"
"We were also required to learn by heart the form of Prayer with
Thanksgiving to be used Yearly upon the Fifth Day of November for
the happy deliverance of King James I. and the Three Estates of
England from the most traitorous and bloody-intended Massacre by
Gunpowder; also the prayers for Charles the Martyr and the
Thanksgiving for having put an end to the Great Rebellion by the
Restitution of the King and Royal Family after many Years'
interruption which unspeakable Mercies were wonderfully completed
upon the 29th of May in the year 1660!"
"1660! We had been forty years in America then," soliloquised
Francesca; "and isn't it odd that the long thanksgivings in our
country must all have been for having successfully run away from the
Gunpowder Treason, King Charles the Martyr, and the Restituted Royal
Family; yet here we are, you and I, the best of friends, talking it
all over."
As we jog along, or walk, by turns, we come to Buckingham Street,
and looking up at Alfred Jingle's lodgings say a grateful word of
Mr. Pickwick. We tell each other that much of what we know of
London and England seems to have been learned from Dickens.
Deny him the right to sit among the elect, if you will; talk of his
tendency to farce and caricature; call his humour low comedy, and
his pathos bathos--although you shall say none of these things in my
presence unchallenged; the fact remains that every child, in America
at least, knows more of England--its almshouses, debtors' prisons,
and law-courts, its villages and villagers, its beadles and cheap-
jacks and hostlers and coachmen and boots, its streets and lanes,
its lodgings and inns and landladies and roastbeef and plum-pudding,
its ways, manners, and customs,--knows more of these things and a
thousand others from Dickens's novels than from all the histories,
geographies, biographies, and essays in the language.
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