The only professed travel book by a woman, however, came at the end of the half century. This is Emma Willard's Journal and Letters, from France and Great Britain, (1833). Mrs. Willard's record is genuinely entertaining, not only because it is fuller and more finished than the others, but because of the firm character of its author. Emma Willard's is one of the first and most important names associated with the education of women in this country, and her trip abroad was taken for the purpose of enlarging her own mental horizon in order to enrich the education she was endeavoring to give to the young ladies in her school. Her book is a composite of travel notes and letters to her sister, Mrs. A. H. Lincoln, and is therefore somewhat uneven, a mixture of sound observation, aptly turned and vigorous comment, and that vice of many women writers of the day, sentimentality. Although primarily interested in the education of women, she makes few remarks on it in England because she found only one school worthy of a visit and there she was not received at all cordially. The lady with whom we have to deal is soon apparent, for upon her arrival at the White Hart in Windsor, the best inn in the town, she says, "as in other inns, it was necessary to look out a little for ourselves. They first showed us rooms comfortable, but not agreeable; and following some wise advice which I had previously received, not to be too easily satisfied, or too unassuming at an English innI indicated in a stately manner, and with few words, the faults of the apartment assigned us; so they gave us better and called me 'my lady' into the bargain."

The English prejudice against Americans is very well illustrated in an incident which she tells of Sir James Mackintosh. After some conversation with her, Sir James approached Miss Edgeworth and asked who the lady was.

She told him and he exclaimed rather loudly, and obviously with surprise, "Why! she is very well!" To compensate for his bad manners in making the remark aloud, and because he was consistently pleasant to all Americans, he was especially so to her during the remainder of the evening. "So you see, as Americans, we have influential friends here; who, though they are astonished, are glad to find us 'very well,' and disposed to make the best of us."

The day upon which Mrs. Willard arrived in London was opportune, for it happened to be "that in which the King prorogued the Parliament, showing thereby his desire to please the people in the matter of the reform bill." "In the flow of feelings," she continues, "the Londoners made a partial illumination of their city."

Two weeks later the authorities arranged for a full lighting of the city. "We were somewhere in the vicinity of St. Paul's Church, and not far from the Lord Mayor's house, when the crowd of men, women, and children thronged around, till the streets were so densely filled, that fathers and mothers were obliged to hold up their little children (brought out in hundreds) above their heads, to save their lives. . . . The dense mass crowded close upon the line of carriages, and sometimes impeded their way. At length we had ascended an eminence, where our view extended far down long and broad streets, and-what a multitude! The heavens dark above, the earth bright beneath, and so many and so thick with people!-Human heads, on which the lights fell brightly, and the tops of carriages entirely filled the whole breadth of the streets as far as the eye could reach."

That she was still woman, even though in advance of her times in some matters, is demonstrated by her interest in

the Waterloo Street shops. "Some of the clerks," she says, "were very polite, and Mrs. R.— told them we were foreigners, and would like to be shown, as a matter of curiosity, some of their finest things. They then took us to see the patterns for court dresses,-satin trains of various colors, embroidered in gold and silver thread,-jewelry, French and English porcelain vases,-fans and boxes-and other little elegant conveniences. In fact it is a kind of bazaar where you find almost everything you can want."

One of her most unexpected personal experiences was her meeting with Robert Owen, the most talked of radical of the day. "Never did I meet a man with a smoother face," she says, "or a smoother tongue. I saw my situation and determined to avoid if possible, controversial matters, and supposed that for an evening I might-but no;—Mr. Owen, confident in his powers-disposed to exert them to the utmost, and backed by his followers, must needs make a proselyte. I endeavoured to evade, but to no purpose, till at last, roused to an energy that seemed more than my own, I turned and encountered the whole." The question which finally ended the argument after a heated session was: "And if human nature in its best estate is thus liable to error, how then can Mr. Owen know that he is infallible?" With that the subject was changed, but later she visited Owen's model community. The whole village consisted of manufactories, chiefly for cotton thread, with dwellings for the workmen, and a school house. "Everything here," she remarks, "has the appearance of comfort and neatness."

Her descriptive powers, as well as her attitude toward her own sex, may be seen in her remarks on the English ladies she saw riding in Regent's Park: "Ladies of elegant form here love to display themselves on horseback. Their

close riding costume shows to advantage a delicate waist; while the black plume rising over their heads, and the long habit, falling in fine folds beneath their feet, adds to the effect in point of dignity and grace."

The same year, she returned, in the words of John Lord, her biographer, "to renew her labors at Troy, with recruited health, and richer experience and added interest. She returned with books and pictures, and works of art, to enrich the institution of which she was the founder. Few people ever derived more profit from a tour to Europe than she, and the effect was speedily seen in the renewed éclat of the Troy Female Seminary," which has, to this day, retained its position among preparatory schools for girls. The personality of Emma Willard was unique.

Although the travel records of women in this early period are scant, the decades immediately following show a sudden and decided change in this state of affairs. Fanny W. Hall's Rambles in Europe in 1836 marks the beginning of a series of travel books which very soon rivaled in numbers those written by men. This phase of the emancipation of American women is a development which belongs to a latter time, but by 1835 the first steps had been taken.

CHAPTER VIII

A LITERARY WANDERER AND OTHERS

The Irving Circle-Ambassador at Large-The England
that Never Was

I

If there is any class of humanity in which one might feel justified in looking for the true Stevensonian wanderer, that class is the traveler. Life is usually too busy to permit its own enjoyment; men and women are too much engrossed in affairs and prospects to realize the carefree detachment which makes donkeys, canoes, and the human feet the most desirable means of transportation.

Especially is this true of the America of to-day, and it was even more true of her early days. Her primary concern with the battle for existence against natural and human foes has always tended to force her into a careful and constant appreciation of ways and means rather than of byways and the meaning of things. Very few of her early literary men, therefore, traveled to any great extent, and of the few who made pilgrimages to England, only Irving, Cooper, and Willis published their impressions in extended literary form. Longfellow, Holmes, Poe, and Emerson all visited the older country before 1835, but they have left scant accounts of their impressions. Philip Freneau, more than any one else the poet of the Revolution, wrote of war with England rather than of England herself. Bryant and Tuckerman, both of whom were abroad in 1834, confined their