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"Books of travel will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode of life with another." SAMUEL JOHNSON

PREFACE

To the American of post-revolutionary days England was both a parent and an enemy nation. With almost equal force, she attracted and repelled her former subjects. A common political, cultural, and racial heredity bound together the young nation and the old more firmly than either would have wished.

The Declaration of Independence defined the theoretical basis of separation, and the Revolution gave it political reality; but it was many years before the whole story had been told and the United States had become an independent nation. The War of 1812 demonstrated the fact that England required over thirty years to appreciate and to acknowledge her former colony's sovereign rights on the sea, and, up to that time, the Americans themselves were unaware of the full meaning of their independence. An attitude of deference to the mother country was apparent in practically all phases of their thought and activity for many years.

The political, and to some extent the economic, aspects of this story of national growth are familiar enough, but no human or national development can be understood when consideration is limited to these two terms. Even the recognition of the steady growth of a national American literature fails to reveal the true relationships of the two countries in this period of probation for both.

There is one exceedingly fertile source of information for the human aspects of the story, in the form of the letters, diaries, and other travel records of those Americans who

went to England in the early national period. There were at least a thousand such travelers, but the majority left only fragmentary comments because they did not feel that they were visiting a foreign nation. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, most of them made no effort to give a complete survey of the English nation. Many of them merely stopped in England for brief stays after extended continental tours, and they were inclined to regard their visit more as the first step in their homeward journey than as part of their trip. Their comments were, therefore, usually brief and personal, qualities which rather tend to enhance their human value. Very few of them can be regarded as literature in the strict sense of the term; but it is equally unfair to consider them solely as source material for political and economic history. Their greatest value lies in the understanding which they afford of the reciprocal attitudes of the two nations in each of the separate aspects of human contact.

Some such consideration as this first prompted an undertaking of the problems involved in this study. It was originally intended to limit it to an examination of the writings of those men who directed thought in obvious ways and left fairly complete records of their experiences and conclusions. The impossibility of drawing any such line between the "great" and the "many" was soon recognized. There is less reflection of the actual state of thought of the two nations in the Sketch Book of Washington Irving or the diplomatic correspondence of Jefferson than there is in a series of composite pictures drawn from the records of each group of Americans who were guided by more or less common motives. The prominence of a single figure is as frequently based on his protest against the average attitude as on his accurate reflection of the public mind. The Rev. Orville