I liked greatly the manners of almost all,—yes, as far as I observed,— all the people at this breakfast, and it was doubtless owing to their being all people either of high rank or remarkable intellect, or both. An Englishman can hardly be a gentleman, unless he enjoy one or other of these advantages; and perhaps the surest way to give him good manners is to make a lord of him, or rather of his grandfather or great-grandfather. In the third generation, scarcely sooner, he will be polished into simplicity and elegance, and his deportment will be all the better for the homely material out of which it is wrought and refined. The Marquis of Lansdowne, for instance, would have been a very commonplace man in the common ranks of life; but it has done him good to be a nobleman. Not that his tact is quite perfect. In going up to breakfast, he made me precede him; in returning to the library, he did the same, although I drew back, till he impelled me up the first stair, with gentle persistence. By insisting upon it, he showed his sense of condescension much more than if, when he saw me unwilling to take precedence, he had passed forward, as if the point were not worth either asserting or yielding. Heaven knows, it was in no humility that I would have trodden behind him. But he is a kind old man; and I am willing to believe of the English aristocracy generally that they are kind, and of beautiful deportment; for certainly there never can have been mortals in a position more advantageous for becoming so. I hope there will come a time when we shall be so; and I already know a few Americans, whose noble and delicate manners may compare well with any I have seen.
I left the house with Mr. Palfrey. He has cone to England to make some researches in the State Paper Office, for the purposes of a work which he has in hand. He mentioned to me a letter which he had seen, written from New England in the time of Charles II. and referring to the order sent by the minister of that day for the appearance of Governor Bellingham and my ancestor on this side of the water. The signature of this letter is an anagram of my ancestor's name. The letter itself is a very bold and able one, controverting the propriety of the measure above indicated; and Mr. Palfrey feels certain that it was written by my aforesaid ancestor. I mentioned my wish to ascertain the place in England whence the family emigrated; and Mr. Palfrey took me to the Record Office, and introduced me to Mr. Joseph Hunter,—a venerable and courteous gentleman, of antiquarian pursuits. The office was odorous of musty parchments, hundreds of years old. Mr. Hunter received me with great kindness, and gave me various old records and rolls of parchment, in which to seek for my family name; but I was perplexed with the crabbed characters, and soon grew weary and gave up the quest. He says that it is very seldom that an American family, springing from the early settlers, can be satisfactorily traced back to their English ancestry.
July 16th.—Monday morning I took the rail from Blackheath to London. It is a very pleasant place, Blackheath, and far more rural than one would expect, within five or six miles of London,—a great many trees, making quite a mass of foliage in the distance; green enclosures; pretty villas, with their nicely kept lawns, and gardens, with grass-plots and flower borders; and village streets, set along the sidewalks with ornamental trees; and the houses standing a little back, and separated one from another,—all this within what is called the Park, which has its gateways, and the sort of semi-privacy with which I first became acquainted at Rock Park.
From the London Bridge station I took a cab for Paddington, and then had to wait above two hours before a train started for Birkenhead. Meanwhile I walked a little about the neighborhood, which is very dull and uninteresting; made up of crescents and terraces, and rows of houses that have no individuality, and second-rate shops,—in short, the outskirts of the vast city, when it begins to have a kind of village character but no rurality or sylvan aspect, as at Blackheath. My journey, when at last we started, was quite unmarked by incident, and extremely tedious; it being a slow train, which plods on without haste and without rest. At about ten o'clock we reached Birkenhead, and there crossed the familiar and detestable Mersey, which, as usual, had a cloudy sky brooding over it. Mrs. Blodgett received me most hospitably, but was impelled, by an overflow of guests, to put me into a little back room, looking into the court, and formerly occupied by my predecessor, General Armstrong. . . . She expressed a hope that I might not see his ghost,—nor have I, as yet.
