improved, of late years, in England. The dandies, of whom you read
in novels, have positively no existence here, or if they have, it
is not among gentlemen. I have seen a great deal of mannerism of
deportment, in the secondary classes, often to a disagreeable and
ludicrous degree, but nothing at all like the coxcombry that figures
in the descriptions of the works of fiction. The men, as a whole,
are simple, masculine in manner and mind, and highly cultivated, so
far as elegant instruction goes. They fail in the knowledge that is
practical, though with a certain set, even with this, or that which
relates to things as they are connected with the machinery of their
own power, they are familiar enough. Nearly all have travelled, and
most read four or five languages, though few speak any well but
their own. The same is true of your sex. I have hardly ever heard
the merits of a novel discussed among them, and to the continental
sentimentality they seem to be utter strangers; but it is apparent
at a glance, that they understand better things, and have had their
minds highly disciplined. Remember, unless, in specific cases, I
allude always to rules, and not to exceptions.
The English women are a little apt to strike an American as, in a
slight degree, less feminine than his own countrywomen. There is
something in the greater robustness of their _physique_ to give rise
to such a feeling, and I think they are, to a trifling extent, more
pronounced in air. While they are much more punctiliously polite,
they are scarcely as gracious. There is certainly less nature about
them, though there is more frankness of exterior. All their conduct
is rigidly regulated, and while they give you their hands in the
manner of friendship, you do not feel as much at home, as with the
American, who does not even rise to receive you, and who protects the
extremities of her fingers, as if they were not the prettiest in the
world. While the English woman would command the most respect, the
American would win most on your feelings, in a general intercourse. I
believe both to be among the best wives and mothers, that the world
contains. The English aid nature, in all things, while the Americans
too often mar it. No women do so much injustice to themselves, as the
latter; their singularly feminine exterior requiring softness and
mildness of voice and deportment, a tone that their unformed habits
have suffered to be supplanted by the rattle of hoydens and the
giggling of the nursery. I have seen many a young American, who has
reminded me of a nightingale roaring. It is a pity that they do not
seek models among the better society of their own country, instead of
the inferior sets of Europe.
LETTER XVIII.
TO RICHARD COOPER, ESQ., COOPERSTOWN, N. Y.
Mr. —— has carried his kindness so far, as to go with me on the
Thames. It had been our plan to row to Greenwich but the weather not
proving favourable, we determined to go as far as London bridge,
and return on foot through the city. We took boat, accordingly, at
Westminster stairs, and went down with the tide.
The Thames is both a pretty and an ugly stream. When full, it is a
river of respectable depth and of some width, but, at low water,
above London bridge, it is little more than a rivulet flowing
amid banks of slimy mud. The wherries in use are well adapted to
their work, in this part of the river, but lower down they are not
sufficiently protected against the waves. Accidents very frequently
happen, though probably they are not out of proportion to the number
of boats that are constantly plying in every direction. The principal
danger is of getting athwart the cables of barges and ships, when the
strength of the current is very apt to cause a wherry to fill.
As we went down with the tide, a pair of sculls answered our
purpose, for one can have oars or sculls, at pleasure. The banks of
the Thames, above Westminster bridge, are quite pretty, and above
Chelsea, where the river flows through fields, they may be said to
be even more; the villas on the shores, the windings of the current,
and the meadows, raising them almost to positive beauty. But below
Westminster bridge, little remains to be admired, until you reach the
sea. Though on a larger scale, the navigable part of the river has
a strong resemblance to the Raritan below Brunswick, being crooked,
muddy, and bounded by wet meadows. The latter has a small advantage
in scenery, however; the hills lying nearer to the stream. The
passage of the Kilns, also, has frequently reminded me of the Thames
below London.
