Part 28 (1/2)
My companion led the way to a hotel, and we were introduced by _English_ waiters (I had not seen such a thing in three years, and it was quite like being waited on by gentlemen), to two blazing coal fires in the ”coffee room” of the ”s.h.i.+p.” Oh what a comfortable place it appeared! A rich Turkey carpet snugly fitted, nice-rubbed mahogany tables, the morning papers from London, bellropes that _would_ ring the bell, doors that _would_ shut, a landlady that spoke English, and was kind and civil; and, though there were eight or ten people in the room, no noise above the rustle of a newspaper, and positively, rich red damask curtains, neither second-hand nor shabby, to the windows! A greater contrast than this to the things that answer to them on the continent, could scarcely be imagined.
_Malgre_ all my observations on the English, whom I have found elsewhere the most open-hearted and social people in the world, they are said by themselves and others to be just the contrary; and, presuming they were different in England, I had made up my mind to seal my lips in all public places, and be conscious of n.o.body's existence but my own. There were several elderly persons dining at the different tables; and one party, of a father and son, waited on by their own servants in livery. Candles were brought in, the different cloths were removed; and, as my companion had gone to bed, I took up a newspaper to keep me company over my wine. In the course of an hour, some remark had been addressed to me, provocative of conversation, by almost every individual in the room! The subjects of discussion soon became general, and I have seldom pa.s.sed a more social and agreeable evening. And so much for the first specimen of English reserve!
The fires were burning brilliantly, and the coffee-room was in the nicest order when we descended to our breakfast at six the next morning. The tea-kettle sung on the hearth, the toast was hot, and done to a turn, and the waiter was neither sleepy nor uncivil--all, again, very unlike a morning at a hotel in _la belle_ France.
The coach rattled up to the door punctually at the hour; and, while they were putting on my way-worn baggage, I stood looking in admiration at the carriage and horses. They were four beautiful bays, in small, neat harness of glazed leather, bra.s.s-mounted, their coats s.h.i.+ning like a racer's, their small, blood-looking heads curbed up to stand exactly together, and their hoofs blacked and brushed with the polish of a gentleman's boots. The coach was gaudily painted, the only thing out of taste about it; but it was admirably built, the wheel-horses were quite under the coachman's box, and the whole affair, though it would carry twelve or fourteen people, covered less ground than a French one-horse cabriolet. It was altogether quite a study.
We mounted to the top of the coach; ”all right,” said the ostler, and away shot the four fine creatures, turning their small ears, and stepping together with the ease of a cat, at ten miles in the hour.
The driver was dressed like a Broadway idler, and sat in his place, and held his ”ribands” and his tandemwhip with a confident air of superiority, as if he were quite convinced that he and his team were beyond criticism--and so they were! I could not but smile at contrasting his silence and the speed and ease with which we went along, with the clumsy, c.u.mbrous diligence or vetturino, and the crying, whipping, cursing and ill-appointed postillions of France and Italy. It seems odd, in a two hours' pa.s.sage, to pa.s.s over such strong lines of national difference--so near, and not even a shading of one into the other.
England is described always very justly, and always in the same words: ”it is all one garden.” There is not a cottage between Dover and London (seventy miles), where a poet might not be happy to live. I saw a hundred little spots I coveted with quite a heart-ache. There was no poverty on the road. Everybody seemed employed, and everybody well-made and healthy. The relief from the deformity and disease of the wayside beggars of the continent was very striking.
We were at Canterbury before I had time to get accustomed to my seat.
The horses had been changed twice; the coach, it seemed to me, hardly stopping while it was done; way-pa.s.sengers were taken up and put down, with their baggage, without a word, and in half a minute; money was tossed to the keeper of the turnpike gate as we dashed through; the wheels went over the smooth road without noise, and with scarce a sense of motion--it was the perfection of travel.
