Hazy and cloudy until night when there were heavy showers. Attended Divine service with my family at St George’s Chapel in George Street, a place frequented by fashionable people, where most of the weddings of that kind are celebrated. Mr Bates had been kind enough to offer his pew. The service was much as usual, the clergyman making a rather more direct and practical discourse than I have heard. Some significant allusions to the vices of the aristocracy, or rather some of them seemed strange in such a place. Mrs Adams took me a drive after luncheon to Hampstead and Highgate hill which again opened a new view of the size of this metropolis. We passed near the scene of a terrible railway accident that happened on Monday last on the North Western railway. Thousands of people were collected there, looking at it. This is the second frightful disaster of the kind that has happened within ten days. On a review of all the events I have observed since my stay in England, I come to the conclusion that many of the pretences made about the greater recklessness of life in America are preposterous. There is as much crime, as much vice and as much indifference to life in London as there is in New York—and the country districts are no better than those of the northern states at least. The country about Hampstead is very pretty, and the view of the town of London in a clear day must be very extensive. It was too hazy today to see it. Evening, the mail arrived from America.229