On the 8th of September 1838, we sailed from the wharf at Bristol in the Cambrian steam-boat, and found ourselves amid an immense multitude of men, women, and children, dogs, bales, bags, porters, and musicians. We were cheered by the strains–not very dulcet–of a harp and a violin, as we descended the stream of the muddy, yet romantic Avon. In sailing down the river, we saw two persons shoot across the gulf, of which it forms the narrow bottom, in a car, slung on an iron bar 785 feet in length, and 170 feet above our heads. It is used by the workmen now engaged in constructing a suspension-bridge from cliff to cliff across the stream.

In an hour and a half, we were on board of the Great Western, lying at anchor in King-Road. Her first appearance disappointed us; for we had heard much of her great dimensions. When compared with the vessels lying near her, she was seen to be very long, but neither remarkably broad nor high. This was her third voyage outward. She was launched on 19th July 1837, and sailed on her first voyage to New York on 2d April 1838.

The passengers were gay; and, although many of us looked wistfully at the receding shores of England, there was no possibility of indulging in sentiment in such a scene of bustle.

On getting outside the gate, we found an immense crowd assembled; they did not molest us in the least, but we passed on very quietly. We were taken through a different quarter of the town to any I had been in before, but the streets were built and ornamented in the same manner; they were lined, on both sides, with such a number of people, that where they could all have come from I could not imagine. We went on thus till we came to the gates of the city, where the mandarins were assembled to see us pass out. The walls were about eighteen feet thick, and twentyfive feet high; but the materials (stones and bricks) seemed so loosely put together, that a swivel might very soon have made a breach in them.

We were now in the suburbs, and close to the river, to which we were taken; and each sedan being placed in a separate boat, we were soon ferried across. The river here was divided into two branches, across one of which we had just been carried; and we went down the left bank of the other; it was about the breadth of the Thames at Westminster. As they conveyed me over, I got out of the sedan, and looked back at the place of my imprisonment. It seemed a large town, walled all round; but in some places the walls were n a very ruinous condition.

Phrenology.–Dr Spurzheim.–On the 20th of June 1832, Dr Spurzheim sailed from Havre for the United States, and arrived at New York on the 4th of August. On the 17th of September, he commenced a course of eighteen lectures at the Athenæum Hall, in Boston, and, soon after, another course at the University, Cambridge, three miles distant. He delivered, besides, in the afternoon of every alternate day, a course of five lectures before the Medical Faculty, and other professional gentlemen of Boston, on the anatomy of the brain. “His lectures, both in Boston, and at the University, excited great and lively interest: they attracted alike the fashionable and the learned, the gay and the grave, the aged and the young, the sceptic and the Christian. Our most eminent men, as well as humble citizens, were early at the hall to secure eligible seats; and they were alike profoundly silent and attentive to the eloquence and philosophy of the lecturer.”

The climate of the United States is felt by most British travellers to be highly stimulating. The air is drier, and it appears to me to be more highly charged with electricity than that of Britain. The habitual state of the American people, also, is one of much higher mental excitement than that of the inhabitants of Britain.

Negro Slavery.–Nothing in the United States has surprised me so much as the general tone of the public mind and the press on the subject of slavery. The institutions of America profess to be based on justice, and certainly an all-pervading justice is indispensable to their permanence and success; yet the most cruel injustice is perpetrated on the Negro race, and defended, as if it were justice, by persons whose character and intelligence render them in every other respect amiable and estimable. This is a canker in the moral constitution of the country, that must produce evil continually until it is removed. Those who defend slavery deny the right of foreigners to interfere with it; they speak of it as a domestic institution, with which nobody has any concern except the legislatures of the States in which it exists, and on this ground the House of Representatives of the United States, at Washington, on the 11th December current, refused to receive any petitions on the subject. Mr Atherton, member for New Hampshire, presented a series of five resolutions; the vote was taken on the first resolution, “Resolved, That this Government is of limited powers, and that, by the constitution of the United States, Congress has no jurisdiction whatever over the institution of slavery in the several States of the confederacy;” which was carried, “ayes, 198; noes, 6.”