Within the town, itself, warehouses blackened by coal-smoke,
manufactories, timber-yards, building and graving docks, and
waterman’s stairs, principally line the shores. There are no
magnificent quays, as at Paris, the shipping taking in and
discharging by means of lighters, except in the wet docks, of which,
however, there are now nearly sufficient to accommodate all the
shipping of the port that is engaged in foreign trade. The Thames
presents a very different picture to-day, from what it did when
I first entered it, in the year 1806. At that time the river was
literally so crowded as to make it a matter of great difficulty to
get a ship through the tiers. There were hundreds of galliots alone,
engaged in the trade from Holland, and this in a time of vindictive
warfare! It was the only place I knew, which gave one a vivid
impression of what is meant by a forest of masts. Most of the docks
existed, too, at that time, and they were crowded with vessels. I
asked the waterman to-day, an old man who remembered the river many
years, what he thought might be the visible difference between the
number of vessels in the port, during the year 1806 and that of 1828,
and he told me fully half. My own eye would confirm this opinion. The
trade has gone to the out-ports; particularly to Liverpool. With the
commerce of the river much of its life and peculiarities, it seems to
me, have departed. The _costumes_ have disappeared: the waterman have
a less jolly manner, and even Jack wears the bell-mouthed trowsers no
longer. These mutations are constantly going on in the world, but the
Thames left a vivid impression on my young fancy, twenty-two years
ago, and returning to it, after so long an absence, they struck me
with force, and in some degree painfully.
Although the Thames is not the Seine, nor the Arno, nor the Tiber, it
has a picturesque and imposing beauty of its own, especially between
the bridges. There is a gloomy grandeur in the affluence of the dark
objects, in the massive piles that cut the stream, in the movement,
and in the sombre edifices that line the shores. Here and there a
building remarkable in history, or of architectural pretension, is
seen, and usually the dome of St. Paul’s is floating in the haze of
the back-ground. As for the bridges themselves, they are not unsuited
to the general sombre character of the view, though I think them in
bad taste as to forms. There is an English massiveness about them
that is imposing, but they strike me as being out of proportion heavy
for the stream they span, and unnecessarily solid. The arches, with
the exception of those of Southwark, are not sufficiently elliptical
for lightness and beauty. It would have been a poetical and worthy
thought to have made the bridge at Westminster gothic. Southwark
bridge is of iron, and the open work impairs the effect of its
proportions, which are much the finest of any, but could the sides be
closed, it would be a succession of bold and noble arches. Between
Westminster Hall and the custom-house, there are now five of these
heavy piles, viz. Westminster, Waterloo, Southwark, Blackfriars,
and London. Preparations are making to rebuild the latter, and as
London has improved so much in nothing, of late years, as in its
public architecture, it is fair to suppose that the new work will be
more worthy of the capital of a great empire than its predecessor;
though, I dare say, it will not be as much extolled, since nations,
like individuals, as their minds expand become less vain of their
knowledge than they were wont to be of their ignorance. The London
bridge of my nursery tales was but an indifferent specimen of
national taste, though lauded to the skies.
We passed the Temple gardens, and one or two more belonging to
private dwellings, before we got to Blackfriars, after which no
signs of vegetation were visible. The Temple buildings are quaint
and interesting, and the gardens, as usual in this country, spots of
emerald, beautifully arranged.
We landed at London bridge, and my companion had the good nature
to point out to me the supposed site of the Boar’s Head, in East
Cheap.[3] It must have been what the cockneys call a _rum_ place, for
an heir-apparent to carouse in, and yet, Shakspeare, who wrote in
the century after that in which Henry reigned, would scarcely have
presumed to take so much liberty with royalty, in an age like his,
without being sustained by pretty well authenticated traditions, in
favour of what he was doing.
Mr. —— threaded the narrow streets of this part of the town,
like one who knew them well, kindly pointing out to me every
object of interest that we passed. I smiled as we went along the
well-remembered thoroughfares, for it was not possible to avoid
comparing the cultivated, celebrated, and refined man who gave
himself this trouble, with an individual who had first introduced me,
twenty-two years earlier, into the very same streets.
You must be sufficiently acquainted with family events to know that
I was once in the navy. At that time, it was considered creditable
as well as advantageous to the young naval aspirant, to show his
mettle by going a voyage or two in a merchant vessel, as a common
mariner, before he was placed on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war.
