The Old Homestead | Page 8

other, that characterize this strange people, to compel us to be a great
nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name,
a province of their small island. What pains did they take to shake us
off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them! It
might seem their folly, but was really their fate, or, rather, the
Providence of God, who has doubtless a work for us to do, in which the
massive materiality of the English character would have been too
ponderous a dead-weight upon our progress. And, besides, if England
had been wise enough to twine our new vigor round about her ancient
strength, her power would have been too firmly established ever to
yield, in its due season, to the otherwise immutable law of imperial
vicissitude. The earth might then have beheld the intolerable spectacle
of a sovereignty and institutions, imperfect, but indestructible.
Nationally, there has ceased to be any peril of so inauspicious and yet
outwardly attractive an amalgamation. But as an individual, the
American is often conscious of the deep-rooted sympathies that belong
more fitly to times gone by, and feels a blind pathetic tendency to
wander back again, which makes itself evident in such wild dreams as I
have alluded to above, about English inheritances. A mere coincidence
of names (the Yankee one, perhaps, having been assumed by legislative
permission), a supposititious pedigree, a silver mug on which an
anciently engraved coat-of-arms has been half scrubbed out, a seal with
an uncertain crest, an old yellow letter or document in faded ink, the
more scantily legible the better,--rubbish of this kind, found in a
neglected drawer, has been potent enough to turn the brain of many an

honest Republican, especially if assisted by an advertisement for lost
heirs, cut out of a British newspaper. There is no estimating or
believing, till we come into a position to know it, what foolery lurks
latent in the breasts of very sensible people. Remembering such sober
extravagances, I should not be at all surprised to find that I am myself
guilty of some unsuspected absurdity, that may appear to me the most
substantial trait in my character.
I might fill many pages with instances of this diseased American
appetite for English soil. A respectable-looking woman, well advanced
in life, of sour aspect, exceedingly homely, but decidedly
New-Englandish in figure and manners, came to my office with a great
bundle of documents, at the very first glimpse of which I apprehended
something terrible. Nor was I mistaken. The bundle contained
evidences of her indubitable claim to the site on which Castle Street,
the Town Hall, the Exchange, and all the principal business part of
Liverpool have long been situated; and with considerable
peremptoriness, the good lady signified her expectation that I should
take charge of her suit, and prosecute it to judgment; not, however, on
the equitable condition of receiving half the value of the property
recovered (which, in case of complete success, would have made both
of us ten or twenty fold millionaires), but without recompense or
reimbursement of legal expenses, solely as an incident of my official
duty. Another time came two ladies, bearing a letter of emphatic
introduction from his Excellency the Governor of their native State,
who testified in most satisfactory terms to their social respectability.
They were claimants of a great estate in Cheshire, and announced
themselves as blood-relatives of Queen Victoria,--a point, however,
which they deemed it expedient to keep in the background until their
territorial rights should be established, apprehending that the Lord High
Chancellor might otherwise be less likely to come to a fair decision in
respect to them, from a probable disinclination to admit new members
into the royal kin. Upon my honor, I imagine that they had an eye to the
possibility of the eventual succession of one or both of them to the
crown of Great Britain through superiority of title over the Brunswick
line; although, being maiden ladies, like their predecessor Elizabeth,
they could hardly have hoped to establish a lasting dynasty upon the
throne. It proves, I trust, a certain disinterestedness on my part, that,

encountering them thus in the dawn of their fortunes, I forbore to put in
a plea for a future dukedom.
Another visitor of the same class was a gentleman of refined manners,
handsome figure, and remarkably intellectual aspect. Like many men of
an adventurous cast, he had so quiet a deportment, and such an
apparent disinclination to general sociability, that you would have
fancied him moving always along some peaceful and secluded walk of
life. Yet, literally from his first hour, he had been tossed upon the
surges of a most varied and tumultuous existence, having been born at
sea, of American parentage,