemed hardly to belong to this world, so bright and soft
the sunshine was, so fresh the grass, so lovely the trees, so trained and
refined and mellowed down was the whole nature of the spot, and so shut
in and guarded from all intrusion.  It is in vain to write about it;
nowhere but in England can there be such a spot, nor anywhere but in the
close of Peterborough Cathedral.


May 28th.--I walked up into the town this morning, and again visited the
cathedral.  On the way, I observed the Falcon Inn, a very old-fashioned
hostelry, with a thatched roof, and what looked like the barn door or
stable door in a side front.  Very likely it may have been an inn ever
since Queen Elizabeth's time.  The Guildhall, as I supposed it to be, in
the market-place, has a basement story entirely open on all sides, but
from its upper story it communicates with a large old house in the rear.
I have not seen an older-looking town than Peterborough; but there is
little that is picturesque about it, except within the domain of the
cathedral.  It was very fortunate for the beauty and antiquity of these
precincts, that Henry VIII. did not suffer the monkish edifices of the
abbey to be overthrown and utterly destroyed, as was the case with so
many abbeys, at the Reformation; but, converting the abbey church into a
cathedral, he preserved much of the other arrangement of the buildings
connected with it.  And so it happens that to this day we have the
massive and stately gateway, with its great pointed arch, still keeping
out the world from those who have inherited the habitations of the old
monks; for though the gate is never closed, one feels himself in a sacred
seclusion the instant he passes under the archway.  And everywhere there
are old houses that appear to have been adapted from the monkish
residences, or from their spacious offices, and made into convenient
dwellings for ecclesiastics, or vergers, or great or small people
connected with the cathedral; and with all modern comfort they still
retain much of the quaintness of the olden time,--arches, even rows of
arcades, pillars, walls, beautified with patches of Gothic sculpture, not
wilfully put on by modern taste, but lingering from a long past; deep
niches, let into the fronts of houses, and occupied by images of saints;
a growth of ivy, overspreading walls, and just allowing the windows to
peep through,--so that no novelty, nor anything of our hard, ugly, and
actual life comes into these limits, through the defences of the gateway,
without being mollified and modified.  Except in some of the old colleges
of Oxford, I have not seen any other place that impressed me in this way;
and the grounds of Peterborough Cathedral have the advantage over even
the Oxford colleges, insomuch that the life is here domestic,--that of
the family, that of the affections,--a natural life, which one deludes
himself with imagining may be made into something sweeter and purer in
this beautiful spot than anywhere else.  Doubtless the inhabitants find
it a stupid and tiresome place enough, and get morbid and sulky, and
heavy and obtuse of head and heart, with the monotony of their life.  But
still I must needs believe that a man with a full mind, and objects to
employ his affection, ought to be very happy here.  And perhaps the forms
and appliances of human life are never fit to make people happy until
they cease to be used for the purposes for which they were directly
intended, and are taken, as it were, in a sidelong application.  I mean
that the monks, probably, never enjoyed their own edifices while they
were a part of the actual life of the day, so much as these present
inhabitants now enjoy them when a new use has grown up apart from the
original one.

Towards noon we all walked into the town again, and on our way went into
the old church with the projecting portal, which I mentioned yesterday.
A woman came hastening with the keys when she saw us looking up at the
door.  The interior had an exceeding musty odor, and was very ancient,
with side aisles opening by a row of pointed arches into the nave, and a
gallery of wood on each side, and built across the two rows of arches.
It was paved with tombstones, and I suppose the dead people contributed
to the musty odor.  Very naked and unadorned it was, except with a few
mural monuments of no great interest.  We stayed but a little while, and
amply rewarded the poor woman with a sixpence.  Thence we proceeded to
the cathedral, pausing by the way to look at the old Guildhall, which is
no longer a Guildhall, but a butter-market; and then we bought some
prints of exterior and interior views of the Minster, of which there are
a great variety on note-paper, letter-sheets, large engravings, and
lithographs.  It is very beautiful; there seems to be nothing better than
to say this over again.  We found the doors most hospitably open, and
every part entirely free to us,--a kindness and liberality which we have
nowhere else experienced in England, whether as regards cathedrals or any
other public buildings.  My wife sat down to draw the font, and I walked
through the Lady Chapel meanwhile, pausing over the empty bed of Queen
Mary, and the grave of Queen Catharine, and looking at the rich and
sumptuous roof, where a fountain, as it were, of groins of arches spouts
from numberless pilasters, intersecting one another in glorious
intricacy.  Under the central tower, opening to either transept, to the
nave, and to the choir, are four majestic arches, which I think must
equal in height those of which I saw the ruins, and one, all but perfect,
at Furness Abbey.  They are about eighty feet high.

I may as well give up Peterborough here, though I hate to leave it
undescribed even to the tufts of yellow flowers, which grow on the
projections high out of reach, where the winds have sown their seeds in
soil made by the aged decay of the edifice.  I could write a page, too,
about the rooks or jackdaws that flit and clamor about the pinnacles, and
dart in and out of the eyelet-holes, the piercings,--whatever they are
called,--in the turrets and buttresses.  On our way back to the hotel,
J----- saw an advertisement of some knights in armor that were to tilt
to-day; so he and I waited, and by and by a procession appeared, passing
through the antique market-place, and in front of the abbey gateway,
which might have befitted the same spot three hundred years ago.  They
were about twenty men-at-arms on horseback, with lances and banners.  We
were a little too near for the full enjoyment of the spectacle; for,
though some of the armor was real, I could not help observing that other
suits were made of silver paper or gold tinsel.  A policeman (a queer
anomaly in reference to such a mediaeval spectacle) told us that they
were going to joust and run at the ring, in a field a little beyond the
bridge.



TO NOTTINGHAM.


May 28th.--We left Peterborough this afternoon, and, however reluctant to
leave the cathedral, we were glad to get away from the hotel; for, though
outwardly pretentious, it is a wretched and uncomfortable place, with
scanty table, poor attendance, and enormous charges.  The first stage of
our journey to-day was to Grantham, through a country the greater part of
which was as level as the Lincolnshire landscapes have been, throughout
our experience of them.  We saw several old villages, gathered round
their several churches; and one of these little communities, "Little
Byforth," had a very primitive appearance,--a group of twenty or thirty
dwellings of stone and thatch, without a house among them that could be
so modern as a hundred years.  It is a little wearisome to think of
people living from century to century in the same spot, going in and out
of the same doors, cultivating the same fields, meeting the same faces,
and marrying one another over and over again; and going to the same
church, and lying down in the same churchyard,--to appear again, and go
through the same monotonous round in the next generation.

At Grantham, our route branches off from the main line; and there was a
delay of about an hour, during which we walked up into the town, to take
a nearer view of a tall gray steeple which we saw from the railway
station.  The streets that led from the station were poor and
commonplace; and, indeed, a railway seems to have the effect of making
its own vicinity mean.  We noticed nothing remarkable until we got to the
marketplace, in the centre of which there is a cross, doubtless of great
antiquity, though it is in too good condition not to have been recently
repaired.  It consists of an upright pillar, with a pedestal of half a
dozen stone steps, which are worn hollow by the many feet that have
scraped their hobnailed shoes upon them.  Among these feet, it is highly
probable, may have been those of Sir Isaac Newton, who was a scholar of
the free school of this town; and when J----- scampered up the steps, we
told him so.  Visible from the market-place also stands the Angel Inn,
which seems to be a wonderfully old inn, being adorned with gargoyles and
other antique sculpture, with projecting windows, and an arched entrance,
and presenting altogether a frontispiece of so much venerable state that
I feel curious to know its history.  Had I been aware that the chief
hotel of Grantham were such a time-honored establishment, I should have
arranged to pass the night there, especially as there were interesting
objects enough in the town to occupy us pleasantly.  The church--the
steeple of which is seen over the market-place, but is removed from it by
a street or two--is very fine; the tower and spire being adorned with
arches, canopies, and niches,--twelve of the latter for the twelve
Apostles, all of whom have now vanished,--and with fragments of other
Gothic ornaments.  The jackdaws have taken up their abodes in the
crevices and crannies of the upper half of the steeple.

We left Grantham at nearly seven, and reached



NOTTINGHAM


just before eight.  The castle, situated on a high and precipitous rock,
directly over the edge of which look the walls, was visible, as we drove
from the station to our hotel.  We followed the advice of a railway
attendant in going first to the May Pole, which proved to be a commercial
inn, with the air of a drinking-shop, in a by-alley; and, furthermore,
they could not take us in.  So we drove to the George the Fourth, which
seems to be an excellent house; and here I have remained quiet, the size
of the town discouraging me from going out in the twilight which was fast
coming on after tea.  These are glorious long days for travel; daylight
fairly between four in the morning and nine at night, and a margin of
twilight on either side.


May 29th.--After breakfast, this morning, I wandered out and lost myself;
but at last found the post-office, and a letter from Mr. Wilding, with
some perplexing intelligence.  Nottingham is an unlovely and
uninteresting town.  The castle I did not see; but, I happened upon a
large and stately old church, almost cathedralic in its dimensions.  On
returning to the hotel, we deliberated on the mode of getting to Newstead
Abbey, and we finally decided upon taking a fly, in which conveyance,
accordingly, we set out before twelve.  It was a slightly overcast day,
about half intermixed of shade and sunshine, and rather cool, but not so
cool that we could exactly wish it warmer.  Our drive to Newstead lay
through what was once a portion of Sherwood Forest, though all of it, I
believe, has now become private property, and is converted into fertile
fields, except where the owners of estates have set out plantations.  We
have now passed out of the fen-country, and the land rises and falls in
gentle swells, presenting a pleasant, but not striking, character of
scenery.  I remember no remarkable object on the road,--here and there an
old inn, a gentleman's seat of moderate pretension, a great deal of tall
and continued hedge, a quiet English greenness and rurality, till,
drawing near



NEWSTEAD ABBEY,


we began to see copious plantations, principally of firs, larches, and
trees of that order, looking very sombre, though with some intermingling
of lighter foliage.  It was after one when we reached "The Hut,"--a
small, modern wayside inn, almost directly across the road from the
entrance-gate of Newstead.  The post-boy calls the distance ten miles
from Nottingham.  He also averred that it was forbidden to drive visitors
within the gates; so we left the fly at the inn, and set out to walk from
the entrance to the house.  There is no porter's lodge; and the grounds,
in this outlying region, had not the appearance of being very primly
kept, but were well wooded with evergreens, and much overgrown with
ferns, serving for cover for hares, which scampered in and out of their
hiding-places.  The road went winding gently along, and, at the distance
of nearly a mile, brought us to a second gate, through which we likewise
passed, and walked onward a good way farther, seeing much wood, but as
yet nothing of the Abbey.  At last, through the trees, we caught a
glimpse of its battlements, and saw, too, the gleam of water, and then
appeared the Abbey's venerable front.  It comprises the western wall of
the church, which is all that remains of that fabric,--a great, central
window, entirely empty, without tracery or mullions; the ivy clambering
up on the inside of the wall, and hanging over in front.  The front of
the inhabited part of the house extends along on a line with this church
wall, rather low, with battlements along its top, and all in good keeping
with the ruinous remnant.  We met a servant, who replied civilly to our
inquiries about the mode of gaining admittance, and bade us ring a bell
at the corner of the principal porch.  We rang accordingly, and were
forthwith admitted into a low, vaulted basement, ponderously wrought with
intersecting arches, dark and rather chilly, just like what I remember to
have seen at Battle Abbey; and, after waiting here a little while, a
respectable elderly gentlewoman appeared, of whom we requested to be
shown round the Abbey.  She courteously acceded, first presenting us to a
book in which to inscribe our names.

I suppose ten thousand people, three fourths of them Americans, have
written descriptions of Newstead Abbey; and none of them, so far as I
have read, give any true idea of the place; neither will my description,
if I write one.  In fact, I forget very much that I saw, and especially
in what order the objects came.  In the basement was Byron's bath,--a
dark and cold and cellarlike hole, which it must have required good
courage to plunge into; in this region, too, or near it, was the chapel,
which Colonel Wildman has decorously fitted up, and where service is now
regularly performed, but which was used as a dog's kennel in Byron's
time.

After seeing this, we were led to Byron's own bedchamber, which remains
just as when he slept in it,--the furniture and all the other
arrangements being religiously preserved.  It was in the plainest
possible style, homely, indeed, and almost mean,--an ordinary
paper-hanging, and everything so commonplace that it was only the deep
embrasure of the window that made it look unlike a bedchamber in a
middling-class lodging-house.  It would have seemed difficult,
beforehand, to fit up a room in that picturesque old edifice so that it
should be utterly void of picturesqueness; but it was effected in this
apartment, and I suppose it is a specimen of the way in which old
mansions used to be robbed of their antique character, and adapted to
modern tastes, before mediaeval antiquities came into fashion.  Some
prints of the Cambridge colleges, and other pictures indicating Byron's
predilections at the time, and which he himself had hung there, were on
the walls.  This, the housekeeper told us, had been the Abbot's chamber,
in the monastic time.  Adjoining it is the haunted room, where the
ghostly monk, whom Byron introduces into Don Juan, is said to have his
lurking-place.  It is fitted up in the same style as Byron's, and used to
be occupied by his valet or page.  No doubt in his Lordship's day, these
were the only comfortable bedrooms in the Abbey; and by the housekeeper's
account of what Colonel Wildman has done, it is to be inferred that the
place must have been in a most wild, shaggy, tumble-down condition,
inside and out, when he bought it.

It is very different now.  After showing us these two apartments of Byron
and his servant, the housekeeper led us from one to another and another
magnificent chamber fitted up in antique style, with oak panelling, and
heavily carved bedsteads, of Queen Elizabeth's time, or of the Stuarts,
hung with rich tapestry curtains of similar date, and with beautiful old
cabinets of carved wood, sculptured in relief, or tortoise-shell and
ivory.  The very pictures and realities, these rooms were, of stately
comfort; and they were called by the name of kings,--King Edward's, King
Charles II's, King Henry VII's chamber; and they were hung with beautiful
pictures, many of them portraits of these kings.  The chimney-pieces were
carved and emblazoned; and all, so far as I could judge, was in perfect
keeping, so that if a prince or noble of three centuries ago were to come
to lodge at Newstead Abbey, he would hardly know that he had strayed out
of his own century.  And yet he might have known by some token, for there
are volumes of poetry and light literature on the tables in these royal
bedchambers, and in that of Henry VII.  I saw The House of the Seven
Gables and The Scarlet Letter in Routledge's edition.

Certainly the house is admirably fitted up; and there must have been
something very excellent and comprehensive in the domestic arrangements
of the monks, since they adapt themselves so well to a state of society
entirely different from that in which they originated.  The library is a
very comfortable room, and provocative of studious ideas, though lounging
and luxurious.  It is long, and rather low, furnished with soft couches,
and, on the whole, though a man might dream of study, I think he would be
most likely to read nothing but novels there.  I know not what the room
was in monkish times, but it was waste and ruinous in Lord Byron's.
Here, I think, the housekeeper unlocked a beautiful cabinet, and took out
the famous skull which Lord Byron transformed into a drinking-goblet.  It
has a silver rim and stand, but still the ugly skull is bare and evident,
and the naked inner bone receives the wine.  I should think it would hold
at least a quart,--enough to overpower any living head into which this
death's-head should transfer its contents; and a man must be either very
drunk or very thirsty, before he would taste wine out of such a goblet.
I think Byron's freak was outdone by that of a cousin of my own, who once
solemnly assured me that he had a spittoon made out of the skull of his
enemy.  The ancient coffin in which the goblet-skull was found was shown
us in the basement of the Abbey.

There was much more to see in the house than I had any previous notion
of; but except the two chambers already noticed, nothing remained the
least as Byron left it.  Yes, another place there was,--his own small
dining-room, with a table of moderate size, where, no doubt, the
skull-goblet has often gone its rounds.  Colonel Wildman's dining-room
was once Byron's shooting-gallery, and the original refectory of the
monks.  It is now magnificently arranged, with a vaulted roof, a
music-gallery at one end, suits of armor and weapons on the walls, and
mailed arms extended, holding candelabras.  There are one or two painted
windows, commemorative of the Peninsular war, and the battles in which
the Colonel and his two brothers fought,--for these Wildmen seem to
have been mighty troopers, and Colonel Wildman is represented as a
fierce-looking mustachioed hussar at two different ages.  The housekeeper
spoke of him affectionately, but says that he is now getting into years,
and that they fancy him failing.  He has no children.  He appears to have
been on good terms with Byron, and had the latter ever returned to
England, he was under promise to make his first visit to his old home,
and it was in such an expectation that Colonel Wildman had kept Byron's
private apartments in the same condition in which he found them.  Byron
was informed of all the Colonel's fittings up and restorations, and when
he introduces the Abbey in Don Juan, the poet describes it, not as he
himself left it, but as Colonel Wildman has restored it.  There is a
beautiful drawing-room, and all these apartments are adorned with
pictures, the collection being especially rich in portraits by Sir Peter
Lely,--that of Nell Gwynn being one, who is one of the few beautiful
women whom I have seen on canvas.

We parted with the housekeeper, and I with a good many shillings, at the
door by which we entered; and our next business was to see the private
grounds and gardens.  A little boy attended us through the first part of
our progress, but soon appeared the veritable gardener,--a shrewd and
sensible old man, who has been very many years on the place.  There was
nothing of special interest as concerning Byron until we entered the
original old monkish garden, which is still laid out in the same fashion
as the monks left it, with a large, oblong piece of water in the centre,
and terraced banks rising at two or three different stages with perfect
regularity around it; so that the sheet of water looks like the plate of
an immense looking-glass, of which the terraces form the frame.  It seems
as if, were there any giant large enough, he might raise up this mirror
and set it on end.  In the monks' garden, there is a marble statue of
Pan, which, the gardener told us, was brought by the "Wicked Lord"
(great-uncle of Byron) from Italy, and was supposed by the country people
to represent the Devil, and to be the object of his worship,--a natural
idea enough, in view of his horns and cloven feet and tail, though this
indicates, at all events, a very jolly devil.  There is also a female
statue, beautiful from the waist upward, but shaggy and cloven-footed
below, and holding a little cloven-footed child by the hand.  This, the
old gardener assured us, was Pandora, wife of the above-mentioned Pan,
with her son.  Not far from this spot, we came to the tree on which Byron
carved his own name and that of his sister Augusta.  It is a tree of twin
stems,--a birch-tree, I think,--growing up side by side.  One of the
stems still lives and flourishes, but that on which he carved the two
names is quite dead, as if there had been something fatal in the
inscription that has made it forever famous.  The names are still very
legible, although the letters had been closed up by the growth of the
bark before the tree died.  They must have been deeply cut at first.

There are old yew-trees of unknown antiquity in this garden, and many
other interesting things; and among them may be reckoned a fountain of
very pure water, called the "Holy Well," of which we drank.  There are
several fountains, besides the large mirror in the centre of the garden;
and these are mostly inhabited by carp, the genuine descendants of those
which peopled the fish-ponds in the days of the monks.  Coming in front
of the Abbey, the gardener showed us the oak that Byron planted, now a
vigorous young tree; and the monument which he erected to his
Newfoundland dog, and which is larger than most Christians get, being
composed of a marble, altar-shaped tomb, surrounded by a circular area of
steps, as much as twenty feet in diameter.  The gardener said, however,
that Byron intended this, not merely as the burial-place of his dog, but
for himself too, and his sister.  I know not how this may have been, but
this inconvenience would have attended his being buried there, that, on
transfer of the estate, his mortal remains would have become the property
of some other man.

We had now come to the empty space,--a smooth green lawn, where had once
been the Abbey church.  The length had been sixty-four yards, the
gardener said, and within his remembrance there had been many remains of
it, but now they are quite removed, with the exception of the one
ivy-grown western wall, which, as I mentioned, forms a picturesque part
of the present front of the Abbey.  Through a door in this wall the
gardener now let us out. . . . .

In the evening our landlady, who seems to be a very intelligent woman, of
a superior class to most landladies, came into our parlor, while I was
out, and talked about the present race of Byrons and Lovelaces, who have
often been at this house.  There seems to be a taint in the Byron blood
which makes those who inherit it wicked, mad, and miserable.  Even
Colonel Wildman comes in for a share of this ill luck, for he has almost
ruined himself by his expenditure on the estate, and by his lavish
hospitality, especially to the Duke of Sussex, who liked the Colonel, and
used often to visit him during his lifetime, and his Royal Highness's
gentlemen ate and drank Colonel Wildman almost up.  So says our good
landlady.  At any rate, looking at this miserable race of Byrons, who
held the estate so long, and at Colonel Wildman, whom it has ruined in
forty years, we might see grounds for believing in the evil fate which is
supposed to attend confiscated church property.  Nevertheless, I would
accept the estate, were it offered me.

. . . . Glancing back, I see that I have omitted some items that were
curious in describing the house; for instance, one of the cabinets had
been the personal property of Queen Elizabeth.  It seems to me that the
fashion of modern furniture has nothing to equal these old cabinets for
beauty and convenience.  In the state apartments, the floors were so
highly waxed and polished that we slid on them as if on ice, and could
only make sure of our footing by treading on strips of carpeting that
were laid down.


June 7th.--We left Nottingham a week ago, and made our first stage to
Derby, where we had to wait an hour or two at a great, bustling,
pell-mell, crowded railway station.  It was much thronged with second and
third class passengers, coming and departing in continual trains; for
these were the Whitsuntide holidays, which set all the lower orders of
English people astir.  This time of festival was evidently the origin of
the old "Election" holidays in Massachusetts; the latter occurring at the
same period of the year, and being celebrated (so long as they could be
so) in very much the same way, with games, idleness, merriment of set
purpose, and drunkenness.  After a weary while we took the train for



MATLOCK,


via Ambergate, and arrived of the former place late in the afternoon.
The village of Matlock is situated on the banks of the Derwent, in a
delightful little nook among the hills, which rise above it in steeps,
and in precipitous crags, and shut out the world so effectually that I
wonder how the railway ever found it out.  Indeed, it does make its
approach to this region through a long tunnel.  It was a beautiful, sunny
afternoon when we arrived, and my present impressions are, that I have
never seen anywhere else such exquisite scenery as that which surrounds
the village.  The street itself, to be sure, is commonplace enough, and
hot, dusty, and disagreeable; but if you look above it, or on either
side, there are green hills descending abruptly down, and softened with
woods, amid which are seen villas, cottages, castles; and beyond the
river is a line of crags, perhaps three hundred feet high, clothed with
shrubbery in some parts from top to bottom, but in other places
presenting a sheer precipice of rock, over which tumbles, as it were, a
cascade of ivy and creeping plants.  It is very beautiful, and, I might
almost say, very wild; but it has those characteristics of finish, and of
being redeemed from nature, and converted into a portion of the adornment
of a great garden, which I find in all English scenery.  Not that I
complain of this; on the contrary, there is nothing that delights an
American more, in contrast with the roughness and ruggedness of his
native scenes,--to which, also, he might be glad to return after a while.

We put up at the old Bath Hotel,--an immense house, with passages of such
extent that at first it seemed almost a day's journey from parlor to
bedroom.  The house stands on a declivity, and after ascending one pair
of stairs, we came, in travelling along the passageway, to a door that
opened upon a beautifully arranged garden, with arbors and grottos, and
the hillside rising steep above.  During all the time of our stay at
Matlock there was brilliant sunshine, and, the grass and foliage being in
their freshest and most luxuriant phase, the place has left as bright a
picture as I have anywhere in my memory.

The morning after our arrival we took a walk, and, following the sound of
a church-bell, entered what appeared to be a park, and, passing along a
road at the base of a line of crags, soon came in sight of a beautiful
church.  I rather imagine it to be the place of worship of the Arkwright
family, whose seat is in this vicinity,--the descendants of the famous
Arkwright who contributed so much towards turning England into a cotton
manufactory.  We did not enter the church, but passed beyond it, and over
a bridge, and along a road that ascended among the hills and finally
brought us out by a circuit to the other end of Matlock village, after a
walk of three or four miles.  In the afternoon we took a boat across the
Derwent,--a passage which half a dozen strokes of the oars accomplished,
--and reached a very pleasant seclusion called "The Lovers' Walk."  A
ferriage of twopence pays for the transit across the river, and gives the
freedom of these grounds, which are threaded with paths that meander and
zigzag to the top of the precipitous ridge, amid trees and shrubbery, and
the occasional ease of rustic seats.  It is a sweet walk for lovers, and
was so for us; although J-----, with his scramblings and disappearances,
and shouts from above, and headlong scamperings down the precipitous
paths, occasionally frightened his mother.  After gaining the heights,
the path skirts along the precipice, allowing us to see down into the
village street, and, nearer, the Derwent winding through the valley so
close beneath us that we might have flung a stone into it.  These crags
would be very rude and harsh if left to themselves, but they are quite
softened and made sweet and tender by the great deal of foliage that
clothes their sides, and creeps and clambers over them, only letting a
stern face of rock be seen here and there, and with a smile rather than a
frown.

The next day, Monday, we went to see the grand cavern.  The entrance is
high up on the hillside, whither we were led by a guide, of whom there
are many, and they all pay tribute to the proprietor of the cavern.
There is a small shed by the side of the cavern mouth, where the guide
provided himself and us with tallow candles, and then led us into the
darksome and ugly pit, the entrance of which is not very imposing, for it
has a door of rough pine boards, and is kept under lock and key.  This is
the disagreeable phase-one of the disagreeable phases--of man's conquest
over nature in England,--cavern mouths shut up with cellar doors,
cataracts under lock and key, precipitous crags compelled to figure in
ornamented gardens,--and all accessible at a fixed amount of shillings or
pence.  It is not possible to draw a full free breath under such
circumstances.  When you think of it, it makes the wildest scenery look
like the artificial rock-work which Englishmen are so fond of displaying
in the little bit of grass-plot under their suburban parlor windows.
However, the cavern was dreary enough and wild enough, though in a mean
sort of way; for it is but a long series of passages and crevices,
generally so narrow that you scrape your elbows, and so low that you hit
your head.  It has nowhere a lofty height, though sometimes it broadens
out into ample space, but not into grandeur, the roof being always within
reach, and in most places smoky with the tallow candles that have been
held up to it.  A very dirty, sordid, disagreeable burrow, more like a
cellar gone mad than anything else; but it served to show us how the
crust of the earth is moulded.  This cavern was known to the Romans, and
used to be worked by them as a lead-mine.  Derbyshire spar is now taken
from it; and in some of its crevices the gleam of the tallow candles is
faintly reflected from the crystallizations; but, on the whole, I felt
like a mole, as I went creeping along, and was glad when we came into the
sunshine again.  I rather think my idea of a cavern is taken from the one
in the Forty Thieves, or in Gil Blas,--a vast, hollow womb, roofed and
curtained with obscurity.  This reality is very mean.

Leaving the cavern, we went to the guide's cottage, situated high above
the village, where he showed us specimens of ornaments and toys
manufactured by himself from Derbyshire spar and other materials.  There
was very pretty mosaic work, flowers of spar, and leaves of malachite,
and miniature copies of Cleopatra's Needle, and other Egyptian monuments,
and vases of graceful pattern, brooches, too, and many other things.  The
most valuable spar is called Blue John, and is only to be found in one
spot, where, also, the supply is said to be growing scant.  We bought a
number of articles, and then came homeward, still with our guide, who
showed us, on the way, the Romantic Rocks.  These are some crags which
have been rent away and stand insulated from the hillside, affording a
pathway between it and then; while the places can yet be seen where the
sundered rocks would fit into the craggy hill if there were but a Titan
strong enough to adjust them again.  It is a very picturesque spot, and
the price for seeing it is twopence; though in our case it was included
in the four shillings which we had paid for seeing the cavern.  The
representative men of England are the showmen and the policemen; both
very good people in their way.

Returning to the hotel, J----- and his mother went through the village to
the river, near the railway, where J----- set himself to fishing, and
caught three minnows.  I followed, after a while, to fetch them back, and
we called into one or two of the many shops in the village, which have
articles manufactured of the spar for sale.  Some of these are nothing
short of magnificent.  There was an inlaid table, valued at sixty
guineas, and a splendid ornament for any drawing-room; another, inlaid
with the squares of a chess-board.  We heard of a table in the possession
of the Marquis of Westminster, the value of which is three hundred
guineas.  It would be easy and pleasant to spend a great deal of money in
such things as we saw there; but all our purchases in Matlock did not
amount to more than twenty shillings, invested in brooches, shawl-pins,
little vases and toys, which will be valuable to us as memorials on the
other side of the water.  After this, we visited a petrifying cave, of
which there are several hereabouts.  The process of petrifaction requires
some months, or perhaps a year or two, varying with the size of the
article to be operated upon.  The articles are placed in the cave, under
the drippings from the roof, and a hard deposit is formed upon them, and
sometimes, as in the case of a bird's-nest, causes a curious result,--
every straw and hair being immortalized and stiffened into stone.  A
horse's head was in process of petrifaction; and J----- bought a broken
eggshell for a penny, though larger articles are expensive.  The process
would appear to be entirely superficial,--a mere crust on the outside of
things,--but we saw some specimens of petrified oak, where the stony
substance seemed to be intimately incorporated with the wood, and to have
really changed it into stone.  These specimens were immensely ponderous,
and capable of a high polish, which brought out beautiful streaks and
shades.

One might spend a very pleasant summer in Matlock, and I think there can
be no more beautiful place in the world; but we left it that afternoon,
and railed to Manchester, where we arrived between ten and eleven at
night.  The next day I left S----- to go to the Art Exhibition, and took
J----- with me to Liverpool, where I had an engagement that admitted of
no delay.  Thus ended our tour, in which we had seen but a little bit of
England, yet rich with variety and interest.  What a wonderful land!  It
is our forefathers' land; our land, for I will not give up such a
precious inheritance.  We are now back again in flat and sandy Southport,
which, during the past week, has been thronged with Whitsuntide people,
who crowd the streets, and pass to and fro along the promenade, with a
universal and monotonous air of nothing to do, and very little enjoyment.
It is a pity that poor folks cannot employ their little hour of leisure
to better advantage, in a country where the soil is so veined with gold.

These are delightfully long days.  Last night, at half past nine, I could
read with perfect ease in parts of the room remote from the window; and
at nearly half past eleven there was a broad sheet of daylight in the
west, gleaming brightly over the plashy sands.  I question whether there
be any total night at this season.


