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direction, to Lichfield, and in another, to Lin- | had arrived. He was in some alarm about coln and Boston; and there is, moreover, a his passenger, whose luggage remained on rapid excursion into the south-west of Scot- shipboard, but of whom nothing had been land. Ere he left England, he seems to have shifted his quarters for a time to the neighborhood of Blackheath and Greenwich, and so to have been able to plunge into London when he liked. There are hints in the book of visits to other parts of England than those which have been mentioned, and probably in his journal there are recollections of many spots not named, or merely named in these volumes; but so far as the volumes are concerned, the above is the outline, Here may seem meagre promise enough; but let any one who thinks the promise meagre read the book, and he will find it rich, beyond most, in quaint fact, in description of scenery, in autobiographic anecdote, in reflection, in humor, and in fancy. A few extracts must serve to suggest the variety of this rich

ness:

heard or seen since the moment of his departure from the consulate. We conferred together, the captain and I, about the expediency of setting the police on the traces (if any were found) of our vanished friend; but it struck me that the good captain was singularly reticent, and that there was something a little mysterious in a few points that he hinted at rather than expressed; so that, scrutinizing the affair carefully, I surmised that the intimacy of life on shipboard might have taught him more about the reverend gentleman than, for some reason or other, he deemed it prudent to reveal. At home, in our native country, I would have looked to the doctor's personal safety, and left his reputation to take care of itself, knowing that the good fame of a thousand saintly clergymen would amply dazzle out any lamentable spot on a single brother's character. But, in scornful and invidious England, on the idea that the credit of the sacred office was measurably intrusted to my discretion, "A Consular Experience.-A parcel of let- I could not endure, for the sake of American ters had been accumulating at the Consulate doctors of divinity generally, that this parfor two or three weeks, directed to a certain ticular doctor should cut an ignoble figure in doctor of divinity, who had left America the police reports of the English newspapers, by a sailing-packet and was still upon the except at the last necessity. The clerical sea. In due time the vessel arrived, and the body, I flatter myself, will acknowledge that reverend doctor paid me a visit. He was a I acted on their own principle. Besides, it fine-looking middle-aged gentleman, a perfect was now too late; the mischief and violence, model of clerical propriety, scholar-like, yet if any had been impending, were not of a with the air of a man of the world rather kind which it requires the better part of a than a student, though overspread with the week to perpetrate; and, to sum up the engraceful sanctity of a popular metropolitan tire matter, I felt certain, from a good deal divine, a part of whose duty it might be to of somewhat similar experience, that, if the exemplify the natural accordance between missing doctor still breathed this vital air, Christianity and good breeding. He seemed he would turn up at the consulate as soon a little excited, as an American is apt to on as his money should be stolen or spent. Prefirst arriving in England, but conversed with cisely a week after this reverend person's intelligence as well as animation, making disappearance, there came to my office a tall, himself so agreeable that his visit stood out middle-aged gentleman in a blue military in considerable relief from the monotony of surtout, braided at the seams, but out at the my daily commonplace. As I learned from elbows, and as shabby as if the wearer had authentic sources, he was somewhat distin- been bivouacking in it throughout a Crimean guished in his own region for fervor and clo- campaign. It was buttoned up to the very quence in the pulpit, but was now compelled chin, except where three or four of the butto relinquish it temporarily for the purpose tons were lost; nor was there any glimpse of renovating his impaired health by an ex- of a white shirt-collar illuminating the rusty tensive tour in Europe. Promising to dine black cravat. A grisly moustache was just with me, he took up his bundle of letters beginning to roughen the stranger's upper and went away. The doctor, however, failed lip. He looked disreputable to the last deto make his appearance at dinner-time, or to gree, but still had a ruined air of good soapologize the next day for his absence; and, ciety glimmering about him, like a few in the course of a day or two more, I for- specks of polish on a sword-blade that has got all about him, concluding that he must lain corroding in a mud-puddle. I took him have set forth on his continental travels, the to be some American marine officer, of dissiplan of which he had sketched out at our in-pated habits, or perhaps a cashiered British terview. Bat, by and by, I received a call major, stumbling into the wrong quarters from the master of the vessel in which he through the unrectified bewilderment of last

