SECOND VISIT TO ENGLAND.
Ship Gladiator, off the Isle of Wight,
Evening of June 9th, 1839.
The bullet which preserves the perpendicular of my cabin-lamp is at last still, I congratulate myself; and with it my optic nerve resumes its proper and steady function. The vagrant tumblers, the peripatetic teeth-brushes, the dancing stools, the sidling wash-basins andet-ceteras, have returned to a steady life. The creaking bulkheads cry no more. I sit on a trunk which will not run away with me, and pen and paper look up into my face with their natural sobriety and attention. I have no apology for not writing to you, except want of event since we parted. There is not a milestone in the three thousand four hundred miles I have travelled. “Travelled!” said I. I am as unconscious of having moved from the wave on which you left me at Staten Island as the prisoner in the hulk. I have pitched forward and backward, and rolled from my left cheek to my right; but as to any feeling of having goneonwardI am as unconscious of it as a lobster backing after the ebb. The sea is a dreary vacuity, in which he, perhaps, who was ever well upon it, can find material for thought. But for one, I will sell at sixpence a month, all copyhold upon so much of my life as is destined “to the deep, the blue, the black” (and whatever else he calls it,) of my friend the song-writer.
Yet there are some moments recorded, first with a sigh, which we find afterward copied into memory with a smile. Here and there a thought has come to me from the wave, snatched listlessly from the elements—here and there a word has been said which on shore should have been wit or good feeling—here and there a “good morning,” responded to with an effort, has from its courtesy or heartiness, left an impression which will make to-morrow’s parting phrases more earnest than I had anticipated.—With this green isle to windward and the smell of earth and flowers coming to my nostrils once more, I begin to feel an interest in several who have sailed with me. Humanity, killed in me invariably by salt-water, revives, I think, with this breath of hawthorn.
The pilot tells us that the Montreal, which sailed ten days before us, has not yet passed up the channel, and that we have brought with us the first west wind they have had in many weeks. The sailors do not know what to say to this, for we had four parsons on board, and, by all sea-canons, they are invariable Jonahs. One of these gentlemen, by the way, is an abolitionist, on a begging crusade for a school devoted to the amalgam of color, and very much to the amusement of the passengers, he met the steward’s usual demand for a fee with an application for a contribution to the funds of his society! His expectations from British sympathy are large, for he is accompanied by a lay brother “used to keeping accounts,” whose sole errand is to record the golden results of his friend’s eloquence. But “eight bells” warn me to bed; so when I have recorded the good qualities of the Gladiator, which are many, and those of her captain, which are more, I will put out my sea lamp for the last time, and get into mypremonitory“six feet by two.”
The George Inn, Portsmouth.—This is a morning in which (under my circumstances) it would be difficult not to be pleased with the entire world. A fair day in June, newly from sea, and with a journey of seventy miles before me on a swift coach, through rural England, is what I call a programme of a pleasant day. Determined not to put myself in the way of a disappointment, I accepted, without the slightest hesitation, on landing at the wharf, the services of an elderly gentleman in shabby black, who proposed to stand between me and all my annoyances of the morning. He was to get my baggage through the customs, submit for me to all the inevitable impositions of tide-waiters, secure my place in the coach, bespeak me a fried sole and green peas, and sum up his services, all in one short phrase ofl. s. d.So putting my temper into my pocket, and making up my mind to let roguery take the wall of me for one day unchallenged, I mounted to the grassy ramparts of the town to walk off the small remainder of sea-air from my stomach, and admire everything that came in my way. I would recommend to all newly landed passengers from the packets to step up and accept of the sympathy of the oaks of the “king’s bastion” in their disgust for the sea. Those sensible trees, leaning toward the earth, and throwing out their boughs as usual to the landward, present to the seaward exposure a turned-up and gnarled look of nausea and disgust which is as expressive to the commonest observer as a sick man’s first look at his bolus. I have great affinity with trees, and I believe implicitly, that what is disagreeable to the tree can not be pleasant to the man. The salt air is not so corrosive here as in the Mediterranean, where the leaves of the olive are eaten off entirely on the side toward the sea; but it is quite enough to make a sensible tree turn up its nose, and in that attitude stands most expressively every oak on the “king’s bastion.”
The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one long alley of ornamented cottages—wood-bine creeping and roses flowering over them all. If there were but two between Portsmouth and London—two even of the meanest we saw—a traveller from any other land would think it worth his while to describe them minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less,) they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural paradises; and I record it as the first point in which I find myself worse for having become a “dweller in the shade.” I was envious. Formerly, in passing a tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, “What a bright lawn! What a trim and fragrant hedge! What luxuriant creepers! I congratulate their fortunate owner!” Now it is, “How I wish I had that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people their shrubs, trellises, and flowers!” I wonder not a little how the English Emigrant can make a home among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities.
After the first few miles, I discovered that the two windows of the coach were very limited frames for the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye, and changing places with William, who was on the top of the coach, I found myself between two tory politicians setting forth to each other most eloquently the mal-administration of the whigs and the queen’s mismanagement. As I was two months behind the English news I listened with some interest. They made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was a silly girl; that she had been caught in a decided fib about Sir Robert Peel’s exactions with respect to the household; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seemed to be a sturdy grazier, said that “in ’igh life the queen-dowager’s ’ealth was now received uniwersally with three times three, while Victoria’s was drank in solemn silence.” Her majesty received no better treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of the seat; and as we whirled under the long park fence of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered by the readers of D’Israeli’s novels, is the original of the picture of the luxuriousmaison de plaisance, drawn in “the Young Duke.”
We got glimpses of the old palace at Esher, of Hampton Court, of Pitt’s country seat at Putney, and of Jane Porter’s cottage at Esher, and in the seventh hour from leaving Portsmouth (seventy-four miles) we found the vehicles thickening, the omnibuses passing, the blue-coated policemen occurring at short intervals, and the roads delightfully watered—symptoms of suburban London. We skirted the privileged paling of Hyde Park; and I could see, over the rails, the flying and gay colored equipages, the dandy horsemen, the pedestrian ladies followed by footmen with their gold sticks, the fashionable throng, in short, which, separated by an iron barrier from all contact with unsightliness and vulgarity, struts its hour in this green cage of aristocracy.
Around the triumphal arch opposite the duke of Wellington’s was assembled a large crowd of carriages and horsemen. The queen was coming from Buckingham palace through the Green park, and they were waiting for a glimpse of Her Majesty on horseback. The Regulator whirled mercilessly on; but far down, through the long avenues of trees, I could see a movement of scarlet liveries, and a party coming rapidly toward us on horseback. We missed the Queen by a couple of minutes.
It was just the hour when all London is abroad, and Piccadilly was one long cavalcade of splendid equipages on their way to the park. I remembered many a face, and many a crest; but either the faces had beautified in my memory, or three years had done time’s pitiless work on them all. Near Devonshire house I saw, fretting behind the slow-moving press of vehicle, a pair of magnificent and fiery blood horses, drawing a coach, which, though quite new, was of a color and picked out with a peculiar stripe that was familiar to my eye. The next glance convinced me that the livery was that of Lady Blessington; but, for the light chariot in which she used to drive, here was a stately coach—for the one tall footman, two—for the plain but elegant harness, a sumptuous and superb caparison—the whole turn-out on a scale of splendor unequalled by anything around us. Another moment decided the doubt—for as we came against the carriage, following, ourselves, an embarrassed press of vehicles, her ladyship appeared, leaning back in the corner with her wrists crossed, the same in the grace of her attitude and the elegance of her toilet, but stouter, more energetic, and graver in the expression of her face, than I ever remembered to have seen her. From the top of the stage-coach I looked, unseen, directly down upon her, and probably got, by chance, a daylight and more correct view of her countenance than I should obtain in a year of opera and drawing-room observation. Tired and dusty, we were turned from hotel to hotel, all full and overflowing; and finding at last a corner at Ragget’s in Dover street, we dressed, dined, and posted to Woolwich. Unexpected and mournful news closed our first day in England with tears.
