scene I have described; and in the distance behind them, the winding

avenue, railed in for the procession, hidden and disclosed by turns among the noble trees of the park, and alive throughout its whole extent with the multitudes crowding to the lists. There was a chivalric splendor in the whole scene, which I thought at the time would repay one for a long pilgrimage to see it—even should the clouds, which by this time were coming up very threateningly from the horizon, put a stop to the tournament altogether.

On entering the castle hall, a lofty room hung round with arms, trophies of the chase, ancient shields, and armor of every description, I found myself in a crowd of a very merry and rather a motley character—knights half armed, esquires in buff, palmers, halberdiers, archers, and servants in modern livery, here and there a lady, and here and there a spectator like myself, and in a corner by one of the Gothic windows—what think you?—a minstrel?—a gray-haired harper?—a jester? Guess again—_a reporter for the Times!_ With a “walking dictionary” at his elbow, in the person of the fat butler of the castle, he was inquiring out the various characters in the crowd, and the rapidity of his stenographic jottings-down (with their lucid apparition in print two days after in London) would in the times represented by the costumes about him, have burnt him at the stake for a wizard with the consent of every knight in Christendom.

I was received by the knight-marshal of the lists, who did the honors of hospitality for Lord Eglington during his preparation for the “passage of arms;” and finding an old friend under the gray beard and scallop shell of a venerable palmer, whose sandal and bare toes I chanced to stumble over, we passed in together to the large dining room of the castle. “Lunch” was on the long table, and some two hundred of the earl’s out-lodging guests were busy at knife and fork, while here and there were visible some of those anachronisms which, to me, made the zest of the tournament—pilgrims eating _Périgord pies_, esquires dressing after the manner of the thirteenth century diving most scientifically into the richer veins of _pâtés de foie-gras_, dames in ruff and farthingale discussing _blue_ blanc-mange, and a knight with an over-night headache calling out for a cup of tea!

On returning to the hall of the castle, which was the principal place of assemblage, I saw with no little regret that ladies were coming from their carriages under umbrellas. The fair archers tripped in doors from their crowded tent, the knight of the dragon, who had been out to look after his charger, was being wiped dry by a friendly pocket-handkerchief, and all countenances had fallen with the barometer. It was time for the procession to start, however, and the knights appeared, one by one, armed _cap-à-pie_, all save the helmet, till at last the hall was crowded with steel-clad and chivalric forms; and they waited only for the advent of the Queen of Beauty. After admiring not a little the manly bearing and powerful “thewes and sinews” displayed by the array of modern English nobility in the trying costumes and harness of olden time, I stepped out upon the lawn with some curiosity to see how so much heavy metal was to be got into a demipique saddle. After one or two ineffectual attempts, foiled partly by the restlessness of his horse, the first knight called ingloriously for a chair. Another scrambled over with great difficulty; and I fancy, though Lord Waterford and Lord Eglinton, and one other whom I noticed, mounted very gallantly and gracefully, the getting to saddle was possibly the most difficult feat of the day. The ancient achievement of leaping on the steed’s back from the ground in complete armor would certainly have broken the spine of any horse present, and was probably never done but in story. Once in the saddle, however, English horsemanship told well; and one of the finest sights of the day I thought was the breaking away of a powerful horse from the grooms, before his rider had gathered up his reins, and a career at furious speed through the open park, during which the steel encumbered horseman rode as safely as a fox-hunter, and subdued the affrighted animal, and brought him back in a style worthy of a wreath from the Queen of Beauty.

Driven in by the rain, I was standing at the upper side of the hall, when a movement in the crowd and an unusual “making-way” announced the coming of the “cynosure of all eyes.” She entered from the interior of the castle with her train held up by two beautiful pages of ten or twelve years of age, and attended by two fair and very young maids of honor. Her jacket of ermine, her drapery of violet and blue velvet, the collars of superb jewels which embraced her throat and bosom, and her sparkling crown, were on her (what they seldom are, but should be only) mere accessaries to her own predominating and radiant beauty. Lady Seymour’s features are as nearly faultless as is consistent with expression; her figure and face are rounded to the complete fulness of the mould for a Juno; her walk is queenly, and peculiarly unstudied and graceful, yet (I could not but think then and since) she was not well chosen for the Queen of a Tournament. The character of her beauty, uncommon and perfect as it is, is that of delicacy and loveliness—the lily rather than the rose—the modest pearl, not the imperial diamond. The eyes to flash over a crowd at a tournament, to be admired from a distance, to beam down upon a knight kneeling for a public award of honor, should be full of command, dark, lustrous, and fiery. Hers are of the sweetest and most tranquil blue that ever reflected the serene heaven of a happy hearth—eyes to love, not wonder at, to adore and rely upon, not admire and tremble for. At the distance at which most of the spectators of the tournament saw Lady Seymour, Fanny Kemble’s stormy orbs would have shown much finer, and the forced and imperative action of a stage-taught head and figure would have been more applauded than the quiet, nameless, and indescribable grace lost to all but those immediately round her. I had seen the Queen of Beauty in a small society, dressed in simple white, without an ornament, when she was far more becomingly dressed and more beautiful than here, and I have never seen, since, the engravings and prints of Lady Seymour which fill every window in the London shops, without feeling that it was a profanation of a style of loveliness that would be—

——“prodigal enough If it unveiled its beauty to the moon.”