night's debauch. He greeted me, however, entered, and walked round among the graves with polite familiarity, as though we had and monuments. The latter were chiefly been previously acquainted; whereupon I headstones, none of which were very old, so drew coldly back (as sensible people natu- far as was discoverable by the dates; some, rally do, whether from strangers or former indeed, in so ancient a cemetery, were disfriends, when too evidently at odds with for- agreeably new, with inscriptions glittering tune), and requested to know who my visitor | like sunshine, in gold letters. The ground might be, and what was his business at the must have been dug over and over again inconsulate. Am I then so changed?' he numerable times, until the soil is made up of exclaimed, with a vast depth of tragic indig- what was once human clay, out of which nation; and, after a little blind and bewil- have sprung successive crops of gravestones, dered talk, behold! the truth flashed upon that flourish their allotted time, and disapme, it was the doctor of divinity! If I had pear like the weeds and flowers in their meditated a scene or a coup de théâtre, I could briefer period. The English climate is very not have contrived a more effectual one than unfavorable to the endurance of memorials by this simple and genuine difficulty of rec-in the open air. Twenty years of it suffice ognition. The poor divine must have felt to give as much antiquity of aspect, whether that he had lost his personal identity through to tombstone or edifice, as a hundred years the misadventures of one little week. And, of our own drier atmosphere-so soon do the to say the truth, he did look as if, like Job, drizzly rains and constant moisture corrode on account of his especial sanctity, he had the surface of marble or freestone. Sculpbeen delivered over to the direst temptations tured edges lose their sharpness in a year or of Satan, and, proving weaker than the man two; yellow lichens overspread a beloved of Uz, the arch-enemy had been empowered name, and obliterate it while it is yet fresh to drag him through Tophet, transforming upon some survivor's heart. Time gnaws an him in the process from the most decorous English gravestone with wonderful appetite; of metropolitan clergymen into the rowdiest and, when the inscription is quite illegible, and dirtiest of disbanded officers. 1 never the sexton takes the useless slab away, and fathomed the mystery of his military cos- perhaps makes a hearthstone of it, and digs tume, but conjectured that a lurking sense up the unripe bones which it ineffectually of fitness had induced him to exchange his tried to memorialize, and gives the bed to clerical garments for this habit of a sinner; another sleeper. In the Charter Street burnor can I tell precisely into what pitfall, not ial-ground at Salem, and in the old gravemore of vice than terrible calamity, he had yard on the hill at Ipswich, I have seen more precipitated himself,-being more than satis- ancient gravestones with legible inscriptions fied to know that the outcasts of society can on them than in any English churchyard. sink no lower than this poor, desecrated And yet this same ungenial climate, hostile wretch had sunk. To conclude this as it generally is to the long remembrance of wretched story, the poor doctor of divinity, departed people, has sometimes a lovely way having been robbed of all his money in this of dealing with the records on certain monulittle airing beyond the limits of propriety, ments that lie horizontally in the open air. was easily persuaded to give up the intended The rain falls into the deep incisions of the tour and return to his bereaved flock, who, letters, and has scarcely time to be dried very probably, were thereafter conscious of away before another shower sprinkles the flat an increased unction in his soul-stirring elo- stone again, and replenishes those little res quence, without suspecting the awful depths ervoirs." The unseen, mysterious seeds of into which their pastor had dived in quest mosses find their way into the lettered furof it. His voice is now silent. I leave it to rows, and are made to germinate by the conmembers of his own profession to decide tinental moisture and watery sunshine of the whether it was better for him thus to sin English sky; and, by and by, in a year, or outright, and so to be let into the miserable two years, or many years, behold the comsecret what manner of man he was, or to plete inscriptionhave gone through life outwardly unspotted, making the first discovery of his latent evil at the judgment-seat. It has occurred to me that his dire calamity, as both he and I regarded it, might have been the only method by which precisely such a man as himself, and so situated, could be redeemed. He has learned, cre now, how that matter stood."

