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COPYRIGHT DEPOSITS

WORKS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

"Such is the beauty of his speech, such the majesty of his
ideas, such the power of the moral sentiment in men, and such
the impression which hi? whole character makes on them, that
they lend him, everywhere, their ears, and thousands bless his
manly thoughts." — Massac/tusei/s Quarterly Review.

ESSAYS. First Series, i vol. i6mo. $1.50.

ESSAYS. Second Series, i vol, i6mo. ^1.50.

MISCELLANIES. Embracing Nature, Addresses, and
Lectures, i vol. i6nio. $ 1.50.

REPRESENTATIVE MEN. Seven Lectures, i vol.
i6mo. $1.50.

ENGLISH TRAITS, i vol. i6mo. {^1.50.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE, i vol. i6mo. 51.50.

PROSE WORKS Comprising the six preceding volumes.
2 vols. i2mo. Cloth, $5.00; Half Calf, $9.00; Morocco,
;? 12.00.

SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE, i vol. i6mo. {^1.50.
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POEMS. I vol. i6mo. With Portrait. $1.50.
MAY-DAY, and Other Pieces, i vol. i6mo. i^i.50.

PARNASSUS : A volume of Choice Poems, selected from
the whole range of English Literature, edited by Ralph
Waldo Emerson. With a Prefatory Essay. Crown
8vo. Nearly 600 pages. $4.00.

JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO.,

Publishers, Boston.

ENGLISH TRAITS.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

NEW AND REVISED EDITION.

M5^*#6£4^

BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co.
1876.

^^

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*«

Copyright, 1856 and 1876,

By RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

U. COPY

WPPLIEO FROM

COPYRIGHT FILES

JANUARY, mi.

University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. First Visit to England .... 7

II. Voyage to England .... 23

III. Land . .30

IV. Race 37

V. Ability .GO

VI. Manners . 81

VII. Truth 91

VIII. Character 99

IX. Cockayne HI

X. Wealth 118

XI. Aristocracy 132

XII. Universities 152

XIII. Religion 163

XIV. Literature . . . . . . 176

VI CONTENTS.

XV. The "Times" 197

XVI. Stonehenge 206

XVII. Personal 220

XVIII. Result 225

XIX. Speech at Manchester .... 232

ENGLISH TRAITS.
CHAPTER I.

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.

I HAVE been twice in England. In 1833, on mj
return from a short tour in Sicily, Italy, and France, I
crossed from Boulogne, and landed in London at the
Tower stairs. It was a dark Sunday morning; there
were few people in the streets ; and I remember the
l)leasure of that first walk on English ground, with my
companion, an American artist, from the Tower up
through Clieapside and the Strand, to a house in Russell
Square, whither we had been recommended to good
chambers. Eor the first time for many months we were
forced to check the saucy habit of travellers' criticism,
as we could no longer speak aloud in the streets without
being understood. The shop-signs spoke our language ;
our country names were on the door-plates ; and the
public and private buildings wore a more native and
wonted front.

Like most young men at that time, I was much in-
debted to the men of Edinburgh, and of the Edinburgh
Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott,

8 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Playfair, and De Quince.y ; and my narrow and desul-
tory reading liad inspired the wisli io see the faces of
three or four writers, — Coleridge, "Wordsworth, Lan-
der, De Quincey, and the latest and strongest contrib-
utor to the critical journals, Carlyle ; and I suppose if
1 had sifted the reasons that led me to Europe, when I
was ill and was advised to travel, it was mainly the
attraction of these persons. If Goethe had been still
living, I might have wandered mto Germany also. Be-
sides those 1 have named (for Scott was dead), there was
not in Britain the man living whom I cared to behold,
unless it were the Duke of Wellington, whom I after-
wards saw at Westminster Abbej"", at the funeral of
"Wilberforce. The young scholar fancies it happiness
enough to live with people who can give an inside to
the world ; without reflecting that they are prisoners,
too, of their own thought, and cannot apply themselves
to yours. The conditions of literary success are almost
destructive of the best social power, as they do not leave
that frolic liberty which only can encounter a companion
on the best terms. It is probable you left some obscure
comrade at a tavern, or in the farms, with right mother-
wit, and equality to life, when you crossed sea and land
to play bo-peep with celebrated scribes. I have, how-
ever, found writers superior to their books, and I cling
to my first belief, that a strong head will dispose fast
enough of these impediments, and give one the satisfac-
tion of reality, the sense of having been met, and a
larger horizon.

On looking over the diary of my journey in 1833, I
find nothing to publish in my memoranda of visits to

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 9

places. But I liave copied the few notes I made of
visits to persons, as they respect parties quite too good
and too transparent to the whole world to make it need-
ful to affect any prudery of suppression about a few
hints of those bright personalities.

At Florence, chief among artists, I found Horatio
Greenough, the American sculptor. His face was so
handsome, and his person so well formed, that he might
be pardoned, if, as was alleged, the face of his Medora,
and the figure of a colossal Achilles in clay, were ideal-
izations of his own. Greenough was a superior man,
ardent and eloquent, and all his opinions had elevation
and magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had
wrought in schools or fraternities, — the geuius of the
master imparting his design to his friends, and inflaming
them with it, and when his strength was spent, a new
hand, with equal heat, continued the work ; and so by
relays, until it was finished in every part with equal fire.
This was necessary in so refractory a material as stone ;
and he thought art would never prosper until we left our
shy jealous ways, and worked in society as they. All his
thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was an ac-
curate and a deep man. He was a votary of the Greeks,
and impatient of Gothic art. His paper on Architecture,
published in 1843, announced in advance the leading
thoughts of Mr. lluskin on the moralUi/ in architecture,
notwithstanding the antagonism in their views of the
history of art. I have a private letter from him, — later,
but respecting the same period, — in which he roughly
sketches his own theory. " Here is my theory of struc-
ture : A scientific arrangement of spaces and forms to
1 *

10 ENGLISH TRAITS.

functions and to site ; an emphasis of features propor-
tioned to their gradated importance in function; color
and ornament to be decided and arranged and varied by
strictly organic laws, having a distinct reason for each
decision ; the entire and innnediate banishment of all
makeshift and make-believe."

Greenougli brought me, through a common friend, an
invitation from Mr, Landor, who lived at San Domenica
di Fiesole. On the 15th May 1 dined with Mr. Landor.
I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pic-
tures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding
a beautiful landscape. 1 had inferred from his books, or
magnified from some anecdotes, an impression of Achil-
lean wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not know
whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on
this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and
he was the most patient and gentle of hosts. He praised
the beautiful cyclamen which grows all about Florence ;
he admired Washington ; talked of Wordsworth, Byron,
Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. To be sure, he is
decided in his opinions, likes to surprise, and is well con-
tent to impress, if possible, his English whim upon the
immutable past. No great man ever had a great son, if
Philip and Alexander be not an exception ; and Philip he
calls the greater man. In art, he loves the Greeks, and
in sculpture, them only. He prefers the Venus to every-
thing else, and, after that, the head of Alexander, in the
gallery here. He prefers John of Bologna to Michel
Angelo ; in painthig, llaflFaelle ; and shares the growing
taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek
histories he thought the only good ; and after them. Vol-

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 11

talre's. I could not make lilm praise Mackiutosl), nor
my more recent friends ; Montaigne very cordially, —
and Charron also, which seemed undiscriminating. He
thought Degerando indebted to " Lucas on Happiness "
and "Lucas on Holiness"! He pestered me with
Southey ; but who is Southey ?

He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Friday I
did not fail to go, and this time with Greenough. He
entertained us at once with reciting half a dozen hexam-
eter lines of Julius Caesar's ! — from Donatus, he said.
He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary,
and undervalued Burke, and undervalued Socrates ; des-
ignated as three of the greatest of men, Washington,
Phocion, and Timoleon ; much as our pomologists, in
their lists, select the three or the six best pears " for a
small orchard " ; and did not even omit to remark the
similar termination of their names. "A great man," he
said, " should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred
oxen, without knowing whether they would be consumed
by gods and heroes, or whether the flies would eat them."
I had visited Professor Amici, who had shown me his
microscopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand diam-
eters ; and I spoke of the uses to which they were applied.
Landor despised entomology, yet, in the same breath,
said, "the sublime was in a grain of dust." I suppose I
teased him about recent writers, but he professed never
to have heard of Herschel, not even by name. One room
was full of pictures, which he likes to show, especially
one piece, standing before which, he said "he would give
fifty guineas to the man that would swear it was a l)o-
menichiuo." I was more curious to see his library, but

12 ENGLISH THAITS.

Mr. H , one of the guests, told me that Mr. Laudor

gives away his books, and has never more than a dozen
at a time in his house.

Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which
the English delight to indulge, as if to signalize their
commanding freedom. He has a wonderful brain, des-
potic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a soldier, by
what chance converted to letters, in which there is not a
style nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English
appetite for action and heroes. The thing done avails,
^ud not what is said about it. An original sentence,
a step forward, is worth more than all the censures.
Landor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ig-
nored; and sometimes savagely attacked in the Reviews.
The criticism may be right or wrong, and is quickly
» forgotten ; but year after year the scholar must still
go back to Landor for a multitude of elegant senten-
ces, — for wisdom, wit, and indignation that are unfor-
getable.

From London, on the 5th August, I went to Highgate,
and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, requesting leave to
pay my respects to him. It was near noon. Mr. Cole-
ridge sent a verbal message, that he was in bed, but if
1 would call after one o'clock, he would see me. I re-
turned at one, and he appeared, a short, thick old man,
with bright blue eyes and fine clear complexion, leaning
on his cane. He took snuff freely, which presently soiled
his cravat and neat black suit. He asked whether I knew
Allston, and spoke warmly of his merits and doings when
he knew him in Home ; what a master of the Titianesque

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 13

be was, etc., etc. He spoke of Dr. Chauning. It was
an unspeakable misfortune that he should have turned
out a Unitarian after all. On this, he burst into a decla-
mation on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism, — its
high unreasonableness ; and taking up Bishop Water-
land's book, which lay on the table, he read with vehe-
mence two or three pages written by himself in the
fly-leaves, — passages, too, which, I believe, are printed
in the " Aids to Reflection." When he stopped to take
breath, I interposed, that, " whilst I highly valued all his
explanations, I was bound to tell him that I was born
and bred a Unitarian." " Yes," he said, " I supposed
so " ; and continued as before. ' It was a wonder, that
after so many ages of unquestioning acquiescence in the
doctrine of St. Paul, — the doctrine of the Trinity, which
was also, according to Philo Judaeus, the doctruie of the
Jews before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians should
take on themselves to deny it, etc., etc. He was very
sorry that Dr. Channiug, — a man to whom he looked
up, — no, to say that he looked tip to him would be to
speak falsely ; but a man whom he looked at with so
much interest, — should embrace such views. When he
saw Dr. Channing, he had hinted to him that he was
afraid he loved Christianity for what was lovely and excel-
lent, — he loved the good in it, and not the true ; and I
tell you, sir, that I have known ten persons who loved
the good, for one person who loved the true ; but it is a
far greater virtue to love the true for itself alone, than to
love the good for itself alone. He (Coleridge) knew all
about Unitarianism perfectly well, because he had once
been a Unitarian, and knew what quackery it was. He

14 ENGLISH TRAITS.

liad been called "the rising star of Uiiitarianism." ' lie
went oil defining, or rather refining -. ' The Trinitarian
doctrine was realism ; the idea of God was not essential,
but super-essential ' ; talked of trinism and tetrakism, and
much more, of which I only caught this : ' that the will
was that by which a person is a person ; because, if one
should push me in the street, and so I should force the
man next me into the kennel, I should at once exclaim,
" I did not do it, sir," meaning it was not my will.' And
this also : ' that if you should insist on your faith here in
England, and I on mine, mine would be the hotter side of
the fagot.'

I took advantage of a pause to say, that he had many
readers of all religious opinions in America, and I pro-
ceeded to inquire if the "extract" from the Indepen-
dent's pamphlet, in the third volume of the Friend, Avere
a veritable quotation. He replied that it was really taken
from a pamphlet in his possession, entitled " A Protest
of one of the Independents," or something to that effect.
I told him how excellent I thought it, and how much I
wished to see the entire work. "Yes," he said, "the
man was a chaos of truths, but lacked the knowledge that
God was a god of order. Yet the passage would no
doubt strike you more in the quotation than in the origi-
nal, for I have filtered it."

When I rose to go, he said, " I do not know whether
you care about poetry, but I will repeat some verses I
lately made on my baptismal anniversary"; and he re-
cited with strong emphasis, standing, ten or twelve lines,
beginning, —

" Born unto God in Christ — "

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 15

lie inquired where I liad been travelling ; and on learn-
ing that I had been in Malta and Sicily, he compared one
island with the other, ' repeating what he had said to the
Bishop of London when he returned from that country,
that Sicily w^as an excellent school of political economy ;
for, in any town there, it only needed to ask what the
government enacted, and reverse that to know what
ought to be done ; it was the most felicitously opposite
legislation to anything good and wise. There were only
three things which the government had brought into
that garden of delights, namely, itch, pox, and famine;
whereas, in Malta, the force of law and mind was seen,
in making that barren rock of semi-Saracen inhabitants
the seat of population and plenty.' Going out, he
showed me in the next apartment a picture of Allston's,
and told me ' that Montague, a picture-dealer, once came
to see him, and, glancing towards tliis, said, " Well, you
have got a picture ! " thinking it the work of an old mas-
ter ; afterwards, Montague, still talking with his back to
the canvas, put u*p his hand and touched it, and exclaimed,
" By Heaven ! this picture is not ten years old " : — so
delicate and skilful was that man's touch.'

I was in his company for about an hour, but find it
impossible to recall the largest part of his discourse,
which was often like so many printed paragraphs in his
book, — perhaps the same, — so readily did he fall into
certain commonplaces. As I might have fores;en, the
visit was rather a spectacle than a conversation, of no use
beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity. He was old and
preoccupied, and could not bend to a new companion and
think with him.

16 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Prom Edinburgli I went to the Highlands. On my
return, I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being
intent on delivering a letter which I had brought from
Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock. It was a farm in
Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles dis-
tant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private
carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate
heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his
mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an
author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as
absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that
hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best in
London. He was tall and gaunt, with a cliff-like brow,
self-possessed, and holding his extraordinary powers of
conversation in easy command ; clinging to his northern
accent with evident relish ; full of lively anecdote, and
with a streaming humor, which floated everything he
looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the familiar
objects, put the companion at once into an acquaintance
with his Lars and Lemurs, and it was very pleasant to
learn what was predestined to be a pretty mythology.
Few were the objects and lonely the man, " not a person
to speak to within sixteen miles except the minister of
Dunscore " ; so that books inevitably made his topics.

He had names of his own for all the matters familiar
to his discourse. "Blackwood's" was the "sand maga-
zine"; "Fraser's" nearer approach to possibility of life
was the " mud magazine " ; a piece of road near by that
marked some failed enterprise was the " grave of the last
sixpence." When too much praise of any genius annoyed
him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 17

Ills pig. He liud spent much time and contrivance in
confining the poor beast to one enclosure in his pen, but
pig, by great strokes of judgment, had found out how to
let a board down, and had foiled him. For all that, he
still thought man the most plastic little fellow in the
planet, and he liked Nero's death, " Qiialis artifex pereo!"
better than most history. He worships a man that will
manifest any truth to him. At one time he had inquired
and read a good deal about America. Landor's principle
was mere rebellion, and that he feared was the American
principle. The best thing he knew of that country was,
that in it a man can have meat for his labor. He had
read in Stewart's book, that when he inquired in a New
York hotel for the Boots, he had been shown across the
street and had found Mungo in his own house dining on
roast turkey.

We talked of books. Plato he does not read, and he
disparaged Socrates ; and, when pressed, persisted in
making Mirabeau a hero. Gibbon he called the splendid
bridge from the old world to the new. His own read-
ing had been multifarious. Tristram Shandy was one of
lus first books after Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's
America an early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce ; and it was
now ten years since he had learned German, by the advice
of a man who told him he would find in that language
what he wanted.

He took despairing or satirical views of literature at
this moment ; recounted the incredible sums paid in one
year by the great booksellers for pufiing. Hence it
comes that no newspaper is trusted now, no books are

B

18 ENGLISH TRAITS.

bought, and the booksellers are on tlie eve of bank-
ruptcy.

He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded
country, the selfish abdication by public men of all that
])ublic persons should perform. ' Government should
direct poor men what to do. Poor Irish folk come wan-
dering over these moors. My dame makes it a rule to
give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies his
wants to the next house. But here are thousands of
acres which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid
these poor Irish go to the moor and till it. Thev burned
the stacks, and so found a way to force the rich people
to attend to them.'

We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at
Criffel, then without his cap, and down into Words-
worth's country. There we sat down, and talked of the
immortality of the soul. It was not Carlyle's fault that
we talked on that topic, for he had the natural disinclina-
tion of every nimble spirit to bruise itself against walls,
and did not like to place himself where no step can be
taken. But he was honest and true, and cognizant of
the subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how
every event affects all the future. ' Christ died on the
tree : that built Dunscore kirk yonder : that brought you
and me together. Time has only a relative existence.'

He was already turning his eyes towards London with
a scholar's appreciation. London is the heart of the
world, he said, wonderful only from the mass of human
beings. He liked the liuge machine. Each keeps its
own round. The baker's boy brings muffins to the
window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all the

FITIST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 19

Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject. But
it turned out good men. He named certain individuals,
especially one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he
knew, whom London had well served.

On the 28th August, I went to Rydal Mount, to pay
my respects to Mr. Wordsworth. His daughters called
in their father, a plain, elderly, white-haired man, not
prepossessing, and disfigured by green goggles. He sat
down, and talked with great simplicity. He had just re-
turned from a journey. His health was good, but he had
broken a tooth by a fall, when walking with two lawyers,
and had said, that he was glad it did not happen forty
years ago ; whereupon they had praised his philosophy.

He had much to say of America, the more that it gave
occasion for his favorite topic, — that society is being en-
lightened by a superficial tuition, out of all proportion to
its being restrained by moral culture. Schools do no
good. Tuition is not education. He thinks more of the
education of circumstances than of tuition. 'T is not a
question whether there are offences of which the law takes
cognizance, but whether there are offences of which the
law does not take cognizance. Sin is what he fears, and
how society is to escape without gravest mischiefs from
this source — ? He has even said, what seemed a para-
dox, that they needed a civil war in America, to teach the
necessity of knitting the social ties stronger. ' There
may be,' he said, ' in America some vulgarity in man-
ner, but that 's not important. That comes of tlie pio-
neer state of things. ♦> But I fear they are too much given
to the making of money ; and secondly, to politics ; that

20 ENGLISH TRAITS.

they make political distinction tlie end, and not the
means. ! And I fear they lack a class of men of leisure, —
ill short, of gentlemen, — to give a tone of honor to the
community. I am told that things are boasted of in tlie
second class of society there, which, in England, — God
knows, are done in England every day, — but would
never be spoken of. In America I wish to know not how
many churches or schools, but what newspapers ? My
friend. Colonel Hamilton, at the foot of the hill, who was
a year in America, assures me that the newspapers are
atrocious, and accuse members of Congress of stealing
spoons ! ' He was against taking off the tax on news-
papers in England, which the reformers represent as a
lax upon knowledge, for this reason, that they would be
inundated with base prints. He said, he talked on politi-
cal aspects, for he wished to impress on me and all good
Americans to cultivate the moral, the conservative, etc.j
etc., and never to call into action the physical strength of
the people,'^ as had just now been done in England in the
Reform Bill, — a thing prophesied by Delolme. He
alluded once or twice to his conversation with Dr. Chan-
ning, who had recently visited him (laying his hand on a
particular chair in which the Doctor had sat).
. The conversation turned on books. Lucretius he es-
teems a. far higher poet than Virgil: not in his system,
which is nothing, but in his power of illustration. Faith
is necessary to explain anything, and to reconcile the
foreknowledge of God with human evil. Of Cousin
(whose lectures we had all been reading in Boston) he
knew only the name.

I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical articles and

FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 21

translations. He said lie tliouglit him sometimes insane.
He proceeded to abuse Goethe's Wilhelm Meister heart-
ily. It was full of all manner of fornication. It was
like the crossing of flies in the air. He had never gone
further than the first part ; so disgusted was he that he
threw the book across the room. I deprecated this
wrath, and said what I could for the better parts of the
book ; and he courteously promised to look at it again.
Carlyle, he said, wrote most obscurely. He was clever
and deep, but he defied the sympathies of ever^^body.
Even Mr. Coleridge wrote more clearly, though he had
always wished Coleridge would write more to be under-
stood. He led me out into his garden, and showed me
the gravel- walk in which thousands of his lines were
composed. His eyes are much inflamed. This is no
loss, except for reading, because he never writes prose,
and of poetry he carries even hundreds of lines in his
head before writing them. He had just returned from a
visit to Staffa, and within three days had made three
sonnets on Eingal's Cave, and was composing a fourth,
when he was called in to see me. He said, " If you are
interested in my verses, perhaps you will like to hear
these lines." I gladly assented ; and he recollected him-
self for a few moments, and then stood forth and re-
peated, one after the other, the three entire sonnets with
great animation. I fancied the second and third more
beautiful than his poems are wont to be. The third is
addressed to the flowers, which, he said, especially the
ox-eye daisy, are very abundant on the top of the rock.
Tlie second alludes to the name of the cave, which is
" Cave of Music " : the first to the circumstance of its

22 ENGLISH TllAITS.

being visited by the promiscuous company of the steam-
boat.

This recitation was so unlooked lor and surprising, —
lie, the old Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to
me in a garden-walk, like a school-boy declaiming, —
that I at first was near to laugh ; but recollecting my-
self, that I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was
chanting poems to me, I saw that he was right and I was
wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear. I told him
how much the few printed extracts had quickened the
desire to possess his unpublished poems. He replied, he
never was in haste to publish; partly, because he cor-
rected a good deal, and every alteration is ungraciously
received after printing; but what he had written would
be printed, whether he lived or died. I said, " Tintern
Abbey " appeared to be the favorite poem with the pub-
lic, but more contemplative readers preferred the first
books of the " Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said,
"Yes, they are belter." He preferred such of his poems
as touched the affections, to any others ; for whatever is
didactic — what theories of society, and so on — might
perish quickly ; but w^hatever combined a truth with an
affection was kxt^/uo es aei, good to-day and good forever.
He cited the sonnet " On the feelings of a high-minded
Spaniard," which he preferred to any other (I so under-
stood him), and the "Two Voices"; and quoted, with
evident pleasure, the verses addressed " To the Skylark."-
In this connection, he said of the Newtonian theory, that
it might yet be superseded and forgotten ; and Dalton's
atomic theory.

When I prepared to depart, he said he wished to show

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 23

me wlmt a common person in England conld do, and lie
led me into the enclosure of his clerk, a young man, to
whom he had given this slip of ground, which was laid
out, or its natural capabilities shown, with much taste.
He then said he would show me a better way towards
the inn ; and he walked a good part of a mile, talking,
and ever and anon stopping short to impress the word or
the verse, and finally parted from me with great kindness,
and returned across the fields.

Wordsworth honored himself by liis simple adherence
to truth, and w^as very willing not to shine ; but he sur-
prised by the hard limits of his thought. To judge from
a single conversation, he made the impression of a nar-
row and very English mind ; of one who paid for his
rare elevation by general tameness and conformity. Off
his own beat, his opinions were of no value. It is not
very rare to find persons loving sympathy and ease, who
expiate their departure from the common in one direc-
tion, by their conformity in every other.

CHAPTER II.

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND.

The occasion of my second visit to England was an
invitation from some Mechanics' Institutes in Lancashire
and Yorkshire, which separately are organized much in
the same w'ay as our New England Lyceums, but, in
1847, had been linked into a "Union," which embraced
twenty or thirty towns and cities, and presently extended

24 ENGLISH TRAITS.

into 1]ie middle counties, find nortliward into Scotland.
1 Avas invited, on liberal Irnns, to read a series of lec-
tures in them all. The request was urged with every
kiiid suggestion, and every assurance of aid and comfort,
by friendliest parties in Manchester, who, in the sequel,
amply redeemed their word. The remuneration was
equivalent to the fees at that time paid in this country
for the like services. At all events, it was sufficient to
cover any travelling expenses, and the proposal offered
an excellent opportunity of seeing the interior of England
and Scotland, by means of a home, and a committee of
intelligent friends, awaiting me in every town.

I did not go very willingly. I am not a good travel-
ler, nor have I found that long journeys yield a fair
share of reasonable hours. But the invitation was re-
peated and pressed at a moment of more leisure, and
when I was a little spent by some unusual studies. I
wanted a change and a tonic, and England was proposed
to me. Besides, there were, at least, the dread attrac-
tion and salutary influences of the sea. So I took my
})erth in the packet-ship Washington Irving, and sailed
from Boston on Tuesday, 5th October, 1847.

On Friday, at noon, we had only made one hundred
and thirty-four miles. A nimble Indian would have
swum as far; but the captain affirmed that the ship
would show us in time all her paces, and we crept along
through the floating drift of boards, logs, and chips,
which the rivers of Maine and New Brunswick pour into
the sea after a freshet.

At last, on Sunday niglit, after doing one day's work i:i
four, the storm came, the winds blew, and wc flew bcrcro

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 25

a northwester, which strained every rope and sail. The
good ship darts through the water all day, all niglit, hke
a fish, quivering with speed, gliding through liquid
leagues, sliding from horizon to horizon. She has passed
Cape Sable ; she has reached the Banks ; the land-birds
are left; gulls, haglets, ducks, petrels, swim, dive, and
liover around ; no fishermen; she has passed the Banks ;
left five sail behind her, far on the edge of the west at
sundown, which were far east of us at morn, — though
they say at sea a stern chase is a long race, — and still
we fly for our lives. The shortest sea-line from Boston
to Liverpool is 2,850 miles. This a steamer keeps, and
saves 150 miles. A sailing ship can never go in a shorter
line than 3,000, and usually it is much longer. Our good
master keeps his kites up to the last moment, studding-
sails alow and aloft, and, by incessant straight steering,
never loses a rod of way. Watchfulness is the law of
the ship, — watch on watch, for advantage and for life.
Since the ship was built, it seems, the master never slept
but in his day-clothes whilst on board. " There are
many advantages," says Saadi, "in sea-voyaging, but
security is not one of them." Yet in hurrying over these
abysses, whatever dangers we are running into, we are
certahily running out of the risks of hundreds of miles
every day, which have their own chances of squall, col-
lision, sea-stroke, piracy, cold, and thunder. Hour for
hour, the risk on a steamboat is greater ; but the speed
is safety, or twelve days of danger, instead of twenty-
four.

Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed per-
haps, with all her freight^ 1,500 tons. The mainmast,
2

26 ENGLISH TRAITS.

from tlie deck to the top-button, measured 115 feet; the
length of the deck, from stem to stern, 155. It is im-
possible not to personify a ship ; everybody does in every-
thing they say : — she behaves well; she minds her rud-
der ; she swims like a duck ; she runs her nose into the
water; she looks into a port. Tlien that wonderful esprit
du corps, by which we adopt into our self-love every-
thing we touch, makes us all champions of her sailing-
qualities.

The conscious ship hears all the praise. In one week
she has made 1,467 miles, and now, at night, seems to
hear the steamer behind her, which left Boston to-day at
two, has mended her speed, and is flying before the gray
south-wind eleven and a half knots the hour. The sea-
fire shines in her wake, and far around wherever a wave
breaks. I read the hour, 9h. 45', on my watch by this
light. Near the equator, you can read small print by
it ; and the mate describes the phospiioric insects, when
taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina potato.

I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for toma-
toes and olives. The confinement, cold, motion, noise,
and odor are not to be dispensed with. The floor of
your room is sloped at an angle of twenty or thirty
degrees, and I waked every morning with the belief tliat
some one was tipping up my berth. Nobody likes to be
treated ignominiously, upset, shoved against the side of
the house, rolled over, suffocated with bilge, mephitis,
and stewing oil. We get used to these annoyances at
last, but the dread of the sea remains longer. The sea is
masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-
shells arc drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 27

with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney
conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-col-
ored circle an eternal cemetery ? In our graveyards we
scoop a pit, but this aggressive water opens mile-wide
pits and chasms, and makes a mouthful of a fleet. To
the geologist, the sea is the only firmament ; the land is
in perpetual flux and change, now blown up like a tumor,
now sunk in a chasm, and the registered observations of
a few hundred years find it in a perpetual tilt, rising and
falling. The sea keeps its old level ; and 't is no wonder
that the history of our race is so recent, if the roar of the
ocean is silencing our traditions. A rising of the sea,
such as has been observed, say an inch in a century, from
east to west on the land, will bury all the towns, monu-
ments, bones, and knowledge of mankind, steadily and
insensibly. If it is capable of these great and secular
mischiefs, it is quite as ready at private and local dam-
age ; and of this no landsman seems so fearful as the sea-
man. Such discomfort and such danger as the narratives
of the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as the
costly fee we pay for entrance to Europe ; but the won-
der is always new that any sane man can be a sailor.
And here, on the second day of our voyage, stepped out
a little boy in his shirt-sleeves, wlio had hid himself,
whilst the ship was in port, in the bread-closet, having
no money, and wishing to go to England. The sailors
have dressed him in Guernsey frock, with a knife in his
belt, and he is climbing nimbly about after them, " likes
the work first-rate, and, if the captain will take him, means
now to come back again in the ship." The mate avers
that this is the history of all sailors ; nine out of ten are

28 ENGLISH TRAITS.

runaway boys ; and adds, tliat all of them are sick of the
sea, but stay in it out of pride. Jack has a Hfe of risks,
incessant abuse, and the worst pay. It is a little better
with the mate, and not very much better with the cap-
tain. A hundred dollars a month is reckoned high pay.
If sailors were contented, if they had not resolved again
and again not to go to sea any more, I should respect
them.

