which America was then too bent on seizing for herself to have time to concede to her off spring. He was at sea nearly two months; and long before he landed at Dover, in July, the battle of Bunker's Hill had been fought, and all hopes of peaceful accommodation closed.

Great Britain and her Colonies, which at the present day appear almost too monstrous for belief, he will not be less kindly disposed to the elderly New Englander who felt that he could only resolve by headlong flight the many awful doubts that were besetting him of what must follow a contest so unnatural. With its only practical issue, Separation, staring every one in the face at the period his diary begins-no one is bold enough to confront it. The idea is not more abhorrent to Lords North and George Germaine than it is to Chatham and to Burke. It will appear not less to the credit of Mr. Curwen's sagacity than of his humanity that he constantly urged conciliation, because he held steadily to the belief that America never would be conquered by arms; but not for an instant, till the very last, did he doubt that the downfall of both countries would follow fast on the heels of what was called "Independence." And all around him, whether favorable or not to the claims of the insurgent colonists, are not less firmly of that opinion. It was not till Mr. Curwen had been living more than two years in England, that (on the night of the 3rd September, 1777) he met one man at Bristol who held quite different views. This eccentric person will appear in our second chapter.

When Judge Curwen fled from the rebellious colonies he was sixty years old, when he went back to the triumphant young republic he was sixty-nine; and of the eventful years which formed the interval-all of them passed in England, and all with the usual penalties of exile, though some with more than its usual enjoyment-he left a curious record in a diary which his surviving representatives printed in New York a dozen years ago, and in which those past days, with all their pains and pleasures, their hopes and their misgivings, still live for us with a vivid and singular reality. For the record was honest and genuine, as in the main the diarist himself was. He does not appear, indeed, to nave been of the heroic stuff of martyrs. If the liberty of opinion he craved had been conceded to him, it would probably have involved nothing graver than the liberty to change his opinion; for he was clearly a man impressible by events, and would probably have saved himself a very long voyage, and very great But whatever errors in political science inconvenience, if he could only have held his might be prevalent did the great mass of tongue till after the first few blows were the people even on this side of the Atlantic, struck in the war of his fellow-citizens for in-though much ill-blood had been violently dependence. Not that he was a time-server stirred, desire other than a speedy and amicafar from that; his views within his line of ble close to this breaking out of quarrel? sight were steady and unwavering; but in Mr. Curwen tells us, no. The experience of politics this line stretched but a little way, his first two months in London sufficed to and took also a subsequent not dishonorable prove to him that though the upper ranks, bias from his avowed liking for his native most of the capital stockholders, and the prinland. In other respects he was a man of fair cipal nobility, were for forcing at all hazards learning, and more than average accomplish-supremacy of Parliament over the insurgent ment; not at all intolerant of opinions at issue with his own; in religion a dissenter of the class still most prevalent in New England, in his tastes scholarly and refined, not ill-read in general literature, prone to social enjoyments, a reasonably good critic of what he saw-altogether an excellent example of the class of men out of whom the Fathers and Founders of that great republic sprang; and a companion not less pleasant than instructive to pass a few hours with, as I hope the reader will find.

If he also finds, as he moves in such company through some memorable scenes long past, that on all sides views are entertained of the probable results of this quarrel between

It was printed in 1842, with the title of Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, Judge of Admiralty, &c.; an American refugee in England; under the editorship of Mr. George Atkinson Ward, Member of the New York Historical Society, and Honorary Member of the Massachusetts Historical Bociety."

colonies, yet from the middle ranks downward the people were decidedly opposed to it. He went into all kinds of coffee-houses (a better index of public opinion in those days than the club-houses since have been), and though he found the resistance of America the standing topic of dispute, and the dispute "something warm," yet it was always" without abuse or ill-nature." Indeed, in one of the very first letters he had to write out after his arrival, when he had not been five weeks in London, he mentions the surprise with which he had found "a tenderness in the minds of many here for America, even of those who disapprove of the principles of an entire independence of the British legislature, and ardently wish an effort may be made to accommodate." He went hardly anywhere into English middle class society that he did not, at the outset of this wretched quarrel, find a manly tolerance expressed for that of which he confesses he had himself in America been very far from equally tolerant. There was one

