tency: so I approached and asked it from the cow; and the juggling, adulterating maid, dipping her glass into the water-bucket, while I was contemplating her Welsh roses, by a slight of hand made me swallow one half the Thames; the rinsings of twenty of my predecessors. He who has only learned cunning from the fox, or rudeness from the bear, in Schuylkill county, need not come to set up his business in London. They reckon, for a supply of the metropolis, eighteen thousand cows, each nine quarts per day, above eight millions of gallons; and the milk-girl, rosy, robust and Welsh qua lac venale per urbem non tacita portat is every where at dawn crying and distributing it in tin pails. The supply of butter is eleven thousand tons; cheese, thirteen thousand. I like to give you the statistics in small pills, they are so indigestible in large doses. The music of the guards about the palace daily, between ten and eleven, is sweet and agreeable. That of the Tuilleries, when the still evening approaches, and the common world may be soothed of its labors of the day, is at a better hour. The English give you twenty, the French fifty minutes of this royal harmony.

What a delicious flavor of truffles! Why is this root, so rich and ambrosial, undiscovered in our country? How perverse it was in nature to put a turkey three thousand miles from its sauce! It was the invention of the hogs (in this friends of mankind) that brought this plant into human uses. The king's dinner is a matter of infinite consideration. Do not be associating with it your vulgar ideas of a kitchen. There are comptrollers of the kitchen,' and 'clerks of the kitchen the chief cook is William Ball, Esquire; his aid Thomas Higgins, Esquire; and Thomas Brown, Esquire, is chief butler. The English 'squire, take notice, has about the same relation of dignity to the American, that sterling has to the pound continental. I chinked a few sovereigns in my pocket, and with the sound paid the smell of the dinner; and His Majesty being content with this Gascon currency, I took leave of the palace.

Now to describe to you the interior of the Park. I forsee that Miss Martineau will write a book in 1838, and will entitle it' How to Observe. Until that event, I must get along as I can. The geese here go barefooted, and venture out in all sorts of weather without umbrellas. What a stately swan! See how with arched neck it rows majestically! Quark! quack-quack-quack! Bah! its a duck! Now I recollect, studying the history of these three kingdoms, to have read, under the article Charles II., of a spot here called Duck Island,' which had, for the royal pleasure, always a decoy of ducks upon it.' It is apparently a religion of the place, as Juno's geese of the capitol. It is a study for Hobbema. See how the lordly drake stands upon the margin, his wives and little ducklings faintly dabbling among the rushes. The paternal air is complete and exemplary.

The swallows are chattering among the shelvy fret-work of the Abbey. The day is genial with the sun, and white fleecy clouds are passing over it, to temper the heat. Flora's prettiest buttons are disclosed, and the gales are perfumed with the sweet spring. Yet nature seems drowsy, and the Park lifeless. Beside geese and ducks,

* Almanack des Gourmands.

† A Dutch painter, famous for geese.

a few domestic animals, as sheep and cows, are feeding upon the wide field. The English are admirable, beyond all other people, in their rural parks, but a city pleasure-ground requires the addition of those thinking things, men and women. Here a few persons only are seated about the hundred acres, seeming to have retired hither, as melancholy rooks, to mope, or sleep away their revels in the shade; and a few are straggling about solitary a studious man, or a pair of lovers, to avoid observation. An old woman, done up in woolsey, or a Miss Peggy, her linen looking out from under her petticoat awry, or a Sawney, with scraggy knees, enjoying fresh air between his plaid and gaiters, stalks across your path; and now and then a horse, bestrode by a cavalier of the court, or endorsed by a fair lady, passes rapidly through. A few favored carriages, also, have the privilege of driving through to the palace. What mallaria, thought I, has passed over this most ancient, convenient, and beautiful of the English parks? The mystery has been explained: it is unfashionable; the upper classes only looking in, as they pass through Piccadilly, and the middle classes not choosing to frequent places contemned or neglected by their betters: so that St. James is left to his old acquaintances, the publicans and sinners.

This park lies adjoining the palace, in the midst of a populous district, and being spacious enough for general accommodation, should be a choice ornament of the metropolis. I would make it lively with jet d'eaux, beautiful with lawns, woodlands, and gardens, and shrubbery, and splendid with statuary, in all the blandishments of elegant forms; and the genteel world at stated hours should make it their fashionable promenade on foot; that the transcendant English woman, from observation of the fine forms and attitudes of sculptured images, exhibited to view from infancy, should attain that which, for want of education, she does not possess in a supreme degree, a graceful air and gait in her walk. In no other state can a woman be seen in the plenitude of her charms; and neither the graces of movement, nor any other graces, were brought ever to perfection under the discipline of an exclusive set.

