As to the state of learning in this city, you know I have not been long enough in it to form a proper judgement of that subject.  I don’t think, however, there is as much respect paid to a man of letters on this side of the water as you imagine.  I don’t find that genius, the ‘rath primrose, which forsaken dies’, is patronized by any of the nobility, so that writers of the first talents are left to the capricious patronage of the public.  Notwithstanding discouragement, literature is cultivated in a high degree.  Poetry raises her enchanting voice to Heaven.  History arrests the wings of Time in his flight to the gulf of oblivion.  Philosophy, the queen of arts, and the daughter of Heaven, is daily extending her intellectual empire.  Fancy sports on airy wing like a meteor on the bosom of a summer cloud; and even Metaphysics spins her cobwebs, and catches some flies.

The House of Commons not unfrequently exhibits explosions of eloquence that rise superior to those of Greece and Rome, even in their proudest days.  Yet, after all, a man will make more by the figures of arithmetic than the figures of rhetoric, unless he can get into the trade wind, and then he may sail secure over Pactolean sands.  As to the stage, it is sunk, in my opinion, into the lowest degree; I mean with regard to the trash that is exhibited on it; but I don’t attribute this to the taste of the audience, for when Shakespeare warbles his ‘native woodnotes’, the boxes, pit, and gallery, are crowded—­and the gods are true to every word, if properly winged to the heart.

Soon after my arrival in town I visited Westminster Abbey:  the moment I entered I felt a kind of awe pervade my mind which I cannot describe; the very silence seemed sacred.  Henry VII’s chapel is a very fine piece of Gothic architecture, particularly the roof; but I am told that it is exceeded by a chapel in the University of Cambridge.  Mrs. Nightingale’s monument has not been praised beyond its merit.  The attitude and expression of the husband in endeavouring to shield his wife from the dart of death, is natural and affecting.  But I always thought that the image of death would be much better represented with an extinguished torch inverted, than with a dart.  Some would imagine that all these monuments were so many monuments of folly;—­I don’t think so; what useful lessons of morality and sound philosophy do they not exhibit!  When the high-born beauty surveys her face in the polished Parian, though dumb the marble, yet it tells her that it was placed to guard the remains of as fine a form, and as fair a face as her own.  They show besides how anxious we are to extend our loves and friendships beyond the grave, and to snatch as much as we can from oblivion—­such is our natural love of immortality; but it is here that letters obtain the noblest triumphs; it is here that the swarthy daughters of Cadmus may hang their trophies on high; for when all the pride of the chisel and the pomp of heraldry yield to the silent touches