house indeed, where, with the noblest echo of about Westminster Hall, remarking it as this better feeling, he might also have heard something odd that the Master of the Rolls a noisier and more violent majority eager to (then Sir Thomas Sewell) should be sitting welcome extremities from which the bulk of in court with his hat on; finding the noise the nation recoiled; but he could not find his much greater than would be allowed in our way into it. In the fourth month after his American courts;" thinking it unbecoming arrival, Burke was upholding with unabated the dignity of a judge that, in place of perand unrivalled eloquence another motion in emptorily checking the noise and confusion, that house to compose the present troubles | Mr. Justice Nares should actually submit to and quiet the minds of His Majesty's subjects rise out of his seat, step forward, and lean in America," but Mr. Curwen in vain exerted down to hear; and giving other intimations himself to obtain admission. After another of an old-world formality and love of grave month, Lord North in a very different spirit precision which a modern visitor from the was urging there, amid Hear hims! of greater New World would hardly be expected to distriumph and with a success of numbers more play. He saw, of course, on this and on potent than Burke's reasoning or wit, his bill other occasions the Chief Justice, and thought for absolutely prohibiting all future commer- his manner very like "the late Judge Dudley cial intercourse with America; and still Mr. of Massachusetts;" all but those peering Curwen knocked at the gallery door in vain. eyes of his, which denoted a penetration and He remonstrated at last; he spoke to Mr. comprehension peculiarly his own. After George Hayley, M. P., whom he met in the that hard look at Mansfield, the man whose Strand; and Mr. Hayley, an active and bus- eloquence was ever loudest against his countling city member in those days, now faded trymen, and whose politics, admired in his out of human memory, could only assure the tory days in America, now appear to him far respected ex-judge that really all strangers for less palatable in these days of exile — (an "exthe present time must be excluded, for the cellent judge and mischievous politician" is attendances were great, the floor of the House the character he gives of him)- he is most too small, and positively the members them- anxious to get sight of Wedderburn, who only selves could not get on without the gallery. last year had flung in Benjamin Franklin's But if he must wait (it is only for a time) face the grossest insult that language could the unbarring of those inhospitable doors, frame; and in Mansfield's court he discovers many more genial ones have been meanwhile, the indiscreet and fiery little Serjeant, but not and still are, opening to him. Let us go back saying anything that was worthy of remema little, and retrace what amusements or brance. In the Common Pleas he sees Blackoccupations they were that relieved the first stone, already famous across the Atlantic months of his exile. For this agitated time as the author of the Commentaries; and. offered no exception to the law which prevails before leaving Westminster Hall, he enterat every other, and which, in presence of the tains himself in the committee chamber of the most trivial interests that can engage the House of Commons at the examination of the individual attention, seems to dwarf the witnesses in the case of the Worcester eleomightiest that affect the welfare of the world. tion, observing the M. P.s sitting on an eleIt is of course not really so, as a very little vated bench looking like a court of sessions, reflection teaches us. We perceive it to be and noting that the examination is carried on the result of one of the wisest of providential by advocates" with regularity and decency." arrangements, that when we penetrate beneath From the law courts to the theatres is no the surface of the most wide-spread calami-violent step, reflecting as they do in pretty ties that absorb the attention of history, we equal proportions the passions and humors should find the ordinary currents of human of life, alike dealing largely in fictitious life moving on with little suffering or disturbance; and we can afford to leave entirely to the use of jaded men of fashion such regrets as Horace Walpole was at this particular hour indulging, that so little grief should be felt by the public for the public misfortunes, and that theatres, operas, parties, dinings, merry-makings, fashionable preachings, and Sunday evening promenadings, should still be in progress just as usual, though armies were surrendering, fleets showing the white feather, and an incapable ministry despoiling the Crown of what Horace protests is" its bright est jewel"—the Colonies of North America! Judge Curwen has only been one day in London when he is to be discovered strolling

pathos and purchased buffoonery, and differing mainly in the fact that the law court beats the theatre in the reality of the catastrophes witnessed or inflicted in it. Mr. Curwen being a man of some taste, of course his first attempt was to see Garrick; and on a night when he was acting Hamlet, he forced his way into Drury Lane. He found him in all respects greatly above the standard of the performers who surrounded him, yet thought him even more perfect in the expression of his face, than in the accent and pronunciation of his voice. But it is to be remembered that the great actor, now in his sixtieth year, was arrived at his last season, and after this was to be seen no more; a fact of which Mr.

