Pièce 86 - Letter from Richard Sheepshanks

4 pp.

RS has been church hunting and gives his verdict on various churches and cathedrals in south England. RS reflects upon his experience of the architecture he encountered on his continental tour of Europe a few years back [WW is currently doing a similar tour of France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland]. RS has read most of Basil Hall's 'clever but heavy book about America. he is not sufficiently a citizen of the world even in imagination to form a fair estimate of brother Jonathan but he has done his best'. RS thinks that nothing 'can be more clear than that America is a hateful country for an Englishman all whose feelings and habits and associations must be perpetually shocked'. RS boils down much of the evil in America 'from the facility with which any man may obtain a livelihood, but still a good deal is left behind which I think with Hall must be laid upon the shoulder of the Democracy. The balance between the necessary evils of a constitution like theirs or like ours so far as we can consider evils as arising to the letter of a constitution, is a different thing and a more difficult subject than Hall would make it. I would not swop but that is still a different thing. I wish his views had been a little wider, because he has evidently had great advantages and because they will be able to criticise very successfully all his merely English notions, so that his good parts and doubts will be lost upon them and he will be set down for author of those John Bulls who travel to see evil in everything not English'.RS is getting a 'twenty inch convertible pendulum, of cylindrical rod and having the planes attached to the pendulum'.