Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/103

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100
LONDON.

country, than from anything very extraordinary in the man. He is pushing his theories with unabated seal. He wasted an hour in trying to convince me that he could make the world over and "set all to rights," if he were permitted to substitute two or three truths for two or three prevailing errors; and on the same morning a philaothropical phrenologist endeavoured to show me how, if bis theory were established, the world would soon become healthy, wealthy, and wise. Both believe the good work is going on—happy men! So it has always been; there must be some philosopher's stone, some shorthand process, rather than the slow way of education and religious discipline which, to us, Providence seems to have ordained.




You will perhaps like to know, my dear C., more definitely than you can get them from these few anecdotes of my month in London, what impressions I have received here; and I will give them fairly to you, premising that I am fully aware how imperfect they are, and how false some of them may be. Travellers should be forgiven their monstrous errors when we find there are so few on whose sound judgments we can rely, of the character of their own people and the institutions of their own country.

In the first place, I have been struck with the identity of the English and the New-England character—the strong family likeness. The oak-tree may be our emblem, modified, but never changed by