to Mr. Hilton, the keeper; to Mr.
Stothard, the librarian; and several others. I expected to have met and
been introduced to Sir Thomas Lawrence, the president, but he was absent,
and I have not had the pleasure of seeing him. I was invited to a seat
with the Academicians, as was also Mr. Cole, a member of our Academy in
New York. I was gratified in seeing America so well represented in the
painters Leslie and Newton. The lecturer also paid, in his lecture, a
high compliment to Allston by a deserved panegyric, and by several
quotations from his poems, illustrative of principles which he advanced.

"After the lecture I went home to tea with Newton, accompanied by Leslie,
where I found our distinguished countryman, Washington Irving, our
Secretary of Legation, and W.E. West, another American painter, whose
portrait of Lord Byron gave him much celebrity. I passed a very pleasant
evening, of course.

"The next day I visited the National Gallery of pictures, as yet but
small, but containing some of the finest pictures in England. Among them
is the celebrated 'Raising of Lazarus' by Sebastian del Piombo, for which
a nobleman of this country offered to the late proprietor sixteen
thousand pounds sterling, which sum was refused. I visited also Mr.
Turner, the best landscape painter living, and was introduced to him....

"I did not see so much of London or its curiosities as I should have done
at another season of the year. The greater part of the time was night--
literally night; for, besides being the shortest days of the year (it not
being light until eight o'clock and dark again at four), the smoke and
fog have been most of the time so dense that darkness has for many days
occupied the hours of daylight....

"On the 22d inst., Tuesday, I left London, after having obtained in due
form my passports, for the Continent, in company with J. Town, Esq., and
N. Jocelyn, Esq., American friends, intending to pass the night at
Canterbury, thirty-six miles from London. The day was very unpleasant,
very cold, and snowing most of the time. At Blackheath we saw the palace
in which the late unfortunate queen of George IV resided. On the heath
among the bushes is a low furze with which it is in part covered. There
were encamped in their miserable blanket huts a gang of gypsies. No
wigwams of the Oneidas ever looked so comfortless. On the road we
overtook a gypsy girl with a child in her arms, both having the stamp of
that singular race s