Miscellany: Things In England

London, June '28, 1843. "And all went merry as a marriagc bcll." I am in the "Royal Gallery of paintings." one of the immense piles of dark grey stone architecture, which frown upon the traveller in London. It stands fronting upon a large open place, which is to be called "Trafalgar square," when the tall monument in its centre has received the statue of Lord Nelson, for which it waits. "Charing-cross," which every American School-boy lias read of, is the street-crossings on the opposite side of the square; the wide opening stretching down among the public buildings and government-offices, over against "The Gallery" is White Hall." St. James' Park, with its green waving trees, grass lawns, diversified with the shrubbery of all lands, and its little winding lake, studded with islets. and alive with wild swans, ducks, geese, moor fowl, eet. eet., pursuing their pleasures, seeking their food, and cackling to their young, as merily as though they had not each lost a joint of her wing to keep them from flying away: this Park is on my right hand as Í look from "The Gallery" down "White Hall." Thetwo hoary towers of "Westminister Abbey" are on the left. If you enter the Park at the "Horse-guards," and go straight fonvard, you approach Buckingham Palace, the residence of the young Queen Victoria, which fronts the Park from the opposite; as the Old St. James Palace, the residence of the Quecn Dowager does on your right. But I must not forget that I am in the "Royal Gallery of paintings." The portrait of Benjamin West, a name familiar to American ears, with some of his finest pictures, hangs upon the wall among the works of the distinguished masters of his art; both ancient and modern. The tears of Narcissus are falling fresh and bitter into the stream which reflects his image, for the love of which he is dying. A little further on, the sylgn god Silenus, in the shape of a jolly old man, up-borne by his satyrs Wpon the skin of a wild beast is striving to reach the branches which depend above them. Further still a sofí voluptuous Venus "recljnes imked in the urms of thO attending Graces: in short, Bomany and mighty are the efforts of genius to illustrate and immortalize the sensual fables of the ancients, as the monstrous obsecnitics of Europa, Leda, and Galatea, that your sensibilities are shockcd to find such paintings in juxta-position with the dying Hebrews, bitten by the fiery serpents; the "Holy family," and the women weeping over the corpse of Jesus. As if in harmony with the scène which surrounds me; of palace and park; of turret andterrace, and this Circean Gallery; which, if it does not transform men into beasts, as to their passions, is not much calculated to transform such beasts into men: - amid these symbols of luxury, and playthings of power, the church-towers are singing out a merry marriage peel, in honor of a royal weeding which takes place in the chapel at Buckingham palace precisely at 8 o'clock to night. Perhaps you wonder how, even the son of a New England Puritan, like myself, can help joining in the mirth of the moment, and increasing by one, the troop of trifling rninds here, which, like cold thin mirrors, merely reflect and give back the images of surrounding objects "jnd passing events. Well listen, and I will teil you. A wedding or a birth, however blithesome such events may be in America; here in England, is rather too serious for a joke. If the parties are peasants, it threatens an increase of pauperism: if princes of the blood, it swells the scourge of England, viz: taxation. To be convinced of the first, you have only to go down to that little cottage, on the little island in that beautiful little lak e, wbere the park wild fowl made their nest in dense copse wood, and island grass. I asked the keeper to day, "Have you a family?" "Yes, bad luck to it," was his reply "I've eight children at home." And it made my heart sick to hear him speak thus of his children. Hunger, even in prospect is a great destróyer of love. The comparison of a child-birth or a wedding of a peasant and prince, here, is interesting, both in the resemblance and the difference. Both have in prospect a maintenance at the public expense; the peasant, in a poor-house by the parish - the prince in a palace by the nation. - One goes upon the poor rates - the other in the striking Parliamentary phrase, -goes upon the taxes." The pauper, at hard work, is allowed five ounces of indifferent bacon, (all the animal food he tías",) per week; the prince in idleness, thousandsper year.The Princcss, Augusta Caroline, (with ivo orsix moie appellations) is to marry to-night, with his Royal Highness Frederick,the Hereditary Grand Duke of Meckenburg Strelitz; one of that class of "little pitiful Germán princes," who used to sell their subjects to England by the head, to fight in Foreign wars, whose father, the old Duke of Mecklenburg, has received a pension out of English taxes to the amount of 335.000 pounds. forsome good or evil conduct in events connected with rogress of the French Revolution. And now that the poor son of this pensioned 'ather is to marry the eldest daughter of the Duke of Cambridge, and cousin to Victoria, the Queen, of course sends a modest request to her faithful commons 'or a grant of money to "enable her majesty to make suitablc provisions for Princess Augusta at her marriage." The Queen already receives a trifle more than four times as much as our who] e execuive, including the President and heads of departments. The Royal family. babes and all. receive more than 700,000 pounds! nore than twenty-eight hundred thousand dollars annually ! Yet her majesty meeky asks the country to enable her to endow her cousin, because lier cousin is grand daughter of George III! As sonie parts of the country are in a state bordering on starvation, and other arts as near rebellion, her majesty's minister brought forward a bilí (which