What memories that week in Salisbury and the excursions from it have

left in my mind's picture gallery! The spire of the great cathedral had

been with me as a frequent presence during the last fifty years of my

life, and this second visit has deepened every line of the impression,

as Old Mortality refreshed the inscriptions on the tombstones of the

Covenanters. I find that all these pictures which I have brought home

with me to look at, with

"that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,"

are becoming clearer and brighter as the excitement of overcrowded days

and weeks gradually calms down. I can _be_ in those places where I

passed days and nights, and became habituated to the sight of the

cathedral, or of the Church of the Holy Trinity, at morning, at noon, at

evening, whenever I turned my eyes in its direction. I often close my

eyelids, and startle my household by saying, "Now I am in Salisbury," or

"Now I am in Stratford." It is a blessed thing to be able, in the

twilight of years, to illuminate the soul with such visions. The

Charles, which flows beneath my windows, which I look upon between the

words of the sentence I am now writing, only turning my head as I sit at

my table,--the Charles is hardly more real to me than Shakespeare's

Avon, since I floated on its still waters, or strayed along its banks

and saw the cows reflected in the smooth expanse, their legs upward, as

if they were walking the skies as the flies walk the ceiling. Salisbury

Cathedral stands as substantial in my thought as our own King's Chapel,

since I slumbered by its side, and arose in the morning to find it still

there, and not one of those unsubstantial fabrics built by the architect

of dreams.

On Thursday, the 22d of July, we left Salisbury for Brighton, where we

were to be guests at Arnold House, the residence of our kind host. Here

we passed another delightful week, with everything around us to

contribute to our quiet comfort and happiness. The most thoughtful of

entertainers, a house filled with choice works of art, fine paintings,

and wonderful pottery, pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and

then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the number, rest and peace in a

magnificent city built for enjoyment,--what more could we have asked to

make our visit memorable? Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate

in the intervals of "the season." This was not the time of Brighton's

influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very

large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops are

well supplied; the salt breeze comes in fresh and wholesome, and the

noble esplanade is lively with promenaders and Bath chairs, some of them

occupied by people evidently ill or presumably lame, some, I suspect,

employed by healthy invalids who are too lazy to walk. I took one

myself, drawn by an old man, to see how I liked it, and found it very

convenient, but I was tempted to ask him to change places and let me

drag him.

With the aid of the guide-book I could describe the wonders of the

pavilion and the various changes which have come over the great

watering-place. The grand walks, the two piers, the aquarium, and all

the great sights which are shown to strangers deserve full attention

from the tourist who writes for other travellers, but none of these

things seem to me so interesting as what we saw and heard in a little

hamlet which has never, so far as I know, been vulgarized by sightseers.

We drove in an open carriage,--Mr. and Mrs. Willett, A----, and

myself,--into the country, which soon became bare, sparsely settled, a

long succession of rounded hills and hollows. These are the South Downs,

from which comes the famous mutton known all over England, not unknown

at the table of our Saturday Club and other well-spread boards. After a

drive of ten miles or more we arrived at a little "settlement," as we

Americans would call it, and drove up to the door of a modest parsonage,

where dwells the shepherd of the South Down flock of Christian

worshippers. I hope that the good clergyman, if he ever happens to see

what I am writing, will pardon me for making mention of his hidden

retreat, which he himself speaks of as "one of the remoter nooks of the

old country." Nothing I saw in England brought to my mind Goldsmith's

picture of "the man to all the country dear," and his surroundings, like

this visit. The church dates, if I remember right, from the thirteenth

century. Some of its stones show marks, as it is thought, of having

belonged to a Saxon edifice. The massive leaden font is of a very great

antiquity. In the wall of the church is a narrow opening, at which the

priest is supposed to have sat and listened to the confession of the

sinner on the outside of the building. The dead lie all around the

church, under stones bearing the dates of several centuries. One

epitaph, which the unlettered Muse must have dictated, is worth

recording. After giving the chief slumberer's name the epitaph adds,--

"Here lies on either side, the remains of each of his former wives."

Those of a third have found a resting-place close by, behind him.

It seemed to me that Mr. Bunner's young man in search of Arcady might

look for it here with as good a chance of being satisfied as anywhere I

can think of. But I suppose that men and women and especially boys,

would prove to be a good deal like the rest of the world, if one lived

here long enough to learn all about them. One thing I can safely

say,--an English man or boy never goes anywhere without his fists. I saw

a boy of ten or twelve years, whose pleasant face attracted my

attention. I said to the rector, "That is a fine-looking little fellow,

and I should think an intelligent and amiable kind of boy." "Yes," he

said, "yes; he can strike from the shoulder pretty well, too. I had to

stop him the other day, indulging in that exercise." Well, I said to

myself, we have not yet reached the heaven on earth which I was fancying

might be embosomed in this peaceful-looking hollow. Youthful angels can

hardly be in the habit of striking from the shoulder. But the well-known

phrase, belonging to the pugilist rather than to the priest, brought me

back from the ideal world into which my imagination had wandered.

Our week at Brighton was passed in a very quiet but most enjoyable way.

It could not be otherwise with such a host and hostess, always arranging

everything with reference to our well-being and in accordance with our

wishes. I became very fond of the esplanade, such a public walk as I

never saw anything to compare with. In these tranquil days, and long,

honest nights of sleep, the fatigues of what we had been through were

forgotten, the scales showed that we were becoming less ethereal every

day, and we were ready for another move.

We bade good-by to our hosts with the most grateful and the warmest

feeling towards them, after a month of delightful companionship and the

experience of a hospitality almost too generous to accept, but which

they were pleased to look upon as if we were doing them a favor.

On the 29th of July we found ourselves once more in London.

VI.

We found our old quarters all ready and awaiting us. Mrs. Mackellar's

motherly smile, Sam's civil bow, and the rosy cheeks of many-buttoned

Robert made us feel at home as soon as we crossed the threshold.

The dissolution of Parliament had brought "the season" abruptly to an

end. London was empty. There were three or four millions of people in

it, but the great houses were for the most part left without occupants

except their liveried guardians. We kept as quiet as possible, to avoid

all engagements. For now we were in London for London itself, to do

shopping, to see sights, to be our own master and mistress, and to live

as independent a life as we possibly could.

The first thing we did on the day of our arrival was to take a hansom

and drive over to Chelsea, to look at the place where Carlyle passed the

larger part of his life. The whole region about him must have been

greatly changed during his residence there, for the Thames Embankment

was constructed long after he removed to Chelsea. We had some little

difficulty in finding the place we were in search of. Cheyne (pronounced

"Chainie") Walk is a somewhat extended range of buildings. Cheyne Row is

a passage which reminded me a little of my old habitat, Montgomery

Place, now Bosworth Street. Presently our attention was drawn to a

marble medallion portrait on the corner building of an ordinary-looking

row of houses. This was the head of Carlyle, and an inscription informed

us that he lived for forty-seven years in the house No. 24 of this row

of buildings. Since Carlyle's home life has been made public, he has

appeared to us in a different aspect from the ideal one which he had

before occupied. He did not show to as much advantage under the

Boswellizing process as the dogmatist of the last century, dear old Dr.

Johnson. But he remains not the less one of the really interesting men

of his generation, a man about whom we wish to know all that we have a

right to know.

The sight of an old nest over which two or three winters have passed is

a rather saddening one. The dingy three-story brick house in which

Carlyle lived, one in a block of similar houses, was far from

attractive. It was untenanted, neglected; its windows were unwashed, a

pane of glass was broken; its threshold appeared untrodden, its whole

aspect forlorn and desolate. Yet there it stood before me, all covered

with its associations as an ivy-clad tower with its foliage. I wanted to

see its interior, but it looked as if it did not expect a tenant and

would not welcome a visitor. Was there nothing but this forbidding

house-front to make the place alive with some breathing memory? I saw

crossing the street a middle-aged woman,--a decent body, who looked as

if she might have come from the lower level of some not opulent but

respectable household. She might have some recollection of an old man

who was once her neighbor. I asked her if she remembered Mr. Carlyle.

Indeed she did, she told us. She used to see him often, in front of his

house, putting bits of bread on the railing for the birds. He did not

like to see anything wasted, she said. The merest scrap of information,

but genuine and pleasing; an instantaneous photograph only, but it makes

a pretty vignette in the volume of my reminiscences. There are many

considerable men in every generation of mankind, but not a great number

who are personally interesting,--not a great many of whom we feel that

we cannot know too much; whose foibles, even, we care to know about;

whose shortcomings we try to excuse; who are not models, but whose

special traits make them attractive. Carlyle is one of these few, and no

revelations can prevent his interesting us. He was not quite finished in

his parental existence. The bricklayer's mortar of his father's calling

stuck to his fingers through life, but only as the soil he turned with

his ploughshare clung to the fingers of Burns. We do not wish either to

have been other than what he was. Their breeding brings them to the

average level, carries them more nearly to the heart, makes them a

simpler expression of our common humanity. As we rolled in the cars by

Ecclefechan, I strained my eyes to take in every point of the landscape,

every cottage, every spire, if by any chance I could find one in that

lonely region. There was not a bridge nor a bit of masonry of any kind

that I did not eagerly scrutinize, to see if it were solid and honest

enough to have been built by Carlyle's father. Solitary enough the

country looked. I admired Mr. Emerson's devotion in seeking his friend

in his bare home among what he describes as the "desolate heathery

hills" about Craigenputtock, which were, I suppose, much like the region

through which we were passing.

It is one of the regrets of my life that I never saw or heard Carlyle.

Nature, who seems to be fond of trios, has given us three dogmatists,

all of whom greatly interested their own generation, and whose

personality, especially in the case of the first and the last of the

trio, still interests us,--Johnson, Coleridge, and Carlyle. Each was an

oracle in his way, but unfortunately oracles are fallible to their

descendants. The author of "Taxation no Tyranny" had wholesale opinions,

and pretty harsh ones, about us Americans, and did not soften them in

expression: "Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful

for anything we allow them short of hanging." We smile complacently when

we read this outburst, which Mr. Croker calls in question, but which

agrees with his saying in the presence of Miss Seward, "I am willing to

love all mankind _except an American_."

A generation or two later comes along Coleridge, with his circle of

reverential listeners. He says of Johnson that his fame rests

principally upon Boswell, and that "his _bow-wow_ manner must have

had a good deal to do with the effect produced." As to Coleridge

himself, his contemporaries hardly know how to set bounds to their

exaltation of his genius. Dibdin comes pretty near going into rhetorical

hysterics in reporting a conversation of Coleridge's to which he

listened: "The auditors seemed to be wrapt in wonder and delight, as one

observation more profound, or clothed in more forcible language, than

another fell from his tongue.... As I retired homeward I thought a

SECOND JOHNSON had visited the earth to make wise the sons of men." And

De Quincey speaks of him as "the largest and most spacious intellect,

the subtlest and most comprehensive, in my judgment, that has yet

existed amongst men." One is sometimes tempted to wish that the

superlative could be abolished, or its use allowed only to old experts.

What are men to do when they get to heaven, after having exhausted their

vocabulary of admiration on earth?

Now let us come down to Carlyle, and see what he says of Coleridge. We

need not take those conversational utterances which called down the

wrath of Mr. Swinburne, and found expression in an epigram which

violates all the proprieties of literary language. Look at the

full-length portrait in the Life of Sterling. Each oracle denies his

predecessor, each magician breaks the wand of the one who went before

him. There were Americans enough ready to swear by Carlyle until he

broke his staff in meddling with our anti-slavery conflict, and buried

it so many fathoms deep that it could never be fished out again. It is

rather singular that Johnson and Carlyle should each of them have

shipwrecked his sagacity and shown a terrible leak in his moral

sensibilities on coming in contact with American rocks and currents,

with which neither had any special occasion to concern himself, and

which both had a great deal better have steered clear of.

But here I stand once more before the home of the long-suffering,

much-laboring, loud-complaining Heraclitus of his time, whose very smile

had a grimness in it more ominous than his scowl. Poor man! Dyspeptic on

a diet of oatmeal porridge; kept wide awake by crowing cocks; drummed

out of his wits by long-continued piano-pounding; sharp of speech, I

fear, to his high-strung wife, who gave him back as good as she got! I

hope I am mistaken about their everyday relations, but again I say, poor

man!--for all his complaining must have meant real discomfort, which a

man of genius feels not less, certainly, than a common mortal.

I made a second visit to the place where he lived, but I saw nothing

more than at the first. I wanted to cross the threshold over which he

walked so often, to see the noise-proof room in which he used to write,

to look at the chimney-place down which the soot came, to sit where he

used to sit and smoke his pipe, and to conjure up his wraith to look in

once more upon his old deserted dwelling. That vision was denied me.

After visiting Chelsea we drove round through Regent's Park. I suppose

that if we use the superlative in speaking of Hyde Park, Regent's Park

will be the comparative, and Battersea Park the positive, ranking them

in the descending grades of their hierarchy. But this is my conjecture

only, and the social geography of London is a subject which only one who

has become familiarly acquainted with the place should speak of with any

confidence. A stranger coming to our city might think it made little

difference whether his travelling Boston acquaintance lived in Alpha

Avenue or in Omega Square, but he would have to learn that it is farther

from one of these places to the other, a great deal farther, than it is

from Beacon Street, Boston, to Fifth Avenue, New York.

