A strange country indeed was England in those times; and to look through the newspapers and memoirs of fifty years ago is an amusement at once instructive and humiliating. The king dines with the premier duke, makes him drunk, and has him carefully driven round the streets, so that the public may see what an intoxicated nobleman is like. The same king pushes a statesman into a pond, and screams with laughter as the drenched victim crawls out. Morning after morning the chief man of the realm visits the boxing-saloon, and learns to batter the faces and ribs of other noble gentlemen. We hear of visits paid by royalty to an obscure Holborn tavern, where, after noisy suppers, the fighting-men were wont to roar their hurricane choruses and talk with many blasphemies of by-gone combats. Think of that succession of ugly and foul sports compared with the peace, the refinement, the gentle and subdued manners of Victoria's court, and we see how far England has travelled since 1837. Fifty years ago our myriads of kinsmen across the seas were strangers to us, and the amazing friendship which has sprung up between the subjects of Victoria and the citizens of the vast republic was represented fifty years ago by a kind of sheepish, good-humored ignorance, tempered by jealousy. The smart packets left London and Liverpool to thrash their way across the Atlantic swell, and they were lucky if they managed to complete the voyage in a month--Charles Dickens sailed in a vessel which took twenty-two days for the trip, and she was a steamer, no less! For all practical purposes England and America are now one country. The trifling distance of 3,000 miles across the Atlantic seems hardly worth counting, according to our modern notions; and the American gentleman talks quite easily and naturally about running over to London or Paris to see a series of dramatic performances or an exhibition of pictures. When Victoria began to reign the English people mostly regarded America as a dim region, and the voyage thither was a fearsome understanding.