and may stand hundreds more,--marry, they have
good foundations.

In walking about Charleston, I was forcibly reminded of some of the
older country towns in England--of Southampton a little. The appearance
of the city is highly picturesque, a word which can apply to none other
American towns; and although the place is certainly pervaded with an air
of decay, 'tis a genteel infirmity, as might be that of a distressed
elderly gentlewoman. It has none of the smug mercantile primness of the
northern cities, but a look of state, as of quondam wealth and
importance, a little gone down in the world, yet remembering still its
former dignity. The northern towns, compared with it, are as the spruce
citizen rattling by the faded splendors of an old family-coach in his
newfangled chariot--they certainly have got on before it. Charleston has
an air of eccentricity, too, and peculiarity, which formerly were not
deemed unbecoming the well-born and well-bred gentlewoman, which her
gentility itself sanctioned and warranted--none of the vulgar dread of
vulgar opinion, forcing those who are possessed by it to conform to a
general standard of manners, unable to conceive one peculiar to
itself,--this "what-'ll-Mrs.-Grundy-say" devotion to conformity in small
things and great, which pervades the American body-social from the
matter of church-going to the trimming of women's petticoats,--this
dread of singularity, which has eaten up all individuality amongst them,
and makes their population like so many moral and mental lithographs,
and their houses like so many thousand hideous brick-twins.

I believe I am getting excited; but the fact is, that being politically
the most free people on earth, the Americans are socially the least so;
and it seems as though, ever since that little affair of establishing
their independence among nations, which they managed so successfully,
every American mother's son of them has been doing his best to divest
himself of his own private share of that great public blessing, liberty.

But to return to Charleston. It is in this respect a far more
aristocratic (should I not say democratic?) city than any I have yet
seen in America, inasmuch as every house seems built to the owner's
particular taste; and in one street you seem to be in an old English
town, and in another in some continental city of France or Italy. This
variety is extremely pleasing to the eye; not less so is the
intermixture of trees with the build