well-dressed people of fashion, an elderly gentleman with a star on his coat, who was pointed out to him as Lord Temple and " supposed author of Junius,' a notion which seems strangely to have slept from that hour till an examination of the Stowe papers reawakened it not many months ago.ˆ İle went to the Royal Academy Exhibition in Pall Mall (it was its last year there), and was yet more struck by it in the year next following - its first in Somerset House. In a very full house at the Haymarket, he heard the humorous George Alexander Stevens' Lecture on Heads; and saw subsequently (of course) an imitation and attempted improvement of the same, where the heads shone forth in transparency, Captain Cooke's calling forth elaborate eulogiuin, and Lawrence Sterne's the accompaniment of a pathetic apostrophe ; - the exhibitor passing afterwards to very surprising tricks with cards, and winding up the whole with marvellous imitations of the thrush, blackbird, skylark, nightingale, woodlark, and quail. But songs more wondrous than these, the good New Englander heard on another occasion at Covent Garden Theatre, where, in honor of Handel (the musical saint of England, he exclaims, whose performances are as much read and studied as Romish manuals of devotion by their admirers), a performance of the oratorio of Messiah was given, with an effect he can only describe by heaping epithet on epithet, as noble, grand, full, sonorous, awfully majestic. The whole assembly as one, rising," continues the earnest old man, "added a solemnity which swelled and filled my soul with an - I know not what, that exalted it beyond itself, bringing to my raised imagination a full view of that sacred assembly of blessed spirits which surround the throne of God."

Curwen had no very agreeable evidence in | Ranelagh, where he found infinite numbers attempting to get into Drury Lane a few of well-dressed people, and rubbed up against months later to see him play Archer in the Duke of Gloucester and the French AmFarquhar's delightful comedy, when, so enor-bassador. At an exhibition, silly enough mous was the crowd, that after " suffering in itself, called Les Ombres Chinoises, a badly thumps, squeezes, and almost suffocation, arranged puppet-show, he saw, among several for two hours," he was obliged to retire without effecting it." He attempted it with no better success a few weeks later, when the dazzling performance of Richard, which had first startled London five-and-thirty years before, was given for the last time; when their majesties both were present, the theatre was again crammed to suffocation, and Mr. Curwen again turned back a disappointed man. He had to console himself as he might with Mrs. Barry at Covent Garden, where he saw and adınired her fine person in Constance; where also he saw a lady play Macheath, thinking it "a great impropriety, not to say indecency;" where he thought Quick a good actor, too; and discreetly singled out Moody for praise before the merits of that performer were publicly acknowledged. On the whole, though, this particular time was but a dull time for theatres, as the interval between the sinking of a great star and the rising of any other generally is; and there seems no reason to attribute to anything but the correctness of his taste the formal complaint of our American critic, that he has no wish to indulge a cynical or surly disposition, yet cannot help declaring that he finds great disappointment at the London theatrical performances. The bulk of the actors fell below his idea of just imitation. To his seeming they over acted, underacted, or contradicted nature; the nicest art of the stage, which is to mark the lines of separation between humors or passions bearing to each other only general resemblances, appeared to be lost altogether; the hero was a bully, the gentleman a cox comb, the coxcomb a fool, the fine lady af fected, insipid, or pert; and nothing but the lower grades of character, the gamesters, chamber-maids, or footmen, were represented to the mark of what was true. As a reward to this well-informed lover of the theatre, however, for reaching London so late as the last season of Garrick, it so befell that he did not quit London till he had assisted at the first success of Mrs. Siddons, and saw the stage as it were reäwaken at the inspiration of her genius.

Such was the character of the amusements that our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers patronized, and incident to which, not seldom, other sights more grave were intruded. Thus, when our American holiday maker was crossing Clerkenwell Green one day, in the hope of passing a pleasant evening. Nor was he, meanwhile, without other in company with a fellow-refugee from New resources. He went to Vauxhall Gardens, England, "Mr. Copley, the limner," and his a" most enchanting spot" in those days, with family (among whom played a sprightly child glorious gravelled walks, shrubberies, illu- of two years old, who was destined to become minated alcoves, and everywhere such myriads Lord High Chancellor of England), he was of variegated lamps, that the lord of Straw-startled by the sight of five couple of boys berry Hill was wont to protest he should never again care a button for trees that had n't red or green lamps to light themselves up with. He took boat at Temple Stairs and went to

chained together, going under care of tipstaves. to Bride well-an exhibition, we grieve to say, which remained common and familiar in the same quarter for more than half a century

accompany our New England visitor to one of those fashionable Sunday promenades, at which it was then no unusual or indecorous thing to find yourself, in the evening, crowding and pushing past the parson under whose pulpit, in the morning, you had been sitting with reverent attention- and of which the doctor of divinity so unexpectedly committed to the Poultry was a noted and constant visitor.