Of course, the inconveniences and terrors of the sea
are not of any account to those whose minds are pre-
occupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the mountain,
the mine, only shatter cockneyism ; every noble activity
makes room for itself. A great mind is a good sailor,
as a great heart is. And the sea is not slow in disclosing
inestimable secrets to a good naturalist.

'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some
piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad
weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best
economist. Classics which at home are drowsily read
have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom
of a merchant brig. I remember tliat some of the hap-
piest and most valuable hours I have owed to books,
passed, many years ago, on shipboard. The worst im-
pediment 1 have found at sea is the want of light in the
cabin.

We found on board the usual cabin library ; Basil
Hall, Dumas, Dickens, Bulwer, Balzac, and Sand were
our sea-gods. Among the passengers, there was some
variety of talent and profession ; we exchanged our
experiences, and all learned something. The busiest
talk with leisure and convenience at sea, and sometimes

VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 29

a memorable fact turns up, wliich you have loug had a
vacant niche for, and seize with the joy of a collector.
But, under the best conditions, a voyage is one of the
S3verest tests to try a man. A college examination is
nothing to it. Sea-days are long, — these lack-lustre,
joyless days which whistled over us ; but they were few,
— only fifteen, as the captain counted, sixteen according
to me. Reckoned from the time when we left soundings,
our speed w^as such that the captain drew the line of his
course in red ink on his chart, for the encouragement
or envy of future navigators.

It has been said that the King of England would con-
sult his dignity by giving audience to foreign ambassa-
dors in the cabin of a man-of-war. And I think the
■white path of an Atlantic ship the right avenue to the
palace front of this sea-faring people, who for hundreds
of years claimed the strict sovereignty of the sea, and
exacted toll and the striking sail from the sliips of all
otiier peoples. When their privilege was disputed by
the Dutch and other junior marines, on the plea that you
could never anchor on the same wave, or hold property in
what was always flowing, the English did not stick to
claim the channel, or bottom of all the main. " As if,"
said they, " we contended for the drops of the sea, and
not for its situation, or the bed of those waters. The sea
is bounded by his Majesty's empire."

As we neared the land, its genius was felt. This was
inevitably the British side. In every man's thought
arises now a new system, English sentiments, English
loves and fears, English history and social modes. Yes-
terday, every passenger had measured the speed of the

30 ENGLISH THAITS.

sliip by watcliiiig the bubbles over the ship's bulwarks.
To-da3% instead of bubbles, we measure by Kinsale, Cork,
Waterford, and Ardmore, There lay the green shore ol'
Ireland, like some coast of plenty. We could see towns,
towers, churclies, harvests ; but the curse of eight hun-
dred years we could not discern.

CHAPTER III.

LAND.

Alfieri thought Italy and England the only countries
worth living in : the former, because there Nature vin-
dicates her rights, and triumphs over the evils inflicted
by the governments; the latter, because art conquers
nature, and transforms a rude, ungenial land into a para-
dise of comfort and plenty. England is a garden. Un-
der an ash-colored sky, the fields have been combed and
rolled till they appear to have been finished with a pencil
instead of a plough. The solidity of the structures that
compose the towns speaks the industry of ages. Nothing
is left as it was made. Rivers, hills, valleys, the sea
itself, feel the hand of a master. The long habitation of
a powerful and ingenious race has turned every rood of
land to its best use, has found all the capabilities, the
arable soil, the quarriable rock, the highways, the by-
ways, the fords, the navigable waters ; and the new arts
of intercourse meet you everywhere ; so that England is
a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is provided
within the precinct. Cushioned and comforted in every

LAND. 31

111 inner, tlie traveller rides as on a cannon-ball, high and
low, over rivers and towns, through mountains, in tun-
nels of three or four miles, at near twice the speed of our
trains ; and reads quietly the Times newspaper, which,
by its immense correspondence and reporting, seems to
Lave machinized the rest of the world for his occasion.

The problem of the travell°.r landing at Liverpool is,
Wiiy England is England. What are the elements of
tliiit power which the English hold over other nations ?
If there be one test of national genius universally
accepted, it is success ; and if there be one successful
country in the universe for the last millennium, that
country is England.

A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the best
of actual nations ; and an American has more reasons
than another to draM'- him to Britain. In all that is done
or begun by the Americans towards right thinking or
practice, we are met by a civilization already settled and
overpowering. The culture of the day, the thoughts and
aims of men, are English thoughts and aims. A nation
considerable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has, in
the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and stamped
the knowledge, activity, and power of mankind with its
impress. Those who resist it do not feel it or obey it
less. The Russian in his snows is aiming to be English.
The Turk and Chinese also are making awkward efforts
to be English. The practical common-sense of modern
society, the utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opin-
ion, religion, take, is the natural genius of the British
mind. The influence of France is a constituent of modern
civility, but not enough opposed to the English for the

32 ENGLISH TRAITS.

most wliolesome effect. The American is only the con-
tinuation of the English genius into new conditions, more
or less propitious.

See what books fill our libraries. Every book we read,
every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still
English history and manners. So that a sensible English-
man once said to me, " As long as you do not grant us
copyright, we shall have the teaching of you."

But we have the same difficulty in making a social or
moral estimate of England, as the sheriff finds in drawing
a jury to try some cause which has agitated the whole
community, and on which everybody finds himself an
interested party. Officers, jurors, judges, have all taken
sides. England has inoculated all nations with her civil-
ization, intelligence, and tas< es ; and, to resist the tyranny
and prepossession of the British element, a serious man
must aid himself, by comparing with it the civilizations
of the farthest east and west, the old Greek, tlie Oriental,
and, much more, the ideal standard, if only by means of
the very impatience which English forms are sure to
awaken in independent minds.

Besides, if we wall visit London, the present time is
the best time, as some signs portend that it has reached
its highest point. It is observed that the English interest
us a little less withhi a few years ; and hence the im-
pression that the British power has culminated, is in
solstice, or already declining.

As soon as you enter England, which, with Wales, is
no larger than the State of Georgia,* this little land

* Add South Carohna, and you have more than an equivalent
for the area of Scotland.

LAND. 33

stretches by an ilhision to tbe dimensions of an empire.
The innumerable details, the crowded succession of
towns, cities, cathedrals, castles, and great and decorated
estates, the number and power of the trades and guilds,
the military strength and splendor, the multitudes of lich
and of remarkable people, the servants and equipages, —
all these catching the eye, and never allowing it to pause,
hide all boundaries, by the impression of magnificence
and endless wealth.

I reply to all the urgencies that refer me to this and
that object indispensably to be seen, — Yes, to see Eng-
land well needs a hundred years ; for, what they told me
was the merit of Sir John Soane's Museum, in London,
— that it was well packed and well saved, — is the merit
of England; — it is stuffed full, in all corners and crevices,
with towns, towers, churches, villas, palaces, hospitals,
and charity-houses. In the history of art, it is a long
way from a cromlech to York minster ; yet all the hiter-
mediate steps may still be traced in this all-preserving
island.

The territory has a singular perfection. The climate
is warmer by many degrees than it is entitled to by lat-
itude. Neither hot nor cold, there is no hour in the
whole year when one cannot work. Here is no winter,
but such days as we have in Massachusetts in November,
a temperature which makes no exhausting damand on
human strength, but allows the attainment of the largest
stature. Charles the Second said, "It invited men
abroad more days in the year and more hours in the day
than another country." Then England has all the mate-
rials of a working country except wood. The constant
2* c

34 ENGLISH TRAITS.

rain — a rain with every tide, in some parts of tlie island
— keeps its multitude of rivers fidl, and brings agricul-
tuial production up to the higliest point. It has plenty
of water, of stone, of potter's clay, of coal, of salt, and of
iron. Tlie land naturally abounds with game, innnense
heaths and downs are paved with quails, grouse, and
woodcock, and the shores are animated by water-birds.
The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with fish;
there are salmon for the rich, aud sprats and herrings for
tlie poor. In the northern lochs, the herring are in
innumerable shoals ; at one season, the country people
say, the lakes contain one part water and two parts fish.

The only drawback on this industrial conveniency is
the darkness of its sky. The night and day are too nearly
of a color. It strains the eyes to read and to write. Add
the coal-smoke. In the manufacturing towns, the hue
soot or blacks darken the day, give white sheep the color
of black sheep, discolor the human saliva, contaminate
the air, poison many plants, and corrode the monuments
and buiklings.

The London fog aggravates the distempers of the sky,
and sometimes justifies the epigram on the climate by an
English wit, " in a fine day, looking up a chimney ; in a
foul day, looking down one." A gentleman in Liverpool
told me that he found he could do without a fire in his
parlor about one day in the year. It is however pre-
tended, that the enormous consumption of coal in the
island is also felt in modifying the general climate.

Factitious climate, factitious position. England re-
sembles a ship in its shape, and, if it were one, its best
admiral could not have Morked it, or anchored it in a

LxVND. 35

more judicious or effective position. Sir John Herseliel
said, " London was the centre of the terrene globe."
The shopkeeping nation, to use a shop word, has a good
stand. The old Venetians pleased themselves with tlie
flattery, that Venice was in 45°, midway between tlie
poles and the line ; as if that were an imperial centrality.
Long of old, the Greeks fancied Delphi the navel of the
earth, in their favorite mode of fabling the eartli to be an
animal. The Jews believed Jerusalem to be the centre.
I have seen a kratometric chart designed to show that
the city of Philadelphia was in the same thermic belt,
and, by inference, in the same belt of empire, as the
cities of Athens, Rome, and London. It was drawn by a
patriotic Philadelphian, and was examined with pleasure,
nuder his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut Street.
But, when carried to Charleston, to New Orleans, and to
Boston, it somehow failed to convince the ingenious
scholars of all those capitals.

But England is ancliored at the side of Europe, and
riglit in the heart of the modern world. Tlie sea, wliich,
according to Virgil's famous line, divided the poor
Britons utterly from the world, proved to be the ring of
marriage with all nations. It is not down in the books,
— it is written oil4y in the geologic strata, — that fortu-
nate day when a wave of the German Ocean burst the old
isthmus which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and
gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable sea-wall,
cutting off an island of eiglit hundred miles in length,
with an irregular breadth reaching to three hundred
miles ; a territory large enougli for independence en-
riched with every seed of national power, so near, that it

36 ENGLISH TRAITS.

can see tlie harvests of the continent ; and so far, that
who woukl cross the strait must he an expert mariner,
ready for tempests. As America, Europe, and Asia Jie,
these Britons have precisely the best commercial position
in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for all the
goods they can manufacture. And to make these advan-
tages avail, the river Thames must dig its spacious outlet
to the sea from the heart of the kingdom, giving road and
landing to innumerable ships, and all the conveniency to
trade, that a people so skilful and sufficient in economiz-
ing water-front by docks, warehouses, and lighters re-
quired. When James the First declared his purpose of
punishing London by removing his Court, the Lord
Mayor replied, " that, in removing his royal presence from
his lieges, they hoped he would leave them the Thames."
In the variety of surface, Britain is a miniature of
Europe, having plain, forest, marsh, river, sea-shore;
mines in Cornwall; caves in Matlock and Derbyshire;
delicious landscape in Dovedale, delicious sea-view at Tor
Bay, Highlands in Scotland, Snowdon in Wales ; and,
in Westmoreland and Cumberland, a pocket Switzerland,
in which the lakes and mountains are on a sufficient scale
to fill the eye and touch the imagination. It is a nation
conveniently small. Eontenelle thought, that nature had
sometimes a little affectation ; and there is such an arti-
ficial completeness in this nation of artificers, as if there
were a design from the beginning to elaborate a bigger
Birmingham. Nature held counsel with herself, and said,
' My Romans are gone. To build my new empire, I will
choose a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength.
I will not grudge a competition of the roughest males.

RACE. 37

Let buffalo j^^orc bufTalo, and the pasture to the strong-
est ! Tor I liave work that requires the best will and
sinew. Sharp and temperate northern breezes shall blow,
to keep that will alive and alert. The sea shall disjoin
the people from others, and knit them to a fierce nation-
ality. It shall give them markets on every side. Long
time I will keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-
wars, sea-faring, sea-risks, and the stimulus of gain. An
island, — but not so large, the people not so many as to
glut the great markets and depress one another, but pro-
portioned to the size of Europe and the continents.'

With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its civil
influence radiate. It is a singular coincidence to this
geographic centrality, the spiritual centrality, which
Emanuel Swedenborg ascribes to the people. "For the
English nation, the best of them are in the centre of all
Christians, because they have interior intellectual light.
This appears conspicuously in the spiritual world. This
light they derive from the liberty of speaking and writing,
and thereby of thinking."

CHAPTEE IV.

RACE.

An ingenious anatomist has written a book* to prove
that races are imperishable, but nations are pliant politi-
cal constnictions, easily changed or destroyed. But this
writer did not found his assumed races on any necessary

* The Races, a Fragment. By Robert Kqox. London : 1850.

38 ENGLISH TRAITS.

law, disclosing tlieir ideal or metaphysical necessity ; nor
did he, on tlie other hand, count with precision the exist-
ing races, and settle the true bounds ; a point of nicety,
and the popular test of the theory. The individuals at
the extremes of divergence in one race of men are as un-
like as the wolf to the lapdog. Yet each variety shades
down imperceptibly into the next, and you cannot draw
the line where a race begins or ends. Hence every writer
makes a different count. Blumenbach reckons five races ;
Humboldt, three ; and Mr. Pickering, who lately, in our
Exploring Expedition, thinks he saw all the kinds of men
that can be on the planet, makes eleven.

The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in 184S)
222,000,000 souls, — perhaps a fifth of the population
of the globe ; and to comprise a territory of 5,000,000
square miles. So far have British people predominated.
Perhaps forty of these millions are of British stock. Add
the United States of America, which reckon (in the same
year), exclusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a
territory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the
foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly assimi-
lated, and you have a population of English descent and
language, of 60,000,000, and governing a population of
245,000,000 souls.

The British census proper reckons twenty-seven and a
half millions in the liome countries. What makes this
census important is the quality of the units that compose
it. They are free forcible men, in a country where life is
safe, and has reached the greatest value. They give the
bias to the current age ; and that, not by chance or by
mass, but by their character, and by the number of indi-

RACE. 39

vidiials among them of personal ability. It lias been de-
nied that the English have genius. Be it as it may, men
of vast intellect have been born on their soil, and they
have made or applied the principal inventions. They
have sound bodies, and supreme endurance in war and in
labor. The spawning force of the race has sufficed to
the colonization of great parts of the world ; yet it re-
mains to be seen whether they can make good the exodus
of millions from Great Britain, amounting, in 1852, to
more than a tliousand a day. They have assimilating
force, since they are imitated by their foreign subjects ;
and they are still aggressive and propagandist, enlarging
the dominion of their arts and liberty. Their laws are
hospitable, and slavery does not exist under them. What
oppression exists is incidental and temporary ; their suc-
cess is not sudden or fortunate, but they have maintained
constancy and self-equality for many ages.

Is this power due to their race, or to some other cause ?
Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every-
body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attrib-
uted to air, soil, sea, or to local wealth, as mines and quar-
ries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to su-
perior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.

We anticipate in the doctrine of race something like
that law of physiology, that, whatever bone, muscle, or
essential organ is found in one healthy individual, the
same part or organ may be found in or near the same
place in its congener; and we look to find in the son
every mental and moral property that existed in the
ancestor. In race, it is not the broad shoulders, or lithe-
ness, or stature that give advantage, but a symmetry that

40 ENGLISH TRAITS.

roaches as far as to llic wit. Then tlio miracle and re-
nown begin. Then first we care to examine the pedigree,
and copy heedfully the training, — wiiat food they ate,
what nursing, school, and exercises they had, which re-
sulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of thought, and robust
wisdom. How came such men as King Alfred, and
Roger Bacon, William of Wykeham, Walter Raleigh,
Philip Sidney, Isaac Newton, WilHam Sliakspeare, George
Chapman, Francis Bacon, George Herbert, Henry Vane,
to exist here? What made these delicate natures? was
it the air? was it the sea? was it the parentage ? For
it is certain that these men are samples of their contem-
poraries. The hearing ear is always found close to the
speaking tongue ; and no genius can loug or often utter
anything which is not invited and gladly entertained by
men around him.

It is race, is it not? that puts the hundred millions of
India under the dominion of a remote island in the north
of Europe, Race avails much, if that be true, which is
alleged, that all Celts are Catholics, and all Saxons arc
Protestants ; that Celts love unity of power, and Saxons
the representative principle. Race is a controlling in-
fluence in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under
every climate, has preserved the same character and
employments. Race in the negro is of appalling impor-
tance. The French in Canada, cut off from all inter-
course with the parent people, have held their national
traits. I chanced to read Tacitus "on the Manners of
the Germans," not long since, in Missouri, and the
heart of Illinois, and I found abundant points of resem-
blance between the Germans of the Hercynian forest.

RACE. 41

and our Iloosiers, Suckers, and Bachjers of the American
woods.

But whilst race works immortally to keep iis own, it
is resisted by other forces. Civilization is a re-agent,
and eats away the old traits. The Arabs of to-day are
the Arabs of Pharaoh ; but the Briton of to-day is a very
different person from Cassibelaunus or Ossian. Each
religious sect has its physiognomy. The Methodists
have acquired a face ; the Quakers, a face ; the nuns, a
face. An Englishman will pick out a dissenter by his
manners. Trades and professions carve their own lines
on face and form. Certain circumstances of English
life are not less effective : as, personal liberty ; plenty of
food ; good ale and mutton ; open market, or good wages
for every kind of labor ; high bribes to talent and skill ;
tlie island life, or the million opportunities and outlets
for expanding and misplaced talent ; readiness of com-
bination among themselves for politics or for business ;
strikes ; and sense of superiority founded on habit of
victory in labor and in war ; and the appetite for su-
periority grows by feeding.

It is easy to add to the counteracting forces to race.
Credence is a main element. 'T is said, that the views of
nature held by any people determine all their institutions.
Whatever influences add to mental or moral faculty, take
men out of nationality, as out of other conditions, and
make the national life a culpable compromise.

Tliese limitations of the formidable doctrine of race
suggest others which threaten to undermine it, as not
sufficiently based. The fixity or inconvertibleness of
races as we see them, is a weak argument for the eter-

42 ENGLISH TRAITS.

nity of iliese frail boundaries, since all our lilstorical
l)eriod is a point to the duration in which nature has
wrought. Any the least and solitariest fact in our natu-
ral history, such as the melioration of fruits and of ani-
mal stocks, has the worth of a power in the opportunity
of geologic periods. Moreover, though we flatter the
self-love of men and nations by the legend of pure races,
all our experience is of the gradation and resolution of
races, and strange resemblances meet us everywhere. It
need not puzzle us that Malay and Papuan, Celt and
lionian, Saxon and Tartar, should mix, when we see the
rudiments of tiger and baboon in our human form, and
know that the barriers of races are not so firm, but that
some spray sprinkles us from the antediluvian seas.

The low organizations are simplest; a mere mouth,
a jelly, or a straight worm. As the scale mounts, the
organizations become complex. We are piqued with
pure descent, but nature loves inoculation. A child
blends in his face the faces of both parents, and some
feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the
wall. The best nations are those. most widely related;
and navigation, as effecting a world-wide mixture, is the
most potent advancer of nations.

The English composite character betrays a mixed ori-
gin. Everything English is a fusion of distant and an-
tagonistic elements. The language is mixed ; the names
of men are of different nations, — three languages, three
or four nations ; — the currents of thought are counter:
contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and
dead conservatism ; world-wide enterprise, and devoted
use and wont ; aggressive freedom and hospitable law.

UACE. 43

with bitter class legislation ; a people scattered by their
wars and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and
homesick to a man ; a country of extremes, — dukes and
chartists. Bishops of Durham and naked heathen colliers ;
— nothing can be praised in it without damning excep-
tions, and nothing denounced without salvos of cordial
praise.

Neither do this people appear to be of one stem ; but
collectively a better race than any from which they are
derived. Nor is it easy to trace it home to its original
seats. Who can call by right names what races are in
Britain ? Who can trace them historically ? Who can
discriminate them anatomically, or metaphysically?

In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction on the
historical question of race, and — come of whatever dis-
putable ancestry — the indisputable Englishman before
me, himself very well marked, and nowhere else to be
found, — I fancied I could leave quite aside the choice of
a tribe as his lineal progenitors. Defoe said in his wrath,
" the Englishman was the mud of all races." I incline
to the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make mortar,
so certain temperaments marry well, and, by well-man-
aged contrarieties, develop as drastic a character as the
English. On the whole, it is not so much a history of
one or of certain tribes of Saxons, Jutes, or Frisians,
coming from one place, and genetically identical, as it is
an anthology of temperaments out of them all. Certain
temperaments suit the sky and soil of England, say eight
or ten or twenty varieties, as, out of a hundred pear-
trees, eight or ten suit the soil of an orchard, and thrive,
whilst all the unadapted temperaments die out.

41 ENGLISH TRAITS.

The English derive ilicir pedigree from siicli a range
of natioiialilies, tliat there needs sea-rooui and hmd-ruoiii
to unfold the varieties of talent and character. Perliaps
the ocean serves as a galvanic battery to distribute acids
at one pole, and alkalies at the other. So England
tends to accumulate her Liberals in America, and her
conservatives at London. The Scandinavians in her race
still hear in every age the murmurs of their mother, tlie
ocean; the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead stilh

Again, as if to intcnsate the influences tliat are not of
race, what we think of when we talk of English trails
really narrows itself to a small district. It excludes
Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales, and reduces itself
at last to London, that is, to those who come and
go thither. The portraits that hang on the walls in the
Academy Exhibition at London, the figures in Punch's
drawings of the public men, or of the club-houses, tiie
prints in the shop-windows, are distinctive English, and
not American, no, nor Scotch, nor Irish : but 't is a very
restricted nationality. As you go north into the manu-
facturing and agricultural districts, and to the population
that never travels, as you go into Yorkshire, as you enter
Scotland, the world's Englishman is no longer found.
In Scotland, there is a rapid loss of all grandeur of mien
and manners ; a provincial eagerness and acuteness ap-
pear ; the poverty of the country makes itself remarked,
and a coarseness of manners ; and, among the intellec-
tual, is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland, are the
same climate and soil -as in England, but less food, no
right relation to the land, political dependence, small
tenantry, and an inferior or misplaced race.

BACE. 4-5

These queries concerning ancestry and blood may l)e
well allowed, for there Is no prosperity that seems more
to depend on the kind of man than British prosperity.
Only a hardy and wise people could have made this small
territory great. We say, in a regatta or yacht-race, that
if the boats are anywhere nearly matched, it Is the man
that wins. Put the best sailing-master into either boat,
and lie will win.

Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of unbroken
traditions, though vague, and losing themselves in fable.
The traditions have got footing, and refuse to be dis-
turbed. The kitchen clock is more convenient than
sidereal time. We must use the popular category, as we
do by the LInnffian classification, for convenience, and not
as exact and final. Otherwise, we are presently con-
founded, when the best-settled traits of one race are
claimed by some new ethnologist as precisely character-
istic of the rival tribe.

I found plenty of well-marked English types, the
ruddy complexion fair and plump, robust men, with faces
cut like a die, and a strong island speech and accent;
a Norman type, Avith the complacency that belongs to
that constitution. Others, who might be Americans, for
anything that appeared in their complexion or form : and
their speech was much less marked, and their thought
much less bound. We will call them Saxons. Then
the Roman has implanted his dark complexion in the
trinity or quaternlty of bloods.

1. The sources from which tradition derives their
stock are mainly three. And, first, they are of the

46 ENGLISH TRAITS.

oldest blood of the world, — tlie Celtic. Some peoples
are deciduous or trausitory. Where are the Greeks?
where the Etrurians ? where the Romaus ? But the
Celts or Sidonides are an old family, of whose beginning
there is no memory, and their end is likely to be still
more remote in the future ; for they have endurance and
productiveness. They planted Britain, and gave to the
seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate
the pure voices of nature. Tliey are favorably remem-
bered in the oldest records of Europe. They had no
violent feudal tenure, but the husbandman owned the
land. They had an alphabet, astronomy, priestly culture,
and a sublime creed. They have a hidden and precarious
genius. They made the best popular literature of the
Middle Ages in the songs of Merlin, and the tender and
delicious mythology of Arthur.

2. The English come mainly from the Germans, whom
the Romans found hard to conquer in two hundred and
ten years, — say, impossible to conquer, — when one
remembers the long sequel ; a people about whom, in the
old empire, the rumor ran, there was never any that med-
dled with them that repented it not.

3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of Nar-
bonnese Gaul, looked out of a window, and saw a fleet
of Northmen cruising in the Mediterranean. They even
entered the port of the town where he was, causing no
small alarm and sudden manning and arming of his gal-
leys. As they put out to sea again, the emperor gazed
long after them, his eyes bathed in tears. " I am tor-
mented with sorrow," he said, " when I foresee the evils
they will bring on my posterity." There was reason

RACE. 47

for thcso Xerxes' tears. Tlie men wlio have built a ship
and invented the rig, — cordage, sail, compass, and
pump, — the working in and out of port, have acquired
much more than a ship. Now arm them, and every
shore is at their mercy. For, if they have not numerical
superiority where tliey anchor, they have only to sail a
mile or two to find it. Bonaparte's art of war, namely,
of concentrating force on the point of attack, must always
be theirs who have the choice of the battle-ground. Of
course they come into the fight from a higher ground of
power than the land-nations ; and can engage them on
sliore with a victorious advantage in the retreat. As
soon as the shores are sufficiently peopled to make
piracy a losing business, the same skill and courage are
ready for the service of trade.

The Heimskrin(/la* or Sagas of the Kings of Norway,
collected by Snorro Sturleson, is the Iliad and Odyssey
of English history. Its portraits, like Homer's, are
strongly individualized. The Sagas describe a monarchi-
cal republic like Sparta. Tiie government disappears
before the importance of citizens. In Norway, no Per-
sian masses fight and perish to aggrandize a king, but
the actors are bonders or landholders, every one of
whom is named and personally and patronymically de-
scribed, as the king's friend and companion. A sparse
population gives this high worth to every man. Individ-
uals are often noticed as very handsome persons, which
trait only brings the story nearer to the English race.
Then the solid material interest predominates, so dear to

* Heimskringla. Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. Lon-
don : 1S44.

48 ENGLISH TRAITS.

English iiiitlcrsianding, wlicrciii tlic association is logical,
between merit and land. The heroes of the Sagas are
not the knights of South Europe. No vaporing of
France and Spain has corrupted them. Tliey are sub-
stantial farmers, whom the rough times have forced to
defend their properties. They have weapons which they
use in a determined manner, by no means for chivalry,
but for their acres. They are people considerably
advanced in rural arts, living amj)hibiously on a rough
coast, and drawing half their food from the sea, and iialf
from the land. They have herds of cows, and malt,
wheat, bacon, butter, and clieese. Tiiey fish in the fiord,
and hunt the deer. A king among these farmers has a
varying power, sometimes not exceeding the authority of
a slieriif. A king was maintained much as, in some of
our country districts, a winter-schoolmaster is quartered,
a week here, a week there, and a fortnight on the next
farm, — on all the farms in rotation. Tliis the king calls
going into guest-quarters; and it was the only way in
which, in a poor country, a poor king, with many retain-
ers, could be kept alive, when he leaves his own farm to
collect his dues through the kingdom.

These Norsemen are excellent persons in the main,
with good sense, steadiness, Avise speech, and prompt
action. But they have a singular turn for homicide ;
their chief end of man is to murder or to be murdered ;
oars, scythes, harpoons, crow-bars, peat-knives, and hay-
forks are tools valued by them all the more for their
charming aptitude for assassinations. A pair of kings,
after dinner, will divert themselves by thrusting each his
sword through the other's body, as did Yngve and Alf.