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"Lillington Churchyard, near Leamington. -A well-trodden path led across the churchyard; and, the gate being on the latch, we

HERE LYETH THE BODY,

and all the rest of the tender falsehood-beautifully embossed in raised letters of living green, a bas-relief of velvet moss on the marble slab! It becomes more legible, under the skyey influences, after the world has forgotten the deceased, than when it was fresh from the stone-cutter's hands. It outlives the grief of friends. I first saw an example of this in Bebbington churchyard, in Cheshire, and thought

that nature must needs have had a special | a Latin inscription addressed to his wife, and tenderness for the person (no noted man, covering her remains; then his own slab, with however, in the world's history) so long ago the old anathematizing stanza upon it; then laid beneath that stone, since she took such that of Thomas Nash, who married his grandwonderful pains to keep his memory green. daughter; then that of Dr. Hall, the husband Perhaps the proverbial phrase just quoted may of his daughter Susannah; and, lastly, Susanhave had its origin in the natural phenome- nah's own. Shakspeare's is the commonestnon here described. While we rested our-looking slab of all, being just such a flagstone as selves on a horizontal monument, which was elevated just high enough to be a convenient scat, I observed that one of the gravestones lay very close to the church, so close that the droppings of the eaves would fall upon it. It seemed as if the inmate of that grave had desired to creep under the church-wall. On closer inspection, we found an almost illegible epitaph on the stone, and with difficulty made out this forlorn verse :

"Poorly lived,

And poorly died, Poorly buried, And no one cried."

It would be hard to compress the story of a cold and luckless life, death, and burial into fewer words or more impressive ones; at least, we found them impressive, perhaps because we had to re-create the inscription by scraping away the lichens from the faintly traced letters. The grave was on the shady and damp side of the church, endwise toward it, the headstone being within about three feet of the foundation wall; so that, unless the poor man was a dwarf, he must have been doubled up to fit him into his final resting-place. No wonder that his epitaph murmured against so poor a burial as this! His name, as well as I could make it out, was Treco,-John Treco, I think, and he died in 1810, at the age of seventy-four. The gravestone is so overgrown with grass and weeds, so covered with unsightly lichens, and so crumbly with time and foul weather, that it is questionable whether anybody will ever be at the trouble of deciphering it again. But there is a quaint and sad kind of enjoyment in defeating (to such slight degree as my pen may do it) the probabilities of oblivion for poor John Treco, and asking a little sympathy for him, half a century after his death, and making him better and more widely known, at least, than any other slumberer in Lillington churchyard: he having been, as appearances go, the outcast of them all."

"Shakspeare's Grave and Bust in Stratfordon-Avon Church.-The poet and his family are in possession of what may be considered the very best burial-places that the church affords. They lie in a row, right across the breadth of the chancel, the foot of each grave- | stone being close to the elevated floor on which the altar stands. Nearest to the side-wall, beneath Shakspeare's bust, is a slab bearing

Essex Street in Salem used to be paved with, when I was a boy. Moreover, unless my eyes or recollection deceive me, there is a crack across it, as if it had already undergone some such violence as the inscription deprecates. Unlike the other monuments of the family, it bears no name, nor am I acquainted with the grounds or authority on which it is absolutely determined to be Shakspeare's; although, being in a range with those of his wife and children, it might naturally be attributed to him. But, then, why does his wife, who died afterwards, take precedence of him and occupy the place next his bust? And where are the graves of another daughter and a son, who have a better right in the family row than Thomas Nash, his grandson-in-law? Might not one or both of them have been laid under the nameless stone? But it is dangerous trifling with Shakspeare's dust; so I forbear to meddle furthur with the grave (though the prohibition makes it tempting), and shall let whatever bones be in it rest in peace. Yet I must needs add that the inscription on the bust seems to imply that Shakspeare's grave was directly underneath it. The poet's bust is affixed to the northern wall of the church, the base of it being about a man's height, or rather more, above the floor of the chancel. The features of this piece of sculpture are entirely unlike any portrait of Shakspeare that I have ever seen, and compel me to take down the beautiful, lofty-browed, and noble picture of him which has hitherto hung in my mental portrait-gallery. The bust cannot be said to represent a beautiful face or an eminently noble head; but it clutches firmly hold of one's sense of reality and insists upon your accepting it, if not as Shakspeare the poet, yet as the wealthy burgher of Stratford, the friend of John a' Combe, who lies yonder in the corner. I know not what the phrenologists say to the bust. The forehead is but moderately developed, and retreats somewhat. the upper part of the scull rising pyramidally; the eyes are prominent almost beyond the penthouse of the brow; the upper lip is so fong that it must have been almost a deformity, unless the sculptor artistically exagger ated its length, in consideration that, on the pedestal, it must be foreshortened by being fooked at from below. On the whole, Shakspeare must have had a singular rather than a prepossessing face; and it is wonderful how; with this bust before its eyes, the world has