The day wore on, and the knight-marshal of the lists, (Sir Charles Lamb, the stepfather of Lord Eglinton, by far the most knightly looking person at the tournament,) appeared in his rich surcoat and embossed armor, and with a despairing look at the increasing torrents of rain, gave the order to get to horse. At the first blast of the trumpet, the thick-leaved trees around the castle gave out each a dozen or two of gay-colored horsemen who had stood almost unseen under the low hanging branches—mounted musicians in silk and gay trappings, mounted men-at-arms in demi-suits of armor, deputy marshals and halberdiers; and around the western tower, where their caparisons had been arranged and their horse armor carefully looked to, rode the glittering and noble company of knights, Lord Eglinton in his armor of inlaid gold, and Lord Alford, with his athletic frame and very handsome features, conspicuous above all. The rain, meantime, spared neither the rich tabard of the pursuivant, nor the embroidered saddle cloths of the queen’s impatient palfrey: and after a half-dozen of dripping detachments had formed and led on, as the head of the procession, the lady archers—who were to go on foot—were called by the marshal with a smile and a glance upward which might have been construed into a tacit advice to stay in doors. Gracefully and majestically, however, with quiver at her back, and bow in hand, the tall and fair archer of whose uncommon beauty I have already spoken, stepped from the castle door; and, regardless of the rain which fell in drops as large as pearls on her unprotected forehead and snowy shoulders, she took her place in the procession with her silken-booted troop picking their way very gingerly over the pools behind her. Slight as the circumstance may seem, there was in the manner of the lady, and her calm disregard of self in the cause she had undertaken, which would leave me in no doubt where to look for a heroine were the days of Wallace, (whose compatriot she is) to come over again. The knight-marshal put spurs to his horse, and re-ordered the little troop to the castle; and regretting that I had not the honor of the lady’s acquaintance for my authority, I performed my only chivalric achievement for the day, the sending a halberdier whom I had chanced to remember as the servant of an old friend, on a crusade into the castle for a lady’s maid and a pair of dry stockings! Whether they were found, and the fair archer wore them, or where she and her silk-shod company have the tournament consumption, rheumatism, or cough, at this hour, I am sorry I cannot say.

The judge of peace, Lord Saltoun, with his wand, and retainers on foot bearing heavy battle axes, was one of the best figures in the procession; though, as he was slightly gray, and his ruby velvet cap and saturated ruff were poor substitutes for a warm cravat and hat-brim, I could not but associate his fine horsemanship with a sore throat, and his retainers and their battle axes with relays of nurses and hot flannels. The flower of the tournament, in the representing and keeping up of the assumed character, however, was its king, Lord Londonderry. He, too, is a man, I should think, on the shady side of fifty, but of just the high preservation and _embonpoint_ necessary for a royal presence. His robe of red velvet and ermine swept the ground as he sat in his saddle; and he managed to keep its immense folds free of his horse’s legs, and yet to preserve its flow in his prancing motion, with a grace and ease, I must say, which seemed truly imperial.—His palfrey was like a fiery Arabian, all action, nerve, and fire; and every step was a rearing prance, which, but for the tranquil self-possession and easy control of the king, would have given the spectators some fears for his royal safety. Lord Londonderry’s whole performance of his part was without a fault, and chiefly admirable, I thought, from his sustaining it with that unconsciousness and entire freedom from _mauvaise honte_ which the English seldom can command in new or conspicuous situations.

The Queen of Beauty was called, and her horse led to the door; but the water ran from the blue saddle cloth and housings like rain from a roof, and the storm seemed to have increased with the sound of her name. She came to the door, and gave a deprecating look upward which would have mollified any thing but a Scotch sky, and, by command of the knight-marshal, retired again to wait for a less chivalric but drier conveyance. Her example was followed by the other ladies, and their horses were led riderless in the procession.

The knights were but half called when I accepted a friend’s kind offer of a seat in his carriage to the lists. The entire park, as we drove along, was one vast expanse of umbrellas; and it looked from the carriage window, like an army of animated and gigantic mushrooms, shouldering each other in a march. I had no idea till then of the immense crowd the occasion had called together. The circuitous route railed in for the procession was lined with spectators six or seven deep, on either side, throughout its whole extent of a mile; the most distant recesses of the park were crowded with men, horses, and vehicles, all pressing onward; and as we approached the lists, we found the multitude full a quarter of a mile deep, standing on all the eminences which looked down upon the enclosure, as closely serried almost as the pit of the opera, and all eyes bent in one direction, anxiously watching the guarded entrance. I heard the number of persons present variously estimated during the day, the estimates ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand, but I should think the latter was nearer the mark.