11 ACE. 49

Another pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and,
finding no Aveapon near, will take the bits out of tlieir
horses' mouths, and crush each other's heads with tliem,
as did Alric and Eric. Tlie sight of a tent-cord or a
cloak-string puts them on hanging somebody, a wife, or
a husband, or, best of all, a king. If a farmer has so
much as a hayfork, he sticks it into a King Dag. King
Ingiald finds it vastly amusing to burn up half a dozen
kings in a hall, after getting them drunk. Never was
poor gentleman so surfeited with life, so furious to be rid
of it, as the Northman. If he cannot pick any other
quarrel, he will get himself comfortably gored by a bull's
horns, like Egil, or slain by a land-slide, like the agricul-
tural King Onund. Odin died in his bed, in Sweden ;
but it was a proverb of ill condition, to die the death of
old age. King Hake of Sweden cuts and slashes iii bat-
tle, as long as he can stand, then orders his war-ship,
loaded with his dead men and their weapons, to be taken
out to sea, the tiller shipped, and the sails spread ; being
left alone, he sets fire to some tar-wood, and lies down
contented on deck. The wind blew off the land, the ship
flew burning in clear flame, out between the islets into the
ocean, and there was the right end of King Hake.

The early Sagas are sanguinary and piratical; the later
are of a noble strain. HFstory rarely yields us better
passages than the conversation between King Sigurd the
Crusader, and King Eystein, his brother, on their respec-
tive merits, — one, the soldier, and the other, a lover of
the arts of peace.

But the reader of the Norman history must steel him-
self by holding fast the remote compensations which

3 D

50 ENGLISH TRAITS.

result from animal vigor. As the old fossil world sliows
that the first steps of reducing the chaos were confided
to saurians and other huge and horrible animals, so the
foundations of the new civility were to be laid by the
most savage men.

The Normans came out of France into England worse
men than they went into it, one hundred and sixty years
before. They had lost their own language, and learned
the Romance or barbarous Latin of the Gauls ; and had
acquired, with the language, all the vices it had names
for. The conquest has obtained, in the chronicles, the
name of the " memory of sorrow." Twenty thousand
thieves landed at Hastings. These founders of the
House of Lords were greedy and ferocious dragoons,
sons of greedy and ferocious pirates. Tiiey were all
alike, they took everything they could carry, they burned,
harried, violated, tortured, and killed, until everything
English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such, how-
ever, is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that decent
and dignified men now existing boast their descent from
these filthy thieves, who showed a far juster conviction
of their own merits, by assuming for their types the
swine, goat, jackal, leopard, wolf, and snake, which they
severally resembled.

England yielded to the Danes and Northmen in the
tenth and eleventh centuries, and was the receptacle into
which all the mettle of that strenuous population was
poured. The continued draught of the best men in Nor-
way, Sweden, and Denmark, to these piratical expedi-
tions, exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears
much fruit when young, and these have been second-rate

RACE. 51

powers ever since. The power of tlie race migrated, and
left Norway void. King Olaf said : " When King Har-
old, my father, went westward to England, tlie chosen
men in Norway followed him ; but Norway was so
emptied then, that such men liave not since been to find
in the country, nor especially such a leader as King Har-
old was for wisdom and bravery."

It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when, in 1801,
the British government sent Nelson to bombard the Dan-
ish forts in the Sound ; and, in 1807, Lord Cathcart, at
Copenhagen, took the entire Danish fleet, as it lay in the
basins, and all the equipments from the Arsenal, and
carried them to England. Konghelle, the town where
the kings of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were wont
to meet, is now rented to a private English gentleman
for a hunting-ground.

It took many generations to trim, and comb, and per-
fume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into royal high-
nesses and most noble Knights of the Garter : but every
sparkle of ornament dates back to the Norse boat.
There will be time enough to mellow this strength into
civility and religion. It is a medical fact, that the chil-
dren of the blind see; the children of felons have a
healthy conscience. Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at
the age of puberty, transformed into a serious and gen-
erous youth.

The mildness of the following ages has not quite
effaced these traits of Odin ; as the rudiment of a struc-
ture matured in the tiger is said to be still found unab-
sorbed in the Caucasian man. Tlie nation has a tough,
acrid, animal nature, which centuries of churching and

52 ENGLISH TRAITS.

civilizing liavc not been able to sweeten. Alfieri said,
"the crimes of Italy were the proof of the superiority of
the stock " ; and one may say of England, that this
watch moves on a splinter of adamant. The English
uncultured are a brutal nation. Tlie crimes recorded in
their calendars leave nothing to be desired in the way of
cold malignity. Dear to the English heart is a fair
stand-up fight. The brutality of the manners in the
lower class appears in the boxing, bear-baiting, cock-
fighting, love of executions, and in the readiness for a
set-to in the streets, delightful to the English of all
classes. The costermongers of London streets hold cow-
ardice in loathing : — " we must work our fists well ; wo
are all handy with our fists." The public schools are
charged with being bear-gardens of brutal strength, and
are liked by the people for that cause. The fagging is a
trait of the same quality. Medwin, in the Life of Shelley,
relates, that, at a military school, they rolled up a young
man in a snowball, and left him so in his room, while the
other cadets w^ent to church ; — and crippled him for life.
They have retained impressment, deck-flogging, army-
flogging, and school-flogging. Such is the ferocity of
the army discipline, that a soldier sentenced to flogging,
sometimes prays that his sentence may be commuted to
death. Flogging, banished from the armies of Western
Europe, remains here by the sanction of the Duke of
Wellington. The right of the husband to sell the wife
has been retained down to our times. The Jews have
been the favorite victims of royal and popular persecu-
tion. Henry III. mortgaged all the Jews in the king-
dom to his brother, the Earl of Coruwall, as security for

RACE. 53

money wliich lie borrowed. The torture of criminals,
and the rack for extortiag evidence, were slowly disused.
Of the criminal statutes. Sir Samuel Uomilly said, " I
have examined the codes of all nations, and ours is the
worst, and worthy of the Anthropophagi." In the last
session (18J;8), the House of Commons was listening to
details of flogging and torture practised in the jails.

As soon as this land, thus geographically posted, got a
hardy people into it, they could not help becoming the
sailors and factors of the globe. From childliood, they
dabbled in water, they swum like fishes, their playthings
were boats. In the case of the ship-money, the judges
•delivered it for law, that " England being an island, the
very midland shires therein are all to be accounted mar-
itime " : and Fuller adds, "the genius even of land-locked
countries driving the natives with a maritime dexterity."
As early as the conquest, it is remarked in explanation
-of the wealth of England, that its merchants trade to all
countries.

The Englisli, at the present day, have great vigor of
body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and
undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger
men than the Americans. I suppose a hundred English
taken at random out of the street would weigh a fourth
more than so many Americans. Yet, I am told, the
skeleton is not larger. They are round, ruddy, and
handsome ; at least, the whole bust is well formed ; and
there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames. I
remarked the stoutness, on my first landing at Liverpool ;
porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — M'hat substantial,
respectable, grandfatherly figures, with costume and

54 ENGLISH TRAITS.

manners to suit. The American has arrived at the old
mansion-house, and finds himself among uncles, aunts,
and grandsires. The pictures on the chimney-tiles of his
nursery were pictures of these people. Here they are in
the identical costumes and air, which so took him.

It is the fault of their forms that they grow stocky,
and the women have that disadvantage, — few tall,
slender figures of flowing shape, but stunted and thickset
persons. The French say, that the Englishwomen have
two left hands. But, in all ages, they are a handsome
race. The bronze monuments of crusaders lying cross-
legged, in the Temple Church at London, and those in
Worcester and in Salisbury Cathedrals, which are seven
hundred years old, are of the same type as the best
youthful heads of men now in England ; — please by
beauty of the same character, an expression blending
good-nature, valor, and refinement, and, mainly, by that
uncorrupt youth in the face of manhood, which is daily
seen in the streets of London.

Both branches of the Scandinavian race are distin-
guished for beauty. The anecdote of the handsome cap-
tives which Saint Gregory found at Rome, a. d. GOO, is
matched by the testimony of the Norman chroniclers, five
centuries later, who wondered at the beauty and long
flowing hair of the young English captives. Meantime,
the Heimskringla has frequent occasion to speak of the
personal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered
what humanity, what resources of mental and moral
power, the traits of the blond race betoken, — its acces-
sion to empire marks a new and finer epoch, wherein the
old mineral force shall be subjugated at last by humanity.

RACE. 55

and sliall plough in its furrow henceforward. It is not
a final race, once a crab always crab, but a race with a
future.

On the English face are combined decision and nerve,
with the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid
aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility,
the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair
Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning',
domestic, affectionate, is not the wood out of which
cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made. But he is
moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the
nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and
colonies.

They are rather manly than warlike. When the war
is over, the mask falls from the affectionate and domestic
tastes, which make them women in kindness. This
union of qualities is fabled in their national legend of
Beautjj and the Beast, or long before, in the Greek legend
of Hermaphrodite. The two sexes are co-present in the
English mind. I apply to Britannia, queen of seas and
colonies, the words in which her latest novelist portrays
his heroine : " She is as mild as she is game, and as game
as she is mild." The English delight in the antagonism
which combines in one person the extremes of courage
and tenderness. Nelson, dying at Trafalgar, sends his
love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent school-
boy that goes to bed, says, " Kiss me. Hardy," and
turns to sleep. Lord Collingwood, his comrade, was of
a nature the most affectionate and domestic. Admiral
llodncy's figure approached to delicacy and effeminacy,
and he declared himself very sensible to fear, which he

56 ENGLISH TRAITS.

surmounted only by considerations of lionor and public
duty. Clarendon says, the Duke of Buckingham was so
modest and gentle, that some courtiers attempted to
put affronts on him, until they found that tliis modesty
and effeminacy was only a mask for the most terrible
determination. And Sir Edward Parry said of Sir John
Franklin, that, " if he found Wellington Sound open,
he explored it ; for he was a man who never turned
liis back on a danger, yet of that tenderness, that he
would not brush away a mosquito." Even for their
highwaymen the same virtue is claimed, and Robin Hood
comes described to us as iultlsslmus pnedonum, the gen-
tlest thief. But they know where their war-dogs lie.
Cromwell, Blake, Marlborough, Chatham, Nelson, and
Wellington are not to be trifled with, and the brutal
strength which lies at the bottom of society, the animal
ferocity of the quays and cock-pits, the bullies of the cos-
termongers of Shoreditch, Seven Dials, and Spitalfields,
they know how to wake up.

They have a vigorous health, and last well into middle
and old age. The old men are as red as roses, and still
handsome. A clear skin, a peach -bloom complexion,
and good teeth are found all over the island. Tiiey use
a plentiful and nutritious diet. The operative cannot
subsist on water-cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread, and
malt-liquors are universal among the first-class laborers.
Good feeding is a chief point of national pride among
the vulgar, and, in their caricatures, they represent the
Eronchman as a poor, starved body. It is curious that
Tacitus found the English beer already in use among tlie
Germans : " They make from barley or wheat a drink

UACE. 57

corrupted into some resemblance to wine," Lord Chief
Justice Fortescue in Henry VI.'s time, says, " The in-
habitants of England drink no water, unless at certain
times, on a religious score, and by way of penance."
The extremes of poverty and ascetic penance, it would
seem, never reaclj cold water in England. Wood, the
antiquary, iu describing the poverty and maceration of
Father Lacey, an English Jesuit, does not deny him
beer. He says, " his bed was under a thatching, and the
way to it up a ladder ; his fare was coarse ; his drink, of
a penny a gawn, or gallon."

They have more constitutional energy than any other
people. They think, with Henri Quatre, that manly
exercises are the foundation of that elevation of mind
which gives one nature ascendant over another ; or, with
the Arabs, that the days spent in the chase are not
counted in the length of life. They box, run, shoot,
ride, row, and sail from pole to pole. They eat and
drink, and live jolly in the open air, putting a bar of
solid sleep between day and day. They walk and ride
as fast as they can, their heads bent forward, as if urged
on some pressing affair. The French say, that English-
men in the street always walk straight before them like
mad dogs. Men and women walk with infatuation. As
soon as he can handle a gun, hunting is the fine art of
every Englishman of condition. They are the most vo-
racious people of prey that ever existed. Every season
turns out the aristocracy into the country, to shoot and
fish. The more vigorous run out of the island to Eu-
rope, to America, to Asia, to Africa, and Australia, to
hunt with fury by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso,
3*

58 ENGLISH TRAITS.

with clog, witli liorse, with elephant, or with dromedary,
all the game that is in nature. These men have written
the game-books of all countries, as Hawker, Scrope,
Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Cunniiing, and a host of
travellers. The people at home are addicted to boxing,
running, leaping, and rowing matches.

I suppose, the dogs and horses must be thanked for the
fact, that the men have muscles almost as tough and
supple as their own. If in every efficient man, there is
first a fine animal, in the English race it is of the best
breed, a wealthy, juicy, broad-chested creature, steeped
in ale and good cheer, and a little overloaded by his
flesh. Men of animal nature rely, like animals, on their
instincts. The Englishman associates well with dogs and
horses. His attachment to the horse arises from the
courage and address required to manage it. The horse
finds out who is afraid of it, and does not disguise its
opinion. Their young boiling clerks and lusty collegians
like the company of horses better than the company of
professors. I suppose, the horses are better company
for them. The horse has more uses than Buffoii noted.
If you go into the streets, every driver in bus or dray
is a bully, and, if I wanted a good trooop of soldiers, I
should recruit among the stables. Add a certain degree
of refinement to the vivacity of these riders, and you
obtain the precise quality which makes the men and
women of polite society formidable.

They come honestly by their horsemanship, with Hengst
and Horsa for their Saxon founders. The other branch
of their race had been Tartar nomads. The horse was all
their wealth. The children were fed on mares' milk.

UACE. 59

Tlie pastures of Tartary were still remembered by the
tenacious practice of the Norsemen to eat horse-flesh at
religious feasts. In the Danish invasions, tlie marauders
seized upon horses where they landed, and were at once
converted into a body of expert cavalry.

At one time, this skill seems to have declined. Two
centuries ago, the English horse never performed any
eminent service beyond the seas ; and the reason as-
signed was, that the genius of the English hath always
more inclined them to foot-service, as pure and proper
manhood, without any mixture; whilst, in a victory
on horseback, the credit ought to be divided betwixt
the man and his horse. But in two hundred years, a
change has taken place. Now, they boast that they un-
derstand horses better than any other people in the world,
and that their horses are become their second selves.

"William the Conqueror being," says Camden, "better
affected to beasts than to men, imposed heavy fines and
punishments on those that should meddle with his game."
The Saxon Chronicle says, " he loved the tall deer as if
he were their father." And rich Englishmen have fol-
lowed his example, according to their ability, ever since,
in encroaching on the tillage and commons with their
game-preserves. It is a proverb in England, that it is
safer to shoot a man than a hare. The severity of the
game-laws certainly indicates an extravagant sympathy of
the nation with horses and hunters. The gentlemen are
always on horseback, and have brought horses to an ideal
perfection, — the English racer is a factitious breed. A
score or two of mounted gentlemen may frequently be
seen running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep

60 ENGLISH TRAITS.

as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined with
pictures of races ; telegraphs communicate, every hour,
tidings of the heats from Newmarket and Ascot : and the
House of Commons adjourns over the * Derby Day/

CHAPTER V.

ABILITY.

TuE Saxon and the Northman are both Scandinavians.
History does not allow us to fix the limits of the applica-
tion of these names with any accuracy ; but from the
residence of a portion of these people in France, and from
some effect of that powerful soil on their blood and man-
ners, the Norman has come popularly to represent in
England the aristocratic, and the Saxon the democratic
principle. And though, I doubt not, the nobles are of
both tribes, and the workers of both, yet we are forced
to use the names a little mythically, one to represent the
worker, and the other the enjoyer.

The island was a prize for the best race. Each of the
dominant races tried its fortune in turn. The Phoenician,
the Celt, and the Goth had already got in. The Roman
came, but in the very day when his fortune culminated.
He looked in the eyes of a new people that was to sup-
plant his own. He disembarked his legions, erected his
camps and towers, — presently he heard bad news from
Italy, and worse and worse, every year : at last, he made
a handsome compliment of roads and walls, and departed.
But the Saxon seriously settled in the land, builded.

ABILITY. 61

tilled, fished, and traded, with German truth and adhe-
siveness. The Dane came, and divided with him. Last
of all, the Norman, or French-Dane, arrived, and formally
conquered, harried, and ruled the kingdom. A century
later, it came out, that the Saxon had the most bottom
and longevity, had managed to make the victor speak the
language and accept the law and usage of the victim ;
forced tiie baron to dictate Saxon terms to Norman
kings ; and, step by step, got all the essential securities
of civil liberty invented and confirmed. The genius of
the race and the genius of the place conspired to this
effect. The island is lucrative to free labor, but not
worth possession on other terms. The race was so intel-
lectual, that a feudal or military tenure could not last
longer than the war. The power of the Saxon-Danes, so
thoroughly beaten in the war, that the name of English
and villein were synonymous, yet so vivacious as to extort
charters from the kings, stood on the strong personality
of these people. Sense and economy must rule in a world
Avhich is made of sense and economy, and the banker,
with his seven per cent, drives the earl out of his castle.
A nobility of soldiers cannot keep down a commonalty
of shrewd scientific persons. Wiiat signifies a pedigree
of a hundred links, against a cotton-spinner with steam
in his mill ; or, against a company of broad-shouldered
Liverpool merchants, for whom Stephenson and Brunei
are contriving locomotives and a tubular bridge ?

These Saxons are the hands of mankind. They have
the taste for toil, a distaste for pleasure or repose,
and the telescopic appreciation of distant gain. They
are the wealth-makers, — and by dint of mental faculty

62 ENGLISH TEAITS.

Avliicli lias its own conditions. The Saxon works after
liking, or, only for himself; and to set him at work, and
to begin to draw his monstrous values out of barren
Britain, all dishonor, fret, and barrier must be removed,
and then his energies begin to pla}^

The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by Trolls,
— a kind of goblin men, with vast power of work and
skilful production, — divine stevedores, carpenters, reap-
ers, smiths, and masons, swift to reward every kindness
done them, with gifts of gold and silver. In all English
history, this dream comes to pass. Certain Trolls or
working brains, under the names of Alfred, Bede, Caxton,
Bracton, Camden, Drake, Selden, Dugdale, Newton,
Gibbon, Brindley, Watt, Wedgwood, dwell in the troll-
mounts of Britain, and turn the sweat of their face to
power and renown.

If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody landed
on this spell-bound island with impunity. The enchant-
ments of barren shingle and rough weather transformed
every adventurer into a laborer. Each vagabond that
arrived bent his neck to the yoke of gain, or found the
air too tense for him. The strong survived, the weaker
went to the ground. Even the pleasure-hunters and sots
of England are of a tougher texture. A hard tempera-
ment had been formed by Saxon and Saxon-Dane, and
such of these French or Normans as could reach it, were
naturalized in every sense.

All the admirable expedients or means hit upon in
England must be looked at as growths or irresistible off-
shoots of the expanding mind of the race. A man of that
brain thinks and acts thus; and his neighbor, being

ABILITY. 63

afflicted Avith the same kind of brain, tlioiigli lie is rich,
and called a baron, or a duke, thinks the same thing, and
is ready to allow the justice of the thought and act in his
retainer or tenant, though sorely against his baronial or
ducal will.

The island was renowned in antiquity for its breed of
mastiffs, so fierce, that when their teeth were set, you
must cut their heads off to part them. The man was
Hke his dog. The people have that nervous bilious
temperament, which is known by medical men to resist
every means employed to make its possessor subservient
to the will of others. The English game is main force to
main force, the planting of foot to foot, fair play and
open field, — a rough tug without trick or dodging, till
one or both come to pieces. King Ethelwald spoke the
language of his race, when he planted himself at Wim-
borne, and said, ' he would do one of two things, or there
live, or there lie.' They hate craft and subtlety. They
neither poison, nor waylay, nor assassinate ; and, when
they have pounded each other to a poultice, they will
shake hands and be friends for the remainder of their
lives.

You shall trace these Gothic touches at school, at
country fairs, at the hustings, and in parliament. No
artifice, no breach of truth and plain dealing, — not so
much as secret ballot, is suffered in the island. In par-
liament, the tactics of the opposition is to resist every
step of the government, by a pitiless attack ; and in a
bargain, no prospect of advantage is so dear to the mer-
chant, as the thought of being tricked is mortifying.

Sir Kenelin Digby, a courtier of Charles and James,

64 ENGLISH TRAITS.

who won the sea-figlit of Scanderoon, was a model
Englishman in his day. " His person was handsome and
gigantic, he had so graceful elocution and noble address,
that, had he been dropt out of the clouds in any part
of the world, he would have made himself respected :
he was skilled in six tongues, and master of arts and
arms." * Sir Kenelm wrote a book, " Of Bodies and
of Souls," in which he propounds, that " syllogisms do
breed or rather are all the variety of man's life. They
are the steps by which we walk in all our businesses.
Man, as he is man, doth nothing else but weave such
chains. Whatsoever he doth, swarving from this work,
he doth as deficient from the nature of man : and, if he
do aught beyond this, by breaking out into divers sorts
of exterior actions, he findeth, nevertheless, in this huked
sequel of simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule,
the bounds, aud the model of it."t

There spoke tlie genius of tlie English people. There
is a necessity on them to be logical. They would hardly
greet the good that did not logically fall, — as if it
excluded their own merit, or shook their understand-
ings. They are jealous of minds that have much facility
of association, from an instinctive fear that the seeing
many relations to their thought might impair this serial
continuity and lucrative concentration. They are impa-
tient of genius, or of minds addicted to contemplation,
and cannot conceal their contempt for sallies of thought,
however lawful, whose steps they cannot count by their

* Antony Wood.

t Man's Soule, p. 29.

ABILITY. 65

wonted rule. Neither do they reckon better a syllogism
that ends in syllogism. For they have a supreme eye to
facts, and theirs is a logic that brings salt to soup, ham-
mer to nail, oar to boat, the logic of cooks, carpenters,
and chemists, following the sequence of nature, and one
on which words make no impression. Their mind is not
dazzled by its own means, but locked and bolted to
results. They love men, who, like Samuel Johnson, a
doctor in the schools, would jump out of his syllogism
the instant his major proposition was in danger, to save
that, at all hazards. Their practical vision is spacious,
and they can hold many threads without entangling
them. All the steps they orderly take ; but with the
higli logic of never confounding the minor and major
proposition; keeping their eye on their aim, in all the
complicity and delay incident to the several series of
means they employ. There is room in their minds for
this and that, — a science of degrees. In the courts, the
independence of the judges and the loyalty of the suitors
are equally excellent. In Parliament, they have hit on
tljat capital invention of freedom, a constitutional opposi-
tion. And when courts and Parliament are both deaf,
the plaintiff is not silenced. Calm, patient, his weapon
of defence from year to year is the obstinate reproduc-
tion of the grievance, with calculations and estimates.
But, meantime, he is drawing numbers and money to his
opinion, resolved that if all remedy fails, right of revolu-
tion is at the bottom of his charter-box. They are
bound to see their measure carried, and stick to it
througii ages of defeat.

Into this English logic, however, an infusion of justice

E

66 ENGLISH TRAITS.

enters, not so apparent in otlier races, — a belief in the
existence of two sides, and the resolution to see fair play.
There is on every question an appeal from the assertion
of the parties to the proof of what is asserted. They are
impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust .
before a fact. Is it a machine, is it a charter, is it a
boxer in the ring, is it a candidate on the hustings, —
the universe of Englishmen will suspend their judgment,
until the trial can be had. They are not to be led by
a phrase, they want a working plan, a working machine, a
working constitution, and will sit out the trial, and abide
by the issue, and reject all preconceived theories. In
politics they put blunt questions, which must be an-
swered ; who is to pay the taxes ? what will you do for
trade ? what for corn ? what for the spinner ?

This singular fairness and its results strike the Trench
with surprise. Philip de Commines says : " Now, in my
opinion, among all the sovereignties I know in the world,
that in which the public good is best attended to, and the
least violence exercised on the people, is that of Eng-
land." Life is safe, and personal rights; and what is
freedom, without security ? whilst, in Erance, ' frater-
nity,' ' equality,' and * indivisible unity ' are names for
assassination. Montesquieu said : " England is the
freest country in the world. If a man in England had
as niany enemies as hairs on his head, no harm would
happen to him."

Their self-respect, their faith in causation, and their
realistic logic or coupling of means to ends, have given
them the leadership of the modern world. Montesquieu
said, " No people have true common-sense but those who

ABILITY. (J7

arc born in Eiiglantl." Tliis common-sense is a percep-
tion of all the conditions of our earthly existence, of
laws tliat can be stated, and of laws that cannot be
stated, or that are learned only by practice, in which
allowance for friction is made. They are impious in
their scepticism of theory, and in high departments they
are cramped and sterile. But the unconditional surren-
der to facts, and the choice of means to reach their ends,
are as admirable as with ants and bees.

The bias of the nation is a passion for utility. They
love the lever, the screw, and pulley, theElanders draught-
horse, the waterfall, wind-mills, tide-mills ; the sea and
the wind to bear their freight-ships. More than the
diamond Koh-i-noor, which glitters among their crown-
jewels, they prize that dull pebble which is wiser than
a man, whose poles turn themselves to the poles of the
world, and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the
world. Now, their toys are steam and galvanism. They
are heavy at the fine arts, but adroit at the coarse ; not
good in jewelry or mosaics, but the best iron-masters,
colliers, wool-combers, and tanners in Europe. They
apply themselves to agriculture, to draining, to resisting
encroachments of sea, wind, travelling sands, cold and
Avet subsoil ; to fishery, to manufacture of indispensable
staples, — salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery,
and brick, — to bees and silk-worms ; and by their
steady combinations they succeed. A manufacturer sits
down to dinner in a suit of clothes which was wool on
a sheep's back at sunrise. You dine with a gentleman on
venison, pheasant, quail, pigeons, poultry, mushrooms, and
pineapples, all the growth of his estate. They are neat

68 ENGLISH TEAITS.

husbands for ordering all tlieir tools pertaining to house
and field. All are well kept. There is no want and no
waste. They study use and fitness in their building, in
tlie order of their dwelUngs, and in tlieii- dress. The
Trenchman invented the ruffle, the Englisliman added
the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible coat but-
toned to the chin, of rough but solid and lasting texture.
If he is a lord, he dresses a little worse than a commoner.
They have diffused the taste for plain substantial hats,
shoes, and coats through Europe. They think him the
best dressed man, whose dress is so fit for his use that
you cannot notice or remember to describe it.

They secure the essentials in their diet, in their arts
and manufactures. Every article of cutlery shows, in its
shape, thought and long experience of workmen. Tliey
put the expense in the right place, as, in their sea-steam-
ers, in the solidity of the machinery and the strength of
the boat. The admirable equipment of their arctic ships
carries London to the pole. They build roads, aqueducts,
warm and ventilate houses. And they have impressed
their directness and practical habit on modern civiliza-
tion.

In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody breaks
who ought not to break ; and, tliat, if he do not make
trade everything, it will make him nothing ; and acts on
this belief. Tiie s|urit of system, attention to details, and
tlie subordination of details, or, the not driving things too
finely (which is charged on the Germans), constitute that
despatch of business, which makes the mercantile power
of England^

In war, the Englishman looks to his means. He is of

ABILITY, 69

the opinion of Civilis, his German ancestor, whom Tacitus
reports as holding " that the gods are on the side of the
strongest " ; — a sentence which Bonaparte unconsciously
translated, when he said, " that he had noticed, that Provi-
dence always favored the heaviest battalion." Their mili-
tary science propounds that if the weight of the advancing
column is greater than that of the resisthig, the latter is
destroyed. Therefore WelHngton, when he came to the
army in Spain, had every man weighed, first with accou-
trements, and then without ; beheving that the force of
an army depended on the weight and power of the indi-
vidual soldiers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palinerstoii
told the House of Commons, that more care is taken of
tlie health and comfort of English troops than of any
other troops in the world ; and that hence the English can
put more men into the ranks, on the day of action, on the
Held of battle, than any other army. Before the bombard-
ment of the Danish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day
after day, himself in the boats, on the exhausting service
of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's celebrated ma-
noeuvre of breaking the line of sea-battle, and Nelson's
feat of doubling, or stationing his ships one on the outer
bow, and another on the outer quarter of each of the
enemy's, were only translations into naval tactics of
Bonaparte's rule of concentration. Lord CoUingwood
was accustomed to tell his men, that, if they could fire
three well-directed broadsides in five minutes, no vessel
could resist them ; and, from constant practice, they came
to do it in three minutes and a half.