An American finds it a little galling to be told that he must not drive

in his _numbered_ hansom or four-wheeler except in certain portions

of Hyde Park. If he is rich enough to keep his own carriage, or if he

will pay the extra price of a vehicle not vulgarized by being on the

numbered list, he may drive anywhere that his Grace or his Lordship

does, and perhaps have a mean sense of satisfaction at finding himself

in the charmed circle of exclusive "gigmanity." It is a pleasure to meet

none but well-dressed and well-mannered people, in well-appointed

equipages. In the high road of our own country, one is liable to fall in

with people and conveyances that it is far from a pleasure to meet. I

was once driving in an open carriage, with members of my family, towards

my own house in the country town where I was then living. A cart drawn

by oxen was in the road in front of us. Whenever we tried to pass, the

men in it turned obliquely across the road and prevented us, and this

was repeated again and again. I could have wished I had been driving in

Hyde Park, where clowns and boors, with their carts and oxen, do not

find admittance. Exclusiveness has its conveniences.

The next day, as I was strolling through Burlington Arcade, I saw a

figure just before me which I recognized as that of my townsman, Mr.

Abbott Lawrence. He was accompanied by his son, who had just returned

from a trip round the planet. There are three grades of recognition,

entirely distinct from each other: the meeting of two persons of

different countries who speak the same language,--an American and an

Englishman, for instance; the meeting of two Americans from different

cities, as of a Bostonian and a New Yorker or a Chicagonian; and the

meeting of two from the same city, as of two Bostonians.

The difference of these recognitions may be illustrated by supposing

certain travelling philosophical instruments, endowed with intelligence

and the power of speech, to come together in their wanderings,--let us

say in a restaurant of the Palais Royal. "Very hot," says the talking

Fahrenheit (Thermometer) from Boston, and calls for an ice, which he

plunges his bulb into and cools down. In comes an intelligent and

socially disposed English Barometer. The two travellers greet each

other, not exactly as old acquaintances, but each has heard very

frequently about the other, and their relatives have been often

associated. "We have a good deal in common," says the Barometer. "Of the

same blood, as we may say; quicksilver is thicker than water." "Yes,"

says the little Fahrenheit, "and we are both of the same mercurial

temperament." While their columns are dancing up and down with laughter

at this somewhat tepid and low-pressure pleasantry, there come in a New

York Réaumur and a Centigrade from Chicago. The Fahrenheit, which has

got warmed up to _temperate_, rises to _summer heat_, and even

a little above it. They enjoy each other's company mightily. To be sure,

their scales differ, but have they not the same freezing and the same

boiling point? To be sure, each thinks his own scale is the true

standard, and at home they might get into a contest about the matter,

but here in a strange land they do not think of disputing. Now, while

they are talking about America and their own local atmosphere and

temperature, there comes in a second Boston Fahrenheit. The two of the

same name look at each other for a moment, and rush together so eagerly

that their bulbs are endangered. How well they understand each other!

Thirty-two degrees marks the freezing point. Two hundred and twelve

marks the boiling point. They have the same scale, the same fixed

points, the same record: no wonder they prefer each other's company!

I hope that my reader has followed my illustration, and finished it off

for himself. Let me give a few practical examples. An American and an

Englishman meet in a foreign land. The Englishman has occasion to

mention his weight, which he finds has gained in the course of his

travels. "How much is it now?" asks the American. "Fourteen stone. How

much do you weigh?" "Within four pounds of two hundred." Neither of them

takes at once any clear idea of what the other weighs. The American has

never thought of his own, or his friends', or anybody's weight in

_stones_ of fourteen pounds. The Englishman has never thought of

any one's weight in _pounds_. They can calculate very easily with a

slip of paper and a pencil, but not the less is their language but half

intelligible as they speak and listen. The same thing is in a measure

true of other matters they talk about. "It is about as large a space as

the Common," says the Boston man. "It is as large as St. James's Park,"

says the Londoner. "As high as the State House," says the Bostonian, or

"as tall as Bunker Hill Monument," or "about as big as the Frog Pond,"

where the Londoner would take St. Paul's, the Nelson Column, the

Serpentine, as his standard of comparison. The difference of scale does

not stop here; it runs through a great part of the objects of thought

and conversation. An average American and an average Englishman are

talking together, and one of them speaks of the beauty of a field of

corn. They are thinking of two entirely different objects: one of a

billowy level of soft waving wheat, or rye, or barley; the other of a

rustling forest of tall, jointed stalks, tossing their plumes and

showing their silken epaulettes, as if every stem in the ordered ranks

were a soldier in full regimentals. An Englishman planted for the first

time in the middle of a well-grown field of Indian corn would feel as

much lost as the babes in the wood. Conversation between two Londoners,

two New Yorkers, two Bostonians, requires no foot-notes, which is a

great advantage in their intercourse.

To return from my digression and my illustration. I did not do a great

deal of shopping myself while in London, being contented to have it done

for me. But in the way of looking in at shop windows I did a very large

business. Certain windows attracted me by a variety in unity which

surpassed anything I have been accustomed to. Thus one window showed

every conceivable convenience that could be shaped in ivory, and nothing

else. One shop had such a display of magnificent dressing-cases that I

should have thought a whole royal family was setting out on its travels.

I see the cost of one of them is two hundred and seventy guineas.

Thirteen hundred and fifty dollars seems a good deal to pay for a

dressing-case.

On the other hand, some of the first-class tradesmen and workmen make no

show whatever. The tailor to whom I had credentials, and who proved

highly satisfactory to me, as he had proved to some of my countrymen and

to Englishmen of high estate, had only one small sign, which was placed

in one of his windows, and received his customers in a small room that

would have made a closet for one of our stylish merchant tailors. The

bootmaker to whom I went on good recommendation had hardly anything

about his premises to remind one of his calling. He came into his

studio, took my measure very carefully, and made me a pair of what we

call Congress boots, which fitted well when once on my feet, but which

it cost more trouble to get into and to get out of than I could express

my feelings about without dangerously enlarging my limited vocabulary.

Bond Street, Old and New, offered the most inviting windows, and I

indulged almost to profligacy in the prolonged inspection of their

contents. Stretching my walk along New Bond Street till I came to a

great intersecting thoroughfare, I found myself in Oxford Street. Here

the character of the shop windows changed at once. Utility and

convenience took the place of show and splendor. Here I found various

articles of use in a household, some of which were new to me. It is very

likely that I could have found most of them in our own Boston Cornhill,

but one often overlooks things at home which at once arrest his

attention when he sees them in a strange place. I saw great numbers of

illuminating contrivances, some of which pleased me by their arrangement

of reflectors.

Bryant and May's safety matches seemed to be used everywhere. I procured

some in Boston with these names on the box, but the label said they were

made in Sweden, and they diffused vapors that were enough to produce

asphyxia. I greatly admired some of Dr. Dresser's water-cans and other

contrivances, modelled more or less after the antique, but I found an

abundant assortment of them here in Boston, and I have one I obtained

here more original in design and more serviceable in daily use than any

I saw in London. I should have regarded Wolverhampton, as we glided

through it, with more interest, if I had known at that time that the

inventive Dr. Dresser had his headquarters in that busy-looking town.

One thing, at least, I learned from my London experience: better a small

city where one knows all it has to offer, than a great city where one

has no disinterested friend to direct him to the right places to find

what he wants. But of course there are some grand magazines which are

known all the world over, and which no one should leave London without

entering as a looker-on, if not as a purchaser.

There was one place I determined to visit, and one man I meant to see,

before returning. The place was a certain book-store or book-shop, and

the person was its proprietor, Mr. Bernard Quaritch. I was getting very

much pressed for time, and I allowed ten minutes only for my visit. I

never had any dealings with Mr. Quaritch, but one of my near relatives

had, and I had often received his catalogues, the scale of prices in

which had given me an impression almost of sublimity. I found Mr.

Bernard Quaritch at No. 15 Piccadilly, and introduced myself, not as one

whose name he must know, but rather as a stranger, of whom he might have

heard through my relative. The extensive literature of catalogues is

probably little known to most of my readers. I do not pretend to claim a

thorough acquaintance with it, but I know the luxury of reading good

catalogues, and such are those of Mr. Quaritch. I should like to deal

with him; for if he wants a handsome price for what he sells, he knows

its value, and does not offer the refuse of old libraries, but, on the

other hand, all that is most precious in them is pretty sure to pass

through his hands, sooner or later.

"Now, Mr. Quaritch," I said, after introducing myself, "I have ten

minutes to pass with you. You must not open a book; if you do I am lost,

for I shall have to look at every illuminated capital, from the first

leaf to the colophon." Mr. Quaritch did not open a single book, but let

me look round his establishment, and answered my questions very

courteously. It so happened that while I was there a gentleman came in

whom I had previously met,--my namesake, Mr. Holmes, the Queen's

librarian at Windsor Castle. My ten minutes passed very rapidly in

conversation with these two experts in books, the bibliopole and the

bibliothecary. No place that I visited made me feel more thoroughly that

I was in London, the great central mart of all that is most precious in

the world.

_Leave at home all your guineas, ye who enter here_, would be a

good motto to put over his door, unless you have them in plenty and can

spare them, in which case _Take all your guineas with you_ would be

a better one. For you can here get their equivalent, and more than their

equivalent, in the choicest products of the press and the finest work of

the illuminator, the illustrator, and the binder. You will be sorely

tempted. But do not be surprised when you ask the price of the volume

you may happen to fancy. You are not dealing with a _bouquiniste_

of the Quais, in Paris. You are not foraging in an old book-shop of New

York or Boston. Do not suppose that I undervalue these dealers in old and

rare volumes. Many a much-prized rarity have I obtained from Drake and

Burnham and others of my townsmen, and from Denham in New York; and

in my student years many a choice volume, sometimes even an Aldus or

an Elzevir, have I found among the trumpery spread out on the parapets

of the quays. But there is a difference between going out on the Fourth

of July with a militia musket to shoot any catbird or "chipmunk" that

turns up in a piece of woods within a few miles of our own cities, and

shooting partridges in a nobleman's preserves on the First of September.

I confess to having felt a certain awe on entering the precincts made

sacred by their precious contents. The lord and master of so many

_Editiones Principes_, the guardian of this great nursery full of

_incunabula_, did not seem to me like a simple tradesman. I felt that

I was in the presence of the literary purveyor of royal and imperial

libraries, the man before whom millionaires tremble as they calculate,

and billionaires pause and consider. I have recently received two of Mr.

Quaritch's catalogues, from which I will give my reader an extract or two,

to show him what kind of articles this prince of bibliopoles deals in.

Perhaps you would like one of those romances which turned the head of

Don Quixote. Here is a volume which will be sure to please you. It is on

one of his lesser lists, confined principally to Spanish and Portuguese

works:--

"Amadis de Gaula ... folio, gothic letter, FIRST EDITION, unique ... red

morocco super extra, _doublé_ with olive morocco, richly gilt,

tooled to an elegant Grolier design, gilt edges ... in a neat case."

A pretty present for a scholarly friend. A nice old book to carry home

for one's own library. Two hundred pounds--one thousand dollars--will

make you the happy owner of this volume.

But if you would have also on your shelves the first edition of the

"Cronica del famoso cabaluero cid Ruy Diaz Campadero," not "richly

gilt," not even bound in leather, but in "cloth boards," you will have

to pay two hundred and ten pounds to become its proprietor. After this

you will not be frightened by the thought of paying three hundred

dollars for a little quarto giving an account of the Virginia

Adventurers. You will not shrink from the idea of giving something more

than a hundred guineas for a series of Hogarth's plates. But when it

comes to Number 1001 in the May catalogue, and you see that if you would

possess a first folio Shakespeare, "untouched by the hand of any modern

renovator," you must be prepared to pay seven hundred and eighty-five

pounds, almost four thousand dollars, for the volume, it would not be

surprising if you changed color and your knees shook under you. No doubt

some brave man will be found to carry off that prize, in spite of the

golden battery which defends it, perhaps to Cincinnati, or Chicago, or

San Francisco. But do not be frightened. These Alpine heights of

extravagance climb up from the humble valley where shillings and

sixpences are all that are required to make you a purchaser.

One beauty of the Old World shops is that if a visitor comes back to the

place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a

great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit.

In driving down to the old city, to the place of business of the

Barings, I found many streets little changed. Temple Bar was gone, and

the much-abused griffin stood in its place. There was a shop close to

Temple Bar, where, in 1834, I had bought some brushes. I had no

difficulty in finding Prout's, and I could not do less than go in and

buy some more brushes. I did not ask the young man who served me how the

old shopkeeper who attended to my wants on the earlier occasion was at

this time. But I thought what a different color the locks these brushes

smooth show from those that knew their predecessors in the earlier

decade!

I ought to have made a second visit to the Tower, so tenderly spoken of

by Artemus Ward as "a sweet boon," so vividly remembered by me as the

scene of a personal encounter with one of the animals then kept in the

Tower menagerie. But the project added a stone to the floor of the

underground thoroughfare which is paved with good intentions.

