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There is more simple
grandeur in those few letters than in all the surrounding
monuments, sir."
How more than English was all this! England had been growing away from
and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but
this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves
and his overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was
living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could
be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a
great empire. A friend asked him how he was pleased with England. He
answered with enthusiasm,--
"There never was such a country on the face of the earth as
England, and it is utterly impossible that there can be any
combination of circumstances hereafter to make such another
country as Old England now is!"
We ought not to have been surprised at the sympathy which the English
Tories felt during the late war for their brethren in the Southern
States of America. It was as natural as it was for the English
Protestants to welcome the banished Huguenots.


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