But conscious that no race of better men exists, they
rely most on the simplest means ; and do not like pon-

70 ENGLISH TRAITS.

derous and difficult tactics, but delight to bring the affair
hand to hand, where the victory lies with the strength,
courage, and endurance of the individual combatants.
They adopt every improvement in rig, in motor, in weap-
ons, but they fundamentally believe that the best strat-
agem in naval war is to lay your ship close alongside of
the enemy's ship, and bring all your guns to bear on him,
until you or he go to the bottom. This is the old fashion,
which never goes out of fashion, neither in nor out of
England.

It is not usually a point of honor, nor a religious sen-
timent, and never any whim that they will shed their
blood for; but usually property, and riglit measured by
property, that breeds revolution. They have no Indian
taste for a tomahawk-dance, no French taste for a badge
or a proclamation. The Englishman is peaceably mind-
ing his business and earning his day's wages. But if
you offer to lay hand on his day's wages, on his cow, or
liis right in conmion, or his shop, he will fight to the
Judgment. Magna-charta, jury-trial, habeas-corpus, star-
chamber, ship-money, Popery, Plymouth colony, American
llevolution, are all questions involving a yeoman's right
to his dinner, and, except as touching that, would not
have lashed the British nation to rage and revolt.

Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of order,
and of calculation, it must be owned they are capable of
larger views ; but the indulgence is expensive to them,
costs great crises, or accumulations of mental power.
In common, the horse works best with blinders. Noth-
ing is more in the line of English thought, than our
unvarnished Connecticut question, "Pray, sir, how do

ABILITY. 71

YOU get your living when you are at home ? " The ques-
tions of freedom, of taxation, of privilege, are money
questions. Heavy fellows, steeped in beer and flesh-
pots, they are hard of hearing and dim of sight. Their
drowsy minds need to be flagellated by war and trade and
politics and persecution. Tiiey cannot well read a prin-
ciple, except by the light of fagots and of burning towns.

Tacitus says of the Germans, " powerful only in sudden
efforts, they are impatient of toil and labor." Tiiis highly
destined race, if it had not somewhere added the chamber
of patience to its brain, would not liave built London.
I know not from wiiicli of the tribes and temperaments
that went to the composition of the people this tenacity
■was supplied, but they clinch every nail they drive.
They have no running for luck, and no immoderate
speed. They spend largely on their fabric, and await the
slow return. Their leather lies tanning seven years in
the vat. At Rogers's mills, in Sheffield, where 1 was
shown the process of making a razor and a penknife, I
was told there is no luck in making good steel; that
tiiey make no mistakes, every blade in the hundred and
in the thousand is good. And that is characteristic of
all their work, — no more is attempted than is done.

When Thor and his companions arrive at Utgard, he
is told that " nobody is permitted to remain here, unless
he understand some art, and excel in it all other men."
The same question is still put to the posterity of Thor.
A nation of laborers, every man is trained to some one
art or detail, and aims at perfection in that : not content
unless he has something in Avhich he thinks he surpasses
all other men. He would rather not du anvtliinsr at all.

1% ENGLISH TRAITS.

than not do it well. I suppose no people have such
thoroughness : from the highest to the lowest, every man
meaning to be master of his art.

"To show capacity," a Frenchman described as the
end of a speech in debate: "no," said an Englishman,
"but to set your slioulder at tlie wheel, — to advance the
business." Sir Samuel Romilly refused to speak in pop-
idar assemblies, confining himself to the House of Com-
mons, where a measure can be carried by a speech. The
business of the House of Commons is conducted by a few
persons, but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel
" knew the Blue Books by heart." His colleagues and
rivals carry Hansard in llieir heads. The high civil and
legal offices are not beds of case, but posts which exact
frightful amounts of mental labor. Many of the great
leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Castlereagh, Romilly, are
soon worked to death. They are excellent judges in
England of a good worker, and when they find one, like
Clarendon, Sir Philip Warwick, Sir William Coventry,
Ashley, Burke, Thurlow, Mansfield, Pitt, Eldon, Peel, or
Kussell, there is nothing too good or too high for him.

They have a wonderful heat in the pursuit of a public
aim. Private persons exhibit, in scientific and antiquarian
researches, the same pertinacity as the nation showed in
the coalitions in which it yoked Europe against the
Empire of Bonaparte, one after the other defeated, and
still renewed, until the sixth hurled him from his seat.

Sir John Herschel, in completion of the work of his
father, who had made the catalogue of the stars of the
northern hemisphere, expatriated himself for years at the
Cape of Good Hope, finished his inventory of the southern

ABILITY. 73

heaven, came liome, and redacted it in eight years more ;
— a work whose value does not begin until thirty years
liave elapsed, and thenceforward a rocord to all ages of
the higliest import. The Admiralty sent out the Arctic
expeditions year after year, in search of Sir John Frank-
lin, until, at last, they have threaded their way through
polar pack and Behring's Straits, and solved the geo-
graphical problem. Lord Elgin, at Athens, saw the
imminent ruin of the Greek remains, set up his scaffold-
ings, in spite of epigrams, and, after five years' labor to
collect them, got his marbles on shipboard. The ship
struck a rock, and went to the bottom. He had them
all fished up, by divers, at a vast expense, and brought
to London ; not knowing that Haydon, Fuseli, and
Canova, and all good heads in all the world, were to be
his applauders. In the same spirit, were the excavation
and research by Sir Charles Eellowes, for the Xanthiau
monument ; and of Layard, for his Nineveh sculptures.

The nation sits in the immense city they have builded,
a London extended into every man's mind, though he
live in Van Dicinan's Land or Capetown. Faithful per-
formance of what is undertaken to be performed, they
honor in themselves, and exact in others, as certificate of
equality with themselves. The modern world is theirs.
Tliey have made and make it day by day. The commer-
cial relations of the world are so intimately drawn to
London, that every dollar on earth contributes to tlie
streugth of the English government. And if all the
wealth in the planet should perish by war or deluge, they
know themselves competent to replace it.

They have approved their Saxon blood, by their sea-
4

74 ENGLISH TRAITS.

going qualities ; their descent from Odin's smitlis, by
their liereditary skill in working in iron; their British
birth, by husbandry and immense wheat harvests ; and
justified their occupancy of the centre of habitable land,
by their supreme ability and cosmopolitan spirit. They
have tilled, builded, forged, spun, and woven. They have
made the island a thoroughfare ; and London a shop, a
law-court, a record-office, and scientific bureau, inviting
to strangers ; a sanctuary to refugees of every political
and religious opinion ; and such a city, that almost every
active man, in any nation, finds himself, at one time or
other, forced to visit it.

In every path of practical activity, they have gone even
with the best. There is no secret of war, in which they
have not shown mastery. The steam-chamber of Watt,
the locomotive of Stephenson, the cotton-mule of Roberts,
perform the labor of the world. There is no department
of literature, of science, or of useful art, in which they
liave not produced a first-rate book. It is England,
whose opinion is waited for on the merit of a new inven-
tion, an improved science. And in the complications of
the trade and politics of their vast empire, they have been
equal to every exigency, with counsel and with conduct.
Is it their luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain, — ■
it is their commercial advantage, that whatever light ap-
pears in better method or happy invention, breaks out in
their race. They are a family to which a destiny attaches,
and the Banshee has sworn that a male heir shall never
be wanting. They have a wealth of men to fill important
posts, and the vigdance of party criticism insures the
selection of a competent person.

ABILITY. 75

A proof of the energy of the British people is the
higlily artificial construction of the whole fabric. The
climate and geography, I said, were factitious, as if
the hands of man liad arranged the conditions. The
same character pervades the whole kingdom. Bacon
said, " Rome was a state not subject to paradoxes " ; but
England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions.
Tlie foundations of its greatness are the rolling waves ;
and, from first to last, it is a museum of anomalies. This
foggy and rainy country furnishes the world with astro-
nomical observations. Its short rivers do not afford
water-power, but the land shakes under the thunder of
the mills. There is no gold-mine of any importance, but
there is more gold in England than in all other countries.
It is too far north for the culture of the vine, but the
wines of all countries are in its docks. The French
Comte de Lauraguais said, "no fruit ripens in England
but a baked apple " ; but oranges and pineapples are as
clieap in London as in tlie Mediterranean. The Mark-
Lane Express, or the Custom-House Keturns bear out
to the letter the vaunt of Pope, —

" Let India boast her palms, nor envy we
The weeping amber, nor the spicy tree,
"While, by our oaks, those precious loads are bonie,
And realms commanded Avhich those trees adorn."

The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full
of artificial breeds. The agriculturist Bakewell created
sheep and cows and horses to order, and breeds in which
everything was omitted but what is economical. The cow
is sacrificed to her bag, the ox to his surloin. Stall-feed-

76 ENGLISH TRAITS.

iiig makes sperm-mills of the cattle, and converts the sta-
ble to a chemical factory. The rivers, lakes, and ponds,
too much tished, or obstructed by factories, are artificially
filled with the eggs of sahuon, turbot, and herring.

Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cam-
bridgeshire are unhealthy and too barren to pay rent. By
cylindrical tiles, and gutla-percha tubes, five millions of
acres of bad land have been drained and put on equality
with the best, for rape-culture and grass. The climate
too, Avhich was already believed to have become, milder
and drier by the enormous consumption of coal, is so far
reached by this new action, that fogs and storms are said
to disappear. In due course, all England will be drained,
and rise a second time out of tlie waters. The latest step
was to call in the aid of steam to agriculture. Steam is
almost an Englishman. I do not know but they will
send him to Parliament, next, to make laws. He weaves,
forges, saws, pounds, fans, and now he must pump, grind,
dig, and plough for the farmer. The markets created by
the manufacturing population have erected agriculture
into a great thriving and spending industry. The value
of the houses in Britain is equal to the value of the soil.
Artificial aids of all kinds are cheaper than the natural
resources. No man can afford to walk, when the parlia-
mentary train carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-
burners are cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in
the cities. All the houses in London buy their water.
The English trade does not exist for the exportation of
native products, but on its manufactures, or the making
well everything which is ill made elsewhere. They make
ponchos for the Mexican, bandannas for the Hindoo, gin-

ABILITY. 77

seng for (lie Cliinese, beads for the Indian, laces for the
Flemings, telescopes for astronomers, cannons for kings.

The Board of Trade caused the best models of Greece
and Italy to be placed within the reach of every manu-
facturing population. They caused to be translated from
foreign languages and illustrated by elaborate drawings,
the most approved works of Munich, Berlin, and Paris.
They have ransacked Italy to find new forms, to add a
grace to the products of their looms, their potteries, and
tlieir foundries.*

The nearer we look, the more artificial is their social
system. Tlieir law is a network of fictions. Their prop-
erty, a scrip or certificate of right to interest on money
that no man ever saw. Their social classes are made by
statute. Their ratios of power and representation are his-
torical and legal. The last reform-bill took away politi-
cal power from a mound, a ruin, and a stone-wall, whilst
Birmingham and Manchester, whose mills paid for the
wars of Europe, had no representative. Purity in the
elective Parliament is secured by the purchase of seats.f
Foreign power is kept by armed colonies ; power at home^
by a standing army of police. The pauper lives better
Iban the free laborer ; the thief better than the pauper ;
and the transported felon better than the one under im-
prisonment. The crimes are factitious, as smuggling,
poaching, non-conformity, heresy, and treason. Better,
tliey say in England, kill a man than a hare. The sov-

* See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1853.

t Sir S. Roniilly, purest of English patriots, decided that
the only independent mode of entering Parliament was to buy
a seat, and he houijht Horsham.

78 ENGLISH TRAITS.

ereigntj of tlie seas is maintained by the impressment
of seamen. " Tlie impressment of seamen," said Lord
Eldon, " is the life of our navy." Solvency is maintained
by means of a national debt, on the principle, " if you
will not lend me the money, how can I pay you ? " For
the administration of justice. Sir Samuel Rom illy 's expe-
dient for clearing the arrears of business in Chancery,
was, the chancellor's staying away entirely from his
court. Their system of education is factitious. The
Universities galvanize dead languages into a semblance
of life. Their church is artificial. The manners and
customs of society are artificial; — made-up men with
made-up manners ; — and thus the whole is Birmingham-
ized, and we have a nation whose existence is a work of
art ; — a cold, barren, almost arctic isle, being made the
most fruitful, luxurious, and imperial land in the whole
earth.

Man in England submits to be a product of political
economy. On a bleak moor, a mill is built, a banking-
house is opened, and men come in, as water in a sluice-
way, and towns and cities rise. Man is made as a Bir-
mingham button. The rapid doubling of the population
dates from Watt's steam-engine. A landlord, who owns
a province, says, " the tenantry are unprofitable ; let me
have sheep." He unroofs the houses, and ships the popu-
lation to America. The nation is accustomed to the in-
stantaneous creation of wealth. It is the maxim of their
economists, " that the greater part in value of the wealth
now existing in England has been produced by human
hands within the last twelve months." Meantime, three or
four days' rain will reduce hundreds to starving in London.

ABILITY. 79

One secret of their power is their mutual good under-
standing. Not only good minds are born among them,
but all the people have good minds. Every nation has
yielded some good wit, if, as has chanced to many tribes,
only one. But the intellectual organization of the Eng-
lish admits a communicableness of knowledge and ideas
among them all. An electric toucli by any of their
national ideas, melts them into one family, and brings
the hoards of power which their individuality is always
hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the smallness of
the country, or is it the pride and affection of race, —
they have solidarity, or responsibleness, and trust in each
other.

Their minds, like wool, admit of a dye which is more
lasting than the cloth. They embrace their cause with
more tenacity than their life. Though not military, yet
every common subject by the poll is fit to make a sol-
dier of. These private reserved mute family-men can
adopt a public end with all their heat, and this strength
of affection makes the romance of their heroes. The
difference of rank does not divide the national heart.
The Danish poet Oehlenschlager complains, that who
writes in Danish writes to two hundred readers. In
Germany, there is one speech for the learned, and another
for the masses, to that extent, that, it is said, no senti-
ment or phrase from the works of any great German
writer is ever heard among the lower classes. But in
England, the language of the noble is the language of
the poor. In Parliament, in pulpits, in theatres, when
the speakers rise to thought and passion, the language
becomes idiomatic ; the people in the street best under-

80 ENGLISH TRAITS.

stand the best words. And their language seems drawn
from the Bible, the common law, and the works of Sliak-
speare, Bacon, Milton, Pope, Young, Cowper, Burns, and
Scott. The island has produced two or three of the
greatest men that ever existed, but they were not solitary
in tlieir own time. Men quickly embodied what Newton
found out, in Greenwich observatories, and practical
navigation. The boys knew all that Hutton knew of
strata, or Dalton of atoms, or Harvey of blood-vessels ;
and these studies, once dangerous, are in fashion. So
what is invented or known in agriculture, or in trade, or
in \var, or in art, or in literature, and antiquities. A
great ability, not amassed on a few giants, but poured
into the general mind, so that each of them could at a
pinch stand in the shoes of the other ; and they are more
bound in character than differenced in ability or in rank.
The laborer is a possible lord. The lord is a possible
basket-maker. Every man carries the English system in
liis brain, knows what is confided to him, and does
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries Eugland
on his mace, the midshipman at the point of his dirk, the
smith on his hammer, the cook in the bowl of his spoon ;
the postilion cracks his whip for England, and the sailor
times his oars to "God save the King!" Tlie very
felons have their pride in each other's English stancli-
ness. In politics and in war, they hold together as by
hooks of steel. The charm in Nelson's history is, the
unselfish greatness ; the assurance of being supported to
tiie uttermost by those Mdiom he supports to the utter-
most. Whilst they are some ages ahead of the rest of
the world in the art of living ; Mdiilst in some directions

MANNERS. 81

they do not represent the modern spirit, but constitute it,
— this vanguard of civility and power they coldly hold,
inarching in phalanx, lock-step, foot after foot, file after
file of heroes, ten thousand deep.

CHAPTER VI.

MANNERS.

I FIND the Englishman to be him of all men who
stands firmest in his shoes. They have in themselves
what they value in their horses, mettle and bottom. On
the day of my arrival at Liverpool, a gentleman, in de-
scribing to me tlie Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, happened
to say, " Lord Clarendon has pluck like a cock, and will
fight till he dies " ; and, what I heard first I lieard last,
and the one thing the English value, is pluck. The
word is not beautiful, but on the quality they signify by
it the nation is unanimous. The cabmen have it; the
merchants have it ; the bishops have it ; the women have
it ; the journals have it ; the Times newspaper, they say,
is the pluckiest thing in England, and Sidney Suiith had
made it a proverb, that little Lord John Russell, the
minister, would take the command of the Channel fleet
to-morrow.

They require you to dare to be of your own opinion,
and they hate the practical cowards who cannot in aifairs
answer directly yes or no. They dare to displease, nay,
they will let you break all the commandments, if you do
it natively, and with spirit. You must be somebody ;
than you may do this or that, as you will.

4* ' r

83 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Macliinery Las been applied to all work, and carried to
sucli perfection, that little is left for the men but to mind
the engines and feed the furnaces. But the machines
require punctual service, and as the}' never tire, they
prove too much for their tenders. Mines, forges, mills,
breweries, railroads, steam-pump, steam-plough, drill of
regiments, drill of police, rule of court, and shop-rule,
have operated to give a mechanical regularity to all the
habit and action of men. A terrible machine has pos-
sessed itself of the ground, the air, the men and women,
and hardly even thought is free.

The mechanical might and organization require in the
people constitution and answering spirits ; and he who
goes among them must have some weight of metal. At
last, you take your hint from the fury of life you find,
and say, one thing is })lain, this is no country for faint-
hearted people : don't creep about diffidently ; make up
your mind ; take your own course, and you shall find
respect and furtherance.

It requires, men sa}^ a good constitution to travel in
Spain. I say as much of England, for other cause, sim-
ply on account of tiie vigor and brawn of the people.
Nothing but the most serious business could give
one any counterweight to these Baresarks, though they
were only to order eggs and muffins for their breakfast.
The Englishman speaks with all his body. His elocution
is stomachic, — as the American's is labial. The Eng-
lishman is very petulant and precise about his accom-
modation at inns, and on the roads ; a quiddle about his
toast and his chop, and every species of convenience,
and loud and pungent in his expressions of impatience at

MANNERS. S3

any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself, at all points, in
his manners, in bis respiration, and tbe inarticulate noises
he makes in clearing tbe throat, — all significant of burly
strength. He lias stamina ; he can take the initiative in
emergencies. He has that aplomb, wbich results from a
good adjustment of tbe moral and physical nature, and
tbe obedience of all tbe powers to tb3 will ; as if tbe
axes of his eyes were united to his backbone, and only
moved with the trunk.

This vigor appears in the incuriosity, and stony neglect,
each of every other. Each man walks, eats, drinks,
shaves, dresses, gesticulates, and, in every manner, acts,
and suffers without reference to tbe bystanders, in his own
fashion, only careful not to interfere with them, or annoy
them ; not that he is trained to neglect tbe eyes of his
neighbors, — he is really occupied with bis own affair,
and does not think of them. Every man in this polished
country consults only bis convenience, as much as a soli-
tary pioneer in Wisconsin. I know not where any per-
sonal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and no man gives
himself any concern with it. An Englishman walks in
a pouring rain, swinging his closed umbrella like a walk-
ing-stick ; wears a wig, or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands
on bis head, and no remark is made. And as he has
been doing this for several generations, it is now in the
blood.

In short, every one of these islanders is an island him-
self, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a company of
strangers, you would think him deaf; his eyes never wan-
der from bis table and newspaper. He is never betrayed
into any curiosity or unbecoming emotion. Tbey have

84 ENGLISH TRAITS.

all been trained in one severe school of manners, and
never put off the harness. He does not give his hand.
He does not let you meet his eye. It is almost an
affront to look a man in tlie face, without being intro-
duced. In mixed or in select companies they do not
introduce persons ; so that a presentation is a circum-
stance as valid as a contract. Introductions are sacra-
ments. He Avithholds his name. At the hotel, he is
hardly willing to whisper it to the clerk at the book-
office. If he give you his private address on a card,
it is like an avowal of friendship ; and his bearing on
being introduced is cold, even though he is seeking
your acquaiutance, and is studying how he shall serve
you.

It was an odd proof of this impressive energy, that,
in my lectures, I hesitated to read and tlirew out for its
impertinence many a disparaging phrase, which I had
been accustomed to spin, about poor, thin, unable mor-
tals; so mi ch had the fine physique and the personal
vigor of this robust race worked on my imagination.

I happened to arrive in England at the moment of
a commercial crisis. But it was evident that, let who
will fail, England will not. These people have sat here
a thousand years, and here will continue to sit. They
will not break up, or arrive at any desperate revolution,
like their neighbors ; for they have as much energy, as
much continence of character, as they ever had. The
power and possession which surround them are their own
creation, and they exert the same connnanding industry
at this moment.

They are positive, methodical, cleanly, and formal,

MANNERS. 85

loving routine, aud conventional ways ; loving truth and
religion, to be sure, but inexorable on points of form.
All the world praises the comfort aud private appoint-
ments of an English inn, and of English households.
You are sure of neatness and of personal decorum. A
Erenchman may possibly be clean : an Englishman is
conscientiously clean. A certain order and complete
propriety is found in his dress and in his belongings.

Born in a harsh and wet climate, which keeps him in
doors whenever he is at rest, and being of an affectionate
and loyal temper, he dearly loves his house. If he is
rich, he buys a demesne, and builds a hall ; if he is in
middle condition, he spares no expense on his house.
Without, it is all planted ; within, it is wainscoted,
carved, curtained, hung with pictures, aud filled with
good furniture. 'T is a passion which survives all others,
to deck and improve it. Hither he brings all that is rare
and costly, and with the national tendency to sit fast in
the same spot for many generations, it comes to be, in
the course of time, a museum of heirlooms, gifts, aud
trophies of the adventures and exploits of the family.
He is very fond of silver plate, and, though he have no
gallery of portraits of his ancestors, he has of their
punch-bowls and porringers. Incredible amounts of
plate are found in good houses, and the poorest have
some spoon or saucepan, gift of a godmother, saved out
of better times.

An English family consists of a few persons, who,
from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet
of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense
as that cartilage which we have seen attachino: the two

86 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Siamese. Euf^land produces under favorable conditions
of ease and culture the finest women in the Avorld.
And, as the men are affectionate and true-hearted, the
women inspire and refine them. Nothing can be more
delicate without being fantastical, nothing more firm and
based in nature and sentiment, than the courtship and
mutual carriage of the sexes. The song of 1590 says,
" The wife of every Englishman is counted blest." The
sentiment of Imogen in Cymbeline is copied from Eng-
lish nature ; and not less the Portia of Brutus, the Kate
Percy, and the Desdemoua. The romance does not
exceed the height of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutch-
inson, or in Lady Russell, or even as one discerns
through the plain prose of Pepys's Diary, the sacred habit
of an English wife. Sir Samuel Romilly could not bear
the death of his wife. Every class has its noble and
tender examples.

Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to
branch wide and high. The motive and end of their
trade and empire is to guard the independence and
privacy of their homes. Nothing so much marks their
manners as the concentration on their household ties.
This domesticity is carried into court and camp. Wel-
lington governed India and Spain and his own troops,
and fought battles like a good family-man, paid his debts,
and, though general of an army in Spain, could not stir
abroad for fear of public creditors. This taste for house
and parish merits has of course its doting and foohsh
side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popularity of
Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact that he
was wont to go to church every Sunday, with a large

MANNERS. 87

quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm, his wife hang-
ing on tlie other, and followed by a long brood of chil-
dren.

They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps,
their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. Tlie Middle
Ages still lurk in the streets of London. The Knights
of the Bath take oath to defend injured ladies ; the gold-
stick-in-waiting survives. They repeated the ceremonies
of the eleventh century in the coronation of the present
Queen. A hereditary tenure is natural to them. Offices,
farms, trades, and traditions descend so. Their leases
run for a hundred and a thousand years. Terms of
service and partnership are lifelong, or are inherited.
" Holdship has been with me," said Lord Eldon, " eight-
and-twenty years, knows all my business and books."
Antiquity of usage is sanction enough. Wordsworth
says of the small freeholders of Westmoreland, " Many
of these humble sons of the hills had a consciousness that
the land which they tilled had for more than five hun-
dred years been possessed by men of the same name
and blood." The ship-carpenter in the public yards, my
lord's gardener and porter, have been there for more
than a hundred years, grandfather, father, and son.

The English power resides also in their dislike of
change. They have difficulty in bringing their reason to
act, and on all occasions use their memory first. As
soon as they have rid themselves of some grievance, and
settled the better practice, they make haste to fix it as
a finality, and never wish to hear of alteration more.

Every Englishman is an embryonic chancellor : his
instinct is to search for a precedent. The favorite phrase

88 ENGLISH TRAITS.

of tlieir law is, "a custom whereof the memory of man
runneth not back to the contrary." The barous say,
'' Nolumus mutari" ; and the cockneys stifle the curi-
osity of the foreigner on the reason of any practice, witli,
"Lord, sir, it was always so." Tliey hate innovation.
Bacon told them, Time was the right reformer; Chat-
ham, that " confidence was a plant of slow growth " ;
Canning, to " advance with the times " ; and Welling-
ton, that "habit was ten times nature." All their
statesmen learn the irresistibility of the tide of custom,
and have invented many fine phrases to cover this slow-
ness of perception, and prehensility of tail.

A sea-shell should be the crest of England, not only
because it represents a power built on the waves, but
also the hard finish of the men. The Englishman is
finished like a cowry or a murex. After tlie spire and
the spines are formed, or, with the formation, a juice
exudes, and a hard enamel varnishes every part. The
keeping of the proprieties is as indispensable as clean
linen. No merit quite countervails the want of this,
whilst this sometimes stands in lieu of all. " 'T is in
bad taste," is the most formidable word an English-
man can pronounce. But this japan costs them dear.
There is a prose in certain Englishmen, which exceeds
in wooden deadness all rivalry w[\\\ other countrymen.
There is a knell in the conceit and externality of their
voice, which seems to say. Leave all hope behind. In
this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity gets intrenched,
and consolidated, and founded in adamant. An English-
man of fashion is like one of those souvenirs, bound in
gold vellum, enriched with delicate engravings, on thick

MANNERS. 89

liot-pressed paper, fit for the hands of ladies and princes,
but with nothing in it worth reading or remembering.

A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage.
When Thalberg, the pianist, was one eveni)ig performing
before the Queen, at Windsor, in a private party, the
Queen accompanied him with her voice. The circum-
stance took air, and all England shuddered from sea to
sea. The indecorum was never repeated. Cold, repres-
sive manners prevail. No enthusiasm is permitted ex-
cept at the opera. They avoid everything marked. They
require a tone of voice that excites no attention in tlie
room. Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of
England, of whom Wotton said, "His wit was the meas-
ure of congruity."

Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful.
They keep to the other extreme of low tone in dress and
manners. They avoid pretension and go right to the
heart of the thing. They bate nonsense, sentimentalism,
and highflown expression ; they use a studied plainness.
Even Brummell their fop was marked by the severest
simplicity in dress. They value themselves on the ab-
sence of everything theatrical in the public business, and
on conciseness and going to the point, in private affairs.

In an aristocratical country, like England, not the
Trial by Jury, but the dinner is the capital institution.
It is the mode of doing honor to a stranger, to invite him
to eat, — and has been for many hundred years. " And
they think," says the Venetian traveller of 1500, "no
greater honor can be conferred or received, than to invite
others to eat with them, or to be invited themselves, and
they would sooner give five or six ducats to provide an

90 ENGLISH TRAITS.

entertainment for a person, than a groat to assist him in
any distress."* It is reserved to the end of the day, the
faniily-hoiu being generally six, in London, and, if any
company is expected, one or two hours later. Every one
dresses for dinner, in his own house, or in another man's.
The guests are expected to arrive within half an hour of
the time fixed by card of invitation, and nothing but death
or mutilation is permitted to detain them. The English
dinner is precisely the model on wliich our own are con-
structed in the Atlantic cities. The company sit one or
two hours, before the ladies leave the table. The gen-
tlemen jremain over their wine an hour longer, and re-
join the ladies in the drawing-room, and take coffee.
The dress dinner generates a talent of table-talk, Avhicli
reaches great perfection : the stories are so good, that
one is sure they must have been often told before, to
have got such happy turns. Hither come all manner of
clever projects, bits of popular science, of practical in-
vention, of miscellaneous humor ; political, literary, and
personal news ; railroads, horses, diamonds, agriculture,
horticulture, pisciculture, and wine.

English stories, bonmots, and the recorded table-talk
of their wits, are as good as the best of the French. In
America, we are apt scholars, but have not yet attained
the same perfection : for the range of nations from which
London draws, and the steep contrasts of condition, create
the picturesque in society, as broken country makes pic-
turesque landscape, whilst our prevailing equality makes
a prairie tameness : and secondly, because the usage of a

* " Relation of England." Printed by the Camden Society.