St. Paul's I must and did visit. The most striking addition since I was

there is the massive monument to the Duke of Wellington. The great

temple looked rather bare and unsympathetic. Poor Dr. Johnson, sitting

in semi-nude exposure, looked to me as unhappy as our own half-naked

Washington at the national capital. The Judas of Matthew Arnold's poem

would have cast his cloak over those marble shoulders, if he had found

himself in St. Paul's, and have earned another respite. We brought away

little, I fear, except the grand effect of the dome as we looked up at

it. It gives us a greater idea of height than the sky itself, which we

have become used to looking upon.

A second visit to the National Gallery was made in company with A----.

It was the repetition of an attempt at a draught from the Cup of

Tantalus. I was glad of a sight of the Botticellis, of which I had heard

so much, and others of the more recently acquired paintings of the great

masters; of a sweeping glance at the Turners; of a look at the

well-remembered Hogarths and the memorable portraits by Sir Joshua. I

carried away a confused mass of impressions, much as the soldiers that

sack a city go off with all the precious things they can snatch up,

huddled into clothes-bags and pillow-cases. I am reminded, too, of Mr.

Galton's composite portraits; a thousand glimpses, as one passes through

the long halls lined with paintings, all blending in one not unpleasing

general effect, out of which emerges from time to time some single

distinct image.

In the same way we passed through the exhibition of paintings at the

Royal Academy. I noticed that A---- paid special attention to the

portraits of young ladies by John Sargent and by Collier, while I was

more particularly struck with the startling portrait of an ancient

personage in a full suit of wrinkles, such as Rembrandt used to bring

out with wonderful effect. Hunting in couples is curious and

instructive; the scent for this or that kind of game is sure to be very

different in the two individuals.

I made but two brief visits to the British Museum, and I can easily

instruct my reader so that he will have no difficulty, if he will follow

my teaching, in learning how not to see it. When he has a spare hour at

his disposal, let him drop in at the Museum, and wander among its books

and its various collections. He will know as much about it as the fly

that buzzes in at one window and out at another. If I were asked whether

I brought away anything from my two visits, I should say, Certainly I

did. The fly sees some things, not very intelligently, but he cannot

help seeing them. The great round reading-room, with its silent

students, impressed me very much. I looked at once for the Elgin

Marbles, but casts and photographs and engravings had made me familiar

with their chief features. I thought I knew something of the sculptures

brought from Nineveh, but I was astonished, almost awe-struck, at the

sight of those mighty images which mingled with the visions of the

Hebrew prophets. I did not marvel more at the skill and labor expended

upon them by the Assyrian artists than I did at the enterprise and

audacity which had brought them safely from the mounds under which they

were buried to the light of day and the heart of a great modern city. I

never thought that I should live to see the Birs Nimroud laid open, and

the tablets in which the history of Nebuchadnezzar was recorded spread

before me. The Empire of the Spade in the world of history was founded

at Nineveh by Layard, a great province added to it by Schliemann, and

its boundary extended by numerous explorers, some of whom are diligently

at work at the present day. I feel very grateful that many of its

revelations have been made since I have been a tenant of the travelling

residence which holds so many secrets in its recesses.

There is one lesson to be got from a visit of an hour or two to the

British Museum,--namely, the fathomless abyss of our own ignorance. One

is almost ashamed of his little paltry heartbeats in the presence of the

rushing and roaring torrent of Niagara. So if he has published a little

book or two, collected a few fossils, or coins, or vases, he is crushed

by the vastness of the treasures in the library and the collections of

this universe of knowledge.

I have shown how not to see the British museum; I will tell how to see

it.

Take lodgings next door to it,--in a garret, if you cannot afford

anything better,--and pass all your days at the Museum during the whole

period of your natural life. At threescore and ten you will have some

faint conception of the contents, significance, and value of this great

British institution, which is as nearly as any one spot the _noeud

vital_ of human civilization, a stab at which by the dagger of

anarchy would fitly begin the reign of chaos.

On the 3d of August, a gentleman, Mr. Wedmore, who had promised to be my

guide to certain interesting localities, called for me, and we took a

hansom for the old city. The first place we visited was the Temple, a

collection of buildings with intricate passages between them, some of

the edifices reminding me of our college dormitories. One, however, was

a most extraordinary exception,--the wonderful Temple church, or rather

the ancient part of it which is left, the round temple. We had some

trouble to get into it, but at last succeeded in finding a slip of a

girl, the daughter of the janitor, who unlocked the door for us. It

affected my imagination strangely to see this girl of a dozen years old,

or thereabouts, moving round among the monuments which had kept their

place there for some six or seven hundred years; for the church was

built in the year 1185, and the most recent of the crusaders' monuments

is said to date as far back as 1241. Their effigies have lain in this

vast city, and passed unharmed through all its convulsions. The Great

Fire must have crackled very loud in their stony ears, and they must

have shaken day and night, as the bodies of the victims of the Plague

were rattled over the pavements.

Near the Temple church, in a green spot among the buildings, a plain

stone laid flat on the turf bears these words: "Here lies Oliver

Goldsmith." I believe doubt has been thrown upon the statement that

Goldsmith was buried in that place, but, as some poet ought to have

written,

Where doubt is disenchantment

'Tis wisdom to believe.

We do not "drop a tear" so often as our Della Cruscan predecessors, but

the memory of the author of the "Vicar of Wakefield" stirred my feelings

more than a whole army of crusaders would have done. A pretty rough set

of filibusters they were, no doubt.

The whole group to which Goldsmith belonged came up before me, and as

the centre of that group the great Dr. Johnson; not the Johnson of the

"Rambler," or of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," or even of "Rasselas,"

but Boswell's Johnson, dear to all of us, the "Grand Old Man" of his

time, whose foibles we care more for than for most great men's virtues.

Fleet Street, which he loved so warmly, was close by. Bolt Court,

entered from it, where he lived for many of his last years, and where he

died, was the next place to visit. I found Fleet Street a good deal like

Washington Street as I remember it in former years. When I came to the

place pointed out as Bolt Court, I could hardly believe my eyes that so

celebrated a place of residence should be entered by so humble a

passageway. I was very sorry to find that No. 3, where he lived, was

demolished, and a new building erected in its place. In one of the other

houses in this court he is said to have labored on his dictionary. Near

by was a building of mean aspect, in which Goldsmith is said to have at

one time resided. But my kind conductor did not profess to be well

acquainted with the local antiquities of this quarter of London.

If I had a long future before me, I should like above all things to

study London with a dark lantern, so to speak, myself in deepest shadow

and all I wanted to see in clearest light. Then I should want time,

time, time. For it is a sad fact that sight-seeing as commonly done is

one of the most wearying things in the world, and takes the life out of

any but the sturdiest or the most elastic natures more efficiently than

would a reasonable amount of daily exercise on a treadmill. In my

younger days I used to find that a visit to the gallery of the Louvre

was followed by more fatigue and exhaustion than the same amount of time

spent in walking the wards of a hospital.

Another grand sight there was, not to be overlooked, namely, the

Colonial Exhibition. The popularity of this immense show was very great,

and we found ourselves, A---- and I, in the midst of a vast throng, made

up of respectable and comfortable looking people. It was not strange

that the multitude flocked to this exhibition. There was a jungle, with

its (stuffed) monsters,--tigers, serpents, elephants; there were

carvings which may well have cost a life apiece, and stuffs which none

but an empress or a millionairess would dare to look at. All the arts of

the East were there in their perfection, and some of the artificers were

at their work. We had to content ourselves with a mere look at all these

wonders. It was a pity; instead of going to these fine shows tired,

sleepy, wanting repose more than anything else, we should have come to

them fresh, in good condition, and had many days at our disposal. I

learned more in a visit to the Japanese exhibition in Boston than I

should have learned in half a dozen half-awake strolls through this

multitudinous and most imposing collection of all

"The gorgeous East with richest hand

Showers on her kings,"

and all the masterpieces of its wonder-working artisans.

One of the last visits we paid before leaving London for a week in Paris

was to the South Kensington Museum. Think of the mockery of giving one

hour to such a collection of works of art and wonders of all kinds! Why

should I consider it worth while to say that we went there at all? All

manner of objects succeeded each other in a long series of dissolving

views, so to speak, nothing or next to nothing having a chance to leave

its individual impress. In the battle for life which took place in my

memory, as it always does among the multitude of claimants for a

permanent hold, I find that two objects came out survivors of the

contest. The first is the noble cast of the column of Trajan, vast in

dimensions, crowded with history in its most striking and enduring form;

a long array of figures representing in unquestioned realism the

military aspect of a Roman army. The second case of survival is thus

described in the catalogue: "An altar or shrine of a female saint,

recently acquired from Padua, is also ascribed to the same sculptor

[Donatello]. This very valuable work of art had for many years been used

as a drinking-trough for horses. A hole has been roughly pierced in it."

I thought the figure was the most nearly perfect image of heavenly

womanhood that I had ever looked upon, and I could have gladly given my

whole hour to sitting--I could almost say kneeling--before it in silent

contemplation. I found the curator of the Museum, Mr. Soden Smith,

shared my feelings with reference to the celestial loveliness of this

figure. Which is best, to live in a country where such a work of art is

taken for a horse-trough, or in a country where the products from the

studio of a self-taught handicraftsman, equal to the shaping of a

horse-trough and not much more, are put forward as works of art?

A little time before my visit to England, before I had even thought of

it as a possibility, I had the honor of having two books dedicated to me

by two English brother physicians. One of these two gentlemen was Dr.

Walshe, of whom I shall speak hereafter; the other was Dr. J. Milner

Fothergill. The name Fothergill was familiar to me from my boyhood. My

old townsman, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, who died in 1846 at the age of

ninety-two, had a great deal to say about his relative Dr. John

Fothergill, the famous Quaker physician of the last century, of whom

Benjamin Franklin said, "I can hardly conceive that a better man ever

existed." Dr. and Mrs. Fothergill sent us some beautiful flowers a

little before we left, and when I visited him he gave me a medallion of

his celebrated kinsman.

London is a place of mysteries. Looking out of one of the windows at the

back of Dr. Fothergill's house, I saw an immense wooden blind, such as

we have on our windows in summer, but reaching from the ground as high

as the top of the neighboring houses. While admitting the air freely, it

shut the property to which it belonged completely from sight. I asked

the meaning of this extraordinary structure, and learned that it was put

up by a great nobleman, of whose subterranean palace and strange

seclusion I had before heard. Common report attributed his unwillingness

to be seen to a disfiguring malady with which he was said to be

afflicted. The story was that he was visible only to his valet. But a

lady of quality, whom I met in this country, told me she had seen him,

and observed nothing to justify it. These old countries are full of

romances and legends and _diableries_ of all sorts, in which truth

and lies are so mixed that one does not know what to believe. What

happens behind the high walls of the old cities is as much a secret as

were the doings inside the prisons of the Inquisition.

Little mistakes sometimes cause us a deal of trouble. This time it was

the presence or absence of a single letter which led us to fear that an

important package destined to America had miscarried. There were two

gentlemen unwittingly involved in the confusion. On inquiring for the

package at Messrs. Low, the publishers, Mr. Watts, to whom I thought it

had been consigned, was summoned. He knew nothing about it, had never

heard of it, was evidently utterly ignorant of us and our affairs. While

we were in trouble and uncertainty, our Boston friend, Mr. James R.

Osgood, came in. "Oh," said he, "it is Mr. Watt you want, the agent of a

Boston firm," and gave us the gentleman's address. I had confounded Mr.

Watt's name with Mr. Watts's name. "W'at's in a name?" A great deal

sometimes. I wonder if I shall be pardoned for quoting six lines from

one of my after-dinner poems of long ago:--

--One vague inflection spoils the whole with doubt,

One trivial letter ruins all, left out;

A knot can change a felon into clay,

A not will save him, spelt without the k;

The smallest word has some unguarded spot,

And danger lurks in i without a dot.

I should find it hard to account for myself during our two short stays

in London in the month of August, separated by the week we passed in

Paris. The ferment of continued over-excitement, calmed very much by our

rest in the various places I have mentioned, had not yet wholly worked

itself off. There was some of that everlasting shopping to be done.

There were photographs to be taken, a call here and there to be made, a

stray visitor now and then, a walk in the morning to get back the use of

the limbs which had been too little exercised, and a drive every

afternoon to one of the parks, or the Thames Embankment, or other

locality. After all this, an honest night's sleep served to round out

the day, in which little had been effected besides making a few

purchases, writing a few letters, reading the papers, the Boston "Weekly

Advertiser" among the rest, and making arrangements for our passage

homeward. The sights we saw were looked upon for so short a time, most

of them so very superficially, that I am almost ashamed to say that I

have been in the midst of them and brought home so little. I remind

myself of my boyish amusement of _skipping stones_,--throwing a

flat stone so that it shall only touch the water, but touch it in half a

dozen places before it comes to rest beneath the smooth surface. The

drives we took showed us a thousand objects which arrested our

attention. Every street, every bridge, every building, every monument,

every strange vehicle, every exceptional personage, was a show which

stimulated our curiosity. For we had not as yet changed our Boston eyes

for London ones, and very common sights were spectacular and dramatic to

us. I remember that one of our New England country boys exclaimed, when

he first saw a block of city dwellings, "Darn it all, who ever see

anything like that 'are? Sich a lot o' haousen all stuck together!" I

must explain that "haousen" used in my early days to be as common an

expression in speaking of houses among our country-folk as its phonetic

equivalent ever was in Saxony. I felt not unlike that country-boy.

