very glad to get your

letter. God bless you, and all yours, and my dear old Dicky Doyle when you see him. The success of 'Esmond' has quite surprised me, for I only looked for a few to like it.

"Write again to Appleton, New York, please, to yours affectionately, W. M. T.”

The little memorandum-book for 1852-53 gives the history of these eventful days; that much of a history that can best be told by names and dates, from which, as from the notes of a music-book, the tune of the past can be played once more. There is a list of places and lectures all the way from Boston to Savannah, and from Savannah to England agaiu, and the names of the hospitable people with whom my father chiefly spent his time, with the dates of their hospitable entertainments. All noted in their turn, with the names of our old friend Mr. Synge, and Mr. Crampton, and Governor Fish, and many others. One of Mr. Lowell's charming little invitations has been preserved:

"CAMBRIDGE, 30th December.

"MY DEAR SIR,-Have you any engagement for Wednesday or Thursday evening of next week? If not, will you give me one of them? Timmins, revolving many things, has decided on a supper, because he can have it under his own roof, and because he can have more pleasant people at it. He will ask only clubbable men, and such as can't make speeches. You shall either be carried back to Boston, or spend the night with us. Crowe survived it. Very sincerely yours, J. R. LOWELL."

"Mr. Prescott, the historian, is delightful," my father wrote from Boston; "Mr. Ticknor is a great city magnate and littérateur. It's like the society of a rich Cathedral-town in England -grave and decorous, and very pleasant and well read."

One of the first of the lectures was delivered in a Unitarian Chapel. My father was rather nervous when he found he was expected to mount the pulpit, and asked whether the organ would strike up when he entered. He not only gave lectures, but attended them. Bancroft was lecturing at that time; so was Theodore Parker, the eloquent anti-slavery champion; so was Mr. Home, whose rapping manifestations were then coming

into vogue. We have one or two scraps pasted into an American scrap-book, with various mysterious messages like telegrams from the unseen world, "I merely wished to say Make-peace you argue of importance." This oracle is dated December 1852. Here is another revelation, "Carissima may move the table." One of the messages on the same page may be spiritual, but it rather reminds one of common life. "Please deliver to W. M. Thackeray, Esq. a hat or a cap as he may wish, and place the same to the account of John N. Genin, 214 Broadway." A stamp in the corner with Genin, Broadway, New York, and the picture of a very tall hat, gives authority to the document.

A letter to Lady Stanley, written from Philadelphia, sums up his first impressions:

"January 21, 1853.

"All those fine plans of writing letters, which my friends were to keep and restore to me, and of which I was to make a book on my return home, are of no avail. I can't see the country, I can't write any letters; the business I am on prevents the one and the other. I am making and receiving visits all day long, going out to dinner and supper prodigiously, and perfectly drunk with the number of new acquaintances poured into me. I tremble as I walk the streets here, lest every man I meet is my friend of last night, who will be offended of course if I forget him. It is like a man canvassing, but the canvass begins afresh in every new city, and goes on till I am perfectly weary of shaking hands and acting. Do you know that there are over five hundred thousand inhabitants in this town? The great impression I have got in going about is how small and dwindled the old country is, and how great and strong the new. Here I must go, Mr. M Michael of the North American Enquirer is below.

"It is two hours afterwards. M'Michael and I have been to the Mint (shake hands with everybody), which is a beautiful institution, of which the Philadelphians have a right to be proud, to the Free School (shake hands with all the professors), a capital school too, seemingly, where the youngest boys know much more than I do, where it is a good thing to think small beer of oneself, comparing one's own ignorance with the knowledge of these little ones. I am making money pretty well, and have put by already nearly two thousand pounds since I have

been here; and do you know that the common interest here is eight per cent., as safe as English Funds, they tell me? . . . I hope to make nearly double what I have before I bend my steps homeward, and then shall get ready some fresh lectures for a new campaign. They will bear me over again in this country, and like me, I believe. I have nothing but praise and kindness, except from some of the Boston papers, who fired into me, and said I was a humbug. But Boston is the centre of lecturing; lecturers go out thence to all quarters of the Union, lecturers who only get one dollar to my ten, and who are at least quite as good as I am, hence animosities and natural heart-burnings; and I don't care, so long as the reason is with them, and the dollars with me. I find wonderfully little difference in manners, an accent not quite like ours; but why should it be? Why should not Jordan be as good as Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus? Even the dress of the New York girls, which struck me as odious at first on account of their splendaciousness, I think now quite handsome. I have found kind matrons and pretty girls everywhere, and in Boston very good, fogeyfied, literary society, with everywhere a love for the old country quite curious, nay, touching, to remark. They are great about pronunciation especially, and take down at my lectures words which this present arbiter of English pronounces differently to them. If Carlyle comes, I wonder whether they will take him as an exemplar. Crowe is my comfort and delight in life; he is worth his weight in gold. Everybody lectures in this country, and it isn't, nor any trade or calling else, for that matter, thought infra dig. Nor is a man thought the worse of for showing a little independence. For instance, when I came here they told me it was usual for lecturers (Mr. B. of London had done it) to call upon all the editors of all the papers, hat in hand, and ask them to puff my lectures. Says I, 'I'll see them all . . .,' here I used a strong expression, which you will find in the Athanasian Creed. Well, they were pleased rather than otherwise, and now the papers are puffing me so as to make me blush."