TRUTH. 91

dress-dinner every day at dark has a tendency to hive and
produce to advantage everything good. Much attrition
has worn every sentence into a bullet. Also one meets
now and then with polished men, who know everything,
have tried everything, can do everything, and are quite
superior to letters and science. What could they not, if
only they would ?

CHAPTER YII.

TRUTH.

The Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart,
which contrasts with the Latin races. The German name
has a proverbial significance of sincerity and honest mean-
ing. The arts bear testimony to it. The faces of clergy
and laity in old sculptures and illuminated missals are
charged with earnest belief. Add to this hereditary rec-
titude, the punctuality and precise dealing which com-
merce creates, and you have the English truth and credit.
The government strictly performs its engagements. The
subjects do not understand trifling on its part. When
any breach of promise occurred, in the old days of pre-
rogative, it was resented by the people as an intolerable
grievance. And, in modern times, any slipperiness in the
government of political faith, or any repudiation or crook-
edness in matters of finance, would bring the whole nation
to a committee of inquiry and reform. Private men keep
their promises, never so trivial. Down goes the flying
word on the tablets, and is indelible as Domesday Book.

Their practical power rests on their national sincerity.

92' ENGLISH TRAITS.

Veracity derives from instinct, and marks superiority in
organization. Nature has endowed some animals with
cunning, as a compensation for strength withheld ; but
it has provoked the malice of all others, as if avengers of
public wrong. In the nobler kinds, where strength could
be afforded, her races are loyal to truth, as truth is the
foundation of the social state. Beasts that make no
truce with man, do not break faith with each other.
'T is said, that the wolf, who makes a cache of his prey,
and brings his fellows with him to the spot, if, on digging
it is not found, is nistantly and unresistingly torn in pieces.
English veracity seems to result on a sounder animal struc-
ture, as if they could afford it. They are blunt in saying
what they think, sparing of promises, and they require
plain dealing of others. We will not have to do with
a man in a mask. Let us know the truth. Draw a
straight line, hit whom and where it ,will. Alfred, whom
the affection of the nation makes the type of their race, is
called by a writer at the Norman Conquest, the truth-
speaker ; Alueredus veridicus. Geoffrey of Monmouth
says of King Aurelius, uncle of Arthur, that " above all
things he hated a lie." The Northman Guttorm said to
King Olaf, "It is royal w^ork to fulfil royal words."
Tiie mottoes of their families are monitory proverbs, as,
Farefac, — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes ; Sai/ and seal, of
the house of Fiennes ; Vero nil veriiis, of the De Veres.
To be king of their word, is their pride. When they un-
mask cant, they say, " The English of this is," etc. ; and
to give the lie is the extreme insult. The phrase of the
lowest of the people is "honor-bright," and their vulgar
praise, " his word is as good as his bond." They hate

TRUTH. 93

shuffling and equivocation, and the canse is damaged in
the public opinion, on which any paltering can be fixed.
Even Lord Chesterfield, with his French breeding, when
he came to define a gentleman, declared that truth made
his distinction ; and nothing ever spoken by him would
find so hearty a suffrage from his nation. The Duke of
Wellington, who had the best right to say so, advises the
French General Kellermann, that he may rely on the pa-
role of an English officer. The English, of all classes,
value themselves on this trait, as distinguishing them
from the French, who, in the popular belief, are more
polite than true. An Englishman understates, avoids the
superlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging, that
in the French language, one cannot speak without lying.

They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality, and do
not easily learn to make a show, and take the world as
it goes. They are not fond of ornaments, and if they
wear them, they must be gems. They read gladly in old
Fuller, that a lady, in the reign of Elizabeth, "would
have as patiently digested a lie, as the wearing of false
stones or pendants of counterfeit pearl." They have the
earth-hunger, or preference for property in land, which
is said to mark the Teutonic nations. They build of
stone; public and private buildings are massive and
durable. In comparing their ships' bouses, and public
offices with the American, it is commonly said, that they
spend a pound, where we spend a dollar. Plain rich
clothes, plahi rich equipage, plain rich finish throughout
their house and belongings, mark the English truth.

They confide in each other, — English believes iu Eng-
lish. The French feel the superiority of this probity.

94 ENGLISH TRAITS.

The Englishman is not springing a trap for his admira-
tion, but is honestly minding his business. The french-
man is vain. Madame de Stael says, that the English
irritated Napoleon, mainly, because they have found out
how to unite success with honesty. She was not aware
how wide an application her foreign readers would give
to the remark. Wellington discovered the ruin of Bona-
parte's affairs, by his own probity. He augured ill of the
empire, as soon as he saw that it was mendacious, and
lived by war. If war do not bring in its sequel new
trade, better agriculture and manufactures, but only
games, fireworks, and spectacles, — no prosperity could
support it; much less, a nation decimated for conscripts,
and out of pocket, like France. So he drudged for years
on his military works at Lisbon, £(nd from this base at last
extended his gigantic lines to Waterloo, believing in his
countrymen and their syllogisms above all the rhodomon-
tade of Europe.

At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I hap-
pened to be a guest, since my return home, I observed
that the chairman complimented his compatriots, by say-
ing, " they confided that wherever they met an English-
man, they found a man who would speak the truth."
And one cannot think this festival fruitless, if, all over
the world, on the 23d of April, wherever two or three
English are found, they meet to encourage each other in
the nationality of veracity.

In the power of saying rude truth, sometimes in the
lion's mouth, no men surpass them. On the king's birtli-
day, when each bishop was expected to offer the king a
purse of gold, Latimer 'gave Henry YIIL a copy of the

TRUTH. 95

Vulgate, with a mark at the passage, "Whoremongers
and adulterers God will judge " ; and they so honor
stoutness in each other, that the king passed it over.
Tliej are tenacious of their belief, and cannot easily
change their opinions to suit the hour. They are like
ships with too much head on to come quickly about, nor
will prosperity or even adversity be allowed to shake
their habitual view of conduct. Whilst I was in Lon-
don, M. Guizot arrived there on his escape from Paris,
in February, 1848. Many private friends called on him.
His name was immediately proposed as an honorary
member to the Athenaeum. M. Guizot was blackballed.
Certainly, they knew the distinction of his name. But
the Englishman is not fickle. He had really made up his
mind, now for years as he read his newspaper, to hate
and despise M. Guizot ; and the altered position of the
man as an illustrious exile, and a guest in the country,
makes no diiference to him, as it would instantly, to an
American.

They require the same adherence, thorough conviction
and reality in public men. It is the want of character
which makes the low reputation of the Irish members.
*•' See them," they said, " one hundred and twenty-seven
all voting like sheep, never proposing anything, and all
but four voting the income tax," — which was an ill-
judged concession of the government, relieving Irish
property from the burdens charged on English.

They have a horror of adventurers in or out of Parlia-
ment. The ruling passion of Englishmen, in these days,
is a terror of humbug. In the same proportion, they
value honesty, stoutness, and adherence to your own.

96 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Tliey like a man committed fo his objects, Tliey hate
the French, as frivolous ; they hate the Irish, as aimless ;
they hate the Germans, as professors. In February,
1848, tliey said, Look, the French king- and his party
fell for want of a shot; they had not conscience to shoot,
so entirely was the pith and heart of monarchy eaten out.

They attack their own politicians every day, on the
same grounds, as adventurers. They love stoutness in
standing for your right, in declining money or promotion
that costs any concession. Tiie barrister refuses the silk
gown of Queen's Counsel, if his junior have it one day
earlier. Lord Collingwood would not accept his medal
for victory on 14th February, 1797, if he did not receive
one for victory on 1st June, 1794 ; and the long-with-
holden medal was accorded. When Castlereagh dis-
suaded Lord Wellington from going to the king's levee,
until the unpopular Cintra business had been explained,
he replied : " You furnish me a reason for going. I will
go to this, or I will never go to a king's levee." The
radical mob at Oxford cried after the tory Lord Eldon,
"There's old Eldon; cheer him; he never ratted."
They have given the parliamentary nickname of Trimmers
to the time-servers, whom English character does not
love.*

They are very liable in their politics to extraordinary
delusions, thus, to believe what stands recorded in the

* It is an unlucky moment to remember these spaikles of
solitary virtue in the face of the honors lately paid in England
to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am sure that no English-
man whom I had the happiness to know, consented, when the
aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like a Neapoli-

TRUTH. 97

gravest books, that tlie movement of lOtli April, 18^8,
was urged or assisted by foreigners : wliich, to be sure,
is paralleled by the democratic whimsey in this country,
which I have noticed to be shared by men sane on other
points, that the English are at the bottom of the agita-
tion of slavery, in American pohtics : and then again to
the Ereuch popular legends on the subject of perjidious
Albion. But suspicion will make fools of nations as of
citizens,

A slow temperament makes them less rapid and ready
than other countrymen, and has given occasion to the
observation that English wit comes afterwards, — which
the French denote as esprit d'escalier. This dulness
makes their attachment to home, and their adherence in
all foreign countries to home habits. The Englishman
who visits Mount Etna will carry his teakettle to the
top. The old Italian author of the " Relation of Eng-
land " (in 1500) says : " I have it on the best informa-
tion, that, when the war is actually raging most furiously,
they will seek for good eating, and all their other com-
forts, without thinking what harm might befall them."
Then their eyes seem to be set at the bottom of a tunnel,
and they affirm the one small fact they know, with the
best faith in the world that nothing else exists. And,
as their own belief in guineas is perfect, they readily, on
all occasions, apply the pecuniary argument as final.
Thus when the Kochester rappings began to be heard of

tan rabble, before a successful thief. But — how to resist one
step, though odious, in a linked series of state necessities ? —
Governments must always learn too late, that the use of dis-
honest agents is as ruinous for nations as for single men.
5 G

98 ENGLISH TRAITS.

ill England, a man deposited £100 in a sealed box in tlie
Dublin Bank, and. then advertised in the newspapers to
all somnambulists, mesmerizers, and others, that whoever
could tell him the number of his note should have the
money. He let it lie there six months, the newspapers
now and then, at his instance, stimulating the attention
of the adepts ; but none could ever tell him ; and he
said, " Now let me never be bothered more with this
proven lie." It is told of a good Sir John, that he heard
a case stated by counsel, and made up his mind ; then
the counsel for the other side taking their turn to speak,
he found himself so unsettled and perplexed, that he
exclaimed, " So help me God ! I will never listen to
evidence again," Any number of delightful examples of
this English stolidity are the anecdotes of Europe. I
knew a very w'orthy man, — a magistrate, I believe he was,
in the town of Derby, — who went to the opera, to see
Malibran. In one scene, the heroine was to rush across
a ruined bridge. Mr. B. arose, and mildly yet firmly
called the attention of the audience and the performers
to the fact that, in his judgment, the bridge was unsafe !
This English stolidity contrasts with Erench wit and
tact. The Erench, it is commonly said, have greatly
more influence in Europe than the English. What in-
fluence the English have is by brute force of wealth an-d
power; that of the Erench by affinity and talent. The
Italian is subtle, the Spaniard treacherous : tortures, it
was said, could never wrest from an Egyptian the confes-
sion of a secret. None of these trails belong to the
Englishman. His choler and conceit force everything
out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says of
them : —

CilAllACTER. 99

'In close intrigue, their fiicnlty 's but weak.
For generally whate'er they know, they speak.
And often their own counsels undermine
Ey mere infirmity without design ;
From whence, the learned say, it doth proceed.
That English treasons never can succeed ;
For they 're so open-hearted, you may know
Their own most secret thoughts, and others' too."

CHAPTER VIII.

CHARACTER.

The English race are reputed morose. I do not
know that they have sadder brows than their neighbors
of northern climates. They are sad by comparison with
the singing and dancing nations : not sadder, but slow
and staid, as finding their joys at home. They, too,
believe that where there is no enjoyment of life, there
can be no vigor and art in speech or thought ; that your
merry heart goes all the way, your sad one tires in a
mile. This trait of gloom has been fixed on them by
French travellers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage,
Mirabeau, down to the lively journalists of iXxefeuilletons,
have spent their wit on the solemnity of their neighbors.
The French say, gay conversation is unknown in their
island : the Englishman finds no relief from reflection
except in reflection : when he wishes for amusement, he
goes to work : his hilarity is like an attack of fever.
Religion, the theatre, and the reading the books of his
country, all feed and increase his natural melancholy.

100 ENGLISH TRAITS.

The police does not interfere with public diversions. It
thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleasures and
rare gayety of this inconsolable nation ; and their well-
known courage is entirely attributable to their disgust
of life.

I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their few
words have obtained this reputation. As compared with
the Americans, I think them cheerful and contented.
Young people, in our country, are much more prone to
melancholy. The English have a mild aspect, and a
ringing, cheerful voice. They are large-natured, and not
so easily amused as the southerners, and are among them
as grown people among children, requiring war, or trade,
or engineering, or science, instead of frivolous games.
They are proud and private, and, even if disposed to
recreation, will avoid an open garden. They sported
sadly ; ils s* amusaient tristement, selon la coutiime de leur
pai/s, said Froissart ; and, 1 suppose, never nation built
their party walls so thick, or their garden fences so high.
Meat and wine produce no effect on them : they are just
as cold, quiet, and composed, at the end, as at the begin-
ning of dinner.

The reputation of taciturnity they have enjoyed for six
or seven hundred years ; and a kind of pride in bad
public speaking is noted in the House of Commons, as
if tliey were willing to show that they did not live by
their tongues, or thought they spoke well enough if they
liad the tone of gentlemen. In mixed company, they
shut their mouths. A Yorkshire mill-owner told me, he
had ridden more than once all the way from London to
Leeds, in the first-class carriage, with the same persons,

CHARACTER. 101

and no word exclianged. The club-houses were estab-
lished to cultivate social habits, and it is rare that more
than two eat together, and oftenest one eats alone. Was
it then a stroke of humor in the serious Swedenborg, or
was it only his pitiless logic, that made him shut up the
English souls in a heaven by themselves ?

They are contradictorily described as sour, splenetic,
and stubborn, — and as mild, sweet, and sensible. The
truth is, they have great range and variety of character.
Commerce sends abroad multitudes of different classes.
The choleric Welshman, the fervid Scot, the bilious resi-
dent in the East or West Indies, are wide of the perfect
behavior of the educated and dignified man of family. So
is the burly farmer ; so is the country 'squire, with his
narrow and violent life. In every inn, is the Commer-
cial-Room, in which * travellers,' or bagmen who carry
patterns, and solicit orders, for the manufacturers, are
wont to be entertained. It easily happens that this class
should characterize England to the foreigner, who meets
tliem on the road, and at every public house, whilst the
gentry avoid the taverns, or seclude themselves whilst
in them.

But these classes are the right English stock, and may
fairly show the national qualities, before yet art and edu-
cation have dealt with them. They are good lovers,
good haters, slow but obstinate admirers, and, in all
tilings, very much steeped in their temperament, like
men hardly awaked from deep sleep, which they enjoy.
Their habits and instincts cleave to nature. They are of
the earth, earthy ; and of the sea, as the sea-kinds, at-
tached to it for what it yields them, and not from any

102 ENGLISH TRAITS.

seutiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude exer-
cise, butcher's meat, and sound sleep ; and suspect any
poetic insinuation or any hint for the conduct of life
which reflects on this animal existence, as if somebody
were fumblhig at the umbilical ccrd and might stop their
supplies. They doubt a man's sound judgment, if he
does not eat with appetite, and shake their heads if he is
particularly chaste. Take them as they come, you shall
find in the connnon people a surly indifference, sometimes
gruffness and ill temper ; and, in minds of more power,
magazines of inexhaustible war, challenging

" The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland,"

They are headstrong believers and defenders of their
opinion, and not less resolute in maintaining their whim
and perversity. Hezekiah Woodward wrote a book
against the Lord's Prayer. And one can believe that
Burton the Anatomist of Melancholy, having predicted
from the stars the hour of his death, slipped the knot
himself round his own neck, not to falsify his horoscope.
Their looks bespeak an invincible stoutness ; they have
extreme difficulty to run away, and will die game. Wel-
lington said of the young coxcombs of the Life-Guards
delicately brought up, " But the puppies fight well " ;
and Nelson said of his sailors, " They really mind shot
no more than peas." Of absolute stoutness no nation
has more or better examples. They are good at storm-
ing redoubts, at boarding frigates, at dying in the last
ditch, or any desperate service which has daylight and
honor in it : but not, I think, at enduring the rack, or any

CHARACTER. 103

passive obedience, like jumping off a castle-roof at the
word of a czar. Being both vascular and highly organ-
ized, so as to be very sensible of pain ; and intellectual,
so as to see reason and glory in a matter.

Of that constitutional force, which yields the supplies
of the day, they have the more than enough, the excess
which creates courage on fortitude, genius in poetry, in-
vention in mechanics, enterprise in trade, magnificence
in wealth, splendor in ceremonies, petulance and projects
in youth. The young men have a rude health which
runs into peccant humors. They drink brandy like water,
cannot expend their quantities of waste strength on
riding, hunting, swimming, and fencing, and run into
absurd frolics with the gravity of the Eumenides. They
stoutly carry into every nook and corner of the earth their
turbulent sense ; leaving no lie uncontradicted, no pre-
tension unexamined. They chew hasheesh ; cut them-
selves with poisoned creases ; swing their hammock in
the boughs of the Bohon Upas ; taste every poison ; buy
every secret ; at Naples, they put St. Jauuarius's blood
in an alembic; they saw a hole into the head of the
" winking Virgin," to know why she winks ; measure
with an English foot-rule every cell of the Inquisition,
every Turkish caaba, every Holy of holies ; translate and
send to Bentley the arcanum bribed and bullied away from
shuddering Bramins ; and measure their own strength by
the terror they cause. These travellers are of every class,
the best and the Avorst ; and it may easily happen that
those of rudest behavior are taken notice of and remem-
bered. The Saxon melancholy in the vulgar rich and
poor appears as gushes of ill-humor, which every check

104 ENGLISH TRAITS.

exasperates into sarcasm and vituperation. There are
multitudes of rude young English who have the self-suffi-
ciency and bluutness of their nation, and who, with their
disdain of the rest of mankind, and with this indigestion
and choler, have made the English traveller a proverb for
uncomfortable and offensive manners. It was no bad de-
scription of the Briton generically, wliat was said two
Imndred years ago, of one particular Oxford scholar:
" He was a very bold man, uttered anything that came
into his mind, not only among liis companions, but in
public coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind of
particular persons then accidentally present, without
examining the company he was in ; for which he was
often reprimanded, and several times threatened to be
kicked and beaten."

The common Englishman is prone to forget a cardinal
article in the bill of social rights, that every man has a
right to his own ears. No man can claim to usurp more
than a few cubic feet of the audibilities of a public room,
or to put upon the company the loud statements of his
crotchets or personalities.

But it is in the deep traits of race that the fortunes
of nations are written, and however derived, w^iether a
happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the air, or what cir-
cumstance, that mixed for them the golden mean of tem-
perament, — here exists the best stock in the world,
broad-fronted, broad-bottomed, best for depth, range,
and equability, men of aplomb and reserves, great range
and many moods, strong instincts, yet apt for culture ;
war-class as well as clerks ; earls and tradesmen ; wise
minority, as well as foolish majority ; abysmal tempera-

CHARACTER. 105

ment, hiding wells of wrath, and glooms on which no
sunshine settles; alternated with a common-sense and
humanity which hold them fast to every piece of cheerful
duty ; making this temperament a sea to which all storms
are superficial ; a race to which their fortunes flow, as if
they alone had the elastic organization at once fine and
robust enough for dominion; as if the burly, inexpres-
sive, now mute and contumacious, now fierce and sharp-
tongued dragon, Avhich once made the island light with
his fiery breatii, had bequeathed his ferocity to his con-
queror. They hide virtues under vices, or the semblance
of them. It is the misshapen hairy Scandinavian troll
again, who lifts the cart out of the mire, or " threshes
the corn that ten day-laborers could not end," but it is
done in the dark, and with muttered maledictions. He
is a churl with a soft place in his heart, whose speech is
a brash of bitter waters, but who loves to help you at a
pinch. He says no, but serves you, and your thanks
disgust him. Here was lately a cross-grained miser, odd
and ugly, resembling in 'countenance the portrait of
Punch, with the laugh left out ; rich by his own indus-
try ; sulking in a lonely house ; who never gave a dinner
to any man, and disdained all courtesies ; yet as true a
worshipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed,
and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his country-
men creations of grace and truth, removing the reproach
of sterility from English art, catching from their savage
climate every fine hint, and importing into their galleries
every tint and trait of sunnier cities and skies ; making
an era in painting ; and, when he saw that the splendor
of one of his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his
5*

106 ENGLISH TRAITS.

rival's that Imng next it, secretly took a brusli and black-
ened his own.

They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for daws
to peck at. They have that phlegm or staidness, which
it is a compliment to disturb. " Great men," said Aris-
totle, "are always of a nature originally melancholy."
'T is the liabit of a mind which attaches to abstractions
with a passion which gives vast results. They dare to
displease, they do not speak to expectation. They like
the sayers of No, better tlian the sayers of Yes. Eacli
of tiiem has an opinion which lie feels it becomes him to
express all the more that it differs from yours. They are
meditating opposition. This gravity is inseparable from
minds of great resources.

There is an English hero superior to the French, tlie
German, the Italian, or the Greek. When he is brought
to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a richer material pos-
session, and on more purely metaphysical grounds. He
is there with his own consent, face to face with fortune,
which he defies. On deliberate choice, and from grounds
of character, he has elected his part to live and die for,
and dies with grandeur. This race has added new ele-
ments to humanity, and has a deeper root in the world.

They have great range of scale, from ferocity to
exquisite refinement. With larger scale, they have great
retrieving power. After running each tendency to an
extreme, they try another tack with equal heat. More
intellectual than other races, when they live with other
races, they do not take their language, but bestow their
own. They subsidize other nations, and are not sub-
sidized. They proselyte, and are not proselyted. They

CHARACTER. 107

assimilate otlier races to themselves, and are not assim-
ilated. The English did not calculate the conquest of
the Indies. It fell to their character. So they admin-
ister in different parts of the world, the codes of every
empire and race : in Canada, old Erench law ; in the
Mauritius, the Code Napoleon ; in the West Indies, the
edicts of the Spanish Cortes ; in the East Indies, the Laws
of Menu ; in the Isle of Man, of the Scandinavian Thing ;
at the Cape of Good Hope, of the Old Netherlands ; and
in the Ionian Islands, the Pandects of Justinian.

They are very conscious of their advantageous position
in history. England is the lawgiver, the patron, tlie
instructor, the ally. Compare the tone of the French
and of the EngUsh press : the first querulous, captious,
sensitive, about Enghsh opinion; the English press is
never timorous about French opinion, but arrogant and
contemptuous.

They are testy and headstrong through an excess of
will and bias ; churlish as men sometimes please to be
who do not forget a debt, who ask no favors, and wlio
will do what they like with their own. With education
and intercourse these asperities wear off, and leave the
good-will pure. If anatomy is reformed according to
national tendencies, I suppose, the spleen will hereafter
be found in the Englishman, not found in the American,
and differencing the one from the other. I anticipate
another anatomical discovery, that this organ will be
found to be cortical and caducous, that they are superfi-
cially morose, but at last tender-hearted, herein differ-
ing from Rome and the Latin nations. Nothing savage,
nothing mean resides in the English heart. They are

108 ENGLISH TRAITS.

subject to panics of credulity and of rag'e, but the tem-
per of the nation, however disturbed, settles itself soon
and easily, as, in this temperate zone, the sky after what-
ever storms clears again, and serenity is its normal con-
dition.

A saving stupidity masks and protects their perception
as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Amer-
icans, when they first deal witli English, pronounce them
stupid ; but, later, do them justice as people who wear
well, or hide their strength. To understand the power
of performance that is m their finest wits, in the patient
Newton, or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the
Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons, and Peels, one
should see how English day-laborers hold out. High
and low, they are of an unctuous texture. There is an
adipocere in their constitution, as if they had oil also for
their mental wheels, and could perform vast amounts of
work without damaging themselves.

Even the scale of expense on which people live, and
to which scholars and professional men conform, proves
the tension of their muscle, when vast numbers are
found who can each lift this enormous load. I might
even add, their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of
body.

No nation was ever so rich in able men : " Gentle-
men," as Charles I. said of Strafford, " wliose abilities
might make a prince rather afraid than ashamed in the
greatest affairs of state " : men of such temper, that,
like Baron Vere, " had one seen him returning from a
victory, he would by his silence have suspected tliat he
had lost the day ; and, had he beheld him in a retreat.

CHARACTER. 109

lie would have collected liim a conqueror by tlie cheer-
fulness of his spirit." *

The following passage from the Heimskriugla might
almost stand as a portrait of the modern Englishman :
"Haldor was very stout and strong, and remarkably
handsome in appearances. King Harold gave him this
testimony, that he, among all his men, cared least about
doubtful circumstances, whether they betokened danger
or pleasure ; for, whatever turned up, lie was never in
higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor more on
account of them, nor ate nor drank but according to Lis
custom. Haldor was not a man of many words, but
short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly, and was
obstinate and hard ; and this could not please the king,
who had many clever people about him, zealous in his
service. Haldor remained a short time with the king,
and then came to Iceland, where he took up his abode in
Hiardaholt, and dwelt in that farm to a very advanced
age."t

The national temper, in the civil history, is not flashy
or whiffling. The slow, deep, English mass smoulders
with fire, which at last sets all its borders in flame. The
wrath of London is not French wrath, but has a long
memory, and, in its hottest heat, a register and rule.

Half their strength they put not forth. They are
capable of a sublime resolution, and if hereafter the war
of races, often predicted, and making itself a war of
opinions also (a question of despotism and liberty com-
ing from Eastern Europe), should menace the English

* Fuller. Worthies of England.

t Heimskringla, Laing's translation, Vol. III. p. 37.

110 ENGLISH TRAITS.

civilization, these sea-kings may take once again to their
floating castles, and find a new home and a second millen-
nium of power in tiieir colonies.

The stability of England is the security of the modern
world. If the English race were as mutable as the
French, what reliance ? But the English stand for lib-
erty. The conservative, money-loving, lord-loving Eng-
lish are yet liberty -loving ; and so freedom is safe : for
they have more personal force than other people. Tiie
nation always resist the immoral action of their govern-
ment. They think humanely on tlie affairs of France, of
Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Holstein,
though overborne by the statecraft of the rulers at last.

Does the early history of each tribe show the perma-
nent bias, which, though not less potent, is masked, as
the tribe spreads its activity into colonies, commerce,
codes, arts, letters ? The early history shows it, as the
musician plays the air which he proceeds to conceal in
a tempest of variations. In Alfred, in the Northmen,
one may read the genius of tiie English society, namely,
that private life is the place of honor. Glory, a career,
and ambition, words famihar to the longitude of Paris,
are seldom heard in English speech. Nelson wrote from
their hearts his homely telegraph, ''England expects
every man to do his duty."

Eor actual service, for the dignity of a profession, or
to appease diseased or inflamed talent, the army and navy
may be entered (the worst boys doing well in the navy) ;
and the civil service, in departments where serious
official work is done ; and they hold in esteem the bar-
rister engaged in the severer studies of the law. But

COCKAYNE. Ill

the calm, sound, and most Britisli Briton shrinks froni
public life, as charlatanism, and respects an economy
founded, on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures, or
trade, which secures an independence through the crea-
tion of real values.

They wish neither to command or obey, but to be
kings in their own houses. They are intellectual and
deeply enjoy literature ; they like well to have the world
served up to them in books, maps, models, and every
mode of exact information, and, though not creators in
the art, they value its refinement. Tliey are ready for
leisure, can direct and fill their own day, nor need so
much as others the constraint of a necessity. But tlie
history of the nation discloses, at every turn, this origi-
nal predilection for private independence, and, however
this inclination may have been disturbed by the bribes
with which their vast colonial power has warped men out
of orbit, the inclination endures, and forms and reforms
the laws, letters, manners, and occupations. They choose
that welfare which is compatible with the commonwealth,
knowing that such alone is stable; as wise merchants
prefer investments in three per cents.

CHAPTEE IX.

COCKAYNE.

The English are a nation of humorists. Individual
right is pushed to the uttermost bound compatible with
public order. Property is so perfect, that it seems the

11^ ENGLISH TRAITS.

craft of tliat race, and not to exist elsewhere. The king
cannot step on an acre whicli the peasant refuses to sell.
A testator endows a dog or a rookery, and Europe can-
not interfere Avith his absurdity. Every individual has
his particular way of living, which he puslies to folly, and
the decided sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to
back up Mr. Crump's whim by statutes, and chancellors,
and horse-guards. Tliere is no freak so ridiculous but
some Englishman has attempted to immortalize by money
and law. Britisli citizenship is as omnipotent as Roman
was. Mr. Cockayne is very sensible of this. The pursy
man means by freedom the right to do as he pleases,
and does wrong in order to feel his freedom, and makes
a conscience of persisting in it.

