Letters of a Traveller; Or, Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America

by William Cullen Bryant

I called the other day on a friend, an American, who told me that he had that morning spoken with his landlady about her carelessness in leaving the shutters of her lower rooms unclosed during the night. She answered that she never took the trouble to close them, that so secure was the city from ordinary burglaries, under the arrangements of the new police, that it was not worth the trouble. The windows of the parlor next to my sleeping-room open upon a rather low balcony over the street door, and they are unprovided with any fastenings, which in New York we should think a great piece of negligence. Indeed, I am told that these night robberies are no longer practiced, except when the thief is assisted by an accessary in the house. All classes of the people appear to be satisfied with the new police. The officers are men of respectable appearance and respectable manners. If I lose my way, or stand in need of any local information, I apply to a person in the uniform of a police officer. They are sometimes more stupid in regard to these matters than there is any occasion for, but it is one of the duties of their office to assist strangers with local information.

Begging is repressed by the new police regulations, and want skulks in holes and corners, and prefers its petitions where it can not be overheard by men armed with the authority of the law. "There is a great deal of famine in London," said a friend to me the other day, "but the police regulations drive it out of sight." I was going through Oxford-street lately, when I saw an elderly man of small stature, poorly dressed, with a mahogany complexion, walking slowly before me. As I passed him he said in my ear, with a hollow voice, "I am starving to death with hunger," and these words and that hollow voice sounded in my ear all day.

Walking in Hampstead Heath a day or two since, with an English friend, we were accosted by two laborers, who were sitting on a bank, and who said that they had came to that neighborhood in search of employment in hay-making, but had not been able to get either work or food. My friend appeared to distrust their story. But in the evening, as we were walking home, we passed a company of some four or five laborers in frocks, with bludgeons in their hands, who asked us for something to eat. "You see how it is, gentlemen," said one of them, "we are hungry; we have come for work, and nobody will hire us; we have had nothing to eat all day." Their tone was dissatisfied, almost menacing; and the Englishman who was with us, referred to it several times afterward, with an expression of anxiety and alarm.

I hear it often remarked here, that the difference of condition between the poorer and the richer classes becomes greater every day, and what the end will be the wisest pretend not to foresee.

Letter XXII.

Edinburgh.

Edinburgh, July 17, 1845.

I had been often told, since I arrived in England, that in Edinburgh, I should see the finest city I ever saw. I confess that I did not feel quite sure of this, but it required scarcely more than a single look to show me that it was perfectly true. It is hardly possible to imagine a nobler site for a town than that of Edinburgh, and it is built as nobly. You stand on the edge of the deep gulf which separates the old and the new town, and before you on the opposite bank rise the picturesque buildings of the ancient city—

"Piled deep and massy, close and high,"

looking, in their venerable and enduring aspect, as if they were parts of the steep bank on which they stand, an original growth of the rocks; as if, when the vast beds of stone crystallized from the waters, or cooled from their fusion by fire, they formed themselves by some freak of nature into this fantastic resemblance of the habitations of men. To the right your eyes rest upon a crag crowned with a grand old castle of the middle ages, on which guards are marching to and fro; and near you to the left, rises the rocky summit of Carlton Hill, with its monuments of the great men of Scotland. Behind you stretch the broad streets of the new town, overlooked by massive structures, built of the stone of the Edinburgh quarries, which have the look of palaces.