"What an everlasting deuce of a fog!" he cried, so soon as he was within earshot. "How the devil can you remain here? I have made out my list: Stowe, Blenheim, Hampton Court, Oxford; with your dreamy ways, you might live with John Bull in vitam æternam and not see a thing!"
A journey with Peltier.
I asked in vain to be excused, I had to go. In the carriage, Peltier enumerated his hopes to me; he had relays of them; no sooner had one croaked beneath him than he straddled another, and on he would go, a leg on either side, to his journey's end. One of his hopes, the robustest, eventually led him to Bonaparte, whom he took by the coat-collar: Napoleon had the simplicity to hit back[330]. Peltier took Sir James Mackintosh[331] as his second; he was condemned by the courts, and made a new fortune (which he incontinently ran through) by selling the documents relating to his trial.
Blenheim[332] was distasteful to me; I suffered so much the more from an ancient reverse of my country in that I had had to endure the insult of a recent affront: a boat going up the Thames caught sight of me on the bank; seeing a Frenchman, the oarsmen gave cheers; the news had just been received of the naval battle of Aboukir: these successes of the foreigner, which might open the gates of France to me, were hateful to me. Nelson[333], whom I had often met in Hyde Park, wrapped his victories in Lady Hamilton's[334] shawl at Naples, while the lazzaroni played at ball with human heads. The admiral died gloriously at Trafalgar[335], and his mistress wretchedly at Calais, after losing beauty, youth and fortune. And I, taunted on the Thames with the victory of Aboukir, have seen the palm-trees of Libya edging the calm and deserted sea which was reddened with the blood of my fellow-countrymen.
Stowe Park[336] is famous for its ornamental buildings: I prefer its shades. The cicerone of the place showed us, in a gloomy ravine, the copy of a temple of which I was to admire the original in the dazzling valley of the Cephisus. Beautiful pictures of the Italian school pined in the darkness of some uninhabited rooms, whose shutters were kept closed: poor Raphael, imprisoned in a castle of the ancient Britons, far from the skies of the Farnesina[337]!
At Hampton Court was preserved the collection of portraits of the mistresses of Charles II.: you see how that Prince took things on emerging from a revolution which cut off his father's head, and which was to drive out his House.
At Slough we saw Herschel[338], with his learned sister[339] and his great forty-foot telescope; he was looking for new planets: this made Peltier laugh, who kept to the seven old ones.
We stopped for two days at Oxford. I took pleasure in this republic of Alfred the Great[340]; it represented the privileged liberties and the manners of the literary institutions of the Middle Ages. We hurried through the twenty colleges, the libraries, the pictures, the museum, the botanic garden. I turned over with extreme pleasure, among the manuscripts of Worcester College, a life of the Black Prince, written in French verse by the Prince's herald-at-arms.
Oxford, without resembling them, recalled to my memory the modest Colleges of Dol, Rennes and Dinan. I had translated Gray's[341] Elegy written in a Country Church-yard:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day[342],