June 21st.--Southport, I presume, is now in its most vivid aspect; there
being a multitude of visitors here, principally of the middling classes,
and a frequent crowd, whom I take to be working-people from Manchester
and other factory towns.  It is the strangest place to come to for the
pleasures of the sea, of which we scarcely have a glimpse from month's
end to mouth's end, nor any fresh, exhilarating breath from it, but a
lazy, languid atmosphere, brooding over the waste of sands; or even if
there be a sulky and bitter wind blowing along the promenade, it still
brings no salt elixir.  I never was more weary of a place in all my life,
and never felt such a disinterested pity as for the people who come here
for pleasure.  Nevertheless, the town has its amusements; in the first
place, the daylong and perennial one of donkey-riding along the sands,
large parties of men and girls pottering along together; the Flying
Dutchman trundles hither and thither when there is breeze enough; an arch
cry-man sets up his targets on the beach; the bathing-houses stand by
scores and fifties along the shore, and likewise on the banks of the
Ribble, a mile seaward; the hotels have their billiard-rooms; there is a
theatre every evening; from morning till night comes a succession of
organ-grinders, playing interminably under your window; and a man with a
bassoon and a monkey, who takes your pennies and pulls off his cap in
acknowledgment; and wandering minstrels, with guitar and voice; and a
Highland bagpipe, squealing out a tangled skein of discord, together with
a Highland maid, who dances a hornpipe; and Punch and Judy,--in a word,
we have specimens of all manner of vagrancy that infests England.  In
these long days, and long and pleasant ones, the promenade is at its
liveliest about nine o'clock, which is but just after sundown; and our
little R----- finds it difficult to go to sleep amid so much music as
comes to her ears from bassoon, bagpipe, organ, guitar, and now and then
a military band.  One feature of the place is the sick and infirm people,
whom we see dragged along in bath-chairs, or dragging their own limbs
languidly; or sitting on benches; or meeting in the streets, and making
acquaintance on the strength of mutual maladies,--pale men leaning on
their ruddy wives; cripples, three or four together in a ring, and
planting their crutches in the centre.  I don't remember whether I have
ever mentioned among the notabilities of Southport the Town Crier,--a
meek-looking old man, who sings out his messages in a most doleful tone,
as if he took his title in a literal sense, and were really going to cry,
or crying in the world's behalf; one other stroller, a foreigner with a
dog, shaggy round the head and shoulders, and closely shaven behind.  The
poor little beast jumped through hoops, ran about on two legs of one
side, danced on its hind legs, or on its fore paws, with its hind ones
straight up in the air,--all the time keeping a watch on his master's
eye, and evidently mindful of many a beating.


June 25th.--The war-steamer Niagara came up the Mersey a few days since,
and day before yesterday Captain Hudson called at my office,--a somewhat
meagre, elderly gentleman, of simple and hearty manners and address,
having his purser, Mr. Eldredge, with him, who, I think, rather prides
himself upon having a Napoleonic profile.  The captain is an old
acquaintance of Mrs. Blodgett, and has cone ashore principally with a
view to calling on her; so, after we had left our cards for the Mayor, I
showed these naval gentlemen the way to her house.  Mrs. Blodgett and
Miss W------ were prodigiously glad to see him and they all three began
to talk of old times and old acquaintances; for when Mrs. Blodgett was a
rich lady at Gibraltar, she used to have the whole navy-list at her
table,--young midshipmen and lieutenants then perhaps, but old, gouty,
paralytic commodores now, if still even partly alive.  It was arranged
that Mrs. Blodgett, with as many of the ladies of her family as she chose
to bring, should accompany me on my official visit to the ship the next
day; and yesterday we went accordingly, Mrs. Blodgett, Miss W------, and
six or seven American captains' wives, their husbands following in
another boat.  I know too little of ships to describe one, or even to
feel any great interest in the details of this or of any other ship; but
the nautical people seemed to see much to admire.  She lay in the Sloyne,
in the midst of a broad basin of the Mersey, with a pleasant landscape of
green England, now warm with summer sunshine, on either side, with
churches and villa residences, and suburban and rural beauty.  The
officers of the ship are gentlemanly men, externally very well mannered,
although not polished and refined to any considerable extent.  At least,
I have not found naval men so, in general; but still it is pleasant to
see Americans who are not stirred by such motives as usually interest our
countrymen,--no hope nor desire of growing rich, but planting their
claims to respectability on other grounds, and therefore acquiring a
certain nobleness, whether it be inherent in their nature or no.  It
always seems to me they look down upon civilians with quiet and not
ill-natured scorn, which one has the choice of smiling or being provoked
at.  It is not a true life which they lead, but shallow and aimless; and
unsatisfactory it must be to the better minds among them; nor do they
appear to profit by what would seem the advantages presented to them in
their world-wide, though not world-deep experience.  They get to be very
clannish too.

After seeing the ship, we landed, all of us, ladies and captain, and went
to the gardens of the Rock Ferry Hotel, where J----- and I stayed behind
the rest.



TO SCOTLAND.


June 28th.--On the 26th my wife, J-----, and I left Southport, taking the
train for Preston, and as we had to stop an hour or two before starting
for Carlisle, I walked up into the town.  The street through which most
of my walk lay was brick-built, lively, bustling, and not particularly
noteworthy; but, turning a little way down another street, the town had a
more ancient aspect.  The day was intensely hot, the sun lying bright and
broad as ever I remember it in an American city; so that I was glad to
get back again to the shade and shelter of the station.  The heat and
dust, moreover, made our journey to Carlisle very uncomfortable.  It was
through very pretty, and sometimes picturesque scenery, being on the
confines of the hill-country, which we could see on our left, dim and
blue; and likewise we had a refreshing breath from the sea in passing
along the verge of Morecambe Bay.  We reached Carlisle at about five
o'clock, and, after taking tea at the Bush Hotel, set forth to look at
the town.

The notable objects were a castle and a cathedral; and we first found our
way to the castle, which stands on elevated ground, on the side of the
city towards Scotland.  A broad, well-constructed path winds round the
castle at the base of the wall, on the verge of a steep descent to the
plain beneath, through which winds the river Eden.  Along this path we
walked quite round the castle, a circuit of perhaps half a mile,--
pleasant, being shaded by the castle's height and by the foliage of
trees.  The walls have been so much rebuilt and restored that it is only
here and there that we see an old buttress, or a few time-worn stones
intermixed with the new facing with which the aged substance is overlaid.
The material is red freestone, which seems to be very abundant in this
part of the country.  We found no entrance to the castle till the path
had led us from the free and airy country into a very mean part of the
town, where the wretched old houses thrust themselves between us and the
castle wall, and then, passing through a narrow street, we walked up what
appeared like a by-lane, and the portal of the castle was before us.
There was a sentry-box just within the gate, and a sentinel was on guard,
for Carlisle Castle is a national fortress, and has usually been a depot
for arms and ammunition.  The sergeant, or corporal of the guard, sat
reading within the gateway, and, on my request for admittance, he civilly
appointed one of the soldiers to conduct us to the castle.  As I
recollect, the chief gateway of the castle, with the guard-room in the
thickness of the wall, is situated some twenty yards behind the first
entrance where we met the sentinel.

It was an intelligent young soldier who showed as round the castle, and
very civil, as I always find soldiers to be.  He had not anything
particularly interesting to show, nor very much to say about it; and what
be did say, so far as it referred to the history of the castle, was
probably apocryphal.

The castle has an inner and outer ward on the descent of the hill; and
included within the circuit of the exterior wall.  Having been always
occupied by soldiers, it has not been permitted to assume the picturesque
aspect of a ruin, but the buildings of the interior have either been
constantly repaired, as they required it, or have been taken down when
past repair.  We saw a small part of the tower where Mary, Queen of
Scots, was confined on her first coming to England; these remains consist
only of a portion of a winding stone staircase, at which we glanced
through a window.  The keep is very large and massive, and, no doubt, old
in its inner substance.  We ascended to the castle walls, and looked out
over the river towards the Scottish hills, which are visible in the
distance,--the Scottish border being not more than eight or nine miles
off.  Carlisle Castle has stood many sieges, and witnessed many battles
under its walls.  There are now, on its ramparts, only some half a dozen
old-fashioned guns, which our soldier told us had gone quite out of use
in these days.  They were long iron twelve-pounders, with one or two
carronades.  The soldier was of an artillery regiment, and wore the
Crimean medal.  He said the garrison now here consists only of about
twenty men, all of whom had served in the Crimea, like himself.  They
seem to lead a very dull and monotonous life, as indeed it must be,
without object or much hope, or any great employment of the present, like
prisoners, as indeed they are.  Our guide showed us on the rampart a
place where the soldiers had been accustomed to drop themselves down at
night, hanging by their hands from the top of the wall, and alighting on
their feet close beside the path on the outside.  The height seemed at
least that of an ordinary house, but the soldier said that nine times out
of ten the fall might be ventured without harm; and he spoke from
experience, having himself got out of the castle in this manner.  The
place is now boarded up, so as to make egress difficult or impossible.

The castle, after all, was not particularly worth seeing.  The soldier's
most romantic story was of a daughter of Lord Scroope, a former governor
of the castle, when Mary of Scotland was confined here.  She attempted to
assist the Queen in escaping, but was shot dead in the gateway by the
warder; and the soldier pointed out the very spot where the poor young
lady fell and died;--all which would be very interesting were there a
word of truth in the story.  But we liked our guide for his intelligence,
simplicity, and for the pleasure which he seemed to take, as an episode
of his dull daily life, in talking to strangers.  He observed that the
castle walls were solid, and, indeed, there was breadth enough to drive a
coach and four along the top; but the artillery of the Crimea would have
shelled them into ruins in a very few hours.  When we got back to the
guard-house, he took us inside, and showed the dismal and comfortless
rooms where soldiers are confined for drunkenness, and other offences
against military laws, telling us that he himself had been confined
there, and almost perished with cold.  I should not much wonder if he
were to get into durance again, through misuse of the fee which I put
into his hand at parting.

The cathedral is at no great distance from the castle; and though the
streets are mean and sordid in the vicinity, the close has the antique
repose and shadowy peace, at once domestic and religious, which seem
peculiar and universal in cathedral closes.  The foundation of this
cathedral church is very ancient, it having been the church portion of an
old abbey, the refectory and other remains of which are still seen around
the close.  But the whole exterior of the building, except here and
there a buttress, and one old patch of gray stones, seems to have been
renewed within a very few years with red freestone; and, really, I think
it is all the more beautiful for being new,--the ornamental parts being
so sharply cut, and the stone, moreover, showing various shadings, which
will disappear when it gets weatherworn.  There is a very large and fine
east window, of recent construction, wrought with delicate stone tracery.
The door of the south transept stood open, though barred by an iron
grate.  We looked in, and saw a few monuments on the wall, but found
nobody to give us admittance.  The portal of this entrance is very lovely
with wreaths of stone foliage and flowers round the arch, recently
carved; yet not so recently but that the swallows have given their
sanction to it, as if it were a thousand years old, and have built their
nests in the deeply carved recesses.  While we were looking, a little
bird flew into the small opening between two of these petrified flowers,
behind which was his nest, quite out of sight.  After some attempts to
find the verger, we went back to the hotel. . . . .

In the morning my wife and J----- went back to see the interior of the
cathedral, while I strayed at large about the town, again passing round
the castle site, and thence round the city, where I found some
inconsiderable portions of the wall which once girt it about.  It was
market-day in Carlisle, and the principal streets were much thronged with
human life and business on that account; and in as busy a street as any
stands a marble statue, in robes of antique state, fitter for a niche in
Westminster Abbey than for the thronged street of a town.  It is a statue
of the Earl of Lonsdale, Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland, who died about
twenty years ago.

[Here follows the record of the visits to the "Haunts of Burns," already
published in Our Old Home.--ED.]



GLASGOW.


July 1st.--Immediately after our arrival yesterday, we went out and
inquired our way to the cathedral, which we reached through a good deal
of Scotch dirt, and a rabble of Scotch people of all sexes and ages.  The
women of Scotland have a faculty of looking exceedingly ugly as they grow
old.  The cathedral I have already noticed in the record of my former
visit to Scotland.  I did it no justice then, nor shall do it any better
justice now; but it is a fine old church, although it makes a colder and
severer impression than most of the Gothic architecture which I have
elsewhere seen.  I do not know why this should be so; for portions of it
are wonderfully rich, and everywhere there are arches opening beyond
arches, and clustered pillars and groined roofs, and vistas, lengthening
along the aisles.  The person who shows it is an elderly man of jolly
aspect and demeanor; he is enthusiastic about the edifice, and makes it
the thought and object of his life; and being such a merry sort of man,
always saying something mirthfully, and yet, in all his thoughts, words,
and actions, having reference to this solemn cathedral, he has the effect
of one of the corbels or gargoyles,--those ludicrous, strange sculptures
which the Gothic architects appended to their arches.

The upper portion of the minster, though very stately and beautiful, is
not nearly so extraordinary as the crypts.  Here the intricacy of the
arches, and the profound system on which they are arranged, is
inconceivable, even when you see them,--a whole company of arches uniting
in one keystone; arches uniting to form a glorious canopy over the shrine
or tomb of a prelate; arches opening through and beyond one another,
whichever way you look,-- all amidst a shadowy gloom, yet not one detail
wrought out the less beautifully and delicately because it could scarcely
be seen.  The wreaths of flowers that festoon one of the arches are cut
in such relief that they do but just adhere to the stone on which they
grow.  The pillars are massive, and the arches very low, the effect being
a twilight, which at first leads the spectator to imagine himself
underground; but by and by I saw that the sunshine came in through the
narrow windows, though it scarcely looked like sunshine then.  For many
years these crypts were used as burial-ground, and earth was brought in,
for the purpose of making graves; so that the noble columns were half
buried, and the beauty of the architecture quite lost and forgotten.  Now
the dead men's bones and the earth that covered them have all been
removed, leaving the original pavement of the crypt, or a new one in its
stead, with only the old relics of saints, martyrs, and heroes
underneath, where they have lain so long that they have become a part of
the spot. . . . . I was quite chilled through, and the old verger
regretted that we had not come during the late hot weather, when the
everlasting damp and chill of the spot would have made us entirely
comfortable.  These crypts originated in the necessity of keeping the
floor of the upper cathedral on one level, the edifice being built on a
declivity, and the height of the crypt being measured by the descent of
the site.

After writing the above, we walked out and saw something of the newer
portion of Glasgow; and, really, I am inclined to think it the stateliest
of cities.  The Exchange and other public buildings, and the shops in
Buchanan Street, are very magnificent; the latter, especially, excelling
those of London.  There is, however, a pervading sternness and grimness
resulting from the dark gray granite, which is the universal
building-material both of the old and new edifices.  Later in the
forenoon we again walked out, and went along Argyle Street, and through
the Trongate and the Salt-Market.  The two latter were formerly the
principal business streets, and together with High Street, the abode of
the rich merchants and other great people of the town.  High Street, and,
still more, the Salt-Market, now swarm with the lower orders to a degree
which I never witnessed elsewhere; so that it is difficult to make one's
way among the sullen and unclean crowd, and not at all pleasant to
breathe in the noisomeness of the atmosphere.  The children seem to have
been unwashed from birth.  Some of the gray houses appear to have once
been stately and handsome, and have their high gable ends notched at the
edges, like a flight of stairs.  We saw the Tron steeple, and the
statue of King William III., and searched for the Old Tolbooth. . . . .
Wandering up the High Street, we turned once more into the quadrangle of
the University, and mounted a broad stone staircase which ascends square,
and with right-angular turns on one corner, on the outside of the
edifices.  It is very striking in appearance, being ornamented with a
balustrade, on which are large globes of stone, and a great lion and
unicorn curiously sculptured on the opposite side.  While we waited here,
staring about us, a man approached, and offered to show us the interior.
He seemed to be in charge of the College buildings.  We accepted his
offer, and were led first up this stone staircase, and into a large and
stately hall, panelled high towards the ceiling with dark oak, and
adorned with elaborately carved cornices, and other wood-work.  There was
a long reading-table towards one end of the hall, on which were laid
pamphlets and periodicals; and a venerable old gentleman, with white head
and bowed shoulders, sat there reading a newspaper.  This was the
Principal of the University, and as he looked towards us graciously, yet
as if expecting some explanation of our entrance, I approached and
apologized for intruding on the plea of our being strangers and anxious
to see the College.  He made a courteous response, though in exceedingly
decayed and broken accents, being now eighty-six years old, and gave us
free leave to inspect everything that was to be seen.  This hall was
erected two years after the Restoration of Charles II., and has been the
scene, doubtless, of many ceremonials and high banquetings since that
period; and, among other illustrious personages, Queen Victoria has
honored it with her presence.  Thence we went into several recitation or
lecture rooms in various parts of the buildings; but they were all of an
extreme plainness, very unlike the rich old Gothic libraries and chapels
and halls which we saw in Oxford.  Indeed, the contrast between this
Scotch severity and that noble luxuriance, and antique majesty, and rich
and sweet repose of Oxford, is very remarkable, both within the edifices
and without.  But we saw one or two curious things,--for instance, a
chair of mahogany, elaborately carved with the arms of Scotland and other
devices, and having a piece of the kingly stone of Scone inlaid in its
seat.  This chair is used by the Principal on certain high occasions, and
we ourselves, of course, sat down in it.  Our guide assigned to it a date
preposterously earlier than could have been the true one, judging either
by the character of the carving or by the fact that mahogany has not been
known or used much more than a century and a half.

Afterwards he led us into the Divinity Hall, where, he said, there were
some old portraits of historic people, and among them an original picture
of Mary, Queen of Scots.  There was, indeed, a row of old portraits at
each end of the apartment,--for instance, Zachariah Boyd, who wrote the
rhyming version of the Bible, which is still kept, safe from any critical
eye, in the library of the University to which he presented this, besides
other more valuable benefactions,--for which they have placed his bust in
a niche in the principal quadrangle; also, John Knox makes one of the row
of portraits; and a dozen or two more of Scotch worthies, all very dark
and dingy.  As to the picture of Mary of Scotland, it proved to be not
hers at all, but a picture of Queen Mary, the consort of William III.,
whose portrait, together with that of her sister, Queen Anne, hangs in
the same row.  We told our guide this, but he seemed unwilling to accept
it as a fact.  There is a museum belonging to the University; but this,
for some reason or other, could not be shown to us just at this time, and
there was little else to show.  We just looked at the gardens, but,
though of large extent, they are so meagre and bare--so unlike that
lovely shade of the Oxford gardens--that we did not care to make further
acquaintance with them.

Then we went back to our hotel, and if there were not already more than
enough of description, both past and to come, I should describe George's
Square, on one side of which the hotel is situated.  A tall column rises
in the grassy centre of it, lifting far into the upper air a fine statue
of Sir Walter Scott, which we saw to great advantage last night, relieved
against the sunset sky; and there are statues of Sir John Moore, a native
of Glasgow, and of James Watt, at corners of the square.  Glasgow is
certainly a noble city.

After lunch we embarked on board the steamer, and came up the Clyde.  Ben
Lomond, and other Highland hills, soon appeared on the horizon; we passed
Douglas Castle on a point of land projecting into the river; and, passing
under the precipitous height of Dumbarton Castle, which we had long
before seen, came to our voyage's end at this village, where we have put
up at the Elephant Hotel.


July 2d.--After tea, not far from seven o'clock, it being a beautiful
decline of day, we set out to walk to



DUMBARTON CASTLE,


which stands apart from the town, and is said to have been once
surrounded by the waters of the Clyde.  The rocky height on which the
castle stands is a very striking object, bulging up out of the Clyde,
with abrupt decision, to the elevation of five hundred feet.  The summit
is cloven in twain, the cleft reaching nearly to the bottom on the side
towards the river, but not coming down so deeply on the landward side.
It is precipitous all around; and wherever the steepness admits, or does
not make assault impossible, there are gray ramparts round the hill, with
cannon threatening the lower world.  Our path led its beneath one of
these precipices several hundred feet sheer down, and with an ivied
fragment of ruined wall at the top.  A soldier who sat by the wayside
told us that this was called the "Lover's Leap," because a young girl, in
some love-exigency, had once jumped down from it, and came safely to the
bottom.  We reached the castle gate, which is near the shore of the
Clyde, and there found another artillery soldier, who guided us through
the fortress.  He said that there were now but about a dozen soldiers
stationed in the castle, and no officer.

The lowest battery looks towards the river, and consists of a few
twelve-pound cannon; but probably the chief danger of attack was from the
land, and the chief pains have been taken to render the castle defensible
in that quarter.  There are flights of stone stairs ascending up through
the natural avenue, in the cleft of the double-summited rock; and about
midway there is an arched doorway, beneath which there used to be a
portcullis,--so that if an enemy had won the lower part of the fortress,
the upper portion was still inaccessible.  Where the cleft of the rock
widens into a gorge, there are several buildings, old, but not
appertaining to the ancient castle, which has almost entirely
disappeared.  We ascended both summits, and, reaching the loftiest point
on the right, stood upon the foundation of a tower that dates back to the
fifth century, whence we had a glorious prospect of Highlands and
Lowlands; the chief object being Ben Lomond, with its great dome, among a
hundred other blue and misty hills, with the sun going down over them;
and, in another direction, the Clyde, winding far downward through the
plain, with the headland of Dumbeck close at hand, and Douglas Castle at
no great distance.  On the ramparts beneath us the soldier pointed out
the spot where Wallace scaled the wall, climbing an apparently
inaccessible precipice, and taking the castle.  The principal parts of
the ancient castle appear to have been on the other and lower summit of
the hill, and thither we now went, and traced the outline of its wall,
although none of it is now remaining.  Here is the magazine, still
containing some powder, and here is a battery of eighteen-pound guns,
with pyramids of balls, all in readiness against an assault; which,
however, hardly any turn of human affairs can hereafter bring about.  The
appearance of a fortress is kept up merely for ceremony's sake; and these
cannon have grown antiquated.  Moreover, as the soldier told us, they are
seldom or never fired, even for purposes of rejoicing or salute, because
their thunder produces the singular effect of depriving the garrison of
water.  There is a large tank, and the concussion causes the rifts of the
stone to open, and thus lets the water out.  Above this battery, and
elsewhere about the fortress, there are warders' turrets of stone,
resembling great pepper-boxes.  When Dr. Johnson visited the castle, he
introduced his bulky person into one of these narrow receptacles, and
found it difficult to get out again.  A gentleman who accompanied him was
just stepping forward to offer his assistance, but Boswell whispered him
to take no notice, lest Johnson should be offended; so they left him to
get out as he could.  He did finally extricate himself, else we might
have seen his skeleton in the turret.  Boswell does not tell this story,
which seems to have been handed down by local tradition.

The less abrupt declivities of the rock are covered with grass, and
afford food for a few sheep, who scamper about the heights, and seem to
have attained the dexterity of goats in clambering.  I never knew a purer
air than this seems to be, nor a lovelier golden sunset.

Descending into the gorge again, we went into the armory, which is in one
of the buildings occupying the space between the two hill-tops.  It
formerly contained a large collection of arms; but these have been
removed to the Tower of London, and there are now only some tattered
banners, of which I do not know the history, and some festoons of
pistols, and grenades, shells, and grape and canister shot, kept merely
as curiosities; and, far more interesting than the above, a few
battle-axes, daggers, and spear-heads from the field of Bannockburn; and,
more interesting still, the sword of William Wallace.  It is a
formidable-looking weapon, made for being swayed with both hands, and,
with its hilt on the floor, reached about to my chin; but the young girl
who showed us the armory said that about nine inches had been broken off
the point.  The blade was not massive, but somewhat thin, compared with
its great length; and I found that I could blandish it, using both hands,
with perfect ease.  It is two-edged, without any gaps, and is quite brown
and lustreless with old rust, from point to hilt.

These were all the memorables of our visit to Dumbarton Castle, which is
a most interesting spot, and connected with a long series of historical
events.  It was first besieged by the Danes, and had a prominent share in
all the warfare of Scotland, so long as the old warlike times and manners
lasted.  Our soldier was very intelligent and courteous, but, as usual
with these guides, was somewhat apocryphal in his narrative; telling us
that Mary, Queen of Scots, was confined here before being taken to
England, and that the cells in which she then lived are still extant,
under one of the ramparts.  The fact is, she was brought here when a
child of six years old, before going to France, and doubtless scrambled
up and down these heights as freely and merrily as the sheep we saw.

We now returned to our hotel, a very nice one, and found the street of
Dumbarton all alive in the summer evening with the sports of children and
the gossip of grown people.  There was almost no night, for at twelve
o'clock there was still a golden daylight, and Yesterday, before it died,
must have met the Morrow.

In the lower part of the fortress there is a large sun-dial of stone,
which was made by a French officer imprisoned here during the Peninsular
war.  It still numbers faithfully the hours that are sunny, and it is a
lasting memorial of him, in the stronghold of his enemies.



INVERANNAN.


Evening.--After breakfast at Dumbarton, I went out to look at the town,
which is of considerable size, and possesses both commerce and
manufactures.  There was a screw-steamship at the pier, and many
sailor-looking people were seen about the streets.  There are very few
old houses, though still the town retains an air of antiquity which one
does not well see how to account for, when everywhere there is a modern
front, and all the characteristics of a street built to-day.  Turning
from the main thoroughfare I crossed a bridge over the Clyde, and gained
from it the best view of the cloven crag of Dumbarton Castle that I had
yet found.  The two summits are wider apart, more fully relieved from
each other, than when seen from other points; and the highest ascends
into a perfect pyramid, the lower one being obtusely rounded.  There seem
to be iron-works, or some kind of manufactory, on the farther side of the
bridge; and I noticed a quaint, chateau-like mansion, with hanging
turrets standing apart from the street, probably built by some person
enriched by business.

We left Dumbarton at noon, taking the rail to Balloch, and the steamer to
the head of Loch Lomond.

Wild mountain scenery is not very good to describe, nor do I think any
distinct impressions are ever conveyed by such attempts; so I mean to be
brief in what I saw about this part of our tour, especially as I suspect
that I have said whatever I knew how to say in the record of my former
visit to the Highlands.  As for Loch Lomond, it lies amidst very striking
scenery, being poured in among the gorges of steep and lofty mountains,
which nowhere stand aside to give it room, but, on the contrary, do their
best to shut it in.  It is everywhere narrow, compared with its length of
thirty miles; but it is the beauty of a lake to be of no greater width
than to allow of the scenery of one of its shores being perfectly enjoyed
from the other.  The scenery of the Highlands, so far as I have seen it,
cannot properly be called rich, but stern and impressive, with very hard
outlines, which are unsoftened, mostly, by any foliage, though at this
season they are green to their summits.  They have hardly flesh enough to
cover their bones,--hardly earth enough to lie over their rocky
substance,--as may be seen by the minute variety,--the notched and jagged
appearance of the profile of their sides and tops; this being caused by
the scarcely covered rocks wherewith these great hills are heaped
together.

Our little steamer stopped at half a dozen places on its voyage up the
lake, most of them being stations where hotels have been established.
Morally, the Highlands must have been more completely sophisticated by
the invention of railways and steamboats than almost any other part of
the world; but physically it can have wrought no great change.  These
mountains, in their general aspect, must be very much the same as they
were thousands of years ago; for their sides never were capable of
cultivation, nor even with such a soil and so bleak an atmosphere could
they have been much more richly wooded than we see them now.  They seem
to me to be among the unchangeable things of nature, like the sea and
sky; but there is no saying what use human ingenuity may hereafter put
them to.  At all events, I have no doubt in the world that they will go
out of fashion in due time; for the taste for mountains and wild scenery
is, with most people, an acquired taste, and it was easy to see to-day
that nine people in ten care nothing about them.  One group of gentlemen
and ladies--at least, men and women--spent the whole time in listening to
a trial for murder, which was read aloud by one of their number from a
newspaper.  I rather imagine that a taste for trim gardens is the most
natural and universal taste as regards landscape.  But perhaps it is
necessary for the health of the human mind and heart that there should be
a possibility of taking refuge in what is wild and uncontaminated by any
meddling of man's hand, and so it has been ordained that science shall
never alter the aspect of the sky, whether stern, angry, or beneficent,--
nor of the awful sea, either in calm or tempest,--nor of these rude
Highlands.  But they will go out of general fashion, as I have said, and
perhaps the next fashionable taste will be for cloud land,--that is,
looking skyward, and observing the wonderful variety of scenery, that now
constantly passes unnoticed, among the clouds.

At the head of the lake, we found that there was only a horse-cart to
convey our luggage to the hotel at Inverannan, and that we ourselves must
walk, the distance being two miles.  It had sprinkled occasionally during
our voyage, but was now sunshiny, and not excessively warm; so we set
forth contentedly enough, and had an agreeable walk along an almost
perfectly level road; for it is one of the beauties of these hills, that
they descend abruptly down, instead of undulating away forever.  There
were lofty heights on each side of us, but not so lofty as to have won a
distinctive name; and adown their sides we could see the rocky pathways
of cascades, which, at this season, are either quite dry, or mere
trickles of a rill.  The hills and valleys abound in streams, sparkling
through pebbly beds, and forming here and there a dark pool; and they
would be populous with trout if all England, with one fell purpose, did
not come hither to fish them.  A fisherman must find it difficult to
gratify his propensities in these days; for even the lakes and streams in
Norway are now preserved.  J-----, by the way, threatens ominously to be
a fisherman.  He rode the latter portion of the way to the hotel on the
luggage-cart; and when we arrived, we found that he had already gone off
to catch fish, or to attempt it (for there is as much chance of his
catching a whale as a trout), in a mountain stream near the house.  I
went in search of him, but without success, and was somewhat startled at
the depth and blackness of some of the pools into which the stream
settled itself and slept.  Finally, he came in while we were at dinner.
We afterwards walked out with him, to let him play at fishing again, and
discovered on the bank of the stream a wonderful oak, with as many as a
dozen holes springing either from close to the ground or within a foot or
two of it, and looking like twelve separate trees, at least, instead of
one.



INVERSNAID.


July 3d.--Last night seemed to close in clear, and even at midnight it
was still light enough to read; but this morning rose on us misty and
chill, with spattering showers of rain.  Clouds momentarily settled and
shifted on the hill-tops, shutting us in even more completely than these
steep and rugged green walls would be sure to do, even in the clearest
weather.  Often these clouds came down and enveloped us in a drizzle, or
rather a shower, of such minute drops that they had not weight enough to
fall.  This, I suppose, was a genuine Scotch mist; and as such it is well
enough to have experienced it, though I would willingly never see it
again.  Such being the state of the weather, my wife did not go out at
all, but I strolled about the premises, in the intervals of rain-drops,
gazing up at the hillsides, and recognizing that there is a vast variety
of shape, of light and shadow, and incidental circumstance, even in what
looks so monotonous at first as the green slope of a hill.  The little
rills that come down from the summits were rather more distinguishable
than yesterday, having been refreshed by the night's rain; but still they
were very much out of proportion with the wide pathways of bare rock
adown which they ran.  These little rivulets, no doubt, often lead
through the wildest scenery that is to be found in the Highlands, or
anywhere else, and to the formation and wildness of which they have
greatly contributed by sawing away for countless ages, and thus deepening
the ravines.

