to Fairmount Park and to the Zoological Garden, on the Schuylkill, a few years ago, with my esteemed friend John J. Ridgway, Esq., whose great activity in raising the money for that fine collection ought never to be forgotten. As we stood on the steps of the house known as "The Solitude," John Penn's residence, I resolved to seize the earliest opportunity to gather the materials for precisely such a paper as this; but I never supposed that my experience would be so full of interest; nor, indeed, that the grave of William Penn would be found in a spot so obscure, or that his name would be forgotten in the very neighborhood where he lived and died. I am not without hope that the Friends of Philadelphia will take steps to remove the remains of their greatest leader to the State that bears his name, and to the city that he founded in 1682. There is no place in the world so fitting as Fairmount Park, and no time more appropriate for the ceremony than the Centennial year. In any case, what I have written may quicken discussion and inquiry. The whole story of William Penn is the romance of truth, and there is not a region in the globe in which it is so well illustrated as in the forty miles around Philadelphia, including part of New Jersey and Delaware.

Americans who visit London habitually seek Windsor Castle and habitually ignore Slough at the old-fashioned hotel, "Botham's," which I have described. They can see both at little additional cost, as they are only two miles apart. My old friend the host of this ancient inn will greet them cordially, and will give them a better dinner than they can get at Windsor, and, what is perhaps the best part of the feast, will now show them how to realize the great difference between the Penns that are remembered for the little that they did for their fellow-creatures and the William Penn who seems to be forgotten after all his sacrifices and services in the cause of humanity. But, in justice to the English people, it deserves to be said that London fervently cherishes the memory of his virtues.

The British and South Kensington museums contain much information, well catalogued and preserved; and in this search. after the facts of his last hours and his final resting-place I have been assisted by several excellent English gentlemen. And now that Hepworth Dixon is in America as a public lecturer, I ask for him high honors for having successfully vindicated the character of the Founder of Pennsylvania against the unjust, and, I believe, the afterwards regretted, aspersions of the late Lord Macaulay.

LIII.

THE MOST CELEBRATED MUSEUM OF WAX FIGURES IN THE

WORLD.—MADAME TUSSAUD's, IN BAKER STREET, LONDON,

ENGLAND.

On the evening of October 6, 1874, I dropped in at Madame Tussaud's famous collection of wax figures, Baker Street, Portman Square; entrance-fee a shilling, and twopence to a man in the vestibule for taking care of your umbrella and overcoat. It is a memorable place. Its founder was Madame Tussaud, born at Berne, Switzerland, in 1760; she died in London in 1850, aged ninety. Her mother lived to the same age, her grandmother to one hundred and four, and her great-grandmother to one hundred and eleven. She was taught to model in wax by her uncle in Paris, at whose house she often dined with Doctor Franklin, Mirabeau, Lafayette, Voltaire, and Rousseau, and made casts of their heads. She also modelled many royal persons and the French revolutionists Robespierre, Marat, Danton, and frequently took casts of heads that had been severed on the scaffold. She continued her work in Paris for many years, and in 1802 moved her museum to London, where it has since been increased and exhibited with much success.

It is now in the hands of her daughter and grandson. There are three hundred figures, and many valuable paintings and statues, most admirably arranged in several noble saloons.

I found the place crowded, but the people in wax were not more interesting to me than the living spectators. The two assemblies more than once seemed to change places, and some of the faces of the dead looked far more natural than many of their breathing observers. The visitors were evidently of the middle class, and there was little comeliness in either sex. There was an old man on a sofa, spectacles in hand, who seemed much more animated than the heavy countryman at his side; and Madame Sainte Amaranthe, in bed asleep, one of the victims of Robespierre, was ten times lovelier than the liv ing women who daily devoured her exquisite features; Hogua, the Chinese tea-merchant, seated at the door, and the Chinese commissioner and his consort near him, were almost speaking figures, the two latter with moving eyes and bodies.

