The first few miles out of Portsmouth form one long alley of ornamented cottages—wood-bine creeping and roses flowering over them all. If there were but two between Portsmouth and London—two even of the meanest we saw—a traveller from any other land would think it worth his while to describe them minutely. As there are two thousand (more or less,) they must pass with a bare mention. Yet I became conscious of a new feeling in seeing these rural paradises; and I record it as the first point in which I find myself worse for having become a “dweller in the shade.” I was envious. Formerly, in passing a tasteful retreat, or a fine manor, I could say, “What a bright lawn! What a trim and fragrant hedge! What luxuriant creepers! I congratulate their fortunate owner!” Now it is, “How I wish I had that hedge at Glenmary! How I envy these people their shrubs, trellises, and flowers!” I wonder not a little how the English Emigrant can make a home among our unsightly stumps that can ever breed a forgetfulness of all these refined ruralities.
After the first few miles, I discovered that the two windows of the coach were very limited frames for the rapid succession of pictures presented to my eye, and changing places with William, who was on the top of the coach, I found myself between two tory politicians setting forth to each other most eloquently the mal-administration of the whigs and the queen’s mismanagement. As I was two months behind the English news I listened with some interest. They made out to their own satisfaction that the queen was a silly girl; that she had been caught in a decided fib about Sir Robert Peel’s exactions with respect to the household; and one of the Jeremiahs, who seemed to be a sturdy grazier, said that “in ’igh life the queen-dowager’s ’ealth was now received uniwersally with three times three, while Victoria’s was drank in solemn silence.” Her majesty received no better treatment at the hands of a whig on the other end of the seat; and as we whirled under the long park fence of Claremont, the country palace of Leopold and the Princess Charlotte, he took the pension of the Belgian king for the burden of his lamentation, and, between whig and tory, England certainly seemed to be in a bad way. This Claremont, it will be remembered by the readers of D’Israeli’s novels, is the original of the picture of the luxurious _maison de plaisance_, drawn in “the Young Duke.”