In thinking of how much I missed seeing, I sometimes have said to

myself, Oh, if the carpet of the story in the Arabian Nights would only

take me up and carry me to London for one week,--just one short

week,--setting me down fresh from quiet, wholesome living, in my usual

good condition, and bringing me back at the end of it, what a different

account I could give of my experiences! But it is just as well as it is.

Younger eyes have studied and will study, more instructed travellers

have pictured and will picture, the great metropolis from a hundred

different points of view. No person can be said to know London. The most

that any one can claim is that he knows something of it. I am now just

going to leave it for another great capital, but in my concluding pages

I shall return to Great Britain, and give some of the general

impressions left by what I saw and heard in our mother country.

VII.

Straitened as we were for time, it was impossible to return home without

a glimpse, at least, of Paris. Two precious years of my early manhood

were spent there under the reign of Louis Philippe, king of the French,

_le Roi Citoyen_. I felt that I must look once more on the places I

knew so well,--once more before shutting myself up in the world of

recollections. It is hardly necessary to say that a lady can always find

a little shopping, and generally a good deal of it, to do in Paris. So

it was not difficult to persuade my daughter that a short visit to that

city was the next step to be taken.

We left London on the 5th of August to go _via_ Folkestone and

Boulogne. The passage across the Channel was a very smooth one, and

neither of us suffered any inconvenience. Boulogne as seen from the

landing did not show to great advantage. I fell to thinking of Brummel,

and what a satisfaction it would have been to treat him to a good

dinner, and set him talking about the days of the Regency. Boulogne was

all Brummel in my associations, just as Calais was all Sterne. I find

everywhere that it is a distinctive personality which makes me want to

linger round a spot, more than an important historical event. There is

not much worth remembering about Brummel; but his audacity, his starched

neckcloth, his assumptions and their success, make him a curious subject

for the student of human nature.

Leaving London at twenty minutes before ten in the forenoon, we arrived

in Paris at six in the afternoon. I could not say that the region of

France through which we passed was peculiarly attractive. I saw no fine

trees, no pretty cottages, like those so common in England. There was

little which an artist would be tempted to sketch, or a traveller by the

railroad would be likely to remember.

The place where we had engaged lodgings was Hôtel d'Orient, in the Rue

Daunou. The situation was convenient, very near the Place Vendome and

the Rue de la Paix. But the house was undergoing renovations which made

it as unpresentable as a moulting fowl. Scrubbing, painting of blinds,

and other perturbing processes did all they could to make it

uncomfortable. The courtyard was always sloppy, and the whole condition

of things reminded me forcibly of the state of Mr. Briggs's household

while the mason was carrying out the complex operations which began with

the application of "a little compo." (I hope all my readers remember Mr.

Briggs, whose adventures as told by the pencil of John Leech are not

unworthy of comparison with those of Mr. Pickwick as related by

Dickens.) Barring these unfortunate conditions, the hotel was

commendable, and when in order would be a desirable place of temporary

residence.

It was the dead season of Paris, and everything had the air of suspended

animation. The solitude of the Place Vendome was something oppressive; I

felt, as I trod its lonely sidewalk, as if I were wandering through

Tadmor in the Desert. We were indeed as remote, as unfriended,--I will

not say as melancholy or as slow,--as Goldsmith by the side of the lazy

Scheldt or the wandering Po. Not a soul did either of us know in that

great city. Our most intimate relations were with the people of the

hotel and with the drivers of the fiacres. These last were a singular

looking race of beings. Many of them had a dull red complexion, almost

brick color, which must have some general cause. I questioned whether

the red wine could have something to do with it. They wore glazed hats,

and drove shabby vehicles for the most part; their horses would not

compare with those of the London hansom drivers, and they themselves

were not generally inviting in aspect, though we met with no incivility

from any of them. One, I remember, was very voluble, and over-explained

everything, so that we became afraid to ask him a question. They were

fellow-creatures with whom one did not naturally enter into active

sympathy, and the principal point of interest about the fiacre and its

arrangements was whether the horse was fondest of trotting or of

walking. In one of our drives we made it a point to call upon our

Minister, Mr. McLane, but he was out of town. We did not bring a single

letter, but set off exactly as if we were on a picnic.

While A---- and her attendant went about making their purchases, I

devoted myself to the sacred and pleasing task of reviving old memories.

One of the first places I visited was the house I lived in as a student,

which in my English friend's French was designated as "Noomero sankont

sank Roo Monshure ler Pranse." I had been told that the whole region

thereabout had been transformed by the creation of a new boulevard. I

did not find it so. There was the house, the lower part turned into a

shop, but there were the windows out of which I used to look along the

Rue Vaugirard,--_au troisième_ the first year, _au second_ the

second year. Why should I go mousing about the place? What would the

shopkeeper know about M. Bertrand, my landlord of half a century ago; or

his first wife, to whose funeral I went; or his second, to whose bridal

I was bidden?

I ought next to have gone to the hospital La Pitié, where I passed much

of my time during those two years. But the people there would not know

me, and my old master's name, Louis, is but a dim legend in the wards

where he used to teach his faithful band of almost worshipping students.

Besides, I have not been among hospital beds for many a year, and my

sensibilities are almost as impressible as they were before daily habit

had rendered them comparatively callous.

How strange it is to look down on one's venerated teachers, after

climbing with the world's progress half a century above the level where

we left them! The stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days. The

microscope was never mentioned by any clinical instructor I listened to

while a medical student. _Nous avons changé tout cela_ is true of

every generation in medicine,--changed oftentimes by improvement,

sometimes by fashion or the pendulum-swing from one extreme to another.

On my way back from the hospital I used to stop at the beautiful little

church St. Etienne du Mont, and that was one of the first places to

which I drove after looking at my student-quarters. All was just as of

old. The tapers were burning about the tomb of St. Genevieve. Samson,

with the jawbone of the ass, still crouched and sweated, or looked as if

he did, under the weight of the pulpit. One might question how well the

preacher in the pulpit liked the suggestion of the figure beneath it.

The sculptured screen and gallery, the exquisite spiral stairways, the

carved figures about the organ, the tablets on the walls,--one in

particular relating the fall of two young girls from the gallery, and

their miraculous protection from injury,--all these images found their

counterpart in my memory. I did not remember how very beautiful is the

stained glass in the _charniers_, which must not be overlooked by

visitors.

It is not far from St. Etienne du Mont to the Pantheon. I cannot say

that there is any odor of sanctity about this great temple, which has

been consecrated, if I remember correctly, and, I will not say

desecrated, but secularized from time to time, according to the party

which happened to be uppermost. I confess that I did not think of it

chiefly as a sacred edifice, or as the resting-place, more or less

secure, of the "_grands hommes_" to whom it is dedicated. I was

thinking much more of Foucault's grand experiment, one of the most

sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records

of science. The reader may not happen to remember it, and will like,

perhaps, to be reminded of it. Foucault took advantage of the height of

the dome, nearly three hundred feet, and had a heavy weight suspended by

a wire from its loftiest point, forming an immense pendulum,--the

longest, I suppose, ever constructed. Now a moving body tends to keep

its original plane of movement, and so the great pendulum, being set

swinging north and south, tended to keep on in the same direction. But

the earth was moving under it, and as it rolled from west to east the

plane running through the north and south poles was every instant

changing. Thus the pendulum appeared to change its direction, and its

deviation was shown on a graduated arc, or by the marks it left in a

little heap of sand which it touched as it swung. This experiment on the

great scale has since been repeated on the small scale by the aid of

other contrivances.

My thoughts wandered back, naturally enough, to Galileo in the Cathedral

at Pisa. It was the swinging of the suspended lamp in that edifice which

set his mind working on the laws which govern the action of the

pendulum. While he was meditating on this physical problem, the priest

may have been holding forth on the dangers of meddling with matters

settled by Holy Church, who stood ready to enforce her edicts by the

logic of the rack and the fagot. An inference from the above remarks is

that what one brings from a church depends very much on what he carries

into it.

The next place to visit could be no other than the Café Procope. This

famous resort is the most ancient and the most celebrated of all the

Parisian cafés. Voltaire, the poet J. B. Rousseau, Marmontel, Sainte

Foix, Saurin, were among its frequenters in the eighteenth century. It

stands in the Rue des Fossés-Saint Germain, now Rue de l'Ancienne

Comédie. Several American students, Bostonians and Philadelphians,

myself among the number, used to breakfast at this café every morning. I

have no doubt that I met various celebrities there, but I recall only

one name which is likely to be known to most or many of my readers. A

delicate-looking man, seated at one of the tables, was pointed out to me

as Jouffroy. If I had known as much about him as I learned afterwards, I

should have looked at him with more interest. He had one of those

imaginative natures, tinged by constitutional melancholy and saddened by

ill health, which belong to a certain class of poets and sentimental

writers, of which Pascal is a good example, and Cowper another. The

world must have seemed very cruel to him. I remember that when he was a

candidate for the Assembly, one of the popular cries, as reported by the

newspapers of the time, was _A bas le poitrinaire!_ His malady soon

laid him low enough, for he died in 1842, at the age of forty-six. I

must have been very much taken up with my medical studies to have

neglected my opportunity of seeing the great statesmen, authors,

artists, orators, and men of science outside of the medical profession.

Poisson, Arago, and Jouffroy are all I can distinctly recall, among the

Frenchmen of eminence whom I had all around me.

The Café Procope has been much altered and improved, and bears an

inscription telling the date of its establishment, which was in the year

1689. I entered the cafe, which was nearly or quite empty, the usual

breakfast hour being past.

_Garçon! Une tasse de café._

If there is a river of _mneme_ as a counterpart of the river

_lethe_, my cup of coffee must have got its water from that stream

of memory. If I could borrow that eloquence of Jouffroy which made his

hearers turn pale, I might bring up before my readers a long array of

pallid ghosts, whom these walls knew well in their earthly habiliments.

Only a single one of those I met here still survives. The rest are

mostly well-nigh forgotten by all but a few friends, or remembered

chiefly in their children and grandchildren.

"How much?" I said to the garçon in his native tongue, or what I

supposed to be that language. "_Cinq sous_," was his answer. By the

laws of sentiment, I ought to have made the ignoble sum five francs, at

least. But if I had done so, the waiter would undoubtedly have thought

that I had just come from Charenton. Besides, why should I violate the

simple habits and traditions of the place, where generation after

generation of poor students and threadbare Bohemians had taken their

morning coffee and pocketed their two lumps of sugar? It was with a

feeling of virile sanity and Roman self-conquest that I paid my five

sous, with the small additional fraction which I supposed the waiter to

expect, and no more.

So I passed for the last time over the threshold of the Café Procope,

where Voltaire had matured his plays and Piron sharpened his epigrams;

where Jouffroy had battled with his doubts and fears; where, since their

time,--since my days of Parisian life,--the terrible storming youth,

afterwards renowned as Léon Michel Gambetta, had startled the quiet

guests with his noisy eloquence, till the old _habitués_ spilled

their coffee, and the red-capped students said to each other, _"Il ira

loin, ce gaillard-là!"_

But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my

early friends and companions, that came up before me in all the

freshness of their young manhood? The memory of them recalls my own

youthful days, and I need not go to Florida to bathe in the fountain of

Ponce de Leon.

I have sometimes thought that I love so well the accidents of this

temporary terrestrial residence, its endeared localities, its precious

affections, its pleasing variety of occupation, its alternations of

excited and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes nearest to the

longings of the natural man, that I might be wickedly homesick in a

far-off spiritual realm where such toys are done with. But there is a

pretty lesson which I have often meditated, taught, not this time by the

lilies of the field, but by the fruits of the garden. When, in the June

honeymoon of the seasons, the strawberry shows itself among the bridal

gifts, many of us exclaim for the hundredth time with Dr. Boteler,

"Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never

did." Nature, who is God's handmaid, does not attempt a rival berry. But

by and by a little woolly knob, which looked and saw with wonder the

strawberry reddening, and perceived the fragrance it diffused all

around, begins to fill out, and grow soft and pulpy and sweet; and at

last a glow comes to its cheek, and we say the peach is ripening. When

Nature has done with it, and delivers it to us in its perfection, we

forget all the lesser fruits which have gone before it. If the flavor of

the peach and the fragrance of the rose are not found in some fruit and

flower which grow by the side of the river of life, an earth-born spirit

might be forgiven for missing them. The strawberry and the pink are very

delightful, but we could be happy without them.

So, too, we may hope that when the fruits of our brief early season of

three or four score years have given us all they can impart for our

happiness; when "the love of little maids and berries," and all other

earthly prettinesses, shall "soar and sing," as Mr. Emerson sweetly

reminds us that they all must, we may hope that the abiding felicities

of our later life-season may far more than compensate us for all that

have taken their flight.

