Cooper and his family entered France July, 1826, and February, 1828, they thought the time had come to change the scene, and proceeded to England.  “I drove around to the rue d’Anjou to take my leave of General Lafayette,” wrote Cooper.  To Calais they had rain and chill and darkness most of the way.  Passing through the gate, they drove to the inn immortalized by Lawrence Sterne and Beau Brummel, where they found English comfort with French cooking and French taste.  One of February’s fine days they left the Hotel Dessein to embark for England.  After a two-hours’ run the cliffs of Dover appeared on each side of that port,—­the nearest to the continent,—­making these chalk cliffs seem, Cooper says, “a magnificent gateway to a great nation.”  Leaving the fishing-boats of the French coast, “the lofty canvas of countless ships and several Indiamen rose from the sea,” as they shot towards the English shore, many “bound to that focus of coal-smoke, London.”  Quietly landing at Dover-haven, they went to Wright’s tavern, where they missed the French manner, mirrors, and table-service, but “got in their place a good deal of solid, unpretending comfort.”  In due time Mr. Wright put them and their luggage into a comfortable post-coach, and on the road he called “quite rotten, sir,” to London.  To Americans, at that date, the road proved good, and also the horses that made the sixteen miles to Canterbury in an hour and a half, where they drove to another Mr. Wright’s; going to four of the name between Dover and London, Cooper concluded with an apology that “it was literally all Wright on this road.”  The visit to Canterbury cathedral was made during “morning vespers in the choir.  It sounded odd to hear our own beautiful service in our own tongue, in such a place, after the Latin chants of canons; and we stood listening with reverence without the screen.”  London met them “several miles in the suburbs down the river,” but they suddenly burst out onto Waterloo bridge, over which they were whirled into the Strand and set down at Wright’s hotel, Adam Street, Adelphi; “and,” wrote Cooper, “we were soon refreshing ourselves with some of worthy Mrs. Wright’s excellent tea.”

[Illustration:  CLIFFS OF DOVER.]

[Illustration:  CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL CHOIR.]

[Illustration:  GREEN GATE, CANTERBURY.]

The second night in London Cooper, stretched out on a sofa, was reading, when some street musicians began to play beneath his window several tunes without success; “finally,” he wrote, “the rogues contrived, after all, to abstract half a crown from my pocket by suddenly striking up ‘Yankee Doodle!’” After some hunting they took a small house in St. James Place, which gave them “a tiny drawing-room, a dining-room, three bed-rooms, offices, and house-service for a guinea per day.”  A guinea more weekly was added for their three fires, and their own maid and man gave personal service during this London season.  Of his man-servant Cooper wrote:  “The English