4

As for me, I do not presume to survive a pretty pair of feet and ankles. The English travellers, plague on them! have not done justice to your American girls for these acquirements. Taken up with your features, they have apparently overlooked your feet; or in your carelessness you have not taken proper steps to exhibit them, or rather perhaps, lacking domestic impression, the bump (of pretty feet) remains in the Englishman's skull yet undeveloped. You are fortunately not rich enough to ride always, and therefore, in defect of gardens, foot it,' the world looking on, on your snug Chestnut streets and Broadways; and therefore have a light, airy grace of movement, which, in the estimation of all persons of competent taste, does you infinite credit. Art passes into nature. Let the English lady have but her fashionable promenade on foot, where the amiable vanities may be paraded and encouraged, and she too will have darling little feet, ankles round and tapering, and movements light and aerial in her walk at last she will be born so. To what else does the belle "of the Tuilleries or Prado, owe her superiority, her delicacy of feet, her

amenity of movement, her lightness and springiness of tread, that scarce make a dint upon the down?'

Incomparable Tuilleries! How sweet, of the fresh morning, to walk amidst the stately marble heroes and divinities, and to see its ten thousand children at their exhilarating and healthful recreations; or the lively belle, in her accoutrements of the season; how majestic in her winter furs, how beautiful in her summer gauze, in her silks like the misty cloud, or changeable in the sun, as if Iris had dipped the woof,' moving at the side of her graceful cavalier, upon the smooth and silent walk, and dividing with art your admiration of human shapes, graces and expressions! Or, as the day declines, to mix with the fashionable groups, seated or promenading, and close the day with the sweet harmony of Rossini or Mozart from the palace gate. The English children, with their fine classical profiles, large clear eyes, hair in soft tresses, with their open honesty of face, and innocence and grace natural to childhood, what a drapery for a garden! But who is going to let his children associate with one knows not whom? So they walk out with their grumbling and surly nurses, instead of being allotted a portion of their fine garden, where their little emulation of address and activity might be brought out by healthful recreations, communicating at the same time cheerfulness, a sense of neatness, and propriety, and health, to their nurses, and a gratification to the idle spectators, especially their parents. To the mother, what delight to see here 'Her little self refined in purer clay !'

And to the father:

'Quelle joie en effet

De se voir caressé d'une spouse qu'on aime,
Et de voir autour de soi

De petits citoyens,' etc.

I went musing thus along, trying to recollect Boileau's lines, by the water side, where the lime-tree hangs its rugged locks upon the stream, enclosed by a tuft of hedge-wood, and crept close under its shade. I reposed here and said with Isaiah, By the rivers of Babylon I sat me down' and much more truly of London than he of Babylon, for here are three rivers the Thames, one of nature's prettiest productions, and the New River' by Hugh Middleton, circulating in its ten thousand leaden veins through London, and the Serpentine, beside docks, and canals, and these little puddles of St. James; and the prophet had but the Euphrates, and it but a hundred yards wide, while the Thames is between three and four hundred. 'And we hanged our harps,' said the prophet, upon the willows thereof. Here also a gray and melancholy willow hangs drooping upon the brook. I will often, said I, take a book, and escape the dog-star in this pleasant retreat; and thinking of harps, an old ballad, which had slept from the cradle in my memory, suddenly awoke, and I sang it with great emphasis: The ducks and the geese they all swam

IF Wiliam Penn, instead of Nimrod, had founded Babylon, David would have been obliged to hang his harp on a less poetical place than a willow; Isaiah would have prophecied in a vale of bricks. Such gardens as St. James' are the work of princes, and not to be expected, they say, from the calculating spirit of a republic. But here is the Zoological,' itself the ornament of a city, from the subscription of private gentlemen.

over;' when all at once I espied, at two steps distance, a pair of lovers eyeing me attentively from behind a screen of the underwood. Why is one more ashamed of being ridiculous than vicious, and more in awe of other's opinions than one's own? Deeply mortified, and softening to a gentler note the unsentimental lullaby, I went off, regaled with a half-suppressed titter of the lady, followed by a full chorus of a laugh by the gentleman.