I suspect the American clouds are more picturesque than those of Great
Britain, whatever our mountains may be; at least, I remember the
Berkshire hills looking grander, under the influence of mist and cloud,
than the Highlands did to-day.  Our clouds seem to be denser and heavier,
and more decided, and form greater contrasts of light and shade.  I have
remarked in England that the cloudy firmament, even on a day of settled
rain, always appears thinner than those I had been accustomed to at home,
so as to deceive me with constant expectations of better weather.  It has
been the same to-day.

Whenever I looked upward, I thought it might be going to clear up; but,
instead of that, it began to rain more in earnest after midday, and at
half past two we left Inverannan in a smart shower.  At the head of the
lake, we took the steamer, with the rain pouring more heavily than ever,
and landed at Inversnaid under the same dismal auspices.  We left a very
good hotel behind us, and have come to another that seems also good.  We
are more picturesquely situated at this spot than at Inverannan, our
hotel being within a short distance of the lake shore, with a glen just
across the water, which will doubtless be worth looking at when the mist
permits us to see it.  A good many tourists were standing about the door
when we arrived, and looked at us with the curiosity of idle and
weather-bound people.  The lake is here narrow, but a hundred fathoms
deep; so that a great part of the height of the mountains which beset it
round is hidden beneath its surface.


July 4th.--This morning opened still misty, but with a more hopeful
promise than yesterday, and when I went out, after breakfast, there were
gleams of sunshine here and there on the hillsides, falling, one did not
exactly see how, through the volumes of cloud.  Close beside the hotel of
Inversnaid is the waterfall; all night, my room being on that side of the
house, I had heard its voice, and now I ascended beside it to a point
where it is crossed by a wooden bridge.  There is thence a view, upward
and downward, of the most striking descents of the river, as I believe
they call it, though it is but a mountain-stream, which tumbles down an
irregular and broken staircase in its headlong haste to reach the lake.
It is very picturesque, however, with its ribbons of white foam over the
precipitous steps, and its deep black pools, overhung by black rocks,
which reverberate the rumble of the falling water.  J----- and I ascended
a little distance along the cascade, and then turned aside; he going up
the hill, and I taking a path along its side which gave me a view across
the lake.  I rather think this particular stretch of Loch Lomond, in
front of Inversnaid, is the most beautiful lake and mountain view that I
have ever seen.  It is so shut in that you can see nothing beyond, nor
would suspect anything more to exist than this watery vale among the
hills; except that, directly opposite, there is the beautiful glen of
Invernglass, which winds away among the feet of Ben Crook, Ben Ein, Ben
Vain, and Ben Voirlich, standing mist-inwreathed together.  The mists,
this morning, had a very soft and beautiful effect, and made the
mountains tenderer than I have hitherto felt them to be; and they
lingered about their heads like morning-dreams, flitting and retiring,
and letting the sunshine in, and snatching it away again.  My wife came
up, and we enjoyed it together, till the steamer came smoking its pipe
along the loch, stopped to land some passengers, and steamed away again.
While we stood there, a Highlander passed by us, with a very dark tartan,
and bare shanks, most enormously calved.  I presume he wears the dress
for the sole purpose of displaying those stalwart legs; for he proves to
be no genuine Gael, but a manufacturer, who has a shooting-box, or a
share in one, on the hill above the hotel.

We now engaged a boat, and were rowed to Rob Roy's cave, which is perhaps
half a mile distant up the lake.  The shores look much more striking from
a rowboat, creeping along near the margin, than from a steamer in the
middle of the loch; and the ridge, beneath which Rob's cave lies, is
precipitous with gray rocks, and clothed, too, with thick foliage.  Over
the cave itself there is a huge ledge of rock, from which immense
fragments have tumbled down, ages and ages ago, and fallen together in
such a way as to leave a large irregular crevice in Rob Roy's cave.  We
scrambled up to its mouth by some natural stairs, and scrambled down into
its depths by the aid of a ladder.  I suppose I have already described
this hole in the record of my former visit.  Certainly, Rob Roy, and
Robert Bruce, who is said to have inhabited it before him, were not to be
envied their accommodations; yet these were not so very intolerable when
compared with a Highland cabin, or with cottages such as Burns lived in.

J----- had chosen to remain to fish.  On our return from the cave, we
found that he had caught nothing; but just as we stepped into the boat, a
fish drew his float far under water, and J------ tugging at one end of
the line, and the fish at the other, the latter escaped, with the hook in
his month.  J------ avers that he saw the fish, and gives its measurement
as about eighteen inches; but the fishes that escape us are always of
tremendous size.  The boatman thought, however, that it might have been a
pike.



THE TROSACHS' HOTEL.--ARDCHEANOCHROCHAN.


July 5th.--Not being able to get a post-chaise, we took places in the
omnibus for the bead of Loch Katrine.  Going up to pay a parting visit to
the waterfall before starting, I met with Miss C------, as she lately
was, who is now on her wedding tour as Mrs. B------.  She was painting
the falls in oil, with good prospect of a successful picture.  She came
down to the hotel to see my wife, and soon afterwards J----- and I set
out to ascend the steep hill that comes down upon the lake of Inversnaid,
leaving the omnibus to follow at leisure.  The Highlander who took us to
Rob Roy's cave had foreboded rain, from the way in which the white clouds
hung about the mountain-tops; nor was his augury at fault, for just at
three o'clock, the time he foretold, there were a few rain-drops, and a
more defined shower during the afternoon, while we were on Loch Katrine.
The few drops, however, did not disturb us; and, reaching the top of the
hill, J----- and I turned aside to examine the old stone fortress which
was erected in this mountain pass to bridle the Highlanders after the
rebellion of 1745.  It stands in a very desolate and dismal situation, at
the foot of long bare slopes, on mossy ground, in the midst of a
disheartening loneliness, only picturesque because it is so exceedingly
ungenial and unlovely.  The chief interest of this spot in the fact that
Wolfe, in his earlier military career, was stationed here.  The fortress
was a very plain structure, built of rough stones, in the form of a
parallelogram, one side of which I paced, and found it between thirty and
forty of my paces long.  The two ends have fallen down; the two sides
that remain are about twenty feet high, and have little port-holes for
defence, but no openings of the size of windows.  The roof is gone, and
the interior space overgrown with grass.  Two little girls were at play
in one corner, and, going round to the rear of the ruin, I saw that a
small Highland cabin had been built against the wall.  A dog sat in the
doorway, and gave notice of my approach, and some hens kept up their
peculiarly domestic converse about the door.

We kept on our way, often looking back towards Loch Lomond, and wondering
at the grandeur which Ben Vain and Ben Voirlich, and the rest of the Ben
fraternity, had suddenly put on.  The mists which had hung about them all
day had now descended lower, and lay among the depths and gorges of the
hills, where also the sun shone softly down among them, and filled those
deep mountain laps, as it were, with a dimmer sunshine.  Ben Vain, too,
and his brethren, had a veil of mist all about them, which seemed to
render them really transparent; and they had unaccountably grown higher,
vastly higher, than when we viewed them from the shore of the lake.  It
was as if we were looking at them through the medium of a poet's
imagination.  All along the road, since we left Inversnaid, there had
been the stream, which there formed the waterfall, and which here was
brawling down little declivities, and sleeping in black pools, which we
disturbed by flinging stones into them from the roadside.  We passed a
drunken old gentleman, who civilly bade me "good day"; and a man and
woman at work in a field, the former of whom shouted to inquire the hour;
and we had come in sight of little Loch Arklet before the omnibus came up
with us.  It was about five o'clock when we reached the head of



LOCH KATRINE,


and went on board the steamer Rob Roy; and, setting forth on our voyage,
a Highland piper made music for us the better part of the way.

We did not see Loch Katrine, perhaps, under its best presentment; for the
surface was roughened with a little wind, and darkened even to inky
blackness by the clouds that overhung it.  The hill-tops, too, wore a
very dark frown.  A lake of this size cannot be terrific, and is
therefore seen to best advantage when it is beautiful.  The scenery of
its shores is not altogether so rich and lovely as I had preimagined; not
equal, indeed, to the best parts of Loch Lomond,--the hills being lower
and of a more ridgy shape, and exceedingly bare, at least towards the
lower end.  But they turn the lake aside with headland after headland,
and shut it in closely, and open one vista after another, so that the eye
is never weary, and, least of all, as we approach the end.  The length of
the loch is ten miles, and at its termination it meets the pass of the
Trosachs, between Ben An and Ben Venue, which are the rudest and
shaggiest of hills.  The steamer passes Ellen's Isle, but to the right,
which is the side opposite to that on which Fitz-James must be supposed
to have approached it.  It is a very small island, situated where the
loch narrows, and is perhaps less than a quarter of a mile distant from
either shore.  It looks like a lump of rock, with just soil enough to
support a crowd of dwarf oaks, birches, and firs, which do not grow so
high as to be shadowy trees.  Our voyage being over, we landed, and found
two omnibuses, one of which took us through the famous pass of the
Trosachs, a distance of a mile and a quarter, to a hotel, erected in
castellated guise by Lord Willoughby d'Eresby.  We were put into a parlor
within one of the round towers, panelled all round, and with four narrow
windows, opening through deep embrasures.  No play-castle was ever more
like the reality, and it is a very good hotel, like all that we have had
experience of in the Highlands.  After tea we walked out, and visited a
little kirk that stands near the shore of Loch Achray, at a good point of
view for seeing the hills round about.

This morning opened cloudily; but after breakfast I set out alone, and
walked through the pass of the Trosachs, and thence by a path along the
right shore of the lake.  It is a very picturesque and beautiful path,
following the windings of the lake,--now along the beach, now over an
impending bank, until it comes opposite to Ellen's Isle, which on this
side looks more worthy to be the island of the poem than as we first saw
it.  Its shore is craggy and precipitous, but there was a point where it
seemed possible to land, nor was it too much to fancy that there might be
a rustic habitation among the shrubbery of this rugged spot.  It is
foolish to look into these matters too strictly.  Scott evidently used as
much freedom with his natural scenery as he did with his historic
incidents; and he could have made nothing of either one or the other if
he had been more scrupulous in his arrangement and adornment of them.  In
his description of the Trosachs, he has produced something very
beautiful, and as true as possible, though certainly its beauty has a
little of the scene-painter's gloss on it.  Nature is better, no doubt,
but Nature cannot be exactly reproduced on canvas or in print; and the
artist's only resource is to substitute something that may stand instead
of and suggest the truth.

The path still kept onward, after passing Ellen's Isle, and I followed
it, finding it wilder, more shadowy with overhanging foliage of trees,
old and young,--more like a mountain-path in Berkshire or New Hampshire,
yet still with an Old World restraint and cultivation about it,--the
farther I went.  At last I came upon some bars, and though the track was
still seen beyond, I took this as a hint to stop, especially as I was now
two or three miles from the hotel, and it just then began to rain.  My
umbrella was a poor one at best, and had been tattered and turned inside
out, a day or two ago, by a gust on Loch Lomond; but I spread it to the
shower, and, furthermore, took shelter under the thickest umbrage I could
find.  The rain came straight down, and bubbled in the loch; the little
rills gathered force, and plashed merrily over the stones; the leaves of
the trees condensed the shower into large drops, and shed them down upon
me where I stood.  Still I was comfortable enough in a thick Skye Tweed,
and waited patiently till the rain abated; then took my way homeward, and
admired the pass of the Trosachs more than when I first traversed it.  If
it has a fault, it is one that few scenes in Great Britain share with
it,--that is, the trees and shrubbery, with which the precipices are
shagged, conceal them a little too much.  A crag, streaked with black and
white, here and there shows its head aloft, or its whole height from base
to summit, and suggests that more of such sublimity is bidden than
revealed.  I think, however, that it is this unusual shagginess which
made the scene a favorite with Scott, and with the people on this side of
the ocean generally.  There are many scenes as good in America, needing
only the poet.


July 6th.--We dined yesterday at the table d'hote, at the suggestion of
the butler, in order to give less trouble to the servants of the hotel,
and afford them an opportunity to go to kirk.  The dining-room is in
accordance with the rest of the architecture and fittings up of the
house, and is a very good reproduction of an old baronial hall, with high
panellings and a roof of dark, polished wood.  There were about twenty
guests at table; and if they and the waiters had been dressed in
mediaeval costume, we might have imagined ourselves banqueting in the
Middle Ages.

After dinner we all took a walk through the Trosachs' pass again, and by
the right-hand path along the lake as far as Ellen's Isle.  It was very
pleasant, there being gleams of calm evening sunshine gilding the
mountain-sides, and putting a golden crown occasionally on the Tread of
Ben Venue.  It is wonderful how many aspects a mountain has,--how many
mountains there are in every single mountain!---how they vary too, in
apparent attitude and bulk.  When we reached the lake its surface was
almost unruffled, except by now and then the narrow pathway of a breeze,
as if the wing of an unseen spirit had just grazed it in flitting across.
The scene was very beautiful, and, on the whole, I do not know that
Walter Scott has overcharged his description, although he has symbolized
the reality by types and images which it might not precisely suggest to
other minds.  We were reluctant to quit the spot, and cherish still a
hope of seeing it again, though the hope does not seem very likely to be
gratified.

This was a lowering and sullen morning, but soon after breakfast I took a
walk in the opposite direction to Loch Katrine, and reached the Brig of
Turk, a little beyond which is the new Trosachs' Hotel, and the little
rude village of Duncraggan, consisting of a few hovels of stone, at the
foot of a bleak and dreary hill.  To the left, stretching up between this
and other hills, is the valley of Glenfinlas,--a very awful region in
Scott's poetry and in Highland tradition, as the haunt of spirits and
enchantments.  It presented a very desolate prospect.  The walk back to
the Trosachs showed me Ben Venue and Ben An under new aspects,--the bare
summit of the latter rising in a perfect pyramid, whereas from other
points of view it looks like quite a different mountain.  Sometimes a
gleam of sunshine came out upon the rugged side of Ben Venue, but his
prevailing mood, like that of the rest of the landscape, was stern and
gloomy.  I wish I could give an idea of the variety of surface upon one
of these hillsides,--so bulging out and hollowed in, so bare where the
rock breaks through, so shaggy in other places with heath, and then,
perhaps, a thick umbrage of birch, oak, and ash ascending from the base
high upward.  When I think I have described them, I remember quite a
different aspect, and find it equally true, and yet lacking something to
make it the whole or an adequate truth.

J----- had gone with me part of the way, but stopped to fish with a
pin-hook in Loch Achray, which bordered along our path.  When I returned,
I found him much elated at having caught a fish, which, however, had got
away, carrying his pin-hook along with it.  Then he had amused himself
with taking some lizards by the tail, and had collected several in a
small hollow of the rocks.  We now walked home together, and at half past
three we took our seats in a genuine old-fashioned stage-coach, of which
there are few specimens now to be met with.  The coachman was smartly
dressed in the Queen's scarlet, and was a very pleasant and affable
personage, conducting himself towards the passengers with courteous
authority.  Inside we were four, including J-----, but on the top there
were at least a dozen, and I would willingly have been there too, but had
taken an inside seat, under apprehension of rain, and was not allowed to
change it.  Our drive was not marked by much describable incident.  On
changing horses at Callender, we alighted, and saw Ben Ledi behind us,
making a picturesque background to the little town, which seems to be the
meeting-point of the Highlands and Lowlands.  We again changed horses at
Doune, an old town, which would doubtless have been well worth seeing,
had time permitted.  Thence we kept on till the coach drew up at a
spacious hotel, where we alighted, fancying that we had reached Stirling,
which was to have been our journey's end; but, after fairly establishing
ourselves, we found that it was the



BRIG OF ALLAN.


The place is three miles short of Stirling.  Nevertheless, we did not
much regret the mistake, finding that the Brig of Allan is the principal
Spa of Scotland, and a very pleasant spot, to all outward appearance.
After tea we walked out, both up and down the village street, and across
the bridge, and up a gentle eminence beyond it, whence we had a fine view
of a glorious plain, out of which rose several insulated headlands.  One
of these was the height on which stands Stirling Castle, and which
reclines on the plain like a hound or a lion or a sphinx, holding the
castle on the highest part, where its head should be.  A mile or two
distant from this picturesque hill rises another, still more striking,
called the Abbey Craig, on which is a ruin, and where is to be built the
monument to William Wallace.  I cannot conceive a nobler or more fitting
pedestal.  The sullenness of the day had vanished, the air was cool but
invigorating, and the cloud scenery was as fine as that below it. . . . .
Though it was nearly ten o'clock, the boys of the village were in full
shout and play, for these long and late summer evenings keep the children
out of bed interminably.



STIRLING.


July 7th.--We bestirred ourselves early this morning, . . . . and took
the rail for Stirling before eight.  It is but a few minutes' ride, so
that doubtless we were earlier on the field than if we had slept at
Stirling.  After our arrival our first call was at the post-office, where
I found a large package containing letters from America, but none from
U----.  We then went to a bookseller's shop, and bought some views of
Stirling and the neighborhood; and it is surprising what a quantity and
variety of engravings there are of every noted place that we have
visited.  You seldom find two sets alike.  It is rather nauseating to
find that what you came to see has already been looked at in all its
lights, over and over again, with thousand-fold repetition; and, beyond
question, its depictment in words has been attempted still oftener than
with the pencil.  It will be worth while to go back to America, were it
only for the chance of finding a still virgin scene.

We climbed the steep slope of the Castle Hill, sometimes passing an
antique-looking house, with a high, notched gable, perhaps with an
ornamented front, until we came to the sculptures and battlemented
wall, with an archway, that stands just below the castle. . . . . A
shabby-looking man now accosted us, and could hardly be shaken off.  I
have met with several such boors in my experience of sight-seeing.  He
kept along with us, in spite of all hints to the contrary, and insisted
on pointing out objects of interest.  He showed us a house in Broad
Street, below the castle and cathedral, which he said had once been
inhabited by Henry Darnley, Queen Mary's husband.  There was little or
nothing peculiar in its appearance; a large, gray, gabled house standing
lengthwise to the street, with three windows in the roof, and connected
with other houses on each side.  Almost directly across the street, he
pointed to an archway, through the side of a house, and, peeping through
it, we found a soldier on guard in a court-yard, the sides of which were
occupied by an old mansion of the Argyle family, having towers at the
corners, with conical tops, like those reproduced in the hotel at the
Trosachs.  It is now occupied as a military hospital.  Shaking off our
self-inflicted guide, we now made our way to the castle parade, and to
the gateway, where a soldier with a tremendously red nose and two medals
at once took charge of us.

Beyond all doubt, I have written quite as good a description of the
castle and Carse of Stirling in a former portion of my journal as I can
now write.  We passed through the outer rampart of Queen Anne; through
the old round gate-tower of an earlier day, and beneath the vacant arch
where the portcullis used to fall, thus reaching the inner region, where
stands the old palace on one side, and the old Parliament House on the
other.  The former looks aged, ragged, and rusty, but makes a good
appearance enough pictorially, being adorned all round about with
statues, which may have been white marble once, but are as gray as
weather-beaten granite now, and look down from between the windows above
the basement story.  A photograph would give the idea of very rich
antiquity, but as it really stands, looking on a gravelled court-yard,
and with "CANTEEN" painted on one of its doors, the spectator does not
find it very impressive.  The great hall of this palace is now
partitioned off into two or three rooms, and the whole edifice is
arranged to serve as barracks.  Of course, no trace of ancient
magnificence, if anywise destructible, can be left in the interior.  We
were not shown into this palace, nor into the Parliament House, nor into
the tower, where King James stabbed the Earl of Douglas.  When I was here
a year ago, I went up the old staircase and into the room where the
murder was committed, although it had recently been the scene of a fire,
which consumed as much of it as was inflammable.  The window whence the
Earl's body was thrown then remained; but now the whole tower seems to
have been renewed, leaving only the mullions of the historic window.

We merely looked up at the new, light-colored freestone of the restored
tower in passing, and ascended to the ramparts, where we found one of the
most splendid views, morally and materially, that this world can show.
Indeed, I think there cannot be such a landscape as the Carse of
Stirling, set in such a frame as it is,--the Highlands, comprehending our
friends, Ben Lomond, Ben Venue, Ben An, and the whole Ben brotherhood,
with the Grampians surrounding it to the westward and northward, and in
other directions some range of prominent objects to shut it in; and the
plain itself, so worthy of the richest setting, so fertile, so beautiful,
so written over and over again with histories.  The silver Links of Forth
are as sweet and gently picturesque an object as a man sees in a
lifetime.  I do not wonder that Providence caused great things to happen
on this plain; it was like choosing a good piece of canvas to paint a
great picture upon.  The battle of Bannockburn (which we saw beneath us,
with the Gillie's Hill on the right) could not have been fought upon a
meaner plain, nor Wallace's victory gained; and if any other great
historic act still remains to be done in this country, I should imagine
the Carse of Stirling to be the future scene of it.  Scott seems to me
hardly to have done justice--to this landscape, or to have bestowed pains
enough to put it in strong relief before the world; although it is from
the light shed on it, and so much other Scottish scenery, by his mind,
that we chiefly see it, and take an interest in it. . . . .

I do not remember seeing the hill of execution before,--a mound on the
same level as the castle's base, looking towards the Highlands.  A
solitary cow was now feeding upon it.  I should imagine that no person
could ever have been unjustly executed there; the spot is too much in the
sight of heaven and earth to countenance injustice.

Descending from the ramparts, we went into the Armory, which I did not
see on my former visit.  The superintendent of this department is an old
soldier of very great intelligence and vast communicativeness, and quite
absorbed in thinking of and handling weapons; for he is a practical
armorer.  He had few things to show us that were very interesting,--a
helmet or two, a bomb and grenade from the Crimea; also some muskets from
the same quarter, one of which, with a sword at the end, he spoke of
admiringly, as the best weapon in the collection, its only fault being
its extreme weight.  He showed us, too, some Minie rifles, and whole
ranges of the old-fashioned Brown Bess, which had helped to win
Wellington's victories; also the halberts of sergeants now laid aside,
and some swords that had been used at the battle of Sheriffmuir.  These
latter were very short, not reaching to the floor, when I held one of
them, point downward, in my hand.  The shortness of the blade and
consequent closeness of the encounter must have given the weapon a most
dagger-like murderousness.  Ranging in the hall of arms, there were two
tattered banners that had gone through the Peninsular battles, one of
them belonging to the gallant 42d Regiment.  The armorer gave my wife a
rag from each of these banners, consecrated by so much battle-smoke; also
a piece of old oak, half burned to charcoal, which had been rescued from
the panelling of the Douglas Tower.  We saw better things, moreover, than
all these rusty weapons and ragged flags; namely, the pulpit and
communion-table of John Knox.  The frame of the former, if I remember
aright, is complete; but one or two of the panels are knocked out and
lost, and, on the whole, it looks as if it had been shaken to pieces by
the thunder of his holdings forth,--much worm-eaten, too, is the old oak
wood, as well it may be, for the letters MD (1500) are carved on its
front.  The communion-table is polished, and in much better preservation.

Then the armorer showed us a Damascus blade, of the kind that will cut a
delicate silk handkerchief while floating in the air; and some inlaid
matchlock guns.  A child's little toy-gun was lying on a workbench among
all this array of weapons; and when I took it up and smiled, he said that
it was his son's.  So he called in a little fellow four years old, who
was playing in the castle yard, and made him go through the musket
exercise, which he did with great good-will.  This small Son of a Gun,
the father assured us, cares for nothing but arms, and has attained
all his skill with the musket merely by looking at the soldiers on
parade. . . . .

Our soldier, who had resigned the care of us to the armorer, met us again
at the door, and led us round the remainder of the ramparts, dismissing
us finally at the gate by which we entered.  All the time we were in the
castle there had been a great discordance of drums and fifes, caused by
the musicians who were practising just under the walls; likewise the
sergeants were drilling their squads of men, and putting them through
strange gymnastic motions.  Most, if not all, of the garrison belongs to
a Highland regiment, and those whom we saw on duty, in full costume,
looked very martial and gallant.  Emerging from the castle, we took the
broad and pleasant footpath, which circles it about midway on the grassy
steep which descends from the rocky precipice on which the walls are
built.  This is a very beautiful walk, and affords a most striking view
of the castle, right above our heads, the height of its wall forming one
line with the precipice.  The grassy hillside is almost as precipitous as
the dark gray rock that rises out of it, to form the foundations of the
castle; but wild rose-bushes, both of a white and red variety, are
abundant here, and all in bloom; nor are these the only flowers.  There
is also shrubbery in some spots, tossing up green waves against the
precipice; and broad sheets of ivy here and there mantle the headlong
rock, which also has a growth of weeds in its crevices.  The castle walls
above, however, are quite bare of any such growth.  Thus, looking up at
the old storied fortress, and looking down over the wide, historic plain,
we wandered half-way round the castle, and then, retracing our steps,
entered the town close by an old hospital.

A hospital it was, or had been intended for; but the authorities of the
town had made some convenient arrangement with those entitled to its
charity, and had appropriated the ancient edifice to themselves.  So said
a boy who showed us into the Guildhall,--an apartment with a vaulted
oaken roof, and otherwise of antique aspect and furniture; all of which,
however, were modern restorations.  We then went into an old church or
cathedral, which was divided into two parts; one of them, in which I saw
the royal arms, being probably for the Church-of-England service, and the
other for the Kirk of Scotland.  I remember little or nothing of this
edifice, except that the Covenanters had uplifted it with pews and a
gallery, and whitewash; though I doubt not it was a stately Gothic
church, with innumerable enrichments and incrustations of beauty, when it
passed from popish hands into theirs.  Thence we wandered downward,
through a back street, amid very shabby houses, some of which bore tokens
of having once been the abodes of courtly and noble personages.  We
paused before one that displayed, I think, the sign of a spirit-retailer,
and looked as disreputable as a house could, yet was built of stalwart
stone, and had two circular towers in front, once, doubtless, crowned
with conical tops.  We asked an elderly man whether he knew anything of
the history of this house; and he said that he had been acquainted with
it for almost fifty years, but never knew anything noteworthy about it.
Reaching the foot of the hill, along whose back the streets of Stirling
run, and which blooms out into the Castle Craig, we returned to the
railway, and at noon took leave of Stirling.

I forgot to tell of the things that awakened rather more sympathy in us
than any other objects in the castle armory.  These were some rude
weapons--pikes, very roughly made; and old rusty muskets, broken and
otherwise out of order; and swords, by no means with Damascus blades--
that had been taken from some poor weavers and other handicraft men who
rose against the government in 1820.  I pitied the poor fellows much,
seeing how wretched were their means of standing up against the cannon,
bayonets, swords, shot, shell, and all manner of murderous facilities
possessed by their oppressors.  Afterwards, our guide showed, in a gloomy
quadrangle of the castle, the low windows of the dungeons where two of
the leaders of the insurrectionists had been confined before their
execution.  I have not the least shadow of doubt that these men had a
good cause to fight for; but what availed it with such weapons! and so
few even of those!

. . . . I believe I cannot go on to recount any further this evening the
experiences of to-day.  It has been a very rich day; only that I have
seen more than my sluggish powers of reception can well take in at once.
After quitting Stirling, we came in somewhat less than an hour to



LINLITHGOW,


and, alighting, took up our quarters at the Star and Garter Hotel, which,
like almost all the Scottish caravan-saries of which we have had
experience, turns out a comfortable one. . . . . We stayed within doors
for an hour or two, and I busied myself with writing up my journal.  At
about three, however, the sky brightened a little, and we set forth
through the ancient, rusty, and queer-looking town of Linlithgow, towards
the palace and the ancient church, which latter was one of St. David's
edifices, and both of which stand close together, a little removed from
the long street of the village.  But I can never describe them worthily,
and shall make nothing of the description if I attempt it now.


July 8th.--At about three o'clock yesterday, as I said, we walked
forth through the ancient street of Linlithgow, and, coming to the
market-place, stopped to look at an elaborate and heavy stone fountain,
which we found by an inscription to be the fac-simile of an old one that
used to stand on the same site.  Turning to the right, the outer entrance
to the palace fronts on this market-place, if such it be; and close to
it, a little on one side, is the church.  A young woman, with a key in
her hand, offered to admit us into the latter; so we went in, and found
it divided by a wall across the middle into two parts.  The hither
portion, being the nave, was whitewashed, and looked as bare and
uninteresting as an old Gothic church of St. David's epoch possibly could
do.  The interior portion, being the former choir, is covered with pews
over the whole floor, and further defaced by galleries, that unmercifully
cut midway across the stately and beautiful arches.  It is likewise
whitewashed.  There were, I believe, some mural monuments of Bailies and
other such people stuck up about the walls, but nothing that much
interested me, except an ancient oaken chair, which the girl said was the
chair of St. Crispin, and it was fastened to the wall, in the holiest
part of the church.  I know not why it was there; but as it had been the
chair of so distinguished a personage, we all sat down in it.  It was in
this church that the apparition of St. James appeared to King James IV.,
to warn him against engaging in that war which resulted in the battle of
Flodden, where he and the flower of his nobility were slain.  The young
woman showed us the spot where the apparition spake to him,--a side
chapel, with a groined roof, at the end of the choir next the nave.  The
Covenanters seem to have shown some respect to this one chapel, by
refraining from drawing the gallery across its height; so that, except
for the whitewash, and the loss of the painted glass in the window, and
probably of a good deal of rich architectural detail, it looks as it did
when the ghostly saint entered beneath its arch, while the king was
kneeling there.

