to make them sharers in a disgrace for which they alone are responsible.  A stranger, in paying his shilling for admission into an exhibition, which has been dubbed nation (by whom?) in contradistinction from another in the Surrey Gardens, very naturally suspects that the people are partners in this contemptible transaction....  The English people are compelled to pay for the ignominy with which their despotic rulers have loaded them.”  Having got his foot into this mare’s nest, he finds an egg a little further on, which he thus hatches for the American public:  “Englishmen not only regard eating as the most inestimable blessing of life, when they enjoy it themselves, but they are always intensely delighted to see it going on.  The Government charge an extra shilling at the Zoological Gardens on the days that the animals are fed in public; but, as much as an Englishman dislikes spending money, the extraordinary attraction never fails to draw,” &c.

From the Gardens he visits Chelsea Hospital, where his keen discriminating powers having been sharpened by the demand for a shilling—­the chief object of which demand is to protect the pensioners from perpetual intrusion—­he bursts forth in a sublime magnifico Kentuckyo flight of eloquence:  “Sordid barbarians might degrade the wonderful monuments of their more civilized ancestors by charging visitors to see them; but to drag from their lowly retreat these maimed and shattered victims of national ambition, to be stared at, and wondered at, like caged beasts, is an outrage against humanity that even savages would shrink from.”  And then, a little further on, he makes the following profound reflection, which no doubt appears to the American mind peculiarly appropriate to Chelsea Hospital:  “Cringing to the great, obsequious to the high, the dwarfed souls of Englishmen have no wide extending sympathy for the humble, no soothing pity for the lowly,” &c.  It would probably astonish some of the readers who have been gulled by his book, could they but know that the sum paid by Great Britain for the support and pension of her veterans by sea and land costs annually nearly enough to buy, equip, and pay the whole army and navy of the United States.[BK]

The next “sixpenny miracle” he visits is Chatsworth, which calls forth the following vigorous attack on sundry gentlemen, clothed in the author’s peculiarly lively and racy language:  “The showy magnificence of Chatsworth, Blenheim, and the gloomy grandeur of Warwick and Alnwick Castles, serve to remind us, like the glittering shell of the tortoise, what worthless and insignificant animals often inhabit the most splendid mansions.”  He follows up this general castigation of the owners of the above properties with the infliction of a special cowhiding upon the Duke of Devonshire, who, he says, “would, no doubt, be very reluctant frankly to confess to the world, that although he had the vanity to affect liberality, he was too penurious to bear the expense