London, April till September, 1822.

PHILADELPHIA-GENERAL WASHINGTON.

BALTIMORE, like all the other principal towns of the United States, was not nearly so large a place at the time I saw it as it has since become; it was a pretty little Catholic town, clean and lively, and its manners and society much resembled those of Europe.

I paid my passage-money to the captain, and gave him a farewell dinner; then took a place in the stage coach which runs three times a week from Baltimore to Philadelphia, and at four in the morning took my seat on it, and found myself rolling along the highways of the New World.

The road by which we travelled, traced rather than properly made, traversed rather a flat country; scarcely any trees, scattered farms and villages, a climate like that of France, and swallows dipping into the waters as on the pond at Combourg.

As we approached Philadelphia, we met peasants going to market, public and private conveyances. Philadelphia appeared to me a handsome town, with wide streets, some of them planted, running direct north and south, east and west, and intersecting each other at right angles. The Delaware flows in a line parallel to the street which runs along its western bank. This river would be called considerable in Europe; in America it is thought nothing of; its banks are flat and not picturesque.

At the time of my visit to it (in the year 1791), Philadelphia did not extend as far as the river Schuylkill; the ground between the town and the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware was parcelled out in sections-here and there a house was in course of being built.

Philadelphia is monotonous in its appearance; in general, the great deficiency in the Protestant cities of the United States is in the great works of architecture; the young Reformation, refusing to sacrifice to the imagination, has rarely erected domes, lofty naves with their airy arches, and twin towers, such as those with which the ancient Catholic religion has crowned Europe. No monument, either at Philadelphia, New York, or Boston, rises above the mass of walls and roofs; and the eye is wearied by the sameness of this level.

I first took up my quarters at the inn, but afterwards estab

lished myself in a boarding-house, where I met St. Domingo colonists, and Frenchmen who had emigrated with very different ideas from myself. A land of liberty offered an asylum to those who fled from the encroachments of liberty at home; nothing can more strongly prove the high value of generous institutions, than this voluntary exile of the partisans of absolute power to a country where the government is a pure democracy.

A man landing as I did in the United States, filled with enthusiastic feeling for classical nations, everywhere seeking the severity of primitive Roman manners, would naturally be much scandalised at finding, instead of this, luxury in equipages, frivolity in conversation, immorality in banking and gaming-houses, and the noisy confusion of ball-rooms and theatres. At Philadelphia I could have fancied myself in Liverpool or Bristol. The appearance of the people was pleasing; the Quakeresses pretty, with their gray dresses, small plain bonnets, and pale complexions.

At that time of my life I had a great admiration for republics, although I did not believe their existence possible in our era of the world; my idea of liberty pictured her such us she was among the ancients, daughter of the manners of an infant society; I knew her not as the daughter of enlightenment and the civilisation of centuries-as the liberty whose reality the representative republic has proved: God grant it may be durable! We are no longer obliged to work in our own little fields, to curse arts and sciences, and to wear long nails and beards, if we would be free.

in

When I arrived at Philadelphia, General Washington was not there, and it was a week before he returned. I saw him pass a carriage whirled along by four spirited horses. Washington, according to my ideas at that period, was necessarily a Cincinnatus; but Cincinnatus in a carriage was a little out of harmony with my republic of the year of Rome, 296. Could the Dictator Washington be other than a rustic, urging on his oxen, and holding his plough? But when I went to deliver my letter of introduction, I found all the simplicity of an ancient Roman.

A small house, similar to those around it, was the palace of the President of the United States; no guards, not even any men-servants. I knocked, and a young girl opened; I asked if the general was at home; she replied in the affirmative, and I said I had a letter to deliver to him. She asked my name, but found it very difficult to pronounce, and could not remember it; then requested me to

"walk in," led me along one of those narrow corridors which serve as vestibules to English houses, and left me in a parlour, where she begged me to wait for the general.

I was not moved or embarrassed; neither greatness of soul nor splendour of fortune awe me; I admire the former without feeling overwhelmed by it; the latter inspires me with more pity than respect; face of man will never confuse me.

After an interval of a few minutes, the general entered; tall, calm, and cold, rather than noble in mien; the engravings of him are good. I silently handed him my letter; he opened it, and turned to the signature, which he read aloud, exclaiming, "Colonel Armand !" The Marquis de la Rouërie was known to him by this name, and had signed the letter with it. We sat down, and I explained to him, as well as I could, the motive of my journey. He answered me in English and French monosyllables, and listened to me with a sort of astonishment. I perceived this, and said to him with some warmth, "But it is less difficult to discover the North-west passage than to create a nation as you have done."

"Well, well, young man!" cried he, holding out his hand to me. He invited me to dine with him on the following day, and we parted.

