boys in the streets made such free comments on the American
clothes and figures, that the travellers hurried to put on tall
hats and long overcoats to escape criticism. No stranger had
rights even in the Strand. The eighteenth century held its own.
History muttered down Fleet Street, like Dr. Johnson, in Adams's
ear; Vanity Fair was alive on Piccadilly in yellow chariots with
coachmen in wigs, on hammer-cloths; footmen with canes, on the
footboard, and a shrivelled old woman inside; half the great
houses, black with London smoke, bore large funereal hatchments;
every one seemed insolent, and the most insolent structures in
the world were the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England. In
November, 1858, London was still vast, but it was the London of
the eighteenth century that an American felt and hated.

Education went backward. Adams, still a boy, could not guess
how intensely intimate this London grime was to become to him as
a man, but he could still less conceive himself returning to it
fifty years afterwards, noting at each turn how the great city
grew smaller as it doubled in size; cheaper as it quadrupled its
wealth; less imperial as its empire widened; less dignified as it
tried to be civil. He liked it best when he hated it. Education
began at the end, or perhaps would end at the beginning. Thus far
it had remained in the eighteenth century, and the next step took
it back to the sixteenth. He crossed to Antwerp. As the Baron Osy
steamed up the Scheldt in the morning mists, a travelling band on
deck began to play, and groups of peasants, working along the
fields, dropped their tools to join in dancing. Ostade and
Teniers were as much alive as they ever were, and even the Duke
of Alva was still at home. The thirteenth-century cathedral
towered above a sixteenth-century mass of tiled roofs, ending