new idea, more than an ant on the surface of an egg. I have seen the very same mother earth abroad as at home; the same hills and valleys, difference of seasons; men are born, eat, sleep, love, and cheat one another, and die, here, as at home. Yes, I have acquired an idea of English rains and English blue-devils. And this Roman pre

tends to cure them with his puny homopathic doses of philosophy! I will try the Englishman.

Again I sat at the table, and read: 'In regulating the mind, you may do much by expedients;' so they do in politics. Having a short allowance of any virtue, the expedient is to supply the deficiency by something else;' yes, with hypocrisy, if you are short of religion. If one is dull, he should affect gravity; if a coward, mildness.' Now, with great deference for my Lord Bacon, this is absolute nonsense. Whoever thought of an ass affecting gravity, or a sheep mildness? A dull man is grave; and a coward meek of his proper nature, and what need to affect? The truth is, one cannot be coaxed into courage by my Lord Bacon, or bullied into it by Seneca. His magnus jacet' seems to me a good inscription for a tomb-stone, and his curing weakness by examples of strength, a downright quackery. As much courage as any one has in him by nature, so much he will manifest in the battle,' says Cataline, and the rogue speaks better than the philosopher. I have read better wisdom in Pilpay, of certain animals, whose leader, the bell-wether, I presume, harangued them eloquently upon this virtue, till encouraged by his words, they swore to close the ranks, and not to budge any more than a wall; but, perceiving a wolf's shadow, in a moment they fled off, general and all, in trepidation and confusion; nature prevailing over their sheepish resolution.

What a beautiful composition it is, Cicero's eulogy of books! They are so delightful at home, and no impediment abroad. A fool pays as much at the custom-house, as an orator; they lodge with us in Threadneedle-street, and ruralize with us at Kew or Windsor-with a fine cadence of the sentence rusticantur. One would think they travelled on horse-back. They intermingle socially in our business and idle hours, nourishing youth, (I have always grown thin on them,) and deceiving old age- more shame for them; sweetening our pleasures and consoling our adversities. His oratorship forgot, apparently, to except two cases, mine and his own, in which they are ineffectual. They do not cure blue devils, Thracian or Britannic.

Night now came on, and spread its crape over the day expiring. The air was chilly, the rain fell drop, drop, from the eaves, and by degrees I had horrified the place up to the standard of my melancholy. Heavens above! have I then traversed a sea of a thou sand leagues, broken up the habits of my life, and left the embraces of my friends, to die in the forlorn solitude of this hideous metropolis! And I walked about the room, killing, one by one, the creeping moments; for they seemed to crawl on my back, till midnight. The candle now flickered in the chimney, and Will-o'-the-Wisp sat upon the roof; the winds raved, the windows banged, the doors creaked, and the dog, foreboding mortality, howled upon the night! I crept into bed.

THE SECOND DAY. Spirits in a hanging condition. A person of my merit arrives in London as a new leaf vegetates on the Alleghany. If you wish to have an idea of infinite insignificance, to think of something less than nothing, I can assist your conceptions. To be solitary in a desert, is expected, and yet bad enough; but to be alone in the midst of two millions of one's fellow creatures it is unnatural and intolerable! Think only of being brought up in a village, where every one knew you were twenty-two inches long, and weighed eight pounds, when you were born; of growing up there, to be envied by the men, and loved by the women; to play the fiddle, and make a speech on the fourth of July; and then to see yourself walk about Cheap seriously, is one of the trying situations of life, and laugh as you will, your heart will rise in your throat. I was homesick while yet a stranger in Paris, but I found there at least some sort of sympathy. The porter's wife, a very fascinating woman, used to bring me, of a morning, a cup of tea, and entertained me with her end of the town; and seeing me retired, and pacing the room, she came in expressly, and implored me not to give myself up to sadness, and even once consoled me with a ticket to the 'Petit Lazari,' which cost her six sous. She said she was not ignorant of misfortune herself, and told me how she had come to Paris an entire stranger also, and how young and inexperienced she was, and how she had been deceived there three times; and then she wept, till I, in sympathy with her misfortunes, forgot my own. ・ ・ Äfter all, the sovereign specific for solitude, is woman. It was her first destination; and so natural and indispensable a one, that I am persuaded Adam must have loved Eve while she yet slept a rib within his bosom; better, perhaps you will say, than when she slept a wife along side of him. As for me, I never understood the first chapter of Genesis till now; and if woman had never been heard of before, I do verily believe I should have invented her in Threadneedle-street. There came one, two days ago, into the adjoining chamber, and thumped fourteen of the twenty-four hours on a piano, which I forgave, I even did not feel the annoyance, in consideration of her sex. Coming in, in the morning, it was to be sure a tender moment, and seeing the intervening door half open, I approached with the design, partly, of shutting it. The lady was not there; but just inside the door, there hung up, on a peg, her petticoat. Agesilaus,