This was my course, and I had twice visited London, in the capacity
of a young tar, before I was eighteen, besides making several other
voyages. The first time I came to London, it was fresh from college,
a lad of about seventeen. I had then been long enough at sea to get
a nautical air, and of course was confounded with my shipmates of
the fore-castle. The oldest custom-house officer put on board the
ship had been a gentleman’s domestic, and he was full of the lore of
the servants’ hall. He soon singled me out, and I was much edified,
for a week, with his second-hand anecdotes of great people, and the
marvels of the West-end. The first Sunday after our arrival in dock,
he proposed giving me ocular proofs of the truth of his accounts,
and we sallied forth in company, he as Minerva, and I as Telemachus.
We passed over much of the ground now passed over under the better
guidance of Mr. —— and it was amusing to me to note the difference
in the tastes and manner of my two cicerones. When we approached
the monument, the ex-valet stopped, and with an important manner
inquired if I had ever heard of the great fire in London. I had,
luckily, for it singularly raised me in his estimation. With due
formalities, I was then introduced to the place where it had broken
out, and to the monument. “That is what we call the monument,” said
Mr. ——, in his quiet way, glancing his eye at it, as he turned away
to show me the new Boar’s Head. “This is the house of my Lord Mayor,
and that is the coach of one of the sheriffs,” said Mr. Swinburne,
for so was the custom-house officer named. “Wren has been much
praised and much censured for this edifice,” observed Mr. ——, as we
passed beneath the massive walls. I was led by the ex-valet down a
narrow street into a quaint, old, gothic, edifice, where, in a large
hall, I was confronted with carved monstrosities in wood, which I
was told with much chuckling were Gog and Magog. “That is a quaint
and rather remarkable building,” said the poet, as we passed the
head of the same street; “it is Guildhall; you may know that it gets
its name, from being used by the guilds, or corporated companies
of the city.” “This is Bow-church, and those are the bells that
Whittington heard, as he was quitting Lunnun,” observed the oracular
Mr. Swinburne—“_You_ were born far enough from this place, to escape
the imputation of cockneyism,” remarked the poet, as we trudged
along. “There, that is St. Paul’s!” cried Mr. Swinburne, with an
awful emphasis, as if he expected me to fall down and worship it.
“It was a great work to be executed by a single architect,” the poet
simply said, “and it has many noble points about it; I think it
has, at least, the merit of simplicity.” He was right enough, as to
externals, but it wants unity of design, within.
In this way, then, I went along, with my present companion,
irresistibly tempted to compare his quiet, unpretending manner, with
the brimful importance, and strutting ignorance of the guardian of
the revenue. One of the contrasts was so droll that I have not yet
forgotten it, though it is unconnected with any of the historical
monuments. Mr. Swinburne bristled close up to me, when we had got
nearer to the court end, and putting his hand to his mouth, as we
passed a quiet old gentleman, he whispered ominously, “An earl!”—“Do
you see that person on the opposite side of the street,” said the
poet, within fifty yards of the same spot—“it is Lord ——, known as
the husband of the handsomest woman in England, and for nothing
else.” I remember to have greatly scandalized Mr. Swinburne, by one
of my antics. “Did you ever hear of such a man as John Horne Tooke,”
he inquired. “Certainly; what of him?” “Why that is he who has just
passed—the fellow who looks like a half and half parson.” I turned
in my tracks, incontinently, and gave chase, for, at that early age
I was not insensible to the pleasure of looking at celebrated men,
and I had been taught to regard Horne Tooke as a writer who had got
the better of Junius. Favored by the jacket and trousers I passed
several times round “the chace,” and I believe at length attracted
his attention, by my manœuvres. He was an austere looking man, but I
fancied he was not displeased at such evident admiration. As for Mr.
Swinburne, he applied some very caustic epithets to my folly, but I
succeeded in mollifying him by double doses of admiration for his
cockney wonders.
Some of the scenes that I had witnessed, in my first visits to
London, returned to my mind so forcibly to-day, that it appeared as
if I had gone back to boyhood and the days of fun. We had in the ship
a gigantic fellow from Kennebunk, of the name of Stephen Stimpson.