I drove up to London the second day after our arrival, and having a little “Grub-street” business, made my way to the purlieus of publishers, Paternoster row. If you could imagine a paper-mine, with a very deep cut shaft laid open to the surface of the earth, you might get some idea of Ivy lane. One walks along through its dim subterranean light, with no idea of breathing the proper atmosphere of day and open air. A strong smell of new books in the nostrils, and one long stripe of blue sky much farther off than usual, are the predominant impressions.
From the dens of the publishers, I wormed my way through the crowds of Cheapside and the Strand, toward that part of London, which, as Horace Smith says, is “open at the top.” Something in the way of a ship’s fender, to save the hips and elbows would sell well, I should think, to pedestrians in London. What crowds, to be sure! On a Sunday, in New York, when all the churches are pouring forth their congregations at the same moment, you have seen a faint image of the Strand. The style of the hack cabriolets is very much changed since I was in London. The passenger sits about as high up from the ground as he would in a common chair—the body of the vehicle suspended from the axle instead of being placed upon it, and the wheels very high. The driver’s seat would suit a sailor, for it answers to the ship’s tiller, well astern. He whips over the passenger’s head. I saw one or two private vehicles built on this principle, certainly one of safety, though they have something thebeautyof a prize hog.
The new National Gallery in Trafalgar square, not finished when I left England, opened upon me as I entered Charing Cross, with what I could not but feel was a very fine effect, though critically, its “pepper-boxity” is not very creditable to the architect. Fine old Northumberland house, with its stern lion atop on one side, the beautiful Club house on the other, St. Martin’s noble church and the Gallery—with such a fine opening in the verycor cordiumof London, could not fail of producing a noble metropolitan view.
The street in front of the gallery was crowded with carriages, showing a throng of visiters within; and mounting the imposing steps, (the loftiness of the vestibule dropping plump as I paid my shilling entrance,) I found myself in a hall whose extending lines of pillars ran through the entire length of the building, offering to the eye a truly noble perspective. Off from this hall, to the right and left, lay the galleries of antique and modern paintings, and the latter were crowded with the fair and fashionable mistresses of the equipages without. You will not care to be bothered with criticism on pictures, and mine was a cursory glance—but a delicious, full-length portrait of a noble lady by Grant, whose talent is now making some noise in London, a glorious painting of Van Amburgh among his lions by Edwin Landseer, and a portrait of Miss Pardoe in a Turkish costume with her pretty feet coiled under her on a Persian carpet, by Pickersgill, are among those I remember. I found a great many acquaintances in the gallery; and I was sitting upon a bench with a lady, who pointed out to me a portrait of Lord Lyndhurst in his chancellor’s wig and robes—a very fine picture of a man of sixty or thereabouts. Directly between me and it, as I looked, sidled a person with his back to me, cutting off my view very provokingly. “When this dandy gets out of the way with his eyeglass,” said I, “I shall be able to see the picture.” My friend smiled. “Who do you take the dandy to be?” It was a well formed man, dressed in the top of the fashion with very straight back, curling brown hair, and the look of perhaps thirty years of age. As he passed on and I caught his profile, I saw it was Lord Lyndhurst himself.
I had not seen Taglioni since the first representation of the Sylphide, eight or nine years ago at Paris. Last night I was at the opera, and saw her in La Gitana; and except that her limbs are the least in the world rounder and fuller, she is, in person, absolutely unchanged. I can appreciate now, better than I could then (when opera dancing was new to me,) what it is that gives this divine woman the right to her proud title ofLa Déesse de la Danse. It is easy for the Ellslers and Augusta, and others who are said to be only second to her, to copy her flying steps, and even to produce by elasticity of limb, the beautiful effect of touching the earth, like a thing afloat, without being indebted to it for the rebound. But Taglioni alonefinishesthe step, or the pirouette, or the arrowy bound over the scene, as calmly, as accurately, as faultlessly, as she begins it. She floats out of a pirouette as if instead of being made giddy, she had been lulled by it into a smiling and child-like dream, and instead of trying herself and hera plomb(as is seen all other dancers, by their effort to recover composure,) it had been the moment when she had rallied and been refreshed. The smile, so expressive of enjoyment in her own grace, which steals over Taglioni’s lips when she closes a difficult step, seems communicated in an indefinable languor, to her limbs. You cannot fancy her fatigued when, with her peculiar softness of motion, she courtesies to the applause of an enchanted audience, and walks lightly away. You are never apprehensive that she has undertaken too much. You never detect as you do in all other dancers, defects slurred over adroitly and movements that, from their anticipating the music of the ballet, are known by the critical eye to cover some flaw in the step, from giddiness or loss of balance. But oh what a new relation bears the music to the dance, when this spirit of grace replaces her companions in the ballet! Whether the motion seems born of the music, or the music floats out of her dreamy motion, the enchanted gazer might be almost embarrassed to know.
In the new ballet of La Gitana, the music is based upon the Mazurka. The story is the old one of the child of a grandee of Spain, stolen by gipsies, and recovered by chance in Russia. The gradual stealing over her of music she had heard in her childhood was the finest piece of pantomimic acting I ever saw. But there is one dance,the Cachucha, introduced at the close of the ballet, in which Taglioni has enchanted the world anew. It could only be done by herself; for there is a succession of flying movements expressive of alarm, in the midst of which she alights and stands poised upon the points of her feet, with a look over her shoulder offiertéand animation possible to no other face, I think, in the world. It was like a deer standing with expanded nostril and neck uplifted to its loftiest height, at the first scent of his pursuers in the breeze. It was the very soul of swiftness embodied in a look! How can I describe it to you?
My last eight hours have been spent between Bedlam and the opera—one of those antipodal contrasts of which London life affords so many. Thanks to God, and to the Howards who have arizen in our time, a madhouse is no longer the heart-rending scene that it used to be; and Bedlam, though a place of melancholy imprisonment, is as cheering a spectacle to the humane as imprisonment can be made by care and kindness. Of the three hundred persons who are inmates of its wards, the greater part seemed quiet and content, some playing at ball in the spacious court-yards, some lying on the grass, and some working voluntarily at a kind of wheel arranged for raising water to their rooms.
On the end of a bench in one of the courts, quite apart from the other patients, sat the youth who came up two hundred miles from the country to marry the queen! You will remember the story of his forcing himself into Buckingham palace. He was a stout, sandy-haired, sad-looking young man, of perhaps twenty-four; and with his arms crossed, and his eyes on the ground, he sat like a statue, never moving even an eyelash while we were there. There was a very gentlemanlike man working at the waterwheel, or rather walking round with his hand on the bar, in a gait that would have suited the most finished exquisite of a drawing-room—Mr. Davis, who shot (I think) at Lord Londonderry. Then in an upper room we saw the Captain Brown who shook his fist in the queen’s face when she went to the city—really a most officer-like and handsome fellow; and in the next room poor old Hatfield who shot at George the Third, and has been in Bedlam for forty years—quite sane! He was a gallant dragoon, and his face is seamed with scars got in battle before his crime. He employs himself with writing poetry on the death of his birds and cats whom he has outlived in prison—all the society he has had in this long and weary imprisonment. He received us very courteously; and called our attention to his favorite canary, showed us his poetry, and all with a sad, mild, subdued resignation that quite moved me.