persisted in maintaining an erroneous notion | express how horrible this infant was, neither of his appearance, allowing painters and ought I'to attempt it. And yet I must add sculptors to foist their idealized nonsense on one final touch. Young as the poor little us all, instead of the genuine man. For my part, the Shakspeare of my mind's eye is henceforth to be a personage of a ruddy English complexion, with a reasonably capacious brow, intelligent and quickly observant eyes, a nosc curved slightly outward, a long, queer upper lip, with the mouth a little unclosed beneath it, and cheeks considerably developed in the lower part and beneath the chin. But, when Shakspeare was himself (for nine-tenths of the time, according to all appearances, he was but the burgher of Stratford), he doubtless shone through this dull mask and transfigured it into the face of an angel."

thing was, its pain and misery had endowed it with a premature intelligence, insomuch that its eyes seemed to stare at the bystanders out of their sunken sockets knowingly and appealingly, as if summoning us one and all to witness the deadly wrong of its existence. At least, I so interpreted its look, when it positively met and responded to my own awestricken gaze, and therefore I lay the case, as far as I am able, before mankind, on whom God has imposed the necessity to suffer in soul and body till this dark and dreadful wrong be righted."

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"Horrors of Speech-Making at a Civic "A Diseased Child in a London Workhouse. Dinner.-While I was thus amiably occupied -In this chamber (which was spacious, con- in criticising my fellow-guests, the mayor taining a large number of beds) there was a had got up to propose another toast; and, clear fire burning on the hearth, as in all the listening rather inattentively to the first senother occupied rooms; and directly in front tence or two, I soon became sensible of a drift of the blaze sat a woman holding a baby, in his worship's remarks that made me glance which, beyond all reach of comparison, was apprehensively towards Sergeant Wilkins. the most horrible object that ever afflicted my Yes,' grumbled that gruff personage, shovsight. Days afterwards-nay, even now, ing a decanter of port towards me, it is your when I bring it up vividly before my mind's turn next;' and seeing in my face, I suppose, eye-it seems to lie upon the floor of my heart, the consternation of a wholly unpractised orapolluting my moral being with the sense of tor, he kindly added, ' It is nothing. A mere something grievously amiss in the entire con- acknowledgment will answer the purpose. ditions of humanity. The holiest man could The less you say, the better they will like it.' not be otherwise than full of wickedness, the That being the case, I suggested that perhaps chastest virgin seemed impure, in a world they would like it best if I said nothing at where such a babe was possible. The gov-all. But the sergeant shook his head. Now, ernor whispered me, apart, that, like nearly all the rest of them, it was the child of unhealthy parents. Ah, yes! there was the mischief. This spectral infant, a hideous mockery of the visible link which Love creates between man and woman, was born of disease and sin. Diseased Sin was its father, and Sinful Discase its mother, and their offspring lay in the woman's arms like a nursing Pestilence, which, could it live and grow up, would make the world a more accursed abode than ever heretofore. Thank Heaven, it could not live! This baby, if we must give it that sweet name, seemed to be three or four months old, but, being such an unthrifty changeling, might have been considerably older. It was all covered with blotches, and preternaturally dark and discolored; it was withered away, quite shrunken and fleshless; it breathed only amid pantings and gaspings, and moaned painfully at every gasp. The only comfort in reference to it was the evident impossibility of its surviving to draw many more of those miserable, moaning breaths; and it would have been infinitely less heartdepressing to see it die, right before my eyes, than to depart and carry it alive in my remembrance, still suffering the incalculable torture of its little life. I can by no means