He had been impressed into the British navy, and when he joined us,
had just been discharged from a frigate called the Boadicea, of
the Boadishy, as he termed her, and (quite as a matter of course)
he hated England in his heart. This man was particularly desirous
of going to the West-end with me, at a later day, having heard
Mr. Swinburne descant on the wonders to be seen there. As we were
walking up St. James’ street in company, whither I had a great deal
of trouble to get him, for he was for philosophizing and speculating
on all he saw, and not a little for fighting, he came suddenly to
a halt. An elderly lady was walking through the crowd followed by
a footman, in a mourning livery. The man carried a cane and wore a
cocked hat. Stephen watched this pair some time, and then gravely
wished to know why “that _minister_ kept so close in the wake of the
old woman ahead of him?” I explained to him who they were, but he
scouted the idea. It was a regular “minister,” as witness the cocked
hat, the black coat and breeches, and moreover the cane, and he was
not to be bamboozled by any nonsense about servants. I had to let him
follow the lady to her own residence, where, as I had foretold, the
“minister” took off his hat, opened the door for his mistress, and
followed her into the house. It was many months before Stephen ceased
to speak of this. After all, the same _promenade_ would excite almost
as much astonishment in Broadway, at this very moment.
At that time there was a stand of sedan-chairs, in St. James’ street,
near the spot where Crockford’s club-house has since been erected.
I had some difficulty in getting him over this “shoal,” for after
laughing in the chairmen’s faces, he was for having a ride, on the
spot.
The ranger of the Green-park, usually a person of rank, has a very
pretty residence and garden, that open on Piccadilly. As we passed
its gate, on our way to Hyde Park corner, a black footman was
standing at it, his master probably expecting company. The negro was
dressed in a rich _white_ livery pretty well garnished with silver
lace, red plush breeches, white silk stockings, a cocked hat, and his
head was powdered as white as snow. You may imagine the effect such
an apparition would be likely to produce on my Kennebunk companion.
As there are no houses, but this of the ranger, on the park side of
Piccadilly, and comparatively few people walk there, we had the black
porter, for a little time, all to ourselves. It was with a good deal
of persuasion that I prevented Stephen from laying hands on the poor
fellow, in order to turn him round and examine him. As it was, he
walked round him himself, dealing out his comments with particular
freedom. All this time, the negro maintained an air of ludicrous
dignity, holding himself as erect as a marine giving a salute, and
looking steadily across the street. Among other things, Stephen
suggested that the fellow might be one of Mr. Jefferson’s “niggers,”
who had decamped with a pair of his master’s nether garments! He was
so tickled with this conceit, that I succeeded in dragging him away
while he was in the humour. When we returned, an hour or two later,
the black had disappeared.
Stephen had a desire to enter the Green-park, but I hesitated,
for I had once been forbidden admission to Kensington Gardens, on
account of wearing a roundabout. While we were debating the point,
a worthy citizen came up, and said—“Go in, my lads; this is a free
country, and you have as much right there as the King.” On this
intimation we proceeded. “What queer notions these people have of
liberty,” observed Stephen, drily. “They think it a great matter to
be able to walk in a field, and there they let a nigger stare them
in the face, with a cocked hat, red breeches, silk stockings, laced
coat, and powdered wool!” I made my own reflections, too, for the
first perception I had of the broad distinction that exists between
political _franchises_ and political _liberty_, dates from that
moment. Young as I then was, I knew enough about royal _appanages_,
and the uses of royal parks, to understand that the public entered
them as a favour, and not as a right; but had it been otherwise, it
would have left ground for reflection on the essential difference
in principle, that exists between a state of things in which the
community receive certain privileges as concessions, and that in
which power itself is merely a temporary trust, delegated directly
and expressly by the body of the people.
But I am permitting the scenes of boyhood, to divert me from the
present moment.
Mr. —— showed me the Blue-coat School, the new General Post Office,
and divers other places of interest, among which was Newgate. The
architecture of the latter struck me as being unusually appropriate,
and some of its emblems as poetically just, whatever may be the legal
reputation of the place on other points.
