III. L’ESTERELLE 523

anything with me, but for the unhappy difference in our innate, and unchangeable, political faiths.

49. Since that day at Sallenches it has become a matter of the most curious speculation to me, what sort of soul Charles Norton would have become, if he had had the blessing to be born an English Tory, or a Scotch Jacobite, or a French Gentilhomme, or a Savoyard Count. I think I should have liked him best to have been a Savoyard Count; say, Lord of the very Tower of Sallenches, a quarter of a mile above me at the opening of the glen,-habitable yet and inhabited; it is half hidden by its climbing grapes. Then, to have read the Fioretti di San Francesco, (which he found out, New Englander though he was, before I did,) in earliest boyhood; then to have been brought into instructively grievous collision with Commerce, Liberty, and Evangelicalism at Geneva; then to have learned Political Economy from Carlyle and me; and finally devoted himself to write the History of the Bishops of Sion! What a grand, happy, consistent creature he would have been,- while now he is as hopelessly out of gear and place, over in the States there, as a runaway star dropped into Purgatory; and twenty times more a slave than the blackest nigger he ever set his white scholars to fight the South for; because all the faculties a black has may be fully developed by a good master (see Miss Edgeworth’s story of The Grateful Negro¹),*-while only about the thirtieth or fortieth part of Charles Norton’s effective contents and capacity are beneficially spent in the dilution of the hot lava, and fructification of the hot ashes, of American character;-which are overwhelming, borne now on volcanic

* I showed the valley of Chamouni, and the “Pierre-à-Bot” above Neuchâtel, to Mrs. Beecher Stowe and her pretty little daughter Georgie,² -when Georgie was about sixteen, and wouldn’t let me say a word against Uncle Tom: howbeit, that story of the Grateful Negro, Robinson Crusoe, and Othello, contain, any of the three, more, alike worldly and heavenly, wisdom than would furnish three Uncle Tom’s Cabins.

¹ [Published March 1802. Included in the “Popular Tales” in vol. vi. of the collected Tales and Miscellaneous Pieces (1825).]

² [In 1856; as recorded in Time and Tide, Vol. XVII. p. 476.]

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