We stayed but a little while in the church, and then proceeded to the
palace, which, as I said, is close at hand.  On entering the outer
enclosure through an ancient gateway, we were surprised to find how
entire the walls seemed to be; but the reason is, I suppose, that the
ruins have not been used as a stone-quarry, as has almost always been the
case with old abbeys and castles.  The palace took fire and was consumed,
so far as consumable, in 1745, while occupied by the soldiers of General
Hawley; but even yet the walls appear so stalwart that I should imagine
it quite possible to rebuild and restore the stately rooms on their
original plan.  It was a noble palace, one hundred and seventy-five feet
in length by one hundred and sixty-five in breadth, and though destitute
of much architectural beauty externally, yet its aspect from the
quadrangle which the four sides enclose is venerable and sadly beautiful.
At each of the interior angles there is a circular tower, up the whole
height of the edifice and overtopping it, and another in the centre of
one of the sides, all containing winding staircases.  The walls facing
upon the enclosed quadrangle are pierced with many windows, and have been
ornamented with sculpture, rich traces of which still remain over the
arched entrance-ways; and in the grassy centre of the court there is the
ruin and broken fragments of a fountain, which once used to play for the
delight of the king and queen, and lords and ladies, who looked down upon
it from hall and chamber.  Many old carvings that belonged to it are
heaped together there; but the water has disappeared, though, had it been
a natural spring, it would have outlasted all the heavy stone-work.

As far as we were able, and could find our way, we went through every
room of the palace, all round the four sides.  From the first floor
upwards it is entirely roofless.  In some of the chambers there is an
accumulation of soil, and a goodly crop of grass; in others there is
still a flooring of flags or brick tiles, though damp and moss-grown, and
with weeds sprouting between the crevices.  Grass and weeds, indeed, have
found soil enough to flourish in, even on the highest ranges of the
walls, though at a dizzy height above the ground; and it was like an old
and trite touch of romance, to see how the weeds sprouted on the many
hearth-stones and aspired under the chimney-flues, as if in emulation of
the long-extinguished flame.  It was very mournful, very beautiful, very
delightful, too, to see how Nature takes back the palace, now that kings
have done with it, and adopts it as a part of her great garden.

On one side of the quadrangle we found the roofless chamber where Mary,
Queen of Scots, was born, and in the same range the bedchamber that was
occupied by several of the Scottish Jameses; and in one corner of the
latter apartment there is a narrow, winding staircase, down which I
groped, expecting to find a door, either into the enclosed quadrangle or
to the outside of the palace.  But it ends in nothing, unless it be a
dungeon; and one does not well see why the bedchamber of the king should
be so convenient to a dungeon.  It is said that King James III. once
escaped down this secret stair, and lay concealed from some conspirators
who had entered his chamber to murder him.  This range of apartments is
terminated, like the other sides of the palace, by a circular tower
enclosing a staircase, up which we mounted, winding round and round, and
emerging at various heights, until at last we found ourselves at the very
topmost point of the edifice; and here there is a small pepper-box of a
turret, almost as entire as when the stones were first laid.  It is
called Queen Margaret's bower, and looks forth on a lovely prospect of
mountain and plain, and on the old red roofs of Linlithgow town, and on
the little loch that lies within the palace grounds.  The cold north-wind
blew chill upon us through the empty window-frames, which very likely
were never glazed; but it must be a delightful nook in a calmer and
warmer summer evening.

Descending from this high perch, we walked along ledges and through
arched corridors, and stood, contemplative, in the dampness of the
banqueting-hall, and sat down on the seats that still occupy the
embrasures of the deep windows.  In one of the rooms, the sculpture of a
huge fireplace has recently been imitated and restored, so as to give an
idea of what the richness of the adornments must have been when the
building was perfect.  We burrowed down, too, a little way, in the
direction of the cells, where prisoners used to be confined; but these
were too ugly and too impenetrably dark to tempt us far.  One vault,
exactly beneath a queen's very bedchamber, was designated as a prison.  I
should think bad dreams would have winged up, and made her pillow an
uncomfortable one.

There seems to be no certain record as respects the date of this palace,
except that the most recent part was built by James I., of England, and
bears the figures 1620 on its central tower.  In this part were the
kitchens and other domestic offices.  In Robert Bruce's time there was a
castle here, instead of a palace, and an ancestor of our friend Bennoch
was the means of taking it from the English by a stratagem in which valor
went halves.  Four centuries afterwards, it was a royal residence, and
might still have been nominally so, had not Hawley's dragoons lighted
their fires on the floors of the magnificent rooms; but, on the whole, I
think it more valuable as a ruin than if it were still perfect.
Scotland, and the world, needs only one Holyrood; and Linlithgow, were it
still a perfect palace, must have been second in interest to that, from
its lack of association with historic events so grand and striking.

After tea we took another walk, and this time went along the High Street,
in quest of the house whence Bothwellhaugh fired the shot that killed the
Regent Murray.  It has been taken down, however; or, if any part of it
remain, it has been built into and incorporated with a small house of
dark stone, which forms one range with two others that stand a few feet
back from the general line of the street.  It is as mean-looking and
commonplace an edifice as is anywhere to be seen, and is now occupied by
one Steele, a tailor.  We went under a square arch (if an arch can be
square), that goes quite through the house, and found ourselves in a
little court; but it was not easy to identify anything as connected with
the historic event, so we did but glance about us, and returned into the
street.  It is here narrow, and as Bothwellhaugh stood in a projecting
gallery, the Regent must have been within a few yards of the muzzle of
his carbine.  The street looks as old as any that I have seen, except,
perhaps, a vista here and there in Chester,--the houses all of stone,
many of them tall, with notched gables, and with stone staircases going
up outside, the steps much worn by feet now dust; a pervading ugliness,
which yet does not fail to be picturesque; a general filth and evil odor
of gutters and people, suggesting sorrowful ideas of what the inner
houses must be, when the outside looks and smells so badly; and, finally,
a great rabble of the inhabitants, talking, idling, sporting, staring
about their own thresholds and those of dram-shops, the town being most
alive in the long twilight of the summer evening.  There was nothing
uncivil in the deportment of these dirty people, old or young; but they
did stare at us most unmercifully.

We walked very late, entering, after all that we had seen, into the
palace grounds, and skirting along Linlithgow Loch, which would be very
beautiful if its banks were made shadowy with trees, instead of being
almost bare.  We viewed the palace on the outside, too, and saw what had
once been the principal entrance, but now looked like an arched window,
pretty high in the wall; for it had not been accessible except by a
drawbridge.  I might write pages in telling how venerable the ruin,
looked, as the twilight fell deeper and deeper around it; but we have had
enough of Linlithgow, especially as there have been so many old palaces
and old towns to write about, and there will still be more.  We left
Linlithgow early this morning, and reached Edinburgh in half an hour.
To-morrow I suppose I shall try to set down what I see; at least, some
points of it.


July 9th.--Arriving at



EDINBURGH,


and acting under advice of the cabman, we drove to Addison's Alma Hotel,
which we find to be in Prince's Street, having Scott's monument a few
hundred yards below, and the Castle Hill about as much above.

The Edinburgh people seem to be accustomed to climb mountains within
their own houses; so we had to mount several staircases before we reached
our parlor, which is a very good one, and commands a beautiful view of
Prince's Street, and of the picturesque old town, and the valley between,
and of the castle on its hill.

Our first visit was to the castle, which we reached by going across the
causeway that bridges the valley, and has some edifices of Grecian
architecture on it, contrasting strangely with the nondescript ugliness
of the old town, into which we immediately pass.  As this is my second
visit to Edinburgh, I surely need not dwell upon describing it at such
length as if I had never been here before.  After climbing up through
various wards of the castle to the topmost battery, where Mons Meg holds
her station, looking like an uncouth dragon,--with a pile of huge stone
balls beside her for eggs,--we found that we could not be admitted to
Queen Mary's apartments, nor to the crown-room, till twelve o'clock;
moreover, that there was no admittance to the crown-room without tickets
from the crown-office, in Parliament Square.  There being no help for it,
I left my wife and J----- to wander through the fortress, and came down
through High Street in quest of Parliament Square, which I found after
many inquiries of policemen, and after first going to the Justiciary
Court, where there was a great throng endeavoring to get in; for the
trial of Miss Smith for the murder of her lover is causing great
excitement just now.  There was no difficulty made about the tickets,
and, returning, found S----- and J-----; but J----- grew tired of
waiting, and set out to return to our hotel, through the great strange
city, all by himself.  Through means of an attendant, we were admitted
into Queen Margaret's little chapel, on the top of the rock; and then we
sat down, in such shelter as there was, to avoid the keen wind, blowing
through the embrasures of the ramparts, and waited as patiently as we
could.

Twelve o'clock came, and we went into the crown-room, with a throng of
other visitors,--so many that they could only be admitted in separate
groups.  The Regalia of Scotland lie on a circular table within an iron
railing, round and round which the visitors pass, gazing with all their
eyes.  The room was dark, however, except for the dim twinkle of a candle
or gaslight; and the regalia did not show to any advantage, though there
are some rich jewels, set in their ancient gold.  The articles consist of
a two-handed sword, with a hilt and scabbard of gold, ornamented with
gems, and a mace, with a silver handle, all very beautifully made;
besides the golden collar and jewelled badge of the Garter, and something
else which I forget.  Why they keep this room so dark I cannot tell; but
it is a poor show, and gives the spectator an idea of the poverty of
Scotland, and the minuteness of her sovereignty, which I had not gathered
from her royal palaces.

Thence we went into Queen Mary's room, and saw that beautiful portrait--
that very queen and very woman--with which I was so much impressed at my
last visit.  It is wonderful that this picture does not drive all the
other portraits of Mary out of the field, whatever may be the comparative
proofs of their authenticity.  I do not know the history of this one,
except that it is a copy by Sir William Gordon of a picture by an
Italian, preserved at Dunrobin Castle.

After seeing what the castle had to show, which is but little except
itself, its rocks, and its old dwellings of princes and prisoners, we
came down through the High Street, inquiring for John Knox's house.  It
is a strange-looking edifice, with gables on high, projecting far, and
some sculpture, and inscriptions referring to Knox.  There is a
tobacconist's shop in the basement story, where I learned that the house
used to be shown to visitors till within three months, but it is now
closed, for some reason or other.  Thence we crossed a bridge into the
new town, and came back through Prince's Street to the hotel, and had a
good dinner, as preparatory to fresh wearinesses; for there is no other
weariness at all to be compared to that of sight-seeing.

In mid afternoon we took a cab and drove to Holyrood Palace, which I have
already described, as well as the chapel, and do not mean to meddle with
either of them again.  We looked at our faces in the old mirrors that
Queen Mary brought from France with her, and which had often reflected
her own lovely face and figure; and I went up the winding stair through
which the conspirators ascended.  This, I think, was not accessible at my
former visit.  Before leaving the palace, one of the attendants advised
us to see some pictures in the apartments occupied by the Marquis of
Breadalbane during the queen's residence here.  We found some fine old
portraits and other paintings by Vandyke, Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey
Kneller, and a strange head by Rubens, amid all which I walked wearily,
wishing that there were nothing worth looking at in the whole world.  My
wife differs altogether from me in this matter; . . . . but we agreed, on
this occasion, in being tired to death.  Just as we got through with the
pictures, I became convinced of what I had been dimly suspecting all the
while, namely, that at my last visit to the palace I had seen these
selfsame pictures, and listened to the selfsame woman's civil answers, in
just the selfsame miserable weariness of mood.

We left the palace, and toiled up through the dirty Canongate, looking
vainly for a fly, and employing our time, as well as we could, in looking
at the squalid mob of Edinburgh, and peeping down the horrible vistas of
the closes, which were swarming with dirty life, as some mouldy and
half-decayed substance might swarm with insects,--vistas down alleys
where sin, sorrow, poverty, drunkenness, all manner of sombre and sordid
earthly circumstances, had imbued the stone, brick, and wood of the
habitations for hundreds of years.  And such a multitude of children too;
that was a most striking feature.

After tea I went down into the valley between the old town and the new,
which is now laid out as an ornamental garden, with grass, shrubbery,
flowers, gravelled walks, and frequent seats.  Here the sun was setting,
and gilded the old town with its parting rays, making it absolutely the
most picturesque scene possible to be seen.  The mass of tall, ancient
houses, heaped densely together, looked like a Gothic dream; for there
seemed to be towers and all sorts of stately architecture, and spires
ascended out of the mass; and above the whole was the castle, with a
diadem of gold on its topmost turret.  It wanted less than a quarter of
nine when the last gleam faded from the windows of the old town, and left
the crowd of buildings dim and indistinguishable, to reappear on the
morrow in squalor, lifting their meanness skyward, the home of layer upon
layer of unfortunate humanity.  The change symbolized the difference
between a poet's imagination of life in the past--or in a state which he
looks at through a colored and illuminated medium--and the sad reality.

This morning we took a cab, and set forth between ten and eleven to see
Edinburgh and its environs; driving past the University, and other
noticeable objects in the old town, and thence out to Arthur's Seat.
Salisbury Crags are a very singular feature of the outskirts.  From the
heights, beneath Arthur's Seat, we had a fine prospect of the sea, with
Leith and Portobello in the distance, and of a fertile plain at the foot
of the hill.  In the course of our drive our cabman pointed out
Dumbiedikes' house; also the cottage of Jeanie Deans,--at least, the spot
where it formerly stood; and Muschat's Cairn, of which a small heap of
stones is yet remaining.  Near this latter object are the ruins of St.
Anthony's Chapel, a roofless gable, and other remains, standing on the
abrupt hillside.  We drove homeward past a parade-ground on which a body
of cavalry was exercising, and we met a company of infantry on their
route thither.  Then we drove near Calton Hill, which seems to be not a
burial-ground, although the site of stately monuments.  In fine, we
passed through the Grass-Market, where we saw the cross in the pavement
in the street, marking the spot, as I recorded before, where Porteous was
executed.  Thence we passed through the Cowgate, all the latter part of
our drive being amongst the tall, quaint edifices of the old town, alike
venerable and squalid.  From the Grass-Market the rock of the castle
looks more precipitous than as we had hitherto seen it, and its prisons,
palaces, and barracks approach close to its headlong verge, and form one
steep line with its descent.  We drove quite round the Castle Hill, and
returned down Prince's Street to our hotel.  There can be no other city
in the world that affords more splendid scenery, both natural and
architectural, than Edinburgh.

Then we went to St. Giles's Cathedral, which I shall not describe, it
having been kirkified into three interior divisions by the Covenanters;
and I left my wife to take drawings, while J----- and I went to
Short's Observatory, near the entrance of the castle.  Here we saw a
camera-obscura, which brought before us, without our stirring a step,
almost all the striking objects which we had been wandering to and fro to
see.  We also saw the mites in cheese, gigantically magnified by a solar
microscope; likewise some dioramic views, with all which I was mightily
pleased, and for myself, being tired to death of sights, I would as lief
see them as anything else.  We found, on calling for mamma at St.
Giles's, that she had gone away; but she rejoined us between four and
five o'clock at our hotel, where the next thing we did was to dine.
Again after dinner we walked out, looking at the shop-windows of
jewellers, where ornaments made of cairngorm pebbles are the most
peculiar attraction.  As it was our wedding-day, . . . . I gave S----- a
golden and amethyst-bodied cairngorm beetle with a ruby head; and after
sitting awhile in Prince's Street Gardens, we came home.


July 10th.--Last evening I walked round the castle rock, and through the
Grass-Market, where I stood on the inlaid cross in the pavement, thence
down the High Street beyond John Knox's house.  The throng in that part
of the town was very great.  There is a strange fascination in these old
streets, and in the peeps down the closes; but it doubtless would be a
great blessing were a fire to sweep through the whole of ancient
Edinburgh.  This system of living on flats, up to I know not what story,
must be most unfavorable to cleanliness, since they have to fetch their
water all that distance towards heaven, and how they get rid of their
rubbish is best known to themselves.

My wife has gone to Roslin this morning, and since her departure it has
been drizzly, so that J----- and I, after a walk through the new part of
the town, are imprisoned in our parlor with little resource except to
look across the valley to the castle, where Mons Meg is plainly visible
on the upper platform, and the lower ramparts, zigzagging about the edge
of the precipice, which nearly in front of us is concealed or softened by
a great deal of shrubbery, but farther off descends steeply down to the
grass below.  Somewhere on this side of the rock was the point where
Claverhouse, on quitting Edinburgh before the battle of Killiecrankie,
clambered up to hold an interview with the Duke of Gordon.  What an
excellent thing it is to have such striking and indestructible landmarks
and time-marks that they serve to affix historical incidents to, and
thus, as it were, nail down the Past for the benefit of all future ages!

The old town of Edinburgh appears to be situated, in its densest part, on
the broad back of a ridge, which rises gradually to its termination in
the precipitous rock, on which stands the castle.  Between the old town
and the new is the valley, which runs along at the base of this ridge,
and which, in its natural state, was probably rough and broken, like any
mountain gorge.  The lower part of the valley, adjacent to the Canongate,
is now a broad hollow space, fitted up with dwellings, shops, or
manufactories; the next portion, between two bridges, is converted into
an ornamental garden free to the public, and contains Scott's beautiful
monument,--a canopy of Gothic arches and a fantastic spire, beneath which
he sits, thoughtful and observant of what passes in the contiguous
street; the third portion of the valley, above the last bridge, is
another ornamental garden, open only to those who have pass-keys.  It is
an admirable garden, with a great variety of surface, and extends far
round the castle rock, with paths that lead up to its very base, among
leafy depths of shrubbery, and winds beneath the sheer, black precipice.
J----- and I walked there this forenoon, and took refuge from a shower
beneath an overhanging jut of the rock, where a bench had been placed,
and where a curtain of hanging ivy helped to shelter us.  On our return
to the hotel, we found mamma just alighting from a cab.  She had had very
bad fortune in her excursion to Roslin, having had to walk a long
distance to the chapel, and being caught in the rain; and, after all, she
could only spend seven minutes in viewing the beautiful Roslin
architecture.



MELROSE.


July 11th.--We left Edinburgh, where we had found at Addison's, 87
Prince's Street, the most comfortable hotel in Great Britain, and went to
Melrose, where we put up at the George.  This is all travelled ground
with me, so that I need not much perplex myself with further description,
especially as it is impossible, by any repetition of attempts, to
describe Melrose Abbey.  We went thither immediately after tea, and were
shown over the ruins by a very delectable old Scotchman, incomparably the
best guide I ever met with.  I think he must take pains to speak the
Scotch dialect, he does it with such pungent felicity and effect, and it
gives a flavor to everything he says, like the mustard and vinegar in a
salad.  This is not the man I saw when here before.  The Scotch dialect
is still, in a greater or less degree, universally prevalent in Scotland,
insomuch that we generally find it difficult to comprehend the answers to
our questions, though more, I think, from the unusual intonation than
either from strange words or pronunciation.  But this old man, though he
spoke the most unmitigated Scotch, was perfectly intelligible,--perhaps
because his speech so well accorded with the classic standard of the
Waverley Novels.  Moreover, he is thoroughly acquainted with the Abbey,
stone by stone; and it was curious to see him, as we walked among its
aisles, and over the grass beneath its roofless portions, pick up the
withered leaves that had fallen there, and do other such little things,
as a good housewife might do to a parlor.  I have met with two or three
instances where the guardian of an old edifice seemed really to love it,
and this was one, although the old man evidently had a Scotch
Covenanter's contempt and dislike of the faith that founded the Abbey.
He repeated King David's dictum that King David the First was "a sair
saint for the crown," as bestowing so much wealth on religious edifices;
but really, unless it be Walter Scott, I know not any Scotchman who has
done so much for his country as this same St. David.  As the founder of
Melrose and many other beautiful churches and abbeys, he left magnificent
specimens of the only kind of poetry which the age knew how to produce;
and the world is the better for him to this day,--which is more, I
believe, than can be said of any hero or statesman in Scottish annals.

We went all over the ruins, of course, and saw the marble stone of King
Alexander, and the spot where Bruce's heart is said to be buried, and the
slab of Michael Scott, with the cross engraved upon it; also the
exquisitely sculptured kail-leaves, and other foliage and flowers, with
which the Gothic artists inwreathed this edifice, bestowing more minute
and faithful labor than an artist of these days would do on the most
delicate piece of cabinet-work.  We came away sooner than we wished, but
we hoped to return thither this morning; and, for my part, I cherish a
presentiment that this will not be our last visit to Scotland and
Melrose. . . . . J----- and I then walked to the Tweed, where we saw two
or three people angling, with naked legs, or trousers turned up, and
wading among the rude stones that make something like a dam over the wide
and brawling stream.  I did not observe that they caught any fish, but
J----- was so fascinated with the spectacle that he pulled out his poor
little fishing-line, and wished to try his chance forthwith.  I never
saw the angler's instinct stronger in anybody.  We walked across the
foot-bridge that here spans the Tweed; and J----- observed that he did
not see how William of Deloraine could have found so much difficulty in
swimming his horse across so shallow a river.  Neither do I.  It now
began to sprinkle, and we hastened back to the hotel.

It was not a pleasant morning; but we started immediately after breakfast
for



ABBOTSFORD,


which is but about three miles distant.  The country between Melrose and
that place is not in the least beautiful, nor very noteworthy,--one or
two old irregular villages; one tower that looks principally domestic,
yet partly warlike, and seems to be of some antiquity; and an undulation,
or rounded hilly surface of the landscape, sometimes affording wide
vistas between the slopes.  These hills, which, I suppose, are some of
them on the Abbotsford estate, are partly covered with woods, but of
Scotch fir, or some tree of that species, which creates no softened
undulation, but overspreads the hill like a tightly fitting wig.  It is a
cold, dreary, disheartening neighborhood, that of Abbotsford; at least,
it has appeared so to me at both of my visits,--one of which was on a
bleak and windy May morning, and this one on a chill, showery morning of
midsummer.

The entrance-way to the house is somewhat altered since my last visit;
and we now, following the direction of a painted finger on the wall, went
round to a side door in the basement story, where we found an elderly man
waiting as if in expectation of visitors.  He asked us to write our names
in a book, and told us that the desk on the leaf of which it lay was the
one in which Sir Walter found the forgotten manuscript of Waverley, while
looking for some fishing-tackle.  There was another desk in the room,
which had belonged to the Colonel Gardiner who appears in Waverley.  The
first apartment into which our guide showed us was Sir Walter's study,
where I again saw his clothes, and remarked how the sleeve of his old
green coat was worn at the cuff,--a minute circumstance that seemed to
bring Sir Walter very near me.  Thence into the library; thence into the
drawing-room, whence, methinks, we should have entered the dining-room,
the most interesting of all, as being the room where he died.  But this
room seems not to be shown now.  We saw the armory, with the gun of Rob
Roy, into the muzzle of which I put my finger, and found the bore very
large; the beautifully wrought pistol of Claverhouse, and a pair of
pistols that belonged to Napoleon; the sword of Montrose, which I
grasped, and drew half out of the scabbard; and Queen Mary's iron
jewel-box, six or eight inches long, and two or three high, with a lid
rounded like that of a trunk, and much corroded with rust.  There is no
use in making a catalogue of these curiosities.  The feeling in visiting
Abbotsford is not that of awe; it is little more than going to a museum.
I do abhor this mode of making pilgrimages to the shrines of departed
great men.  There is certainly something wrong in it, for it seldom or
never produces (in me, at least) the right feeling.  It is an odd truth,
too, that a house is forever after spoiled and ruined as a home, by
having been the abode of a great man.  His spirit haunts it, as it were,
with a malevolent effect, and takes hearth and hall away from the nominal
possessors, giving all the world the right to enter there because he had
such intimate relations with all the world.

We had intended to go to Dryburgh Abbey; but as the weather more than
threatened rain, . . . . we gave up the idea, and so took the rail for
Berwick, after one o'clock.  On our road we passed several ruins in
Scotland, and some in England,--one old castle in particular, beautifully
situated beside a deep-banked stream.  The road lies for many miles along
the coast, affording a fine view of the German Ocean, which was now blue,
sunny, and breezy, the day having risen out of its morning sulks.  We
waited an hour or more at Berwick, and J----- and I took a hasty walk
into the town.  It is a rough and rude assemblage of rather mean houses,
some of which are thatched.  There seems to have been a wall about the
town at a former period, and we passed through one of the gates.  The
view of the river Tweed here is very fine, both above and below the
railway bridge, and especially where it flows, a broad tide, and between
high banks, into the sea.  Thence we went onward along the coast, as I
have said, pausing a few moments in smoky Newcastle, and reaching Durham
about eight o'clock.



DURHAM.


I wandered out in the dusk of the evening,--for the dusk comes on
comparatively early as we draw southward,--and found a beautiful and
shadowy path along the river-side, skirting its high banks, up and adown
which grow noble elms.  I could not well see, in that obscurity of
twilight boughs, whither I was going, or what was around me; but I judged
that the castle or cathedral, or both, crowned the highest line of the
shore, and that I was walking at the base of their walls.  There was a
pair of lovers in front of me, and I passed two or three other tender
couples.  The walk appeared to go on interminably by the river-side,
through the same sweet shadow; but I turned and found my way into the
cathedral close, beneath an ancient archway, whence, issuing again, I
inquired my way to the Waterloo Hotel, where we had put up.


ITEMS.--We saw the Norham Castle of Marmion, at a short distance from the
station of the same name.  Viewed from the railway, it has not a very
picturesque appearance,--a high, square ruin of what I suppose was the
keep.--At Abbotsford, treasured up in a glass case in the drawing-room,
were memorials of Sir Walter Scott's servants and humble friends,--for
instance, a brass snuff-box of Tom Purdie,--there, too, among precious
relics of illustrious persons.--In the armory, I grasped with some
interest the sword of Sir Adam Ferguson, which he had worn in the
Peninsular war.  Our guide said, of his own knowledge, that "he was a
very funny old gentleman."  He died only a year or two since.


July 11th.--The morning after our arrival in Durham being Sunday, we
attended service in the cathedral. . . . . We found a tolerable audience,
seated on benches, within and in front of the choir; and people
continually strayed in and out of the sunny churchyard and sat down, or
walked softly and quietly up and down the side aisle.  Sometimes, too,
one of the vergers would come in with a handful of little boys, whom he
had caught playing among the tombstones.



DURHAM CATHEDRAL


has one advantage over the others which I have seen, there being no
organ-screen, nor any sort of partition between the choir and nave; so
that we saw its entire length, nearly five hundred feet, in one vista.
The pillars of the nave are immensely thick, but hardly of proportionate
height, and they support the round Norman arch; nor is there, as far as I
remember, a single pointed arch in the cathedral.  The effect is to give
the edifice an air of heavy grandeur.  It seems to have been built before
the best style of church architecture had established itself; so that it
weighs upon the soul, instead of helping it to aspire.  First, there are
these round arches, supported by gigantic columns; then, immediately
above, another row of round arches, behind which is the usual gallery
that runs, as it were, in the thickness of the wall, around the nave of
the cathedral; then, above all, another row of round arches, enclosing
the windows of the clere-story.  The great pillars are ornamented in
various ways,--some with a great spiral groove running from bottom to
top; others with two spirals, ascending in different directions, so as to
cross over one another; some are fluted or channelled straight up and
down; some are wrought with chevrons, like those on the sleeve of a
police-inspector.  There are zigzag cuttings and carvings, which I do not
know how to name scientifically, round the arches of the doors and
windows; but nothing that seems to have flowered out spontaneously, as
natural incidents of a grand and beautiful design.  In the nave, between
the columns of the side aisles, I saw one or two monuments. . . . .

The cathedral service is very long; and though the choral part of it is
pleasant enough, I thought it not best to wait for the sermon, especially
as it would have been quite unintelligible, so remotely as I sat in the
great space.  So I left my seat, and after strolling up and down the
aisle a few times, sallied forth into the churchyard.  On the cathedral
door there is a curious old knocker, in the form of a monstrous face,
which was placed there, centuries ago, for the benefit of fugitives from
justice, who used to be entitled to sanctuary here.  The exterior of the
cathedral, being huge, is therefore grand; it has a great central tower,
and two at the western end; and reposes in vast and heavy length, without
the multitude of niches, and crumbling statues, and richness of detail,
that make the towers and fronts of some cathedrals so endlessly
interesting.  One piece of sculpture I remember,--a carving of a cow, a
milk-maid, and a monk, in reference to the legend that the site of the
cathedral was, in some way, determined by a woman bidding her cow go home
to Dunholme.  Cadmus was guided to the site of his destined city in some
such way as this.

It was a very beautiful day, and though the shadow of the cathedral fell
on this side, yet, it being about noontide, it did not cover the
churchyard entirely, but left many of the graves in sunshine.  There were
not a great many monuments, and these were chiefly horizontal slabs, some
of which looked aged, but on closer inspection proved to be mostly of the
present century.  I observed an old stone figure, however, half worn
away, which seemed to have something like a bishop's mitre on its head,
and may perhaps have lain in the proudest chapel of the cathedral before
occupying its present bed among the grass.  About fifteen paces from the
central tower, and within its shadow, I found a weather-worn slab of
marble, seven or eight feet long, the inscription on which interested me
somewhat.  It was to the memory of Robert Dodsley, the bookseller,
Johnson's acquaintance, who, as his tombstone rather superciliously
avers, had made a much better figure as an author than "could have been
expected in his rank of life."  But, after all, it is inevitable that a
man's tombstone should look down on him, or, at all events, comport
itself towards him "de haut en bas."  I love to find the graves of men
connected with literature.  They interest me more, even though of no
great eminence, than those of persons far more illustrious in other walks
of life.  I know not whether this is because I happen to be one of the
literary kindred, or because all men feel themselves akin, and on terms
of intimacy, with those whom they know, or might have known, in books.  I
rather believe that the latter is the case.

My wife had stayed in the cathedral, but she came out at the end of the
sermon, and told me of two little birds, who had got into the vast
interior, and were in great trouble at not being able to find their way
out again.  Thus, two winged souls may often have been imprisoned within
a faith of heavy ceremonials.

We went round the edifice, and, passing into the close, penetrated
through an arched passage into the crypt, which, methought, was in a
better style of architecture than the nave and choir.  At one end stood a
crowd of venerable figures leaning against the wall, being stone images
of bearded saints, apostles, patriarchs, kings,--personages of great
dignity, at all events, who had doubtless occupied conspicuous niches in
and about the cathedral till finally imprisoned in this cellar.  I looked
at every one, and found not an entire nose among them, nor quite so many
heads as they once had.

Thence we went into the cloisters, which are entire, but not particularly
interesting.  Indeed, this cathedral has not taken hold of my affections,
except in one aspect, when it was exceedingly grand and beautiful.

