cab; thoughtful, melancholy, disappointed in his political schemes, and
undervaluing his literary success, and expressing, in his scholar-like
and beautiful profile, as he passes us, both the thirst at his heart and
the satiety at his lips. The livery of his “tiger” is neglected, and he
drives like a man who has to choose between running and being run
against, and takes that which leaves him the most leisure for
reflection. Poor D’Israeli! With a kind and generous heart, talents of
the most brilliant order, an ambition which consumes his soul, and a
father who expects everything from his son; lost for the want of a tact
common to understandings fathoms deep below his own, and likely to drive
in Hyde Park forty years hence—if he die not of the corrosion of
disappointment—no more distinguished than now, and a thousand times
more melancholy.[3]

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

-----

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

                                LONDON.

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

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

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

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

-----

[4] Count D’Orsay.

                          ISLE OF WIGHT—RYDE.

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

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

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

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

“An American packet, you mean?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                      COMPARISON OF THE CLIMATE OF
                           EUROPE AND AMERICA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                           STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                 VISIT TO STRATFORD-ON-AVON—SHAKSPERE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And this small wooden box?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                              CHARLECOTE.

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

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

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

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

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

                            WARWICK CASTLE.

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

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

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

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

                              KENILWORTH.

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

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

“_Son’ di Firenze, signore!_”

“And where are you going?”

“_Li! al castello._”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----

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

                    CLOSING SCENES OF THE SESSION AT
                               WASHINGTON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                           THE INAUGURATION.

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

“It is a cloudy day, sir!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                       WASHINGTON IN THE SESSION.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                     WASHINGTON AFTER THE SESSION.

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

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

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

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