immediately ordered off by the master, and not choosing to obey, a scuffle ensued with high words. Memorandum. I am sorry to find, that the English are an exceedingly quarrelsome people.

"April 24th-Put up at one of the most respectable inns in Chester. The head waiter wanted to know how long we had been in Hingland. Memorandum. How barbarously these Hinglish people, of all classes, speak their own language.

"Went to look at the Cathedral, which they are extremely proud of. Found it almost a ruin. . . . Why don't they pull down the old rookery, and build up a neat, convenient church, of brick or granite, such as they have in New York or Boston? .

...

"[August] 8th-I have not seen a decent tract of woodland in all England. It is true, they have a few handsome parks, but what are a thousand of them compared with one of our American forests? Their largest lakes, too, compared with ours, are mere mill-ponds. In short, nature has done everything on a small scale in Great Britain."

William B. Sprague seems to have been the only other Congregational minister who published at this time a book of travel letters from England. His Letters from Europe in 1828 appeared in the New York Observer and were reprinted in a small volume the same year. As he spent only a month in England, more than half of which was confined to London, his observations were not extensive. His later volume, Visits to European Celebrities (1855), was based chiefly on his later trip (1836), although he revised some of the matter of his first impressions.

Sprague's mission in 1828 was his own health and he concerned himself more with men than with things, although his interests were dominantly theological. His descriptions

of the two London clergymen who were then most conspicuous, Edward Irving and Rowland Hill, are very complete, as he not only heard these men from the pulpit, but he later called upon them. He also spent, as Hannah More later expressed it, an hour and a half near the threshold of heaven in the library of the aged Wilberforce. Most of the other celebrities of his later book, particularly the Scottish, were the features of his second tour.

The picture of England which is given by these three men is as colored by prejudice and limitation of viewpoint as any travel book of the time. But the prejudice was not a national one. Neither Codman nor Humphrey, nor in fact the vast majority of American travelers in England whose missions were associated with religion or philanthropy, could be said to be either pro-British or antiBritish. Their minds were colored by religious rather than patriotic sympathies, they recognized the bonds of race and of human brotherhood to the exclusion of national antipathies and of political antagonism. They went to England to visit those who spoke and believed as they did, and they were welcomed as brothers in the faith.

There is almost no growth or change in the attitude of these men, as American citizens, over the period of fifty years following American independence. But there is the same development in their attitudes as writers of travel literature that we find in practically all other groups. To these travelers themselves and to their readers, England was by 1835 a country to be toured, described, and pictured; it was no longer the land of their father's or grandfather's boyhood. John Mitchell Mason visited his uncle and wrote to his family and friends of their old home across the water; Dewey and Humphrey wrote journals of visits to a foreign land.

CHAPTER VII

A NOTE ON WOMEN

Wives and Daughters-Women Travelers

I

One of the most curious aspects of this story of the American traveler in England is the fact that we have such slight record of the women who probably went abroad during these years. One would be led to suppose that with the exception of the Quaker ministers, who were as often women as men, women invariably remained at home in the good old accepted fashion, while men alone hazarded their fortunes in the world at large. This is partially true, at least. The great majority of these travelers were not accompanied by their sisters, mothers, wives, or daughters. In fact, much of our information about the travelers themselves is derived from letters written to, or journals kept for the future entertainment of, womenfolk who had been left at home.

The fact that women did not travel may be in large part attributed to the theories of the day concerning the relative places of women and men in society, but much of it can also be explained by the very real sense of danger which was experienced by any one undertaking a transatlantic voyage. An attitude of protective chivalry would tend to make a traveler leave his wife at home, and, even if she were fully prepared for the risks and hardships of the trip, it would scarcely be natural to submit children to

such an experience. The duty of the mother was therefore an additional and deciding factor in many cases.

Added to these forces which tended to keep American women in America, we may cite one other factor which makes the travel records of women scarce to-day. Feminine authorship was not even yet considered wholly genteel, in spite of the vogue of the Blue Stockings, and this was even more the case in America, as yet a land of vigorous action and not of sophisticated contemplation, than it was in England. There are very few American women authors of the post-revolutionary period. If, therefore, in spite of all contrary forces, an American woman went abroad, and if, again in spite of restraining influences, she kept a record of her travels, there was nothing to make her wish to publish her observations and everything to prevent. We have, as a result, no published travel literature from the pens of women, with exception of the Quakers, until well into the nineteenth century.

There are, however, a few fragmentary diaries from this early period, most of which have not even yet been published. One of the most entertaining, as well as one of the most eager and spontaneous of all these travel records, is the schoolgirl diary of Catherine G. Hickling, later Mrs. William Prescott.' She went to London in 1786 with her brother, after stopping off at the Azores where her father was the United States consul, and she was immediately taken in by friends of her father, both English and American. Most of her time was occupied with those social activities which are suitable to the sub-debutante generation. On one call in the West End, she was so overwhelmed by the army of footmen and the glitter of the parade that she felt "quite satisfied to be a little body." She often went 1 Ms. in the possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

to the theater with her brother and his friends, saw Mrs. Siddons among others, and at one time witnessed a farce at which the hissing and hooting were so "very terrific, we were glad to escape as soon as possible."

Her diary is full of ingenuous comment. For a time she lived at Clapham, and while in London she attended a grand ball where there were "three hundred persons, who all looked to me like nobility." She kept a journal only because she had promised her American friends that she would, but she hopes they will throw it into the fire after they read it, as, she continues, "I am not willing even to have the paper used to cover pies and puddings, the general use of all old writing." As these same friends obviously disregarded her wish, we may perhaps be pardoned for fingering through her copy-book pages covered in a large childish hand. She scarcely realized that she was to be the first spokesman of her sex in such a matter as this.

2

Similar to this journal are two others kept some years later by young ladies in like circumstances, those of Lydia Smith (1805-6) and Harriet Balch (1815-6). Miss Balch, then Mrs. James P. Wilson, kept an entirely spontaneous journal, full of fresh comment and impressions. Her summary of London is among the best characterizations of that metropolis: "London upon the whole is an overgrown elegant place crowded by thousands of people; the one half know not how they are to get the next meal." She shows a similar directness and lack of reverence when, in looking out over Windsor Park from the Castle she remarks that "the Princesses Maria and Augusta were airing

2 Extract edited by W. C. Ford, Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings XLVIII, 508-34.

3 Ms. in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.