down at the hospitable door of a friend, first known in America, and who has kindly insisted on my spending my first few days in London as his guest. It was an unexpected pleasure, but a great one, to receive my first impressions of London in the agreeable company of the Reverend Ernest Hawkins, a person singularly qualified to share the feelings of a stranger, but upon whose valuable time I should not have ventured to trespass, except at his own friendly instance. After renewing the acquaintance, formed during his short visit to our country in 1849, the question was, Where shall we begin? A fine day was already clouded over, and alternate light and shade were inviting and again discouraging out-door amusements. However, a turn through St. James’s Park to Whitehall was practicable enough, and at Whitehall I was resolved to begin. Forth we go, step into the Athenæum Club House, and descend into the Park, by the Duke of York’s Column, descrying through the mist the towers of Westminster Abbey, and soon passing through the Horse-Guards, stand “in the open street before Whitehall.” There is the Banqueting-room—there the fatal window—here is the very spot, where the tide turned between old and new, and parted on an axe’s edge. That martyrdom! What that has happened in Church and State, not only among Anglo-Saxons, but in the greater part of Europe, since 1649, has not resulted from the deed of blood done here! My kind friend took me out upon Hungerford Bridge, and bade me use my eyes, and tell the different objects if I could. I turned towards Lambeth, saw the old towers through the gray mist, and began with indescribable pleasure to single out St. Mary’s, Lambeth, the New Parliament Houses, Westminster Hall, the Abbey, St. Margaret’s, and so forth, till turning round, I descried St. Paul’s, (vast, sublimely so, and magnificently tutelary,) and nearer by, Somerset House and the bridges, and the little steamers shooting to and fro beneath their noble arches. Enough for a first glimpse! We went into Regent Street, and by Burlington Arcade into Piccadilly, and turning into St. James’s Street, I first saw the old Palace at its extremity, looking just as one sees it in Hogarth’s picture of “the Rake going to Court,” in the last century, old and shabby, and venerable altogether. Such was my first ramble in London and Westminster.