In the female wards I saw nothing very striking, except one very noble-looking woman who was standing at her grated window, entirely absorbed in reading the Bible. Her face expressed the most heart-rending melancholy I had ever witnessed. She has been for years under the terrible belief that she has committed “the unpardonable sin,” and though quiet all the day, her agony at night becomes horrible. What a comment on a much practiced mode of preaching the mild and forgiving religion of our Savior!
As I was leaving one of the wards, a young woman of nineteen or twenty came up to me with a very polite courtesy and said, “Will you be so kind as to have me released from this dreadful place?” “I am afraid I can not,” said I. “Then,” she replied laying her hand on my arm, with a most appealing earnestness, “perhaps you will on Monday—you know I’ve nothing to pack!” The matron here interposed, and led her away, but she kept her eyes on us till the door closed. She was confined there for the murder of her child.
We visited the kitchens, wash-houses, bakery, &c., &c.—all clean, orderly, and admirable, and left our names on the visitors’ book, quite of the opinion of a Frenchman who was there just before us, and who had written under his own name this expressive praise:—“J’ai visite certains palais moins beaux et moins bien entretenus que cette maison de la folie.”
Two hours after I was listening to the overture of La Cenerentola, and watching the entrance, to the opera, of the gay, the celebrated, and the noble. In the house I had left, night had brought with it (as it does always to the insane) a maddening and terrific exaltation of brain and spirit—but how different from that exaltation of brain and spirit sought at the same hour by creatures of the same human family, at the opera! It was difficult not to wonder at the distribution of allotments to mankind. In a box on the left of me sat the Queen, keeping time with a fan to the delicious singing of Pauline Garcia, her favorite minister standing behind her chair, and her maids of honor around—herself the smiling, youthful, and admired Sovereign of the most powerful nation on earth! I thought of the poor girl in her miserable cell at Bedlam imploring release.
The Queen’s face has thinned and grown more oval since I saw her at a drawing-room four years ago, as Princess Victoria. She has been compelled tothinksince then, and such exigencies, in all stations of life, work out the expression of the face. She has now what I should pronounce a decidedly intellectual countenance, a little petulant withal when she turns to speak, but on the whole quite beautiful enough for a virgin queen. No particular attention seemed paid to her by the audience. She was dressed less gayly than many others around her. Her box was at the left side of the house undistinguished by any mark of royalty, and a stranger would never have suspected her presence.
Pauline Garcia sang better than I thought it possible for any one to sing after Malibran was dead. She has her sister’s look about the forehead and eyes, and all her sister’s soul and passionateness in her style of singing. Her face is otherwise very plain, but, plain as it is, the opera-going public prefer her already to the beautiful and more powerful Grisi. The latter long triumphantprima donnais said to be very unhappy at her eclipse by this new favorite; and it is curious enough to hear the hundred and one faults found in the declining songstress by those who once would not admit that she could be transcended on earth. A very celebrated person, whom I remembered, when in London before, giving Grisi the most unqualified eulogy, assured the gay admirers in her box last night that she hadalwayssaid that Grisi had nothing but lungs and fine eyes. She was a great healthy Italian girl, and could sing in tune; but soul or sentiment she never had! Poor Grisi! Hers is the lot of all who are so unhappy as to have been much admired. “Le monde ne hait rien autant que ses idoles quand ils sont à terre,” said the wise La Bruyere.
Some of the most delightful events in one’s travels are those which afford the leastmatérielfor description, and such is ourséjourof a few days at the vicarage of B——. It was a venerable old house with pointed gables, elaborate and pointed windows, with panes of glass of the size of the palm of the hand, low doors, narrow staircases, all sorts of unsuspected rooms and creepers outside, trellised and trained to every corner and angle. Then there was the modern wing, with library and dining room, large windows, marble fireplaces, and French paper; and in going from your bedroom to breakfast you might fancy yourself stepping from Queen Elizabeth’s time to Queen Victoria’s. A high hedge of holly divided the smoothly-shaven lawn from the church-yard, and in the midst of the moss-grown headstones stood a gray old church with four venerable towers, one of the most picturesque and beautiful specimens of the old English architecture that I have ever seen. The whole group, church, vicarage, and a small hamlet of vine covered and embowered stone cottages, lay in the lap of a gently rising sweep of hills, and all around were spread landscapes of the finished and serene character peculiar to England—rich fields framed in flowering hedges, clumps of forest trees, glimpses of distant parks, country seats, and village spires, and on the horizon a line of mist-clad hills, scarce ever more distinct than the banks of low-lying clouds retiring after a thunder storm in America.
Early on Sunday morning we were awakened by the melody of the bells in the old towers; and with brief pauses between the tunes, they were played upon most musically, till the hour for the morning services. We have little idea in America of the perfection to which the chiming of bells is carried in England. In the towers of this small rural church are hung eight bells of different tone, and the tunes played on them by the more accomplished ringers of the neighboring hamlet are varied endlessly. I lay and listened to the simple airs as they died away over the valley, with a pleasure I can scarcely express. The morning was serene and bright, the perfume of the clematis and jasmine flowers at the window penetrated to the curtains of my bed, and Sunday seemed to have dawned with the audible worship and palpable incense of nature. We were told at breakfast that the chimes had been unusually merry, and were a compliment to ourselves, the villagers always expressing thus their congratulations on the arrival of guests at the vicarage. The compliment was repeated between services, and a very long peal rang in the twilight—our near relationship to the vicar’s family authorizing a very special rejoicing.
The interior of the church was very ancient looking and rough, the pews of unpainted oak, and the massive stone walls simply whitewashed. The congregation was small, perhaps fifty persons, and the men were (with two exceptions) dressed in russet carters’ frocks, and most of them in leather leggins. The children sat on low benches placed in the centre of the one aisle, and the boys, like their fathers, were in smock frocks of homespun, their heavy shoes shod with iron like horses’ hoofs, and their little legs buttoned up in the impenetrable gaiters of coarse leather. They looked, men and boys, as if they were intended to wear but one suit in this world.
I was struck with the solemnity of the service, and the decorous attention of men, women, and children, to the responses. It was a beautiful specimen of simple and pastoral worship. Each family had the name of their farm or place of residence printed on the back of the pew, with the number of seats to which they were entitled, probably in proportion to their tithes. The “living” is worth, if I remember right, not much over a hundred pounds—an insufficient sum to support so luxurious a vicarage as is appended to it; but, happily for the people, the vicar chances to be a man of fortune, and he unites in his excellent character the exemplary pastor with the physician and lord of the manor. I left B—— with the conviction that if peace, contentment, and happiness, inhabit one spot more than all others in a world whose allotments are so difficult to estimate, it is the vicarage in the bosom of that rural upland.