The new driver from Canterbury rather astonished me. He drove into London every day, and was more of a ”_swell_.” He owned the first team himself, four blood horses of great beauty, and it was a sight to see him drive them! His language was free from all slang, and very gentlemanlike and well chosen, and he discussed everything. He found out that I was an American, and said we did not think enough of the memory of Was.h.i.+ngton. Leaving his bones in the miserable brick tomb, of which he had descriptions, was not, in his opinion, worthy of a country like mine. He went on to criticise Julia Grisi (the new singer just then setting London on fire), hummed airs from ”_Il Pirati_,” to show her manner; sang an English song like Braham; gave a decayed Count, who sat on the box, some very sensible advice about the management of a wild son; drew a comparison between French and Italian women (he had travelled); told us who the old Count was in very tolerable French, and preferred Edmund Kean and f.a.n.n.y Kemble to all actors in the world. His taste and his philosophy, like his driving, were quite unexceptionable. He was, withal, very handsome, and had the easy and respectful manners of a well-bred person. It seemed very odd to give him a s.h.i.+lling at the end of the journey.
At Chatham we took up a very elegantly dressed young man, who had come down on a fis.h.i.+ng excursion. He was in the army, and an Irishman. We had not been half an hour on the seat together, before he had discovered, by so many plain questions, that I was an American, a stranger in England, and an acquaintance of a whole regiment of his friends in Malta and Corfu. If this had been a Yankee, thought I, what a chapter it would have made for Basil Hall or Madame Trollope! With all his inquisitiveness I liked my companion, and half accepted his offer to drive me down to Epsom the next day to the races. I know no American who would have beaten _that_ on a stage-coach acquaintance.
LETTER LXVIII.
FIRST VIEW OF LONDON--THE KING'S BIRTHDAY--PROCESSION OF MAIL COACHES--REGENT STREET--LADY BLESSINGTON--THE ORIGINAL PELHAM--BULWER, THE NOVELIST--JOHN GALT--D'ISRAELI, THE AUTHOR OF VIVIAN GREY--RECOLLECTIONS OF BYRON--INFLUENCE OF AMERICAN OPINIONS ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
LONDON.--From the top of Shooter's Hill we got our first view of London--an indistinct, architectural ma.s.s, extending all round to the horizon, and half enveloped in a dim and lurid smoke. ”That is St.
Paul's!--there is Westminster Abbey!--there is the tower of London!”
What directions were these to follow for the first time with the eye!
From Blackheath (seven or eight miles from the centre of London), the beautiful hedges disappeared, and it was one continued ma.s.s of buildings. The houses were amazingly small, a kind of thing that would do for an object in an imitation perspective park, but the soul of neatness pervaded them. Trelises were nailed between the little windows, roses quite overshadowed the low doors, a painted fence enclosed the hand's breadth of gra.s.s-plot, and very, oh, _very_ sweet faces bent over lapfuls of work beneath the snowy and looped-up curtains. It was all home-like and amiable. There was an _affectionateness_ in the mere outside of every one of them.
After crossing Waterloo Bridge, it was busy work for the eyes. The brilliant shops, the dense crowds of people, the absorbed air of every pa.s.senger, the lovely women, the cries, the flying vehicles of every description, pa.s.sing with the most dangerous speed--accustomed as I am to large cities, it quite made me dizzy. We got into a ”jarvey” at the coach-office, and in half an hour I was in comfortable quarters, with windows looking down St. James street, and the most agreeable leaf of my life to turn over. ”Great emotions interfere little with the mechanical operations of life,” however, and I dressed and dined, though it was my first hour in London.
I was sitting in the little parlor alone over a fried sole and a mutton cutlet, when the waiter came in, and pleading the crowded state of the hotel, asked my permission to spread the other side of the table for a clergyman. I have a kindly preference for the cloth, and made not the slightest objection. Enter a fat man, with top-boots and a hunting-whip, rosy as Bacchus, and excessively out of breath with mounting one flight of stairs. Beefsteak and potatoes, a pot of porter, and a bottle of sherry followed close on his heels. With a single apology for the intrusion, the reverend gentleman fell to, and we ate and drank for a while in true English silence.