We presented our tickets at the private door, in the rear of the principal gallery, and found ourselves introduced to a very dry place among the supports and rafters of the privileged structure. The look-out was excellent in front, and here I proposed to remain, declining the wet honor of a place above stairs. The gentleman-usher, however, was very urgent for our promotion; but as we found him afterward chatting very familiarly with a party who occupied the seats we had selected, we were compelled to relinquish the flattering unction that he was actuated by an intuitive sense of our deservings. On ascending to the covered gallery, I saw, to my surprise, that some of the best seats in front were left vacant, and here and there, along the different tiers of benches, ladies were crowding excessively close together, while before or behind them there seemed plenty of unoccupied room. A second look showed me small streams of water coming through the roof, and I found that a dry seat was totally unattainable. The gallery held about a thousand persons (the number Lord Eglinton had invited to the banquet and ball,) and the greater part of these were ladies, most of them in fancy dresses, and the remainder in very slight _demi-toilette_—everybody having dressed apparently with a full reliance on the morning’s promise of fair weather. Less fortunate than the multitude outside the Earl’s guests seemed not to have numbered umbrellas among the necessities of a tournament; and the demand for this despised invention was sufficient (if merit was ever rewarded) to elevate it for ever after to a rank among chivalric appointments. Substitutes and imitations of it were made of swords and cashmeres; and the lenders of veritable umbrellas received smiles which should induce them, one would think, to carry half-a-dozen to all future tournaments in Scotland. It was pitiable to see the wreck going on among the perishable elegancies of Victorine and Herbault—chip hats of the most faultless _tournure_ collapsing with the wet; starched ruffs quite flat; dresses passing helplessly from “Lesbia’s” style to “Nora Creina’s;” shawls, tied by anxious mammas over chapeau and coiffure, crushing pitilessly the delicate fabric of months of invention; and, more lamentable still, the fair brows and shoulders of many a lovely woman proving with rainbow clearness that the colors of the silk or velvet composing her head-dress were by no means ‘fast.’ The Irvine archers, by the way, who as the Queen’s body guard, were compelled to expose themselves to the rain on the grand staircase, resembled a troop of New Zealanders with their faces tattooed of a delicate green; though, as their Lincoln bonnets were all made of the same faithless velvet, they were fortunately streaked so nearly alike as to preserve their uniform.

After a brief consultation between the rheumatisms in my different limbs, it was decided (since it was vain to hope for shelter for the entire person) that my cloth cap would be the best recipient for the inevitable wet; and selecting the best of the vacated places, I seated myself so as to receive one of the small streams as nearly as possible on my organ of firmness. Here I was undisturbed, except once that I was asked, (my seat supposed to be a dry one) to give place for a lady newly arrived, who, receiving my appropriated rivulet in her neck, immediately restored it to me with many acknowledgments, and passed on. In point of position, my seat, which was very near the pavilion of the Queen of Beauty, was one of the best at the tournament; and diverting my aqueduct, by a little management, over my left shoulder, I contrived to be more comfortable, probably, than most of my shivering and melancholy neighbors.

A great agitation in the crowd, and a dampish sound of coming trumpets announced the approach of the procession. As it came in sight, and wound along the curved passage to the lists, its long and serpentine line of helmets and glittering armor, gonfalons, spear-points, and plumes, just surging above the moving sea of umbrellas, had the effect of some gorgeous and bright-scaled dragon swimming in troubled waters. The leaders of the long cavalcade pranced into the arena at last, and a tremendous shout from the multitude announced their admiration of the spectacle. On they came toward the canopy of the Queen of Beauty, men-at-arms, trumpeters, heralds, and halberdiers, and soon after them the king of the tournament, with his long scarlet robe flying to the tempest, and his rearing palfrey straining every nerve to show his pride and beauty. The first shout from the principal gallery was given in approbation of this display of horsemanship, as Lord Londonderry rode past; and considering the damp enthusiasm which prompted it, it should have been considered rather flattering. Lord Eglinton came on presently, distinguished above all others no less by the magnificence of his appointments than by the ease and dignity with which he rode, and his knightly bearing and stature. His golden armor sat on him as if he had been used to wear it; and he managed his beautiful charger, and bowed in reply to the reiterated shouts of the multitude and his friends, with a grace and chivalric courtesy which drew murmurs of applause from the spectators long after the cheering had subsided.

The jester rode into the lists upon a gray steed, shaking his bells over his head, and dressed in an odd costume of blue and yellow, with a broad flapped hat, asses’ ears, &c. His character was not at first understood by the crowd, but he soon began to excite merriment by his jokes, and no little admiration by his capital riding. He was a professional person, I think it was said, from Astley’s, but as he spoke with a most excellent Scotch “burr,” he easily passed for an indigenous “fool.” He rode from side to side of the lists during the whole of the tournament, borrowing umbrellas, quizzing the knights, &c.

One of the most striking features of the procession was the turn-out of the knight of the Gael, Lord Glenlyon, with seventy of his clansmen at his back in plaid and philibeg, and a finer exhibition of calves (without a joke) could scarce be desired. They followed their chieftain on foot, and when the procession separated, took up their places in a line along the palisade serving as a guard to the lists.

