was to the electioneering talents of herself and her sister, the Lady Duncannon, that Fox, at one crisis, owed his election.  We Americans should remember that it was this party who advocated our cause during our revolutionary struggle.  Fox and his associates pleaded for us with much the same arguments, and with the same earnestness and warmth, that American abolitionists now plead for the slaves.  They stood against all the power of the king and cabinet, as the abolitionists in America in 1850 stood against president and cabinet.

The Duchess of Devonshire was a woman of real noble impulses and generous emotions, and had a true sympathy for what is free and heroic.  Coleridge has some fine lines addressed to her,—­called forth by a sonnet which she composed, while in Switzerland, on William Tell’s Chapel,—­which begin,—­

  “O lady, nursed in pomp and pleasure,
  Where learn’dst thou that heroic measure?”

The Duchess of Sutherland, in our times, has been known to be no less warmly interested on the liberal side.  So great was her influence held to be, that upon a certain occasion when a tory cabinet was to be formed, a distinguished minister is reported to have said to the queen that he could not hope to succeed in his administration while such a decided influence as that of the Duchess of Sutherland stood at the head of her majesty’s household.  The queen’s spirited refusal to surrender her favorite attendant attracted, at the time, universal admiration.

Like her brother Lord Carlisle, the Duchess of Sutherland has always professed those sentiments with regard to slavery which are the glory of the English nation, and which are held with more particular zeal by those families who are favorable to the progress of liberal ideas.

At about seven o’clock we took our carriage to go to the Earl of Carlisle’s, the dinner hour being here somewhere between eight and nine.  As we rode on through the usual steady drizzling rain, from street to street and square to square, crossing Waterloo Bridge, with its avenue of lamps faintly visible in the seethy mist, plunging through the heart of the city, we began to realize something of the immense extent of London.

Altogether the most striking objects that you pass, as you ride in the evening thus, are the gin shops, flaming and flaring from the most conspicuous positions, with plate-glass windows and dazzling lights, thronged with men, and women, and children, drinking destruction.  Mothers go there with babies in their arms, and take what turns the mother’s milk to poison.  Husbands go there, and spend the money that their children want for bread, and multitudes of boys and girls of the age of my own.  In Paris and other European cities, at least the great fisher of souls baits with something attractive, but in these gin shops men bite at the bare, barbed hook.  There are no garlands, no dancing, no music, no theatricals, no pretence of social exhilaration, nothing but hogsheads of spirits, and people going in to drink.  The number of them that I passed seemed to me absolutely appalling.