king of Sparta, riding one day on a stick among his children, whispered to a friend, who had come in and surprised him, 'Say nothing of this until you are a father;' and you know the similar story of a great modern king being caught upon his hands and feet by a Spanish ambassador. He only asked if he had children. Seeing I was alone, (I will confess it) I took in my arms this petticoat, and embraced it, not without tears! I doubt whether a pious child ever embraced more innocently its mother; and I am quite sure this garment had never received proofs of a more harmless affection, while it contained the limbs of its beautiful possessor. If you tell this story to any young man, please enjoin silence upon him, until he may hold some post under petticoat government.

Every thing here is modelled upon the anti-social school. Mr. Boots, the Parisian, when he came, his hat in one hand and boots

in the other, made me at least an éloge of the veritable cirage Anglais. The chambermaid, too, as she made the bed, inquired how I had passed the night, and cautioned me against the tricks and libertinism of French chambermaids, and other maids-assisting my inexperience. But when the English shoe-black, under favor of Day and Martin, has contemplated himself in your boots, he smuggles them in by the chambermaid, lest he might disturb the gentleman; she, for the same reason, having made your bed mysteriously, while you were at breakfast. The waiter, too, has such a knowledge of humanity and its appetites, that he anticipates your wants, by looking upon the back of your neck. He too evades conversation, from respect to the gentleman. I should not be surprised, if I should die here of my own respectability. Whoever imagines that freedoms and attentions, even from this little people, are superfluous to one in my state of loneliness and abandonment, must have got over several of the prejudices of human nature. I could almost make a panegyric of American inquisitiveness; for what is it, after all, but either benevolence, or curiosity of knowledge, or at most, barrenness in want of conception? Commendable enough, and natural inclinations. He had not been suckled in the capital, that old Menedemus of the classic scene, who deemed the concerns of his fellow creatures a part of his own busiThe capital is the place to admire such sentiments.

ness.

One usually sees, in a voyage to Europe, little else than a frolic; and this you may realize, in some degree, if your plan is to overrun in a month or two the whole space; but if it is to be alone and stationary in a large city, without business, you will do well to measure the strength of your domestic attachments, and the consistency of your courage. As it is possible, on a little and sufficient income, to be happier than Crœsus, so on a little misery, to be more unhappy than Lazarus or Job. But this I do not count among the little evils. Believe me, there has not issued from Pandora's box a more distressing malady than home-sickness. I am now in my second day, and near its close. Every feeling of resistance has died away, and the heart, without support, left to prey upon itself. At this stage, there is but one remedy, and it is a privilege of your weaker sex, and not the only instance in which weakness makes your strength; I mean that with which we solace our pains in coming into this crying world. We of the other sex, in modern times, and especially at fifty-five degrees north latitude, think this sentimental crying unbecoming our manhood. We cry now-a-days only for spite, or some of the bad passions. I have read lately a great legislator of moral sentiments, Adam Smith, who is as hardened against these melting propensities as a rock of the Highlands; not allowing us a tear, even with the foot upon the scaffold. It is possible, however, he might make an exception in favor of one lodging in Threadneedle-street! With respect, I prefer nature to any of the Smiths; and she has made, in this point, no such distinction of sex. She has set us both off to the same tune. The best examples, too, of antiquity are in favor. Hector, the pious Æneas, and other respectable ancients, not inferior in courage to any thing in Scotland, were quite subject to this weakness; and it never has been mentioned to their discredit. By opposing or suppressing pain, we increase its intensity. It is from the opposite cause that

cowardly persons bear more beating than the brave; drunkards fall with less danger than the sober. Beside, (I say it on the authority of the doctors,) these anti-diuretic affections are medicinal. It is known that patients, who by words, wailings, or tears, vent their grief, are longer lived than the silent. Jeremiah was a notorious long liver; and if Shakspeare's girl had told her love,' she might, beyond all reasonable doubt, have survived, perhaps lived be the mother of many children. Good night!

THE THIRD DAY. This day has at least action in it. It contains my first excursion in the great Babylon, and will make the plump part of this letter. The events are quite little; but I have had yet no intercourse with greater ones, and must make the best of them. Little as they are, I ascribe to them almost the preservation of my life. Ever since the invention of steam, excitement has become one of our natural and indispensable wants. . But I must proceed. I turned heels upon Threadneedle-street, at eight; the object being to find a lodging nearer the west, and less subject to the spleen.