After the procession had twice made the circuit of the enclosure, doing obeisance to the Queen of Beauty, the jester had possession of the field while the knights retired to don their helmets, (hitherto carried by their esquires,) and to await the challenge to combat. All eyes were now bent upon the gorgeous clusters of tents at either extremity of the oblong area; and in a very few minutes the herald’s trumpet sounded, and the Knight of the Swan rode forth, having sent his defiance to the Knight of the Golden Lion. At another blast of the trumpet they set their lances in rest, selected opposite sides of the long fence or barrier running lengthwise through the lists, and rode furiously past each other, the fence of course preventing any contact except that of their lances. This part of the tournament (the essential part, one would think) was, from the necessity of the case, the least satisfactory of all. The knights, though they rode admirably, were so oppressed by the weight of their armor, and so embarrassed in their motions by the ill-adjusted joints, that they were like men of wood, unable apparently even to raise the lance from the thigh on which it rested. I presume no one of them either saw where he should strike his opponent, or had any power of directing the weapon. As they rode close to the fence, however, and a ten-foot pole sawed nearly off in two or three places was laid crosswise on the legs of each, it would be odd if they did not come in contact; and the least shock of course splintered the lance—in other words, finished what was begun by the carpenter’s saw. The great difficulty was to ride at all under such a tremendous weight, and manage a horse of spirit, totally unused both to the weight and the clatter of his own and his rider’s armor. I am sure that Lord Eglinton’s horse, for one, would have bothered Ivanhoe himself to “bring to the scratch;” and Lord Waterford’s was the only one that, for all the fright he showed, might have been selected (as they all should have been) for the virtue of having peddled tin-ware. These two knights, by the way, ran the best career, Lord Eglinton, _malgré_ his bolter, coming off the victor.

The rain, meantime, had increased to a deluge, the Queen of Beauty sat shivering under an umbrella, the jester’s long ears were water-logged, and lay flat on his shoulders, and everybody in my neighborhood had expressed a wish for a dry seat and a glass of sherry. The word “banquet” occurred frequently right and left; hopes for “mulled wine or something hot before dinner” stole from the lips of a mamma on the seat behind; and there seemed to be but one chance for the salvation of health predominant in the minds of all—and that was drinking rather more freely than usual at the approaching banquet. Judge what must have been the astonishment, vexation, dread, and despair, of the one thousand wet, shivering, and hungry candidates for the feast, when Lord Eglinton rode up to the gallery unhelmeted, and delivered himself as follows:—

“Ladies and gentlemen, I had hoped to have given you all a good dinner; but to my extreme mortification and regret, I am just informed that the rain has penetrated the banqueting pavilions, and that, in consequence, I shall only be able to entertain so many of my friends as can meet around my ordinary table.”

About as uncomfortable a piece of intelligence to some nine hundred and sixty of his audience, as they could have received, short of a sentence for their immediate execution.

To comprehend fully the disastrous extent of the disappointment in the principal gallery, it must be taken into consideration that the domicils, fixed or temporary, of the rejected sufferers, were from five to twenty miles distant—a long ride at best, if begun on the point of famishing, and in very thin and well-saturated fancy dresses. Grievance the first, however, was nothing to grievance the second; viz. that from the tremendous run upon post-horses, and horses of all descriptions, during the three or four previous days, the _getting to_ the tournament was the utmost that many parties could achieve. The nearest baiting-place was several miles off; and in compassion to the poor beasts, and with the weather promising fair on their arrival, most persons had consented to take their chance for the quarter of a mile from the lists to the castle, and had dismissed their carriages with orders to return at the close of the banquet and ball—daylight the next morning! The castle, every body knew, was crammed, from “donjon-keep to turret-top,” with the relatives and friends of the noble earl, and his private table could accommodate no more than these. _To get home_ was the inevitable alternative.

The rain poured in a deluge. The entire park was trodden into a slough, or standing in pools of water—carts, carriages, and horsemen, with fifty thousand flying pedestrians, crowding every road and avenue. How to get home _with_ a carriage! How the deuce to get home _without_ one!

A gentleman who had been sent out on the errand of Noah’s dove by a lady whose carriage and horses were ordered at four the following morning, came back with the mud up to his knees, and reported that there was not a wheelbarrow to be had for love or money. After threading the crowd in every direction, he had offered a large sum, in vain, for a one-horse cart!

Night was coming on, meantime, very fast; but absorbed by the distresses of the shivering groups around me, I had scarce remembered that my own invitation was but to the banquet and ball—and my dinner, consequently, nine miles off, at Ardrossan. Thanking Heaven, that, at least, I had no ladies to share my evening’s pilgrimage, I followed the Queen of Beauty down the muddy and slippery staircase, and, when her majesty had stepped into her carriage, I stepped over ankles in mud and water, and began my _wade_ toward the castle.

Six hours of rain, and the trampling of such an immense multitude of men and horses, had converted the soft and moist sod and soil of the park into a deep and most adhesive quagmire. Glancing through the labyrinth of vehicles on every side, and seeing men and horses with their feet completely sunk below the surface, I saw that there was no possibility of shying the matter, and that _wade_ was the word. I thought at first, that I had a claim for a little sympathy on the score of being rather slenderly shod (the impalpable sole of a pattern leather boot being all that separated me from the subsoil of the estate of Eglinton;) but overtaking, presently, a party of four ladies who had lost several shoes in the mire, and were positively wading on in silk stockings, I took patience to myself from my advantage in the comparison, and thanked fate for the thinnest sole with leather to keep it on. The ladies I speak of were under the charge of a most despairing-looking gentleman, but had neither cloak nor umbrella, and had evidently made no calculations for a walk. We differed in our choice of the two sides of a slough, presently, and they were lost in the crowd; but I could not help smiling, with all my pity of their woes, to think what a turning up of prunella shoes there will be, should Lord Eglinton ever plough the chivalric field of the Tournament.