I looked forward with the greatest interest to revisiting the Gallery of

the Louvre, accompanied by my long-treasured recollections. I retained a

vivid remembrance of many pictures, which had been kept bright by seeing

great numbers of reproductions of them in photographs and engravings.

The first thing which struck me was that the pictures had been

rearranged in such a way that I could find nothing in the place where I

looked for it. But when I found them, they greeted me, so I fancied,

like old acquaintances. The meek-looking "Belle Jardinière" was as

lamb-like as ever; the pearly nymph of Correggio invited the stranger's

eye as frankly as of old; Titian's young man with the glove was the

calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire; the splashy Rubenses,

the pallid Guidos, the sunlit Claudes, the shadowy Poussins, the moonlit

Girardets, Géricault's terrible shipwreck of the Medusa, the exquisite

home pictures of Gerard Douw and Terburg,--all these and many more have

always been on exhibition in my ideal gallery, and I only mention them

as the first that happen to suggest themselves. The Museum of the Hôtel

Cluny is a curious receptacle of antiquities, many of which I looked at

with interest; but they made no lasting impression, and have gone into

the lumber-room of memory, from which accident may, from time to time,

drag out some few of them.

After the poor unsatisfactory towers of Westminster Abbey, the two

massive, noble, truly majestic towers of Notre Dame strike the traveller

as a crushing contrast. It is not hard to see that one of these grand

towers is somewhat larger than the other, but the difference does not

interfere with the effect of the imposing front of the cathedral.

I was much pleased to find that I could have entrance to the Sainte

Chapelle, which was used, at the time of my earlier visit, as a

storehouse of judicial archives, of which there was a vast accumulation.

With the exception of my call at the office of the American Legation, I

made but a single visit to any person in Paris. That person was M.

Pasteur. I might have carried a letter to him, for my friend Mrs.

Priestley is well acquainted with him, but I had not thought of asking

for one. So I presented myself at his headquarters, and was admitted

into a courtyard, where a multitude of his patients were gathered. They

were of various ages and of many different nationalities, every one of

them with the vague terror hanging over him or her. Yet the young people

seemed to be cheerful enough, and very much like scholars out of school.

I sent my card in to M. Pasteur, who was busily engaged in writing, with

his clerks or students about him, and presently he came out and greeted

me. I told him I was an American physician, who wished to look in his

face and take his hand,--nothing more. I looked in his face, which was

that of a thoughtful, hard-worked student, a little past the grand

climacteric,--he was born in 1822. I took his hand, which has performed

some of the most delicate and daring experiments ever ventured upon,

with results of almost incalculable benefit to human industries, and the

promise of triumph in the treatment of human disease which prophecy

would not have dared to anticipate. I will not say that I have a full

belief that hydrophobia--in some respects the most terrible of all

diseases--is to be extirpated or rendered tractable by his method of

treatment. But of his inventive originality, his unconquerable

perseverance, his devotion to the good of mankind, there can be no

question. I look upon him as one of the greatest experimenters that ever

lived, one of the truest benefactors of his race; and if I made my due

obeisance before princes, I felt far more humble in the presence of this

great explorer, to whom the God of Nature has entrusted some of her most

precious secrets.

There used to be--I can hardly think it still exists--a class of

persons who prided themselves on their disbelief in the reality of any

such distinct disease as hydrophobia. I never thought it worth while to

argue with them, for I have noticed that this disbelief is only a

special manifestation of a particular habit of mind. Its advocates will

be found, I think, most frequently among "the long-haired men and the

short-haired women." Many of them dispute the efficacy of vaccination.

Some are disciples of Hahnemann, some have full faith in the mind-cure,

some attend the séances where flowers (bought from the nearest florist)

are materialized, and some invest their money in Mrs. Howe's Bank of

Benevolence. Their tendency is to reject the truth which is generally

accepted, and to accept the improbable; if the impossible offers itself,

they deny the existence of the impossible. Argument with this class of

minds is a lever without a fulcrum.

I was glad to leave that company of--patients, still uncertain of their

fate,--hoping, yet pursued by their terror: peasants bitten by mad

wolves in Siberia; women snapped at by their sulking lap-dogs in London;

children from over the water who had been turned upon by the irritable

Skye terrier; innocent victims torn by ill-conditioned curs at the doors

of the friends they were meaning to visit,--all haunted by the same

ghastly fear, all starting from sleep in the same nightmare.

If canine rabies is a fearful subject to contemplate, there is a sadder

and deeper significance in _rabies humana_; in that awful madness

of the human race which is marked by a thirst for blood and a rage for

destruction. The remembrance of such a distemper which has attacked

mankind, especially mankind of the Parisian sub-species, came over me

very strongly when I first revisited the Place Vendôme. I should have

supposed that the last object upon which Parisians would, in their

wildest frenzy, have laid violent hands would have been the column with

the figure of Napoleon at its summit. We all know what happened in 1871.

An artist, we should have thought, would be the last person to lead the

iconoclasts in such an outrage. But M. Courbet has attained an

immortality like that of Erostratus by the part he took in pulling down

the column. It was restored in 1874. I do not question that the work of

restoration was well done, but my eyes insisted on finding a fault in

some of its lines which was probably in their own refracting media.

Fifty years before an artist helped to overthrow the monument to the

Emperor, a poet had apostrophized him in the bitterest satire since the

days of Juvenal:--

"Encor Napoléon! encor sa grande image!

Ah! que ce rude et dur guerrier

Nous a couté de sang et de pleurs et d'outrage

Pour quelques rameaux de laurier!

* * * * *

"Eh bien! dans tous ces jours d'abaissement, de peine,

Pour tous ces outrages sans nom,

Je n'ai jamais chargé qu'un être de ma haine,...

Sois maudit, O Napoléon!"

After looking at the column of the Place Vendôme and recalling these

lines of Barbier, I was ready for a visit to the tomb of Napoleon. The

poet's curse had helped me to explain the painter's frenzy against the

bronze record of his achievements and the image at its summit. But I

forgot them both as I stood under the dome of the Invalides, and looked

upon the massive receptacle which holds the dust of the imperial exile.

Two things, at least, Napoleon accomplished: he opened the way for

ability of all kinds, and he dealt the death-blow to the divine right of

kings and all the abuses which clung to that superstition. If I brought

nothing else away from my visit to his mausoleum, I left it impressed

with what a man can be when fully equipped by nature, and placed in

circumstances where his forces can have full play. "How infinite in

faculty! ... in apprehension how like a god!" Such were my reflections;

very much, I suppose, like those of the average visitor, and too

obviously having nothing to require contradiction or comment.

Paris as seen by the morning sun of three or four and twenty and Paris

in the twilight of the superfluous decade cannot be expected to look

exactly alike. I well remember my first breakfast at a Parisian café in

the spring of 1833. It was in the Place de la Bourse, on a beautiful

sunshiny morning. The coffee was nectar, the _flute_ was ambrosia,

the _brioche_ was more than good enough for the Olympians. Such an

experience could not repeat itself fifty years later. The first

restaurant at which we dined was in the Palais Royal. The place was hot

enough to cook an egg. Nothing was very excellent nor very bad; the wine

was not so good as they gave us at our hotel in London; the enchanter

had not waved his wand over our repast, as he did over my earlier one in

the Place de la Bourse, and I had not the slightest desire to pay the

garçon thrice his fee on the score of cherished associations.

We dined at our hotel on some days, at different restaurants on others.

One day we dined, and dined well, at the old Café Anglais, famous in my

earlier times for its turbot. Another day we took our dinner at a very

celebrated restaurant on the boulevard. One sauce which was served us

was a gastronomic symphony, the harmonies of which were new to me and

pleasing. But I remember little else of superior excellence. The garçon

pocketed the franc I gave him with the air of having expected a

napoleon.

Into the mysteries of a lady's shopping in Paris I would not venture to

inquire. But A---- and I strolled together through the Palais Royal in

the evening, and amused ourselves by staring at the glittering windows

without being severely tempted. Bond Street had exhausted our

susceptibility to the shop-window seduction, and the napoleons did not

burn in the pockets where the sovereigns had had time to cool.

Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges. The Pont

Neuf did not seem to me altered, though we had read in the papers that

it was in ruins or seriously injured in consequence of a great flood.

The statues had been removed from the Pont Royal, one or two new bridges

had been built, but all was natural enough, and I was tempted to look

for the old woman, at the end of the Pont des Arts, who used to sell me

a bunch of violets, for two or three sous,--such as would cost me a

quarter of a dollar in Boston. I did not see the three objects which a

popular saying alleges are always to be met on the Pont Neuf: a priest,

a soldier, and a white horse.

The weather was hot; we were tired, and did not care to go to the

theatres, if any of them were open. The pleasantest hours were those of

our afternoon drive in the Champs Elysées and the Bois de Boulogne,--or

"the Boulogne Woods," as our American tailor's wife of the old time

called the favorite place for driving. In passing the Place de la

Concorde, two objects in especial attracted my attention,--the obelisk,

which was lying, when I left it, in the great boat which brought it from

the Nile, and the statue of Strasbourg, all covered with wreaths and

flags. How like children these Parisians do act; crying "À Berlin, à

Berlin!" and when Berlin comes to Paris, and Strasbourg goes back to her

old proprietors, instead of taking it quietly, making all this parade of

patriotic symbols, the display of which belongs to victory rather than

to defeat!

I was surprised to find the trees in the Bois de Boulogne so well grown:

I had an idea that they had been largely sacrificed in the time of the

siege. Among the objects which deserve special mention are the shrieking

parrots and other birds and the yelping dogs in the grounds of the

Society of Acclimatization,--out of the range of which the visitor will

be glad to get as soon as possible. A fountain visited by newly married

couples and their friends, with a restaurant near by, where the bridal

party drink the health of the newly married pair, was an object of

curiosity. An unsteadiness of gait was obvious in some of the feasters.

At one point in the middle of the road a maenad was flinging her arms

about and shrieking as if she were just escaped from a madhouse. But the

drive in the Bois was what made Paris tolerable. There were few fine

equipages, and few distinguished-looking people in the carriages, but

there were quiet groups by the wayside, seeming happy enough; and now

and then a pretty face or a wonderful bonnet gave variety to the

somewhat _bourgeois_ character of the procession of fiacres.

[Illustration: Place de la Concorde]

I suppose I ought to form no opinion at all about the aspect of Paris,

any more than I should of an oyster in a month without an _r_ in

it. We were neither of us in the best mood for sight-seeing, and Paris

was not sitting up for company; in fact, she was "not at home."

Remembering all this, I must say that the whole appearance of the city

was dull and dreary. London out of season seemed still full of life;

Paris out of season looked vacuous and torpid. The recollection of the

sorrow, the humiliation, the shame, and the agony she had passed through

since I left her picking her way on the arm of the Citizen King, with

his old _riflard_ over her, rose before me sadly, ominously, as I

looked upon the high board fence which surrounded the ruins of the

Tuileries. I can understand the impulse which led the red caps to make a

wreck of this grand old historical building. "Pull down the nest," they

said, "and the birds will not come back." But I shudder when I think

what "the red fool-fury of the Seine" has done and is believed capable

of doing. I think nothing has so profoundly impressed me as the story of

the precautions taken to preserve the Venus of Milo from the brutal

hands of the mob. A little more violent access of fury, a little more

fiery declamation, a few more bottles of _vin bleu_, and the

Gallery of the Louvre, with all its treasures of art, compared with

which the crown jewels just sold are but pretty pebbles, the market

price of which fairly enough expresses their value,--much more, rather,

than their true value,--that noble gallery, with all its masterpieces

from the hands of Greek sculptors and Italian painters, would have been

changed in a single night into a heap of blackened stones and a pile of

smoking cinders.

I love to think that now that the people have, or at least think they

have, the power in their own hands, they will outgrow this form of

madness, which is almost entitled to the name of a Parisian endemic.

Everything looked peaceable and stupid enough during the week I passed

in Paris. But among all the fossils which Cuvier found in the Parisian

basin, nothing was more monstrous than the _poissardes_ of the old

Revolution, or the _pétroleuses_ of the recent Commune, and I fear

that the breed is not extinct. An American comes to like Paris as warmly

as he comes to love England, after living in it long enough to become

accustomed to its ways, and I, like the rest of my countrymen who

remember that France was our friend in the hour of need, who remember

all the privileges and enjoyments she has freely offered us, who feel

that as a sister republic her destinies are of the deepest interest to

us, can have no other wish than for her continued safety, order, and

prosperity.

We returned to London on the 13th of August by the same route we had

followed in going from London to Paris. Our passage was rough, as

compared to the former one, and some of the passengers were seasick. We

were both fortunate enough to escape that trial of comfort and

self-respect.

I can hardly separate the story of the following week from that of the

one before we went to Paris. We did a little more shopping and saw a few

more sights. I hope that no reader of mine would suppose that I would

leave London without seeing Madame Tussaud's exhibition. Our afternoon

drives made us familiar with many objects which I always looked upon

with pleasure. There was the obelisk, brought from Egypt at the expense

of a distinguished and successful medical practitioner, Sir Erasmus

Wilson, the eminent dermatologist and author of a manual of anatomy

which for many years was my favorite text-book. There was "The

Monument," which characterizes itself by having no prefix to its generic

name. I enjoyed looking at and driving round it, and thinking over

Pepys's lively account of the Great Fire, and speculating as to where

Pudding Lane and Pie Corner stood, and recalling Pope's lines which I

used to read at school, wondering what was the meaning of the second

one:--

"Where London's column, pointing to the skies

Like a tall bully, lifts its head and lies."