After looking at the crypt and the cloisters, we returned through the
close and the churchyard, and went back to the hotel through a path by
the river-side.  This is the same dim and dusky path through which I
wandered the night before, and in the sunshine it looked quite as
beautiful as I knew it must,-- a shadow of elm-trees clothing the high
bank, and overarching the paths above and below; some of the elms growing
close to the water-side, and flinging up their topmost boughs not nearly
so high as where we stood, and others climbing upward and upward, till
our way wound among their roots; while through the foliage the quiet
river loitered along, with this lovely shade on both its banks, to pass
through the centre of the town.  The stately cathedral rose high above
us, and farther onward, in a line with it, the battlemented walls of the
old Norman castle, gray and warlike, though now it has become a
University.  This delightful walk terminates at an old bridge in the
heart of the town; and the castle hangs immediately over its busiest
street.  On this bridge, last night, in the embrasure, or just over the
pier, where there is a stone seat, I saw some old men seated, smoking
their pipes and chatting.  In my judgment, a river flowing through the
centre of a town, and not too broad to make itself familiar, nor too
swift, but idling along, as if it loved better to stay there than to go,
is the pleasantest imaginable piece of scenery; so transient as it is,
and yet enduring,--just the same from life's end to life's end; and this
river Wear, with its sylvan wildness, and yet so sweet and placable, is
the best of all little rivers,--not that it is so very small, but with a
bosom broad enough to be crossed by a three-arched bridge.  Just above
the cathedral there is a mill upon its shore, as ancient as the times of
the Abbey.

We went homeward through the market-place and one or two narrow streets;
for the town has the irregularity of all ancient settlements, and,
moreover, undulates upward and downward, and is also made more
unintelligible to a stranger, in its points and bearings, by the tortuous
course of the river.

After dinner J----- and I walked along the bank opposite to that on which
the cathedral stands, and found the paths there equally delightful with
those which I have attempted to describe.  We went onward while the river
gleamed through the foliage beneath us, and passed so far beyond the
cathedral that we began to think we were getting into the country, and
that it was time to return; when all at once we saw a bridge before us,
and beyond that, on the opposite bank of the Wear, the cathedral itself!
The stream had made a circuit without our knowing it.  We paused upon the
bridge, and admired and wondered at the beauty and glory of the scene,
with those vast, ancient towers rising out of the green shade, and
looking as if they were based upon it.  The situation of Durham Cathedral
is certainly a noble one, finer even than that of Lincoln, though the
latter stands even at a more lordly height above the town.  But as I saw
it then, it was grand, venerable, and sweet, all at once; and I never saw
so lovely and magnificent a scene, nor, being content with this, do I
care to see a better.  The castle beyond came also into the view, and the
whole picture was mirrored in the tranquil stream below.  And so,
crossing the bridge, the path led us back through many a bower of hollow
shade; and we then quitted the hotel, and took the rail for



YORK,


where we arrived at about half past nine.  We put up at the Black Swan,
with which we had already made acquaintance at our previous visit to
York.  It is a very ancient hotel; for in the coffee-room I saw on the
wall an old printed advertisement, announcing that a stage-coach would
leave the Black Swan in London, and arrive at the Black Swan in York,
with God's permission, in four days.  The date was 1706; and still, after
a hundred and fifty years, the Black Swan receives travellers in Coney
Street.  It is a very good hotel, and was much thronged with guests when
we arrived, as the Sessions come on this week.  We found a very smart
waiter, whose English faculties have been brightened by a residence of
several years in America.

In the morning, before breakfast, I strolled out, and walked round the
cathedral, passing on my way the sheriff's javelin-men, in long gowns of
faded purple embroidered with gold, carrying halberds in their hands;
also a gentleman in a cocked hat, gold-lace, and breeches, who, no doubt,
had something to do with the ceremonial of the Sessions.  I saw, too, a
procession of a good many old cabs and other carriages, filled with
people, and a banner flaunting above each vehicle.  These were the
piano-forte makers of York, who were going out of town to have a
jollification together.

After breakfast we all went to the cathedral, and no sooner were we
within it than we found how much our eyes had recently been educated, by
our greater power of appreciating this magnificent interior; for it
impressed us both with a joy that we never felt before.  J----- felt it
too, and insisted that the cathedral must have been altered and improved
since we were last here.  But it is only that we have seen much splendid
architecture since then, and so have grown in some degree fitted to enjoy
it.  York Cathedral (I say it now, for it is my present feeling) is the
most wonderful work that ever came from the hands of man.  Indeed, it
seems like "a house not made with hands," but rather to have come down
from above, bringing an awful majesty and sweetness with it and it is so
light and aspiring, with all its vast columns and pointed arches, that
one would hardly wonder if it should ascend back to heaven again by its
mere spirituality.  Positively the pillars and arches of the choir are so
very beautiful that they give the impression of being exquisitely
polished, though such is not the fact; but their beauty throws a gleam
around them.  I thank God that I saw this cathedral again, and I thank
him that he inspired the builder to make it, and that mankind has so long
enjoyed it, and will continue to enjoy it.


July 14th.--We left York at twelve o'clock, and were delayed an hour or
two at Leeds, waiting for a train.  I strolled up into the town, and saw
a fair, with puppet-shows, booths of penny actors, merry-go-rounds,
clowns, boxers, and other such things as I saw, above a year ago, at
Greenwich fair, and likewise at Tranmere, during the Whitsuntide
holidays.

We resumed our journey, and reached Southport in pretty good trim at
about nine o'clock.  It has been a very interesting tour.  We find
Southport just as we left it, with its regular streets of little and big
lodging-houses, where the visitors perambulate to and fro without any
imaginable object.  The tide, too, seems not to have been up over the
waste of sands since we went away; and far seaward stands the same row of
bathing-machines, and just on the verge of the horizon a gleam of water,
--even this being not the sea, but the mouth of the river Ribble, seeking
the sea amid the sandy desert.  But we shall soon say good-by to
Southport.



OLD TRAFFORD, MANCHESTER.


July 22d.--We left Southport for good on the 20th, and have established
ourselves in this place, in lodgings that had been provided for us by Mr.
Swain; our principal object being to spend a few weeks in the proximity
of the Arts' Exhibition.  We are here, about three miles from the
Victoria Railway station in Manchester on one side, and nearly a mile
from the Exhibition on the other.  This is a suburb of Manchester, and
consists of a long street, called the Stratford Road, bordered with brick
houses two stories high, such as are usually the dwellings of tradesmen
or respectable mechanics, but which are now in demand for lodgings, at
high prices, on account of the Exhibition.  It seems to be rather a new
precinct of the city, and the houses, though ranged along a continuous
street, are but a brick border of the green fields in the rear.
Occasionally you get a glimpse of this country aspect between two houses;
but the street itself, even with its little grass-plots and bits of
shrubbery under the front windows, is as ugly as it can be made.  Some of
the houses are better than I have described; but the brick used here in
building is very unsightly in hue and surface.

Betimes in the morning the Exhibition omnibuses begin to trundle along,
and pass at intervals of two and a half minutes through the day,--immense
vehicles constructed to carry thirty-nine passengers, and generally with
a good part of that number inside and out.  The omnibuses are painted
scarlet, bordered with white, have three horses abreast, and a conductor
in a red coat.  They perform the journey from this point into town in
about half an hour; and yesterday morning, being in a hurry to get to the
railway station, I found that I could outwalk them, taking into account
their frequent stoppages.

We have taken the whole house (except some inscrutable holes, into which
the family creeps), of respectable people, who never took lodgers until
this juncture.  Their furniture, however, is of the true lodging-house
pattern, sofas and chairs which have no possibility of repose in them;
rickety tables; an old piano and old music, with "Lady Helen Elizabeth"
somebody's name written on it.  It is very strange how nothing but a
genuine home can ever look homelike.  They appear to be good people; a
little girl of twelve, a daughter, waits on table; and there is an elder
daughter, who yesterday answered the door-bell, looking very like a young
lady, besides five or six smaller children, who make less uproar of grief
or merriment than could possibly be expected.  The husband is not
apparent, though I see his hat in the hall.  The house is new, and has a
trim, light-colored interior of half-gentility.  I suppose the rent, in
ordinary times, might be 25 pounds per annum; but we pay at the rate of
335 pounds for the part which we occupy.  This, like all the other houses
in the neighborhood, was evidently built to be sold or let; the builder
never thought of living in it himself, and so that subtile element, which
would have enabled him to create a home, was entirely left out.

This morning, J----- and I set forth on a walk, first towards the palace
of the Arts' Exhibition, which looked small compared with my idea of it,
and seems to be of the Crystal Palace order of architecture, only with
more iron to its glass.  Its front is composed of three round arches in a
row.  We did not go in. . . . . Turning to the right, we walked onward
two or three miles, passing the Botanic Garden, and thence along by
suburban villas, Belgrave terraces, and other such prettinesses in the
modern Gothic or Elizabethan style, with fancifully ornamented
flower-plats before them; thence by hedgerows and fields, and through two
or three villages, with here and there an old plaster and timber-built
thatched house, among a street full of modern brick-fronts,--the
alehouse, or rural inn, being generally the most ancient house in the
village.  It was a sultry, heavy day, and I walked without much enjoyment
of the air and exercise.  We crossed a narrow and swift river, flowing
between deep banks.  It must have been either the Mersey, still an infant
stream, and little dreaming of the thousand mighty ships that float on
its farther tide, or else the Irwell, which empties into the Mersey.  We
passed through the village beyond this stream, and went to the railway
station, and then were brought back to Old Trafford, and deposited close
by the Exhibition.

It has showered this afternoon; and I beguiled my time for half an hour
by setting down the vehicles that went past; not that they were
particularly numerous, but for the sake of knowing the character of the
travel along the road.


July 26th.--Day before yesterday we went to the Arts' Exhibition, of
which I do not think that I have a great deal to say.  The edifice, being
built more for convenience than show, appears better in the interior than
from without,--long vaulted vistas, lighted from above, extending far
away, all hung with pictures; and, on the floor below, statues, knights
in armor, cabinets, vases, and all manner of curious and beautiful
things, in a regular arrangement.  Scatter five thousand people through
the scene, and I do not know how to make a better outline sketch.  I was
unquiet, from a hopelessness of being able to enjoy it fully.  Nothing is
more depressing to me than the sight of a great many pictures together;
it is like having innumerable books open before you at once, and being
able to read only a sentence or two in each.  They bedazzle one another
with cross lights.  There never should be more than one picture in a
room, nor more than one picture to be studied in one day.  Galleries of
pictures are surely the greatest absurdities that ever were contrived,
there being no excuse for them, except that it is the only way in which
pictures can be made generally available and accessible.

We went first into the Gallery of British Painters, where there were
hundreds of pictures, every one of which would have interested me by
itself; but I could not fix nay mind on one more than another, so I
wandered about, to get a general idea of the Exhibition.  Truly it is
very fine; truly, also, every great show is a kind of humbug.  I doubt
whether there were half a dozen people there who got the kind of
enjoyment that it was intended to create,--very respectable people they
seemed to be, and very well behaved, but all skimming the surface, as I
did, and none of them so feeding on what was beautiful as to digest it,
and make it a part of themselves.  Such a quantity of objects must be
utterly rejected before you can get any real profit from one!  It seemed
like throwing away time to look twice even at whatever was most precious;
and it was dreary to think of not fully enjoying this collection, the
very flower of Time, which never bloomed before, and never, by any
possibility, can bloom again.  Viewed hastily, moreover, it is somewhat
sad to think that mankind, after centuries of cultivation of the
beautiful arts, can produce no more splendid spectacle than this.  It is
not so very grand, although, poor as it is, I lack capacity to take in
even the whole of it.

What gave me most pleasure (because it required no trouble nor study to
come at the heart of it) were the individual relics of antiquity, of
which there are some very curious ones in the cases ranged along the
principal saloon or nave of the building.  For example, the dagger with
which Felton killed the Duke of Buckingham,--a knife with a bone handle
and a curved blade, not more than three inches long; sharp-pointed,
murderous-looking, but of very coarse manufacture.  Also, the Duke of
Alva's leading staff of iron; and the target of the Emperor Charles V.,
which seemed to be made of hardened leather, with designs artistically
engraved upon it, and gilt.  I saw Wolsey's portrait, and, in close
proximity to it, his veritable cardinal's hat in a richly ornamented
glass case, on which was an inscription to the effect that it had been
bought by Charles Kean at the sale of Horace Walpole's collection.  It is
a felt hat with a brim about six inches wide all round, and a rather high
crown; the color was, doubtless, a bright red originally, but now it is
mottled with a grayish hue, and there are cracks in the brim, as if the
hat had seen a good deal of wear.  I suppose a far greater curiosity than
this is the signet-ring of one of the Pharaohs, who reigned over Egypt
during Joseph's prime ministry,--a large ring to be worn on the thumb, if
at all,--of massive gold, seal part and all, and inscribed with some
characters that looked like Hebrew.  I had seen this before in Mr.
Mayer's collection in Liverpool.  The mediaeval and English relics,
however, interested me more,--such as the golden and enamelled George
worn by Sir Thomas More; or the embroidered shirt of Charles I.,--the
very one, I presume, which he wore at his execution.  There are no
blood-marks on it, it being very nicely washed and folded.  The texture
of the linen cloth--if linen it be--is coarser than any peasant would
wear at this day, but the needle-work is exceedingly fine and elaborate.
Another relic of the same period,--the Cavalier General Sir Jacob
Astley's buff-coat, with his belt and sword; the leather of the
buff-coat, for I took it between my fingers, is about a quarter of an
inch thick, of the same material as a wash-leather glove, and by no means
smoothly dressed, though the sleeves are covered with silver-lace.  Of
old armor, there are admirable specimens; and it makes one's head ache to
look at the iron pots which men used to thrust their heads into.  Indeed,
at one period they seem to have worn an inner iron cap underneath the
helmet.  I doubt whether there ever was any age of chivalry. . . . . It
certainly was no chivalric sentiment that made men case themselves in
impenetrable iron, and ride about in iron prisons, fearfully peeping at
their enemies through little slits and gimlet-holes.  The unprotected
breast of a private soldier must have shamed his leaders in those days.
The point of honor is very different now.

I mean to go again and again, many times more, and will take each day
some one department, and so endeavor to get some real use and improvement
out of what I see.  Much that is most valuable must be immitigably
rejected; but something, according to the measure of my poor capacity,
will really be taken into my mind.  After all, it was an agreeable day,
and I think the next one will be more so.


July 28th.--Day before yesterday I paid a second visit to the Exhibition,
and devoted the day mainly to seeing the works of British painters, which
fill a very large space,--two or three great saloons at the right side of
the nave.  Among the earliest are Hogarth's pictures, including the
Sigismunda, which I remember to have seen before, with her lover's heart
in her hand, looking like a monstrous strawberry; and the March to
Finchley, than which nothing truer to English life and character was ever
painted, nor ever can be; and a large stately portrait of Captain Coram,
and others, all excellent in proportion as they come near to ordinary
life, and are wrought out through its forms.  All English painters
resemble Hogarth in this respect.  They cannot paint anything high,
heroic, and ideal, and their attempts in that direction are
wearisome to look at; but they sometimes produce good effects by
means of awkward figures in ill-made coats and small-clothes, and hard,
coarse-complexioned faces, such as they might see anywhere in the street.
They are strong in homeliness and ugliness, weak in their efforts at the
beautiful.  Sir Thomas Lawrence attains a sort of grace, which you feel
to be a trick, and therefore get disgusted with it.  Reynolds is not
quite genuine, though certainly he has produced some noble and beautiful
heads.  But Hogarth is the only English painter, except in the landscape
department; there are no others who interpret life to me at all, unless
it be some of the modern Pre-Raphaelites.  Pretty village scenes of
common life,--pleasant domestic passages, with a touch of easy humor in
them,--little pathoses and fancynesses, are abundant enough; and Wilkie,
to be sure, has done more than this, though not a great deal more.  His
merit lies, not in a high aim, but in accomplishing his aim so perfectly.
It is unaccountable that the English painters' achievements should be so
much inferior to those of the English poets, who have really elevated the
human mind; but, to be sure, painting has only become an English art
subsequently to the epochs of the greatest poets, and since the beginning
of the last century, during which England had no poets.  I respect Haydon
more than I once did, not for his pictures, they being detestable to see,
but for his heroic rejection of whatever his countrymen and he himself
could really do, and his bitter resolve to achieve something higher,--
failing in which, he died.

No doubt I am doing vast injustice to a great many gifted men in what I
have here written,--as, for instance, Copley, who certainly has painted a
slain man to the life; and to a crowd of landscape-painters, who have
made wonderful reproductions of little English streams and shrubbery, and
cottage doors and country lanes.  And there is a picture called "The
Evening Gun" by Danby,--a ship of war on a calm, glassy tide, at sunset,
with the cannon-smoke puffing from her porthole; it is very beautiful,
and so effective that you can even hear the report breaking upon the
stillness, with so grand a roar that it is almost like stillness too.  As
for Turner, I care no more for his light-colored pictures than for so
much lacquered ware or painted gingerbread.  Doubtless this is my fault,
my own deficiency; but I cannot help it,--not, at least, without
sophisticating myself by the effort.  The only modern pictures that
accomplish a higher end than that of pleasing the eye--the only ones that
really take hold of my mind, and with a kind of acerbity, like unripe
fruit--are the works of Hunt, and one or two other painters of the
Pre-Raphaelite school.  They seem wilfully to abjure all beauty, and to
make their pictures disagreeable out of mere malice; but at any rate, for
the thought and feeling which are ground up with the paint, they will
bear looking at, and disclose a deeper value the longer you look.  Never
was anything so stiff and unnatural as they appear; although every single
thing represented seems to be taken directly out of life and reality,
and, as it were, pasted down upon the canvas.  They almost paint even
separate hairs.  Accomplishing so much, and so perfectly, it seems
unaccountable that the picture does not live; but Nature has an art
beyond these painters, and they leave out some medium,--some enchantment
that should intervene, and keep the object from pressing so baldly and
harshly upon the spectator's eyeballs.  With the most lifelike
reproduction, there is no illusion.  I think if a semi-obscurity were
thrown over the picture after finishing it to this nicety, it might bring
it nearer to nature.  I remember a heap of autumn leaves, every one of
which seems to have been stiffened with gum and varnish, and then put
carefully down into the stiffly disordered heap.  Perhaps these artists
may hereafter succeed in combining the truth of detail with a broader and
higher truth.  Coming from such a depth as their pictures do, and having
really an idea as the seed of them, it is strange that they should look
like the most made-up things imaginable.  One picture by Hunt that
greatly interested me was of some sheep that had gone astray among
heights and precipices, and I could have looked all day at these poor,
lost creatures,--so true was their meek alarm and hopeless bewilderment,
their huddling together, without the slightest confidence of mutual help;
all that the courage and wisdom of the bravest and wisest of them could
do being to bleat, and only a few having spirits enough even for this.

After going through these modern masters, among whom were some French
painters who do not interest me at all, I did a miscellaneous business,
chiefly among the water-colors and photographs, and afterwards among the
antiquities and works of ornamental art.  I have forgotten what I saw,
except the breastplate and helmet of Henry of Navarre, of steel, engraved
with designs that have been half obliterated by scrubbing.  I remember,
too, a breastplate of an Elector of Saxony, with a bullet-hole through
it.  He received his mortal wound through that hole, and died of it two
days afterwards, three hundred years ago.

There was a crowd of visitors, insomuch that, it was difficult to get a
satisfactory view of the most interesting objects.  They were nearly all
middling-class people; the Exhibition, I think, does not reach the lower
classed at all; in fact, it could not reach them, nor their betters
either, without a good deal of study to help it out.  I shall go to-day,
and do my best to get profit out of it.


July 30th.--We all, with R----- and Fanny, went to the Exhibition
yesterday, and spent the day there; not J-----, however, for he went to
the Botanical Gardens.  After some little skirmishing with other things,
I devoted myself to the historical portraits, which hang on both sides of
the great nave, and went through them pretty faithfully.  The oldest are
pictures of Richard II. and Henry IV. and Edward IV. and Jane Shore, and
seem to have little or no merit as works of art, being cold and stiff,
the life having, perhaps, faded out of them; but these older painters
were trustworthy, inasmuch as they had no idea of making a picture, but
only of getting the face before them on canvas as accurately as they
could.  All English history scarcely supplies half a dozen portraits
before the time of Henry VIII.; after that period, and through the reigns
of Elizabeth and James, there are many ugly pictures by Dutchmen and
Italians; and the collection is wonderfully rich in portraits of the time
of Charles I. and the Commonwealth.  Vandyke seems to have brought
portrait-painting into fashion; and very likely the king's love of art
diffused a taste for it throughout the nation, and remotely suggested,
even to his enemies, to get their pictures painted.  Elizabeth has
perpetuated her cold, thin visage on many canvases, and generally with
some fantasy of costume that makes her ridiculous to all time.  There are
several of Mary of Scotland, none of which have a gleam of beauty; but
the stiff old brushes of these painters could not catch the beautiful.
Of all the older pictures, the only one that I took pleasure in looking
at was a portrait of Lord Deputy Falkland, by Vansomer, in James I.'s
time,--a very stately, full-length figure in white, looking out of the
picture as if he saw you.  The catalogue says that this portrait
suggested an incident in Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto; but I do not
remember it.

I have a haunting doubt of the value of portrait-painting; that is to
say, whether it gives you a genuine idea of the person purporting to be
represented.  I do not remember ever to have recognized a man by having
previously seen his portrait.  Vandyke's pictures are full of grace and
nobleness, but they do not look like Englishmen,--the burly, rough,
wine-flushed and weather-reddened faces, and sturdy flesh and blood,
which we see even at the present day, when they must naturally have
become a good deal refined from either the country gentleman or the
courtier of the Stuarts' age.  There is an old, fat portrait of Gervoyse
Holles, in a buff-coat,--a coarse, hoggish, yet manly man.  The painter
is unknown; but I honor him, and Gervoyse Holles too,--for one was
willing to be truly rendered, and the other dared to do it.  It seems to
be the aim of portrait-painters generally, especially of those who have
been most famous, to make their pictures as beautiful and noble as can
anywise consist with retaining the very slightest resemblance to the
person sitting to them.  They seldom attain even the grace and beauty
which they aim at, but only hit some temporary or individual taste.
Vandyke, however, achieved graces that rise above time and fashion, and
so did Sir Peter Lely, in his female portraits; but the doubt is, whether
the works of either are genuine history.  Not more so, I suspect, than
the narrative of a historian who should seek to make poetry out of the
events which he relates, rejecting those which could not possibly be thus
idealized.

I observe, furthermore, that a full-length portrait has seldom face
enough; not that it lacks its fair proportion by measurement, but the
artist does not often find it possible to make the face so intellectually
prominent as to subordinate the figure and drapery.  Vandyke does this,
however.  In his pictures of Charles I., for instance, it is the
melancholy grace of the visage that attracts the eye, and it passes to
the rest of the composition only by an effort.  Earlier and later
pictures are but a few inches of face to several feet of figure and
costume, and more insignificant than the latter because seldom so well
done; and I suspect the same would generally be the case now, only that
the present simplicity of costume gives the face a chance to be seen.

I was interrupted here, and cannot resume the thread; but considering how
much of his own conceit the artist puts into a portrait, how much
affectation the sitter puts on, and then again that no face is the same
to any two spectators; also, that these portraits are darkened and faded
with age, and can seldom be more than half seen, being hung too high, or
somehow or other inconvenient, on the whole, I question whether there is
much use in looking at them.  The truest test would be, for a man well
read in English history and biography, and himself an observer of
insight, to go through the series without knowing what personages they
represented, and write beneath each the name which the portrait
vindicated for itself.

After getting through the portrait-gallery, I went among the engravings
and photographs, and then glanced along the old masters, but without
seriously looking at anything.  While I was among the Dutch painters, a
gentleman accosted me.  It was Mr. J------, whom I once met at dinner
with Bennoch.  He told me that "the Poet Laureate" (as he called him) was
in the Exhibition rooms; and as I expressed great interest, Mr. J------
was kind enough to go in quest of him.  Not for the purpose of
introduction, however, for he was not acquainted with Tennyson.  Soon Mr.
J------ returned, and said that he had found the Poet Laureate,--and,
going into the saloon of the old masters, we saw him there, in company
with Mr. Woolner, whose bust of him is now in the Exhibition.

Gazing at him with all my eyes, I liked him well, and rejoiced more in
him than in all the other wonders of the Exhibition.

How strange that in these two or three pages I cannot get one single
touch that may call him up hereafter!

I would most gladly have seen more of this one poet of our day, but
forbore to follow him; for I must own that it seemed mean to be dogging
him through the saloons, or even to look at him, since it was to be done
stealthily, if at all.

He is as un-English as possible; indeed an Englishman of genius usually
lacks the national characteristics, and is great abnormally.  Even the
great sailor, Nelson, was unlike his countrymen in the qualities that
constituted him a hero; he was not the perfection of an Englishman, but a
creature of another kind,--sensitive, nervous, excitable, and really more
like a Frenchman.

Un-English as he was, Tennyson had not, however, an American look.  I
cannot well describe the difference; but there was something more mellow
in him,--softer, sweeter, broader, more simple than we are apt to be.
Living apart from men as he does would hurt any one of us more than it
does him.  I may as well leave him here, for I cannot touch the central
point.


August 2d.--Day before yesterday I went again to the Exhibition, and
began the day with looking at the old masters.  Positively, I do begin to
receive some pleasure from looking at pictures; but as yet it has nothing
to do with any technical merit, nor do I think I shall ever get so far as
that.  Some landscapes by Ruysdael, and some portraits by Murillo,
Velasquez, and Titian, were those which I was most able to appreciate;
and I see reason for allowing, contrary to my opinion, as expressed a few
pages back, that a portrait may preserve some valuable characteristics of
the person represented.  The pictures in the English portrait-gallery are
mostly very bad, and that may be the reason why I saw so little in them.
I saw too, at this last visit, a Virgin and Child, which appeared to me
to have an expression more adequate to the subject than most of the
innumerable virgins and children, in which we see only repetitions of
simple maternity; indeed, any mother, with her first child, would serve
an artist for one of them.  But, in this picture the Virgin had a look as
if she were loving the infant as her own child, and at the same time
rendering him an awful worship, as to her Creator.

While I was sitting in the central saloon, listening to the music, a
young man accosted me, presuming that I was so-and-so, the American
author.  He himself was a traveller for a publishing firm; and he
introduced conversation by talking of Uttoxeter, and my description of it
in an annual.  He said that the account had caused a good deal of pique
among the good people of Uttoxeter, because of the ignorance which I
attribute to them as to the circumstance which connects Johnson with
their town.  The spot where Johnson stood can, it appears, still be
pointed out.  It is on one side of the market-place, and not in the
neighborhood of the church.  I forget whether I recorded, at the time,
that an Uttoxeter newspaper was sent me, containing a proposal that a
statue or memorial should be erected on the spot.  It would gratify me
exceedingly if such a result should come from my pious pilgrimage
thither.

My new acquaintance, who was cockneyish, but very intelligent and
agreeable, went on to talk about many literary matters and characters;
among others, about Miss Bronte, whom he had seen at the Chapter
Coffee-House, when she and her sister Anne first went to London.  He was
at that time connected with the house of ------ and ------, and he
described the surprise and incredulity of Mr.------, when this little,
commonplace-looking woman presented herself as the author of Jane Eyre.
His story brought out the insignificance of Charlotte Bronte's aspect,
and the bluff rejection of her by Mr. ------, much more strongly than
Mrs. Gaskell's narrative.


Chorlton Road, August 9th.--We have changed our lodgings since my last
date, those at Old Trafford being inconvenient, and the landlady a sharp,
peremptory housewife, better fitted to deal with her own family than to
be complaisant to guests.  We are now a little farther from the
Exhibition, and not much better off as regards accommodation, but the
housekeeper is a pleasant, civil sort of a woman, auspiciously named Mrs.
Honey.  The house is a specimen of the poorer middle-class dwellings as
built nowadays,--narrow staircase, thin walls, and, being constructed for
sale, very ill put together indeed,--the floors with wide cracks between
the boards, and wide crevices admitting both air and light over the
doors, so that the house is full of draughts.  The outer walls, it seems
to me, are but of one brick in thickness, and the partition walls
certainly no thicker; and the movements, and sometimes the voices, of
people in the contiguous house are audible to us.  The Exhibition has
temporarily so raised the value of lodgings here that we have to pay a
high price for even such a house as this.

Mr. Wilding having gone on a tour to Scotland, I had to be at the
Consulate every day last week till yesterday; when I absented myself from
duty, and went to the Exhibition.  U---- and I spent an hour together,
looking principally at the old Dutch masters, who seem to me the most
wonderful set of men that ever handled a brush.  Such lifelike
representations of cabbages, onions, brass kettles, and kitchen crockery;
such blankets, with the woollen fuzz upon them; such everything I never
thought that the skill of man could produce!  Even the photograph cannot
equal their miracles.  The closer you look, the more minutely true the
picture is found to be, and I doubt if even the microscope could see
beyond the painter's touch.  Gerard Dow seems to be the master among
these queer magicians.  A straw mat, in one of his pictures, is the most
miraculous thing that human art has yet accomplished; and there is a
metal vase, with a dent in it, that is absolutely more real than reality.
These painters accomplish all they aim at,--a praise, methinks, which can
be given to no other men since the world began.  They must have laid down
their brushes with perfect satisfaction, knowing that each one of their
million touches had been necessary to the effect, and that there was not
one too few nor too many.  And it is strange how spiritual and suggestive
the commonest household article--an earthen pitcher, for example--
becomes, when represented with entire accuracy.  These Dutchmen got at
the soul of common things, and so made them types and interpreters of the
spiritual world.

Afterwards I looked at many of the pictures of the old masters, and found
myself gradually getting a taste for them; at least, they give me more
and more pleasure the oftener I come to see them.  Doubtless, I shall be
able to pass for a man of taste by the time I return to America.  It is
an acquired taste, like that for wines; and I question whether a man is
really any truer, wiser, or better for possessing it.  From the old
masters, I went among the English painters, and found myself more
favorably inclined towards some of them than at my previous visits;
seeing something wonderful even in Turner's lights and mists and yeasty
waves, although I should like him still better if his pictures looked in
the least like what they typify.  The most disagreeable of English
painters is Etty, who had a diseased appetite for woman's flesh, and
spent his whole life, apparently, in painting them with enormously
developed busts.  I do not mind nudity in a modest and natural way; but
Etty's women really thrust their nudity upon you with malice
aforethought, . . . . and the worst of it is they are not beautiful.

Among the last pictures that I looked at was Hogarth's March to Finchley;
and surely nothing can be covered more thick and deep with English nature
than that piece of canvas.  The face of the tall grenadier in the centre,
between two women, both of whom have claims on him, wonderfully expresses
trouble and perplexity; and every touch in the picture meant something
and expresses what it meant.