As I reached the castle, I got upon the Macadamised road, which had the advantage of a bottom _somewhere_, though it was covered with a liquid mud, of which every passing foot gave you a spatter to the hips. My exterior was by this time equally divided between water and dirt, and I trudged on in comfortable fellowship with farmers, coal-miners, and Scotch lasses—envying very much the last, for they carried their shoes in their hands, and held their petticoats, to say the least, clear of the mud. Many a good joke they seemed to have among them, but as they spoke in Gaelic, it was lost on my Sassenach ears.

I had looked forward with a faint hope to a gingerbread and ale-cart, which I remembered having seen in the morning established near the terminus of the railroad, trusting to refresh my strength and patience with a glass of anything that goes under the generic name of “summat;” but though the cart was there, the gingerbread shelf was occupied by a row of Scotch lasses, crouching together under cover from the rain, and the pedlar assured me that “there wasna a drap o’ speerit to be got within ten mile o’ the castle.” One glance at the railroad, where a car with a single horse was beset by some thousands of shoving and fighting applicants, convinced me that I had a walk of eight miles to finish my “purgation by” tournament; and as it was getting too dark to trust to any picking of the way, I took the middle of the rail-track, and set forward.

“Oh, but a weary wight was he When he reached the foot of the dogwood tree.”

Eight miles in a heavy rain, with boots of the consistence of brown paper, and a road of alternate deep mud and broken stone, should entitle one to the green turban. I will make the pilgrimage of a Hadjii from the “farthest inn” with half the endurance.

I found my Liverpool friends over a mutton chop in the snug parlor of our host, and with a strong brew of hot toddy, and many a laugh at the day’s adventures by land and water, we got comfortably to bed “somewhere in the small hours.” And so ended (for me) the great day of the tournament.

After witnessing the disasters of the first day, the demolition of costumes, and the perils by water, of masqueraders and spectators, it was natural to fancy that the tournament was over. So did not seem to think several thousands of newly-arrived persons, pouring from steamer after steamer upon the pier of Ardrossan, and in every variety of costume, from the shepherd’s maud to the courtier’s satin, crowding to the rail-cars from Eglinton. It appeared from the chance remarks of one or two who came to our lodgings to deposite their carpet bags, that it had rained very little in the places from which the steamers had come, and that they had calculated on the second as the great day of the joust. No dissuasion had the least effect upon them, and away they went, bedecked and merry, the sufferers of the day before looking out upon them, from comfortable hotel and lodging, with prophetic pity.

At noon the sky brightened; and as the cars were running by this time with diminished loads, I parted from my agreeable friends, and bade adieu to my garret at Ardrossan. I was bound to Ireland, and my road lay by Eglinton to Irvine and Ayr. Fellow-passengers with me were twenty or thirty men in Glengary bonnets, plaids, &c.; and I came in for my share of the jeers and jokes showered on them by the passengers in the return-cars, as men bound on a fruitless errand. As we neared the castle, the crowds of people with disconsolate faces waiting for conveyances, or standing by the reopened ginger-bread carts in listless idleness, convinced my companions, at last, that there was nothing to be seen, for that day at least, at Eglinton. I left them sitting on the cars, undecided whether to go on or return without losing their places; and seeing a coach marked “Irvine” standing in the road, I jumped in without question or ceremony. It belonged to a private party of gentlemen, who were to visit the castle and tilting-ground on their way to Irvine; and as they very kindly insisted on my remaining after I had apologised for the intrusion, I found myself “booked” for a glimpse of the second day’s attractions.

The avenue to the castle was as crowded as on the day before; but it was curious to remark how the general aspect of the multitude was changed by the substitution of disappointment for expectation. The lagging gait and surly silence, instead of the elastic step and merry joke, seemed to have darkened the scene more than the withdrawal of the sun, and I was glad to wrap myself in my cloak, and remember that I was on the wing. The banner flying at the castle tower was the only sign of motion I could see in its immediate vicinity; the sail-cloth coverings of the pavilion were dark with wet; the fine sward was everywhere disfigured with traces of mud, and the whole scene was dismal and uncomfortable. We kept on to the lists, and found them, as one of my companions expressed it, more like a cattle-pen after a fair than a scene of pleasure—trodden, wet, miry, and deserted. The crowd, content to view them from a distance, were assembled around the large booths on the ascent of the rising ground toward the castle, where a band was playing some merry reels, and the gingerbread and ale venders plied a busy vocation. A look was enough; and we shaped our course for Irvine, sympathizing deeply with the disappointment of the high-spirited and generous Lord of the Tourney. I heard at Irvine, and farther on, that the tilting would be renewed, and the banquet and ball given on the succeeding days; but after the wreck of dresses and peril of health I had witnessed, I was persuaded that the best that could be done would be but a slender patching up of the original glories as well as a halting rally of the original spirits of the tournament. So I kept on my way.

TALKS OVER TRAVEL. LONDON.

