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his memory, by firing minute guns, closing all public offices and shops, and suspending the usual Easter festivities, and by a general mourning and funeral prayers in all the churches. His body was embalmed by the physicians, and preparations were made for taking it to England.

"A few days after his death, his honoured remains were borne to the church where the body of Marco Botzaris was buried. The coffin was a rude chest of wood; a black mantle was his only pall; and over it were placed a helmet, a sword, and a crown of laurel.

"Here the bier rested for two days; and around it gathered a thousand noble hearts who had loved the generous poet.

"I stood by that coffin a long time; and more tears were shed over it than I ever saw fall upon the dust of a great man. But the simple-hearted, grateful people who crowded the church loved him, not as the author of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but as the disinterested Benefactor of Greece. A detachment of his own brigade guarded his body. There was something indescribably more affecting and sublime in this spectacle than in the gorgeous display which usually attends the funeral obsequies of the great.

"I remained in the church until the shadows of night had fallen around that solemn place; and there could be seen the rude forms of the descendants of Platæa relieved against the walls, their armour

gleaming in the uncertain light of the wax candles burning before the altar, and in the centre of the church a group of emancipated Greeks bending over that illustrious dust. It was all in keeping with the poet's own wild, wayward soul.

"I have known but few I loved so well as Byron; and from his kindness to me, stranger as I was, I felt that I had lost a friend."

After listening to this affecting story, I felt little like remaining in a crowd; and taking my companion's arm, we cast one glance upon her whom Byron once loved so well, and left the hall.-"Poor Byron !" Affectionately yours,

LETTER TO WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING. 139

To William Ellery Channing, D.D.

SIR,

Manchester, 1840.

THERE is no man who feels a deeper or more generous sympathy than yourself for humanity in its sorrows, struggles, and advancement; no one who has more faith in its capacity for elevation, or respect for its greatness. I do not address this letter to you because I expect to be able to communicate any information of which you are not already possessed; nor have I supposed I could reflect any new lustre upon your genius or your fame: far from it. I do it because the matters upon which I shall speak so immediately affect the interests of millions of the race, to whose redemption you have devoted your best powers, and so large a portion of your life.

If we may judge of your heart by the spirit of your writings, that beautiful saying of Terrence is as true of you, as of him to whom it was first applied: Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto. Besides, the philosophy which you have gained from no shallow meditation or common learning, will enable you to decide if my remarks are entitled to any consideration.

The deep depression of the mass of the English people has surprised and grieved me exceedingly

since I have been in Great Britain. In common with every other American, I had long known that great abuses existed in the government of this country, and that the poverty, ignorance, and suffering of the lower classes were extreme; but I was not prepared to find such a state of things as I have witnessed.

I think Americans, generally, have no adequate idea of the wretchedness of the poor of this island. Tourists have passed in stage-coaches, or in private carriages, over the smooth roads and along the hawthorn hedgerows of this beautiful land; they have seen the gray towers and pinnacles of old castles and churches rising from verdant lawns or crowning green hills; they have told us much about parks and pleasure-grounds, gardens and ruins; they have spoken of the moss-covered cottages of the peasantry-"Trellises nailed between the little windows; roses quite overshadowing the low doors; the painted fence enclosing the hand's breadth of grassplat; very, oh! very sweet faces bent over laps full of work, beneath the snowy and looped-up curtains: it was all home-like and amiable; there was an affectionateness in the mere outside of every one of them; and the soul of neatness pervaded them all;" and, to crown the picture, rosy-cheeked children were sporting away life's early morn amid fragrance and flowers. At every step the traveller witnessed some new landscape of rural peace and beauty. We have dwelt upon these de

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scriptions till the very heart ached to gaze on scenes of so much loveliness for ourselves.

England furnishes us with numberless luxuries; we are clothed like princes in her rich fabrics; and such bright images of commercial prosperity and agricultural plenty crowd upon the mind when we think of our "father-land," that we fancy it must be a paradise. A paradise indeed it is for the higher classes; and a paradise it will be for them, until the sword of vengeance which now sleeps in the hands of an oppressed people, shall at length awake to its terrible work, and revolution establish her tribunal, not to hear causes, but to decide them.

In no country on earth is there such a field for enjoyment and luxury. Everything which wealth can purchase or ingenuity invent is brought to the doors of English magnates. Their houses are surrounded by gardens in which cool fountains are playing, and where flowers, brought from every land, are courted by artificial heat and the tenderest care, to bloom in this cold region. There is not a climate from the equator to the poles that does not send its delicacies to the homes of the rich. On every side the Englishman finds choice books, museums of science, and literary society. Nothing is left unsatisfied but the feverish desire for something which even an English home cannot gratify. And these are the pictures travellers have presented to us.

But it has been well said by an Englishman himself, that "To talk of English happiness is like talk