”From Oxford, sir, I presume,” he said at last, pus.h.i.+ng back his plate, with an air of satisfaction.
”No, I had never the pleasure of seeing Oxford.”
”R--e--ally! may I take a gla.s.s of wine with you, sir?”
We got on swimmingly. He would not believe I had never been in England till the day before, but his cordiality was no colder for that. We exchanged port and sherry, and a most amicable understanding found its way down with the wine. Our table was near the window, and a great crowd began to collect at the corner of St. James' street. It was the king's birth-day, and the people were thronging to see the n.o.bility come in state from the royal _levee_. The show was less splendid than the same thing in Rome or Vienna, but it excited far more of my admiration. Gaudiness and tinsel were exchanged for plain richness and perfect fitness in the carriages and harness, while the horses were incomparably finer. My friend pointed out to me the different liveries as they turned the corner into Piccadilly, the duke of Wellington's among others. I looked hard to see His Grace; but the two pale and beautiful faces on the back seat, carried nothing like the military nose on the handles of the umbrellas.
The annual procession of mail-coaches followed, and it was hardly less brilliant. The drivers and guard in their bright red and gold uniforms, the admirable horses driven so beautifully, the neat harness, the exactness with which the room of each horse was calculated, and the small s.p.a.ce in which he worked, and the compactness and contrivance of the coaches, formed altogether one of the most interesting spectacles I have ever seen. My friend, the clergyman, with whom I had walked out to see them pa.s.s, criticised the different teams _con amore_, but in language which I did not always understand. I asked him once for an explanation; but he looked rather grave, and said something about ”gammon,” evidently quite sure that my ignorance of London was a mere quiz.
We walked down Piccadilly, and turned into, beyond all comparison, the most handsome street I ever saw. The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the Kohl-market of Vienna, the Rue de la Paix and Boulevards of Paris, have each impressed me strongly with their magnificence, but they are really nothing to Regent-street. I had merely time to get a glance at it before dark; but for breadth and convenience, for the elegance and variety of the buildings, though all of the same scale and material, and for the brilliancy and expensiveness of the shops, it seemed to me quite absurd to compare it with anything between New York and Constantinople--Broadway and the Hippodrome included.
It is the custom for the king's tradesmen to illuminate their shops on His Majesty's birth-night, and the princ.i.p.al streets on our return were in a blaze of light. The crowd was immense. None but the lower order seemed abroad, and I cannot describe to you the effect on my feelings on hearing my language spoken by every man, woman, and child, about me. It seemed a completely foreign country in every other respect, different from what I had imagined, different from my own and all that I had seen; and, coming to it last, it seemed to me the farthest off and strangest country of all--and yet the little sweep who went laughing through the crowd, spoke a language that I had heard attempted in vain by thousands of educated people, and that I had grown to consider next to unattainable by others, and almost useless to myself. Still, it did not make me feel at home. Everything else about me was too new. It was like some mysterious change in my own ears--a sudden power of comprehension, such as a man might feel who was cured suddenly of deafness. You can scarcely enter into my feelings till you have had the changes of French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Illyrian, and the mixtures and dialects of each, rung upon your hearing almost exclusively, as I have for years. I wandered about as if I were exercising some supernatural faculty in a dream.
A friend in Italy had kindly given me a letter to Lady Blessington, and with a strong curiosity to see this celebrated lady, I called on the second day after my arrival in London. It was ”deep i' the afternoon,” but I had not yet learned the full meaning of ”town hours.” ”Her ladys.h.i.+p had not come down to breakfast.” I gave the letter and my address to the powdered footman, and had scarce reached home when a note arrived inviting me to call the same evening at ten.