We left B—— at twelve in the Brighton “Age”—the “swell coach” of England. We were to dine thirty miles nearer London, at —— Park, and we did the distance in exactly three hours, including a stop of fifteen minutes to dine. We are abused by all travellers for our alacrity in dining on the road; but what stage-coach in the United States ever limited its dining time to fifteen minutes, and what American dinner of roast, pastry, and cheese, was ever dispatched so briefly? Yet the travellers to Brighton are of the better class; and whose who were my fellow passengers the day I refer to were particularly well-dressed and gentlemanly—yetallof them achieved a substantial dinner of beef, pudding, and cheese, paid their bills, and drained their glass of porter, within the quarter of an hour. John Bull’s blindness to the beam in his own eye is perhaps owing to the fact that this hasty meal is sometimescalleda “lunch!”
Thetwoplaces beside our own in the inside were occupied by a lady and her maid and two children—an interpretation of number two to which I would not have agreed if I could have helped it. We cannot always tell at first sight what will be most amusing, however; and the child of two years, who sprawled over my rheumatic knees with her mother’s permission, thereby occasioning on my part a most fixed look out of the window, furnished me with a curious bit of observation. At one of the commons we passed, the children running out from a gipsy encampment flung bunches of heath flowers into the coach, which the little girl appropriated, and commenced presenting rather graciously to her mother, the maid, and Mrs. W., all of whom received them with smiles and thanks. Having rather a sulky face of my own when not particularly called on to be pleased, the child omitted me for a long time in her distributions. At last, after collecting and redistributing the flowers for above an hour, she grew suddenly grave, laid the heath all out upon her lap, selected the largest and brightest flowers, and made them into a nosegay. My attention was attracted by the seriousness of the child’s occupation; and I was watching her without thinking my notice observed, when she raised her eyes to me timidly, turned her new boquet over and over, and at last, with a blush, deeper than I ever saw before upon a child, placed the flowers in my hand and hid her face in her mother’s bosom. My sulkiness gave way, of course, and the little coquette’s pleasure in her victory was excessive. For the remainder of the journey, those who had given her their smiles too readily were entirely neglected, and all her attentions were showered upon the only one she had found it difficult to please. I thought it as pretty a specimen of the ruling passion strong in baby-hood as I ever saw. It was a piece of finished coquetry in a child not old enough to speak plain.
The coachman of “the Age” was a young man of perhaps thirty, who is understood to have run through a considerable fortune, and drives for a living—but he was not at all the sort of looking person you would fancy for a “swell whip.” He drove beautifully, helped the passengers out and in, lifted their baggage, &c., very handily, but evidently shunned notice, and had no desire to chat with the “outsides.” The excessive difficulty in England of findinganyclean way of making a living after the initiatory age is passed—a difficulty which reduced gentlemen feel most keenly—probably forced this person as it has others to take up a vocation for which the world fortunately finds an excuse in eccentricity. He touches his hat for the half crown or shilling, although probably if it were offered to him when the whip was out of his hand he would knock the giver down for his impertinence. I may as well record here, by the way, for the benefit of those who may wish to know a comparison between the expense of travelling hero and at home, for two inside places for thirty miles the coach fare was two pounds, and the coachman’s fee five shillings, or half a-crown each inside. To get from the post town to —— Park (two miles) cost me five-and-sixpence for a “fly,” so that for thirty-two miles travel I paid 2l.10s.6d., a little more than twelve dollars.
And speaking of vocations, it would be a useful lesson to some of our ambitious youths to try abeginningat getting a living in England. I was never at all aware of the difficulty of finding even bread and salt for a young man till I had occasion lately to endeavor to better the condition of a servant of my own—a lad who has been with me four or five years, and whose singular intelligence, good principle and high self-improvement, fitted him, I thought, for any confidential trust or place whatever.[2]His own ideas, too (I thought, not unreasonably,) had become somewhat sublimated in America, and he was unwilling to continue longer as a servant. He went home to his mother, a working woman of London, and I did my utmost, the month I was in town, inquiring among all classes of my friends, advertising, &c., to find him any possible livelihood above menial service. I was met everywhere with the same answer; “There are hundreds of gentleman’s sons wearing out their youth in looking for the same thing.” I was told daily that it was quite in vain—that apprenticeships were as much sought as clerkships, and that every avenue to the making of a sixpence was overcrammed and inaccessible. My boy and his mother at last came to their senses; and, consenting to apply once more for a servant’s place, he was fortunate enough to engage as valet to bachelor, and is now gone with his new master on a tour to France. As Harding the painter said to me, when he returned after his foreign trip; “England is a great place to take the nonsense out of people.”
When London shall have become the Rome or Athens of a fallen empire (qu. will it ever?) the termini of the railways will be among its finest ruins. That of the Birmingham and Liverpool track is almost as magnificent as that flower of sumptuousness, the royal palace of Caserta, near Naples. It is really an impressive scene simply to embark for “Brummagem;” and there is that utility in all this showy expenditure for arch, gateway, and pillar, that no one is admitted but the passenger, and you are refreshingly permitted to manage your baggage, &c. without the assistance of a hundred blackguards at a shilling each. Then there are “ladies’ waiting-rooms,” and “gentlemen’s waiting-rooms,” and attached to them every possible convenience, studiously clean and orderly. I wish the president and directors of the Utica and other American railroads would step over and take a sumptuary hint.
The cars are divided into stalls,i. e.each passenger is cushioned off by a stuffed partition from his neighbor’s shoulder, and sleeps without offence or encroachment. When they are crowded, that is an admirable arrangement; but I have found it very comfortable in long journeys in America to take advantage of an empty car, and stretch myself to sleep along the vacant seat. Here, full or empty, you can occupy but your upright place. In every car are suspended lamps to give light during the long passages through the subterranean tunnels.
We rolled from under the Brobdignag roof of the terminus, as the church of Mary-le-bone (Cockney for Marie la-bonne, but so carved on the frieze) struck six. Our speed was increased presently to thirty miles in the hour; and with the exception of the slower rate in passing the tunnels, and the slackening and getting under way at the different stations, this rate was kept up throughout. We arrived at Liverpool (205 miles or upward) at three o’clock, our stoppages having exceeded an hour altogether.
I thought toward the end, that all this might be very pleasant with a consignment of buttons or an errand to Gretna Green. But for thepleasureof the thing I would as lief sit in an arm-chair and see bales of striped green silk unfolded for eight hours astravelthe same length of time by the railroad. (I have described in this simile exactly the appearance of the fields as you see them in flying past.) The old women and cabbages gain by it, perhaps, for you cannot tell whether they are not girls and roses. The washerwoman at her tub follows the lady on the lawn so quickly that you confound the two irresistibly—the thatched cottages look like browsing donkeys, and the browsing donkeys like thatched cottages—you ask the name of a town, and by the time you get up your finger you point at a spot three miles off—in short, the salmon well packed in straw on the top of the coach, and called fresh fish after a journey of 200 miles, sees quite as much of the country as his most intellectual fellow-passenger. I foresee in all this a new distinction in phraseology. “Have you travelled in England?” will soon be a question having no reference to railroads. The winding turnpike and cross-roads, the coaches and post carriages, will be resumed by all those who consider the sense of sight as useful in travel, and the bagmen and letter-bags will have almost undisputed possession of the rail-cars.