He is intensely patriotic, for his country is so small.
His confidence in the power and performance of his
nation makes him provokingly incurious about other na-
tions. He dislikes foreigners. Swedenborg, who lived
much in England, notes " the similitude of minds among
the English, in consequence of wliich they contract famil-
iarity with friends who are of that nation, and seldom
witli others ; and they regard foreigners, as one looking
through a telescope from the top of a palace regards
those who dwell or wander about out of the city." A
much older traveller, the Venetian who wrote the " Rela-
tion of England," * in 1500, says : " The English are
great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging
to them. They think that there are no other men than
themselves, and no other world but England ; and, when-
ever they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he

* Printed by the Camden Society.

COCKAYNE. 113

looks like au Englishman, and it is a great pity lie should
not be an Englishman ; and whenever they partake of
any delicacy with a foreigner, they ask him whether such
a thing is made in his country." When he adds epithets
of praise, his climax is " so English " ; and when he
wishes to pay you the highest compliment, he says, I
should not know you from au Englishman. France is,
by its natural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which
English character draws its own traits in chalk. This
arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions to the
French. *I suppose that all men of English blood in
America, Europe, or Asia have a secret feeling of joy
tliat they are not French natives. Mr. Coleridge is said
to have given public thanks to God, at the close of a
lecture, that he had defended him from being able to
utter a single sentence in the French language. I have
found that Englishmen have such a good opinion of
England, that the ordinary phrases, in all good society,
of postponing or disparaging one's own things in talking
with a stranger, are seriously mistaken by them for an
insuppressible homage to the merits of their nation ; and
the New-Yorker or Pennsylvanian who modestly laments
the disadvantage of a new country, log-huts, and savages,
is surprised by the instant and. unfeigned commiseration
of the whole company, who plainly account all the world
out of England a heap of rubbish.

Tlie same insular limitation pinches his foreign poli-
tics. He sticks to his traditions and usages, and, so
help him God ! he will force his island by-laws down the
throat of great countries, like India, China, Canada,
Australia, and not only so, but impose Wapping on the

114 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Congress of Vienna, and trample down all nationalities
with iiis taxed boots. Lord Chatham goes for liberty,
and no taxation without representation; — for that is
British law ; but not a hobnail shall they dare make in
America, but buy their nails in England, — for that also
is British law ; and the fact that British commerce was
to be re-created by the independence of America, took
them all by surprise.

In short, I am afraid that English nature is so rank
and aggressive as to be a little incompatible with every
other. The world is not wide enough for two.

But, beyond this nationality, it must be admitted, the
island offers a daily worship to the old Norse god Brage,
celebrated among onr Scandinavian forefathers, for his
eloquence and majestic air. The English have a steady
courage, that fits them for great attempts and endurance :
they have also a petty courage, through which every man
delights in showing himself for what he is, and in doing
what he can ; so that, in all companies, each of them has
too good an opinion of himself to imitate anybody. He
hides no defect of his form, features, dress, connection,
or birthplace, for he thinks every circumstance belonging
to him comes recommended to you. If one of them
have a bald, or a red, or a green head, or bow legs, or a
scar, or mark, or a paunch, or a squeaking or a raven
voice, he has persuaded himself that there is something
modish and becoming in it, and that it sits well on him.

But nature makes nothing hi vain, and this little su-
perfluity of self-regard in the English brain is one of
the secrets of their power and history. It sets every
man on being and doing what he really is and can. It

COCKAYNE. 115

takes away a dodging, skulking, secondary air, and en-
courages a frank and manly bearing, so that, each man
makes the most of himself, and loses no opportunity for
want of pushing. A man's personal defects will com-
monly have with the rest of the world precisely that
importance which they have to himself. If he makes
light of them, so will other men. We all find in these a
convenient meter of character, since a little man would
be ruined by the vexation. I remember a shrewd poli-
tician, in one of our Western cities, told me "that he had
known several successful statesmen made by their foi-
ble." And another, an ex-governor of Illinois, said to
me : " If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner
and be modest ; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that
lie goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary
discoveries."

There is also this benefit in brag, that the speaker
is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor
him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to
it. Their culture generally enables the travelled Englisli
to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing,
and to give it an agreeable air. Then the natural dis-
position is fostered by the respect which they find enter-
tained in the world for English ability. It was said of
Louis XIV., that his gait and air were becoming enough
in so great a monarch, yet would have been ridiculous in
another man ; so the prestige of the English name war-
rants a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or
Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel them-
selves at liberty to assume the most extraordinary tone
on the subject of English merits.

116 ENGLISH TRAITS.

An English lady on the Rhine hearing a German
speaking of her party as foreigners, exelainied, " No, we
are not foreigners ; we are English : it is you that are
foreigners." They tell you daily, in London, the story
of the Frenchman and Englishman who quarrelled.
Both were unwilling to fight, hut their companions put
them up to it; at last, it was agreed, that they should
fight alone, in the dark, and with pistols : the candles
were put out, and the Englishman, to make sure not to
hit anybody, fired up the chimney, and brought down tiie
Erenchnian. They have no curiosity about foreigners,
and answer any information you may volunteer, with
" Oh ! Oh ! " until the informant makes up his mind,
that they shall die in their ignorance, for any help he
will offer. There are really no limits to this conceit,
though brighter men among them make painful efforts to
be candid.

The habit of brag runs through all classes, from the
Tiijies newspaper through politicians and poets, through
Wordsworl h, Carlyle, Mill, and Sydney Smith, down to
the boys of Eton. In the gravest treatise on political
economy, in a philosophical essay, in books of science, one
is surprised by the most innocent exhibition of unflinch-
ing nationality. In a tract on Corn, a most amiable and
accomplished gentleman writes thus : " Though Britain,
according to Bishop Berkeley's idea, were surrounded by
a wall of brass ten thousand cubits in height, still, she
would as far excel the rest of the globe in riches, as she
now does, both in this secondary quality, and in the
more important ones of freedom, virtue, and science." *

* William Spence.

COCKAYNE. 117

The English dislike the American structure of society,
whilst yet trade, mills, public education, aud chartism
are doing what they can to create in England the same
social condition. America is the paradise of the econ-
omists ; is the favorable exception invariably quoted to
the rules of ruin; but when he speaks directly of the
Americans, the islander forgets his philosophy, and re-
members his disparaging anecdotes.

But this childish patriotism costs something, like all
narrowness. The English sway of their colonies has no
root of kindness. They govern by their arts and ability ;
they are more just than kind ; and, whenever an abate-
ment of their power is felt, they have not conciliated the
affection on which to rely.

Coarse local distinctions, as those of nation, province,
or town, are useful in the absence of real ones ; but we
must not insist on these accidental lines. Individual
traits are always triumphing over national ones. There
is no fence in metaphysics discriminating Greek, or Eng-
lish, or Spanish science, ^sop and Montaigne, Cervan-
tes and Saadi, are men of the world ; and to wave our
own flag at the dinner-table or in the University, is to
carry the boisterous dulness of a fire-club into a polite
circle. Nature and destiny are always on the watch for
our follies. Nature trips us up when we strut ; and
there are curious examples in history on this very point
of national pride.

George of Cappadocia, born at Epiphania in Cllicia,
was a low parasite, who got a lucrative contract to
supply the army with bacon. A rogue and informer, he
got rich, and was forced to run from justice. He saved

118 ENGLISH TRAITS.

his money, embraced Arianism, collected a library, and
got promoted by a faction to the episcopal throne of
Alexandria. When Julian came, a. d. 3G1, George was
dragged to prison; the prison was burst open by the
mob, and George was lynched, as he deserved. And this
precious knave became, in good time. Saint George of
England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory and civil-
ity, and the pride of the best blood of the modern world.
Strange, that the solid truth-speaking Briton should
derive from an impostor. Strange, that the New World
should have no better luck, — that broad America must
wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-
dealer at Seville, who w^ent out, in 1499, a subaltern
with Hojeda, and whose highest naval rank was boat-
swain's mate in an expedition that never sailed, managed
in this lying world to supplant Columbus, and baptize
half the earth with his own dishonest name. Thus no-
body can throw stones. We ai-e equally badly off' in our
h)unders ; and the false pickle-dealer is an offset to the
false bacon-seller.

CHAPTER X.

WEALTH.

There is no country in which so absolute a homage
is paid to wealth. In America, there is a touch of shame
when a man exhibits the evidences of large property, as
if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has
pure pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate.
A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls ; — if

WEALTH. 119

you have merit, can you not sliow it by your good
clothes, and coach, and horses ? How can a man be a
gentleman without a pipe of wine ? Haydon says,
" Tbere is a fierce resolution to make every man live
according to the means he possesses," There is a mix-
tare of religion in it. They are under the Jewish law,
and read w^ith sonorous emphasis that their days shall be
long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters,
flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion is
the reproach of poverty. They do not wish to be repre-
sented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has
lost his fortune is said to have died of a broken heart.
Tlie last term of insult is, "a beggar." Nelson said,
" The want of fortune is a crime which I can never get
over." Sydney Smith said, "Poverty is infamous in
Eugland." And one of their recent writers speaks, in
reference to a private and scholastic hfe, of " the grave
moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer."
You shall find this sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet
deeply implied, in the novels and romances of the present
century, and not only in these, but in biography, and in
the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preach-
ing, and in the table-talk.

I was lately turning over Wood's Af hence Oxonienses,
and looking naturally for another standard in a chronicle
of the scholars of Oxford for two hundred years. But
I found the two disgraces in that, as in most English
books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and,
second, to be born poor, or to come to poverty. A natu-
ral fruit of England is the brutal political economy.
Malthus finds no cover laid at nature's table for the

120 ENGLISH TRAITS.

laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament
expressed itself by tlie language of Mr. Fuller in the
House of Commons, " If you do not like the country,
damn you, you can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly
proposed his bill forbidding parish officers to bind chil-
dren apprentices at a greater distance than forty miles
from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said,
" though, in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affec-
tions was a good thing, 't was not so among the lower
oi-dcrs. Better take them away from tliose who might
deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to
stop binding to manufacturers, as it must raise the price
of labor, and of manufactured goods."

The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled
only by the respect for wealth. It is at once the pride of
art of the Saxon, as he is a wealth-maker, and his passion
for independence. The Englishman believes that every
man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank,
if he do not mend his condition. To pay their debts is
their national point of honor. From the Exchequer and
the East India House to the huckster's shop, everything
prospers, because it is solvent. The British annies are
solvent, and pay for what they take. The British empire
is solvent ; for, in spite of the huge national debt, the
valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815,
whilst they complained that they were taxed within an
inch of their lives, and, by dint of enormous taxes, were
subsidizing all the continent against France, the English
were growing rich every year faster than any people ever
grew before. It is their maxim, that the weight of taxes
must be calculated, not by what is taken^ but by what is

WEALTH. 121

left. Solvency is in the ideas and mecLanism of an Eng-
lishman. The Crystal Palace is n©t considered honest
until it pays ; no matter how much convenience, beauty,
or eclat, it must be self-supporting. They are contented
with slower steamers, as long as they know that swifter
boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double
method of labor and thrift. Every household exhibits
an exact economy, and nothing of that uncalculated
headlong expenditure which families use in America. If
they cannot pay, they do not buy ; for they have no pre-
sumption of better fortunes next year, as our people
have ; and they say without sliame, I cannot afford it.
Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class
cars, or in the second cabin. An economist, or a man
who can proportion his means and his ambition, or bring
the year round with expenditure which expresses his
character, without embarrassing one day of his future, is
already a master of life, and a freeman. Lord Burleigh
writes to his son, " that one ought never to devote more
than two thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of
life, since the extraordinary will be certain to absorb the
other third."

The ambition to create value evokes every kind of
ability, government becomes a manufjicturing corpora-
tion, and every house a mill. The headlong bias to util-
ity will let no talent lie in a napkin, — if possible, will
teach spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman,
while he eats and drinks no more, or not much more than
another man, labors three times as many hours in the
course of a year, as an other European ; or, his life as
a workman is three lives. He works fast. Everytliing
6

I'ZZ ENGLISH TEAITS.

in England is at a quick pace. They have reinforced
their own productivity, by the creation of that marvel-
lous machinery which differences this age from any other
age.

'T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth
of the machine-shop. Six hundred years ago, Roger
Bacon explained the precession of the equinoxes, the con-
sequent necessity of the reform of the calendar; meas-
ured the length of the year, invented gunpowder; and
announced (as if looking from his lofty cell, over five cen-
turies, into ours) " that machines can be constructed to
drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers
could do; nor would they need anything but a pilot
to steer them. Carriages also might be constructed to
move with an incredible speed, Avithout the aid of any
animal. Finally, it would not be impossible to make
machines, which, by means of a suit of wings, should fly
in the air in the manner of birds." But the secret slept
with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet ful-
filled his words. Two centuries ago, the sawing of tim-
ber was done by hand ; the carriage-wheels ran on
w^ooden axles ; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs.
And it was to little purpose that they had pit-coal or that
looms were improved, unless Watt and Stephenson had
taught them to work force-pumps and poM^er-looms by
steam. The great strides were all taken within the
last hundred years. Tlie life of Sir Robert Peel, in
his day the model Englishman, very properly has, for
a frontispiece, a drawing of the spinning-jenny, which
wove the web of his fortunes. Ilargreaves invented the
spiiniing-jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright

WEALTH. 123

improved the invention ; and the machine dispensed with
the work of ninety-nine men : that is, one spinner could
do as much work as one hundred had done before. The
loom was improved further. But the men would some-
times strike for wages, and combine against the masters,
and, about 1829 - 30, much fear was felt, lest the trade
would be drawn away by these interruptions, and the
emigration of the spinners, to Belgium and the United
States. Iron and steel are very obedient. Whether it
were not possible to make a spinner that would not
rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor
emigrate? At the solicitation of the masters, after a
mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts of Manches-
ter undertook to create this peaceful fellow, instead of
the quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a few
trials, he succeeded, and, in 1830, procured a patent for
his self-acting mule ; a creation, the delight of mill-own-
ers, and " destined," tliey said, " to restore order among
the industrious classes " ; a machine requiring only a
child's hand to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright
had destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed
tlie factory spinner. The power of machinery in Great
Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to
600,000,000 men, one man being able by the aid of steam
to do the work which required two hundred and fifty men
to accomplish fifty years ago. The production has been
commensurate. England already had this laborious race,
rich soil, water, wood, coal, iron, and favorable climate.
Eight hundred years ago, commerce liad made it rich, and
it was recorded, " England is the ricliest of all the north-
ern nations." The Norman historians recite, that "in

124 ENGLISH TRAITS.

1067, William carried witli Lini into Normaudj, from
England, more gold and silver than had ever before been
seen in Gaul. But when, to this labor and trade and
these native resources was added this goblin of steam,
with his myriad arms, never tired, working night and
day everlastingly, the amassing of property has run out
of all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety
years. The steam-pipe has added to her population and
wealth the equivalent of four or five Englands. Forty
thousand ships are entered in Lloyd's lists. The yield
of wheat has gone on from 2,000,000 quarters in the
time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854. A thousand
million pounds sterling are said to compose the float-
ing money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Russell
stated that the people of this country had laid out
£300,000,000 of capital in railways, in the last four
years. But a better measure than these sounding fig-
ures is the estimate, that there is wealth enough in
England to support the entire population in idleness for
one year.

The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels,
roads, locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar
to a millionth of an inch. Steam twines huge cannon
into wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies with
the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can
clothe shingle mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-
blades that will cut gun-barrels in two. In Egypt, it
can plant forests, and bring rain after three thousand
years. Already it is ruddering the balloon, and the
next war will be fought in the air. But another m^-
clihie more potent in England than steam is the Bank.

WEALTH. 125

It votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, and
cities rise ; it refuses loans, and emigration empties the
country ; trade sinks ; revolutions break out ; kings are
dethroned. By these new agents our social system is
moulded. By dint of steam and of money, war and com-
merce are changed. Nations have lost their old omnip-
otence ; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are
getting obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam
lias enabled men to choose what law they will live under.
Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a limp-
band that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now,
that a telegraph line runs through France and Eu-
rope, from London, every message it transmits makes
stronger by one thread the band which war will have
to cut.

The introduction of these elements gives new resources
to existing proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that
the state depends on the House of Lords, but the en-
gineer sees, that every stroke of the steam-piston gives
value to the duke's land, fills it with tenants ; doubles,
quadruples, centuples the duke's capital, and creates new
measures and new necessities for the culture of his chil-
dren. Of course, it draws the nobility into the compe-
tition as stockholders in the mine, the canal, the railway,
in the application of steam to agriculture, and sometimes
into trade. But it also introduces large classes into the
same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms
itself with these magnificent powers ; new men prove an
overmatch for the land-owner, and the mill buys out the
castle. Scandinavian Tlior, who once forged his bolts in
icy Hecla, and built galleys by lonely fiords, in England,

126 ENGLISH TRAITS.

has advanced with the times, has shorn his beard, enters
Parliament, sits down at a desk in the India House, and
lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.

The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety
years is a main fact in modern history. The wealth of
London determines prices all over the globe. All things
precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are
sucked into this commerce and floated to London. Some
English private fortunes reach, and some exceed, a mil-
lion of dollars a year. A hundrad thousand palaces
adorn the island. All that can feed the senses and pas-
sions, all that can succor the talent, or arm the hands of
the intelligent middle class who never spare in what they
buy for their own consumption ; all that can aid sci-
ence, gratify taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market.
Whatever is excellent and beautiful in civil, rural, or ec-
clesiastic architecture; in fountain, garden, or grounds;
the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy
at home. The taste and science of thirty peaceful gener-
ations ; the gardens which Evelyn planted ; the temples
and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher
Wren built; the wood that Gibbous carved; the taste
of foreign and domestic artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown,
Loudon, Paxton, are in the vast auction, and the heredi-
tary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit
of ages of owners. The present possessors are to the
full as absolute as any of their fathers, in choosing and
procuring what they like. This comfort and splendor,
the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture, and
park, sumptuous castle and modern villa, — all consist
with perfect order. They have no revolutions ; no horse-

WEALTH. 127

guards dictating to tlie crown ; no Parisian poissardes
and barricades ; no mob ; but drowsy habitude, daily
dress-dinners, wine, and ale, and beer, and gin, and.
sleep.

With this power of creation, and this passion for
independence, property has reached an ideal perfection.
It is felt and treated as the national life-blood. The
laws are framed to give property the securest possible
basis, and the provisions to lock and transmit it have
exercised the cunuingest heads in a profession which
never admits a fool. The riglits of property nothing but
felony and treason can override. The house is a castle
which the king cannot enter. The Bank is a strong-box
to which the king has no key. Whatever surly sweet-
ness possession can give, is tasted in England to the
dregs. Vested rights are awful things, and absolute
possession gives the smallest freeholder identity of inter-
est with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked
garden gates announce the absolute will of the owner to
be alone. Every whim of exaggerated egotism is put
into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with costly
deliberation and detail.

An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes
to establish some claim to put her park paling a rod for-
ward into his grounds, so as to get a coachway, and save
her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his
paling into stone masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma,
and all Europe cannot prevail on him to sell or com-
pound for an inch of the land. They delight in a freak
as the proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward
Boynton, at Spic Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice of

128 ENGLISH TUAITS.

incomparable prospect, built a house like a long bam,
which had not a window on the prospect side. Straw-
berry Hill of Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr.
Beckford, were freaks ; and Newstead Abbey became
one in the hands of Lord Byron.

But the proudest result of this creation lias been the
great and refined forces it has put at the disposal of the
private citizen. In the social world, an Englishman to-
day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He
goes with the most powerful protection, keeps the best
company, is armed by the best education, is seconded by
wealth ; and his English name and accidents are like
a flourish of trumpets announcing him. This, with his
quiet style of manners, gives him the power of a sov-
ereign, without the inconveniences M'hich belong to that
rank. I much prefer the condition of an English gen-
tleman of the better class, to that of any potentate in
Europe, — whether for travel, or for opportunity of
society, or for access to means of science or study, or
for mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at
home.

Such, as we have seen, is the wealth of England, a
mighty mass, and made good in whatever details we care
to explore. The cause and spring of it is the wealth
of temperament in the people. Tlie wonder of Britain
is this plenteous nature. Her worthies are ever sur-
rounded by as good men as themselves ; each is a
captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of men is
represented again in the faculty of each individual, —
that he has waste strength, power to spare. The Eng-
lish are so rich, and seem to have established a taproot

WEALTH. 129

in the bowels of the planet, because they are constitu-
tionallj fertile and creative.

But a man must keep an eye on liis servants, if he
■would not have them rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor,
and is ever taking the hint of a new machine from his
own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy
in iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in
the work of the world. But it is found that the machine
uimians the user. Wiuit he gains in making cloth, he
loses in general power. There should be temperance
in making cloth, as well as in eating. A man should
not be a silkworm ; nor a nation a tent of caterpillars.
The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the
Leicester stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner,
— far on the way to be spiders and needles. The inces-
sant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man,
robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a
pin-polisher, a buckle-maker, or any other specialty ; and
presently, in a change of industry, whole towns are
sacrificed like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoestrings
supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen,
or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are enclosed
by landlords. Then society is admonished of the mis-
chief of the division of labor, and that the best political
economy is care and culture of men ; for, in these crises,
all are ruined except such as are proper individuals,
capable of thought, and of new choice and the applica-
tion of their talent to new labor. Then again come in
new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her
fraud in the adulteration of food, of drugs, and of almost
every fabric in her mills and shops ; finding that milk will
6* I

130 ENGLISH TRAITS.

not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread satisfy, nor
pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. lu true England
all is false and forged. This too is the reaction of nin-
chiuery, but of the larger machinery of commerce. 'T is
not, 1 suppose, want of probity, so much as the tyranny
of trade, which necessitates a pei'petual competition of
underselling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of
the fabric.

The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanage-
able, and flies away with the aeronaut. Steam from the
first hissed and screamed to M^arn him ; it was dreadful
with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The ma-
chinist has wrought and watched, engineers and firemen
without number have been sacrificed in learning to tame
and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved
to resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper
wings. Chancellors and Boards of Trade, Pitt, Peel,
and Bobinson, and their Parliaments, and their whole
generation, adopted false principles, and went to their
graves in the belief that they were enriching the country
which they were impoverishing. They congratulated
each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find
a merchant who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why
prices rise or fall, or who knows the mischief of paper-
money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in
the annexation of countries ; building of ships, depots,
towns ; in the influx of tons of gold and silver ; amid the
chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it was found that
bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman was forced
to sell his cow and pig, his tools, and his acre of land ;
and the dreadful barometer of the poor-rates was touch-

WEALTH. 131

ing the point of ruin. The poor-rate was sucking in the
solvent classes, and forcing an exodus of farmers and
mechanics. What befalls from the violence of financial
crises, befalls daily in the violence of artificial legislation.

Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounte-
ous, and augmenting. But the question recurs, does she
take the step beyond, namely, to the wise use, in view
of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the
wisdom of nations by seeing what they did with their
surplus capital. And, in view of these injuries, some
compensation has been attempted in England. A part
of the money earned returns to the brain to buy schools,
hbraries, bishops, astronomers, chemists, and artists with;
and a part to repair the wrongs of this intemperate weav-
ing, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics' Institutes,
public grounds, and otlier charities and amenities. But
the antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil
requires a deeper cure, which time and a simpler social
organization must supply. At present, she does not rule
her wealth. She is simply a good England, but no
divinity, or wise and instructed soul. She too is in the
stream of fate, one victim more in a common catastrophe.

But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of
greatness to be held as the chief offender. England must
be held responsible for the despotism of expense. Her
prosperity, the splendor which so much manhood and tal-
ent and perseverance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the
very argument of materialism. Her success strengthens
tlie hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth
poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the

132 ENGLISH TRAITS.

conquest of letters and arts ; when Eiiglisli success lias
grown out of the very renunciation of principles, and the
dedication to outsides. A civility of trifles, of money
and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and
the putting as many impediments as we can, between the
man and his objects. Hardly the bravest among them
have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence, it
has come, that not the aims of a manly life, but the
means of meeting a certain ponderous expense, is that
which is to be considered by a youth in England, emer-
ging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a
misfortune. And it is a consolation in the death of the
young, that a source of expense is closed.

CHAPTER XI.

AUISTOCRACY.

The feudal character of the English state, now that it
is getting obsolete, glares a little, in contrast with the
democratic tendencies. The inequality of power and
property shocks republican nerves. Palaces, halls, villas,
walled parks, all over England, rival the splendor of
royal seats. Many of tlie halls, like Haddon, or Kedles-
ton, are beautiful desolations. The proprietor never saw
them, or never lived in them. Primogeniture built these
sumptuous piles, and, I suppose, it is the sentiment of
every traveller, as it was mine, 'T was well to come ere
these were gone. Primogeniture is a cardinal rule of
English property and institutions. Laws, customs, man-
ners, the very persons and faces, affirm it.

ARISTOCRACY. 133

The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of the
people is loyal. The estates, names, and manners of
the nobles flatter the fancy of the people, and conciliate
the necessary support. In spite of broken faith, stolen
charters, and the devastation of society by the profligacy
of the court, we take sides as we read for the loyal
England and King Charles's "return to his right" with
his Cavaliers, — knowing what a heartless trifler he is,
and what a crew of God-forsaken robbers they are. The
people of England knew as much. But the fair idea of
a settled government connecting itself with heraldic
names, with the written and oral history of Europe, and,
at last, with the Hebrew religion, and the oldest tradi-
tions of the world, was too pleasing a vision to be shat-
tered by a few offensive realities, and the politics of
shoemakers and costermongers. The hopes of the com-
moners take the same direction with the interest of the
patricians. Every man who becomes rich buys land, and
does what he can to fortify the nobility, into which he
hopes to rise. The Anglican clergy -are identified with
the aristocracy. Time and law have made the joining
and moulding perfect in every part. The Cathedrals,
the Universities, the national music, the popular ro-
mances, conspire to uphold the heraldry, which the
current poKtics of the day are sapping. The taste of
the people is conservative. They are proud of the cas-
tles, and of the language and symbol of chivalry. Even
the word " lord " is the luckiest style that is used in
any language to designate a patrician. The superior
education and manners of the nobles recommend them
to the country.

134 ENGLISH THAITS.

The Norwegian pirate got what he could, and held it
for his eldest son. The Norman noble, who was the Nor-
wegian pirate baptized, did likewise. Thece was this ad-
vantage of Western over Oriental nobility, that this was
recruited from below. English history is aristocracy
with the doors open. Who has courage and faculty, let
him come in. Of course, the terms of admission to this
club are hard and high. The selfishness of the nobles
comes in aid of the interest of the nation to require signal
merit. Piracy and war gave place to trade, politics, and
letters ; the war-lord to the law-lord ; the law-lord to the
merchant and the mill-owner ; but the privilege was kept,
whilst the means of obtaining it were changed.

The foundations of these families lie deep in Norwegian
exploits by sea, and Saxon sturdiness on land. All no-
bility in its beginnings was somebody's natural superior-
ity. The things these English have done were not done
without peril of life, nor without wisdom and conduct ;
and the first hands, it may be presumed, were often chal-
lenged to show their right to their honors, or yield them
to better men. " He that will be a head, let him be a
bridge," said the Welsh chief Benegridran, when he car-
ried all his men over the river on his back. " He shall
have the book," said the mother of Alfred, "who can
read it " ; and Alfred won it by that title : and I make
no doubt that feudal tenure was no sinecure, but baron,
knight, and tenant often had their memories refreshed,
in regard to the service by which they held their lands.
The De Veres, Bohuns, Mowbrays, and Plantagenets
were not addicted to contemplation. The Middle Age
adorned itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of

ARISTOCRACY. 135

Richard Beaiicljamp, Earl of Warwick, tlie Emperor told
Henry V. that no Christian king had siicli another knig-ht
for wisdom, nurture, and manliood, and caused him to be
named, " Eatlier of curtesie." " Our success in France,"
saj's the historian, " lived and died with him." *

Tlie war-lord earned his lionors, and no donation of
land was large, as long as it brouglit the duty of protect-
ing it, hour by hour, against a terrible enemy. In France
and in England, the nobles were, down to a late day, born
and bred to war ; and the duel, which in peace still held
them to the risks of war, diminished the envy that, in
trading and studious nations, would else have pried into
their title. They were looked on as men who played high
for a great stake.