But there are some heart-rending caricatures. Mr. Lincoln resembles United States Senator Lewis, of Virginia, and has painted cheeks and light hair; General Grant looks to be a boy about eighteen; Andrew Johnson would pass for a blond German, and Jefferson Davis for a slim actor who had just rouged his lips. William Penn might have stood for Daniel Lambert. Shakespeare is striking an attitude, and, with his thin hair combed into a sort of flowing mane, is for all the world like an escaped lunatic. Henry the Eighth, with his platoon of wives, would do for the President of the New England Fat Men's Club, surrounded by seven lady friends in an interesting. condition. There is an overflow of royalty in store clothes and stage jewels. Bismarck has evidently just had a set-to with the Emperor William, and Von Moltke has the withered air of a boy of seventeen suddenly turned into a man of seventy. Napoleon I. would do very well for Theodore Cuyler, of Philadelphia; Daniel O'Connell would answer for Lyman Tremain,

of New York; Charles the First proves that he was too ugly to live; Charles the Second is evidently out of humor with his clothes; and Oliver Cromwell has been put where he is as if to prove that he was just the man for the bold work he began and finished. The best-looking wax man was a great criminal, and the worst a great philanthropist. Poor Henry Ward Beecher was surrounded with spectators, and as they chaffed and hinted I preferred to recall his great speeches in London for the Union cause in 1863-64, and his later manly expressions for reconciliation with the South.

As you enter this strange assembly, you have George Washington on your right and Benjamin Franklin on your left, both exceedingly well done. Standing before these two illustrious characters, the fact came back to me that their ancestors lived for several generations in Central England, in the same county -Northamptonshire. The social difference between these ancestors was marked. Washington, according to Washington. Irving, was of gentle lineage. "Knights, abbots, lords of the manor, valiant defenders of cities, and partakers of the spoils of conquest bore the name of Washington, whose deeds and honors are recorded in ancient parchment, upon memorial brass and monumental stone.” Franklin, on the contrary, says James Parton, "came of a long line of village blacksmiths. A Franklin may have tightened a rivet in the armor or replaced a shoe upon the horse of a Washington, or doffed his cap to a Washington riding by the ancestral forge, but until Postmaster Franklin met Colonel Washington in the camp of General Braddock in 1755, the two races had run their several ways without communion." And here, not quite one hundred and twenty years after, the two greatest names of these two old English families are honored by the best place in one of the favorite museums in London; returning, so to speak, to the country of their ancestors, revered by all classes for their achievements in the New World. It is difficult to say which

of these great names most completely dominates the American continent, or which is more honored in England. Their influence largely shapes the destinies of more than forty millions of human beings. Washington is the ideal of unchallenged patriotism and disinterestedness; Franklin the type of a practical and irresistible philosophy. They cease to be local because the whole world concurs in the American judgment upon them. Thackeray, in his last essay upon the "Four Georges," contrasts the grand feast in London, at the opening of the reign of George the Fourth, with the splendid lesson taught in the resignation by George Washington of his position as commander-inchief of the armies of the United States, at Annapolis, Maryland, and asks, "Which is the nobler character for after-ages to admire? Yon fribble, dancing in lace and spangles, or yonder hero who sheathes his sword after a life of spotless honor, a purity unreproached, a courage indomitable, and a consummate victor? Which of these is the true gentleman?"

All Europe worships and studies the image and the maxims of Franklin. Washington never saw the land of his ancestors; but Benjamin Franklin was three times in England. The first, when he was eighteen and a journeyman printer, in 1724, and had lodgings in the street still known as Little Britain, at three shillings and sixpence a week; the second, in 1756, when he was fifty and the commissioner of Pennsylvania, appointed by the Assembly to go to England to urge redress for the grievances of the State, and established himself in lodgings at No. 7 Craven Street, Strand, a fashionable quarter in those days. The landlady was Mrs. Margaret Stevenson, one of the most amiable of women, with whom and her daughter he contracted a friendship which never ceased. He remained until 1762, six years, returning home to begin a new career of usefulness. His third visit was in 1764, as representative of the thirteen colonies, when he was fifty-nine, again establishing himself in his old lodgings at Craven Street.