in Newgate. This work, and managing a farm, did not, however, exhaust all his energies. He was still actively employed in educating his younger children. To his son James he wrote a series of letters on English Grammar, which he afterwards published as a book. This amusing and characteristic work has always been very popular. 10,000 copies were sold in one month.
Wherever he went it might be said that the schoolmaster was abroad, for he immediately began to take upon himself the office of Educator-in-general to the people. Long Island he found singularly deficient in gardens, so in a short time he brought out for the benefit of its inhabitants a little book called "The American Gardener."
"Some persons may think," he says in the Preface, "that flowers are things of no use; that they are nonsensical things. … For my part, as a thing to keep and not to sell, as a thing the possession of which is to give me pleasure, I hesitate not a moment to prefer the plant of a fine carnation to a watch set with diamonds."
Nothing, perhaps, so marks the change which had taken place in his views as the way in which he now regarded the American people and their institutions. He saw everything couleur de rose, "America was a land of universal civility, of unbounded hospitality. Everybody's circumstances were so easy that there was no occasion for hypocrisy; there was no boasting of wealth, no attempt to disguise poverty, no over-anxious desire to get on, and no attempt to get distinction from mere riches. Every farmer was good-humoured, well-informed, modest, and sedate. So far from being a land of paupers, there was, properly speaking, no class like that to which the French have applied the degrading appellation of Peasantry. All were living in peace and prosperity, and to crown all, they enjoyed what England did not—freedom of representation, and freedom of the press."
Such, in brief, was his account of America "revisited." He had dropped his green spectacles, and saw through a pair of magnifiers.
Nevertheless his heart yearned after his native land. He was born for England, and was never intended to become a Yankee. In May 18 19, a fire having destroyed his dwelling-house burnt most of his stock, he determined to return home.
