part in the great world. A shrewd prophet in Wall Street might

DaRWINISM 5235
perhaps have set a mark on Pierpont Morgan, but hardly on the Rockefellers or William C. Whitney or Whitelaw Reid. No one would have picked out William McKinley or John Hay or Mark Hanna for great statesmen. Boston was ignorant of the careers in store for Alexander Agassiz and Henry Higginson. Phillips Brooks was unknown; Henry James was unheard; Howells was new; Richardson and LaFarge were struggling for a start. Out of any score of names and reputations that should reach beyond the century, the thirty-years-old who were starting in the year 1867 could show none that was so far in advance as to warrant odds in its favor. The army men had for the most part fallen to the ranks. Had Adams foreseen the future exactly as it came, he would have been no wiser, and could have chosen no better path. Thus it turned out that the last year in England was the pleas- antest. He was already oid in society, and belonged to the Silu- rian horizon. The Prince of Wales had come. Mr. Disraeli, Lord Stanley, and the future Lord Salisbury had thrown into. the background the memories of Palmerston and Russell. Europe was moving rapidly, and the conduct of England during the American Civil War was the last thing that London liked to re- call. The revolution since 1861 was nearly complete, and, for the first time in history, the American felt himself almost as strong as an Englishman. He had thirty years to wait before he should feel himself stronger. Meanwhile even a private secre- tary could afford to be happy. His old education was finished; his new one was not begun; he still loitered a year, feeling ‘en. self near the end of a very long, anxious, tempestuous, success- ful voyage, with another to follow, and a summer sea between. He made what use he could of it. In February, 1868, he was back in Rome with his friend Milnes Gaskell. For another season - he wandered on horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Ceeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain af Trevi. Rome wasstill tragic and solemn
236 Tue EpucaTion oF HENRY ADAMS
as ever, with its medizval society, artistic, literary, and clerical, - taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley.
The long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing , for him there. He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858. He had
learned nothing whatever that made Rome more intelligible to
him, or made life easier to handle. The case was no better when
he got back to London and went through his last season. Lon-
don had become his vice. He loved his haunts, his houses, his
habits, and even his hansom cabs. He loved growling like an
Englishman, and going into society where he knew not a face,
and cared not a straw. He lived deep into the lives and loves
and disappointments of his friends. When at last he found
himself back again at Liverpool, his heart wrenched by the act
of parting, he moved mechanically, unstrung, but he had no
more acquired education than when he first trod the steps of
the Adelphi Hotel in November, 1858. He could see only one
great change, and this was wholly in years. Eaton Hall no
longer impressed his imagination; even the architecture of - Chester roused but a sleepy interest; he felt no sensation what- ever in the atmosphere of.the British peerage, but mainly an habitual dislike to most of the people who frequented their country houses; he-had become English to the point of sharing their petty social divisions, their dislikes and prejudices against each other; he took England no longer with the awe of Ameri- can youth, but with the habit of an old and rather worn suit of clothes. As far as he knew, this was all that Englishmen meant by social education, but in any case it was all the education he had gained from seven years in London.