Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, never saw America or Sarah Rolfe again. He never saw his only daughter, born after his flight from Concord, until, at the age of twenty, she too left the forests of New England to meet him in London. From the Continent she wrote those interesting letters which his biographer has made accessible, the record of a singular experience--that of a bright but untrained New England girl introduced, without the least preparation, to courtly European life. She relates her blunders and misadventures very frankly; how she filled her father with consternation by making her best courtesy to a housekeeper; how she ordered costly goods without inquiring the prices; how--but I see that this _naïve_ young woman is likely to lead us from our subject, for Miss Thompson evidently went away from home when she left New England.
As for her father, he lived to marry a second widow, the brilliant and distinguished woman who had been the wife of Lavoisier. We cannot say that Count Rumford's good fortune kept to him in the matter of this second marriage. It was an unhappy one; it reminds us of Dr. Johnson's genial remark that second marriages are made to illustrate "the triumph of hope over experience." My lord and my lady did not suit each other; they quarrelled in the midst of their splendor, and in ways not always the most decorous. Poor Benjamin Thompson! I fancy that after Madame had "poured hot water" on the choicest flowers in your garden, you wished that you were taking your ease in Concord again, the Revolution being now safely ended, and no further question of tar and feathers being likely to arise!
Alexander Hamilton was another eminent American who migrated in search of a home; but seeking, not quitting, our dear country. Born of English parentage in another British colony, the West Indies, he spent his boyhood cursing the fate which had doomed him, apparently, to what he called the "grovelling condition of a clerk" in the North Caribbee islands. He longed to escape from trade; boy-like, he longed for a war, for the opportunity of distinction in affairs. Nor did he have to wait until age, or even until maturity, for verification of the saying of his contemporary, Goethe, about the final fulfilment of the desires of youth. What Hamilton desired in boyhood came to him promptly, almost as by the rubbing of the lamp. We all know the story: how at fifteen he found his way to New Jersey, whence extricating himself he went to Columbia college; and how, while he was there, the Revolutionary war broke out, making the lad drop his books at once to accept his appointment as a major of artillery; and how naturally his career flowed from that initial point. And in our own times Thackeray was another product of a British colony, having been born in Calcutta, and spending the first seven years of his childhood there. I will not venture to say that I trace much colonial influence in his writings. He may have been a true Indian at heart, but his novels are certainly those of a club-man and a Londoner; and none of his essays disclose very much of the Hindoo. Sainte-Claire Deville, again, one of the truest of Frenchmen, was born, like Hamilton, in the Antilles.