From the top of Shooter's Hill we got our first view of London--an
indistinct, architectural mass, extending all round to the horizon,
and half enveloped in a dim and lurid smoke. "That is St.
Paul's!--there is Westminster Abbey!--there is the Tower of London!"
What directions were these to follow for the first time with the eye!
From Blackheath, (seven or eight miles from the centre of London,) the
beautiful hedges disappeared, and it was one continued mass of
buildings. The houses were amazingly small, a kind of thing that would
do for an object in an imitation perspective park, but the soul of
neatness pervaded them. Trellises were nailed between the little
windows, roses quite overshadowed the low doors, a painted fence
enclosed the hand's breadth of grass-plot, and very, oh, _very_ sweet
faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the snowy and looped-up
curtains. It was all home-like and amiable. There was an
_affectionateness_ in the mere outside of every one of them.
After crossing Waterloo bridge, it was busy work for the eyes. The
brilliant shops, the dense crowds of people, the absorbed air of every
passenger, the lovely women, the cries, the flying vehicles of every
description, passing with the most dangerous speed--accustomed as I am
to large cities, it quite made me giddy. We got into a "jarvey" at the
coach-office, and in half an hour I was in comfortable quarters, with
windows looking down St. James'-street, and the most interesting leaf
of my life to turn over. "Great emotions interfere little with the
mechanical operations of life," however, and I dressed and dined,
though it was my first hour in London.
I was sitting in the little parlor alone, over a fried sole and a
mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, and pleading the crowded state
of the hotel, asked my permission to spread the other side of the
table for a clergyman. I have a kindly preference for the cloth, and
made not the slightest objection. Enter a fat man, with top-boots and
a hunting whip, rosy as Bacchus, and excessively out of breath with
mounting one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a pot of porter
and a bottle of sherry followed close on his heels. With a single
apology for the intrusion, the reverend gentleman fell to, and we ate
and drank for a while in true English silence.
"From Oxford, sir, I presume," he said at last, pushing back his
plate, with an air of satisfaction.
"No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford."
"R-e-ally! may I take a glass of wine with you, sir?"
We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I had never been in England
till the day before, but his cordiality was no colder for that. We
exchanged port and sherry, and a most amicable understanding found its
way down with the wine. Our table was near the window, and a great
crowd began to collect at the corner of St. James'-street. It was the
king's birth-day, and the people were thronging to see the nobility
come in state from the royal _levee_. The show was less splendid than
the same thing in Rome or Vienna, but it excited far more of my
admiration. Gaudiness and tinsel were exchanged for plain richness and
perfect fitness in the carriages and harness, while the horses were
incomparably finer. My friend pointed out to me the different liveries
as they turned the corner into Piccadilly, the duke of Wellington's
among others. I looked hard to see his grace; but the two pale and
beautiful faces on the back seat, carried nothing like the military
nose on the handles of the umbrellas.
The annual procession of mail coaches followed, and it was hardly less
brilliant. The drivers and guard in their bright red and gold
uniforms, the admirable horses driven so beautifully, the neat
harness, the exactness with which the room of each horse was
calculated, and the small space in which he worked, and the
compactness and contrivance of the coaches, formed altogether one of
the most interesting spectacles I have ever seen. My friend, the
clergyman, with whom I had walked out to see them pass, criticised the
different teams _con amore_, but in language which I did not always
understand. I asked him once for an explanation; but he looked rather
grave, and said something about "gammon," evidently quite sure that my
ignorance of London was a mere quiz.
We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, beyond all comparison, the
most handsome street I ever saw. The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of
Rome, the Kohlmarket of Vienna, the Rue de la Paix and Boulevards of
Paris, have each impressed me strongly with their magnificence, but
they are really nothing to Regent-street. I had merely time to get a
glance at it before dark; but for breadth and convenience, for the
elegance and variety of the buildings, though all of the same scale
and material, and for the brilliancy and expensiveness of the shops,
it seemed to me quite absurd to compare it with any thing between New
York and Constantinople--Broadway and the Hippodrome included.
It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illuminate their shops on
his majesty's birth-night, and the principal streets on our return
were in a blaze of light. The crowd was immense. None but the lower
order seemed abroad, and I cannot describe to you the effect on my
feelings on hearing my own language spoken by every man, woman and
child about me. It seemed a completely foreign country in every other
respect, different from what I had imagined, different from my own and
all that I had seen, and coming to it last, it seemed to me the
farthest off and strangest country of all--and yet the little sweep,
who went laughing through the crowd, spoke a language that I had heard
attempted in vain by thousands of educated people, and that I had
grown to consider next to unattainable by others, and almost useless
to myself. Still, it did not make me feel at home. Every thing else
about me was too new. It was like some mysterious change in my own
ears--a sudden power of comprehension, such as a man might feel who
was cured suddenly of deafness. You can scarcely enter into my
feelings till you have had the changes of French, Italian, German,
Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, and the mixtures and dialects of each, rung
upon your hearing almost exclusively, as I have for years. I wandered
about as if I were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream.
A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to lady Blessington,
and with a strong curiosity to see this celebrated lady, I called on
her the second day after my arrival in London. It was "deep i' the
afternoon," but I had not yet learned the full meaning of "town
hours."--"Her ladyship had not come down to breakfast." I gave the
letter and my address to the powdered footman, and had scarce reached
home when a note arrived inviting me to call the same evening at ten.
