Francis W. Gilmer to John Randolph
| Dear Sir | London 25th Sepr 1824. |
The time for my departure is now so near at hand, that I begin to desp[air of seeing you in?] England, which I was very desirous to do. The more so, because I fear you did not receive a letter I wrote you from Cambridge, the very day I I left London, in answer to your note sent to the Tavistock, which I received only in the instant of my setting out, when it was impossible to detain the coach to write a word. The newspaper you gave me, I have carefully preserved, and hope to return it to you in Virginia.
I have had greater success in procuring Professors than I promised myself after all the discouraging prognostics I saw on my arrival, and fully as great as I ever promised myself. hoped for. They are men of good families, good moral characters,1 genteel manners, regular education, talents, & educated at from the great universities, two are of Trinity Coll. Camb. one M.A. the other entitled to his fellowship next spring.— N.B. none of them are Scots.
My visit to England has been upon the whole more pleasant than I anticipated. The soil is less fertile, the climate far worse, and the [p]eople much better, than I imagined. Nothing has [ast]onished me more, than the youthful vigour with which population & improvement shoot in every part of the kingdom. we imagine England an old country, we hear of her “green old age,” but I see none of the marks of decline about her. The towns are every where increasing, the peasantry seem happy & contented, and children crowd upon the sight every where.
Scotland is bleak & desolate, beyond all my conceptions. I thought as I saw barefooted women shivering on those cold & flinty hills in the month of august, of our sunny fields and shady forests, and I must think our climate far preferable to that of GB. I mean Virginia above tide [w]ater.
If you [wish?] to see the “abomination of desolation”2 spoken of by Daniel, ride from Brandon to Fakenham. a wilder waste of sterility & nakedness cannot be imagined. It is for near 20 miles a b rabbit warren of apparently baked clay, & burnt sand.
I wish I could have seen you. perhaps I may yet meet you during the winter—but when or where, believe me
United States Congressman John Randolph departed for england in May 1824, travelled to Paris in late August, and returned to the U.S. in early December (New York, NY, Evening Post, 17 May 1824; Boston Columbian Centinel, 4 Sept. 1824; Baltimore Patriot 6 Dec. 1824; Gilmer to Randolph, 6 May, 22 June 1824 [ViU: FWG]). With abomination of desolation, Jesus referred to the prophet Daniel’s warning of approaching calamity in the Bible (Matthew 24.15; Mark 13.14).