ie, and Scott and Byron to arise; Garrick to delight the world with his
dazzling dramatic genius, and Kean to leap on the stage and take
possession of the astonished theatre. Steam has to be invented; kings to
be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored. Napoleon to be but an episode,
and George III is to be alive through all these varied changes, to
accompany his people through all these revolutions of thought, government,
society; to survive out of the old world into ours.

When I first saw England, she was in mourning for the young Princess
Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our
ship touched at an island on the way home, where my black servant took me
a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a garden, where we saw a
man walking. "That is he," said the black man: "that is Bonaparte! He eats
three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on!"
There were people in the British dominions besides that poor Calcutta
serving-man, with an equal horror of the Corsican ogre.

With the same childish attendant, I remember peeping through the colonnade
at Carlton House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I can
see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place. The place? What
place? The palace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is
but a name now. Where be the sentries who used to salute as the Royal
chariots drove in and out? The chariots, with the kings inside, have
driven to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into darkness,
and the echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades. Where the palace once
stood, a hundred little children are paddling up and down the steps to St.
James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the
Athenaeum Club; as many grizzly warriors are garrisoning the United
Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London
now--the mart of news, of politics, of scandal, of rumour--the English
forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last dispatch from the Crimea,
the last speech of Lord Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now and
then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the past rather than
with the present, it is a memorial of old times and old people, and Pall
Mall is our Palmyra. Look! About this spot, Tom of Ten Thousand was killed
by Koenigsmarck's gang. In that great red house Gainsborough lived, and
Culloden Cumberland, George III's uncle. Yo