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

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

Everybody who knows the society of Paris knows something of a handsome and very elegant young baron of the Faubourg St. Germain, who, with small fortune, very great taste, and greater credit, contrived to go on very swimmingly as an adorable _roue_ and _vaurien_ till he was hard upon twenty-five. At the first crisis in his affairs, the ladies, who hold all the politics in their laps, got him appointed consul to Algiers, or minister to Venezuela, and with this pretty pretext for selling his horses and dressing-gowns, these cherished articles brought twice their original value and saved his _loyauté_, and set him up in fans and monkeys at his place of exile. A year of this was enough for the darling of Paris, and not more than a day before his desolate loves would have ceased to mourn for him, he galloped into his hotel with a new fashion of whiskers, a black female slave, and the most delicious histories of his adventures during the ages he had been exiled. Down to the earth and their previous obscurity dropped the rivals who were just beginning to usurp his glories. A new stud, an indescribable vehicle, a suite of rooms _à l’Africaine_, and a mystery, preserved at some expense, about his negress, kept all Paris, including his new creditors, in admiring astonishment for a year. Among the crowd of his worshippers, not the last or least fervent, were the fair-haired and glowing beauties who assemble at the _levees_ of their ambassador in the Rue St. Honore, and upon whom _le beau Adolphe_ had looked as pretty savages, whose frightful toilets and horrid French accent might be tolerated one evening in the week—_vu le souper!_

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

“_Ahi! mais comment!_”

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

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

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

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

No offers of marriage the first evening!

None the second!!

None the third!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_E vero!_” said Ivanhoff, with a look of modest admiration at the _prima donna_.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Giulia!” “Giulietta!” “Giuliettina!” cried out one and another as she ceased, expressing in their Italian diminutives, the love and delight she had inspired by her incomparable execution.

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

THE STREETS OF LONDON.

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

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

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

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

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

I like Cranbourne alley, because it reminds me of Venice. The half-daylight between the high and overhanging roofs, the just audible hum of voices and occupation from the different shops, the shuffling of hasty feet over the smooth flags, and particularly the absence of horses and wheels, make it (in all but the damp air and the softer speech) a fair resemblance to those close passages in the rear of the canals between St. Mark’s and the Rialto. Then I like studying a pawnbroker’s window, and I like ferreting in the old book-stalls that abound here. It is a good lesson in humility for an author to see what he can be bought for in Cranbourne alley. Some “gentle reader,” who has paid a guinea and a half for you, has resold you for two-and-sixpence. For three shillings you may have the three volumes, “as good as new,” and the shopman, by his civility, pleased to be rid of it on the terms. If you would console yourself, however, buy Milton for one-and-sixpence, and credit your vanity with the eighteen-pence of the remainder.

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

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

LONDON.

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

There is a “town” manner, too, and a “city” manner, practised with great nicety by all who frequent both extremities of London. Nothing could be in more violent contrast, for example, than the manner of your banker when you dine with him at his country house, and the same person when you meet him on the narrow sidewalk in Throgmorton street. If you had seen him first in his suburban retreat, you would wonder how the deuce such a cordial, joyous, spare-nothing sort of good fellow could ever reduce himself to the cautious proportions of Change alley. If you met him first in Change alley, on the contrary, you would wonder, with quite as much embarrassment, how such a cold, two-fingered, pucker-browed slave of Mammon could ever, by any license of interpretation, be called a gentleman. And when you have seen him in both places, and know him well, if he is a favorable specimen of his class, you will be astonished still more to see how completely he will sustain both characters—giving you the cold shoulder, in a way that half insults you, at twelve in the morning, and putting his home, horses, cellar, and servants, completely at your disposal at four in the afternoon. Two souls inhabit the banker’s body, and each is apparently sole tenant in turn. As the Hampstead early coach turns the corner by St. Giles’s, on its way to the bank, the spirit of gain enters into the bosom of the junior Firkins, ejecting, till the coach passes the same spot at three in the afternoon, the more gentlemanly inhabitants. Between those hours, look to Firkins for no larger sentiment than may be written upon the blank lines of a note of hand, and expect no courtesy that would occupy the head or hands of the junior partner longer than one second by St. Paul’s. With the broad beam of sunshine that inundates the returning omnibus emerging from Holborn into Tottenham Court road, the angel of port wine and green fields passes his finger across Firkins’s brow, and _presto!_ the man is changed. The sight of a long and narrow strip of paper, sticking from his neighbor’s pocket, depreciates that person in his estimation, he criticises the livery and riding of the groom trotting past, says some very true things of the architecture of the new cottage on the roadside, and is landed at the end of his own shrubbery, as pleasant and joyous-looking a fellow as you would meet on that side of London. You have ridden out to dine with him, and as he meets you on the lawn, there is still an hour to dinner, and a blood horse spatters round from the stables, which you are welcome to drive to the devil if you like, accompanied either by Mrs. Firkins or himself; or, if you like it better, there are Mrs. Firkins’s two ponies, and the chaise holds two and the tiger. Ten to one Mrs. Firkins is a pretty woman, and has her whims, and when you are fairly on the road, she proposes to leave the soup and champagne at home to equalize their extremes of temperature, drive to Whitehall Stairs, take boat and dine, _extempore_, at Richmond. And Firkins, to whom it will be at least twenty pounds out of pocket, claps his hands and says—“By Jove, it’s a bright thought! touch up the near pony, Mrs. Firkins.” And away you go, Firkins amusing himself the whole way from Hampstead to Richmond, imagining the consternation of his cook and butler when nobody comes to dine.

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

“Isn’t it tiresome?”