The new palace looks you in the face, approaching the West End. Having a ticket of admission, I spent some time in looking through this residence of future monarchs. It is the old Buckingham House reformed. King William refuses to lodge in it, and clings with Dutch inhabitiveness to the old mews of St. James'. This palace, like twenty others, is built with two wings, connected at the farthest end by a main building. Entering this, upon a level with the ground, you are in a splendid hall, surrounded by half a hundred white Corinthian pillars, their capitals of Mosaic gold, and by rich scagliola walls. Ascending a few steps, you enter the Hall of Sculpture,' of the entire length of the building, and connected with a dining room, concert-chamber, and library, the queen's morning room, and private stairs. By a grand stair-way on the left, you enter the Saloon of Reception, and Throne Room, and adjoining are the king's tiring room, withdrawing room, also the queen's, with the royal bed-chamber between, dressing rooms, picture galleries, etc. Ladies of honor and waiting maids are to inhabit the left wing, and servants the right. The whole is filled up as becomes a royal residence. The chapel only is unfurnished. A chapel is always an appurtenance of a palace, and usually of gentlemen's seats; and religion is more familiarly admitted here than in America, among the worldly concerns of life; and still more in the Catholic countries. The ladies of the continent often intermix a fervent devotion with their amours. I have read of one having two wafers, and after making up her mind, swallowed the one, and put the other in a billet-doux. To take the sacrament and attend balls and other festivities on the same day, is not unusual, even in England. Caroline, queen of George II., had prayers said in a room where there was a naked Venus, and often while changing her linen. Queen Anne, economical of time, had the same custom. Once, (for she was nicer than Caroline) in the very emergency of a change, she ordered the door to be closed. Why does he not proceed,' sent her stripped majesty to inquire of the chaplain, who replied, he would not whisper the word of God through the keyhole.' I give you these royal anecdotes on the authority of Horace Walpole. The wings of the palace are adorned with sculpture and statuary, representing Virtues, Sciences, and Arts. Though saints are forbidden, the English will be guilty of a little idolatry, as long as there are women and allegories:

'Colitur Pax atque Fides, VICTORIA Virtus.'

I now stepped into Hyde Park from St. James, by the north-west corner, by a splendid gate, of the Ionic order, having three arched ways for carriages, and two for pedestrians; and just opposite a more magnificent opening into Green Park, a park which lies with

out any other note than a huge reservoir of filtered water, at the north side of St. James'. I paid here a hasty visit to Apsley House, (the outside of it,) and had an interview with my Lord Wellington. He was looking out of the window. His lordship is shut up here à la tortue sheet-iron blinds facing the Park, and the one open palisade placked inside; very prudently, for there is no knowing when one's fellow citizens may carry one on their shoulders, or when break one's windows with bullets. Wellington, Louis Philippe, and Audrew Jackson, are at present the three great men of nearly the same age, and qualities of mind, and balancing different portions of the globe. I am very happy to mention Mr. Tattersall immediately after them, who lives in the vicinity of Apsley House. The horsemarket is conducted on the most gentlemanly principles.' Horses more polished than the velvet, and fleeter than the roe, are here at your bidding; and pointers, terriers, gray-hounds, and all the apparatus of racing and hunting. The subscription room is only a guinea, with genteel entertainment and the best company of England; and what perfect equality! Saturn, you would imagine, had returned to be President of the Jocky' Club.' He in whips and spurs,' is the heir of a noble house; his forte is driving; in this he triumphs; he perusing his legs, and caressing and coaxing his whiskers into a graceful curve, he is a groom; and he the footman, who gives his little finger to my lord. To know the pedigree and qualities of a horse, is human knowledge. But I must refer you to Tom and Jerry' for the minuter particulars.

Hyde Park is an immense field, and creeping through it is a tiny river, which, having no bend in it, they call the Serpentine. The water here also has a sleepy look; is bounded by no pastoral images, and inhabited by no swans, but sometimes a tadpole, aspiring to be a frog, merrily wags its tail from one mud puddle to another. The London youth comes hither to bathe in the heats of the carricule, as the day is opening its golden eye-lids; and now and then an open barouche, laden with the fair, passes softly by in quest of fresh air in the Park. To see the fine human forms plunging in, rowing their way through the liquid stream, or sunning themselves upon the bank, is an amusement. Quand cette saison n'est pas venue les femmes ne s'y promenent pas encore, et quand elle est passée elles ne s'y promenent plus." Hackney and stage coaches are shut out, and women in clogs ; otherwise, the Public walks in, as slovenly and shabbily as she pleases.

Where is the Ring,' so famous in romance and history-especially the history of duelling? It was ninety yards only in diameter, and sixty years ago, large enough for fashionable London. The ride round, the compliments, repartees, nods and smiles, and jolly faces of our grandmothers where are they now? Hyde Park, while the French gardens have each a litter of heroes, counts only Achilles, draped in fig leaves. He is alone in possession of the field, as he was wont to be at Troy, in an attitude of defiance. This image was put up in honor of Lord Wellington, by the London ladies, his lordship

* Labruyere.