"J. D. HUNTER.

"LONDON, 15th May, 1824."

* * * * *

_Kean at a Public Dinner._--A terrible outcry just now, in consequence
of certain exposures and a published correspondence. At a public dinner,
he says he is going to America. The Duke of York, who presides, cries
out, "No, no!" Shouts follow and the rattling of glasses, and men leap
on the chairs and almost on the tables, repeating the Duke's "No, no!"
till at last Kean promises to make an apology from the stage,--a
perilous experiment, he will find, after which he cannot stay here. The
object of Price, who has engaged him, is to kill off Cooper. The best
actors now get fifty guineas a week, or twenty-five pounds a night for
so many nights, play or pay, with a benefit.

* * * * *

_Architecture._--I have seen no greater barbarisms anywhere than I find
here. The screen of Carleton House,--a long row of double columns, with
a heavy entablature supporting the arms of Great Britain,--"that and
nothing more"; the doings of Inigo Jones in his water-gates and arches,
with two or three orders intermixed; and the late achievements of Mr.
Nash along Regent Street,--with the church spire, which has the
attractiveness and symmetry of an exaggerated marlin-spike, for a
vanishing point,--are of themselves enough to show that the people here
have no taste, and no feeling for this department of the Fine Arts,
however much they may brag and bluster.

But I have just returned from a visit to one of Sir Christopher Wren's
masterpieces, which has greatly disturbed my equanimity, and obliges me
to modify my opinion. It is a church back of the Mansion House; and is
the original of Godefroy's Unitarian church at Baltimore, beyond all
question: the dome rests on arches, and springs into the air, as if
buoyed up and aspiring of itself. Bad for the music, however. Here I
find West's picture of the Martyrdom of St. Stephen, with a figure which
he has repeated in "Christ Healing the Sick," and a woman,--or young
man, you do not feel certain which,--weeping upon the hand of the
martyr, precisely as in a painting in Baltimore Cathedral by Renou, who
must have borrowed or stolen it from West, if West did not borrow or
steal it from him.

* * * * *

_Drawings._--I have just returned from visiting a collection of drawings
by the old masters,--Raphael, Michael Angelo, Rembrandt, Titian,