These Englishmen are certainly a franker and simpler people than ourselves, from peer to peasant; but it may be that they owe those manly qualities to a coarser grain in their nature, and that, with a fine one in ours, we shall ultimately acquire a marble polish of which they are unsusceptible.
From Greenwich the steamers offer much the most agreeable mode of getting to London. At least, it might be agreeable except for the soot from the stove-pipe, the heavy heat of the unsheltered deck, the spiteful little showers of rain, the inexhaustible throng of passengers, and the possibility of getting your pocket picked.
A notable group of objects on the bank of the river is an assemblage of walls, battlements, and turrets, out of the midst of which rises one great, greyish, square tower, known in English history as the Tower. Under the base of the rampart we may catch a glimpse of an arched water-entrance; it is the Traitor's Gate, through which a multitude of noble and illustrious personages have entered the Tower on their way to Heaven.
Later, we have a glimpse of the holy Abbey; while that grey, ancestral pile on the opposite side of the river is Lambeth Palace. We have passed beneath half a dozen bridges in our course, and now we look back upon the mass of innumerable roofs, out of which rise steeples, towers, columns, and the great crowning Dome--look back upon that mystery of the world's proudest city, amid which a man so longs and loves to be, not, perhaps, because it contains much that is positively admirable and enjoyable, but because the world has nothing better.