SIE CHARLES LYELL. 265 



Hyde Park, London, and a year later gave a second 

 course of lectures at the Lowell Institute, Boston. 

 So kindly and cordially had he written concerning 

 us and our country, that he received the heartiest 

 welcome. He had carried out in his life what he 

 wrote to beautiful Mary Homer, twenty years 

 before : " I hope we shall both of us contrive to 

 cultivate a disposition which David Hume said 

 was better than a fortune of one thousand pounds 

 a year to look on the bright side of things. I 

 think I shall, and I believe you will." The sweet- 

 natured and great-minded man had looked on the 

 bright side of America, and seen the good rather 

 than the evil. He believed in our future. When 

 Prescott died, to whom he was devotedly attached, 

 he said : " From such a soil and in such an atmos- 

 phere, great literary men must continue to spring 

 up." 



All through our Civil War, he had known and 

 loved us so well, that he was, like John Bright, our 

 constant advocate. He deprecated the course of 

 some of the English newspapers. " The integrity 

 of the empire," he said, "and the non-extension 

 and for the last two years the extinction of slavery 

 constitute to my mind better grounds for a pro- 

 tracted struggle than those for which any war in 

 our time, perhaps in all history, has been waged. 

 ... I am in hopes that the struggle in America 

 will rid the country in the course of twenty years 

 of that great curse to the whites, slave labor, and, 

 if so, it may be worth all it will cost in blood and 

 treasure. . . ." 