Speaking of ghosts, Mr. H. A. B——— told me a singular story to-day of an apparition that haunts the Times Office, in Printing-House Square. A Mr. W——— is the engineer of the establishment, and has his residence in the edifice, which is built, I believe, on the site of Merchant Taylor's school,—an old house that was no longer occupied for its original purpose, and, being supposed haunted, was left untenanted. The father-in-law of Mr. W———, an old sea-captain, came on a visit to him and his wife, and was put into their guest-chamber, where he passed the night. The next morning, assigning no very satisfactory reason, he cut his visit short and went away. Shortly afterwards, a young lady came to visit the W———'s; but she too went away the next morning,—going first to make a call, as she said, to a friend, and sending thence for her trunks. Mrs. W——— wrote to this young lady, asking an explanation. The young lady replied, and gave a singular account of an apparition,— how she was awakened in the night by a bright light shining through the window, which was parallel to the bed; then, if I remember rightly, her curtains were withdrawn, and a shape looked in upon her,—a woman's shape, she called it; but it was a skeleton, with lambent flames playing about its bones, and in and out among the ribs. Other persons have since slept in this chamber, and some have seen the shape, others not. Mr. W——— has slept there himself without seeing anything. He has had investigations by scientific people, apparently under the idea that the phenomenon might have been caused by some of the Times's work-people, playing tricks on the magic-lantern principle; but nothing satisfactory has thus far been elucidated. Mr. B——— had this story from Mrs. Gaskell. . . . Supposing it a ghost, nothing else is so remarkable as its choosing to haunt the precincts of the Times newspaper.
July 29th.—On Saturday, 26th, I took the rail from the Lime Street station for London, via the Trent Valley, and reached Blackheath in the evening. . . .
Sunday morning my wife and I, with J——-, railed into London, and drove to the Essex Street Chapel, where Mr. Channing was to preach. The Chapel is the same where Priestley and Belsham used to preach,—one of the plainest houses of worship I was ever in, as simple and undecorated as the faith there inculcated. They retain, however, all the form and ceremonial of the English Established Church, though so modified as to meet the doctrinal views of the Unitarians. There may be good sense in this, inasmuch as it greatly lessens the ministerial labor to have a stated form of prayer, instead of a necessity for extempore outpourings; but it must be, I should think, excessively tedious to the congregation, especially as, having made alterations in these prayers, they cannot attach much idea of sanctity to them.
[Here follows a long record of Mr. Hawthorne's visit to Miss Bacon,— condensed in Our Old Hone, in the paper called "Recollections of a Gifted Woman.">[
August 2d.—On Wednesday (30th July) we went to Marlborough House to see the Vernon gallery of pictures. They are the works, almost entirely of English artists of the last and present century, and comprise many famous paintings; and I must acknowledge that I had more enjoyment of them than of those portions of the National Gallery which I had before seen,— including specimens of the grand old masters. My comprehension has not reached their height. I think nothing pleased me more than a picture by Sir David Wilkie,—The Parish Beadle, with a vagrant boy and a monkey in custody; it is exceedingly good and true throughout, and especially the monkey's face is a wonderful production of genius, condensing within itself the whole moral and pathos of the picture.
Marlborough House was the residence of the Great Duke, and is to be that of the Prince of Wales, when another place is found for the pictures. It adjoins St. James's Palace. In its present state it is not a very splendid mansion, the rooms being small, though handsomely shaped, with vaulted ceilings, and carved white-marble fireplaces. I left S——- here after an hour or two, and walked forth into the hot and busy city with J——-. . . . I called at Routledge's bookshop, in hopes to make an arrangement with him about Miss Bacon's business. But Routledge himself is making a journey in the north, and neither of the partners was there, so that I shall have to go thither some other day. Then we stepped into St. Paul's Cathedral to cool ourselves, and it was delightful so to escape from the sunny, sultry turmoil of Fleet Street and Ludgate, and find ourselves at once in this remote, solemn, shadowy seclusion, marble-cool. O that we had cathedrals in America, were it only for the sensuous luxury! We strolled round the cathedral, and I delighted J——- much by pointing out the monuments of three British generals, who were slain in America in the last war,—the naughty and bloodthirsty little man! We then went to Guildhall, where I thought J——- would like to see Gog and Magog; but he had never heard of those illustrious personages, and took no interest in them. . . . But truly I am grateful to the piety of former times for raising this vast, cool canopy of marble [St. Paul's] in the midst of the feverish city. I wandered quite round it, and saw, in a remote corner, a monument to the officers of the Coldstream Guards, slain in the Crimea. It was a mural tablet, with the names of the officers on an escutcheon; and two privates of the Guards, in marble bas-relief, were mourning over them. Over the tablet hung two silken banners, new and glossy, with the battles in which the regiment has been engaged inscribed on them,—not merely Crimean but Peninsular battles. These banners will bang there till they drop away in tatters.