The price of admission, after two o'clock, being sixpence, the Exhibition
was thronged with a class of people who do not usually come in such large
numbers.  It was both pleasant and touching to see how earnestly some of
them sought to get instruction from what they beheld.  The English are a
good and simple people, and take life in earnest.


August 14th.--Passing by the gateway of the Manchester Cathedral the
other morning, on my way to the station, I found a crowd collected, and,
high overhead, the bells were chiming for a wedding.  These chimes of
bells are exceedingly impressive, so broadly gladsome as they are,
filling the whole air, and every nook of one's heart with sympathy.  They
are good for a people to rejoice with, and good also for a marriage,
because through all their joy there is something solemn,--a tone of that
voice which we have heard so often at funerals.  It is good to see how
everybody, up to this old age of the world, takes an interest in
weddings, and seems to have a faith that now, at last, a couple have come
together to make each other happy.  The high, black, rough old cathedral
tower sent out its chime of bells as earnestly as for any bridegroom and
bride that came to be married five hundred years ago.  I went into the
churchyard, but there was such a throng of people on its pavement of flat
tombstones, and especially such a cluster along the pathway by which the
bride was to depart, that I could only see a white dress waving along,
and really do not know whether she was a beauty or a fright.  The happy
pair got into a post-chaise that was waiting at the gate, and immediately
drew some crimson curtains, and so vanished into their Paradise.  There
were two other post-chaises and pairs, and all three had postilions in
scarlet.  This is the same cathedral where, last May, I saw a dozen
couples married in the lump.

In a railway carriage, two or three days ago, an old merchant made rather
a good point of one of the uncomfortable results of the electric
telegraph.  He said that formerly a man was safe from bad news, such as
intelligence of failure of debtors, except at the hour of opening his
letters in the morning; and then he was in some degree prepared for it,
since, among (say) fifteen letters, he would be pretty certain to find
some "queer" one.  But since the telegraph has come into play, he is
never safe, and may be hit with news of failure, shipwreck, fall of
stocks, or whatever disaster, at all hours of the day.

I went to the Exhibition on Wednesday with U----, and looked at the
pencil sketches of the old masters; also at the pictures generally, old
and new.  I particularly remember a spring landscape, by John Linnell the
younger.  It is wonderfully good; so tender and fresh that the artist
seems really to have caught the evanescent April and made her permanent.
Here, at least, is eternal spring.

I saw a little man, behind an immense beard, whom I take to be the Duke
of Newcastle; at least, there was a photograph of him in the gallery,
with just such a beard.  He was at the Palace on that day.


August 16th.--I went again to the Exhibition day before yesterday, and
looked much at both the modern and ancient pictures, as also at the
water-colors.  I am making some progress as a connoisseur, and have got
so far as to be able to distinguish the broader differences of style,--
as, for example, between Rubens and Rembrandt.  I should hesitate to
claim any more for myself thus far.  In fact, however, I do begin to have
a liking for good things, and to be sure that they are good.  Murillo
seems to me about the noblest and purest painter that ever lived, and his
"Good Shepherd" the loveliest picture I have seen.  It is a hopeful
symptom, moreover, of improving taste, that I see more merit in the crowd
of painters than I was at first competent to acknowledge.  I could see
some of their defects from the very first; but that is the earliest stage
of connoisseurship, after a formal and ignorant admiration.  Mounting a
few steps higher, one sees beauties.  But how much study, how many
opportunities, are requisite to form and cultivate a taste!  The
Exhibition must be quite thrown away on the mass of spectators.

Both they and I are better able to appreciate the specimens of ornamental
art contained in the Oriental Room, and in the numerous cases that are
ranged up and down the nave.  The gewgaws of all Time are here, in
precious metals, glass, china, ivory, and every other material that could
be wrought into curious and beautiful shapes; great basins and dishes of
embossed gold from the Queen's sideboard, or from the beaufets of
noblemen; vessels set with precious stones; the pastoral staffs of
prelates, some of them made of silver or gold, and enriched with gems,
and what have been found in the tombs of the bishops; state swords, and
silver maces; the rich plate of colleges, elaborately wrought,--great
cups, salvers, tureens, that have been presented by loving sons to their
Alma Mater; the heirlooms of old families, treasured from generation to
generation, and hitherto only to be seen by favored friends; famous
historical jewels, some of which are painted in the portraits of the
historical men and women that hang on the walls; numerous specimens of
the beautiful old Venetian glass, some of which looks so fragile that it
is a wonder how it could bear even the weight of the wine, that used to
be poured into it, without breaking.  These are the glasses that tested
poison, by being shattered into fragments at its touch.  The strangest
and ugliest old crockery, pictured over with monstrosities,--the Palissy
ware, embossed with vegetables, fishes, lobsters, that look absolutely
real; the delicate Sevres china, each piece made inestimable by pictures
from a master's hand;--in short, it is a despair and misery to see so
much that is curious and beautiful, and to feel that far the greater
portion of it will slip out of the memory, and be as if we had never seen
it.  But I mean to look again and again at these things.  We soon
perceive that the present day does not engross all the taste and
ingenuity that has ever existed in the mind of man; that, in fact, we are
a barren age in that respect.


August 20th.--I went to the Exhibition on Monday, and again yesterday,
and measurably enjoyed both visits.  I continue to think, however, that a
picture cannot be fully enjoyed except by long and intimate acquaintance
with it, nor can I quite understand what the enjoyment of a connoisseur
is.  He is not usually, I think, a man of deep, poetic feeling, and does
not deal with the picture through his heart, nor set it in a poem, nor
comprehend it morally.  If it be a landscape, he is not entitled to judge
of it by his intimacy with nature; if a picture of human action, he has
no experience nor sympathy of life's deeper passages.  However, as my
acquaintance with pictures increases, I find myself recognizing more and
more the merit of the acknowledged masters of the art; but, possibly, it
is only because I adopt the wrong principles which may have been laid
down by the connoisseurs.  But there can be no mistake about Murillo,--
not that I am worthy to admire him yet, however.

Seeing the many pictures of Holy Families, and the Virgin and Child,
which have been painted for churches and convents, the idea occurs, that
it was in this way that the poor monks and nuns gratified, as far as they
could, their natural longing for earthly happiness.  It was not Mary and
her heavenly Child that they really beheld, or wished for; but an earthly
mother rejoicing over her baby, and displaying it probably to the world
as an object worthy to be admired by kings,--as Mary does, in the
Adoration of the Magi.  Every mother, I suppose, feels as if her first
child deserved everybody's worship.

I left the Exhibition at three o'clock, and went to Manchester, where I
sought out Mr. C  S------- in his little office.  He greeted me warmly,
and at five we took the omnibus for his house, about four miles from
town.  He seems to be on pleasant terms with his neighbors, for almost
everybody that got into the omnibus exchanged kindly greetings with him,
and indeed his kindly, simple, genial nature comes out so evidently that
it would be difficult not to like him.  His house stands, with others, in
a green park,--a small, pretty, semi-detached suburban residence of
brick, with a lawn and garden round it.  In close vicinity, there is a
deep clough or dell, as shaggy and wild as a poet could wish, and with a
little stream running through it, as much as five miles long.

The interior of the house is very pretty, and nicely, even handsomely and
almost sumptuously, furnished; and I was very glad to find him so
comfortable.  His recognition as a poet has been hearty enough to give
him a feeling of success, for he showed me various tokens of the
estimation in which he is held,--for instance, a presentation copy of
Southey's works, in which the latter had written "Amicus amico,--poeta
poetae."  He said that Southey had always been most kind to him. . . . .
There were various other testimonials from people of note, American as
well as English.  In his parlor there is a good oil-painting of himself,
and in the drawing-room a very fine crayon sketch, wherein his face,
handsome and agreeable, is lighted up with all a poet's ecstasy; likewise
a large and fine engraving from the picture.  The government has
recognized his poetic merit by a pension of fifty pounds,--a small sung,
it is true, but enough to mark him out as one who has deserved well of
his country. . . . . The man himself is very good and lovable. . . . . I
was able to gratify him by saying that I had recently seen many favorable
notices of his poems in the American newspapers; an edition having been
published a few months since on our side of the ocean.  He was much
pleased at this, and asked me to send him the notices. . . . .


August 30th.--I have been two or three times to the Exhibition since my
last date, and enjoy it more as I become familiar with it.  There is
supposed to be about a third of the good pictures here which England
contains; and it is said that the Tory nobility and gentry have
contributed to it much more freely and largely than the Whigs.  The Duke
of Devonshire, for instance, seems to have sent nothing.  Mr. Ticknor,
the Spanish historian, whom I met yesterday, observed that we should not
think quite so much of this Exhibition as the English do after we have
been to Italy, although it is a good school in which to gain a
preparatory knowledge of the different styles of art.  I am glad to hear
that there are better things still to be seen.  Nevertheless, I should
suppose that certain painters are better represented here than they ever
have been or will be elsewhere.  Vandyke, certainly, can be seen nowhere
else so well; Rembrandt and Rubens have satisfactory specimens; and the
whole series of English pictorial achievement is shown more perfectly
than within any other walls.  Perhaps it would be wise to devote myself
to the study of this latter, and leave the foreigners to be studied on
their own soil.  Murillo can hardly have done better than in the pictures
by him which we see here.  There is nothing of Raphael's here that is
impressive.  Titian has some noble portraits, but little else that I care
to see.  In all these old masters, Murillo only excepted, it is very
rare, I must say, to find any trace of natural feeling and passion; and I
am weary of naked goddesses, who never had any real life and warmth in
the painter's imagination,--or, if so, it was the impure warmth of an
unchaste woman, who sat for him.

Last week I dined at Mr. F. Heywood's to meet Mr. Adolphus, the author of
a critical work on the Waverley Novels, published long ago, and intended
to prove, from internal evidence, that they were written by Sir Walter
Scott. . . . . His wife was likewise of the party, . . . . and also a
young Spanish lady, their niece, and daughter of a Spaniard of literary
note.  She herself has literary tastes and ability, and is well known to
Prescott, whom, I believe, she has assisted in his historical researches,
and also to Professor Ticknor; and furthermore she is very handsome and
unlike an English damsel, very youthful and maiden-like; and her manners
have all ardor and enthusiasm that were pleasant to see, especially as
she spoke warmly of my writings; and yet I should wrong her if I left the
impression of her being forthputting and obtrusive, for it was not the
fact in the least.  She speaks English like a native, insomuch that I
should never have suspected her to be anything else.

My nerves recently have not been in an exactly quiet and normal state.  I
begin to weary of England and need another clime.


September 6th.--I think I paid my last visit to the Exhibition, and feel
as if I had had enough of it, although I have got but a small part of the
profit it might have afforded me.  But pictures are certainly quite other
things to me now from what they were at my first visit; it seems even as
if there were a sort of illumination within them, that makes me see them
more distinctly.  Speaking of pictures, the miniature of Anne of Cleves
is here, on the faith of which Henry VIII. married her; also, the picture
of the Infanta of Spain, which Buckingham brought over to Charles I.
while Prince of Wales.  This has a delicate, rosy prettiness.

One rather interesting portion of the Exhibition is the Refreshment-room,
or rather rooms; for very much space is allowed both to the first and
second classes.  I have looked most at the latter, because there John
Ball and his wife may be seen in full gulp aid guzzle, swallowing vast
quantities of cold boiled beef, thoroughly moistened with porter or
bitter ale; and very good meat and drink it is.

At my last visit, on Friday, I met Judge Pollock of Liverpool, who
introduced me to a gentleman in a gray slouched hat as Mr. Du Val, an
artist, resident in Manchester; and Mr. Du Val invited me to dine with
him at six o'clock.  So I went to Carlton Grove, his residence, and found
it a very pretty house, with its own lawn and shrubbery about it. . . . .
There was a mellow fire in the grate, which made the drawing-room very
cosey and pleasant, as the dusk came on before dinner.  Mr. Du Val looked
like an artist, and like a remarkable man. . . . . We had very good talk,
chiefly about the Exhibition, and Du Val spoke generously and
intelligently of his brother-artists.  He says that England might furnish
five exhibitions, each one as rich as the present.  I find that the most
famous picture here is one that I have hardly looked at, "The Three
Marys," by Annibal Caracci.  In the drawing-room there were several
pictures and sketches by Du Val, one of which I especially liked,--a
misty, moonlight picture of the Mersey, near Seacombe.  I never saw
painted such genuine moonlight. . . . .

I took my leave at half past ten, and found my cab at the door, and my
cabman snugly asleep inside of it; and when Mr. Du Val awoke him, he
proved to be quite drunk, insomuch that I hesitated whether to let him
clamber upon the box, or to take post myself, and drive the cabman home.
However, I propounded two questions to him: first, whether his horse
would go of his own accord; and, secondly, whether be himself was
invariably drunk at that time of night, because, if it were his normal
state, I should be safer with him drunk than sober.  Being satisfied on
these points, I got in, and was driven home without accident or
adventure; except, indeed, that the cabman drew up and opened the door
for me to alight at a vacant lot on Stratford Road, just as if there had
been a house and home and cheerful lighted windows in that vacancy.  On
my remonstrance he resumed the whip and reins, and reached Boston Terrace
at last; and, thanking me for an extra sixpence as well as he could
speak, he begged me to inquire for "Little John" whenever I next wanted a
cab.  Cabmen are, as a body, the most ill-natured and ungenial men in the
world; but this poor little man was excellently good-humored.

Speaking of the former rudeness of manners, now gradually refining away,
of the Manchester people, Judge ------ said that, when he first knew
Manchester, women, meeting his wife in the street, would take hold of her
dress and say, "Ah, three and sixpence a yard!"  The men were very rough,
after the old Lancashire fashion.  They have always, however, been a
musical people, and this may have been a germ of refinement in them.
They are still much more simple and natural than the Liverpool people,
who love the aristocracy, and whom they heartily despise.  It is singular
that the great Art-Exhibition should have come to pass in the rudest
great town in England.



LEAMINGTON.


Lansdowne Cirrus, September 10th.--We have become quite weary of our
small, mean, uncomfortable, and unbeautiful lodgings at Chorlton Road,
with poor and scanty furniture within doors, and no better prospect from
the parlor windows than a mud-puddle, larger than most English lakes, on
a vacant building-lot opposite our house.  The Exhibition, too, was fast
becoming a bore; for you must really love a picture, in order to tolerate
the sight of it many times.  Moreover, the smoky and sooty air of that
abominable Manchester affected my wife's throat disadvantageously; so, on
a Tuesday morning, we struck our tent and set forth again, regretting to
leave nothing except the kind disposition of Mrs. Honey, our housekeeper.
I do not remember meeting with any other lodging-house keeper who did not
grow hateful and fearful on short acquaintance; but I attribute this, not
so much to the people themselves, as, primarily, to the unfair and
ungenerous conduct of some of their English guests, who feel so sure of
being cheated that they always behave as if in an enemy's country, and
therefore they find it one.

The rain poured down upon us as we drove away in two cabs, laden with
mountainous luggage to the London Road station; and the whole day was
grim with cloud and moist with showers.  We went by way of Birmingham,
and stayed three hours at the great dreary station there, waiting for the
train to Leamington, whither Fanny had gone forward the day before to
secure lodgings for us (as she is English, and understands the matter)
We all were tired and dull by the time we reached the Leamington station,
where a note from Fanny gave us the address of our lodgings.  Lansdowne
Circus is really delightful after that ugly and grimy suburb of
Manchester.  Indeed, there could not possibly be a greater contrast than
between Leamington and Manchester,--the latter built only for dirty uses,
and scarcely intended as a habitation for man; the former so cleanly, so
set out with shade trees, so regular in its streets, so neatly paved, its
houses so prettily contrived and nicely stuccoed, that it does not look
like a portion of the work-a-day world.



KENILWORTH.


September 13th.--The weather was very uncertain through the last week,
and yesterday morning, too, was misty and sunless; notwithstanding which
we took the rail for Kenilworth before eleven.  The distance from
Leamington is less than five miles, and at the Kenilworth station we
found a little bit of an omnibus, into which we packed ourselves,
together with two ladies, one of whom, at least, was an American.  I
begin to agree partly with the English, that we are not a people of
elegant manners.  At all events there is sometimes a bare, hard, meagre
sort of deportment, especially in our women, that has not its parallel
elsewhere.  But perhaps what sets off this kind of behavior, and brings
it into alto relievo, is the fact of such uncultivated persons travelling
abroad, and going to see sights that would not be interesting except to
people of some education and refinement.

We saw but little of the village of Kenilworth, passing through it
sidelong fashion, in the omnibus; but I learn that it has between three
and four thousand inhabitants, and is of immemorial antiquity.  We saw a
few old, gabled, and timber-framed houses; but generally the town was of
modern aspect, although less so in the immediate vicinity of the castle
gate, across the road from which there was an inn, with bowling-greens,
and a little bunch of houses and shops.  Apart from the high road there
is a gate-house, ancient, but in excellent repair, towered, turreted, and
battlemented, and looking like a castle in itself.  Until Cromwell's
time, the entrance to the castle used to be beneath an arch that passed
through this structure; but the gate-house being granted to one of the
Parliament officers, he converted it into a residence, and apparently
added on a couple of gables, which now look quite as venerable as the
rest of the edifice.  Admission within the outer grounds of the castle is
now obtained through a little wicket close beside the gate-house, at
which sat one or two old men, who touched their hats to us in humble
willingness to accept a fee.  One of them had guide-books for sale; and,
finding that we were not to be bothered by a cicerone, we bought one of
his books.

The ruins are perhaps two hundred yards from the gate-house and the road,
and the space between is a pasture for sheep, which also browse in the
inner court, and shelter themselves in the dungeons and state apartments
of the castle.  Goats would be fitter occupants, because they would climb
to the tops of the crumbling towers, and nibble the weeds and shrubbery
that grow there.  The first part of the castle which we reach is called
Caesar's Tower, being the oldest portion of the ruins, and still very
stalwart and massive, and built of red freestone, like all the rest.
Caesar's Tower being on the right, Leicester's Buildings, erected by the
Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth's favorite, are on the left; and
between these two formerly stood other structures which have now as
entirely disappeared as if they had never existed; and through the wide
gap, thus opened, appears the grassy inner court, surrounded on three
sides by half-fallen towers and shattered walls.  Some of these were
erected by John of Gaunt; and among these ruins is the Banqueting-Hall,--
or rather was,--for it has now neither floor nor roof, but only the
broken stone-work of some tall, arched windows, and the beautiful, old
ivied arch of the entrance-way, now inaccessible from the ground.  The
ivy is very abundant about the ruins, and hangs its green curtains quite
from top to bottom of some of the windows.  There are likewise very large
and aged trees within the castle, there being no roof nor pavement
anywhere, except in some dungeon-like nooks; so that the trees having
soil and air enough, and being sheltered from unfriendly blasts, can grow
as if in a nursery.  Hawthorn, however, next to ivy, is the great
ornament and comforter of these desolate ruins.  I have not seen so much
nor such thriving hawthorn anywhere else,--in the court, high up on
crumbly heights, on the sod that carpets roofless rooms,--everywhere,
indeed, and now rejoicing in plentiful crops of red berries.  The ivy is
even more wonderfully luxuriant; its trunks being, in some places, two or
three feet in diameter, and forming real buttresses against the walls,
which are actually supported and vastly strengthened by this parasite,
that clung to them at first only for its own convenience, and now holds
them up, lest it should be ruined by their fall.  Thus an abuse has
strangely grown into a use, and I think we may sometimes see the same
fact, morally, in English matters.  There is something very curious in
the close, firm grip which the ivy fixes upon the wall, closer and closer
for centuries.  Neither is it at all nice as to what it clutches, in its
necessity for support.  I saw in the outer court an old hawthorn-tree, to
which a plant of ivy had married itself, and the ivy trunk and the
hawthorn trunk were now absolutely incorporated, and in their close
embrace you could not tell which was which.

At one end of the Banqueting-Hall, there are two large bay-windows, one
of which looks into the inner court, and the other affords a view of
the surrounding country.  The former is called Queen Elizabeth's
Dressing-room.  Beyond the Banqueting-Hall is what is called the Strong
Tower, up to the top of which we climbed principally by the aid of the
stones that have tumbled down from it.  A lady sat half-way down the
crumbly descent, within the castle, on a camp-stool, and before an easel,
sketching this tower, on the summit of which we sat.  She said it was Amy
Robsart's Tower; and within it, open to the day, and quite accessible, we
saw a room that we were free to imagine had been occupied by her.  I do
not find that these associations of real scenes with fictitious events
greatly heighten the charm of them.

By this time the sun had come out brightly, and with such warmth that we
were glad to sit down in the shadow.  Several sight-seers were now
rambling about, and among them some school-boys, who kept scrambling up
to points whither no other animal, except a goat, would have ventured.
Their shouts and the sunshine made the old castle cheerful; and what with
the ivy and the hawthorn, and the other old trees, it was very beautiful
and picturesque.  But a castle does not make nearly so interesting and
impressive a ruin as an abbey, because the latter was built for beauty,
and on a plan in which deep thought and feeling were involved; and having
once been a grand and beautiful work, it continues grand and beautiful
through all the successive stages of its decay.  But a castle is rudely
piled together for strength and other material conveniences; and, having
served these ends, it has nothing left to fall back upon, but crumbles
into shapeless masses, which are often as little picturesque as a pile of
bricks.  Without the ivy and the shrubbery, this huge Kenilworth would
not be a pleasant object, except for one or two window-frames, with
broken tracery, in the Banqueting-Hall. . . . .

We stayed from eleven till two, and identified the various parts of the
castle as well as we could by the guide-book.  The ruins are very
extensive, though less so than I should have imagined, considering that
seven acres were included within the castle wall.  But a large part of
the structures have been taken away to build houses in Kenilworth village
and elsewhere, and much, too, to make roads with, and a good deal lies
under the green turf in the court-yards, inner and outer.  As we returned
to the gate, my wife and U---- went into the gate-house to see an old
chimney-piece, and other antiquities, and J----- and I proceeded a little
way round the outer wall, and saw the remains of the moat, and Lin's
Tower,--a real and shattered fabric of John of Gaunt.

The omnibus now drove up, and one of the old men at the gate came
hobbling up to open the door, and was rewarded with a sixpence, and we
drove down to the King's Head. . . . . We then walked out and bought
prints of the castle, and inquired our way to the church and to the ruins
of the Priory.  The latter, so far as we could discover them, are very
few and uninteresting; and the church, though it has a venerable
exterior, and an aged spire, has been so modernized within, and in so
plain a fashion, as to have lost what beauty it may once have had.  There
were a few brasses and mural monuments, one of which was a marble group
of a dying woman and her family by Westmacott.  The sexton was a cheerful
little man, but knew very little about his church, and nothing of the
remains of the Priory.  The day was spent very pleasantly amid this
beautiful green English scenery, these fine old Warwickshire trees, and
broad, gently swelling fields.



LIVERPOOL.


September 17th.--I took the train for Rugby, and thence to Liverpool.
The most noticeable character at Mrs. Blodgett's now is Mr. T------, a
Yankee, who has seen the world, and gathered much information and
experience already, though still a young man,--a handsome man, with black
curly hair, a dark, intelligent, bright face, and rather cold blue eyes,
but a very pleasant air and address.  His observing faculties are very
strongly developed in his forehead, and his reflective ones seem to be
adequate to making some, if not the deepest, use of what he sees.  He has
voyaged and travelled almost all over the world, and has recently
published a book of his peregrinations, which has been well received.  He
is of exceeding fluent talk, though rather too much inclined to unfold
the secret springs of action in Louis Napoleon, and other potentates, and
to tell of revolutions that are coming at some unlooked-for moment, but
soon.  Still I believe in his wisdom and foresight about as much as in
any other man's.  There are no such things.  He is a merchant, and
meditates settling in London, and making a colossal fortune there during
the next ten or twenty years; that being the period during which London
is to hold the exchanges of the world, and to continue its metropolis.
After that, New York is to be the world's queen city.

There is likewise here a young American, named A------, who has been at a
German University, and favors us with descriptions of his student life
there, which seems chiefly to have consisted in drinking beer and
fighting duels.  He shows a cut on his nose as a trophy of these combats.
He has with him a dog of St. Bernard, who is a much more remarkable
character than himself,--an immense dog, a noble and gentle creature; and
really it touches my heart that his master is going to take him from his
native snow-mountain to a Southern plantation to die.  Mr. A------ says
that there are now but five of these dogs extant at the convent; there
having, within two or three years, been a disease among them, with which
this dog also has suffered.  His master has a certificate of his
genuineness, and of himself being the rightful purchaser; and he says
that as he descended the mountain, every peasant along the road stopped
him, and would have compelled him to give up the dog had he not produced
this proof of property.  The neighboring mountaineers are very jealous of
the breed being taken away, considering them of such importance to their
own safety.  This huge animal, the very biggest dog I ever saw, though
only eleven months old, and not so high by two or three inches as he will
be, allows Mr. ------ to play with him, and take him on his shoulders (he
weighs, at least, a hundred pounds), like any lapdog.



LEAMINGTON.


Lansdowne Circus, October 10th.--I returned hither from Liverpool last
week, and have spent the time idly since then, reposing myself after the
four years of unnatural restraint in the Consulate.  Being already pretty
well acquainted with the neighborhood of Leamington, I have little or
nothing to record about the prettiest, cheerfullest, cleanest of English
towns.

On Saturday we took the rail for Coventry, about a half-hour's travel
distant.  I had been there before, more than two years ago. . . . . No
doubt I described it on my first visit; and it is not remarkable enough
to be worth two descriptions,--a large town of crooked and irregular
streets and lanes, not looking nearly so ancient as it is, because of new
brick and stuccoed fronts which have been plastered over its antiquity;
although still there are interspersed the peaked gables of old-fashioned,
timber-built houses; or an archway of worn stone, which, if you pass
through it, shows like an avenue from the present to the past; for just
in the rear of the new-fangled aspect lurks the old arrangement of
court-yards, and rustiness, and grimness, that would not be suspected
from the exterior.

Right across the narrow street stands St. Michael's Church with its tall,
tall tower and spire.  The body of the church has been almost entirely
recased with stone since I was here before; but the tower still retains
its antiquity, and is decorated with statues that look down from their
lofty niches seemingly in good preservation.  The tower and spire are
most stately and beautiful, the whole church very noble.  We went in, and
found that the vulgar plaster of Cromwell's time has been scraped from
the pillars and arches, leaving them all as fresh and splendid as if just
made.

We looked also into Trinity Church, which stands close by St. Michael's,
separated only, I think, by the churchyard.  We also visited St. John's
Church, which is very venerable as regards its exterior, the stone being
worn and smoothed--if not roughened, rather--by centuries of storm and
fitful weather.  This wear and tear, however, has almost ceased to be a
charm to my mind, comparatively to what it was when I first began to see
old buildings.  Within, the church is spoiled by wooden galleries, built
across the beautiful pointed arches.

We saw nothing else particularly worthy of remark except Ford's Hospital,
in Grey Friars' Street.  It has an Elizabethan front of timber and
plaster, facing on the street, with two or three peaked gables in a row,
beneath which is a low, arched entrance, giving admission into a small
paved quadrangle, open to the sky above, but surrounded by the walls,
lozenge-paned windows, and gables of the Hospital.  The quadrangle is but
a few paces in width, and perhaps twenty in length; and, through a
half-closed doorway, at the farther end, there was a glimpse into a
garden.  Just within the entrance, through an open door, we saw the neat
and comfortable apartment of the Matron of the Hospital; and, along the
quadrangle, on each side, there were three or four doors, through which
we glanced into little rooms, each containing a fireplace, a bed, a chair
or two,--a little, homely, domestic scene, with one old woman in the
midst of it; one old woman in each room.  They are destitute widows, who
have their lodging and home here,--a small room for each one to sleep,
cook, and be at home in,--and three and sixpence a week to feed and
clothe themselves with,--a cloak being the only garment bestowed on them.
When one of the sisterhood dies each old woman has to pay twopence
towards the funeral; and so they slowly starve and wither out of life,
and claim each their twopence contribution in turn.  I am afraid they
have a very dismal time.

There is an old man's hospital in another part of the town, on a similar
plan.  A collection of sombre and lifelike tales might be written on the
idea of giving the experiences of these Hospitallers, male and female;
and they might be supposed to be written by the Matron of one, who had
acquired literary taste and practice as a governess,--and by the Master
of the other, a retired school-usher.

It was market-day in Coventry, and far adown the street leading from it
there were booths and stalls, and apples, pears, toys, books, among which
I saw my Twice-Told Tales, with an awful portrait of myself as
frontispiece,--and various country produce, offered for sale by men,
women, and girls.  The scene looked lively, but had not much vivacity in
it.


October 27th.--The autumn has advanced progressively, and is now fairly
established, though still there is much green foliage, in spite of many
brown trees, and an enormous quantity of withered leaves, too damp to
rustle, strewing the paths,--whence, however, they are continually swept
up and carried off in wheelbarrows, either for neatness or for the
agricultural worth, as manure, of even a withered leaf.  The pastures
look just as green as ever,--a deep, bright verdure, that seems almost
sunshine in itself, however sombre the sky may be.  The little plats of
grass and flowers, in front of our circle of houses, might still do
credit to an American midsummer; for I have seen beautiful roses here
within a day or two; and dahlias, asters, and such autumnal flowers, are
plentiful; and I have no doubt that the old year's flowers will bloom
till those of the new year appear.  Really, the English winter is not so
terrible as ours.


October 30th.--Wednesday was one of the most beautiful of all days, and
gilded almost throughout with the precious English sunshine,--the most
delightful sunshine ever made, both for its positive fine qualities and
because we seldom get it without too great an admixture of water.  We
made no use of this lovely day, except to walk to an Arboretum and
Pinetum on the outskirts of the town.  U---- and Mrs. Shepard made an
excursion to Guy's Cliff.

[Here comes in the visit to Leicester's Hospital and Redfern's Shop, and
St. Mary's Church, printed in Our Old Home.--ED.]