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

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

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

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

LONDON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

LONDON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us stand by the railing a moment, and see what comes by. This is the field of display for the coachman, who sits upon his sumptuous hammercloth, and takes more pride in his horses than their owner, and considers them, if not like his own honor and blood, very like his own property. Watch the delicate handling of his ribands, the affected nonchalance of his air, and see how perfectly, how admirably, how beautifully, move his blood horses, and how steadily and well follows the compact carriage! Within (it is a dark-green _calèche_, and the liveries are drab, with red edgings) sits the oriental form and bright spiritual face of a banker’s wife, the daughter of a noble race, who might have been, but was not, sacrificed in “marrying into the finance,” and who soars up into the sky of happiness, like the unconscious bird that has escaped the silent arrow of the savage, as if her destiny could not but have been thus fulfilled. Who follows? D’Israeli, alone in his cab; thoughtful, melancholy, disappointed in his political schemes, and undervaluing his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst at his heart and the satiety at his lips. The livery of his “tiger” is neglected, and he drives like a man who has to choose between running and being run against, and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for reflection. Poor D’Israeli! With a kind and generous heart, talents of the most brilliant order, an ambition which consumes his soul, and a father who expects everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact common to understandings fathoms deep below his own, and likely to drive in Hyde Park forty years hence—if he die not of the corrosion of disappointment—no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times more melancholy.[3]

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

[3] This picture of D’Israeli as _he was_, notwithstanding its erroneous prophecy, may not be uninteresting now.

LONDON.

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

It is getting late, and, as we turn down toward the Clubs, we shall meet the last and most fashionable comers to the Park. Here is a horseman,[4] surrounded with half a dozen of the first young noblemen of England. He rides a light bay horse with dark legs, whose delicate veins are like the tracery of silken threads beneath the gloss of his limbs, and whose small, animated head seems to express the very essence of speed and fire. He is the most beautiful Park horse in England; and behind follows a high-bred milk-white pony, ridden by a small, faultlessly-dressed groom, who sits the spirited and fretting creature as if he anticipated every movement before the fine hoof rose from the ground. He rides admirably, but his master is more of a study. A luxuriance of black curls escapes from the broad rim of a peculiar hat, and forms a relief to the small and sculpture-like profile of a face as perfect, by every rule of beauty, as the Greek Antinous. It would be too feminine but for the muscular neck and broad chest from which the head rises, and the indications of great personal strength in the Herculean shoulders. His loose coat would disguise the proportions of a less admirable figure; but, _au reste_, his dress is without fold or wrinkle and no _figurante_ of the ballet ever showed finer or more skilfully developed limbs. He is one of the most daring in this country of bold riders; but modifies the stiff English school of equestrianism, with the ease and grace of that of his own country. His manner, though he is rather _Anglomane_, is in striking contrast to the grave and quiet air of his companions; and between his recognitions, right and left, to the passing promenaders, he laughs and amuses himself with the joyous and thoughtless gayety of a child. Acknowledged by all his acquaintances to possess splendid talents, this “observed of all observers” is a singular instance of a modern Sybarite—content to sacrifice time, opportunity, and the highest advantages of mind and body, to the pleasure of the moment. He seems exempt from all the usual penalties of such a career. Nothing seems to do its usual work on him—care, nor exhaustion, nor recklessness, nor the disapprobation of the heavy-handed opinion of the world. Always gay, always brilliant, ready to embark at any moment, or at any hazard, in anything that will amuse an hour, one wonders how and where such an unwonted meteor will disappear.

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

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

[4] Count D’Orsay.

ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.

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

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

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

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

“An American packet, you mean?”

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

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

“No, sir! all ‘cal_ky_lators,’ sharp as a needle!”

“Thank you,” said I; “I am a _calculator_ too!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“_Some_ people have _no_ souls,” responded the gentleman.

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

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

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

COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF EUROPE AND AMERICA.

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

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

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

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

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

The habit of regular exercise in the open air, which is found to be so salutary in England, is scarcely possible in America. It is said, and said truly, of the first, that there is no day in the year when a lady may not ride comfortably on horseback—but with us, the extremes of heat and cold, and the tempestuous character of our snows and rains, totally forbid, to a delicate person, anything like regularity in exercise. The consequence is, that the habit rarely exists, and the high and glowing health so common in England, and consequent, no doubt, upon the equable character of the climate in some measure, is with us sufficiently rare to excite remark. “Very English-looking,” is a common phrase, and means very healthy-looking. Still our people _last_—and though I should define the English climate as the one in which the human frame is in the highest condition, I should say of America, that it is the one in which you could get the most work out of it.

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

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

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

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

STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON—SHAKSPERE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this small wooden box?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHARLECOTE.

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

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

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

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

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

WARWICK CASTLE.

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

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

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

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

KENILWORTH.

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

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

“_Son’ di Firenze, signore!_”

“And where are you going?”

