My reader will think my day sufficiently full already, but I must not conclude without some reference to the pleasures of the evening. I drove out to Chelsea, where the pupils of St. Mark’s Training College performed the Oratorio of “Israel in Egypt.” The hail-stone chorus was given with great effect, and several of the solos and recitatives were creditably executed. I saw there, among others, Lord Monteagle, better known as Mr. Spring Rice, but was more pleased with an introduction to the head of the College, Mr. Derwent Coleridge, who showed me a very striking portrait of his father—“the rapt one of the godlike forehead,” and made some feeling allusions to his brother Hartley, then lately dead. I saw also another member of this interesting family, Sara Coleridge, one of the cleverest of womankind. Returning to London, I stepped from the carriage at Hyde Park Corner, where chariots and wheels of every description were still rumbling incessantly, and where the gas-lamps made it light as day, though it was now eleven o’clock. I looked at Apsley-house, where the Iron Duke was then living, and so made my way along Piccadilly and St. James’s-street, as pleasantly as if I had known them all my days, but thinking such thoughts as nothing but an American’s earliest experiences of London life can possibly inspire. CHAPTER VI. _Hyde Park—Excursion to Oxfordshire._ My plan was to fix my head-quarters in London, and to make excursions thence into the various parts of the country which I desired to see. This enabled me to choose my times for being in the Metropolis, and also for visiting other places; and I found it better, on many accounts, than the more usual method of seeing London all at once, and then going through the rest of England in a tour. I took lodgings in Bury-street, St. James’s, a time-honored place for the temporary abode of strangers, and in all respects convenient for my purposes. On looking into _Peter Cunningham_, I found I had unwittingly placed myself near the old haunts of several famous men of letters. Dean Swift lodged in this street in 1710, and Sir Richard Steele about the same time. Crabbe took his turn here in 1817, and here Tom Moore was sought out by Lord Byron, a few years earlier. Just round the corner, in Jermyn-street, Gray used to sojourn; and there, too, Sir Walter Scott lodged for the last time in London, after his return from the Continent in 1832. Hard by, still lives old Samuel Rogers, and Murray’s famous publishing-house is but a few steps out of the way. I was, at first, a little provoked at _Cunningham_ for getting up a book which tends to put the most stupid visitor of London on a footing with the man whose general reading has fitted him to enjoy it: but many little pleasures which he thus supplied me, by recalling things forgotten, quite altered my humour towards him; especially as I soon reflected that the traveller to whom he only