AN AMERICAN VISITOR DT THE 'SEVENTIES. Mx. RICHARD HENRY DANA,
the son of the author of Two Years Before the Mast, has published the diary which he kept during a visit to England and Europe in 1875-6. After half a century this book, entitled Hospitable England in the 'Seventies (Murray. 21s. net), has acquired a historic interest. The young American, well provided with introductions, met many of the eminent men and women of the day and recorded his impressions with great care. He saw a good deal, for example, of Mr. Gladstone, who cross-examined him about America and incidentally corrected his estimate of the London rainfall. He met the venerable Lord Russell—the Lord John of the first Reform Bill—and discussed Burke's speeches with him.
Lord Russell agreed with my grandfather Dana's idea that a king and nobility in America would be a great blessing, believing the American people needed something to look up, to. Of course this was only a fancy, for Russell knew well enough it would never work in our country.
Mr. Dana stayed at Althorp with the "Red Earl" and visited the famous Lord Young in Edinburgh. He records only two of Young's innumerable repartees ; to Alfred Austin's remark that he was writing a few verses to keep the wolf from the door, Young retorted : "Do you read the verses to the wolf ? " He went on to Inveraray to stay with the Duke of Argyll, and met there Princess Louise and her husband, then Marquess of Lome.
Mr. Dana, as a former stroke of the Harvard boat, was careful to study the Oxford and Cambridge methods of rowing ; noted at Cambridge that "they do not snatch so quickly from the water, which is becoming a great fault at Oxford," though he thought that the Cambridge stroke was over-long. Mr. Dana adds a few reflections to his youthful diary. He comments admiringly on our "wonderful English hospitality " ; "the English people seem educated to entertain, and I believe that education. comeafrom the universities of Oxford and Cambridge."
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