Famous Persons and Places

by Nathaniel Parker Willis

“You are at least as honest as the Duke,” I soliloquised as I pocketed the six bright and substantial half-crowns.

I was at the “White Horse Cellar” again the following morning at six, promising myself with great sincerity never to rely again on the constancy of an English sky. It rained in torrents. The four inside places were all taken, and with twelve fellow outsides, I mounted to the wet seat, and begging a little straw by way of cushion from the ostler, spread my umbrella, abandoned my knees with a single effort of mind to the drippings of the driver’s weather-proof upper Benjamin, and away we sped. I was “due” at the house of a hospitable Catholic Baronet, a hundred and two miles from London, at the dinner hour of that day, and to wait till it had done raining in England is to expect the millennium.

London in the morning—I mean the poor man’s morning, daylight—is to me matter for the most speculative and intense melancholy. Hyde park in the sunshine of a bright afternoon, glittering with equipages, and gay with the Aladdin splendors of rank and wealth, is a scene which sends the mercurial qualities of the blood trippingly through the veins. But Hyde park at daylight seen from Piccadilly through fog and rain, is perhaps, of all contrasts, to one who has frequented it in its bright hours, the most dispiriting and dreary. To remember that behind the barricaded and wet windows of Apsley house sleeps the hero of Waterloo—that under these crowded and fog-wrapped houses lie, in their dim chambers breathing of perfume and luxury, the high-born and nobly-moulded creatures who preserve for the aristocracy of England the palm of the world’s beauty—to remember this, and a thousand other associations linked with the spot, is not at all to diminish, but rather to deepen, the melancholy of the picture. Why is it that the deserted stage of a theatre, the echo of an empty ball-room, the loneliness of a frequented promenade in untimely hours—any scene, in short, of gayety gone by but remembered—oppresses and dissatisfies the heart! One would think memory should re-brighten and re-populate such places.

The wheels hissed through the shallow pools in the Macadam road, the regular pattering of the small hoofs in the wet carriage-tracks maintained its quick and monotonous beat on the ear; the silent driver kept his eye on the traces, and “reminded” now and then with but the weight of his slight lash a lagging wheeler or leader, and the complicated but compact machine of which the square foot that I occupied had been so nicely calculated, sped on its ten miles in the hour with the steadfastness of a star in its orbit, and as independent of clouds and rain.

“Est ce que monsieur parle François?” asked at the end of the first stage my right-hand neighbor, a little gentleman, of whom I had hitherto only remarked that he was holding on to the iron railing of the seat with great tenacity.

Having admitted in an evil moment that I had been in France, I was first distinctly made to understand that my neighbor was on his way to Birmingham purely for pleasure, and without the most distant object of business—a point on which he insisted so long, and recurred to so often, that he succeeded at last in persuading me that he was doubtless a candidate for the French clerkship of some exporter of buttons. After listening to an amusing dissertation on the rashness of committing one’s life to an English stage-coach with scarce room enough for the perch of a parrot, and a velocity so diablement dangereux, I tired of my Frenchman; and, since I could not have my own thoughts in peace, opened a conversation with a straw-bonnet and shawl on my left—the property, I soon discovered, of a very smart lady’s maid, very indignant at having been made to change places with Master George, who, with his mother and her mistress, were dry and comfortable inside. She “would not have minded the outside place,” she said, “for there were sometimes very agreeable gentlemen on the outside, very!—but she had been promised to go inside, and had dressed accordingly; and it was very provoking to spoil a nice new shawl and best bonnet, just because a great school-boy, that had nothing on that would damage, chose not to ride in the rain.”

“Very provoking, indeed!” I responded, letting in the rain upon myself unconsciously, in extending my umbrella forward so as to protect her on the side of the wind.

“We should have gone down in the carriage, sir,” she continued, edging a little closer to get the full advantage of my umbrella; “but John the coachman has got the hinfluenzy, and my missis wo’n’t be driven by no other coachman; she’s as obstinate as a mule, sir. And that isn’t all I could tell, sir; but I scorns to hurt the character of one of my own sex.” And the pretty abigail pursed up her red lips, and looked determined not to destroy her mistress’s character—unless particularly requested.

I detest what may be called a proper road-book—even would it be less absurd than it is to write one on a country so well conned as England.

I shall say nothing, therefore, of Marlow, which looked the picture of rural loveliness though seen through fog, nor of Oxford, of which all I remember is that I dined there with my teeth chattering, and my knees saturated with rain. All England is lovely to the wild eye of an American unused to high cultivation; and though my enthusiasm was somewhat damp, I arrived at the bridge over the Avon, blessing England sufficiently for its beauty, and much more for the speed of its coaches.