Great estates are not sinecures, if they are to be kept
great. A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.
In the same line of Warwick, the successor next but one
to Beauchamp was the stout earl of Henry VI. and
Edward IV. Few esteemed themselves in the mode,
whose heads were not adorned with the black ragged
staff, his badge. At his house in London, six oxen were
daily eaten at a breakfast ; and every tavern was full of
his meat ; and who had any acquaintance in his family,
should have as much boiled and roast as he could carry
on a long dagger.

The new age brings new qualities into request, the
virtues of pirates gave way to those of planters, mer-
chants, senators, and scholars. Comity, social talent,
and fine manners, no doubt, have had their part also. I
have met somewhere with a historiette, which, whether

* Fuller's Worthies, II. p 472.

136 ENGLISH TRAITS. '

more or less true in its particulars, carries a general truth.
" How came the Duke of Bedford by his great landed
estates ? His ancestor having travelled on the continent,
a lively, pleasant man, became the companion of a foreign
prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast, where Mr.
Russell lived. The prince recommended him to Henry
VIII., who, liking his company, gave him a large share
of the plundered church lands."

The pretence is that the noble is of unbroken descent
from the Norman, and has never worked for eight hun-
dred years. But the fact is otherwise. Where is Bohun ?
where is De Vere? The lawyer, the farmer, the silk-
mercer, lies i^erda under the coronet, and winks to the
antiquary to say nothhig ; especially skilful lawyers,
nobody's sons, who did some piece of work at a nice
moment for government, and were rewarded with ermine.

The national tastes of the English do not lead them
to the life of the courtier, but to secure the comfort
and independence of their homes. The aristocracy are
marked by their predilection for country-life. They are
called the county-families. They have often no residence
in London, and only go thither for a short time, during
the season, to see the opera ; but they concentrate the love
and labor of many generations on the building, planting,
and decoration of their homesteads. Some of them are
too old and too proud to wear titles, or, as Sheridan said
of Coke, " disdain to hide their head in a coronet " ; and
some curious examples are cited to show the stability of
English families. Their proverb is, that, fifty miles from
London, a family will last a hundred years ; at a hundred
miles, two hundred years ; and so on ; but I doubt that

ARISTOCRACY. 137

steam, the enemy of time, as well as of space, will dis-
turb these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of the
first Duke of Buckingham : " He was born at Brookeby
in Leicestershire, where his ancestors had chiefly contin-
ued about the space of four hundred years, rather with-
out obscurity, than with any great lustre." * Wraxall
says, that, in 1781, Lord Surrey, afterwards Duke of
Norfolk, told him, that when the year 1783 should arrive,
he meant to give a grand festival to all the descendants
of the body of Jockey of Norfolk, to mark the day when
the dukedom should have remained three hundred years
in their house, since its creation by Richard III. Pepys
tells us, in writing of an Earl Oxford, in 1666, that the
honor had now remained in that name and blood six hun-
dred years.

This long descent of families and this cleaving through
ages to the same spot of ground captivates the imagina-
tion. It has too a connection with the names of the
towns and districts of the country.

The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of legen-
dary melody spread over the land. Older than all epics
and histories, which clothe a nation, this undershirt sits
close to the body. What history too, and what stores of
primitive and savage observation, it infolds ! Cambridge
is the bridge of the Cam ; Sheffield, the field of the river
Sheaf; Leicester, the castra or camp of the Lear or Leir
(now Soar) ; Rochdale, of the Roch ; Exeter or Excester,
the castra of the Ex ; Exmouth, Dartmouth, Sidmouth,
Teignmouth, the mouths of the Ex, Dart, Sid, and Teign
Rivers. Waltham is strong town ; Radcliflfe is red cliff ;

* Reliquiee Wottonianse, p. 208.

138 ENGLISH TRAITS.

and so on ; — a sincerity and use in naming very striking
to an American, wliose country is wliitewashed all over
by unmeaning- names, the cast-ofF clothes of the country
from which its emigrants came ; or, named at a pinch
from a psalm-tune. But the English are those "barba-
rians " of Jamblichus, who " are stable in their manners,
and firmly continue to employ the same words, which also
are dear to the gods."

'T is an old sneer, that the Irish peerage drew their
names from playbooks. The English lords do not call
their lands after their own names, but call themselves
after their lands ; as if the man represented the country
that bred him ; and tliey rightly wear the token of the
glebe that gave them birth; suggesting that the tie is not
cut, but that there in London, — the crags of Argyle, the
kail of Cornwall, the downs of Devon, the iron of Wales,
the clays of Stafibrd, arc neitlier forgetting nor forgotten,
but know the man who was born by them, and who, like
the long line of his fathers, has carried that crag, that
shore, dale, fen, or woodland in his blood and manners.
It has, too, the advantage of suggesting responsibleness.
A susceptible man could not wear a name which repre-
sented in a strict sense a city or a county of England,
without hearing in it a challenge to duty and honor.

The predilection of the patricians for residence in the
country, combined with tlie degree of liberty possessed
by the peasant, makes the safety of the Enghsli hall.
Mirabeau wrote prophetically from England, in 1784 :
" If revolution break out in Erance, 1 tremble for the
aristocracy : their chateaux will be reduced to ashes, and
their blood spilt in torrents. The English tenant would

ARISTOCRACY. lo9

defend liis lord to the last extremity." Tlie English go
to their estates for grandeur. The French live at court,
and exile themselves to their estates for economy. As
they do not mean to live with their tenants, they do not
conciliate them, but wring from them the last sous.
Evelyn writes from Blois, in 1644 : " The wolves are
here in such numbers, that they often come and take
children out of the streets; yet will not the Duke, who is
sovereign here, permit them to be destroyed."

In evidence of the wealth amassed by ancient families,
the traveller is shown the palaces in Piccadilly, Burling-
ton House, Devonshire House, Lansdowne House in
Berkghire Square, and, lower down in the city, a few
noble liouses which still withstaiKi in all their amplitude
the encroachment of streets. The Duke of Bedford in-
cludes or included a mile square in the heart of London,
where the British Museum, once Montague House, now
stands, and the land occupied by Woburn Square, Bed-
ford Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of Westmin-
ster built within a few years the series of squares called
Belgravia. Stafford House is the noblest palace in Lon-
don. Northumberland House holds its place by Charing
Cross. Chesterfield House remains in Audley Street.
Sion House and Holland House are in the suburbs. But
most of the historical houses are masked or lost in the
modern uses to which trade or charity has converted
them. A multitude of town palaces contain inestimable
galleries of art.

Li the country, the size of private estates is more
impressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on the high-
way twenty-three miles from High Force, a fall of the

140 ENGLISH TEAITS.

TeeSj towards Darlington, past Raby Castle, flirougli
tlie estate of the Duke of Cleveland. The Marquis of
Breadalbane rides out of his house a hundred miles in
a straight line to the sea, on his own property. The
Duke of Sutherland owns the county of Sutherland,
stretching across Scotland from sea to sea. The Duke
of Devonshire, besides his other estates, owns 96,000
acres in the county of Derby. The Duke of Richmond
has 40,000 acres at Goodwood, and 300,000 at Gordon
Castle. The Duke of Norfolk's park in Sussex is fifteen
miles in circuit. An agriculturist bought lately the
island of Lewes, in Hebrides, containing 500,000 acres.
The possessions of the Earl of Lonsdale gave him eight
seats in Parliament. This is the Heptarchy again ; and
before the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four
persons sent three hundred and seven members to Par-
liament. The borough-mongers governed England.

These large domains are growing larger. Tlie great
estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In 1786, the
soil of England was owned by 250,000 cor])orations and
proprietors; and, in 1822, by 32,000. These broad
estates find room in this narrow island. All over Eng-
land, scattered at short intervals among ship-yards, mills,
mines, and forges, are the paradises of the nobles, where
the livelong repose and refinement are heightened by the
contrast with the roar of industry and necessity, out of
which yon have stepped aside.

I was surprised to observe the very small attendance
usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573 peers, on
ordinary days, only twenty or thirty. Where are they ?

ARISTOCRACY. Ill

I asked. " At home on their estates, devoured by ennui,
or in the Alps, or up the Rhine, in the Harz Mountains,
or in Egypt, or in India, on the Ghauts." But, witli
such interests at stake, how can these men afford to
neglect tliem ? " O," replied my friend, " why should
they work for themselves, when every man in England
works for them, and will suffer before they come to
harm ? " The hardest radical instantly uncovers, and
changes his tone to a lord. It was remarked on the
10th April, 1818 (the day of the Chartist demonstration),
that the upper classes were, for the first time, actively
interesting themselves in their own defence, and men of
rank were sworn special constables, with the rest. " Be-
sides, why need they sit out the debate ? Has not the
Duke of Wellington, at this moment, their proxies, — the
proxies of fifty peers in his pocket, to vote for them, if
there be an emergency ? "

It is however true, that the existence of the House of
Peers as a branch of the government entitles them to fill
half the Cabinet; and their weight of property and station
gives them a virtual nomination of the other half; whilst
they have their share in the subordinate offices, as a school
of training. This monopoly of political power has given
them their intellectual and social eminence in Europe.
A few law lords and a few political lords take the brunt
of public business. In the army, the nobility fill a large
part of the high commissions, and give to these a tone of
expense and splendor, and also of exclusiveness. They
have borne their full share of duty and danger in this
service ; and there are few noble families which have not
paid in some of their members, the debt of life or limb,

14>i ENGLISH TRAITS.

ill the sacrifices of tlie Russian war. For the rest, the
nobility have the lead in matters of state, and of expense ;
in questions of taste, in social usages, in convivial and
domestic hospitalities. In general, all that is required of
them is to sit securely, to preside at public meetings, to
countenance charities, and to give the example of that
decorum so dear to the British heart.

If one asks, in the critical spirit of the day, what ser-
vice this class have rendered ? — uses appear, or they
would have perished long ago. Some of these are easily
enumerated, others more subtle make a part of uncon-
scious history. Their institution is one step in the prog-
ress of society. For a race yields a nobility in some form,
however we name the lords, as surely as it yields women.

The English nobles are high-spirited, active, educated
men, born to wealth and power, who have run through
every country, and kept in every country the best com-
pany, have seen every secret of art and nature, and, when
men of any ability or ambition, have been consulted in
the conduct of every important action. You cannot wield
great agencies without lending yourself to them, and
when it happens that the s})iiit of the earl meets his
rank and duties, we have the best examples of behavior.
Power of any kind readily appears in the manners ; and
beneficent power, le talent de bieti /aire, gives a majesty
which cannot be concealed or resisted.

These people seem to gain as much as they lose by
their position. They survey society, as from the top of
St. Paul's, and if they never hear plain truth from men,
they see the best of everything, in every kind, and they
see things so grouped and amassed as to infer easily the

ARISTOCRACY. 143

sum and genius, instead of tedious particularities. Their
good behavior deserves all its fame, and they have that
simplicity, and that air of repose, which are the finest
ornament of greatness.

The upper classes have only birth, say the people here,
and not thoughts. Yes, but they have manners, and 't is
wonderful, how much talent runs into manners : — no-
where and never so much as in England, They have the
sense of superiority, the absence of all the ambitious
effort which disgusts in the aspiring classes, a pure tone
of thought and feeling, and the power to command,
among their other luxuries, the presence of the most
accomplished men in their festive meetings.

Loyalty is in the English a sub-religion. They wear
the laws as ornaments, and walk by their faith in their
painted May-Fair, as if among the forms of gods. The
economist of 1835 who asks, of what use are the lords?
may learn of Franklin to ask, of what use is a baby?
They have been a social church proper to inspire senti-
ments mutually honoring the lover and the loved. Po-
liteness is the ritual of society, as prayers are of the
church; a school of manners, and a gentle blessing to
the age in which it grew. 'T is a romance adorning
English life with a larger horizon; a midway heaven,
fulfilling to their sense their fairy tales and poetry. This,
just as far as the breeding of the nobleman, really made
him brave, handsome, accomplished, and great-hearted.

On general grounds, whatever tends to form manners,
or to finish men, has a great value. Every one who has
tasted the delight of friendship, will respect every social
guard which our manners can establish, tending to secure

144 ENGLISH THAITS.

from the intrusion of frivolous and distasteful people.
The jealousy of every class to guard itself, is a testimony
to the reality they have found in life. When a man once
knows that he has done justice to himself, let him dis-
miss all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as
he is concerned. He who keeps the door of a mine,
whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel, or plumbago,
securely knows that the world cannot do without him.
Everybody who is real is open and ready for that which
is also real.

Besides, these are they who make England that strong-
box and museum it is ; who gather and protect works of
art, dragged from amidst burning cities and revolution-
ary countries, and brought hither out of all the world. I
look with respect at houses six, seven, eight hundred, or,
like Warwick Castle, nine hundred years old. I par-
doned high park fences, when I saw, that, besides does
and pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles,
Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libraries,
Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manuscripts, monas-
tic architectures, millennial trees, and breeds of cattle
elsewhere extinct. In these manors, after the frenzy of
war and destruction subsides a little, the antiquary finds
the frailest Roman jar, or crumbling Egyptian mummy-
case, without so much as a new layer of dust, keeping
the series of history unbroken, and waiting for its inter-
preter, who is sure to arrive. These lords are the treas-
urers and librarians of mankind, engaged by their pride
and wealth to this function.

Yet there were other works for British dukes to do.
George Loudon, Quintinyc, Evelyn, had taught them to

ARISTOCRACY. 145

make gardens. Arthur Young, Bakewell, and Meclii
Lave made them agricultural. Scotland was a camp
until the day of Culloden. The Dukes of Atliol, Suther-
land, Buccleugh, and the Marquis of Breadalbane have
introduced the rape-culture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drain-
age, the plantation of forests, the artificial replenishment
of lakes and ponds with fish, the renting of game-pre-
serves. Against the cry of the old tenantry, and the
sympathetic cry of the English press, they have rooted
out and planted anew, and now six millions of people live,
and hve better on the same land that fed three millions.

The English barons, in every period, have been brave
and great, after the estimate and opinion of their times.
Tlie grand old halls scattered up and down in England
are dumb vouchers to the state and broad hospitality of
their ancient lords. Shakspeare's portraits of good Duke
Humphrey, of Warwick, of Northumberland, of Talbot,
were drawn in strict consonance with the traditions. A
sketch of the Earl of Shrewsbury, from the pen of Queen
Elizabeth's Archbishop Parker ; * Lord Herbert of Cher-
bury's autobiography ; the letters and essays of Sir
Philip Sidney ; the anecdotes preserved by the antiqua-
ries Puller and Collins ; some glimpses at the interiors of
noble houses, which we owe to Pepys and Evelyn ; the
details which Ben Jonson's masques (performed at Kenil-
worth, Althorpe, Belvoir, and other noble houses) record
or suggest ; down to Aubrey's passages of the life of
Hobbes in the house of the Earl of Devon, are favorable
pictures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst still
shines for us, and its Christmas revels, " where logs not

* Dibdin's Literary Reminiscences, Vol. I. xii.
7 J

146 ENGLISH TEAITS.

burn, but men." At Wilton House, the " xircadia " was
written, amidst conversations with Fulke Greville, Lord
Brooke, a man of no vulgar mind, as his own poems de-
clare him. I must hold Ludlow Castle an honest house,
for which Milton's "Comus" was written, and the com-
pany nobly bred which performed it with knowledge and
sympathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, philos-
ophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid virtues
and of lofty sentiments ; often they have been the friends
and patrons of genius and learning, and especially of the
fine arts ; and at this moment, almost every great house
has its sumptuous picture-gallery.

Of course, there is another side to this gorgeous show.
Every victory was the defeat of a party only less wortliy.
Castles are proud things, but 't is safest to be outside of
them. War is a foul game, and yet war is not the worst
part of aristocratic history. In later times, when the
Imron, educated only for war, with his brains paralyzed
by his stomach, found himself idle at home, he grew fat
and wanton, and a sorry brute. Grammont, Pepys, and
Evelyn show the kennels to which the king and court
went in quest of pleasure. Prostitutes taken from the
theatres were made duchesses, their bastards dukes and
earls. " The young men sat uppermost, the old serious
lords were out of favor." The discourse that the king's
companions had with him was " poor and frothy." No
man who valued liis head might do what these pot-com-
panions familiarly did with the king. In logical sequence
of these dignified revels, Pepys can tell the beggarly shifts
to which the king was reduced, who could not find paper
at his council table, and "no handkerchers " in his ward-

AUISTOCUACY. 147

robe, " and but three bands to liis neck," and the linen-
draper and the stationer were out of pocket, and refusing
to trust liim, and the baker ^vill not bring bread any
longer. Meantime, the Englisli Channel was swept, and
London threatened by the Dutch fleet, manned too by
English sailors, who, having been cheated of their pay for
years by the king, enlisted with the enemy.

Tlie Selwyn correspondence in the reign of George
III. discloses a rottenness in the aristocracy, which
threatened to decompose the state. The sycophancy and
sale of votes and honor, for place and title ; lewdness,
gaming, smuggling, bribery, and cheating; the sneer at
the childish indiscretion of quarrelling with ten thousand
a year ; the want of ideas ; the splendor of the titles, and
the apathy of the nation, are instructive, and make the
reader pause and explore the firm bounds which confined
these vices to a handful of rich men. In the reign of the
Fourth George, things do not seem to have mended, and
the rotten debauchee let down from a window by an in-
clined plane into his coach to take the air, was a scandal
to Europe which the ill fame of his queen and of his
family did nothing to retrieve.

Under the present reign, the perfect decorum of the
Court is thought to have put a check on the gross vices
of the aristocracy ; yet gaming, racing, drinking, and mis-
tresses bring them down, and the democrat can still gather
scandals, if he will. Dismal anecdotes abound, verifying
the gossip of the last generation of dukes served by bai-
liifs, with all their plate in pawn ; of great lords living by
the showing of their houses ; and of an old man wheeled
in his chair from room to room, whilst his chambers are

148 ENGLISH TEAITS.

exliibited to the visitor for money : of ruined dukes and
earls living in exile for debt. The historic names of the
Buckinghams, Beaufort s, Marlboroughs, and Hertfords
have gained no new lustre, and now and then darker
scandals break out, ominous as the new chapters added
under the Orleans dynasty to the " Causes Celebres " in
France. Even peers, who are men of worth and public
spirit, are overtaken and embarrassed by their vast ex-
pense. The respectable Duke of Devonshire, willing to
be the MecEEuas and Lucullus of his island, is reported
to have said that he cannot live at Chatswortli I'mt one
month in the year. Their many houses eat them up.
They cannot sell them, because they are entailed. They
will not let them, for pride's sake, but keep them empty,
aired, and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of
four or five thousand pounds a year. The spending is
for a great part in servants, in many houses- exceeding a
hundred.

Most of them are only chargeable with idleness, which,
because it squanders such vast power of benefit, has the
mischief of crime. " They might be little Providences
on earth," said my friend, "and they are, for the most
part, jockeys and fops." Campbell says : "Acquaintance
with the nobility, I could never keep up. It requires a
life of idleness, dressing, and attendance on their parties."
I suppose, too, that a feeling of self-respect is driving
cultivated men out of this society, as if the noble were
slow to receive the lessons of the times, and had not
learned to disguise his pride of place. A man of wit,
who is also one of the celebrities of wealth and fashion,
confessed to his friend, that he could not enter their

ARISTOCRACY. 149

houses without being made to feel that they were great
lords, aud lie a low plebeian. With the tribe of artistes,
including the musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps
no terms, but excludes them. When Julia Grisi and
Mario sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and
other grandees, a ribbon was stretched between the
singer and the company.

When every noble was a soldier, they were carefully
bred to great personal prowess. The education of a sol-
dier is a simpler affair than that of an earl in the nine-
teenth century. And this was very seriously pursued ;
they were expert in every species of equitation, to the
most dangerous practices, and this down to the accession
of William of Orange. But graver men appear to have
trained their sons for civil affairs. Elizabeth extended
her thought to the future ; and Sir Philip Sidney in his
letter to his brother, and Milton and Evelyn, gave plain
and hearty counsel. Already, too, the English noble
aud squire were preparing for the career of the country-
gentleman, and his peaceable expense. They went from
city to city, learning receipts to make perfumes, sweet
powders, pomanders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems,
coins, and divers curiosities, preparing for a private life
thereafter, in which they should take pleasure ui these
recreations.

All advantages given to absolve the young patrician
from intellectual labor are of course mistaken. " In the
university, noblemen are exempted from the public exer-
cises for the degree, etc., by which they attain a degree
called honorary. At the same time the fees they must
pay for matriculation, and on all other occasions, are

150 ENGLISH TRAITS.

much higher."* Fuller records "the observation of
foreigners, that Englishmen, by making their children
gentlemen, before they are men, cause they are so seldom
wise men." This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson's bitter
apology for primogeniture, " that it makes but one fool
in a family."

The revolution in society has reached this class. The
great povpers of industrial art have no exclusion of name
or blood. The tools of our time, namely, steam, ships,
printing, money, and popular education, belong to those
who can handle them ; and their effect has been, that ad-
vantages once confined to men of family are now open to
the whole ipiddle class. The road that grandeur levels
for his coach, toil can travel in his cart.

This is more manifest every day, but I think it is true
throughout English history. English history, wisely
read, is the vindication of the brain of that people. Here,
at last, were climate and condition friendly to the work-
ing faculty. Who now will work and dare, shall rule.
This is the charter, or the chartism, which fogs, and seas,
and rains ])roclaimed, — that intellect and personal force
should make the law ; that industry and administrative
talent should administer; that work should wear the
crown. I know that not this, but something else is pre-
tended. The fiction with which the noble and the by-
stander equally please themselves is, that the former is of
unbroken descent from the Norman, and so has never
worked for eight hundred years. All the families are
new, but the name is old, and they have made a covenant
with their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis

* Huber, History of Euglish Universities.

ARISTOCRACY. 131

of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay and
extinction of old families, the continual recmiting of these
from new blood. The doors, though ostentatiously
guarded, are really open, and hence the power of the
bribe. All the barriers to rank only whet the thirst, and
enhance the prize. " Now," said Nelson, wlien clearing
for battle, " a peerage, or Westminster Abbey ! " "I have
no illusion left," said Sidney Smith, " but the Archbishop
of Canterbury." " The lawyers," said Burke, " are only
birds of passage in this House of Commons," and tlien
added, with a new figure, " they have their best bower
anchor in the House of Lords."

Another stride that has been taken, appears in the
perishing of heraldry. Wiiilst the privileges of nobility
are passing to the middle class, the badge is discredited,
and the titles of lordship are getting musty and cumber-
some. I wonder that sensible men have not been already
impatient of them. They belong, with wigs, powder, and
scarlet coats, to an earlier age, and may be advanta-
geously consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the digni-
taries of Australia and Polynesia.

A multitude of English, educated at the universities,
bred into their society with manners, ability, and the
gifts of fortune, are every day confronting the peers on
a footing of equality, and outstripping them, as often, in
the race of honor and influence. That cultivated class is
large and ever enlarging. It is computed that, with titles
and without, there are seventy thousand of these people
coming and going in London, who make up what is
called high society. They cannot shut their eyes to tlie
fact that an untitled nobility possess all the power with-

153 ENGLISH TRAITS.

out the inconveniences that belong to rank, and tlie rich
Englislinian goes over the world at the present day,
drawing more than all the advantages which the strong-
est of his kings could command.

CHAPTER XII.

rNHEE-SITIES.

• Of British universities, Cambridge has the most illus-
trious names on its list. At the present day, too, it has
the advantage of Oxford, counting in its alumni a greater
number of distinguished scholars. I regret that I had
but a single day wherein to see King's College Chapel,
the beautiful lawns and gardens of the colleges, and a few
of its gownsmen.

But I availed myself of some repeated invitations to
Oxford, where I had introductions to Dr. Daubeny, Pro-
fessor of Botany, and to the Regius Professor of Divinity,
as well as to a valued friend, a Pellow of Oriel, and went
tliither on the last day of March, 1848. I was the guest
of my friend in Oriel, was housed close upon that college,
and I lived on college hospitalities.

My new friends showed me their cloisters, the Bodleian
Library, the Randolph Gallery, Merton Hall, and the
rest. I saw several faithful, high-minded young men,
some of them in the mood of making sacrifices for peace
of mind, — a topic, of course, on which I had no coun-
sel to offer. Their affectionate and gregarious ways re-
minded me at once of the habits of our Cambridge men.

UNIVERSITIES. . 153

though I imputed to these English an advantage in their
secure and polished manners. The halls are rich with
oaken wainscoting and ceiling. The pictures of the
founders hang from the walls ; the tables glitter with
plate. A youth came forward to the upper table, and
pronounced the ancient form of grace before meals,
which, I suppose, has been in use here for ages, Bene-
dictus henedicat ; henedicitur, benedicatar.

It is a curious proof of the English use and wont, or
of their good-nature, that these young men are locked up
every night at nine o'clock, and the porter at each hall is
required to give the name of any belated student who is
admitted after that hour. Still more descriptive is the
fact, that out of twelve hundred young men, comprising
the most spirited of the aristocracy, a duel has never
occurred.

Oxford is old, even in England, and conservative. Its
foundations date from Alfred, and even from Arthur, if,
as is alleged, the Pheryllt of the Druids had a seminary
here. In the reign of Edward I., it is pretended, here
were thirty thousand students ; and nineteen most noble
foundations were then establisiied. Chaucer found it as
firm as if it had always stood ; and it is in British story,
rich with great names, the school of the island, and the
link of England to the learned of Europe. Hither came
Erasmus, with delight, in 1497. Albericus Gentilis, in
1580, was relieved and maintained by the university.
Albert Alaskie, a noble Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who
visited England to admire the wisdom of Queen Eliza-
beth, was entertained with stage-plays in the Refectory
of Christ-church, in 15 S3. Isaac Casaubon, coming from
7*

154 . ENGLISH TEAITS.

Henri Quatre of France, by invitation of James I., was
admitted to Christ's College, in July, 1613. I saw the
Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ashmole, in 1682,
sent twelve cart-loads of rarities. Here indeed was the
Olyrnpia of all Antony Wood's and Aubrey's games and
heroes, and every inch of ground has its lustre. Tor
Wood's Athena Oxonienses, or calendar of the writers
of Oxford for two hundred years, is a lively record of
English manners and merits, and as much a national
monument as Purchas's Pilgrims or Hansard's Register.
On every side, Oxford is redolent of age and authority.
Its gates shut of themselves against modern innovation.
It is still governed by the statutes of Arclibisliop Laud.
The books in Merton Library are still chained to the
wall. Here, on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro
Popido Anylicano Defensio and Icomclastes were com-
mitted to the flames. I saw the school-court or quadran-
gle, where, in 1683, the Convocation caused the Leviatlian
of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt. I do not know
whether tiiis learned body have yet heard of the Declara-
tion of American Independence, or whether the Ptole-
maic astronomy does not still hold its ground against the
novelties of Copernicus.

As many sons, almost so many benefactors. It is
usual for a nobleman, or indeed for almost every wealthy
student, on quitting college, to leave behind him some
article of plate ; and gifts of all values, from a hall, or a
fellowship, or a library, down to a picture or a spoon, are
continually accruing, in the course of a century. My
friend Doctor J. gave me the following anecdote. In
Sir Thomas Lawrence's collection at London were the

UNIVERSITIES. 155

cartoons of Rapliael and Michel Angelo. This inestima-
ble prize was offered to Oxford University for seven
thonsand pounds. The offer was accepted, and the com-
mittee charged with the affair had collected three thou-
sand pounds, when among other friends they called on
Lord Eldon. Instead of a hundred pounds, he surprised
them by putting down his name for three thousand
pounds. They tqld him, they should now very easily
raise the remainder. "No," he said, " your men have
probably already contributed all they can spare ; I can
as well give the rest " : and he withdrew his check for
three thousand, and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw
the whole collection in April, 1848.

In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed me tlie
manuscript Plato, of the date of a., d. 896, brought by
Dr. Clarke from Egypt; a manuscript Virgil, of the same
century; the first Bible printed at Mentz (I believe in
1450) ; and a duplicate of the same, which had been defi-
cient in about twenty leaves at the end. But, one day,
being in Venice, lie bought a room full of books and
manuscripts — every scrap and fragment — for four
thousand louis d'ors, and had the doors locked and
sealed by the consul. On proceeding, afterwards, to
examine his purchase, he found the twenty deficient
pages of his Mentz Bible, in perfect order ; brought
them to Oxford, with the rest of his purchase, and
placed them in the volume ; but has too mucli awe for
the Providence that appears in bibliography also, to suf-
fer the reunited parts to be rebound. The oldest build-
ing here is two hundred years younger than the frail
manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke from Egypt. No

156 ENGLISH TRAITS.

candle or fire is ever lighted in the Bodleian. Its cata-
logue is the standard catalogue on the desk of every
library in Oxford. In each several college, they under-
score in red ink on this catalogue the titles of books
contained in the library of that college, — the theory
being that the Bodleian has all books. This rich library
spent during the last year (1847) for the purchase of
books £ 1,668.