of course passed) to settle on the Princess Augusta a little annuity of L3000 a year, i. e. above twelve thousand dollars! One ïonest Scotchman, Mr. Hume, of Montrose, had the firmness to oppose the apropriation; and though his speech was a sort of running the gauntlet lilce one of Adams', Giddings', or Slade's in a slaveïolding house of Representatives, there were found 57 men in their places, out of 553 English, and 105 Irish members to sustain his opposition to the grant. As my sheet is full, I will close by saying that, in my simple apprehension, much as I dread a work-house and five ounces animal food per week, I should much prefer the condition of the pauper to that of the Prince. The trees are a darker, richer green than QÚrs. The fields are fairer and smaller. The elms, under which the great English cattle are grazing quietly, though noble trees as elms always are, iro loss tall, lithe-limed and grneoiul than ours; the sheep and horses, fatter, and beter tended, the meadows spotted here and there, with an artificial mound surrounded by 'a moat. and plantcd with everyinable sort aiid kind of tree, among which you recognize, by their marked peculiarities of shape or hue, the copper beech, thepine, the cedar, the sumach andmountaiu-ash; under whose protecting shadow the rabbit sits ruminating by the mouth of his burrow; and the half-wild fowl is peeping from beneath the brake: and then the gardens with their fruit-trees are till nailed to the wall, and the dull sallow brick houses half concealed by flowering and creeping vines; and lastly, the everywhere hedge-row, froin whose thorns the wandering child picks haws in winter,but which is now as fresh and green, and fair as when it saw Burns and his Mary exchange Biblcs; and fragrant too, as it breathed in his memory. when, describing that hour of plighted troth, he wrote the stanza - "O eweetly bloomed the gay green birk, And sweet the haw-thorn's blossom; As underneath its sacred shade ( clasped her to my bosom.'' These, and like them, are the objects of external nature, amid which I dreamed away the hours of yesterday. And if I could only divest myself of one chilling thought, a thought which follows like my shadow and haunts me like a spectre, go where I will, here, I could have lost myself in a dreamy wilderness of enjoyment, lapped as I was in the society of friends, the clear and tranquil kindness of whose hearts, more than mirrors the gentle and gorgeous loveliness of the landscape which surrounds ihem. What is that "one idea," pray? It is, that the men whose toil beautified,and whose sweatenriched these lands, did not, and their children's children after them, will not, own one foot of them. - They are known simply as "laborers," and they keep to their caste, almost as rigidly as a Chinese or Brahmin beggar, who begs simply because his father did. But of these in their place. After dinner (which in favor of an old lady of 80 was at the early hour of V2 o'clock, instead from four to six as we usually have it here,) my friend walked with me over to Elizabeth Fry's residence. Her "man" who carne to open the gate to us, was so dexterously arrayed in habiliments so equivocal, as to color, and shape and ornament, that you could not really make oath that he was on "livery," or was not; whether his costume was a badge of his own servitude or his mistress' religión. The dark color of the coat, and its straight make reminded you of religión, while the buttons, small clothes and stockings were, of the two, rather worldly.I hope your readers, if tempted to think me sornewhat tediously trifling, -and minute, will just have the good sense to remember that I ain in a land where buckles, and breeches, and strings and the like are grave and serious mattersj and espeially as connected with servants. For gentry are here graduated, if in the military line, like nobility among Indians, by the number of scalps taken from the enemy. Henee the tallest monuments are erected to mere fighters. But the common scale of a man's quality here is the color and quality of the velvet in his servan t's unmentionables. I suspect I have dwelt a little too long on this topic of liveried servants, and am therefore very naturally inclined to dweil a little longer. I am on principie, sternly opposed to this body-servant system. It is a multiplication of mouths which must be fed at the expense of somebody's hunger. Kept for the most part from ostentation, tricked out in a man-debasing finery, with plenty of idleness and bread, the thousands who belong to the great frmilies here, almost of necessity and of course become a species of male human vermin who eat out the substance, and swell the moral íoathsomeness and disease, of the metropolis. I never shall forget the impression made on my mind by the first servant in livery I saw. For though I have passed some time in Quebec and most of the considerable places between it and Washington, D. C, I never recollected to have noticed one till on my way from Portsmouth to London through the window of the car. I discovered a dazzling yollow doublet and small clothes of a man, whose head and shoulders were out of sight. I held my head down at once expecting to see the epulets and mustaches of a brigadier general at least. When lo! it stood there in the outward shape of a man with a hat on its head and a brave top knot springing out smartly in front of the left shoulder, about three paces back, and one to the left, of a stout, redfaced English woman. He was her footman; and such an expression of face! - so meek and lamb-like - so pale livered and emascúlate. I could not but blush for the credit of the sex to see it so profaned in his person, and charitably wishcdhim 50 acres of Western Prairie, withthe salutary option to rajse corn or starve, and for his mistress, the severe calamity of bringing from her cellar all the wine and beer she may hereafter find or swppose it necessary to drink.