Chapter XX: Letter XVII (1)

ENGLISH CORDIALITY AND HOSPITALITY, AND THE FEELINGS AWAKENED BY
IT—LIVERPOOL, UNCOMFORTABLE COFFEE-HOUSE THERE—TRAVELLING
AMERICANS—NEW YORK PACKETS—THE RAILWAY—MANCHESTER.

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

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

There are good inns, I believe, at Liverpool, but the coach put me down at the dirtiest and worst specimen of a public house that I have encountered in England. As I was to stay but a night, I overcame the prejudice of the first _coup d’œil_, and made the best of a dinner in the coffee room. It was crowded with people, principally merchants, I presumed, and the dinner hour having barely passed, most of them were sitting over their wine or toddy at the small tables, discussing prices or reading the newspapers. Near me were two young men, whose faces I thought familiar to me, and with a second look I resolved them into two of my countrymen, who, I found out presently by their conversation, were eating their first dinner in England. They were gentlemanlike young men, of good education, and I pleased myself with looking about and imagining the comparison they would draw, with their own country fresh in their recollection, between it and this. I could not help feeling how erroneous in this case would be a first impression. The gloomy coffee room, the hurried and uncivil waiters, the atrocious cookery, the bad air, greasy tables, filthy carpet, and unsocial company—and this one of the most popular and crowded inns of the first commercial town in England! My neighbors themselves, too, afforded me some little speculation. They were a fair specimen of the young men of our country, and after several years’ exclusive conversance with other nations, I was curious to compare an untravelled American with the Europeans around me. I was struck with the exceeding _ambitiousness_ of their style of conversation. Dr. Pangloss himself would have given them a degree. They called nothing by its week-day name, and avoided with singular pertinacity exactly that upon which the modern English are as pertinaciously bent—a concise homeliness of phraseology. They were dressed much better than the people about them, (who were apparently in the same sphere of life,) and had on the whole a superior air—owing possibly to the custom prevalent in America of giving young men a university education before they enter into trade. Like myself, too, they had not yet learned the English accomplishment of total unconsciousness in the presence of others. When not conversing they did not study profoundly the grain of the mahogany, nor gaze with solemn earnestness into the bottom of their wine-glasses, nor peruse with the absorbed fixedness of Belshazzar, the figures on the wall. They looked about them with undisguised curiosity, ordered a great deal more wine than they wanted (_very_ American, that!) and were totally without the self-complacent, self-amused, sober-felicity air which John Bull assumes after his cheese in a coffee room.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND.

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

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

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

The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel, and that we have brought with us the first west wind they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement of the passengers, he met the steward’s usual demand for a fee with an application for a contribution to the funds of his society! His expectations from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,” whose sole errand is to record the golden results of his friend’s eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her captain, which are more, I will put out my sea lamp for the last time, and get into my _premonitory_ “six feet by two.”

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon most musically, till the hour for the morning services. We have little idea in America of the perfection to which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In the towers of this small rural church are hung eight bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature. We were told at breakfast that the chimes had been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves, the villagers always expressing thus their congratulations on the arrival of guests at the vicarage. The compliment was repeated between services, and a very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship to the vicar’s family authorizing a very special rejoicing.

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

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

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

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

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

And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try a _beginning_ at getting a living in England. I was never at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and salt for a young man till I had occasion lately to endeavor to better the condition of a servant of my own—a lad who has been with me four or five years, and whose singular intelligence, good principle and high self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any confidential trust or place whatever.[2] His own ideas, too (I thought, not unreasonably,) had become somewhat sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to continue longer as a servant. He went home to his mother, a working woman of London, and I did my utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any possible livelihood above menial service. I was met everywhere with the same answer; “There are hundreds of gentleman’s sons wearing out their youth in looking for the same thing.” I was told daily that it was quite in vain—that apprenticeships were as much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inaccessible. My boy and his mother at last came to their senses; and, consenting to apply once more for a servant’s place, he was fortunate enough to engage as valet to bachelor, and is now gone with his new master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip; “England is a great place to take the nonsense out of people.”

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You—a—got your things, sir?”

“What things?”

“The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bedroom, sir?”

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

The waiter resumed his, and presently approached again.

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

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

My friend began again at the next turn.

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

“Yes.” I walked on once more.

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

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

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

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