ands of young hearts to the
beauty and the nobleness of the old pre-Reformation age, and of that
romance and art from which their too exclusive hereditary training had,
until his time, shut them out. And he has thus, truly, done a sacred
deed in turning the hearts of the children to their fathers. That was
enough: but that is not the whole. He has, conversely, turned the hearts
of the fathers to the children. The world-wide humanity of his poems,
and, to be just, of all your American poets who have studied in his
school, has produced throughout Great Britain a just reverence and
affection for the American mind which will have--which has had
already--large social and political results. Be sure, be sure, that in
spite of passing jars, our empire will never be long unjust to yours,
while Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell remain not merely the household
bards--though that is much--but counsellors, comforters, and trusted
friends to hundreds of thousands of gentle and earnest souls; from the
palace to the parsonage, from the little village shop to the farm-house
on the lonely down.

But there is another American author--who was the delight of my own
youth, and who should have been my teacher also, for he was a master of
our common tongue, and his prose is as graceful and felicitous as poor
Elia's own, and it is certainly more manly--another American author, I
say, who, with that high-bred reverence for what is old, has told you
already more about Westminster Abbey, and told it better, than I am
likely to tell it. Need I say that I mean the lamented Washington
Irving? Ah, that our authors had always been as just to you as he was
just to us; and indeed more than just; for in his courtesy and geniality
he saw us somewhat _en beau_, and treated old John Bull too much as the
poet advises us to treat young and fair ladies--

Be to their faults a little blind,
Be to their virtues very kind.

But what a charming book is that old 'Sketch-book.' And what a charming
essay that on our great Abbey, set with such gems of prose as these,--

'The sun was pouring down a yellow autumnal ray into the square of the
cloisters, beaming upon a scanty spot of grass in the centre, and
lighting up an angle of the vaulted passage with a kind of dusty
splendour. From between the arcades, the eye glanced up to a bit of blue
sky, or a passing cloud, and beheld the sun-gilt pinnacles of the Abbey
towering into the azure heaven.'

Or thi