“_Li! al castello._”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A VISIT TO DUBLIN ABOUT THE TIME OF THE QUEEN’S MARRIAGE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Moore’s remark has been often quoted—“there is nothing like an Irish woman to take a man off his feet;” but whether this figure of speech was suggested by the little bard’s common _soubriquet_ of “Jump-up-and-kiss-me[5] Tom Moore,” or simply conveyed his idea of the bewildering character of Irish beauty, it contains, to any one who has ever travelled (or waltzed) in that country, a very just, as well as realizing description. Physically, Irish women are probably the finest race in the world—I mean, taller, better limbed and chested, larger eyed, and with more luxuriant hair, and freer action, than any other nation I have observed. The Phœnician and Spanish blood which has run hundreds of years in their veins, still kindles its dark fire in their eyes, and with the vivacity of the northern mind and the bright color of the northern skin, these southern qualities mingle in most admirable and superb harmony. The idea we form of Italian and Grecian beauty is never realized in Greece and Italy, but we find it in Ireland, heightened and exceeded. Cheeks and lips of the delicacy and bright teint of carnation, with snowy teeth, and hair and eyebrows of jet, are what we should look for on the palette of Apelles, could we recall the painter, and re-animate his far-famed models; and these varied charms, united, fall very commonly to the share of the fair Milesian of the upper classes. In other lands of dark eyes, the rareness of a fine-grained skin, so necessary to a brunette, makes beauty as rare—but whether it is the damp softness of the climate or the infusion of Saxon blood, a coarse skin is almost never seen in Ireland. I speak now only of the better-born ranks of society, for in all my travels in Ireland I did not chance to see even one peasant girl of any pretensions to good looks. From north to south, they looked, to me, coarse, ill-formed, and repulsive.

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

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

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

[5] The name of a small flower, common in Ireland.

CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT WASHINGTON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE INAUGURATION.

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

“It is a cloudy day, sir!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.

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

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

The new-comer, when asked what hotel he will drive to, thinks himself very safe if he chooses that nearest the capitol—supposing, of course, that, as Washington is purely a legislative metropolis, the most central part will naturally be near the scene of action. He is accordingly set down at Gadsby’s, and, at a price that would startle an English nobleman, he engages a pigeon-hole in the seventh heaven of that boundless caravansary. Even at Gadsby’s, however, he finds himself over half a mile from the capitol, and wonders, for two or three days, why the deuce the hotel was not built on some of the waste lots at the foot of Capitol hill, an improvement which might have saved him, in rainy weather, at least five dollars a day in hack-hire. Meantime the secretaries and foreign ministers leave their cards, and the party and dinner-giving people shower upon him the “small rain” of pink billets. He sets apart the third or fourth day to return their calls, and inquires the addresses of his friends (which they never write on their cards, because, if they did, it would be no guide,) and is told it is impossible to direct him, _but the hackney-coachmen all know_! He calls the least ferocious-looking of the most bullying and ragged set of tatterdemalions he has ever seen, and delivers himself and his visiting-list into his hands. The first thing is a straight drive two miles away from the capitol. He passes the President’s house, and getting off the smooth road, begins to drive and drag through cross lanes and open lots, laid out according to no plan that his loose ideas of geometry can comprehend, and finds his friends living in houses that want nothing of being in the country, but trees, garden, and fences. It looks as if it had rained naked brick houses upon a waste plain, and each occupant had made a street with reference to his own front door. The much-shaken and more-astonished victim consumes his morning and his temper, and has made, by dinner-time, but six out of forty calls, all imperatively due, and all scattered far and wide with the same loose and irreconcilable geography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a very simple reason why a Congress of the United States should be, as they certainly are, a much more marked body of men than the English house of commons or lords, or the chamber of peers or deputies in France. I refer to the mere means by which, in either case, they come to their honors. In England and France the lords and peers are legislators by hereditary right, and the members of the commons and deputies from the possession of extensive property or family influence, or some other cause, arguing, in most cases, no great personal talent in the individual. They are legislators, but they are devoted very often much more heartily to other pursuits—hunting or farming, racing, driving, and similar out-of-door passions common to English gentlemen and lords, or the corresponding _penchants_ of French peers and deputies. It is only the few great leaders and orators who devote themselves to politics exclusively. With us every one knows it is quite the contrary. An American politician delivers himself, body and soul, to his pursuit. He never sleeps, eats, walks, or dreams, but in subservience to his aim. He cannot afford to have another passion of any kind till he has reached the point of his ambition—and then it has become a mordent necessity from habit. The consequence is, that no man can be found in an elevated sphere in our country, who has not had occasion for more than ordinary talent to arrive there. He inherited nothing of his distinction, and has made himself. Such ordeals leave their marks, and they who have thought, and watched, and struggled, and contended with the passions of men as an American politician inevitably must, cannot well escape the traces of such work. It usually elevates the character of the face—it always strongly marks it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They showed great good nature in allowing us to look at their ornaments, tomahawks, &c. White Cloud wore a collar of bear’s claws, which marked him for a chief; and the Sioux-killer carried a great cluster of brass bells on the end of his tomahawk, of which he explained the use very energetically. It was to shake when he stood over his fallen enemy in the fight, to let the tribe know he had killed him. After another tumbler of champagne each, they rose to take their leave, and White Cloud gave us his hand, gently, with a friendly nod. We were all amused, however, with the Sioux-killer’s more characteristic adieu. He looked us in the eye like a hawk, and gave us each a grip of his iron fist, that made the blood tingle under our nails. He would be an awkward customer in a fight, or his fixed lips and keen eye very much belie him.

WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTICLES FROM THE JOURNAL,

OF WHICH THE AUTHOR WAS EDITOR,

PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK.

LETTERS FROM ENGLAND AND THE CONTINENT IN 1845–’46.