From Redfern's we went back to the market-place, expecting to find J-----
at the Museum, but the keeper said he had gone away.  We went into this
museum, which contains the collections in Natural History, etc., of a
county society.  It is very well arranged, and is rich in specimens of
ornithology, among which was an albatross, huge beyond imagination.  I do
not think that Coleridge could have known the size of the fowl when he
caused it to be hung round the neck of his Ancient Mariner.  There were a
great many humming-birds from various parts of the world, and some of
their breasts actually gleamed and shone as with the brightest lustre of
sunset.  Also, many strange fishes, and a huge pike taken from the river
Avon, and so long that I wonder how he could turn himself about in such a
little river as the Avon is near Warwick.  A great curiosity was a bunch
of skeleton leaves and flowers, prepared by a young lady, and preserving
all the most delicate fibres of the plant, looking like inconceivably
fine lace-work, white as snow, while the substance was quite taken away.
In another room there were minerals, shells, and a splendid collection of
fossils, among which were remains of antediluvian creatures, several feet
long.  In still another room, we saw some historical curiosities,--the
most interesting of which were two locks of reddish-brown hair, one from
the head and one from the beard of Edward IV.  They were fastened to a
manuscript letter which authenticates the hair as having been taken from
King Edward's tomb in 1739.  Near these relics was a seal of the great
Earl of Warwick, the mighty kingmaker; also a sword from Bosworth Field,
smaller and shorter than those now in use; for, indeed, swords seem to
have increased in length, weight, and formidable aspect, now that the
weapon has almost ceased to be used in actual warfare.  The short Roman
sword was probably more murderous than any weapon of the same species,
except the bowie-knife.  Here, too, were Parliamentary cannon-balls,
etc. . . . .

[The visit to Whitnash intervenes here.--ED.]



LONDON.


24 Great Russell Street, November 10th.--We have been thinking and
negotiating about taking lodgings in London lately, and this morning we
left Leamington and reached London with no other misadventure than that
of leaving the great bulk of our luggage behind us,--the van which we
hired to take it to the railway station having broken down under its
prodigious weight, in the middle of the street.  On our journey we saw
nothing particularly worthy of note,--but everywhere the immortal verdure
of England, scarcely less perfect than in June, so far as the fields are
concerned, though the foliage of the trees presents pretty much the same
hues as those of our own forests, after the gayety and gorgeousness have
departed from them.

Our lodgings are in close vicinity to the British Museum, which is the
great advantage we took them for.

I felt restless and uncomfortable, and soon strolled forth, without any
definite object, and walked as far as Charing Cross.  Very dull and
dreary the city looked, and not in the least lively, even where the
throng was thickest and most brisk.  As I trudged along, my reflection
was, that never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than
London; and that it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for
centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result.  Yet
these old names of the city--Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, the Strand-used
to throw a glory over these homely precincts when I first saw them, and
still do so in a less degree.  Where Farrington Street opens upon Fleet
Street, moreover, I had a glimpse of St. Paul's, along Ludgate Street, in
the gathering dimness, and felt as if I saw an old friend.  In that
neighborhood--speaking of old friends--I met Mr. Parker of Boston, who
told me sad news of a friend whom I love as much as if I had known him
for a lifetime, though he is, indeed, but of two or three years'
standing.  He said that my friend's bankruptcy is in to-day's Gazette.
Of all men on earth, I had rather this misfortune should have happened to
any other; but I hope and think he has sturdiness and buoyancy enough to
rise up beneath it.  I cannot conceive of his face otherwise than with a
glow on it, like that of the sun at noonday.

Before I reached our lodgings, the dusk settled into the streets, and a
mist bedewed and bedamped me, and I went astray, as is usual with me, and
had to inquire my way; indeed, except in the principal thoroughfares,
London is so miserably lighted that it is impossible to recognize one's
whereabouts.  On my arrival I found our parlor looking cheerful with a
brisk fire; . . . . but the first day or two in new lodgings is at best
an uncomfortable time.  Fanny has just come in with more unhappy news
about ------.  Pray Heaven it may not be true! . . . . Troubles are a
sociable brotherhood; they love to come hand in hand, or sometimes, even,
to come side by side, with long looked-for and hoped-for good
fortune. . . . .


November 11th.--This morning we all went to the British Museum, always a
most wearisome and depressing task to me.  I strolled through the lower
rooms with a good degree of interest, looking at the antique sculptures,
some of which were doubtless grand and beautiful in their day. . . . .
The Egyptian remains are, on the whole, the more satisfactory; for,
though inconceivably ugly, they are at least miracles of size and
ponderosity,--for example, a hand and arm of polished granite, as much as
ten feet in length.  The upper rooms, containing millions of specimens of
Natural History, in all departments, really made my heart ache with a
pain and woe that I have never felt anywhere but in the British Museum,
and I hurried through them as rapidly as I could persuade J----- to
follow me.  We had left the rest of the party still intent on the Grecian
sculptures; and though J----- was much interested in the vast collection
of shells, he chose to quit the Museum with me in the prospect of a
stroll about London.  He seems to have my own passion for thronged
streets, and the utmost bustle of human life.

We went first to the railway station, in quest of our luggage, which we
found.  Then we made a pretty straight course down to Holborn, and
through Newgate Street, stopping a few moments to look through the iron
fence at the Christ's Hospital boys, in their long blue coats and yellow
petticoats and stockings.  It was between twelve and one o'clock; and I
suppose this was their hour of play, for they were running about the
enclosed space, chasing and overthrowing one another, without their caps,
with their yellow petticoats tucked up, and all in immense activity and
enjoyment.  They were eminently a healthy and handsome set of boys.

Then we went into Cheapside, where I called at Mr. Bennett's shop, to
inquire what are the facts about ------.  When I mentioned his name, Mr.
Bennett shook his head and expressed great sorrow; but, on further talk,
I found that he referred only to the failure, and had heard nothing about
the other rumor.  It cannot, therefore, be true; for Bennett lives in his
neighborhood, and could not have remained ignorant of such a calamity.
There must be some mistake; none, however, in regard to the failure, it
having been announced in the Times.

From Bennett's shop--which is so near the steeple of Bow Church that it
would tumble upon it if it fell over--we strolled still eastward, aiming
at London Bridge; but missed it, and bewildered ourselves among many
dingy and frowzy streets and lanes.  I bore towards the right, however,
knowing that that course must ultimately bring me to the Thames; and at
last I saw before me ramparts, towers, circular and square, with
battlemented summits, large sweeps and curves of fortification, as well
as straight and massive walls and chimneys behind them (all a great
confusion--to my eye), of ancient and more modern structure, and four
loftier turrets rising in the midst; the whole great space surrounded by
a broad, dry moat, which now seemed to be used as an ornamental walk,
bordered partly with trees.  This was the Tower; but seen from a
different and more picturesque point of view than I have heretofore
gained of it.  Being so convenient for a visit, I determined to go in.
At the outer gate, which is not a part of the fortification, a sentinel
walks to and fro, besides whom there was a warder, in the rich old
costume of Henry VIII's time, looking very gorgeous indeed,--as much so
as scarlet and gold can make him.

As J----- and I were not going to look at the Jewel-room, we loitered
about in the open space, before the White Tower, while the tall, slender,
white-haired, gentlemanly warder led the rest of the party into that
apartment.  We found what one might take for a square in a town, with
gabled houses lifting their peaks on one side, and various edifices
enclosing the other sides, and the great White Tower,--now more black
than white,--rising venerable, and rather picturesque than otherwise, the
most prominent object in the scene.  I have no plan nor available idea of
it whatever in my mind, but it seems really to be a town within itself,
with streets, avenues, and all that pertains to human life.  There were
soldiers going through their exercise in the open space, and along at the
base of the White Tower lay a great many cannon and mortars, some of
which were of Turkish manufacture, and immensely long and ponderous.
Others, likewise of mighty size, had once belonged to the famous ship
Great Harry, and had lain for ages under the sea.  Others were
East-Indian.  Several were beautiful specimens of workmanship.  The
mortars--some so large that a fair-sized man might easily be rammed into
them--held their great mouths slanting upward to the sky, and mostly
contained a quantity of rain-water.  While we were looking at these
warlike toys,--for I suppose not one of them will ever thunder in earnest
again,--the warder reappeared with his ladies, and, leading us all to a
certain part of the open space, he struck his foot on the small stones
with which it is paved, and told us that we were standing on the spot
where Anne Boleyn and Catharine Parr were beheaded.  It is not exactly in
the centre of the square, but on a line with one of the angles of the
White Tower.  I forgot to mention that the middle of the open space is
occupied by a marble statue of Wellington, which appeared to me very poor
and laboriously spirited.

Lastly, the warder led us under the Bloody Tower, and by the side of the
Wakefield Tower, and showed us the Traitor's Gate, which is now closed
up, so as to afford no access to the Thames.  No; we first visited the
Beauchamp Tower, famous as the prison of many historical personages.
Some of its former occupants have left their initials or names, and
inscriptions of piety and patience, cut deep into the freestone of the
walls, together with devices--as a crucifix, for instance--neatly and
skilfully done.  This room has a long, deep fireplace; it is chiefly
lighted by a large window, which I fancy must have been made in modern
times; but there are four narrow apertures, throwing in a little light
through deep alcoves in the thickness of the octagon wall.  One would
expect such a room to be picturesque; but it is really not of striking
aspect, being low, with a plastered ceiling,--the beams just showing
through the plaster,--a boarded floor, and the walls being washed over
with a buff color.  A warder sat within a railing, by the great window,
with sixpenny books to sell, containing transcripts of the inscriptions
on the walls.

We now left the Tower, and made our way deviously westward, passing St.
Paul's, which looked magnificently and beautifully, so huge and dusky as
it was, with here and there a space on its vast form where the original
whiteness of the marble came out like a streak of moonshine amid the
blackness with which time has made it grander than it was in its newness.
It is a most noble edifice; and I delight, too, in the statues that crown
some of its heights, and in the wreaths of sculpture which are hung
around it.


November 12th.--This morning began with such fog, that at the window of
my chamber, lighted only from a small court-yard, enclosed by high, dingy
walls, I could hardly see to dress.  It kept alternately darkening, and
then brightening a little, and darkening again, so much that we could but
just discern the opposite houses; but at eleven or thereabouts it grew so
much clearer that we resolved to venture out.  Our plan for the day was
to go in the first place to Westminster Abbey; and to the National
Gallery, if we should find time. . . . . The fog darkened again as we
went down Regent Street, and the Duke of York's Column was but barely
visible, looming vaguely before us; nor, from Pall Mall, was Nelson's
Pillar much more distinct, though methought his statue stood aloft in a
somewhat clearer atmosphere than ours.  Passing Whitehall, however, we
could scarcely see Inigo Jones's Banqueting-House, on the other side of
the street; and the towers and turrets of the new Houses of Parliament
were all but invisible, as was the Abbey itself; so that we really were
in some doubt whither we were going.  We found our way to Poets' Corner,
however, and entered those holy precincts, which looked very dusky and
grim in the smoky light. . . . . I was strongly impressed with the
perception that very commonplace people compose the great bulk of society
in the home of the illustrious dead.  It is wonderful how few names there
are that one cares anything about a hundred years after their departure;
but perhaps each generation acts in good faith in canonizing its own
men. . . . . But the fame of the buried person does not make the marble
live,--the marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would
else be forgotten.  No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

The painted windows of the Abbey, though mostly modern, are exceedingly
rich and beautiful; and I do think that human art has invented no other
such magnificent method of adornment as this.

Our final visit to-day was to the National Gallery, where I came to the
conclusion that Murillo's St. John was the most lovely picture I have
ever seen, and that there never was a painter who has really made the
world richer, except Murillo.


November 12th.--This morning we issued forth, and found the atmosphere
chill and almost frosty, tingling upon our cheeks. . . . . The gateway of
Somerset House attracted us, and we walked round its spacious quadrangle,
encountering many government clerks hurrying to their various offices.
At least, I presumed them to be so.  This is certainly a handsome square
of buildings, with its Grecian facades and pillars, and its sculptured
bas-reliefs, and the group of statuary in the midst of the court.
Besides the part of the edifice that rises above ground, there appear to
be two subterranean stories below the surface.  From Somerset House we
pursued our way through Temple Bar, but missed it, and therefore entered
by the passage from what was formerly Alsatia, but which now seems to be
a very respectable and humdrum part of London.  We came immediately to
the Temple Gardens, which we walked quite round.  The grass is still
green, but the trees are leafless, and had an aspect of not being very
robust, even at more genial seasons of the year.  There were, however,
large quantities of brilliant chrysanthemums, golden, and of all hues,
blooming gorgeously all about the borders; and several gardeners were at
work, tending these flowers, and sheltering them from the weather.  I
noticed no roses, nor even rose-bushes, in the spot where the factions of
York and Lancaster plucked their two hostile flowers.

Leaving these grounds, we went to the Hall of the Middle Temple, where we
knocked at the portal, and, finding it not fastened, thrust it open.  A
boy appeared within, and the porter or keeper, at a distance, along the
inner passage, called to us to enter; and, opening the door of the great
hall, left us to view it till he should be at leisure to attend to us.
Truly it is a most magnificent apartment; very lofty,--so lofty, indeed,
that the antique oak roof was quite hidden, as regarded all its details,
in the sombre gloom that brooded under its rafters.  The hall was lighted
by four great windows, I think, on each of the two sides, descending
half-way from the ceiling to the floor, leaving all beneath enclosed by
oaken panelling, which, on three sides, was carved with escutcheons of
such members of the society as have held the office of reader.  There is
likewise, in a large recess or transept, a great window, occupying the
full height of the hall, and splendidly emblazoned with the arms of the
Templars who have attained to the dignity of Chief Justices.  The other
windows are pictured, in like manner, with coats of arms of local
dignitaries connected with the Temple; and besides all these there are
arched lights, high towards the roof, at either end full of richly and
chastely colored glass, and all the illumination that the great hall had
come through these glorious panes, and they seemed the richer for the
sombreness in which we stood.  I cannot describe, or even intimate, the
effect of this transparent glory, glowing down upon us in that gloomy
depth of the hall.  The screen at the lower end was of carved oak, very
dark and highly polished, and as old as Queen Elizabeth's time.  The
keeper told us that the story of the Armada was said to be represented in
these carvings, but in the imperfect light we could trace nothing of it
out.  Along the length of the apartment were set two oaken tables for the
students of law to dine upon; and on the dais, at the upper end, there
was a cross-table for the big-wigs of the society; the latter being
provided with comfortable chairs, and the former with oaken benches.
From a notification, posted near the door, I gathered that the cost of
dinners is two shillings to each gentleman, including, as the attendant
told me, ale and wine.  I am reluctant to leave this hall without
expressing how grave, how grand, how sombre, and how magnificent I feel
it to be.  As regards historical association, it was a favorite
dancing-hall of Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Christopher Hatton danced
himself into her good graces here.

We next went to the Temple Church, and, finding the door ajar, made free
to enter beneath its Norman arches, which admitted us into a circular
vestibule, very ancient and beautiful.  In the body of the church beyond
we saw a boy sitting, but nobody either forbade or invited our entrance.
On the floor of the vestibule lay about half a score of Templars,--the
representatives of the warlike priests who built this church and formerly
held these precincts,--all in chain armor, grasping their swords, and
with their shields beside them.  Except two or three, they lay
cross-legged, in token that they had really fought for the Holy
Sepulchre.  I think I have seen nowhere else such well-preserved
monumental knights as these.  We proceeded into the interior of the
church, and were greatly impressed with its wonderful beauty,--the roof
springing, as it were, in a harmonious and accordant fountain, out of the
clustered pillars that support its groined arches; and these pillars,
immense as they are, are polished like so many gems.  They are of Purbeck
marble, and, if I mistake not, had been covered with plaster for ages
until latterly redeemed and beautified anew.  But the glory of the church
is its old painted windows; and, positively, those great spaces over the
chancel appeared to be set with all manner of precious stones,--or it was
as if the many-colored radiance of heaven were breaking upon us,--or as
if we saw the wings of angels, storied over with richly tinted pictures
of holy things.  But it is idle to talk of this marvellous adornment; it
is to be seen and wondered at, not written about.  Before we left the
church, the porter made his appearance, in time to receive his fee,--
which somebody, indeed, is always ready to stretch out his hand for.  And
so ended our visit to the Temple, which, by the by, though close to the
midmost bustle of London, is as quiet as if it were always Sunday there.

We now went to St. Paul's.  U---- and Miss Shepard ascended to the
Whispering Gallery, and we, sitting under the dome, at the base of one of
the pillars, saw them far above us, looking very indistinct, for those
misty upper-depths seemed almost to be hung with clouds.  This cathedral,
I think, does not profit by gloom, but requires cheerful sunshine to show
it to the best advantage.  The statues and sculptures in St. Paul's are
mostly covered with years of dust, and look thereby very grim and ugly;
but there are few memories there from which I should care to brush away
the dust, they being, in nine cases out of ten, naval and military heroes
of second or third class merit.  I really remember no literary celebrity
admitted solely on that account, except Dr. Johnson.  The Crimean war has
supplied two or three monuments, chiefly mural tablets; and doubtless
more of the same excrescences will yet come out upon the walls.  One
thing that I newly noticed was the beautiful shape of the great, covered
marble vase that serves for a font.

From St. Paul's we went down Cheapside, and, turning into King Street,
visited Guildhall, which we found in process of decoration for a public
ball, to take place next week.  It looked rather gewgawish thus gorgeous,
being hung with flags of all nations, and adorned with military trophies;
and the scene was repeated by a range of looking-glasses at one end of
the room.  The execrably painted windows really shocked us by their
vulgar glare, after those of the Temple Hall and Church; yet, a few years
ago, I might very likely have thought them beautiful.  Our own national
banner, I must remember to say, was hanging in Guildhall, but with only
ten stars, and an insufficient number of stripes.


November 15th.--Yesterday morning we went to London Bridge and along
Lower Thames Street, and quickly found ourselves in Billingsgate Market,
--a dirty, evil-smelling, crowded precinct, thronged with people carrying
fish on their heads, and lined with fish-shops and fish-stalls, and
pervaded with a fishy odor.  The footwalk was narrow,--as indeed was the
whole street,--and filthy to travel upon; and we had to elbow our way
among rough men and slatternly women, and to guard our heads from the
contact of fish-trays; very ugly, grimy, and misty, moreover, is
Billingsgate Market, and though we heard none of the foul language of
which it is supposed to be the fountain-head, yet it has its own
peculiarities of behavior.  For instance, U---- tells me that one man,
staring at her and her governess as they passed, cried out, "What
beauties!"--another, looking under her veil, greeted her with, "Good
morning, my love!"  We were in advance, and heard nothing of these
civilities.  Struggling through this fishy purgatory, we caught sight of
the Tower, as we drew near the end of the street; and I put all my party
under charge of one of the Trump Cards, not being myself inclined to make
the rounds of the small part of the fortress that is shown, so soon after
my late visit.

When they departed with the warder, I set out by myself to wander about
the exterior of the Tower, looking with interest at what I suppose to be
Tower Hill,--a slight elevation of the large open space into which Great
Tower Street opens; though, perhaps, what is now called Trinity Square
may have been a part of Tower Hill, and possibly the precise spot where
the executions took place.  Keeping to the right, round the Tower, I
found the moat quite surrounded by a fence of iron rails, excluding me
from a pleasant gravel-path, among flowers and shrubbery, on the inside,
where I could see nursery-maids giving children their airings.  Possibly
these may have been the privileged inhabitants of the Tower, which
certainly might contain the population of a large village.  The aspect of
the fortress has so much that is new and modern about it that it can
hardly be called picturesque, and yet it seems unfair to withhold that
epithet from such a collection of gray ramparts.  I followed the iron
fence quite round the outer grounds, till it approached the Thames, and
in this direction the moat and the pleasure-ground terminate in a narrow
graveyard, which extends beneath the walls, and looks neglected and
shaggy with long grass.  It appeared to contain graves enough, but only a
few tombstones, of which I could read the inscription of but one; it
commemorated a Mr. George Gibson, a person of no note, nor apparently
connected with the place.  St. Katharine's Dock lies along the Thames, in
this vicinity; and while on one side of me were the Tower, the quiet
gravel-path, and the shaggy graveyard, on the other were draymen and
their horses, dock-laborers, sailors, empty puncheons, and a
miscellaneous spectacle of life,--including organ-grinders, men roasting
chestnuts over small ovens on the sidewalk, boys and women with boards or
wheelbarrows of apples, oyster-stands, besides pedlers of small wares,
dirty children at play, and other figures and things that a Dutch painter
would seize upon.

I went a little way into St. Katharine's Dock, and found it crowded with
great ships; then, returning, I strolled along the range of shops that
front towards this side of the Tower.  They have all something to do with
ships, sailors, and commerce; being for the sale of ships' stores,
nautical instruments, arms, clothing, together with a tavern and
grog-shop at every other door; bookstalls, too, covered with cheap novels
and song-books; cigar-shops in great numbers; and everywhere were
sailors, and here and there a soldier, and children at the doorsteps, and
women showing themselves at the doors or windows of their domiciles.
These latter figures, however, pertain rather to the street up which I
walked, penetrating into the interior of this region, which, I think, is
Blackwall--no, I forget what its name is.  At all events, it has an
ancient and most grimy and rough look, with its old gabled houses, each
of them the seat of some petty trade and business in its basement story.
Among these I saw one house with three or four peaks along its front,--a
second story projecting over the basement, and the whole clapboarded
over. . . . . There was a butcher's stall in the lower story, with a
front open to the street, in the ancient fashion, which seems to be
retained only by butchers' shops.  This part of London having escaped the
Great Fire, I suppose there may be many relics of architectural antiquity
hereabouts.

At the end of an hour I went back to the Refreshment-room, within the
outer gate of the Tower, where the rest of us shortly appeared.  We now
returned westward by way of Great Tower Street, Eastcheap, and Cannon
Street, and, entering St. Paul's, sat down beneath the misty dome to rest
ourselves.  The muffled roar of the city, as we heard it there, is very
soothing, and keeps one listening to it, somewhat as the flow of a river
keeps us looking at it.  It is a grand and quiet sound; and, ever and
anon, a distant door slammed somewhere in the cathedral, and reverberated
long and heavily, like the roll of thunder or the boom of cannon.  Every
noise that is loud enough to be heard in so vast an edifice melts into
the great quietude.  The interior looked very sombre, and the dome hung
over us like a cloudy sky.  I wish it were possible to pass directly from
St. Paul's into York Minster, or from the latter into the former; that
is, if one's mind could manage to stagger under both in the same day.
There is no other way of judging of their comparative effect.

Under the influence of that grand lullaby,--the roar of the city,--we sat
for some time after we were sufficiently rested; but at last plunged
forth again, and went up Newgate Street, pausing to look through the iron
railings of Christ's Hospital.  The boys, however, were not at play; so
we went onward, in quest of Smithfield, and on our way had a greeting
from Mr. Silsbee, a gentleman of our own native town.  Parting with him,
we found Smithfield, which is still occupied with pens for cattle, though
I believe it has ceased to be a cattle-market.  Except it be St.
Bartholomew's hospital on one side, there is nothing interesting in this
ugly square; though, no doubt, a few feet under the pavement there are
bones and ashes as precious as anything of the kind on earth.  I wonder
when men will begin to erect monuments to human error; hitherto their
pillars and statues have only been for the sake of glorification.  But,
after all, the present fashion may be the better and wholesomer. . . . .


November 16th.--Mr. Silsbee called yesterday, and talked about matters of
art, in which he is deeply interested, and which he has had good
opportunities of becoming acquainted with, during three years' travel on
the Continent.  He is a man of great intelligence and true feeling, and
absolutely brims over with ideas,--his conversation flowing in a constant
stream, which it appears to be no trouble whatever to him to keep
up. . . . . He took his leave after a long call, and left with us a
manuscript, describing a visit to Berlin, which I read to my wife in the
evening.  It was well worth reading.  He made an engagement to go with us
to the Crystal Palace, and came rather for that purpose this morning.

We drove to the London Bridge station, where we bought return tickets
that entitled us to admission to the Palace, as well as conveyance
thither, for half a crown apiece.  On our arrival we entered by the
garden front, thus gaining a fine view of the ornamental grounds, with
their fountains and stately pathways, bordered with statues; and of the
edifice itself, so vast and fairy-like, looking as if it were a bubble,
and might vanish at a touch.  There is as little beauty in the
architecture of the Crystal Palace, however, as was possible to be with
such gigantic use of such a material.  No doubt, an architectural order
of which we have as yet little or no idea is to be developed from the use
of glass as a building-material, instead of brick and stone.  It will
have its own rules and its own results; but, meanwhile, even the present
Palace is positively a very beautiful object.  On entering we found the
atmosphere chill and comfortless,--more so, it seemed to me, than the
open air itself.  It was not a genial day; though now and then the sun
gleamed out, and once caused fine effects in the glasswork of a crystal
fountain in one of the courts.

We were under Mr. Silshee's guidance for the day, . . . . and first we
looked at the sculpture, which is composed chiefly of casts or copies of
the most famous statues of all ages, and likewise of those crumbs and
little fragments which have fallen from Time's jaw,--and half-picked
bones, as it were, that have been gathered up from spots where he has
feasted full,--torsos, heads and broken limbs, some of them half worn
away, as if they had been rolled over and over in the sea.  I saw nothing
in the sculptural way, either modern or antique, that impressed me so
much as a statue of a nude mother by a French artist.  In a sitting
posture, with one knee over the other, she was clasping her highest knee
with both hands; and in the hollow cradle thus formed by her arms lay two
sweet little babies, as snug and close to her heart as if they had not
yet been born,--two little love-blossoms,--and the mother encircling
them and pervading them with love.  But an infinite pathos and strange
terror are given to this beautiful group by some faint bas-reliefs on the
pedestal, indicating that the happy mother is Eve, and Cain and Abel the
two innocent babes.

Then we went to the Alhambra, which looks like an enchanted palace.  If
it had been a sunny day, I should have enjoyed it more; but it was
miserable to shiver and shake in the Court of the Lions, and in those
chambers which were contrived as places of refuge from a fervid
temperature.  Furthermore, it is not quite agreeable to see such clever
specimens of stage decoration; they are so very good that it gets to be
past a joke, without becoming actual earnest.  I had not a similar
feeling in respect to the reproduction of mediaeval statues, arches,
doorways, all brilliantly colored as in the days of their first glory;
yet I do not know but that the first is as little objectionable as the
last.  Certainly, in both cases, scenes and objects of a past age are
here more vividly presented to the dullest mind than without such
material facilities they could possibly be brought before the most
powerful imagination.  Truly, the Crystal Palace, in all its departments,
offers wonderful means of education.  I marvel what will come of it.
Among the things that I admired most was Benvenuto Cellini's statue of
Perseus holding the head of Medusa, and standing over her headless and
still writhing body, out of which, at the severed neck, gushed a vast
exuberance of snakes.  Likewise, a sitting statue, by Michel Angelo, of
one of the Medici, full of dignity and grace and reposeful might.  Also
the bronze gate of a baptistery in Florence, carved all over with
relieves of Scripture subjects, executed in the most lifelike and
expressive manner.  The cast itself was a miracle of art.  I should have
taken it for the genuine original bronze.

We then wandered into the House of Diomed, which seemed to me a dismal
abode, affording no possibility of comfort.  We sat down in one of the
rooms, on an iron bench, very cold.

It being by this time two o'clock, we went to the Refreshment-room and
lunched; and before we had finished our repast, my wife discovered that
she had lost her sable tippet, which she had been carrying on her arm.
Mr. Silsbee most kindly and obligingly immediately went in quest of
it, . . . . but to no purpose. . . . .

Upon entering the Tropical Saloon, we found a most welcome and delightful
change of temperature among those gigantic leaves of banyan-trees, and
the broad expanse of water-plants, floating on lakes, and spacious
aviaries, where birds of brilliant plumage sported and sang amid such
foliage as they knew at home.  Howbeit, the atmosphere was a little faint
and sickish, perhaps owing to the odor of the half-tepid water.  The most
remarkable object here was the trunk of a tree, huge beyond imagination,
--a pine-tree from California.  It was only the stripped-off bark,
however, which had been conveyed hither in segments, and put together
again beyond the height of the palace roof; and the hollow interior
circle of the tree was large enough to contain fifty people, I should
think.  We entered and sat down in all the remoteness from one another
that is attainable in a good-sized drawing-room.  We then ascended the
gallery to get a view of this vast tree from a more elevated position,
and found it looked even bigger from above.  Then we loitered slowly
along the gallery as far as it extended, and afterwards descended into
the nave; for it was getting dusk, and a horn had sounded, and a bell
rung a warning to such as delayed in the remote regions of the building.
Mr. Silsbee again most kindly went in quest of the sables, but still
without success. . . . . I have not much enjoyed the Crystal Palace, but
think it a great and admirable achievement.


November 19th.--On Tuesday evening Mr. Silsbee came to read some letters
which he has written to his friends, chiefly giving his observations on
Art, together with descriptions of Venice and other cities on the
Continent.  They were very good, and indicate much sensibility and
talent.  After the reading we had a little oyster-supper and wine.

I had written a note to ------, and received an answer, indicating that
he was much weighed down by his financial misfortune. . . . . However, he
desired me to come and see him; so yesterday morning I wended my way down
into the city, and after various reluctant circumlocutions arrived at his
house.  The interior looked confused and dismal.

It seems to me nobody else runs such risks as a man of business, because
he risks everything.  Every other man, into whatever depth of poverty he
may sink, has still something left, be he author, scholar, handicraftman,
or what not; the merchant has nothing.

We parted with a long and strong grasp of the hand, and ------ promised
to come and see us soon. . . . .

On my way home I called at Truebner's in Pater Noster Row. . . . . I
waited a few minutes, he being busy with a tall, muscular, English-built
man, who, after he had taken leave, Truebner told me was Charles Reade.
I once met him at an evening party, but should have been glad to meet him
again, now that I appreciate him so much better after reading Never too
Late to Mend.