After Philadelphia, where Mr. Reid made the travellers at home, came Baltimore and Washington, and “an interminable succession of balls, parties, banquets at the British Embassy and

elsewhere." Sir John Crampton was ambassador in those days, President Fillmore was at the White House, and for three weeks lecturing and hospitality alternated. Then they took steamer to Richmond. "I sketched the distant outline of Mr. Washington's home," says Mr. Crowe, "and we tried to spot the new Castlewood, which was raised on the beautiful banks of the Potomac."

Brief records of Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah follow in my father's little diary: "Calm passage, pleasant boat, river like the Nile. Quitted the horrible hotel for Mr. Low's pleasant house. On Tuesday the 15th of March drove to Bon Aventure and Mr. Faversham's estate. Negro houses, moss on the trees, yellow jessamine, splendid magnolia. First lecture about 360, I should think. I read in the papers of snow twelve inches thick falling in New England; here all windows open, peachtrees in most 'lubly' blossom, leaves coming out, fresh salad for dinner, balmy air blowing."

On Saturday the 19th March he wrote to us: "Yesterday your papa performed for the first time in a theatre-who would ever have thought of seeing him on a stage? The room where I generally act is engaged, and I had such a dirty little theatre. instead. The proceeds for the three lectures are about the smallest I shall get in the States, but it is only a little place-a friendly, pretty little place-and Mr. Low, my host, has made me and Eyre as comfortable as mortal man could be in this hot weather. It doesn't agree with me, I think, and I am glad I am going out of these enervating damp climates. I wish you could have seen a little negrillo of five years old toddling about with the plates at dinner yesterday, and listening to the young ladies making music afterwards."

"Providence has proved rather a failure," he wrote from that place after the first lecture. "There are not above 500 auditors, and I must return half the money we agreed for. Nobody must lose money by me in America, where I have had such a welcome and hospitality."

He says in a letter to Dr. Brown:

"CHARLESTOWN, March 25, 1853. "The lectures do pretty well, and I have laid by already. This will make me easy against the day when work will be over,

and then and then who knows what fate will bring. The idleness of the life is dreary and demoralising though, and the bore and humiliation of delivering these stale old lectures is growing intolerable. Why, what a superior heroism is Albert Smith's, who has ascended Mont Blanc 400 times!

"It's all exaggeration about this country-barbarism, eccentricities, nigger cruelties, and all. They are not so highly educated as individuals, but a circle of people knows more than an equal number of English (of Scotch I don't say-there, in Edinburgh you are educated)."

By April he was back in New York. Mr. George Smith has given me some letters dated from the Clarendon, New York. "We have had a very pleasant and not unprofitable tour in the South," my father dictates. "The words are the words of Thackeray, but the pen is the pen of Crowe. The former is boiling himself in a warm bath, and is, whether in or out of hot water, yours very faithfully always. . . ."

The following amusing little jeu d'esprit appeared in the Boston Post, and is pasted into the American scrap-book: "High Life in Boston: Literary Breakfast of a family of opulence moving in a select circle, residing in a select square.

"Clever Daughter. Decidedly I esteem Mr. Thackeray, the fort esprit of his time: strongly resembling Bussy de Rabutin, but with a more introspective cast. He reminds one constantly of the subtle companion of Faust: no moral obliquity without its palliative, no human weakness without a claim to a tender extenuation. We learn to love the vice, but hate the sinner; I would say, hate the sinner and love the vice-vice-versa.

"Sentimental Daughter. I'm sure I wish I had been born in Queen Anne's day, when all the gentlemen were so enthusiastic, and wore red cloaks and green stockings. They seem to have had such a ceaseless flow of spirits.

"Pert Son. Well, they didn't have anything else.

Gruff Papa. A pack of d-d scamps as ever 'scaped hanging. If I'd had any idea of such characters being raked up at a lecture in Boston, no son or daughter of mine should have set foot in the hall, if they grew up ever so ignorant.'

"Clever Girl. But, dear papa, genius is ever eccentric: can