MORE MEMORIES. I. PERSONAL. Fear and Hope-Some Misapprehension as to our Appreciations of America General Washington American Authors - Subjects and Objects of Addresses. IF I am presumptuous in obtruding upon your notice so large an amount of British humanity, if I should fail to evoke your interest, and to win your approbation, I can only call upon those who, privately, suggested my visit by their cordial invitations, and publicly encouraged it by their genial praise of my books, to retire with me into the wilderness to share and to solace my despair. But I will not anticipate such a doleful disaster. The kindness which I have already received, my earnest anxiety to please, the object of my enterprise, the sympathy which has always responded to my love for my fellow-men, to my "enthusiasm of humanity," these all combine to assure me that you will minimize my faults, which are many, and will magnify my merits, which are few. In the days of my boyhood there was a custom in our English homes, when a new little brother or a new little sister was given to our love, to trace with pins on a large white pincushion this shining salutation WELCOME LITTLE STRANGER and as I seem to read a similar reception, in the bright eyes and smiling faces before me, I am inspired with the hopeful, happy ambition, that the little stranger may grow in your esteem, and enlarge himself to your affectionate regard. I am here, ladies and gentlemen, not only in response to the kindly inducements which I have. mentioned — I may add that your reviewers have almost made me of Jefferson's mind, when he said, "that if it were left for him to decide whether there should be a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, he should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter but I come to realize my life-long desire to see your wonderful country, its cities, and its scenery, its rivers, "broad, and deep, and brimming over, making their waves a blessing as they flow," the splendid glories of your forests in "the fall," the triumphs of your inventive and industrial power. You come to us to venerate the past; we come to you to admire the present and to anticipate the future the progress of a mighty people, which, while all the other nations of the world are armed to the teeth, yet ever seeking new armaments, amid wars and rumours of wars, work on in peace, practising that which your great poet preached "Were half the power that fills the world with terror, Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, Given to redeem the human mind from error, There were no need of arsenals and forts." It has been said by an American bishop, that all we English people knew about American history was the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers upon Plymouth Rock, and that he became so wearied by monotonous references to this particular embarkation, that he began to wish that the arrangements had been reversed, and that Plymouth Rock had landed on the Pilgrim Fathers! Such a катаσтродη would not only have been fatal to the Fathers, but would have deprived America of some of her most famous men, and certainly of one of her most famous institutions; for it was Elihu Yale, the son of one of these Pilgrim Fathers, whose munificence to the New Haven College at Connecticut induced the trustees to rename it "Yale College." I have seen his monument in the churchyard at Wrexham, North Wales, and remember part of the inscription "Born in America, in Europe bred, Much good, some ill, he did, So hope all's even, And that his soul, through mercy, 's gone to heaven." |