TheAdelphiis the Astor house of Liverpool, a very large and showy hotel near the terminus of the railway. We were shown into rather a magnificent parlor on our arrival; and very hungry with rail-roading since six in the morning, we ordered dinner at their earliest convenience. It came after a full hour, and we sat down to four superb silver covers, anticipating a meal corresponding to the stout person and pompous manners of the fattest waiter I have seen in my travels. The grand cover was removed with a flourish and disclosed—divers small bits of second hand beefsteak, toasted brown and warped at the corners by a second fire; and, on the removal of the other three silver pagodas, our eyes were gratified by a dish of peas that had been once used for green soup, three similarly toasted and warped mutton chops, and three potatoes. Quite incredulous of the cook’s intentions, I ventured to suggest to the waiter that he had probably mistaken the tray and brought us the dinner of some sportsman’s respectable brace of pointers; but on being assured that there were no dogs in the cellar, I sent word to the master of the house that we had rather a preference for a dinner new and hot, and would wait till he could provide it. Half an hour more brought up the landlord’s apologies and a fresh and hot beefsteak, followed by a tough crusted apple-pie, custard, and cheese—and with a bottle of Moselle whichwasgood, we finished our dinner at one of the most expensive and showy hotels in England. The manners and fare at the American hotels being always described as exponents of civilization by English travellers, I shall be excused for giving a counter-picture of one of the most boasted of their own.
Regretting exceedingly that the recent mourning of my two companions must prevent their presence at the gay festivities of Eglington, I put them on board the steamer, bound on a visit to relatives in Dublin, and returned to the Adelphi to waiten garçonfor the Glasgow steamer of Monday. My chamber is a large and well-furnished room, with windows looking out on the area shut in by the wings of the house; and I must make you still more contented at the Astor, by describing what is going on below at this moment. It is half-past eight, and a Sunday morning. All the bells of the house, it seems to me, are ringing, most of them very impatiently, and in the area before the kitchen windows are six or eight idle waiters, and four or five female scullions, playing, quarrelling, scolding and screaming; the language of both men and women more profane and indecent than anything I have ever before chanced to hear, and every word audible in every room in this quarter of the hotel. This has been going on since six this morning; and I seriously declare I do not think I ever heard as much indecent conversation in my life as for three mortal hours must have “murdered sleep” for every lady and gentleman lodged on the rear side of the “crack hotel” of Liverpool.
Sick of the scene described above, I went out just now to take a turn or two in my slippers in the long entry. Up and down, giving me a most appealing stare whenever we met, dawdled also the fat waiter who served up the cold victuals of yesterday. He evidently had some errand with me, but what I did not immediately fathom. At last he approached—
“You—a—got your things, sir?”
“What things?”
“The stick and umbrella, I carried to your bedroom, sir?”
“Yes, thank you,” and I resumed my walk.
The waiter resumed his, and presently approached again.
“You—a—don’t intend to use the parlor again, sir?”
“No: I have explained to the master of the house that I shall breakfast in the coffee-room.” And again I walked on.
My friend began again at the next turn.
“You—a—pay for those ladies’ dinner yourself, sir?”
“Yes.” I walked on once more.
Once more approaches my fat incubus, and with a twirl of the towel in his hand looks as if he would fain be delivered of something.
“Why the d—l am I badgered in this way?” I stormed out at last, losing patience at his stammering hesitation, and making a move to get round the fat obstruction and pursue my walk.
“Will you—a—remember the waiter, if you please, sir?”
“Oh! I was not aware that I was to pay the waiter at every meal. I generally do it when I leave the house. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to let me finish my walk, and trust me till to-morrow morning?”
P. S.Evening in the coffee-room.—They say the best beginning in love is a decided aversion, and badly as I began at Liverpool, I shall always have a tender recollection of it for the unequalled luxury of itsbaths. A long and beautiful Grecian building crests the head of George’s pier, built by the corporation of Liverpool, and devoted exclusively to salt-water baths. I walked down in the twilight to enjoy this refreshing luxury, and it being Sunday evening, I was shown into the ladies’ end of the building. The room where I waited till the bath was prepared was a lofty and finely proportioned apartment, elegantly furnished, and lined with superbly bound books and pictures, the tables covered with engravings, and the whole looking like a central apartment in a nobleman’s residence. A boy showed me presently into a small drawing-room, to which was attached a bath closet, the two rooms lined, boudoir fashion, with chintz, a clock over the bath, a nice carpet and stove, in short, every luxury possible to such an establishment. I asked the boy if the gentlemen’s baths were as elegant as these. “Oh yes,” he said: “there are two splendid pictures of Niagara Falls and Catskill.” “Who painted them?” “Mr. Wall.” “And whose are they?” “They belong to our father, sir!” I made up my mind that “our father” was a man of taste and a credit to Liverpool.
I have just returned from the dinner given to Macready at the Freemason’s tavern. The hall, so celebrated for public “feeds,” is a beautiful room of a very showy style of architecture, with three galleries, and a raised floor at the end, usually occupied by the cross-table. It accommodated on this occasion four hundred persons.
From the peculiar object of the meeting to do honor to an actor for his intellectual qualities, and for his efforts to spiritualize and elevate the stage, there probably never was collected together in one room so much talent and accomplishment. Artists, authors, critics, publishers and amateurs of the stage—a large body in London—made up the company. My attention was called by one of my neighbors to the singularly superior character of theheadsabout us, and I had already observed the striking difference, both in head and physiognomy, between this and a common assemblage of men. Most of the persons connected with the press, it was said, were present; and perhaps it would have been a worthy service to the world had some shorn Samson, among the authors, pulled the temple upon the heads of the Philistines.
The cry of “make way!” introduced the duke of Sussex, the chairman of the meeting—a stout, mild-looking, dignified old man, wearing a close black scull-cap and the star and riband. He was followed by Lord Conyngham, who, as grand chamberlain, had done much to promote the interest of the drama; by Lord Nugent (whom I had last seen sailing ascampaviain the bay of Corfu,) by Sir Lytton Bulwer, Mr. Sheil, Sir Martin Shee, Young, the actor, Mr. Milnes, the poet, and other distinguished men. I should have said, by the way, Mr. Macready followed next his Royal Highness.
The cheering and huzzas, as this procession walked up the room, were completely deafening. Macready looked deadly pale and rather overcome; and amid the waving of handkerchiefs and the stunning uproar of four hundred “gentlemen and scholars,” the Duke placed the tragedian at his right hand, and took his seat before the turbot.
The dinner was an uncommonly bad one; but of this I had been forewarned, and so had taken a provisory chop at the club. I had leisure, therefore, to look about me, and truly there was work enough for the eyes. M——’s head interested me more than any one’s else, for it was the personification of his lofty, liberal, and poetic genius. His hair, which was long and profuse, curled in tendrils over the loftiest forehead; but about the lower part of the face lay all the characteristics which go to make up a voluptuous yet generous, an enthusiastic and fiery, yet self-possessed and well-directed character. He was excessively handsome; yet it was the beauty of Massaniello, or Salvator Rosa, with more of intellect than both together. All in all, I never saw a finer face for an artist; and judging from his looks and from his works (he is perhaps twenty-four,) I would stake my sagacity on a bold prophecy of his greatness.
