The Old Homestead | Page 2

it is undeniable that
an American is continually thrown upon his national antagonism by
some acrid quality in the moral atmosphere of England. These people
think so loftily of themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else,
that it requires more generosity than I possess to keep always in
perfectly good-humor with them. Jotting down the little acrimonies of
the moment in my journal, and transferring them thence (when they

happened to be tolerably well expressed) to these pages, it is very
possible that I may have said things which a profound observer of
national character would hesitate to sanction, though never any, I verily
believe, that had not more or less of truth. If they be true, there is no
reason in the world why they should not be said. Not an Englishman of
them all ever spared America for courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in
my opinion, would it contribute in the least to our mutual advantage
and comfort if we were to besmear one another all over with butter and
honey. At any rate, we must not judge of an Englishman's
susceptibilities by our own, which, likewise, I trust, are of a far less
sensitive texture than formerly.
And now farewell, my dear friend; and excuse (if you think it needs
any excuse) the freedom with which I thus publicly assert a personal
friendship between a private individual and a statesman who has filled
what was then the most august position in the world. But I dedicate my
book to the Friend, and shall defer a colloquy with the Statesman till
some calmer and sunnier hour. Only this let me say, that, with the
record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in
my deeper consciousness as among the few things that time has left as
it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful forever to
that grand idea of an irrevocable Union, which, as you once told me,
was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there
may be a choice of paths,--for you, but one; and it rests among my
certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast, no man's hopes or
apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt,
or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal happiness,
than those of FRANKLIN PIERCE.
THE WAYSIDE, July 2, 1863.

CONTENTS.
Consular Experiences Leamington Spa About Warwick Recollections
of a Gifted Woman Lichfield and Uttoxeter Pilgrimage to Old Boston
Near Oxford Some of the Haunts of Burns A London Suburb Up the
Thames Outside Glimpses of English Poverty Civic Banquets.

OUR OLD HOME.

CONSULAR EXPERIENCES.
The Consulate of the United States, in my day, was located in
Washington Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four
stories high, thus illustriously named in honor of our national
establishment), at the lower corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to
the Gorec Arcade, and in the neighborhood of scone of the oldest docks.
This was by no means a polite or elegant portion of England's great
commercial city, nor were the apartments of the American official so
splendid as to indicate the assumption of much consular pomp on his
part. A narrow and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally
narrow and ill-lighted passageway on the first floor, at the extremity of
which, surmounting a door-frame, appeared an exceedingly stiff
pictorial representation of the Goose and Gridiron, according to the
English idea of those ever-to-be-honored symbols. The staircase and
passageway were often thronged, of a morning, with a set of beggarly
and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to our own countrymen
in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine American),
purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of
Liverpool Blackballers and the scum of every maritime nation on earth;
such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the
navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a most
unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed,
board, and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, bruised
and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers,
drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly
intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men.
All of them (save here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman
in his shoregoing rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which they had
sweltered or shivered throughout the voyage, and all required consular
assistance in one form or another.
Any respectable visitor, if he could make up his mind to elbow a
passage among these sea-monsters, was admitted into an outer office,
where he found more of the same species, explaining their respective
wants or grievances to the Vice-Consul and clerks, while their
shipmates awaited their turn outside