American Travels in Europe 1865

This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 2/28/2005

Autograph Letters Signed, 200p. quarto, penned by H. H. Emmons, while on board the Steamer China, from August 31, 1865 though October 21, 1865. Includes complete transcript, which covers his travels from Boston to Europe, it reads in small part: “…Our fellow passengers presented many subjects of study. As usual all nations and classes were represented. The Jew, Spaniard, German, Frenchman, Englishman, and American the North and South were all there. The English aristocracy and commoner and the poor man and rich from our own land. Everything in law, politics, and religion was discussed…Gardiner Brewer, wife and daughter were others boding and in our circle distinguished passengers. he is known from all of us, only by his immense wealth…His new house…is erected on the site of John Hancock’s old residence fronting on Boston Common…They go to Europe to buy the furniture and drapery for their costly mansion…left London with Burton…Dover was reached about 10…Here was the first of France you could see at once a new race. Everything was changed. The shapes of the boats were aas unlike those a few miles across on the English coast as are the Chinese junks. Short, round and shallow with such fixtures for masts as I cannot now describe…Paris…This bold achievement is the wonder of Modern Times…The strangest sight I saw was one of these vast cuttings through the old buildings, showing he interiors of the rooms and ragged walls far as the eye could see…I had to enquire of the guid if there was nothing of old Paris left. Yes said he, but nothing such as we used to have when I was a boy. This is all gone…So out of the splendor he had been showing us went to look up the poverty, vice and suffering….I protested there was some poorer, dirtier, meaner place in Paris…Not one drunken person nor a begger…The Parisians are governed most empahtically. The people not only do not rule, but are not consented as to the rules they are forced to follow. Where is the rightful limit, that which is best for the masses between the power of the Government and that of the People. London with her unlimited liberty is a reeking stench of misery squalid poverty, drunkenness and crime compared with tyranny ridden Paris…Where Napoleon lives there are in the vicinity no hiding places and Carmon could sweep away the mob now if it should dare to gather….I left for Villanueva by rail…The Alps have been ten thousand times described, but for other mountain views I have seen as a reader I should have been a little the wiser…Today Murphy and a Mr. McChesny, consul at New Castle, England went with me to Wierboden, the famous watering place where I imagine the place of general torment as nearby as the springs are so hot you cannot hold the glass filled with water fresh from them. Here are some of the great gambling houses of Europe. They are owned by corporations whose stocks like our R.U. shares are bought and sold in the market. They own long rows of shops with colonnades and broad piazzas in front like the Palais Royal in Paris seven or eight hundred feet in length…Mr. Burtan and myself both in the evening to take a ticket a friend had sent and got see Bo. Anderson the Wizard. McCals the ventriloquist and Anac the Giant….We wondered at the giant and the tricks of Anderson and laughed at the extraordinary performances of McCals….I saw by the Free Press that John Ward is dead. I was actually relieed when I heard it. It is a mercy to him. John had already fostered upon him the grips of the monster which has crushed out so much of the happiness of our own family. His crime is nothing! Nothing! It is but one of those wayward accidents which the great demon of intoxication scatters in the pathway of his victims irrespective of their rank, breeding, virtues, or talent…May not Morisey the ex-prize fighter and his gambling associates aided by the presence of miscalled ladies and gentlemen in Saratoga succeed in fostering upon ours the wicked demoralization of the English Race Course. Can Christian civilization and aristocratic birth, fortune, and education bolt farther more directly from the upward and onward course, Lords and Ladies were there cheering a HORSE! But I am as usual moralizing. The spectacle was grand…The race itself was so mere and insignificant a part of the great occasion…The great St. Lager ran. There were other races but this was the great event of the gathering. ‘Gladiator’ (Gladiatem) the horse from France carried easily off the honors as he some months before had done at the still greater Derby Races. England did not mour more generally and sincerely when the ‘Alabama’ pierced by the guns of the Kearsarge went down in her channel then she now does that the horse of English blood and lineage, reared, cared for and rode by English grooms and jockeys fed on English hay and oaks and trained and run on English soil has beaten these English horses of the same race. And why? He is owned by a Frenchman!...An invitation is received to dine with Mr. Dokin (He is Lord Mayor of London)…went to the Tower of London. Into the dungeon where Raleigh saw the fearful instruments which beheaded the beautiful wives of the monster Henry the VIII…’Westminster Palace’ being the new houses of Parliament, I also went through…Its architecture most elaborate and beautiful relieved at intervals by loft towers and projections…the House of Parliament is a little room counter - pliable in extent and appointments, actually incapable of holding over two thirds of the members at a time with no desks of any kind, but ample closely parked benchens are behind the others like the arrangement of a county school house. The gallery for spectators will not accommodate 50 person, and the ladies, bless the dear things have to look down into the legislative well from a small shelf high up on the wall from behind a wire screen…The House of Lords is a magnificent bird cage not large enough for a good sized PARROT, but gilded, and gilded, and gilded and then gilded a little more…it is too ludicrous for realization by any who have not seen it…went to the British Museum, one of the Worlds Wonders…miles of corridors filled with environs and raw things of the earth…” Much much more. Fine.

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