ABSTRACT
The avenues that lead from the banks of the river to the immense capital of the British empire, are ill calculated to impress a stranger with the idea that he is entering the first city in the world. It was almost night-fall when D’Alonville passed through the Borough and through the city;42 and at such a season of the year, and such a time of the evening, every object appeared to him as dark and dreary as his own destiny. Though accompanied by Ellesmere, he had, on his landing, experienced some of that behaviour by which the lower class of people in England disgrace themselves in their conduct towards foreigners; and while the mob had abused both D’Alonville and Ellesmere as Frenchmen on their going on shore, the authorized enquiries of the Custom-house, evidently indicated unusual suspicion and mistrust. It was at the period when every foreigner was suspected of being a Jacobin, and when there were undoubtedly many agents of that society sent round Europe, at once, to inform their club of the disposition of other countries; and to blow up every spark of spirit, resembling that which had occasioned in their own so dreadful a conflagration. To the antipathy which the inferior class of the English have been taught to entertain against every other nation, but particularly against the French, together with the numbers that had lately taken shelter in England, was now added doubts, lest every foreigner was an incendiary: and the assurances of Ellesmere, on behalf of his friend, were hardly sufficient to secure him from molestation. To a stranger, so imperfectly acquainted with the language, as to be unable to follow their rapid dialogue, the loud tones and rough language used on such occasions, seem doubly harsh and menacing; the specimen of national hospitality with which D’Alonville was greeted on his first touching English ground, was not very flattering, nor much calculated to raise his depressed spirits.
