I must tell you, then, as one of the first remarks on matters and things here in England, that “robin redbreast” is not at all the fellow we in America take him to be.  The character who flourishes under that name among us is quite a different bird; he is twice as large, and has altogether a different air, and as he sits up with military erectness on a rail fence or stump, shows not even a family likeness to his diminutive English namesake.  Well, of course, robin over here will claim to have the real family estate and title, since he lives in a country where such matters are understood and looked into.  Our robin is probably some fourth cousin, who, like others, has struck out a new course for himself in America, and thrives upon it.

We hurried to dress, remembering our engagements to breakfast this morning with a brother of our host, whose cottage stands on the same ground, within a few steps of our own.  I had not the slightest idea of what the English mean by a breakfast, and therefore went in all innocence, supposing that I should see nobody but the family circle of my acquaintances.  Quite to my astonishment, I found a party of between thirty and forty people.  Ladies sitting with their bonnets on, as in a morning call.  It was impossible, however, to feel more than a momentary embarrassment in the friendly warmth and cordiality of the circle by whom we were surrounded.

The English are called cold and stiff in their manners; I had always heard they were so, but I certainly saw nothing of it here.  A circle of family relatives could not have received us with more warmth and kindness.  The remark which I made mentally, as my eye passed around the circle, was—­Why, these people are just like home; they look like us, and the tone of sentiment and feeling is precisely such as I have been accustomed to; I mean with the exception of the antislavery question.

That question has, from the very first, been, in England, a deeply religious movement.  It was conceived and carried on by men of devotional habits, in the same spirit in which the work of foreign missions was undertaken in our own country; by just such earnest, self-denying, devout men as Samuel J. Mills and Jeremiah Evarts.

It was encountered by the same contempt and opposition, in the outset, from men of merely worldly habits and principles; and to this day it retains that hold on the devotional mind of the English nation that the foreign mission cause does in America.

Liverpool was at first to the antislavery cause nearly what New York has been with us.  Its commercial interests were largely implicated in the slave trade, and the virulence of opposition towards the first movers of the antislavery reform in Liverpool was about as great as it is now against abolitionists in Charleston.

When Clarkson first came here to prosecute his inquiries into the subject, a mob collected around him, and endeavored to throw him off the dock into the water; he was rescued by a gentleman, some of whose descendants I met on this occasion.