In a long library lined alternately with splendidly-bound books and
mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room, opening
upon Hyde Park, I found lady Blessington alone. The picture to my eye,
as the door opened, was a very lovely one. A woman of remarkable
beauty half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a
magnificent lamp, suspended from the centre of the arched ceiling;
sofas, couches, ottomans and busts arranged in rather a crowded
sumptuousness through the room; enamel tables, covered with expensive
and elegant trifles in every corner, and a delicate white hand
relieved on the back of a book, to which the eye was attracted by the
blaze of its diamond rings. As the servant mentioned my name, she rose
and gave me her hand very cordially, and a gentleman entering
immediately after, she presented me to her son-in-law, Count D'Orsay,
the well-known Pelham of London, and certainly the most splendid
specimen of a man and a well-dressed one that I had ever seen. Tea was
brought in immediately, and conversation went swimmingly on.
Her ladyship's inquiries were principally about America, of which,
from long absence, I knew very little.--She was extremely curious to
know the degrees of reputation the present popular authors of England
enjoy among us, particularly Bulwer, Galt, and D'Israeli, (the author
of Vivian Grey.) "If you will come to-morrow night," she said, "you
will see Bulwer. I am delighted that he is popular in America. He is
envied and abused by all the literary men of London, for nothing, I
believe, except that he gets five hundred pounds for his books and
they fifty, and knowing this, he chooses to assume a pride, (some
people call it puppyism,) which is only the armor of a sensitive mind,
afraid of a wound. He is to his friends the most frank and gay
creature in the world, and open to boyishness with those who he thinks
understand and value him. He has a brother, Henry, who is as clever as
himself in a different vein, and is just now publishing a book on the
present state of France. Bulwer's wife, you know, is one of the most
beautiful women in London, and his house is the resort of both fashion
and talent. He is just now hard at work on a new book, the subject of
which is the last days of Pompeii. The hero is a Roman dandy, who
wastes himself in luxury, till this great catastrophe rouses him and
developes a character of the noblest capabilities.--Is Galt much
liked?"
I answered to the best of my knowledge that he was not. His life of
Byron was a stab at the dead body of the noble poet, which, for one, I
never could forgive, and his books were clever, but vulgar. He was
evidently not a gentleman in his mind. This was the opinion I had
formed in America, and I had never heard another.
"I am sorry for it," said Lady B., "for he is the dearest and best old
man in the world. I know him well.--He is just on the verge of the
grave, but comes to see me now and then, and if you had known how
shockingly Byron treated him, you would only wonder at his sparing his
memory so much."
"_Nil mortuis nisi bonum_," I thought, would have been a better
course. If he had reason to dislike him, he had better not have
written since he was dead.
"Perhaps--perhaps. But Galt has been all his life miserably poor, and
lived by his books. That must be his apology. Do you know the
D'Israeli in America?"
I assured her ladyship that the "Curiosities of Literature," by the
father, and "Vivian Grey and Contarini Fleming," by the son, were
universally known.
"I am pleased at that, too, for I like them both. D'Israeli the elder
came here with his son the other night.--It would have delighted you
to see the old man's pride in him. He is very fond of him, and as he
was going away, he patted him on the head, and said to me 'take care
of him, lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but he
wants ballast. I am glad he has the honor to know you, for you will
check him sometimes when I am away!' D'Israeli, the elder, lives in
the country about twenty miles from town, and seldom comes up to
London. He is a very plain old man in his manners, as plain as his son
is the reverse. D'Israeli, the younger, is quite his own character of
Vivian Grey, crowded with talent, but very _soigne_ of his curls, and
a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reserve about him, however, and he is
the only _joyous_ dandy I ever saw."
I asked if the account I had seen in some American paper of a literary
celebration at Canandaigua, and the engraving of her ladyship's name
with some others upon a rock, was not a quiz.
"Oh, by no means. I was equally flattered and amused by the whole
affair. I have a great idea of taking a trip to America to see it.
Then the letter, commencing 'Most charming countess--for charming you
must be since you have written the conversations of Lord Byron'--oh,
it was quite delightful. I have shown it to every body. By the way, I
receive a great many letters from America, from people I never heard
of, written in the most extraordinary style of compliment, apparently
in perfectly good faith. I hardly know what to make of them."
I accounted for it by the perfect seclusion in which great numbers of
cultivated people live in our country, who, having neither intrigue,
nor fashion, nor twenty other things to occupy their minds as in
England, depend entirely upon books, and consider an author who has
given them pleasure as a friend. America, I said, has probably more
literary enthusiasts than any country in the world; and there are
thousands of romantic minds in the interior of New England, who know
perfectly every writer this side the water, and hold them all in
affectionate veneration, scarcely conceivable by a sophisticated
European. If it were not for such readers, literature would be the
most thankless of vocations. I, for one, would never write another
line.
"And do you think these are the people who write to me? If I could
think so, I should be exceedingly happy. People in England are refined
down to such heartlessness--criticism, private and public, is so
interested and so cold, that it is really delightful to know there is
a more generous tribunal. Indeed I think all our authors now are
beginning to write for America. We think already a great deal of your
praise or censure."