December 6th.--All these days, since my last date, have been marked by
nothing very well worthy of detail and description.  I have walked the
streets a great deal in the dull November days, and always take a certain
pleasure in being in the midst of human life,--as closely encompassed by
it as it is possible to be anywhere in this world; and in that way of
viewing it there is a dull and sombre enjoyment always to be had in
Holborn, Fleet Street, Cheapside, and the other busiest parts of London.
It is human life; it is this material world; it is a grim and heavy
reality.  I have never had the same sense of being surrounded by
materialisms and hemmed in with the grossness of this earthly existence
anywhere else; these broad, crowded streets are so evidently the veins
and arteries of an enormous city.  London is evidenced in every one of
them, just as a megatherium is in each of its separate bones, even if
they be small ones.  Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation
in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in
spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life to wander through these
huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a
million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be
individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking
aspect of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me,--wearisome cabs and
omnibuses; everywhere the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and
shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud, that serves London for a
sky,--in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness; and at this
season always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so
densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene
resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness.
It is strange how little splendor and brilliancy one sees in London,--in
the city almost none, though some in the shops of Regent Street.  My wife
has had a season of indisposition within the last few weeks, so that my
rambles have generally been solitary, or with J----- only for a
companion.  I think my only excursion with my wife was a week ago, when
we went to Lincoln's Inn Fields, which truly are almost fields right in
the heart of London, and as retired and secluded as if the surrounding
city were a forest, and its heavy roar were the wind among the branches.
We gained admission into the noble Hall, which is modern, but built in
antique style, and stately and beautiful exceedingly.  I have forgotten
all but the general effect, with its lofty oaken roof, its panelled
walls, with the windows high above, and the great arched window at one
end full of painted coats of arms, which the light glorifies in passing
through them, as if each were the escutcheon of some illustrious
personage.  Thence we went to the chapel of Lincoln's Inn, where, on
entering, we found a class of young choristers receiving instruction from
their music-master, while the organ accompanied their strains.  These
young, clear, fresh, elastic voices are wonderfully beautiful; they are
like those of women, yet have something more birdlike and aspiring, more
like what one conceives of the singing of angels.  As for the singing of
saints and blessed spirits that have once been human, it never can
resemble that of these young voices; for no duration of heavenly
enjoyments will ever quite take the mortal sadness out of it.

In this chapel we saw some painted windows of the time of James I., a
period much subsequent, to the age when painted glass was in its glory;
but the pictures of Scriptural people in these windows were certainly
very fine,--the figures being as large as life, and the faces having much
expression.  The sunshine came in through some of them, and produced a
beautiful effect, almost as if the painted forms were the glorified
spirits of those holy personages.

After leaving Lincoln's Inn, we looked at Gray's Inn, which is a great,
quiet domain, quadrangle beyond quadrangle, close beside Holborn, and a
large space of greensward enclosed within it.  It is very strange to find
so much of ancient quietude right in the monster city's very jaws, which
yet the monster shall not eat up,--right in its very belly, indeed, which
yet, in all these ages, it shall not digest and convert into the same
substance as the rest of its bustling streets.  Nothing else in London is
so like the effect of a spell, as to pass under one of these archways,
and find yourself transported from the jumble, mob, tumult, uproar, as of
an age of week-days condensed into the present hour, into what seems an
eternal sabbath.  Thence we went into Staple Inn, I think it was,--which
has a front upon Holborn of four or five ancient gables in a row, and a
low arch under the impending story, admitting you into a paved
quadrangle, beyond which you have the vista of another.  I do not
understand that the residences and chambers in these Inns of Court are
now exclusively let to lawyers; though such inhabitants certainly seem to
preponderate there.

Since then J----- and I walked down into the Strand, and found ourselves
unexpectedly mixed up with a crowd that grew denser as we approached
Charing Cross, and became absolutely impermeable when we attempted to
make our way to Whitehall.  The wicket in the gate of Northumberland
House, by the by, was open, and gave me a glimpse of the front of the
edifice within,--a very partial glimpse, however, and that obstructed by
the solid person of a footman, who, with some women, were passing out
from within.  The crowd was a real English crowd, perfectly
undemonstrative, and entirely decorous, being composed mostly of
well-dressed people, and largely of women.  The cause of the assemblage
was the opening of Parliament by the Queen, but we were too late for any
chance of seeing her Majesty.  However, we extricated ourselves from the
multitude, and, going along Pall Mall, got into the Park by the steps at
the foot of the Duke of York's Column, and thence went to the Whitehall
Gateway, outside of which we found the Horse Guards drawn up,--a regiment
of black horses and burnished cuirasses.  On our way thither an open
carriage came through the gateway into the Park, conveying two ladies in
court dresses; and another splendid chariot pressed out through the
gateway,--the coachman in a cocked hat and scarlet and gold embroidery,
and two other scarlet and gold figures hanging behind.  It was one of the
Queen's carriages, but seemed to have nobody in it.  I have forgotten to
mention what, I think, produced more effect on me than anything else,
namely, the clash of the bells from the steeple of St. Martin's Church
and those of St. Margaret.  Really, London seemed to cry out through
them, and bid welcome to the Queen.


December 7th.--This being a muddy and dismal day, I went only to the



BRITISH MUSEUM,


which is but a short walk down the street (Great Russell Street).  I have
now visited it often enough to be on more familiar terms with it than at
first, and therefore do not feel myself so weighed down by the many
things to be seen.  I have ceased to expect or hope or wish to devour and
digest the whole enormous collection; so I content myself with individual
things, and succeed in getting now and then a little honey from them.
Unless I were studying some particular branch of history or science or
art, this is the best that can be done with the British Museum.

I went first to-day into the Townley Gallery, and so along through all
the ancient sculpture, and was glad to find myself able to sympathize
more than heretofore with the forms of grace and beauty which are
preserved there,--poor, maimed immortalities as they are,--headless and
legless trunks, godlike cripples, faces beautiful and broken-nosed,--
heroic shapes which have stood so long, or lain prostrate so long, in the
open air, that even the atmosphere of Greece has almost dissolved the
external layer of the marble; and yet, however much they may be worn
away, or battered and shattered, the grace and nobility seem as deep in
them as the very heart of the stone.  It cannot be destroyed, except by
grinding them to powder.  In short, I do really believe that there was an
excellence in ancient sculpture, which has yet a potency to educate and
refine the minds of those who look at it even so carelessly and casually
as I do.  As regards the frieze of the Parthenon, I must remark that the
horses represented on it, though they show great spirit and lifelikeness,
are rather of the pony species than what would be considered fine horses
now.  Doubtless, modern breeding has wrought a difference in the animal.
Flaxman, in his outlines, seems to have imitated these classic steeds of
the Parthenon, and thus has produced horses that always appeared to me
affected and diminutively monstrous.

From the classic sculpture, I passed through an Assyrian room, where the
walls are lined with great slabs of marble sculptured in bas-relief with
scenes in the life of Senmacherib, I believe; very ugly, to be sure, yet
artistically done in their own style, and in wonderfully good
preservation.  Indeed, if the chisel had cut its last stroke in them
yesterday, the work could not be more sharp and distinct.  In glass
cases, in this room, are little relics and scraps of utensils, and a
great deal of fragmentary rubbish, dug up by Layard in his researches,--
things that it is hard to call anything but trash, but which yet may be
of great significance as indicating the modes of life of a long-past
race.  I remember nothing particularly just now, except some pieces of
broken glass, iridescent with certainly the most beautiful hues in the
world,--indescribably beautiful, and unimaginably, unless one can
conceive of the colors of the rainbow, and a thousand glorious sunsets,
and the autumnal forest-leaves of America, all condensed upon a little
fragment of a glass cup,--and that, too, without becoming in the least
glaring or flagrant, but mildly glorious, as we may fancy the shifting
lines of an angel's wing may be.  I think this chaste splendor will glow
in my memory for years to come.  It is the effect of time, and cannot be
imitated by any known process of art.  I have seen it in specimens of old
Roman glass, which has been famous here in England; but never in anything
is there the brilliancy of these Oriental fragments.  How strange that
decay, in dark places, and underground, and where there are a billion
chances to one that nobody will ever see its handiwork, should produce
these beautiful effects!  The glass seems to become perfectly brittle, so
that it would vanish, like a soap-bubble, if touched.

Ascending the stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains,--which
I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,--
and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the
gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a
fac-simile of it in crystal.  I think the aerolites are as interesting as
anything in this department, and one piece of pure iron, laid against the
wall of the room, weighs about fourteen hundred pounds.  Whence could it
have come?  If these aerolites are bits of other planets, how happen they
to be always iron?  But I know no more of this than if I were a
philosopher.

Then I went through rooms of shells and fishes and reptiles and
tortoises, crocodiles and alligators and insects, including all manner of
butterflies, some of which had wings precisely like leaves, a little
withered and faded, even the skeleton and fibres of the leaves
represented; and immense hairy spiders, covering, with the whole
circumference of their legs, a space as big as a saucer; and centipedes
little less than a foot long; and winged insects that look like jointed
twigs of a tree.  In America, I remember, when I lived in Lenox, I found
an insect of this species, and at first really mistook it for a twig.  It
was smaller than these specimens in the Museum.  I suppose every
creature, almost, that runs or creeps or swims or flies, is represented
in this collection of Natural History; and it puzzles me to think what
they were all made for, though it is quite as mysterious why man himself
was made.

By and by I entered the room of Egyptian mummies, of which there are a
good many, one of which, the body of a priestess, is unrolled, except the
innermost layer of linen.  The outline of her face is perfectly visible.
Mummies of cats, dogs, snakes, and children are in the wall-cases,
together with a vast many articles of Egyptian manufacture and use,--even
children's toys; bread, too, in flat cakes; grapes, that have turned to
raisins in the grave; queerest of all, methinks, a curly wig, that is
supposed to have belonged to a woman,--together with the wooden box that
held it.  The hair is brown, and the wig is as perfect as if it had been
made for some now living dowager.

From Egypt we pass into rooms containing vases and other articles of
Grecian and Roman workmanship, and funeral urns, and beads, and rings,
none of them very beautiful.  I saw some splendid specimens, however, at
a former visit, when I obtained admission to a room not indiscriminately
shown to visitors.  What chiefly interested me in that room was a cast
taken from the face of Cromwell after death; representing a wide-mouthed,
long-chinned, uncomely visage, with a triangular English nose in the very
centre.  There were various other curiosities, which I fancied were safe
in my memory, but they do not now come uppermost.

To return to my to-day's progress through the Museum;--next to the
classic rooms are the collections of Saxon and British and early English
antiquities, the earlier portions of which are not very interesting to
me, possessing little or no beauty in themselves, and indicating a kind
of life too remote from our own to be readily sympathized with.  Who
cares for glass beads and copper brooches, and knives, spear-heads, and
swords, all so rusty that they look as much like pieces of old iron hoop
as anything else?  The bed of the Thames has been a rich treasury of
antiquities, from the time of the Roman Conquest downwards; it seems to
preserve bronze in considerable perfection, but not iron.

Among the mediaeval relics, the carvings in ivory are often very
exquisite and elaborate.  There are likewise caskets and coffers, and a
thousand other Old World ornamental works; but I saw so many and such
superior specimens of them at the Manchester Exhibition, that I shall say
nothing of them here.  The seal-ring of Mary, Queen of Scots, is in one
of the cases; it must have been a thumb-ring, judging from its size, and
it has a dark stone, engraved with armorial bearings.  In another case is
the magic glass formerly used by Dr. Doe, and in which, if I rightly
remember, used to be seen prophetic visions or figures of persons and
scenes at a distance.  It is a round ball of glass or crystal, slightly
tinged with a pinkish hue, and about as big as a small apple, or a little
bigger than an egg would be if perfectly round.  This ancient humbug kept
me looking at it perhaps ten minutes; and I saw my own face dimly in it,
but no other vision.  Lastly, I passed through the Ethnographical Rooms;
but I care little for the varieties of the human race,--all that is
really important and interesting being found in our own variety.  Perhaps
equally in any other.  This brought me to the head of one of the
staircases, descending which I entered the library.

Here--not to speak of the noble rooms and halls--there are numberless
treasures beyond all price; too valuable in their way for me to select
any one as more curious and valuable than many others.  Letters of
statesmen and warriors of all nations, and several centuries back,--among
which, long as it has taken Europe to produce them, I saw none so
illustrious as those of Washington, nor more so than Franklin's, whom
America gave to the world in her nonage; and epistles of poets and
artists, and of kings, too, whose chirography appears to have been much
better than I should have expected from fingers so often cramped in iron
gauntlets.  In another case there were the original autograph copies of
several famous works,--for example, that of Pope's Homer, written on the
backs of letters, the direction and seals of which appear in the midst of
"the Tale of Troy divine," which also is much scratched and interlined
with Pope's corrections; a manuscript of one of Ben Jonson's masques; of
the Sentimental Journey, written in much more careful and formal style
than might be expected, the book pretending to be a harum-scarum; of
Walter Scott's Kenilworth, bearing such an aspect of straightforward
diligence that I shall hardly think of it again as a romance;--in short,
I may as well drop the whole matter here.

All through the long vista of the king's library, we come to cases in
which--with their pages open beneath the glass--we see books worth their
weight in gold, either for their uniqueness or their beauty, or because
they have belonged to illustrious men, and have their autographs in them.
The copy of the English translation of Montaigne, containing the strange
scrawl of Shakespeare's autograph, is here.  Bacon's name is in another
book; Queen Elizabeth's in another; and there is a little devotional
volume, with Lady Jane Grey's writing in it.  She is supposed to have
taken it to the scaffold with her.  Here, too, I saw a copy, which was
printed at a Venetian press at the time, of the challenge which the
Admirable Crichton caused to be posted on the church doors of Venice,
defying all the scholars of Italy to encounter him.  But if I mention one
thing, I find fault with myself for not putting down fifty others just as
interesting,--and, after all, there is an official catalogue, no doubt,
of the whole.

As I do not mean to fill any more pages with the British Museum, I will
just mention the hall of Egyptian antiquities on the ground-floor of the
edifice, though I did not pass through it to-day.  They consist of things
that would be very ugly and contemptible if they were not so immensely
magnified; but it is impossible not to acknowledge a certain grandeur,
resulting from the scale on which those strange old sculptors wrought.
For instance, there is a granite fist of prodigious size, at least a yard
across, and looking as if it were doubled in the face of Time, defying
him to destroy it.  All the rest of the statue to which it belonged seems
to have vanished; but this fist will certainly outlast the Museum, and
whatever else it contains, unless it be some similar Egyptian
ponderosity.  There is a beetle, wrought out of immensely hard black
stone, as big as a hogshead.  It is satisfactory to see a thing so big
and heavy.  Then there are huge stone sarcophagi, engraved with
hieroglyphics within and without, all as good as new, though their age is
reckoned by thousands of years.  These great coffins are of vast weight
and mass, insomuch that when once the accurately fitting lids were shut
down, there might have seemed little chance of their being lifted again
till the Resurrection.  I positively like these coffins, they are so
faithfully made, and so black and stern,--and polished to such a nicety,
only to be buried forever; for the workmen, and the kings who were laid
to sleep within, could never have dreamed of the British Museum.

There is a deity named Pasht, who sits in the hall, very big, very grave,
carved of black stone, and very ludicrous, wearing a dog's head.  I will
just mention the Rosetta Stone, with a Greek inscription, and another in
Egyptian characters which gave the clew to a whole field of history; and
shall pretermit all further handling of this unwieldy subject.

In all the rooms I saw people of the poorer classes, some of whom seemed
to view the objects intelligently, and to take a genuine interest in
them.  A poor man in London has great opportunities of cultivating
himself if he will only make the best of them; and such an institution as
the British Museum can hardly fail to attract, as the magnet does steel,
the minds that are likeliest to be benefited by it in its various
departments.  I saw many children there, and some ragged boys.

It deserves to be noticed that some small figures of Indian Thugs,
represented as engaged in their profession and handiwork of cajoling and
strangling travellers, have been removed from the place which they
formerly occupied in the part of the Museum shown to the general public.
They are now in the more private room, and the reason of their withdrawal
is, that, according to the Chaplain of Newgate, the practice of garroting
was suggested to the English thieves by this representation of Indian
Thugs.  It is edifying, after what I have written in the preceding
paragraph, to find that the only lesson known to have been inculcated
here is that of a new mode of outrage.


December 8th.--This morning, when it was time to rise, there was but a
glimmering of daylight, and we had candles on the breakfast-table at
nearly ten o'clock.  All abroad there was a dense dim fog brooding
through the atmosphere, insomuch that we could hardly see across the
street.  At eleven o'clock I went out into the midst of the fog-bank,
which for the moment seemed a little more interfused with daylight; for
there seem to be continual changes in the density of this dim medium,
which varies so much that now you can but just see your hand before you,
and a moment afterwards you can see the cabs dashing out of the duskiness
a score of yards off.  It is seldom or never, moreover, an unmitigated
gloom, but appears to be mixed up with sunshine in different proportions;
sometimes only one part sun to a thousand of smoke and fog, and sometimes
sunshine enough to give the whole mass a coppery line.  This would have
been a bright sunny day but for the interference of the fog; and before I
had been out long, I actually saw the sun looking red and rayless, much
like the millionth magnification of a new halfpenny.

I was bound towards Bennoch's; for he had written a note to apologize for
not visiting us, and I had promised to call and see him to-day.

I went to Marlborough House to look at the English pictures, which I care
more about seeing, here in England, than those of foreign artists,
because the latter will be found more numerously and better on the
Continent.  I saw many pictures that pleased me; nothing that impressed
me very strongly.  Pictorial talent seems to be abundant enough, up to a
certain point; pictorial genius, I should judge, is among the rarest of
gifts.  To be sure, I very likely might not recognize it where it
existed; and yet it ought to have the power of making itself known even
to the uninstructed mind, as literary genius does.  If it exist only for
connoisseurs, it is a very suspicious matter.  I looked at all Turner's
pictures, and at many of his drawings; and must again confess myself
wholly unable to understand more than a very few of them.  Even those few
are tantalizing.  At a certain distance you discern what appears to be a
grand and beautiful picture, which you shall admire and enjoy infinitely
if you can get within the range of distinct vision.  You come nearer, and
find only blotches of color and dabs of the brush, meaning nothing when
you look closely, and meaning a mystery at the point where the painter
intended to station you.  Some landscapes there were, indeed, full of
imaginative beauty, and of the better truth etherealized out of the
prosaic truth of Nature; only it was still impossible actually to see it.
There was a mist over it; or it was like a tract of beautiful dreamland,
seen dimly through sleep, and glimmering out of sight, if looked upon
with wide-open eyes.  These were the more satisfactory specimens.  There
were many others which I could not comprehend in the remotest degree; not
even so far as to conjecture whether they purported to represent earth,
sea, or sky.  In fact, I should not have known them to be pictures at
all, but might have supposed that the artist had been trying his brush on
the canvas, mixing up all sorts of hues, but principally white paint, and
now and then producing an agreeable harmony of color without particularly
intending it.  Now that I have done my best to understand them without an
interpreter, I mean to buy Ruskin's pamphlet at my next visit, and look
at them through his eyes.  But I do not think that I can be driven out of
the idea that a picture ought to have something in common with what the
spectator sees in nature.

Marlborough House may be converted, I think, into a very handsome
residence for the young Prince of Wales.  The entrance from the
court-yard is into a large, square central hall, the painted ceiling of
which is at the whole height of the edifice, and has a gallery on one
side, whence it would be pleasant to look down on a festal scene below.
The rooms are of fine proportions, with vaulted ceilings, and with
fireplaces and mantel-pieces of great beauty, adorned with pillars and
terminal figures of white and of variegated marble; and in the centre of
each mantel-piece there is a marble tablet, exquisitely sculptured with
classical designs, done in such high relief that the figures are
sometimes almost disengaged from the background.  One of the subjects was
Androcles, or whatever was his name, taking the thorn out of the lion's
foot.  I suppose these works are of the era of the first old Duke and
Duchess.  After all, however, for some reason or other, the house does
not at first strike you as a noble and princely one, and you have to
convince yourself of it by examining it more in detail.

On leaving Marlborough House, I stepped for a few moments into the
National Gallery, and looked, among other things, at the Turners and
Claudes that hung there side by side.  These pictures, I think, are quite
the most comprehensible of Turner's productions; but I must say I prefer
the Claudes.  The latter catches "the light that never was on sea or
land" without taking you quite away from nature for it.  Nevertheless, I
will not be quite certain that I care for any painter except Murillo,
whose St. John I should like to own.  As far as my own pleasure is
concerned, I could not say as much for any other picture; for I have
always found an infinite weariness and disgust resulting from a picture
being too frequently before my eyes.  I had rather see a basilisk, for
instance, than the very best of those old, familiar pictures in the
Boston Athenaeum; and most of those in the National Gallery might soon
affect me in the same way.

From the Gallery I almost groped my way towards the city, for the fog
seemed to grow denser and denser as I advanced; and when I reached St.
Paul's, the sunny intermixture above spoken of was at its minimum, so
that, the smoke-cloud grew really black about the dome and pinnacles, and
the statues of saints looked down dimly from their standpoints on high.
It was very grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge
bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into
yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the
churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly
vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors
were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had
again dissolved.  It is good to think, nevertheless,--and I gladly accept
the analogy and the moral,--that the cathedral was really there, and as
substantial as ever, though those earthly mists had hidden it from mortal
eyes.

I found ------ in better spirits than when I saw him last, but his
misfortune has been too real not to affect him long and deeply.  He was
cheerful, however, and his face shone with almost its old lustre.  It has
still the cheeriest glow that I ever saw in any human countenance.

I went home by way of Holborn, and the fog was denser than ever,--very
black, indeed more like a distillation of mud than anything else; the
ghost of mud,--the spiritualized medium of departed mud, through which
the dead citizens of London probably tread in the Hades whither they are
translated.  So heavy was the gloom, that gas was lighted in all the
shop-windows; and the little charcoal-furnaces of the women and boys,
roasting chestnuts, threw a ruddy, misty glow around them.  And yet I
liked it.  This fog seems an atmosphere proper to huge, grimy London; as
proper to London as that light neither of the sun nor moon is to the New
Jerusalem.

On reaching home, I found the same fog diffused through the drawing-room,
though how it could have got in is a mystery.  Since nightfall, however,
the atmosphere is clear again.


December 20th.--Here we are still in London, at least a month longer than
we expected, and at the very dreariest and dullest season of the year.
Had I thought of it sooner, I might have found interesting people enough
to know, even when all London is said to be out of town; but meditating a
stay only of a week or two (on our way to Rome), it did not seem worth
while to seek acquaintances.

I have been out only for one evening; and that was at Dr. ------'s, who
had been attending all the children in the measles.  (Their illness was
what detained us.)  He is a homoeopathist, and is known in scientific or
general literature; at all events, a sensible and enlightened man, with
an un-English freedom of mind on some points.  For example, he is a
Swedenborgian, and a believer in modern spiritualism.  He showed me
some drawings that had been made under the spiritual influence by a
miniature-painter who possesses no imaginative power of his own, and is
merely a good mechanical and literal copyist; but these drawings,
representing angels and allegorical people, were done by an influence
which directed the artist's hand, he not knowing what his next touch
would be, nor what the final result.  The sketches certainly did show a
high and fine expressiveness, if examined in a trustful mood.  Dr. ------
also spoke of Mr. Harris, the American poet of spiritualism, as being the
best poet of the day; and he produced his works in several volumes, and
showed me songs, and paragraphs of longer poems, in support of his
opinion.  They seemed to me to have a certain light and splendor, but not
to possess much power, either passionate or intellectual.  Mr. Harris is
the medium of deceased poets, Milton and Lord Byron among the rest; and
Dr. ------ said that Lady Byron--who is a devoted admirer of her husband,
in spite of their conjugal troubles--pronounced some of these posthumous
strains to be worthy of his living genius.  Then the Doctor spoke of
various strange experiences which he himself has had in these spiritual
matters; for he has witnessed the miraculous performances of Home, the
American medium, and he has seen with his own eyes, and felt with his own
touch, those ghostly hands and arms the reality of which has been
certified to me by other beholders.  Dr. ------ tells me that they are
cold, and that it is a somewhat awful matter to see and feel them.  I
should think so, indeed.  Do I believe in these wonders?  Of course; for
how is it possible to doubt either the solemn word or the sober
observation of a learned and sensible man like Dr. ------?  But again, do
I really believe it?  Of course not; for I cannot consent to have heaven
and earth, this world and the next, beaten up together like the white and
yolk of an egg, merely out of respect to Dr. ------'s sanity and
integrity.  I would not believe my own sight, nor touch of the spiritual
hands; and it would take deeper and higher strains than those of Mr.
Harris to convince me.  I think I might yield to higher poetry or
heavenlier wisdom than mortals in the flesh have ever sung or uttered.

Meanwhile, this matter of spiritualism is surely the strangest that ever
was heard of; and yet I feel unaccountably little interest in it,--a
sluggish disgust, and repugnance to meddle with it,--insomuch that I
hardly feel as if it were worth this page or two in my not very eventful
journal.  One or two of the ladies present at Dr. ------'s little party
seemed to be mediums.

I have made several visits to the picture-galleries since my last date;
and I think it fair towards my own powers of appreciation to record that
I begin to appreciate Turner's pictures rather better than at first.  Not
that I have anything to recant as respects those strange, white-grounded
performances in the chambers at the Marlborough House; but some of his
happier productions (a large landscape illustrative of Childe Harold, for
instance) seem to me to have more magic in them than any other pictures.
I admire, too, that misty, morning landscape in the National Gallery;
and, no doubt, his very monstrosities are such as only he could have
painted, and may have an infinite value for those who can appreciate the
genius in them.

The shops in London begin to show some tokens of approaching Christmas;
especially the toy-shops, and the confectioners',--the latter ornamenting
their windows with a profusion of bonbons and all manner of pygmy figures
in sugar; the former exhibiting Christmas-trees, hung with rich and gaudy
fruit.  At the butchers' shops, there is a great display of fat
carcasses, and an abundance of game at the poulterers'.  We think of
going to the Crystal Palace to spend the festival day, and eat our
Christmas dinner; but, do what we may, we shall have no home feeling or
fireside enjoyment.  I am weary, weary of London and of England, and can
judge now how the old Loyalists must have felt, condemned to pine out
their lives here, when the Revolution had robbed them of their native
country.  And yet there is still a pleasure in being in this dingy,
smoky, midmost haunt of men; and I trudge through Fleet Street and
Ludgate Street and along Cheapside with an enjoyment as great as I ever
felt in a wood-path at home; and I have come to know these streets as
well, I believe, as I ever knew Washington Street in Boston, or even
Essex Street in my stupid old native town.  For Piccadilly or for Regent
Street, though more brilliant promenades, I do not care nearly so much.


December 27th.--Still leading an idle life, which, however, may not be
quite thrown away, as I see some things, and think many thoughts.

The other day we went to Westminster Abbey, and through the chapels; and
it being as sunny a day as could well be in London, and in December, we
could judge, in some small degree, what must have been the splendor of
those tombs and monuments when first erected there.

I presume I was sufficiently minute in describing my first visit to the
chapels, so I shall only mention the stiff figure of a lady of Queen
Elizabeth's court, reclining on the point of her elbow under a mural arch
through all these dusty years; . . . . and the old coronation-chair, with
the stone of Scone beneath the seat, and the wood-work cut and scratched
all over with names and initials. . . . .

I continue to go to the picture-galleries.  I have an idea that the face
of Murillo's St. John has a certain mischievous intelligence in it.  This
has impressed me almost from the first.  It is a boy's face, very
beautiful and very pleasant too, but with an expression that one might
fairly suspect to be roguish if seen in the face of a living boy.

About equestrian statues, as those of various kings at Charing Cross, and
otherwhere about London, and of the Duke of Wellington opposite Apsley
House, and in front of the Exchange, it strikes me as absurd, the idea of
putting a man on horseback on a place where one movement of the steed
forward or backward or sideways would infallibly break his own and his
rider's neck.  The English sculptors generally seem to have been aware of
this absurdity, and have endeavored to lessen it by making the horse as
quiet as a cab-horse on the stand, instead of rearing rampant, like the
bronze group of Jackson at Washington.  The statue of Wellington, at the
Piccadilly corner of the Park, has a stately and imposing effect, seen
from far distances, in approaching either through the Green Park, or from
the Oxford Street corner of Hyde Park.


January 3d, 1858.--On Thursday we had the pleasure of a call from Mr.
Coventry Patmore, to whom Dr. Wilkinson gave me a letter of introduction,
and on whom I had called twice at the British Museum without finding him.
We had read his Betrothal and Angel in the House with unusual pleasure
and sympathy, and therefore were very glad to make his personal
acquaintance.  He is a man of much more youthful aspect than I had
expected, . . . . a slender person to be an Englishman, though not
remarkably so had he been an American; with an intelligent, pleasant,
and sensitive face,--a man very evidently of refined feelings and
cultivated mind. . . . . He is very simple and agreeable in his
manners; a little shy, yet perfectly frank, and easy to meet on real
grounds. . . . . He said that his wife had proposed to come with him, and
had, indeed, accompanied him to town, but was kept away. . . . . We were
very sorry for this, because Mr. Patmore seems to acknowledge her as the
real "Angel in the House," although he says she herself ignores all
connection with the poem.  It is well for her to do so, and for her
husband to feel that the character is her real portrait; and both, I
suppose, are right.  It is a most beautiful and original poem,--a poem
for happy married people to read together, and to understand by the light
of their own past and present life; but I doubt whether the generality of
English people are capable of appreciating it.  I told Mr. Patmore that I
thought his popularity in America would be greater than at home, and he
said that it was already so; and he appeared to estimate highly his
American fame, and also our general gift of quicker and more subtle
recognition of genius than the English public. . . . . We mutually
gratified each other by expressing high admiration of one another's
works, and Mr. Patmore regretted that in the few days of our further stay
here we should not have time to visit him at his home.  It would really
give me pleasure to do so. . . . . I expressed a hope of seeing him in
Italy during our residence there, and he seemed to think it possible, as
his friend, and our countryman, Thomas Buchanan Read, had asked him to
come thither and be his guest.  He took his leave, shaking hands with all
of us because he saw that we were of his own people, recognizing him as a
true poet.  He has since given me the new edition of his poems, with a
kind rote.

We are now making preparations for our departure, which we expect will
take place on Tuesday; and yesterday I went to our Minister's to arrange
about the passport.  The very moment I rang at his door, it swung open,
and the porter ushered me with great courtesy into the anteroom; not that
he knew me, or anything about me, except that I was an American citizen.
This is the deference which an American servant of the public finds it
expedient to show to his sovereigns.  Thank Heaven, I am a sovereign
again, and no longer a servant; and really it is very singular how I look
down upon our ambassadors and dignitaries of all sorts, not excepting the
President himself.  I doubt whether this is altogether a good influence
of our mode of government.

I did not see, and, in fact, declined seeing, the Minister himself, but
only his son, the Secretary of Legation, and a Dr. P------, an American
traveller just from the Continent.  He gave a fearful account of the
difficulties that beset a person landing with much luggage in Italy, and
especially at Civita Vecchia, the very port at which we intended to
debark.  I have been so long in England that it seems a cold and shivery
thing to go anywhere else.

Bennoch came to take tea with us on the 5th, it being his first visit
since we came to London, and likewise his farewell visit on our leaving
for the Continent.

On his departure, J----- and I walked a good way down Oxford Street and
Holborn with him, and I took leave of him with the kindest wishes for his
welfare.


END OF VOL. II.





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