The week passed away rapidly enough, and we made ready for our

departure. It was no easy matter to get a passage home, but we had at

last settled it that we would return in the same vessel in which we had

at first engaged our passage to Liverpool, the Catalonia. But we were

fortunate enough to have found an active and efficient friend in our

townsman, Mr. Montgomery Sears, who procured staterooms for us in a much

swifter vessel, to sail on the 21st for New York, the Aurania.

Our last visitor in London was the faithful friend who had been the

first to welcome us, Lady Harcourt, in whose kind attentions I felt the

warmth of my old friendship with her admired and honored father and her

greatly beloved mother. I had recently visited their place of rest in

the Kensal Green Cemetery, recalling with tenderest emotions the many

years in which I had enjoyed their companionship.

On the 19th of August we left London for Liverpool, and on our arrival

took lodgings at the Adelphi Hotel.

The kindness with which I had been welcomed, when I first arrived at

Liverpool, had left a deep impression upon my mind. It seemed very

ungrateful to leave that noble city, which had met me in some of its

most esteemed representatives with a warm grasp of the hand even before

my foot had touched English soil, without staying to thank my new

friends, who would have it that they were old friends. But I was

entirely unfit for enjoying any company when I landed. I took care,

therefore, to allow sufficient time in Liverpool, before sailing for

home, to meet such friends, old and recent, as cared to make or renew

acquaintance with me. In the afternoon of the 20th we held a reception,

at which a hundred visitors, more or less, presented themselves, and we

had a very sociable hour or two together. The Vice-Consul, Mr. Sewall,

in the enforced absence of his principal, Mr. Russell, paid us every

attention, and was very agreeable. In the evening I was entertained at a

great banquet given by the Philomathean Society. This flourishing

institution enrolls among its members a large proportion of the most

cultivated and intelligent gentlemen of Liverpool. I enjoyed the meeting

very highly, listened to pleasant things which were said about myself,

and answered in the unpremeditated words which came to my lips and were

cordially received. I could have wished to see more of Liverpool, but I

found time only to visit the great exhibition, then open. The one class

of objects which captivated my attention was the magnificent series of

models of steamboats and other vessels. I did not look upon them with

the eye of an expert, but the great number and variety of these

beautiful miniature ships and boats excited my admiration.

On the 21st of August we went on board the Aurania. Everything was done

to make us comfortable. Many old acquaintances, friends, and family

connections were our fellow-passengers. As for myself, I passed through

the same trying experiences as those which I have recorded as

characterizing my outward passage. Our greatest trouble during the

passage was from fog. The frequency of collisions, of late years, tends

to make everybody nervous when they hear the fog-whistle shrieking. This

sound and the sight of the boats are not good for timid people.

Fortunately, no one was particularly excitable, or if so, no one

betrayed any special uneasiness.

On the evening of the 27th we had an entertainment, in which Miss

Kellogg sang and I read several poems. A very pretty sum was realized

for some charity,--I forget what,--and the affair was voted highly

successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor

through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old

rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the much-lied-about

maelstrom.

On Sunday, the 29th of August, my birthday, we arrived in New York. In

these days of birthday-books our chronology is not a matter of secret

history, in case we have been much before the public. I found a great

cake had been made ready for me, in which the number of my summers was

represented by a ring of raisins which made me feel like Methuselah. A

beautiful bouquet which had been miraculously preserved for the occasion

was for the first time displayed. It came from Dr. Beach, of Boston,

_via_ London. Such is the story, and I can only suppose that the

sweet little cherub who sits up aloft had taken special charge of it, or

it would have long ago withered.

We slept at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, which we found fresh, sweet,

bright,--it must have been recently rejuvenated, I thought. The next day

we took the train for New Haven, Springfield, and Boston, and that night

slept in our own beds, thankful to find ourselves safe at home after our

summer excursion, which had brought us so many experiences delightful to

remember, so many friendships which have made life better worth living.

In the following section I shall give some of the general impressions

which this excursion has left in my memory, and a few suggestions

derived from them.

VIII.

My reader was fairly forewarned that this narrative was to be more like

a chapter of autobiography than the record of a tourist. In the language

of philosophy, it is written from a subjective, not an objective, point

of view. It is not exactly a "Sentimental Journey," though there are

warm passages here and there which end with notes of admiration. I

remind myself now and then of certain other travellers: of Benjamin of

Tudela, going from the hospitalities of one son of Abraham to another;

of John Buncle, finding the loveliest of women under every roof that

sheltered him; sometimes, perhaps, of that tipsy rhymester whose record

of his good and bad fortunes at the hands of landlords and landladies is

enlivened by an occasional touch of humor, which makes it palatable to

coarse literary feeders. But in truth these papers have many of the

characteristics of private letters written home to friends. They

_are_ written for friends, rather than for a public which cares

nothing about the writer. I knew that there were many such whom it would

please to know where the writer went, whom he saw and what he saw, and

how he was impressed by persons and things.

If I were planning to make a tour of the United Kingdom, and could

command the service of all the wise men I count or have counted among my

friends, I would go with such a retinue summoned from the ranks of the

living and the dead as no prince ever carried with him. I would ask Mr.

Lowell to go with me among scholars, where I could be a listener; Mr.

Norton to visit the cathedrals with me; Professor Gray to be my

botanical oracle; Professor Agassiz to be always ready to answer

questions about the geological strata and their fossils; Dr. Jeffries

Wyman to point out and interpret the common objects which present

themselves to a sharp-eyed observer; and Mr. Boyd Dawkins to pilot me

among the caves and cairns. Then I should want a better pair of eyes and

a better pair of ears, and, while I was reorganizing, perhaps a quicker

apprehension and a more retentive memory; in short, a new outfit, bodily

and mental. But Nature does not care to mend old shoes; she prefers a

new pair, and a young person to stand in them.

What a great book one could make, with such aids, and how many would

fling it down, and take up anything in preference, provided only that it

were short enough; even this slight record, for want of something

shorter!

Not only did I feel sure that many friends would like to read our

itinerary, but another motive prompted me to tell the simple story of

our travels. I could not receive such kindness, so great evidences of

friendly regard, without a strong desire, amounting to a positive

necessity, for the expression of my grateful sense of all that had been

done for us. Individually, I felt it, of course, as a most pleasing

experience. But I believed it to have a more important significance as

an illustration of the cordial feeling existing between England and

America. I know that many of my countrymen felt the attentions paid to

me as if they themselves shared them with me. I have lived through many

strata of feeling in America towards England. My parents, full-blooded

Americans, were both born subjects of King George III. Both learned in

their early years to look upon Britons as the enemies of their country.

A good deal of the old hostility lingered through my boyhood, and this

was largely intensified by the war of 1812. After nearly half a century

this feeling had in great measure subsided, when the War of Secession

called forth expressions of sympathy with the slaveholding States which

surprised, shocked, and deeply wounded the lovers of liberty and of

England in the Northern States. A new generation is outgrowing that

alienation. More and more the older and younger nations are getting to

be proud and really fond of each other. There is no shorter road to a

mother's heart than to speak pleasantly to her child, and caress it, and

call it pretty names. No matter whether the child is something

remarkable or not, it is _her_ child, and that is enough. It may be

made too much of, but that is not its mother's fault. If I could believe

that every attention paid me was due simply to my being an American, I

should feel honored and happy in being one of the humbler media through

which the good-will of a great and generous country reached the heart of

a far-off people not always in friendly relations with her.

I have named many of the friends who did everything to make our stay in

England and Scotland agreeable. The unforeseen shortening of my visit

must account for many disappointments to myself, and some, it may be, to

others.

First in the list of lost opportunities was that of making my bow to the

Queen. I had the honor of receiving a card with the invitation to meet

Her Majesty at a garden-party, but we were travelling when it was sent,

and it arrived too late.

I was very sorry not to meet Mr. Ruskin, to whom Mr. Norton had given me

a note of introduction. At the time when we were hoping to see him it

was thought that he was too ill to receive visitors, but he has since

written me that he regretted we did not carry out our intention. I

lamented my being too late to see once more two gentlemen from whom I

should have been sure of a kind welcome,--Lord Houghton and Dean

Stanley, both of whom I had met in Boston. Even if I had stayed out the

whole time I had intended to remain abroad, I should undoubtedly have

failed to see many persons and many places that I must always feel sorry

for having missed. But as it is, I will not try to count all that I

lost; let me rather be thankful that I met so many friends whom it was a

pleasure to know personally, and saw so much that it is a pleasure to

remember.

I find that many of the places I most wish to see are those associated

with the memory of some individual, generally one of the generations

more or less in advance of my own. One of the first places I should go

to, in a leisurely tour, would be Selborne. Gilbert White was not a

poet, neither was he a great systematic naturalist. But he used his eyes

on the world about him; he found occupation and happiness in his daily

walks, and won as large a measure of immortality within the confines of

his little village as he could have gained in exploring the sources of

the Nile. I should make a solemn pilgrimage to the little town of Eyam,

in Derbyshire, where the Reverend Mr. Mompesson, the hero of the plague

of 1665, and his wife, its heroine and its victim, lie buried. I should

like to follow the traces of Cowper at Olney and of Bunyan at Elstow. I

found an intense interest in the Reverend Mr. Alger's account of his

visit to the Vale of Llangollen, where Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss

Ponsonby passed their peaceful days in long, uninterrupted friendship.

Of course the haunts of Burns, the home of Scott, the whole region made

sacred by Wordsworth and the group to which he belongs would be so many

shrines to which I should make pilgrimages.

I own, also, to having something of the melodramatic taste so notable in

Victor Hugo. I admired the noble façade of Wells cathedral and the grand

old episcopal palace, but I begged the bishop to show me the place where

his predecessor, Bishop Kidder, and his wife, were killed by the falling

chimney in the "Great Storm."--I wanted to go to Devizes, and see the

monument in the market-place, where Ruth Pierce was struck dead with a

lie in her mouth,--about all which I had read in early boyhood. I

contented myself with a photograph of it which my friend, Mr. Willett,

went to Devizes and bought for me.

There are twenty different Englands, every one of which it would be a

delight to visit, and I should hardly know with which of them to begin.

The few remarks I have to make on what I saw and heard have nothing

beyond the value of first impressions; but as I have already said, if

these are simply given, without pretending to be anything more, they are

not worthless. At least they can do little harm, and may sometimes amuse

a reader whom they fail to instruct. But we must all beware of hasty

conclusions. If a foreigner of limited intelligence were whirled through

England on the railways, he would naturally come to the conclusion that

the chief product of that country is _mustard_, and that its most

celebrated people are Mr. Keen and Mr. Colman, whose great advertising

boards, yellow letters on a black ground, and black letters on a yellow

ground, stare the traveller in the face at every station.

Of the climate, as I knew it in May and the summer months, I will only

say that if I had any illusions about May and June in England, my

fireplace would have been ample evidence that I was entirely

disenchanted. The Derby day, the 26th of May, was most chilly and

uncomfortable; at the garden-party at Kensington Palace, on the 4th of

June, it was cold enough to make hot drinks and warm wraps a comfort, if

not a necessity. I was thankful to have passed through these two ordeals

without ill consequences. Drizzly, or damp, or cold, cloudy days were

the rule rather than the exception, while we were in London. We had some

few hot days, especially at Stratford, in the early part of July. In

London an umbrella is as often carried as a cane; in Paris _"un homme

à para-pluie"_ is, or used to be, supposed to carry that useful

article because he does not keep and cannot hire a carriage of some

sort. He may therefore be safely considered a person, and not a

personage.

The soil of England does not seem to be worn out, to judge by the

wonderful verdure and the luxuriance of vegetation. It contains a great

museum of geological specimens, and a series of historical strata which

are among the most instructive of human records. I do not pretend to

much knowledge of geology. The most interesting geological objects in

our New England that I can think of are the great boulders and the

scratched and smoothed surface of the rocks; the fossil footprints in

the valley of the Connecticut; the trilobites found at Quincy. But the

readers of Hugh Miller remember what a variety of fossils he found in

the stratified rocks of his little island, and the museums are full of

just such objects. When it comes to underground historical relics, the

poverty of New England as compared with the wealth of Old England is

very striking. Stratum after stratum carries the explorer through the

relics of successive invaders. After passing through the characteristic

traces of different peoples, he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below

this the weapons and ornaments of a tribe of ancient Britons. One cannot

strike a spade into the earth, in Great Britain, without a fair chance

of some surprise in the form of a Saxon coin, or a Celtic implement, or

a Roman fibula. Nobody expects any such pleasing surprise in a New

England field. One must be content with an Indian arrowhead or two, now

and then a pestle and mortar, or a stone pipe. A top dressing of

antiquity is all he can look for. The soil is not humanized enough to be

interesting; whereas in England so much of it has been trodden by human

feet, built on in the form of human habitations, nay, has been itself a

part of preceding generations of human beings, that it is in a kind of

dumb sympathy with those who tread its turf. Perhaps it is not literally

true that

One half her soil has walked the rest

In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages;

but so many of all these lie within it that the whole mother island is a

_campo santo_ to all who can claim the same blood as that which

runs in the veins of her unweaned children.

