MRS. TROLLOPE. 383 very little success in gaining adherents. She was part of the movement which led to Brook Farm, New Har- mony, and similar establishments founded on principles which work beautifully so long as they are confined to the amiable thoughts of their founders. It is probable that Mrs. Trollope, without being a dreamer of this school, came to America a sentimental republican, expecting to find here the realization of a dream not less erroneous than that of Frances Wright. She was wofully disappointed. In New Orleans, where she landed, she saw slavery, and shuddered at the spectacle. "At the sight," she says, " of every negro man, woman, and child that passed, my fancy wove some little romance of misery as belonging to each of them ; since I have known more on the subject, and become better acquainted with their real situation in America, I have often smiled at recalling what I then felt." This was one great shock. She was, perhaps, not less offended, as an Englishwoman and the daughter of a clergyman of the church of England, to find that the white people were living together on terms approaching social equality. She found in New Orleans a milliner holding a kind of levee in her shop, to whom she was formally introduced, and who spoke of the French fashions to the ladies, and of metaphysics to the gentlemen. Mrs. Trollope was not severely afflicted at this instance of republican equality ; but the free and easy manners pre- vailing on board of the Mississippi steamboats disgusted her entirely, particularly the frightful expectorating of the men, and their silent voracity at the dinner table. And here she fell into her great mistake. She attribu- ted the crude provincialisms of American life to the institutions of the country, and not their true cause, the desperate struggle in which the people were engaged with