This street deserves a particular notice; not because it has the Bank, Royal Exchange, Stock Exchange, South Sea House, and St. Bartholomew-who-was-flayed-alive's Church in it, with a gridiron on the top, but on its own account. St. Anne, where I lived in Paris, is so called, because there are no saints in it; the Rue des Postes, no post office; and the Rue Bergere, there not being any shepherdess in in it; but Threadneedle-street does not belie its etymology. Just where I lodge, it is so narrow that a slender man has sometimes to make himself thinner by holding his breath, to get through it; and yet all London, I verily believe, passes through it daily. The very fat persons used to go round by East Cheap and Mrs. Quickly's. This was my starting place, or rather Leadenhall-street, close by, whither I had sauntered only to take a look at a camel, a hundred feet in the air, and other images, on top of the East India House. This seemed to me the place where rich men go through the eye of a neeedle, and camels go to heaven. On my return, I was choaked up with all sexes, ages, and conditions, in this strait, until, by the accumulated pressure from behind, we were pushed through, with almost an explosion, and sent diverging violently into the wider space; as the Juniatta, pent between two hills, rushes out and expatiates in the wider channel. A native gets through well enough, and seems rather pleased than otherwise; but a new comer puts himself in a flurry, makes supernatural exertions, struggles till he is black in the face, comes out deplorably rumpled, and then stands rubbing his legs or adjusting his wardrobe, in a corner. Your best way, in such an emergency, is to run into the Royal Exchange, or some place of public resort, to get out of the crowd. So I did.

This Exchange, inside, is an open area, like Priam's chapel, surrounded by a colonnade and piazza, with benches. Upon one of these I sat down, and clasping my hands instinctively, said over the multiplication table. It not being 'change hours, it was empty, except that now and then a person of a meditative and algebraic expression of countenance, would pass through; no more noticing me, and a poor German who sat in symmetry, with a face an ell Flemish long, on the

other side; no more, apparently, than if we had been similar quantities on the opposite sides of an equation. Here again, I was mortified at the nothingness of a stranger in London. Unhappy German! thought I; he sits there, the two millionth part of a community, and if expunged altogether, would not be missed in the great account. He is the fag-end of an infinite series, a fluxionary calculus run out. Happy! if he has left no one to love him in his native land; if his ambition is to pass down the stream of life unnoticed; or if, unlike me, he is unconscious of his prodigious littleness! And now I sat calculating, being in a mood to conceive the divinity of the place, and found out that one's affections for one's friends increase, exactly the reverse of gravitation, and as the square of the distance from the centre of attraction; and that in a multitude one is seen inversely, as the number of persons there are to look at one; until at last Ì became bewildered in the dizziness of computation, and various spectres floated before my fancy. Millions of little pounds sterling, and winged speculations, were fluttering through the air, and American stocks, and innumerable counterfeits, South Sea schemes, and bad debts, in the shape of lizards, toads, spiders, and bats, were climbing up the walls, or hanging from the eaves of the piazza. Around this building are ranged, in awful series, our British kings: they were ours before the Independence; and I should like to know who gave Thomas Jefferson, or any body else, the right to cancel the claims of his posterity? And here was the gracious and virginal Anne; ditto Elizabeth, to give grace to the sovereignty. I should oppose the salique laws, if for no other reason, for the family picture. I confess no collection has ever yet fixed my attention, that had not a woman in it. Our fifty-six signers of Independence, in the legislative hall, stripped of the patriotic interest, is the ugliest picture upon the earth. Well did John Randolph term it 'the shin-piece.' I now got up, and continued my journey, believing that, like the Gresham College, I should be of more account westwardly.

Of the crowds upon Cheapside, I despair of giving you any sensible impression. Malthus' book and Miss Martineau's have been of no manner of service. This huddling together has had its effect upon the national character. The fondness of the English for squeezing one another, and their flocking for this express purpose to public places, are matters of history. In a fashionable party, a squeeze is the chief luxury of the entertainment, and the quantity of pressure enjoyed, the measure of its gentility. You know the distress of English travellers who come to America, where the ordinary pressure being removed, they feel as fish transferred from their denser medium to our atmosphere. Mrs. Trollope was very unhappy. But contrary effects are produced often by the same causes, or at least by their reaction; so the desire to be alone is also a national characteristic of the Englishman. Indeed, the habits of a London existence seem almost entirely built upon the extremes of the social and antisocial propensities.

The crowd upon the street, of vehicles crammed to suffocation, and the dense mass of pedestrians, with the addition of umbrellas, on a wet day, is indeed a spectacle. As I stood wrapped up in a stupid astonishment, and looking on, I met an adventure, which made me a ridiculous part of the exhibition. I saw a person at some distance,