On the same side were the L——s, very quiet-looking men, and S—— the portrait-painter, a merry looking grenadier, and L—— B—— the poet, with a facelikea poet. Near me was Lover, the painter, poet, novelist, song and music writer, dramatist, and good fellow—seven characters of which his friends scarce know in which he is most excellent—and he has a round Irish face, with a bright twinkle in his eye, and a plump little body which carries off all his gifts as if they were no load at all.—And on my left was S——, the glorious painter of Venice, of the battle of Trafalgar, the unequalled painter of the sea in all its belongings; and you would take him for a gallant lieutenant of the navy, and with the fire of a score of battles asleep in his eye, and the roughening of a hundred tempests in his cheek. A franker and more manly face would not cross your eye in a year’s travel.
Mr. J—— was just beyond, a tall, sagacious looking good humored person of forty-five. He was a man of very kind manners, and was treated with great marks of liking and respect by all about him. But directly opposite to me sat so exact a picture of Paul Pry as he is represented on the stage, particularly of my friend Finn in that character, that it was difficult not to smile in looking at him. To my surprise, I heard some one point him out, soon after, as the well-known original in that character—the gentleman, whose peculiarities of person, as well as manners, were copied in the farce of Mr. Poole. “That’s my name—what’s yours?” said he the moment after he had seated himself, thrusting his card close to the nose of the gentleman next him. I took it of course for a piece of fun between two very old friends, but to my astonishment the gentleman next him was as much astonished as I.
The few servants scattered up and down were deaf to everything but calls for champagne (furnished only at an extra charge when called for—a very mean system for a public dinner by the way,) and the wines on the table seemed selected to drive one to champagne or the doctor. Each person had four plates, and when used, they were to be put under the bench, or on the top of your head, or to be sat upon, or what you would except to be taken away, and the soup and fish, and the roast and boiled and all, having been put on together, was all removed at one fell swoop—the entire operation of dinner having lasted justtwenty-five minutes. Keep this fact till we are recorded by some new English traveller as the most expeditious eaters in Christendom.
Here end my croakings, however, for the speeches commenced directly, and admirable they were. To the undoing of much prejudice got by hearsay, I listened to Bulwer. He is, beyond all comparison, the most graceful and effective speaker I ever heard in England. All the world tells you that he makes signal failures in oratory—yet he rose, when his health was drank, and, in self-possessed, graceful, unhesitating language, playful, yet dignified, warm, yet not extravagant, he replied to the compliments of His Royal Highness, and brought forward his plan (as you have seen it reported in the newspapers) for the erection of a new theatre for the legitimate drama and Macready. I remember once hearing that Bulwer had a belief in his future eminence as an orator—and I would warrant his warmest anticipations in that career of ambition. He is a better speaker than Sheil, who followed him, and Sheil is renowned as an orator. Really there is nothing like one’s own eyes and ears in this world of envy and misrepresentation.
D—— sat near Sheil, at the cross-table, very silent, as is his custom and that of most keen observers. The courtly Sir Martin Shea was near B——, looking like some fine old picture of a wit of Charles the second’s time, and he and Y—— the actor made two very opposite and gentlemanlike speeches. I believe I have told you nearly all that struck me except what was reported in the gazettes, and that you have no need to read over again. I got away at eleven, and reached the opera in time to hear the last act of the Puritani, and see the Elsslers dance in the ballet, and with a look in at a ball, I concluded one of those exhausting, exciting, overdone London days, which are pleasanter to remember than to enjoy, and pleasanter to read about than either.
One of the most elegant and agreeable persons I ever saw was Miss Jane Porter, and I think her conversation more delightful to remember than any person’s I ever knew. A distinguished artist told me that he remembered her when she was his beau-ideal of female beauty; but in those days she was more “fancy-rapt,” and gave in less to the current and spirit of society. Age has made her, if it may be so expressed, less selfish in her use of thought, and she pours it forth like Pactolus—that gold which is sand from others. She is still what I should call a handsome woman, or, if that be not allowed, she is the wreck of more than a common allotment of beauty, and looks it. Her person is remarkably erect, her eyes and eyelids (in this latter resembling Scott) very heavily moulded, and her smile is beautiful. It strikes me that it always is so—where it ever was. The smile seems to be the work of the soul.
I have passed months under the same roof with Miss Porter, and nothing gave me more pleasure than to find the company in that hospitable house dwindled to a “fit audience though few,” and gathered around the figure in deep mourning which occupied the warmest corner of the sofa. In any vein, andaproposto the gravest and the gayest subject, her well-stored mind and memory flowed forth in the same rich current of mingled story and reflection, and I never saw an impatient listener beside her. I recollect, one evening, a lady’s singing “Auld Robin Gray,” and some one remarking, (rather unsentimentally) at the close, “By-the-by, what is Lady ——, (the authoress of the ballad) doing with so many carpenters. Berkely square is quite deafened with their hammering.” “Aproposof carpenters and Lady ——,” said Miss Porter—“this same charming ballad writer owes something to the craft. She was better-born than provided with the gifts of fortune, and in her younger days was once on a visit to a noble house, when to her dismay, a large and fashionable company arrived, who brought with them a mania for private theatricals. Her wardrobe was very slender, barely sufficient for the ordinary events of a week-day, and her purse contained one solitary shilling. To leave the house was out of the question, to feign illness as much so, and to decline taking a part was impossible, for her talent and sprightliness were the hope of the theatre. A part was cast for her, and, in despair, she excused herself from the gay party bound to the country town to make purchases of silk and satin, and shut herself up, a prey to mortified low spirits. The character required a smart village dress, and it certainly did not seem that it could come out of a shilling. She sat at her window, biting her lips, and turning over in her mind whether she could borrow of some one, when her attention was attracted to a carpenter, who was employed in the construction of a stage in the large hall, and who, in the court below, was turning off from his plane broad and long shavings of a peculiarly striped wood. It struck her that it was like riband. The next moment she was below, and begged of the man to give her half a dozen lengths as smooth as he could shave them. He performed his task well, and depositing them in her apartment, she set off alone on horseback to the village, and with her single shilling succeeded in purchasing a chip hat of the coarsest fabric. She carried it home, exultingly, trimmed it with her pine shavings, and on the evening of the performance appeared with a white dress, and hat and belt ribands which were the envy of the audience. The success of her invention gave her spirits and assurance, and she played to admiration. The sequel will justify my first remark. She made a conquest on that night of one of her titled auditors, whom she afterward married.—You will allow that Lady —— may afford to be tolerant of carpenters.”
An eminent clergyman one evening became the subject of conversation, and a wonder was expressed that he had never married. “That wonder,” said Miss Porter, “was once expressed to the reverend gentleman himself, in my hearing, and he told a story in answer which I will tell you—and perhaps, slight as it may seem, it is the history of other hearts as sensitive and delicate as his own. Soon after his ordination, he preached once every Sabbath, for a clergyman in a village not twenty miles from London. Among his auditors, from Sunday to Sunday, he observed a young lady, who always occupied a certain seat, and whose close attention began insensibly to grow to him an object of thought and pleasure. She left the church as soon as service was over, and it so chanced that he went on for a year without knowing her name; but his sermon was never written without many a thought how she would approve it, nor preached with satisfaction unless he read approbation in her face. Gradually he came to think on her at other times than when writing sermons, and to wish to see her on other days than Sundays; but the weeks slipped on, and though he fancied she grew paler and thinner, he never brought himself to the resolution either to ask her name, or to seek to speak with her. By these silent steps, however, love had worked into his heart, and he had made up his mind to seek her acquaintance and marry her, if possible, when one day he was sent for to minister at a funeral. The face of the corpse was the same that had looked up to him Sunday after Sunday, till he had learned to make it a part of his religion and his life. He was unable to perform the service, and another clergyman present officiated; and after she was buried, her father took him aside, and begged his pardon for giving him pain—but he could not resist the impulse to tell him that his daughter had mentioned his name with her last breath, and he was afraid that a concealed affection for him had hurried her to the grave. Since that, said the clergyman in question, my heart has been dead within me, and I look forward only. I shall speak to her in heaven.”
