A Passionate Pilgrim

I

Intending to sail for America in the early part of June, I
determined to spend the interval of six weeks in England, to
which country my mind's eye only had as yet been introduced. I
had formed in Italy and France a resolute preference for old
inns, considering that what they sometimes cost the ungratified
body they repay the delighted mind. On my arrival in London,
therefore, I lodged at a certain antique hostelry, much to the
east of Temple Bar, deep in the quarter that I had inevitably
figured as the Johnsonian. Here, on the first evening of my stay,
I descended to the little coffee-room and bespoke my dinner of
the genius of "attendance" in the person of the solitary waiter.
No sooner had I crossed the threshold of this retreat than I felt
I had cut a golden-ripe crop of English "impressions." The
coffee-room of the Red Lion, like so many other places and things
I was destined to see in the motherland, seemed to have been
waiting for long years, with just that sturdy sufferance of time
written on its visage, for me to come and extract the romantic
essence of it.

The latent preparedness of the American mind even for the most
characteristic features of English life was a matter I meanwhile
failed to get to the bottom of. The roots of it are indeed so
deeply buried in the soil of our early culture that, without some
great upheaval of feeling, we are at a loss to say exactly when
and where and how it begins. It makes an American's enjoyment of
England an emotion more searching than anything Continental. I
had seen the coffee-room of the Red Lion years ago, at home--at
Saragossa Illinois--in books, in visions, in dreams, in Dickens,
in Smollett, in Boswell. It was small and subdivided into six
narrow compartments by a series of perpendicular screens of
mahogany, something higher than a man's stature, furnished on
either side with a meagre uncushioned ledge, denominated in
ancient Britain a seat. In each of these rigid receptacles was a
narrow table--a table expected under stress to accommodate no
less than four pairs of active British elbows. High pressure
indeed had passed away from the Red Lion for ever. It now knew
only that of memories and ghosts and atmosphere. Round the room
there marched, breast-high, a magnificent panelling of mahogany,
so dark with time and so polished with unremitted friction that
by gazing a while into its lucid blackness I made out the dim
reflexion of a party of wigged gentlemen in knee-breeches just
arrived from York by the coach. On the dark yellow walls, coated
by the fumes of English coal, of English mutton, of Scotch
whiskey, were a dozen melancholy prints, sallow-toned with age--
the Derby favourite of the year 1807, the