on first receiving the mayor's invitation to dinner, it bad occurred to me that I might possibly be brought into my present predicament; but I had dismissed the idea from my mind as too disagreeable to be entertained, and, moreover, as so alien from my disposition and character that Fate surely could not keep such a misfortune in store for me. If nothing else prevented, an earthquake or the crack of doom would certainly interfere before I need rise to speak. Yet here was the mayor getting on inexorably-and, indeed, I heartily wished that he might get on and on forever, and of his wordy wanderings find no end. If the gentle reader, my kindest friend and closest confidant, deigns to desire it, I can impart to him my own experience as a public speaker quite as indifferently as if it concerned another person. Indeed, it does concern another, or a mere spectral phenomenon, for it was not I, in my proper and natural self, that sat there at table or subsequently rose to speak. At the moment, then, if the choice had been offered me whether the mayor should let off a speech at my head or a pistol, I should unhesitatingly have taken the latter alternative. I had really nothing to say, not an idea in my head, nor, which was a great deal worse, any flowing words or embroidered sentences

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of extracts:

in which to dress out that empty Nothing, character which we should hardly have exand give it a cunning aspect of intelligence, pected from Mr. Hawthorne, did we not know such as might last the poor vacuity the little that somehow every American man, woman, time it had to live. But time pressed; the and child has of late conceived a detestation mayor brought his remarks, affectionately of our nation so deep, so bitter, so intense, as eulogistic of the United States, and highly complimentary to their distinguished repreto be comparable only to the feeling of the sentative at the table, to a close, amid a vast French, while yet revenge for Waterloo was deal of cheering; and the band struck up, the paramount desire of their Celtic souls. Hail Columbia,' I believe, though, it might There is no way of showing the strength and have been Old Hundred,' or God Save the keenness of this anti-English feeling which Queen' over again, for anything that I should have known or cared. When the pervades the book, except by another series music ceased, there was an intensely disagreeable instant, during which I seemed to rend away, and fling off the habit of a lifetime, and rose, still void of ideas, but with preternatural composure, to make a speech. The guests rattled on the table, and cried Hear!' most vociferously, as if now, at length, in this foolish and idly garrulous world, had come the long-expected moment when one golden word was to be spoken; and in that imminent crisis I caught a glimpse of a little bit of an effusion of international sentiment, which it might and must and should do to utter. Well; it was nothing, as the sergeant had said. What surprised me most was the sound of my own voice, which I had never before heard at a declamatory pitch, and which impressed me as belonging to some other person, who, and not myself, would be responsible for the speech: a prodigious consolation and encouragement under the circumstances! I went on without the slightest embarrassment, and sat down amid great applause, wholly undeserved by anything that I had spoken, but well won from Englishmen, methought, by the new development of pluck that alone had enabled me to speak at all."

While the reader is going through the varied richness of the book which we have thus tried to exemplify by a few selected extracts (and we may say that we have rarely known a book which it was so difficult to exemplify by apt extracts, on account both of its changing mood and matter, and the tendency of its best passages to lengthen themselves out), he will have been conscious from the first, unless he is unusually good-humored, or more deficient in patriotism than Englishmen generally are, of the perpetual presence of an irritating and disturbing element. This is Mr. Hawthorne's anti-English feeling. We can call it by no weaker name than that. From the beginning of the book to the end there is a succession, at intervals of only a few pages, of passages of the most acrid Americanism, conveying opinions respecting the English

"That in the English Character which has lost America.-It has required nothing less than the boorishness, the stolidity, the selfsufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a province of their small island. What pains did they take to shake us off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them! It might seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather the providence of God, who has, doubtless, a work for us to do, in which the massive materiality of the English character would have been too ponderous a dead weight upon our progress.

"The One-Eyedness of the English.-The secret of English practical success lies in their characteristic faculty of shutting one eye, whereby they get so distinct and decided a view of what immediately concerns them that they go stumbling towards it over a hundred insurmountable obstacles, and achieve a magnificent triumph without ever being aware of half its difficulties. If General McClellan

could but have shut his left eye, the right one would long ago have guided us into Richmond."

"English Girls.-The comely, rather than pretty, English girls, with their deep, healthy bloom, which an American taste is apt to deem fitter for a milkmaid than for a lady."

"Elderly English Ladies.-1 have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation before it can quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined and delicate, as far as her physique goes, than anything that we western people class under the name of woman. She like the looser development of our few fat has an awful ponderosity of frame, not pulpy, women, but massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling

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