London is wonderfully embellished within the last three years—not so much by new buildings, public or private, but by the almost insane rivalry that exists among the tradesmen to outshow each other in the expensive magnificence of their shops. When I was in England before, there were two or three of these palaces of columns and plate-glass—a couple of shawl shops, and a glass warehouse or two, but now the west end and the city have each their scores of establishments, of which you would think the plate-glass alone would ruin any body but Aladdin. After an absence of a month from town lately, I gave myself the always delightful treat of an after-dinner ramble among the illuminated palaces of Regent street and its neighborhood, and to my surprise found four new wonders of this description—a shawl house in the upper Regent’s Circus, a silk mercer’s in Oxford street, a whip maker’s in Regent street, and a fancy stationer’s in the Quadrant—either of which establishments fifty years ago would have been the talk of all Europe. The first-mentioned warehouse lines one of the quarters of the Regent Circus, and turns the corner of Oxford street with what seems but one window—a series of glass plates, only divided by brass rods, reaching from the ground to the roof—window panes twelve feet high, and four or five feet broad! The opportunity which this immense transparency of front gives for the display of goods is proportionately improved; and in the mixture of colors and fabrics to attract attention there is evidently no small degree of art—so harmonious are the colors and yet so gorgeous the show. I see that several morerenovationsare taking place in different parts of both “city” and “town;” and London promises, somewhere in the next decimals, to complete its emergence from the chrysalis with a glory to which eastern tales will be very gingerbread matters indeed.
If I may judge by my own experience and by what I can see in the streets, all this night-splendor out of doors empties the playhouses—for I would rather walk Regent street of an evening than see ninety-nine plays in a hundred; and so think apparently multitudes of people, who stroll up and down the clean and broad London sidewalks, gazing in at the gorgeous succession of shop-windows, and by the day-bright glare of the illumination extending nods and smiles—the street, indeed, becoming gradually a fashionable evening promenade, as cheap as it is amusing and delightful. There are large classes of society, who find the evenings long in their dingy and inconvenient homes, and who must gosomewhere; and while the streets were dark, and poorly paved and lighted, the play-house was the only resort where they could beguile their cares with splendor and amusement, and in those days theatricals flourished, as in these days of improved thoroughfares and gay shops they evidently languish. I will lend the hint to the next essayist on the “Decline of the Drama.”
The increased attractiveness of London, from thus disclosing the secrets of its wondrous wealth, compensates in a degree for what increases as rapidly on me—the distastefulness of the suburbs, from the forbidding and repulsive exclusiveness of high garden walls, impermeable shrubberies, and every sort of contrivance for confining the traveller to the road, and nothing but the road. What should we say in America to travelling miles between two brick walls, with no prospect but the branches of overhanging trees from the invisible park lands on either side, and thealleyof cloudy sky overhead?—How tantalizing to pass daily by a noble estate with a fine specimen of architecture in its centre, and see no more of it than a rustic lodge and some miles of the tops of trees over a paling! All this to me is oppressive—I feel abridged of breathing room and eyesight—deprived of my liberty—robbed of my horizon. Much as I admire high preservation and cultivation, I would almost compromise for a “snake fence” in this part of England.
On a visit to a friend a week or two since in the neighborhood of London, I chanced, during a long walk, to get a glimpse over the wall of a nicely-gravelled and secluded path, which commanded what the proprietor’s fence enviously shut from the road—a noble view of London and the Thames. Accustomed to see people traversing my own lawn and fields in America without question, as suits their purpose, and tired of the bricks, hedges, and placards of blacking and pills, I jumped the fence, and with feelings of great relief and expansion aired my eyes and my imagination in the beautiful grounds of my friend’s opulent neighbor. The Thames, with its innumerable steamers, men-of-war, yachts, wherries, and ships—a vein of commercial and maritime life lying between the soft green meadows of Kent and Essex—formed a delicious picture of contrast and meaning beauty, which I gazed on with great delight for—some ten minutes. In about that time I was perceived by Mr. B——’s gardener, who, with a very pokerish stick in his hand, came running toward me, evidently by his pace, prepared for a vigorous pursuit of the audacious intruder. He came up to where I stood, quite out of breath, and demanded, with a tight grasp of his stick, what business I had there. I was not very well prepared with an answer, and short of beating the man for his impudence, (which in several ways might have been a losing job,) I did not see my way very clearly out of Mr. B.’s grounds. My first intention, to call on the proprietor and apologise for my intrusion while I complained of the man’s insolence, was defeated by the information, evidently correct, that Mr. B—— was not resident at the place, and so I was walked out of the lodge gate with a vagabond’s warning—never to let him “catch me there again.” So much for my liberal translation of a park fence.
This spirit of exclusion makes itself even more disagreeably felt where a gentleman’s paling chances to include any natural curiosity. One of the wildest, as well as most exquisitely beautiful spots on earth is the Dargle, in the county Wicklow, in Ireland. It is interesting, besides, as belonging to the estate of the orator and patriot Grattan. To get to it, we were let through a gate by an old man, who received a douceur: we crossed a newly reaped field, and came to another gate; another person opened this, and we paid another shilling. We walked on toward the glen, and in the middle of the path, without any object apparently but the toll, there was another locked gate, and another porter to pay; and when we made our exit from the opposite extremity of the grounds, after seeing the Dargle, there was a fourth gate and a fourth porter. The first field and fee belonged, if I remember rightly, to a Captain Somebody, but the other three gates belong to the present Mr. Grattan, who is very welcome to my three shillings, either as a tribute to his father’s memory, or to the beauty of Tinnehinch and the Dargle. But on whichever ground he pockets it, themodeof assessment is, to say the least, ungracious. Without subjecting myself to the charge of a mercenary feeling, I think I may say that the enthusiasm for natural scenery is very much clipped and belittled by seeing it at a shilling the perch—paying the money and taking the look. I should think no sum lost which was expended in bringing me to so romantic a glen as the Dargle; but it should be levied somewhere else than within sound of its wild waterfall—somewhere else than between the waterfall and the fine mansion of Tinnehinch.
The fish most “out of water” in the world is certainly a Frenchman in England without acquaintances. The illness of a friend has lately occasioned me one or two hasty visits to Brighton; and being abandoned on the first evening to the solitary mercies of the coffee-room of the hotel, I amused myself not a little with watching theennuiof one of these unfortunate foreigners who was evidently there simply to qualify himself to say that he had been at Brighton in the season. I arrived late, and was dining by myself at one of the small tables, when I became aware that some one at the other end of the room was watching me very steadily. The place was as silent as coffee-rooms usually are after the dinner hour, the rustling of newspapers the only sound that disturbed the digestion of eight or ten persons present, when the unmistakeable call of “Vaitare!” informed me that if I looked up I should encounter the eyes of a Frenchman. The waiter entered at the call, and after a considerable parley with my opposite neighbor, came over to me and said in rather an apologetic tone, “Beg pardon, sir, but theshevaleerwishes to know if your name isCoopair.” Not very much inclined, fatigued as I was, for a conversation in French, which I saw would be the result of a polite answer to his question, I merely shook my head, and took up the newspaper. The Frenchman drew a long sigh, poured out his last glass of claret, and crossing his thumbs on the edge of the table, fell into a profound study of the grain of the mahogany.