Pursuing our way down Ludgate-hill, my companion turned short into
the door of a considerable shop. It was Rundle & Bridges, the first
jewellers and goldsmiths of the world! England has probably more
plate, than all the rest of Europe united; at least, judging by the
eye alone, I think it would so appear to a stranger, although her
wealth in the precious stones appears to be even less than that of
some of the smaller countries. One certainly sees fewer jewels in
society, although I am told the display of diamonds at Court, is
sometimes very great. There are no public collections to compare
with those of the continent, and the severe, one might almost say
classical, purity of taste, which prevails in the dress of the men
here, must have an effect to lessen the demand for jewels.
I was on the same sofa, at a ball in Paris, with Prince ——, one of
the richest men of the continent. His arm lay on the back of the
seat, in a way to bring the hand quite near me. Every finger was
covered with jewels of price, some of them literally having two or
three, like the fingers of a woman. A piece of soap would have done
more to embellish the hand, than all this finery. Directly before me
stood the Duke of ——, one of the richest nobles of England. I took
an occasion to look at him, as he drew a glove. He had not even the
signet-ring, which it is now so very common to wear, but the hand was
as white as snow.
The shop of Rundle & Bridges was large, but it made a wholesale and
affluent appearance, rather than the brilliant show one meets with in
Paris. As Mr. —— was known we were received with great attention and
civility. One of the heads of the establishment took us up stairs,
into a more private apartment, where we were shown many magnificent
things, and among others a good deal of the royal plate which had
been sent here to be cleaned. It struck me, as a whole, that the same
objection exists to the taste of England, as respects her plate, that
exists in relation to almost all her works of art—its clumsiness.
An English tureen is larger than a French tureen; an English chair,
an English plate, an English carriage, even an English razor, are
all larger than common. The workmanship is quite often better, but
the forms are neither as classical, nor as graceful. As respects the
plate, its massiveness may convey an idea of magnificence, but it is
a ponderous and, in so much, a barbarous magnificence compared to
that in which the beauty of the proportions, or of the intellectual
part, is made of more importance than the mere metal. To the eye of
taste a vessel of brass may have more value than one of gold.
You can have no just notion of the affluence of the shops of London,
generally, in the article of plate. Gold, silver-gilt, and silver
vessels, are literally piled in their vast windows, from the bottoms
to the summits, as if space were the only thing desirable. I have
seen single windows, in which, it struck me, the simple metallic
wealth was greater in amount, than the value of the entire stock of
our heaviest silversmiths. I am certain we were shown, to-day, single
sets of diamonds that would form a capital for a large dealer in
America.
While I tell you the taste of the English plate is not generally
good, the cultivation of the fine arts being still too limited to
extend much of its influence to the mechanical industry of the
country, there are some great exceptions. Flaxman, one of the first
geniuses of our times, a man perhaps superior to Benvenuto Cellini,
in the intellectual part of his particular branch of art, was
compelled, by the want of taste in the public and his own poverty,
to make designs for the silversmiths, for which he had been fitted
by early and severe study in Italy. Perhaps he was really more
successful in his sketches than in his completer works. Had there
been a dozen such men in England, the tables of the British nobility
would have exhibited taste and beauty, as well as magnificence.
Among the royal plate was a salver just finished, which was
beautiful, although the conceit was feudal rather than poetical, and
conveyed an idea very different from that created by a sight of the
steel-yards, and weights, and other familiar objects of domestic use,
disinterred at Pompeii. The material was gold, and the ornaments
were the stars and other insignia of the orders of chivalry which
the present king is entitled to wear. The star and garter of the
first English order was in the centre of the salver, drawn in large
figures, while the others were arranged on the border, which was wide
enough to receive them, on a diminished, but still on a suitable
scale. The work resembled line engraving, and was done with truth and
spirit, though, after all, it was nothing but a sort of _tailorism_.
The history of the salver itself was rather curious. The eastern
kings have a practice of enclosing their personal missives in tubes
or cases of gold, resembling the tin and copper cases that are used
to hold scrolls. In the course of a century, so many of these golden
cases had accumulated, that George IV., who is a much greater prince
in such matters, than in others more essential, took a fancy to have
them converted into this piece of furniture.