The vessel in which I sailed was a round-sterned bark, very black, and English built, with hogsheads of tobacco for Bristol. I was under the care of Mr. Moir, a clergyman from the south of Virginia, who was returning to get orders for his son from the Bishop of London. The son and his brother were twins, and were gay companions. We were out seven weeks, and were several times in great peril. But I forgot all when I saw England in mid May. The transition is peculiarly strong in contrasts for one who goes from a region not abounding in greensward and roadside flowers, and equally destitute of the castle and the cottage. In June I heard a nightingale near Warwick castle, and took my first lesson in cricket on the green near Hampton Court; I dined at the Mitre, and shortly after looked at the Eton boys shooting their “four-oars” on the Thames. London was all mapped off in my head; and the impression had not been forestalled by a previous sight of Philadelphia, then our only great city. I was acquainted with Sir Roger de Coverley’s haunts; I knew where to go for the Boar’s Head, which had not yet been thrust aside for a king’s statue. The very names of the streets were redolent of memories; St. Swithin’s Lane, Aldermanbury, the Minories. Billingsgate was in its full Aristophanic glory; not yet invaded by a lordly structure of brick market-houses. “O rare Ben Jonson!” how I gloated over thy memorial in the Poet’s Corner! Though roses no longer bloom in the Temple Garden, yet I walked there as proud as if my veins carried the red and white of York and Lancaster. Methinks I was an antiquary before my time; but certain it is that I whiled away whole weeks in the odd, out-of-the-way corners of old London, and almost venerated Pie-corner, where the structures remain as of old, before the Great Fire stopped short at that bounding locality.

My quarters were at the Axe Inn, Aldermanbury. This is not very far from Christ-Church hospital; and the Blue-coat boys—whom I daily met, in their yellow nether-stocks, dark frocks, and clerical bands—carried me back to the times of old, and made me a frequent visitor of those antique and hospitably open cloisters.

My studies toward the Law, were to be under the guidance of a gentleman of Gray’s Inn, long since dead; John Thweat, Esq.—His son is now a solicitor in chancery—He was a typical Englishman. In his wig—when he drove in a chaise, without hat, to Westminster Hall—his face was not unlike a boiled lobster, in a garnish of cauliflower. I soon found that my study was to be pen-work, and that my apprenticeship—if entered into—would be a slavish drawing of forms. My father was easier in his ways every year; so he assented to my spending a few months in travel. Do not imagine that I am going to record my journeys? These were the glorious old days of coaching. From the George Inn, opposite Addle street, Aldermanbury, I used to see forty coaches set out.

It was near my lodgings. The Hogarthian coachman was then not extinct. In my last visit, I detected one or two of the old sort, degenerated into omnibus-men. Hyde Park was not what it has since become, but it was a marvel, nevertheless; and I studied, with daily application, the heraldry of all the turn-outs, and the horsemanship of gentlemen in boots and small-clothes, who, to my American eyes, seemed sad riders, from the English trick of “rising to the trot.”

But when summer was over, and the short days came on, and the shops had candles at noon, and the Strand and Holburn were dank and miry, and London smoke became a wetting nimbus, I gathered up my odds and ends, and make a dash over to Ireland. But this should be reserved for another chapter.

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