What with dawdling over coffee and tea and reading half a dozen newspapers, I whiled away the time till ten o’clock, pitying occasionally the unhappy chevalier who exhibited every symptom of a person bored to the last extremity. One person after another called for a bedroom candle, and exit finally the Frenchman himself, making me, however, a most courteous bow as he passed out. There were two gentlemen left in the room, one a tall and thin old man of seventy, the other a short and portly man of fifty or thereabouts, both quite bald. They rose together and came to the fire near which I was sitting.
“That last man that went out calls himself a chevalier,” said the thin gentleman.
“Yes,” said his stout friend—“he took me for a Mr. Cooper he had travelled with.”
“The deuce he did,” said the other—“why he took me for a Mr. Cooper, too, and we are not very much alike.”
“I beg pardon, gentlemen,” said I—“he took me for this Mr. Cooper too.”
The Frenchman’srusewas discovered. It was instead of a snuff-box—a way he had of making acquaintance. We had a good laugh at our triple resemblance (three men more unlike it would be difficult to find,) and bidding the two Messrs. Cooper good-night, I followed the ingenious chevalier up stairs.
The next morning I came down rather late to breakfast, and found my friend chipping his egg-shells to pieces at the table next to the one I had occupied the night before. He rose immediately with a look of radiant relief in his countenance, made a most elaborate apology for having taken me for Mr. Cooper (whom I was so like,cependant, that we should be mistaken for each other by our nearest friends,) and in a few minutes, Mr. Cooper himself, if he had entered by chance, would have returned the compliment, and taken me for the chevalier’s most intimate friend and fellow-traveller.
I remained two or three days at Brighton, and never discovered in that time that the chevalier’srusesucceeded with any other person. I was his only successful resemblance to “Monsieur Coopair.” He always waited breakfast for me in the coffee room, and when I called for my bill on the last morning, he dropped his knife and asked if I was going to London—and at what hour—and if I would be so obliging as to take a place for him in the same coach.
It was a remarkably fine day; and with my friend by my side outside of “the Age,” we sped on toward London, the sun getting dimmer and dimmer, and the fog thicker and more chilly at every mile farther from the sea. It was a trying atmosphere for the best of spirits—let alone the ever depressed bosom of a stranger in England. The coach stopped at the Elephant and Castle, and I ordered down my baggage, and informed my friend, for the first time, that I was bound to a country-house six miles from town. I scarce knew how I had escaped telling him of it before, but his “impossible! mon ami!” was said in a tone and accompanied with a look of the most complete surprise and despair. I was evidently his only hope in London.
I went up to town a day or two after; and in making my way to Paternoster Row, I saw my friend on the opposite side of the Strand, with his hands thrust up to the wrists in the pockets of his “Taglioni,” and his hat jammed down over his eyes, looking into the shop-windows without much distinction between the trunkmaker’s and the printseller’s—evidently miserable beyond being amused by anything. I was too much in a hurry to cross over and resume my office as escape-valve to hisennui, and I soon outwalked his slow pace, and lost sight of him. Whatever title he had to “chevalier” (and he was decidedly too deficient in address to belong to the order “d’industrie”) he had no letter of recommendation in his personal appearance, and as little the air of even a Frenchman of “quality” as any man I ever saw in the station of a gentleman. He is, in short, the person who would first occur to me if I were to see a paragraph in the Times headed “suicide by a foreigner.”
Revenons un peu.Brighton at this season (November) enjoys a climate, which, as a change from the heavy air in the neighborhood of London, is extremely exhilarating and agreeable. Though the first day of my arrival was rainy, a walk up the west cliff gave me a feeling of elasticity and lightness of spirits, of which I was beginning to forget the very existence, in the eternal fogs of the six months I had passed inland. I do not wonder at the passion of the English for Brighton. It is, in addition to the excellence of the air, both a magnificent city and the most advantageous ground for the discomfiture of the common enemy, “winter and rough weather.” The miles of broad gravel walk just out of reach of the surf of the sea, so hard and so smoothly rolled that they are dry in five minutes after the rain has ceased to fall, are, alone, no small item in the comfort of a town of professed idlers and invalids. I was never tired of sauntering along this smooth promenade so close to the sea. The beautiful children, who throng the walks in almost all weathers, (and what children on earth are half as beautiful as English children?) were to me a constant source of pleasure and amusement. Tire of this, and by crossing the street you meet a transfer of the gay throngs of Regent street and Hyde Park, with splendid shops and all the features of a metropolis, while midway between the sea and this crowded sidewalk pours a tide of handsome equipages, parties on horseback, and vehicles of every description, all subservient to exercise and pleasure.
My first visit to Brighton was made in avery cold day in summer, and I saw it through most unfavorable spectacles. But I should think that along the cliffs, where there are no trees or verdure to be seen, there is very little apparent difference between summer and winter; and coming here with the additional clothing of a severer season, the temperature of the elastic and saline air is not even chilly. The most delicate children play upon the beach in days when there is no sunshine; and invalids, wheeled out in these convenient bath chairs, sit for hours by the seaside, watching the coming and retreating of the waves, apparently without any sensation of cold—and this in December. In America (in the same latitudes with Leghorn and Venice) an invalid sitting out of doors at this season would freeze to death in half an hour. Yet it was as cold in August, in England, as it has been in November, and it is this temperate evenness of the weather throughout the year which makes English climate, on the whole, perhaps the healthiest in the world.
In the few days I was at Brighton, I became very fond of the perpetual loud beat of the sea upon the shore. Whether, like the “music of the spheres,” it becomes at last “too constant to be heard,” I did not ask—but I never lost the consciousness of it except when engaged in conversation, and I found it company to my thoughts when I dined or walked alone, and a most agreeable lullaby at night. This majestic monotone is audible all over Brighton, in-doors and out, and nothing overpowers it but the wind in a storm; it is even then only by fits, and the alternation of the hissing and moaning of the blast with the broken and heavy plash of the waters is so like the sound of a tempest at sea (the whistling in the rigging, and the burst of the waves) that those who have been at Brighton in rough weather, have realized all of a storm at sea but the motion and the sea-sickness—rather a large, but not an undesirable diminution of experience.
Calling on a friend at Brighton, I was introduced casually to a Mr. Smith. The name, of course, did not awaken any immediate curiosity, but a second look at the gentleman did—for I thought I had never seen a more intellectual or finer head. A fifteen minutes’ conversation, which touched upon nothing that could give me a clue to his profession, still satisfied me that so distinguished an address, and so keen an eye, could belong to no nameless person, and I was scarcely surprised when I read upon his card at parting—Horace Smith. I need not say it was a very great pleasure to meet him. I was delighted, too, that the author of books we love as much as “Zillah,” and “Brambletye House,” looks unlike other men. It gratifies somehow a personal feeling—as if those who had won so much admiration from us should, for our pride’s sake, wear the undeniable stamp of superiority—as if we had acquired a property in him by loving him. How natural it is, when we have talked and thought a great deal about an author, to call him “ours.” “What Smith? WhyourSmith—Horace Smith”—is as common a dialogue between persons who never saw him as it is among his personal friends.