The flora and fauna of a country, as seen from railroad trains and

carriages, are not likely to be very accurately or exhaustively studied.

I spoke of the trees I noticed between Chester and London somewhat

slightingly. But I did not form any hasty opinions from what happened to

catch my eye. Afterwards, in the oaks and elms of Windsor Park, in the

elms of Cambridge and Oxford and Salisbury, in the lindens of Stratford,

in the various noble trees, including the cedar of Lebanon, in which

Tennyson very justly felt a pride as their owner, I saw enough to make

me glad that I had not uttered any rash generalizations on the strength

of my first glance. The most interesting comparison I made was between

the New England and the Old England elms. It is not necessary to cross

the ocean to do this, as we have both varieties growing side by side in

our parks,--on Boston Common, for instance. It is wonderful to note how

people will lie about big trees. There must be as many as a dozen trees,

each of which calls itself the "largest elm in New England." In my

younger days, when I never travelled without a measuring-tape in my

pocket, it amused me to see how meek one of the great swaggering elms

would look when it saw the fatal measure begin to unreel itself. It

seemed to me that the leaves actually trembled as the inexorable band

encircled the trunk in _the smallest place it could find_, which is

the only safe rule. The English elm (_Ulmus campestris_) as we see

it in Boston comes out a little earlier perhaps, than our own, but the

difference is slight. It holds its leaves long after our elms are bare.

It grows upward, with abundant dark foliage, while ours spreads,

sometimes a hundred and twenty feet, and often droops like a weeping

willow. The English elm looks like a much more robust tree than ours,

yet they tell me it is very fragile, and that its limbs are constantly

breaking off in high winds, just as happens with our native elms. Ours

is not a very long-lived tree; between two and three hundred years is, I

think, the longest life that can be hoped for it. Since I have heard of

the fragility of the English elm, which is the fatal fault of our own, I

have questioned whether it can claim a greater longevity than ours.

There is a hint of a typical difference in the American and the

Englishman which I have long recognized in the two elms as compared to

each other. It may be fanciful, but I have thought that the compactness

and robustness about the English elm, which are replaced by the long,

tapering limbs and willowy grace and far-spreading reach of our own,

might find a certain parallelism in the people, especially the females

of the two countries.

I saw no horse-chestnut trees equal to those I remember in Salem, and

especially to one in Rockport, which is the largest and finest I have

ever seen; no willows like those I pass in my daily drives.

On the other hand, I think I never looked upon a Lombardy poplar equal

to one I saw in Cambridge, England. This tree seems to flourish in

England much more than with us.

I do not remember any remarkable beeches, though there are some very

famous ones, especially the Burnham beeches.

No apple-trees I saw in England compare with one next my own door, and

there are many others as fine in the neighborhood.

I have spoken of the pleasure I had in seeing by the roadside primroses,

cowslips, and daisies. Dandelions, buttercups, hawkweed looked much as

ours do at home. Wild roses also grew at the roadside,--smaller and

paler, I thought, than ours.

I cannot make a chapter like the famous one on Iceland, from my own

limited observation: _There are no snakes in England._ I can say

that I found two small caterpillars on my overcoat, in coming from Lord

Tennyson's grounds. If they had stayed on his premises, they might

perhaps have developed into "purple emperors," or spread "the tiger

moth's deep damasked wings" before the enraptured eyes of the noble

poet. These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard,

or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few

birds,--rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain

just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I

neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret. They had

been singing at Oxford a short time before my visit to that place. The

only song I heard was that which I have mentioned, the double note of

the cuckoo.

England is the paradise of horses. They are bred, fed, trained, groomed,

housed, cared for, in a way to remind one of the Houyhnhnms, and

strikingly contrasting with the conditions of life among the wretched

classes whose existence is hardly more tolerable than that of those

_quasi_-human beings under whose name it pleased the fierce

satirist to degrade humanity. The horses that are driven in the hansoms

of London are the best I have seen in any public conveyance. I cannot

say as much of those in the four-wheelers.

Broad streets, sometimes, as in Bond Street, with narrow sidewalks;

_islands_ for refuge in the middle of many of them; deep areas;

lofty houses; high walls; plants in the windows; frequent open spaces;

policemen at near intervals, always polite in my experience,--such are

my recollections of the quarter I most frequented.

Are the English taller, stouter, lustier, ruddier, healthier, than our

New England people? If I gave my impression, I should say that they are.

Among the wealthier class, tall, athletic-looking men and stately,

well-developed women are more common, I am compelled to think, than with

us. I met in company at different times five gentlemen, each of whom

would be conspicuous in any crowd for his stature and proportions. We

could match their proportions, however, in the persons of well-known

Bostonians. To see how it was with other classes, I walked in the Strand

one Sunday, and noted carefully the men and women I met. I was surprised

to see how many of both sexes were of low stature. I counted in the

course of a few minutes' walk no less than twenty of these little

people. I set this experience against the other. Neither is convincing.

The anthropologists will settle the question of man in the Old and in

the New World before many decades have passed.

In walking the fashionable streets of London one can hardly fail to be

struck with the well-dressed look of gentlemen of all ages. The special

point in which the Londoner excels all other citizens I am conversant

with is the hat. I have not forgotten Béranger's

"_Quoique leurs chapeaux soient bien laids_

*** ***! moi, j'aime les Anglais;"

but in spite of it I believe in the English hat as the best thing of its

ugly kind. As for the Englishman's feeling with reference to it, a

foreigner might be pardoned for thinking it was his fetich, a North

American Indian for looking at it as taking the place of his own

medicine-bag. It is a common thing for the Englishman to say his prayers

into it, as he sits down in his pew. Can it be that this imparts a

religious character to the article? However this may be, the true

Londoner's hat is cared for as reverentially as a High-Church altar. Far

off its coming shines. I was always impressed by the fact that even with

us a well-bred gentleman in reduced circumstances never forgets to keep

his beaver well brushed, and I remember that long ago I spoke of the hat

as the _ultimum moriens_ of what we used to call gentility,--the

last thing to perish in the decay of a gentleman's outfit. His hat is as

sacred to an Englishman as his beard to a Mussulman.

* * * * *

In looking at the churches and the monuments which I saw in London and

elsewhere in England, certain resemblances, comparisons, parallels,

contrasts, and suggestions obtruded themselves upon my consciousness. We

have one steeple in Boston which to my eyes seems absolutely perfect:

that of the Central Church, at the corner of Newbury and Berkeley

streets. Its resemblance to the spire of Salisbury had always struck me.

On mentioning this to the late Mr. Richardson, the very distinguished

architect, he said to me that he thought it more nearly like that of the

Cathedral of Chartres. One of our best living architects agreed with me

as to its similarity to that of Salisbury. It does not copy either

exactly, but, if it had twice its actual dimensions, would compare well

with the best of the two, if one is better than the other.

Saint-Martin's-in-the-Fields made me feel as if I were in Boston. Our

Arlington Street Church copies it pretty closely, but Mr. Gilman left

out the columns. I could not admire the Nelson Column, nor that which

lends monumental distinction to the Duke of York. After Trajan's and

that of the Place Vendôme, each of which is a permanent and precious

historical record, accounting sufficiently for its existence, there is

something very unsatisfactory in these nude cylinders. That to the Duke

of York might well have the confession of the needy knife grinder as an

inscription on its base. I confess in all honesty that I vastly prefer

the monument commemorating the fire to either of them. That _has_ a

story to tell and tells it,--with a lie or two added, according to Pope,

but it tells it in language and symbol.

As for the kind of monument such as I see from my library window

standing on the summit of Bunker Hill, and have recently seen for the

first time at Washington, on a larger scale, I own that I think a

built-up obelisk a poor affair as compared with an Egyptian monolith of

the same form. It was a triumph of skill to quarry, to shape, to

transport, to cover with expressive symbols, to erect, such a stone as

that which has been transferred to the Thames Embankment, or that which

now stands in Central Park, New York. Each of its four sides is a page

of history, written so as to endure through scores of centuries. A

built-up obelisk requires very little more than brute labor. A child can

shape its model from a carrot or a parsnip, and set it up in miniature

with blocks of loaf sugar. It teaches nothing, and the stranger must go

to his guide-book to know what it is there for. I was led into many

reflections by a sight of the Washington Monument. I found that it was

almost the same thing at a mile's distance as the Bunker Hill Monument

at half a mile's distance; and unless the eye had some means of

measuring the space between itself and the stone shaft, one was about as

good as the other. A mound like that of Marathon or that at Waterloo, a

cairn, even a shaft of the most durable form and material, are fit

memorials of the place where a great battle was fought. They seem less

appropriate as monuments to individuals. I doubt the durability of these

piecemeal obelisks, and when I think of that vast inverted pendulum

vibrating in an earthquake, I am glad that I do not live in its shadow.

The Washington Monument is more than a hundred feet higher than

Salisbury steeple, but it does not look to me so high as that, because

the mind has nothing to climb by. But the forming taste of the country

revels in superlatives, and if we could only have the deepest artesian

well in the world sunk by the side of the tallest column in all

creation, the admiring, not overcritical patriot would be happier than

ever was the Athenian when he looked up at the newly erected Parthenon.

I made a few miscellaneous observations which may be worth recording.

One of these was the fact of the repetition of the types of men and

women with which I was familiar at home. Every now and then I met a new

acquaintance whom I felt that I had seen before. Presently I identified

him with his double on the other side. I had found long ago that even

among Frenchmen I often fell in with persons whose counterparts I had

known in America. I began to feel as if Nature turned out a batch of

human beings for every locality of any importance, very much as a

workman makes a set of chessmen. If I had lived a little longer in

London, I am confident that I should have met myself, as I did actually

meet so many others who were duplicates of those long known to me.

I met Mr. Galton for a few moments, but I had no long conversation with

him. If he should ask me to say how many faces I can visually recall, I

should have to own that there are very few such. The two pictures which

I have already referred to, those of Erasmus and of Dr. Johnson, come up

more distinctly before my mind's eye than almost any faces of the

living. My mental retina has, I fear, lost much of its sensitiveness.

Long and repeated exposure of an object of any kind, in a strong light,

is necessary to fix its image.

* * * * *

Among the gratifications that awaited me in England and Scotland was

that of meeting many before unseen friends with whom I had been in

correspondence. I have spoken of Mr. John Bellows. I should have been

glad to meet Mr. William Smith, the Yorkshire antiquary, who has sent me

many of his antiquarian and biographical writings and publications. I do

not think I saw Mr. David Gilmour, of Paisley, whose "Paisley Folk" and

other writings have given me great pleasure. But I did have the

satisfaction of meeting Professor Gairdner, of Glasgow, to whose

writings my attention was first called by my revered instructor, the

late Dr. James Jackson, and with whom I had occasionally corresponded. I

ought to have met Dr. Martineau. I should have visited the Reverend

Stopford Brooke, who could have told me much that I should have liked to

hear of dear friends of mine, of whom he saw a great deal in their hours

of trial. The Reverend Mr. Voysey, whose fearless rationalism can hardly

give him popularity among the conservative people I saw most of, paid me

the compliment of calling, as he had often done of sending me his

published papers. Now and then some less known correspondent would

reveal himself or herself in bodily presence. Let most authors beware of

showing themselves to those who have idealized them, and let readers not

be too anxious to see in the flesh those whom they have idealized. When

I was a boy, I read Miss Edgeworth's "L'Amie Inconnue." I have learned

to appreciate its meaning in later years by abundant experiences, and I

have often felt unwilling to substitute my real for my imaginary

presence. I will add here that I must have met a considerable number of

persons, in the crowd at our reception and elsewhere, whose names I

failed to hear, and whom I consequently did not recognize as the authors

of books I had read, or of letters I had received. The story of my

experience with the lark accounts for a good deal of what seemed like

negligence or forgetfulness, and which must be, not pardoned, but sighed

over.

I visited several of the well-known clubs, either by special invitation,

or accompanied by a member. The Athenaeum was particularly attentive,

but I was unable to avail myself of the privileges it laid freely open

before me during my stay in London. Other clubs I looked in upon were:

the Reform Club, where I had the pleasure of dining at a large party

given by the very distinguished Dr. Morell Mackenzie; the Rabelais, of

which, as I before related, I have been long a member, and which was one

of the first places where I dined; the Saville; the Savage; the St.

George's. I saw next to nothing of the proper club-life of London, but

it seemed to me that the Athenaeum must be a very desirable place of

resort to the educated Londoner, and no doubt each of the many

institutions of this kind with which London abounds has its special

attractions.

