MEMOIR. 



xlv 



gaged in a series of visits to the most extensive and 

 remarkable of English country seats, where he was an 

 honored guest. The delight of the position was beyond 

 words to a man of his peculiar character and habits. 

 He saw on every hand the perfection of elegant rural life, 

 which was his ideal of life. He saw the boundless parks, 

 the cultivated landscape, the tropics imprisoned in glass ; 

 he saw spacious Italian villas, more Italian than in Italy ; 

 every various triumph of park, garden, and country- 

 house. But with these, also, he met in the pleasantest 

 way much fine English society, which was his ideal of 

 society. There was nothing wanting to gratify his fine 

 and fastidious taste ; but the passage already quoted from 

 his letter at Warwick Castlj shows how firmly his faith 

 was set upon his native land, while his private letters are 

 full of affectionate longing to return. It is easy to figure 

 him moving with courtly grace through the rooms of 

 palaces, gentle, respectful, low in tone, never exaggerating, 

 welcome to lord and lady for his good sense, his practical 

 knowledge, his exact detail ; pleasing the English man and 

 woman by his English sympathies, and interesting them by 

 his manly and genuine, not boasting, assertions of Ameri- 

 can genius and success. Looking at the picture, one re- 

 members again that earlier one of the boy coming home 

 from Montgomery Academy, in Orange County, and intro- 

 duced at the wealthy neighbor's to the English gentleman. 

 The instinct that remembered so slight an event secured 

 his appreciation of all that England offered. No Ameri- 

 can ever visited England with a mind more in tune with 

 ail that is nobly characteristic of her. He remarked, upon 

 his return, that he had been much impressed by the quiet, 

 religious life and habits which he found in many great 

 English houses. It is not a point of English life often 



