I think the Americans have the advantage of being less ‘farceurs’ than the British subject is apt to be. There is a sort of servants’-hall facetiousness which predominates in the cockney world, and finds its way into literature, which I think deserves no sort of imitation or admiration.
I have just been taking a house in the extreme skirts of the Regent’s Park, not far from the Zoological Gardens, with a canal underneath it, and some very un-Venetian gondolas, called here coal-barges, passing to and fro upon it in the foreground, while in the distance rise the suburban Alps of ’Ampstead and ’Ighgate—‘Oh breathe on them softly’—and a little to one side swells the pastural eminence of Primrose Hill.
To C. E. Norton, Esq.
London: September 1854.
I have never acknowledged yet, except per Professor Child, Ph.D., your letter from Newport. Your description was somewhat amusing, as, in point of fact, I have been in Newport, and have not been in the Isle of Wight. I was at Newport at the age of six or seven, and passed by it, moreover—scarcely, however, realising the scenes of my infancy—in that swift transit commenced under your auspices, from Boston viâ Fall River to New York and the ‘Asia’ steamer.
London is empty, of course, and only excited by the terror of cholera, which is however, I believe, subsiding. Positively, for two or three days last week, in the district between Leicester Square and Oxford Street, north and south, and Soho Square and Regent Street, east and west, there were scenes not unlike those of the old Plague. It has often been asserted that this was one of the great burying-places of the old 1665 Plague, and this outbreak is by some ascribed to this. However, virulent as it was, it was as brief; and fortunately, perhaps, it came just at the beginning of a new Health Report week, so that it did not get into the papers till it was pretty well over.
Tell me a little about politics, as the weather gets cooler. I am at the mercy of the ‘Times,’ and don’t believe that it knows much about anything. Are there really any ‘Know-nothings,’ and is it really a matter of importance? That the Whigs will not, as a body, join as yet in political alliance with the Free Soil party, I suppose, is true.
I send a little volume, ‘Scaliger’s Poetics,’ with Johnson’s autograph (pretty certain, I believe), for your own antiquarian appropriation, if you will have it.
To the same.
Downing Street: October 24, 1854.