My obligations to my brethren of the medical profession are too numerous

to be mentioned in detail. Almost the first visit I paid was one to my

old friend and fellow-student in Paris, Dr. Walter Hayle Walshe. After

more than half a century's separation, two young friends, now old

friends, must not expect to find each other just the same as when they

parted. Dr. Walshe thought he should have known me; my eyes are not so

good as his, and I would not answer for them and for my memory. That he

should have dedicated his recent original and ingenious work to me,

before I had thought of visiting England, was a most gratifying

circumstance. I have mentioned the hospitalities extended to me by

various distinguished members of the medical profession, but I have not

before referred to the readiness with which, on all occasions, when

professional advice was needed, it was always given with more than

willingness, rather as if it were a pleasure to give it. I could not

have accepted such favors as I received had I not remembered that I, in

my time, had given my services freely for the benefit of those of my own

calling. If I refer to two names among many, it is for special reasons.

Dr. Wilson Fox, the distinguished and widely known practitioner, who

showed us great kindness, has since died, and this passing tribute is

due to his memory. I have before spoken of the exceptional favor we owed

to Dr. and Mrs. Priestley. It enabled us to leave London feeling that we

had tried, at least, to show our grateful sense of all the attentions

bestowed upon us. If there were any whom we overlooked, among the guests

we wished to honor, all such accidental omissions will be pardoned, I

feel sure, by those who know how great and bewildering is the pressure

of social life in London.

I was, no doubt, often more or less confused, in my perceptions, by the

large number of persons whom I met in society. I found the

dinner-parties, as Mr. Lowell told me I should, very much like the same

entertainments among my home acquaintances. I have not the gift of

silence, and I am not a bad listener, yet I brought away next to nothing

from dinner-parties where I had said and heard enough to fill out a

magazine article. After I was introduced to a lady, the conversation

frequently began somewhat in this way:--

"It is a long time since you have been in this country, I believe?"

"It is a _very_ long time: fifty years and more."

"You find great changes in London, of course, I suppose?"

"Not so great as you might think. The Tower is where I left it. The

Abbey is much as I remember it. Northumberland House with its lion is

gone, but Charing Cross is in the same old place. My attention is drawn

especially to the things which have not changed,--those which I

remember."

That stream was quickly dried up. Conversation soon found other springs.

I never knew the talk to get heated or noisy. Religion and politics

rarely came up, and never in any controversial way. The bitterest

politician I met at table was a quadruped,--a lady's dog,--who refused a

desirable morsel offered him in the name of Mr. Gladstone, but snapped

up another instantly on being told that it came from Queen Victoria. I

recall many pleasant and some delightful talks at the dinner-table; one

in particular, with the most charming woman in England. I wonder if she

remembers how very lovely and agreeable she was? Possibly she may be

able to identify herself.

People--the right kind of people--meet at a dinner-party as two ships

meet and pass each other at sea. They exchange a few signals; ask each

other's reckoning, where from, where bound; perhaps one supplies the

other with a little food or a few dainties; then they part, to see each

other no more. But one or both may remember the hour passed together all

their days, just as I recollect our brief parley with the brig

Economist, of Leith, from Sierra Leone, in mid ocean, in the spring of

1833.

I am very far from despising the science of gastronomy, but if I wished

to institute a comparison between the tables of England and America, I

could not do it without eating my way through the four seasons. I will

say that I did not think the bread from the bakers' shops was so good as

our own. It was very generally tough and hard, and even the muffins were

not always so tender and delicate as they ought to be. I got impatient

one day, and sent out for some biscuits. They brought some very

excellent ones, which we much preferred to the tough bread. They proved

to be the so-called "seafoam" biscuit from New York. The potatoes never

came on the table looking like new fallen snow, as we have them at home.

We were surprised to find both mutton and beef overdone, according to

our American taste. The French talk about the Briton's "_bifteck

saignant_," but we never saw anything cooked so as to be, as we

should say, "rare." The tart is national with the English, as the pie is

national with us. I never saw on an English table that excellent

substitute for both, called the Washington pie, in memory of him whom we

honor as first in pies, as well as in war and in the hearts of his

countrymen.

The truth is that I gave very little thought to the things set before

me, in the excitement of constantly changing agreeable companionship. I

understand perfectly the feeling of the good liver in Punch, who

suggests to the lady next him that their host has one of the best cooks

in London, and that it might therefore be well to defer all conversation

until they adjourned to the drawing-room. I preferred the conversation,

and adjourned, indefinitely, the careful appreciation of the

_menu_. I think if I could devote a year to it, I might be able to

make out a graduated scale of articles of food, taking a well-boiled

fresh egg as the unit of gastronomic value, but I leave this scientific

task to some future observer.

The most remarkable piece of European handiwork I remember was the steel

chair at Longford Castle. The most startling and frightful work of man I

ever saw or expect to see was another specimen of work in steel, said to

have been taken from one of the infernal chambers of the Spanish

Inquisition. It was a complex mechanism, which grasped the body and the

head of the heretic or other victim, and by means of many ingeniously

arranged screws and levers was capable of pressing, stretching,

piercing, rending, crushing, all the most sensitive portions of the

human body, one at a time or many at once. The famous Virgin, whose

embrace drove a hundred knives into the body of the poor wretch she took

in her arms, was an angel of mercy compared to this masterpiece of

devilish enginery.

Ingenuity is much better shown in contrivances for making our daily life

more comfortable. I was on the lookout for everything that promised to

be a convenience. I carried out two things which seemed to be new to the

Londoners: the Star Razor, which I have praised so freely, and still

find equal to all my commendations; and the mucilage pencil, which is a

very handy implement to keep on the writer's desk or table. I found a

contrivance for protecting the hand in drawing corks, which all who are

their own butlers will appreciate, and luminous match-boxes which really

shine brightly in the dark, and that after a year's usage; whereas one

professing to shine by night, which I bought in Boston, is only visible

by borrowed light. I wanted a very fine-grained hone, and inquired for

it at a hardware store, where they kept everything in their line of the

best quality. I brought away a very pretty but very small stone, for

which I paid a large price. The stone was from Arkansas, and I need not

have bought in London what would have been easily obtained at a dozen or

more stores in Boston. It was a renewal of my experience with the

seafoam biscuit. "Know thyself" and the things about thee, and "Take the

good the gods provide thee," if thou wilt only keep thine eyes open, are

two safe precepts.

Who is there of English descent among us that does not feel with Cowper,

"England, with all thy faults, I love thee still"?

Our recently naturalized fellow-citizens, of a different blood and

different religion, must not suppose that we are going to forget our

inborn love for the mother to whom we owe our being. Protestant England

and Protestant America are coming nearer and nearer to each other every

year. The interchange of the two peoples is more and more frequent, and

there are many reasons why it is likely to continue increasing.

Hawthorne says in a letter to Longfellow, "Why don't you come over,

being now a man of leisure and with nothing to keep you in America? If I

were in your position, I think I should make my home on this side of the

water,--though always with an indefinite and never-to-be-executed

intention to go back and die in my native land. America is a good land

for young people, but not for those who are past their prime. ... A man

of individuality and refinement can certainly live far more comfortably

here--provided he has the means to live at all--than in New England. Be

it owned, however, that I sometimes feel a tug at my very heart-strings

when I think of my old home and friends." This was written from

Liverpool in 1854.

We must not forget that our fathers were exiles from their dearly loved

native land, driven by causes which no longer exist. "Freedom to worship

God" is found in England as fully as in America, in our day. In placing

the Atlantic between themselves and the Old World civilizations they

made an enormous sacrifice. It is true that the wonderful advance of our

people in all the arts and accomplishments which make life agreeable has

transformed the wilderness into a home where men and women can live

comfortably, elegantly, happily, if they are of contented disposition;

and without that they can be happy nowhere. What better provision can be

made for a mortal man than such as our own Boston can afford its wealthy

children? A palace on Commonwealth Avenue or on Beacon Street; a

country-place at Framingham or Lenox; a seaside residence at Nahant,

Beverly Farms, Newport, or Bar Harbor; a pew at Trinity or King's

Chapel; a tomb at Mount Auburn or Forest Hills; with the prospect of a

memorial stained window after his lamented demise,--is not this a pretty

programme to offer a candidate for human existence?

Give him all these advantages, and he will still be longing to cross the

water, to get back to that old home of his fathers, so delightful in

itself, so infinitely desirable on account of its nearness to Paris, to

Geneva, to Rome, to all that is most interesting in Europe. The less

wealthy, less cultivated, less fastidious class of Americans are not so

much haunted by these longings. But the convenience of living in the Old

World is so great, and it is such a trial and such a risk to keep

crossing the ocean, that it seems altogether likely that a considerable

current of re-migration will gradually develop itself among our people.

Some find the climate of the other side of the Atlantic suits them

better than their own. As the New England characteristics are gradually

superseded by those of other races, other forms of belief, and other

associations, the time may come when a New Englander will feel more as

if he were among his own people in London than in one of our seaboard

cities. The vast majority of our people love their country too well and

are too proud of it to be willing to expatriate themselves. But going

back to our old home, to find ourselves among the relatives from whom we

have been separated for a few generations, is not like transferring

ourselves to a land where another language is spoken, and where there

are no ties of blood and no common religious or political traditions. I,

for one, being myself as inveterately rooted an American of the

Bostonian variety as ever saw himself mirrored in the Frog Pond, hope

that the exchanges of emigrants and re-migrants will be much more evenly

balanced by and by than at present. I hope that more Englishmen like

James Smithson will help to build up our scientific and literary

institutions. I hope that more Americans like George Peabody will call

down the blessings of the English people by noble benefactions to the

cause of charity. It was with deep feelings of pride and gratitude that

I looked upon the bust of Longfellow, holding its place among the

monuments of England's greatest and best children. I see with equal

pleasure and pride that one of our own large-hearted countrymen has

honored the memory of three English poets, Milton, and Herbert, and

Cowper, by the gift of two beautiful stained windows, and with still

ampler munificence is erecting a stately fountain in the birthplace of

Shakespeare. Such acts as these make us feel more and more the truth of

the generous sentiment which closes the ode of Washington Allston,

"America to Great Britain:" We are one!

* * * * *

I have told our story with the help of my daughter's diary, and often

aided by her recollections. Having enjoyed so much, I am desirous that

my countrymen and countrywomen should share my good fortune with me. I

hesitated at first about printing names in full, but when I remembered

that we received nothing but the most overflowing hospitality and the

most considerate kindness from all we met, I felt sure that I could not

offend by telling my readers who the friends were that made England a

second home to us. If any one of them is disturbed by such reference as

I have made to him or to her, I most sincerely apologize for the liberty

I have taken. I am far more afraid that through sheer forgetfulness I

have left unmentioned many to whom I was and still remain under

obligations.

If I were asked what I think of people's travelling after the commonly

accepted natural term of life is completed, I should say that everything

depends on constitution and habit. The old soldier says, in speaking of

crossing the Beresina, where the men had to work in the freezing stream

constructing the bridges, "Faut du tempérament pour cela!" I often

thought of this expression, in the damp and chilly weather which not

rarely makes English people wish they were in Italy. I escaped unharmed

from the windy gusts at Epsom and the nipping chill of the Kensington

garden-party; but if a score of my contemporaries had been there with

me, there would not improbably have been a funeral or two within a week.

If, however, the super-septuagenarian is used to exposures, if he is an

old sportsman or an old officer not retired from active service, he may

expect to elude the pneumonia which follows his footsteps whenever he

wanders far from his fireside. But to a person of well-advanced years

coming from a counting-room, a library, or a studio, the risk is

considerable, unless he is of hardy natural constitution; any other will

do well to remember, "Faut du tempérament pour cela!"

Suppose there to be a reasonable chance that he will come home alive,

what is the use of one's going to Europe after his senses have lost

their acuteness, and his mind no longer retains its full measure of

sensibilities and vigor? I should say that the visit to Europe under

those circumstances was much the same thing as the _petit

verre_,--the little glass of Chartreuse, or Maraschino, or Curaçoa,

or, if you will, of plain Cognac, at the end of a long banquet. One has

gone through many courses, which repose in the safe recesses of his

economy. He has swallowed his coffee, and still there is a little corner

left with its craving unappeased. Then comes the drop of liqueur,

_chasse-café_, which is the last thing the stomach has a right to

expect. It warms, it comforts, it exhales its benediction on all that

has gone before. So the trip to Europe may not do much in the way of

instructing the wearied and overloaded intelligence, but it gives it a

fillip which makes it feel young again for a little while.

Let not the too mature traveller think it will change any of his habits.

It will interrupt his routine for a while, and then he will settle down

into his former self, and be just what he was before. I brought home a

pair of shoes I had made in London; they do not fit like those I had

before I left, and I rarely wear them. It is just so with the new habits

I formed and the old ones I left behind me.

But am I not glad, for my own sake, that I went? Certainly I have every

reason to be, and I feel that the visit is likely to be a great source

of happiness for my remaining days. But there is a higher source of

satisfaction. If the kindness shown me strengthens the slenderest link

that binds us in affection to that ancestral country which is, and I

trust will always be to her descendants, "dear Mother England," that

alone justifies my record of it, and to think it is so is more than

reward enough. If, in addition, this account of our summer experiences

is a source of pleasure to many friends, and of pain to no one, as I

trust will prove to be the fact, I hope I need never regret giving to

the public the pages which are meant more especially for readers who

have a personal interest in the writer.