The Sunday evening promenade, says Mr. Curwen (and the remark may be not unworthy of attention with such a question as the Sunday admission to the Sydenham Palace still undetermined), had been invented because less objectionable places of amusement were closed by enactment. In lieu of such, the promenade had been instituted "to compensate for twelve tedious hours' interval laid under an interdict by the laws of the country, as yet unrepealed formally by the legislature. though effectually so in the houses of the great and wealthy, from whence religion and charity are but too generally banished." It was held at the house (now D'Almaine's) in Soho Square, which the Lords Carlisle occupied to within twenty years of this date, which Mrs. Cornelys had afterwards hired for her celebrated balls and masquerades, and which

afterwards. On another occasion, in that sume neighborhood, he was led, by an awful curiosity, having heard that it was "notorious for its constant supply of Tyburn," into a court called Blueberry Alley, which he found to be precisely what to our disgrace such courts remain at the present hour, "filled with small, huttish kind of houses, the habitations of filth and vice." Having occasion to cross Hounslow Heath, his attention is arrested by "three monuments of human folly and divine justice". as many gibbets with the remains of so many wretches hanging in chains. At Tyburn itself, he sees thirteen executed in one day; in connection with which he has to note the melancholy consideration that robberies are nevertheless greatly increasing, as indeed is thieving of all kinds in the metropolis. Not long after, he beheld a similar exhibition of ten suffering in one day on the same scaffold. Quietly walking up Holborn on another day, shortly after having seen two pickpockets publicly whipped at the Old Bailey (when the assembled mob expressed much dissatisfaction with the very moderate lashing inflicted on the oldest of fender, and loudly swore he had bought off Jack Ketch"), he found a throng of ordinary people crowding round a chaise filled with young children of about seven years of age, on that ingenious but unsuccessful lady's and, inquiring what it meant, learnt to his retreat from it, to vend asses' milk at Knightshorror that so many infants, "capable of bridge was fitted up with rooms à la Chibeing trained to useful employments, and be- nois, with variegated, lamp-lit galleries, with coming blessings to society," were already grottoes of natural evergreens, with wilderknown for hardened young sinners, and at nesses of flowering moss and grass, with that instant were on their way to Newgate. dimly-lighted caves of spar and stalactite, What was his amazement, too, to find a with Egyptian recesses mysterious in hieroclergyman of the church of England suddenly glyphic panellings, and with tea-rooms and carried off to Poultry Compter on a charge tea-tables for accommodation of a thousand of forgery-his real name Dodd, but better promenaders. The employment of the comknown by the name of the Macaroni Doctor; pany was simply walking through the rooms. and to remember that this was the same rev- and drinking (when they could get it) tea, or erend divine whom, not many months before, coffee, or chocolate, or negus, or lemonade; he had heard at the Magdalen preaching, from for which privilege tickets were purchased at the text, These things I command you, that ye the doors, costing three shillings each. What love one another, "a most elegant, sensible, such a place would degenerate into, the serious, and pathetic discourse, enough to reader can easily imagine. Though it is have warmed a heart not callous to the im- also resorted to by persons of irreproachable pressions of pity," and which did indeed warm character," says our grave and elderly friend, his, until his eyes" flowed with tears of com- among the wheat will be tares; the ladies passion." were rigged out in gaudy attire, and attended by bucks, bloods, and macaronies." Full dress he found not requisite; but respectable habiliments absolutely so; and on the night he attended, the spurs of one promenader caught carelessly in a lady's flounce, whereupon the booted individual was obliged to apologize, and take them off. Yet very difficult it must have been for anybody, spurred or not, to keep clear of the flounces, seeing that the ladies appear to have come uniformly in two divisions, of which the first swept their track by long trails, and the other by enor mous hoops and petticoats. A good thousand

The tears of compassion due to Doctor Dodd in the pulpit, however, were certainly not due to him in his more proper place, the prison; and Mr. Curwen's feeling, when he heard what his previous career had been, took the very different and more natural direction of surprise that such a man should have been permitted to mount the pulpit at all. But without dwelling upon this, or seeking to account for the indifferentism which at that time had crept into the church, and which the vigorous preachings of Wesley and Whitfield were rapidly driving out of it, let us

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