Good-natured reader, are you a man of sensitive perceptions as to the proprieties and dignities of dress and deportment which should characterise some great historical personage whose name you have held in profound veneration all your life long?  Now, in the wayward drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern fashion, did it ever dare to present before your eyes St. Paul in strapped pantaloons, figured velvet vest, swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe hat, and a cockney glass at his eye?  Did your fancy, in its wildest fictions, ever pass such an image across the speculum of your mental vision?

Gentle reader, “in maiden meditation, fancy free,” did a dreamy thought of yours ever stray through the histories of your sex and its modes of dress and adornment, and so blend or transpose them as to present to you, in a sudden flash of the imagination, the Virgin Mary dressed like the Empress Eugenie?  Readers both, did not that fancy trouble you, as if an unholy thought had fallen into the soul?  Well, a thought like that must trouble the American when his fancy passes before his mind’s eye the image of Old England Americanised.  And a faculty more serious and trusty than fancy will present this transformation to him, day by day, as he visits the great centres of the nation’s life and industry.  In London, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the most busy and prosperous commercial and manufacturing towns, he will see that England is becoming Americanised shockingly fast.  In all these populous places it is losing the old individuality that once distinguished the grandfatherland of fifty millions who now speak its language beyond the sea.  Look at London! look at the miles of three and four story houses under the mason’s hands, now running out in every direction from the city.  Will you see a single feature of the Old England of our common memories in them?  No, not one! no more than in a modern English dress-coat, or in one of the iron rails of the British Great Western, or of the Illinois Central.  It is doubtful if there will be anything of England left in London at the end of the next fifty years, unless it be the fog and the Lord Mayor’s Show.  Already the radicals are crying out against both of these institutions, which are merely local, by the way.  The tailor’s shears, the mason’s trowel, and the carpenter’s edge-tools are evening everything in Christendom to one dead level of uniformity.  The railroads and telegraphs are all working to the same end.  All these agencies of modern civilization at first lay their innovating hands upon large cities or commercial centres.  Thence they work outward slowly and transform the appearance and habits of the country.  The transformations I have noticed in England since 1846 are wonderful, utilitarian, and productive of absolute and rigid comfort to the people; still, I must confess, they inspire in me a sentiment akin to that which our village fathers experienced when the old church in which they worshipped from childhood was pulled down to make room for a better one.