I took care not to fail in my appointment. We were only a party of five or six; the conversation turned on the French revolution, and the general showed us a key of the Bastille. I have already said that these keys were the rather foolish playthings which it was then the fancy to distribute. Three years later, the distributors of locksmiths' work might have sent the president the bolt of the prison of the monarch who gave liberty to France and to America. If Washington had seen the victors of the Bastille in the gutters of Paris, he would have less respected his relic. The serious essence and strength of the revolution arose not from these bloody orgies. At the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, the same populace of the faubourg St. Antoine demolished the Protestant church at Charenton, with as much zeal as it showed in pillaging and destroying the church of St. Denis in 1793.

I parted from my host at ten o'clock, and never saw him again; he went away next day, and I continued my travels.

Such was my meeting with the soldier citizen, the liberator of a world. Washington went down to the tomb before even the slightest fame was attached to my steps; I passed before his eyes as a being utterly unknown; he was at the zenith of his fame, I

in all my obscurity; perhaps my name did not even dwell for a day in his memory-how happy am I, nevertheless, that his eyes have even looked upon me! I have felt their vivifying influence throughout my life; there is a virtue in the glance of a great

man.

COMPARISON BETWEEN WASHINGTON AND BONAPARTE.

BONAPARTE has but just ceased to exist; and since I have but now spoken of my interview with Washington, a comparison between the founder of the United States and the Emperor of the French naturally presents itself to my mind; the more so, as at the moment I write these lines Washington himself is gone. Ercilla, while singing and fighting in Chili, stopped in the midst of his travels to narrate the death of Dido; I delay at the very outset of my journeyings in Pensylvauia to compare Washington and Bonaparte. I might indeed have deferred the comparison until I came to speak of my meeting with Napoleon; but should death interrupt me before I reach the year 1814, what I have to say of these two instruments of Providence would never be known; I remember the example of Castelnau; he was ambassador in England, like myself, and, like me, wrote part of his life when in London; at the last page of Book VII. of this life, he says to his son: "I will treat of this subject in Book VIII. ;" and Book VIII. was never written; the circumstance warns me to take advantage of life.

Washington does not, like Bonaparte, belong to that race who outstrip the standard of human measurement. Nothing amazing is attached to his person; he is not placed on a vast theatre of action; is not engaged in terrible combat with the most skilful generals and most powerful monarchs of his time; does not haste full speed from Memphis to Vienna, from Cadiz to Moscow; he stands his ground with a handful of citizens in a country adorned with no peculiar celebrity, within the narrow circle of their domestic hearths. He fights no battles which revive the triumphs of Arbela and Pharsalia; he overturns no thrones to build up others with their ruins; he does not say to the kings at his gate: "Qu'ils se font trop attendre, et qu'Attila s'ennuie."

An air of silence envelopes Washington's actions; he acts

slowly; as if feeling that the liberty of the future is in his hands, and fearful of compromising it. This hero of a new race manages and directs, not his own destinies, but those of his country; he does not allow himself to toy with what is not his own; but from this profound humility what brilliancy now bursts forth! Traverse the woods where Washington's sword flashed to the light; what will you find? Graves?-No! a world! Washington has left the United States as a trophy on his battle-field.

Bonaparte has no trait in common with this grave, calm American; he combats noisily on an old theatre of action, in an old country; he thinks only of building up his own fame, takes charge only of his own destiny. He seems to know that his mission will be short; that the torrent which falls from such a height will quickly be exhausted; he hastens to enjoy and to abuse his power, like a quickly fleeting youth. Like Homer's gods, he longs to reach the extremity of the world in four steps. He appears on every shore; hastily inscribes his name on the records of every nation, and throws crowns to his family and his soldiers; he is in haste in every thing, in his monuments, his laws, and his victories. Leaning over the world, with one hand he overturns kings, with the other crushes the giant revolution; but in overcoming anarchy, he stifles liberty, and finally loses his own on his last field of battle.

Each is rewarded according to his deeds; Washington raises a nation to independence; a magistrate in the repose of domestic life, he falls asleep beneath his own roof, amidst the regrets of his fellow-countrymen, and the veneration of nations.

upon

Bonaparte robs a nation of its independence; a fallen emperor, he is cast forth into exile, where the terror of nations still looks him as insufficiently imprisoned, even under the guard of ocean. He expires; the news, published at the gate of the palace before which the conqueror caused so many deaths to be proclaimed, neither arrests nor astonishes the passer-by; what had the citizens to regret?

Washington's Republic still exists; Bonaparte's Empire has fallen to the ground. Washington and Bonaparte were both nursed in the lap of democracy; both born of liberty, the one was faithful to her, the other betrayed her.

Washington was the representative of the wants, ideas, intelligence, and opinions of his time; he seconded instead of opposing, the movements of the public mind; he willed what it was his duty to will, the thing to which he was called; hence the