The logical English train a scholar as they train an
engineer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills
Aveave carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel. They know the
use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse ; and they
draw the greatest amount of benefit out of both. The
reading-men are -kept by hard walking, hard riding, and
measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condi-
tion, and two days before the examination, do no work,
but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college
doomsday. Seven years' residence is the theoretic
period for a master's degree. In point of fact, it has
long been three years' residence, and four years more
of standing. This " three years " is about twenty-one
months in all.*

" The whole expense," says Professor Sewel, " of or-
dinary college tuition at Oxford, is about sixteen guineas
a year." But this plausible statement may deceive a
reader unacquainted with the fact, that the principal
teaching rehed on is private tuition. And the expenses
of private tuition are reckoned at from £ 50 to £ 70 a
year, or $ 1,000 for the whole course of three years and

* Huber, II. T). 304.

UNIVERSITIES. 157

a lialf. At Cambridge $ 750 a year is economical, and
$ 1,500 not extravagant.*

The number of students and of residents, the dignity
of the authorities, the value of the foundations, the his-
tory and the architecture, the known sympathy of entire
Britain in what is done there, justify a dedication to
study in the undergraduate, such as cannot easily be in
America, where his college is half suspected by the
Freshman to be insignificant in the scale beside trade
and politics. Oxford is a little aristocracy in itself, nu-
merous and dignified enough to rank with other estates
in the realm ; and where fame and secular promotion are
to be had for study, and in a direction which has the
unanimous respect of all cultivated nations.

This aristocracy, of course, repairs its own losses ; fills
places, as they fall vacant, from the body of students.
The number of fellowships at Oxford is 540, averaging
£ 200 a year, with lodging and diet at the college. If a
young American, loving learning, and hindered by pov-
erty, were offered a home, a table, the walks, and the
library, in one of these academical palaces, and a thousand
dollars a year as long as he chose to remain a bachelor,
he would dance for joy. Yet these young men thus hap-
pily placed, and paid to read, are impatient of their few
checks, and many of them preparing to resign their fellow-
ships. They shuddered at the prospect of dying a Fellow,
and they pointed out to me a paralytic old man, who was
assisted into the hall. As the number of undergraduates
at Oxford is only about 1,200 or 1,300, and many of these
are never competitors, the chance of a fellowship is very

* Bristed, Five Years at an English University.

158 ENGLISH TRAITS.

great. The income of tlie nineteen colleges is conjec-
tured at £ 150,000 a year.

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of
Greek and Latin, and of mathematics, and the solidity
and taste of English criticism. Whatever luck there may
be in this or that award, an Eton captain can write Latin
longs and shorts, can turn the Court-Guide into hex-
ameters, and it is certain that a Senior Classic can quote
correctly from the Corpus Poetarum, and is critically
learned in all the humanities. Greek erudition exists on
the Isis and Cam, whether the Maud man or the Brazen
Nose man be properly ranked or not ; the atmosphere is
loaded with Greek learning ; the whole river has reached
a certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds, which
this Castalian water kills. The English nature takes
culture kindly. So Milton thought. It refines the Norse-
man. Access to the Greek mind lifts his standard of
taste. He has enough to think of, and, unless of an im-
pulsive nature, is indisposed from writing or speaking,
by the fulness of his mind, and the new severity of his
taste. The great silent crowd of thorough-bred Grecians
always known to be around him, the English writer
cannot ignore. They prune his orations, and point his
pen. Hence, the style and tone of English journalism.
The men have learned accuracy and comprehension,
logic, and pace, or speed of working. They have bot-
tom, endurance, wind. When born with good constitu-
tions, they make those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-
iron men, the dura ilia, whose powers of performance
compare with ours, as the steam-hammer M'ith the music-
box ; — Cokes, Mansfields, Scldens, and Bentleys, and

UNIVERSITIES. 159

when it happens that a superior brain puts a rider on
this admirable horse, we obtain those masters of the
world who combine the highest energy in affairs, with
a supreme culture.

It is contended by those who have been bred at Eton,
Harrow, Rugby, and Westminster, that the public sen-
timent within each of those schools is high-toned and
manly ; that, in their playgrounds, courage is universally
admired, meanness despised, manly feelings and gener-
ous conduct are encouraged ; that an unwritten code of
honor deals to the spoiled child of rank and to the child
of upstart wealth an even-handed justice, purges their
nonsense out of both, and does all that can be done to
make them gentlemen.

Again, at the universities, it is urged, that all goes to
form what England values as the flower of its national
life, _ a well-educated gentleman. The German Huber,
in describing to his countrymen the attributes of an
English gentleman, frankly admits, that "in Germany,
we have nothing of the kind. A gentleman must possess
a political character, an independent and public position,
or, at least, the right of assuming it. He must have
average opulence, either of his own, or in his family.
He should also have bodily activity and strength, unat-
tainable by our sedentary life in public offices. The race
of English gentlemen presents an appearance of manly
vigor and form, uot elsewhere to be found among an equal
number of persons. No other nation produces the stock.
And in England, it has deteriorated. The university is
a decided presumption in any man's favor. And so em-
inent are the members that a glance at the calendars will

160 ENGLISH TRAITS.

show tliat in all the world one cannot be in better com-
pany than on the books of one of the larger Oxford or
Cambridge colleges," *

These seminaries are finishing schools for the upper
classes, and not for the poor. The useful is exploded.
Tlie definition of a public school is " a school wliich
excludes all that could fit a man for standing behind a
counter." f

No doubt, the foundations have been perverted, Ox-
ford, which equals in wealth several of the smaller Eu-
ropean states, shuts up the lectureships which were made
" public for all men thereunto to have concourse" ; mis-
spends the revenues bestowed for such youths "as should
be most meet for towardness, poverty, and painfulness " ;
there is gross favoritism ; many chairs and many fellow-
ships are made beds of ease ; and 't is likely that the
university will know how to resist and make inoperative
the terrors of parliamentary inquiry; no doubt, their
learning is grown obsolete; but Oxford also has its
merits, and I found here also proof of the national fidelity
and thoroughness. Such knowledge as they prize they
possess and impart. Whether in course or by indirec-
tion, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with
prizes and foundation scholarsliips, education according to
the English notion of it is acquired. I looked over the
Examination Papers of tlie year 1848, for the various
scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford,

* Huber, History of the English Universities, Newman's
Translation,

t See Bristed, Five Years in an English University. New
York, 1852.

UNIVERSITIES. 161

the Dean-Ireland, and the University (copies of which
were kindly given me by a Greek professor), containing
the tasks which many competitors had victoriously per-
formed, and 1 believed they would prove too severe tests
for tlie candidates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or
Harvard. And, in general, here was proof of a more
search hig study in the appointed directions, and the
knowledge pretended to be conveyed was conveyed.
Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty very able
men, and three or four hundred well-educated men.

The diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount
of old Norse power. A fop will fight, and, in exigent
circumstances, will play the manly part. In seeing these
youths, I believed I saw already an advantage in vigor
and color and general habit, over their contemporaries in
the American colleges. No doubt much of the power
and brilliancy of the reading-men is merely constitutional
or hygienic. With a hardier habit and i-esolute gymnas-
tics, with five miles more walking, or five ounces less
eating, or with a saddle and gallop of twenty miles a day,
with skating and rowing matches, the American would
arrive at as robust exegesis, and cheery and hilarious
tone. I should readily concede these advantages, which
it would be easy to acquire, if I did not find also that
they read better than we, and write better.

English wealth falling on their school and university
training, makes a systematic reading of the best authors,
and to the end of a knowledge how the things whereof
they treat really stand : whilst pamphleteer or journalist
reading for an argument for a party, or reading to write,
or, at all events, for some by end imposed on them, must

K

162 ENGLISH TRAITS.

read meanly and fragmentarily. Charles I. said, that he
understood English law as well as a gentleman ought to
understand it.

Then they have access to books ; the rich libraries col-
lected at every one of many thousands of houses, give
an advantage not to be attained by a youth in this coun-
try, when one thinks how much more and better may be
learned by a scholar, who, immediately on hearing of
a book, can consult it, than by one who is on the quest
for years, and reads inferior books, because he cannot
find the best.

Again, the great number of cultivated men keep each
other up to a high standard. The habit of meeting well-
read and knowing men teaches the art of omission and
selection.

Universities are, of course, hostile to geniuses, which
seeing and using ways of their own, discredit the rou-
tine : as churches and monasteries persecute youthful
saints. Yet we all send our sons to college, and, though
he be a genius, he must take his chance. The university
must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to
the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. Ox-
ford is a library, and the professors must be librarians.
And I should as soon think of quarrelling with the jan-
itor for not magnifying his office by hostile sallies into
the street, like the Governor of Kertch or Kinburn, as
of quarrelling with the professors for not admiring the
young neologists who pluck the beards of Euclid and
Aristotle, or for not attempting themselves to fill their
vacant shelves as original writers.

It is easy to carp at colleges, and the college, if we

RELIGION. 163

Will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius exists
there also, but will not answer a call of a committee of
tlie House of Commons. It is rare, precarious, eccen-
tric, and darkliug. England is the land of mixture and
surprise, and Avhen you have settled it that the univer-
sities are moribund, out comes a poetic influence from
the heart of Oxford, to mould the opinions of cities, to
build their houses as simply as birds their nests, to give
veracity to art, and charm mankind, as an appeal to
moral order always must. But besides this restorative
genius, the best poetry of England of this age, in the
old forms, comes from two graduates of Cambridge.

CHAPTEK, XIII.

RELIGION.

No people, at the present day, can be explained by
their national religion, Tliey do not feel responsible for
it; it lies far outside of them. Their loyalty to truth
and their labor and expenditure rest on real foundations,
and not on a national church. And English life, it is
evident, does not grow out of the Athanasian creed, or
the Articles, or the Eucharist. It is with religion as
with marriage. A youth marries in haste; afterwards,
when his mind is opened to the reason of the conduct of
life, he is asked, what he thinks of the institution of mar-
riage, and of the right relations of the sexes. 'I should
have much to say,' he might reply, ' if the question were
open, but I have a wife and children, and all question is

1G4 ENGLISH TEAITS.

closed for me.' In ilie havbarous days of a nation, some
cultm is formed or imported ; altars are built, tithes are
paid, priests ordained. The education and expenditure
of the country take that direction, and when wealth, re-
finement, great men, and ties to the world supervene, its
prudent men say, why fight against Fate, or lift these
absurdities which are now mountainous ? Better find
some niche or crevice in this mountain of stone Avhich
religious ages have quarried and carved, wherein to
bestow yourself, than attempt anything ridiculously and
dangerously above your strength, like removing it.

In seeing old castles and cathedrals, I sometimes say,
as to-day, in front of Dundee Church tower, which is
eight hundred years old, ' this was built by another and
a better race than any that now look on it,' And, plainly,
there has been great power of sentiment at work in this
island, of which these buildings are the proofs : as vol-
canic basalts show the work of fire which has been extin-
guished for ages. England felt the full heat of the Chris-
tianity which fermented Europe, and drew, like the
chemistry of fire, a firm line between barbarism and cul-
ture. Tlie power of the religious sentiment put an end
to human sacrifices, checked appetite, inspired the cru-
sades, inspired resistance to tyrants, inspired self-respect,
set bounds to serfdom and slavery, founded libert}^
created the religious architecture, — York, Newstead,
Westminster, Fountains Abbey, llipon, Beverlc}^, and
Dundee, — works to which the key is lost, with the senti-
ment which created them ; inspired the English Bible,
the liturgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Bicli-
ard of Devizes. The priest translated the Yulgatc, and

HELIGION. 165

translated tlie sanctities of old liagiology into English
virtues on English ground. It was a certain affiiinative
or aggressive state of the Caucasian races. Man awoke
refreshed by the sleep of ages. The violence of the
Northern savages exasperated Christianity into power.
It lived by the love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid man-
umitted two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found
attached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite from
labor for the boor on the Sabbath, and on church festi-
vals. " The lord who compelled his boor to labor be-
tween sunset on Saturday and sunset on Sunday, forfeited
him altogether." The priest came out of the people, and
sympathized with his class. The church was the media-
tor, check, and democratic principle in Europe. Latimer,
Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons, Sir Harry
Vane, George Eox, Penn, Bunyan, are the democrats, as
well as the saints of their times. The Catholic Church,
thrown on this toihng, serious people, has made in four-
teen centuries a massive system, close fitted to the man-
ners and genius of the country, at once domestical and
stately. In the long time, it has blended with every-
thing in heaven above and the earth beneath. It moves
through a zodiac of feasts and fasts, names every day of
the year, every town and market and headland and monu-
ment, and has coupled itself with the almanac, that no
court can be held, no field ploughed, no horse shod, with-
out some leave from the church. All maxims of pru-
dence or shop or farm are fixed and dated by the church.
Hence, its strength in the agricultural districts. The
distribution of land into parishes enforces a church sanc-
tion to every civil privilege; and the gradation of the

166 ENGLISH TRAITS.

clergy, — prelates for the rich, and curates for tlie poor,
— with the fact that a classical education has been se-
cured to the clergyman, uuikes them " the link which
unites tlie sequestered peasantry with the intellectual
advancement of the age." *

The EngUsh Church has many certificates to show, of
humble effective service in humanizing the people, in
cheering and refining men, feeding, heaUng, and educat-
ing. It has the seal of martyrs and confessors ; the
noblest books ; a sublime architecture ; a ritual marked
by the same secular merits, nothing cheap or purchasa-
ble.

From this slow-grown church important reactions pro-
ceed ; much for culture, much for giving a direction to
the nation's affection and will to-day. The carved and
pictured chapel — its entire surface animated with image
and emblem — made the parish-church a sort of book
and Bible to the people's eye.

Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service
in the vernacular tongue, it was the tutor and university
of the people. In York minster, on the day of the
enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the ser-
vice of evening prayer read and chanted in tlie choir.
It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal
of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read
with circumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th Jan-
uary, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just fresh
from the Times newspaper and their wine ; and listening
with all the devotion of national pride. That was bind-
ing old and new to some purpose. The reverence for

* Wordsworth.

RELIGION. 167

the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has
tiie history of tlie world, been preserved, and is pre-
served. Here in England every day a chapter of Gen-
esis, and a leader in the Times.

Another part of the same service on this occasion was
not insignificant. Handel's coronation anthem, God save
the King, was played by Dr. Camidge on the organ, with
sublime effect. The minster and the music were made
for each other. It was a hint of the part the church
plays as a political engine. From his infancy, every
Englishman is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the
queen, for the royal family, and the Parliament, by name ;
and this lifelong consecration of these personages cannot
b^ without influence on his opinions.

Tlie universities, also, are parcel of the ecclesiastical
system, and their first design is to form the clergy. Thus
the clergy for a thousand years have been the scholars of
the nation.

The national temperament deeply enjoys the unbroken
order and tradition of its church ; the liturgy, ceremony,
architecture ; the sober grace, the good company, the
connection with the throne, and with history, which
adorn it. And whilst it endears itself thus to men of
more taste than activity, the stability of the English
nation is passionately enlisted to its support, from its
inextricable connection with the cause of public order,
with politics, and with the funds.

Good churches are not built by bad men; at least
there must be probity and enthusiasm somewhere in soci-
ety. These minsters were neither built nor filled by

168 ENGLISH TRAITS.

atheists. No clmrcli has had more learned, mdustrlous,
or devoted men ; plenty of " clerks and bishops, who,
out of their gowns, would turn their backs on no man." *
Their architecture still glows with faith in immortality.
Heats and genial periods arrive in history, or, shall we
say, plenitudes of Divine Presence, by which high tides
are caused in the human spirit, and great virtues and
talents appear, as in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and
again in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when
the nation was full of genius and piety.

But the age of the Wicliffes, Cobhams, Arundels, Beck-
ets ; of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers ; of the Taylors,
Leightons, Herberts ; of the Slierlocks, and Butlers, is
gone. Silent revolutions in opinion have made it impos-
sible that men like tliese should return or find a place in
their once sacred stalls. The spirit that dwelt in this
church has glided away to animate other activities ; and
they who come to the old shrines find apes and players
rustling the old garments.

The religion of England is part of good breeding.
When you see on the Continent the well-dressed Eiiglisli-
man come into his ambassador's cliapel, and put his face
for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, one cannot
help feeling how much national pride prays with him,
and the religion of a gentleman. So far is he from
attaching any meaning to tlie words, that he believes
liimself to liave done almost the generous thing, and that
it is very condescending in him to pray to God. A great
duke said on the occasion of a victory, in the House of
Lords, that he thought the Almighty God had not been

* Fuller.

RELIGION. 169

well used by them, and that it would become their mag-
iiauimitj, after so great successes, to take order that a
proper acknowledgment be made. It is tlie church of
the gentry ; but it is not the church of the poor. The
operatives do not own it, and gentlemen lately testified
in the House of Commons that in their lives they never
saw a poor man in a ragged coat inside a church.

The torpidity on the side of religion of the vigorous
English understanding shows how much wit and folly
can agree in one brain. Their religion is a quotation ;
tlieir church is a doll ; and any examination is interdicted
with screams of terror. In good company, you expect
them to laugh at the fanaticism of the vulgar ; but they
do not ; they are the vulgar.

The English, in common perhaps with Christendom in
the nineteenth century, do not respect power, but only
performance; value ideas only for an economic result.
Wellington esteems a saint only as far as he can be an
army chaplain : " Mr. Briscoll, by his admirable conduct
and good sense, got the better of Methodism, which had
appeared among the soldiers, and once among the offi-
cers." They value a pbilosoplieras they value an apothe-
cary who brings bark or a drench ; and inspiration is only
some blowpipe, or a finer mechanical aid.

I suspect that there is in an Englishman's brain a valve
that can be closed at pleasure, as an engineer shuts off
steam. The most sensible and well-informed men possess
the power of thinking just so far as the bishop in relig-
ious matters, and as the chancellor of the exchequer in
politics. They talk with courage and logic, and show
you magnificent results ; but the same men who have

170 ENGLISH TRAITS.

brouglit free-trade or geology to their present stuiicUng,
look grave and lofty, and shut down tlieir valve, as soon
• as the conversation approaches the English Church.
After that, you talk with a box-turtle.

The action of the university, both in what is taught, and
in the spirit of the place, is directed more on producing
an English gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist. It
ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not
know that tiiere is more cabalism in the Anglican, than
in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified
with the aristocracy. They say, here, that, if you talk
with a clergyman, you are sure to find him well bred,
informed, and candid. He entertains your thought or
your project with sympathy and praise. But if a second
clergyman come in, the sympathy is at an end: two to-
gether are inaccessible to your thought, and, whenever it
comes to action, the clergyman invariably sides with his
church.

The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good
sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The
gospel it preaches is, ' By taste are ye saved.' It keeps
the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in
music and building ; and in buying Pugin, and architec-
tural literature. It has a general good name for amenity
and mildness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church ;
it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive, is perfectly
well bred, and can shut its eyes on all proper occasions.
If you let it alone, it will let you alone. But its instinct
is hostile to all change in politics, literature, or social
ai-ts. The churcli has not been the founder of the Lon-
don University, of the Mechanics' Institutes, of the Eree

RELIGION. 171

School, or whatever aims at diffusion of knowledge. The
Platonists of Oxford are as bitter against this heresy, as
Thomas Taylor.

The doctrine of the Old Testament is the religion *of
England. The first leaf of the New Testament it docs
not open. It believes in a Providence which does not
treat with levity a pound sterling. They are neither
transcendentalists nor Christians. They put up no So-
cratic prayer, much less any saintly prayer for the queen's
mind ; ask neither for light nor right, but say bluntly,
" Grant her in health and wealth long to live." And
one traces this Jewish prayer in all English private his-
tory, from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of
Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir Samuel
Rom illy, and of Hay don the painter. "Abroad with my
wife," writes Pepys piously, " the first time that ever 1
rode in my own coach ; which do make my heart rejoice
and praise God, and pray him to bless it to me, and con-
tinue it." The bill for the naturalization of the Jews (in
1753) was resisted by petitions from all parts of the king-
dom, and by petition from the city of London, reprobat-
ing this bill, as " tending extremely to the dishonor of
the Christian religion, and extremely injurious to the in-
terests and commerce of the kingdom in general, and of
the city of London in particular."

But they have not been able to congeal humanity by
act of Parliament. " The heavens journey still and so-
journ not," and arts, wars, discoveries, and opinion go
onward at their own pace. The new age has new de-
sires, new enemies, new trades, new charities, and reads
the Scriptures with new eyes. The chatter of French

17^ ENGLISH TRAITS.

politics, tlie steam-whistle, the hum of the mill, and the '
noise of embarking emigrants, had quite put most of
the old legends out of mind ; so that when you came to
read the liturgy to a modern congregation, it was almost
absurd in its unfitness, and suggested a masquerade of
old costumes.

No chemist has prospered in the attempt to crystallize
a religion. It is endogenous, like the skin, and other
vital organs. A new statement every day. The prophet
and apostle knew this, and the non-conformist confutes
the conformists, by quoting the texts they must allow.
It is the condition of a religion, to require religion for
its expositor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly
understood by prophet and apostle. The statesman
knows that the religious element will not fail, any more
than the supply of fibi-ine and chyle ; but it is in its
nature constructive, and will organize such a church as
it wants. The wise legislator will spend on temples,
schools, libraries, colleges, but will shun the enriching of
priests. If, in any manner, he can leave the election and
paying of the priest to the people, he will do well. Like
the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a class of
priests, and create opportunity and expectation in the
society, to run to meet natural endowment, in this kind.
But, when wealth accrues to a chaplaincy, a bishopric, or
rectorship, it requires moneyed men for its stewards, who
will give it another direction than to the mystics of their
day. Of course, money will do after its kind, and will
steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurcli the people
to whom it was bequeathed. The class certain to be
excluded from all preferment are tlie religious, — and

RELIGION. 173

driven to other cliurclies ; — which is nature's vis niedi-
catrix.

The curates are ill paid, and the prelates are overpaid.
This abuse draws into the church the children of the
nobility, and other unfit persons, w4io have a taste for
expense. Thus a bishop is only a surpliced merchant.
Through his lawn, I can see the bright buttons of the
shopman's coat glitter. A wealth like that of Durham
makes almost a premium on felony. Brougham, in a
speech in the House of Commons on the Irish elective
franchise, said, "How will the reverend bishops of the
other house be able to express their due abhorrence of
the crime of perjury, who solemnly declare in the pres-
ence of God, that when they are called upon to accept a
living, perhaps of £ 4,000 a year, at that very instant, they
are moved by the Holy Ghost to accept the office and
administration thereof, and for no other reason what-
ever ? " The modes of initiation are more damaging
than custom-house oaths. The bishop is elected by the
Dean and Prebends of the cathedral. The Queen sends
these gentlemen a conge (TeUre, or leave to elect; but
also sends them the name of the person whom they are
to elect. They go into the cathedral, chant and pray,
and beseech the Holy Ghost to assist them in their
choice ; and, after these invocations, invariably find that
the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the recom-
mendations of the Queen.

But you must pay for conformity. All goes well as
long as you run with conformists. But you, who are an
honest man in other particulars, know, that there is alive
somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point

174 ENGLISH TRAITS.

also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the
day when you meet him, you sink into the class of coun-
terfeits. Besides, this succumbing has grave penalties.
If you take in a lie, you must take in all that belongs to
it. England accepts this ornamented national church,
and it glazes the eyes, bloats the flesh, gives the voice a
stertorous clang, and clouds the understanding of the
receivers.

The English Church, undermined by German criticism,
had nothing left but tradition, and was led logically back
to Romanism. But that was an element which only hot
heads could breathe : in view of the educated class,
generally, it was not a fact to front the sun; and the
alienation of such men from the church became complete.

Nature, to be sure, had her remedy. Religious per-
sons are driven out of the Established CImrch into sects,
which instantly rise to credit, and hold the Establishment
in check. Nature has sharper remedies, also. The Eng-
lish, abhorring change in all things, abhorring it most in
matters of religion, cling to the last rag of form, and are
dreadfully given to cant. The English (and I wish it
were confined to them, but 't is a taint in the Anglo-
Saxon blood in both hemispheres), the English and the
Americans cant beyond all other nations. The French
relinquish all that industry to them. What is so odious
as the polite bows to God, in our books and newspapers ?
The popular press is flagitious in the exact measure of its
sanctimony, and the religion of the day is a theatrical
Sinai, where the thunders are supplied by the property-
man. The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire. Punch
finds an inexhaustible material. Dickens wriles novels

RELIGION. 175

on Exeter Hall liumanitj. Thackeray exposes the heart-
less high life. Nature revenges herself more summarily
by the heathenism of the lower classes. Lord Shaftes-
bury calls the poor tliieves together, and reads sermons
to them, and they call it 'gas.' George Borrow sum-
mons the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews
in Egypt, and reads to tliem the Apostles' creed in
Romany. " When I had concluded," he says, " I looked
around me. The features of the assembly were twisted,
and the eyes of all turned upon me with a frightful
squint : not an individual present but squinted ; the gen-
teel Pepa, the good-humored Chicharona, the Cosdami,
all squinted : the Gypsy jockey squinted worst of all."

The church at this moment is much to be pitied. She
has nothing left but possession. If a bishop meets an
intelligent gentleman, and reads fatal interrogations iu
his eyes, he has no resource but to take wine with him.
False position introduces cant, perjury, simony, and ever
a lower class of mind and character into the clergy ; and,
when the hierarchy is afraid of science and education,
afraid of piety, afraid of tradition, and afraid of tlieolog}^
there is nothmg left but to quit a church which is no
longer one.

But the religion of England, — is it the Established
Churcli ? no ; is it the sects ? no ; they are only perpetu-
ations of some private man's dissent, and are to the Es-
tablished Church as cabs are to a coach, cheaper and
more convenient, but really the same thing. Where
dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells elec-
tricity, or motion, or thought, or gesture. They do not
dwell or stay at all. Electricity cannot be made fast,

176 ENGLISH TRAITS.

mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the
Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep
it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore;
it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a
newness, a surprise, a secret, which perplexes them, and
puts them out. Yet, if religion be the doing of all good,
and for its sake the suffering of all evil, sovffrir de tout le
monde et ne faire sotiffrir personue, that divine secret has
existed in England from the days of Alfred to those of
Romilly, of Ciarkson, and of Florence Nightingale, and in
thousands who have no fame.

CHAPTEE XIV.

LITERATURE.

A STRONG common-sense, which it is not easy to unseat
or disturb, marks the English mind for a thousand years ;
a rude strength newly applied to thought, as of. sailors
and soldiers who had lately learned to read. They have
no fancy, and never are surprised into a covert or witty
word, such as pleased the Athenians and Italians, and
was convertible into a fable not long after ; but they de-
light in strong earthy expression, not mistakable, coarsely
true to the human body, and, though spoken among
princes, equally fit and welcome to the mob. This home-
liness, veracity, and plain style appear in the earliest
extant works, and in the latest. It imports into songs
and ballads the smell of the earth, the breath of cattle,
and, like a Dutch painter, seeks a household charm,

LITERATURE. 177

tlioiigli by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional
utiHty in verse. The kail and herrings are never out of
sight. The poet nimbly recovers himself from every
sally of the imagination. The English muse loves the
farm-yard, the lane and market. Si»e says, with De
Stael, " I tramp in the mire with wooden shoes, when-
ever they would force me into the clouds." For, the
Englishman has accurate perceptions; takes hold of
things by the right end, and there is no slipperiness in
his grasp. He loves the axe, the spade, the oar, the
gun, the steam-pipe : he has built the engine he uses.
He is materialist, economical, mercantile. He must be
treated with sincerity and reality, with muffius and not
the promise of muffius ; and prefers his hot chop, with
perfect security and convenience in the eating of it, to
the chances of the amplest and Erenchiest bill of fare,
engraved on embossed paper. When he is intellectual,
and a poet or a philosopiier, he carries the same hard
truth and the same keen machinery into the mental
sphere. His mind must stand on a fact. He will not
be baffled, or catch at clouds, but the mind must have
a symbol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in
Dante, is the vice-like tenacity with which he holds a
mental image before the eyes, as if it were a scutcheon
I)ainted on a shield. Byron "liked something craggy
to break his mind upon." A taste for plain strong
speech, what is called a biblical style, marks the English.
It is in Alfred, and the Saxon Chronicle, and in the
Sagas of the Northmen. Latimer was homely. Hobbes
was perfect in the "noble vulgar speech." Donne,
Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker, Cotton,
8* L

178 ENGLISH TRAITS.

and the translators, wrote it. How realistic or material-
istic in treatment of his subject is Swift. He describes
his fictitious persons as if for the police. Defoe has no
insecurity or choice, Hudibras has the same hard men-
tality, — keeping the truth at once to the senses, and to
the intellect.

It is not less seen in poetry. Chaucer's hard painting
of his Canterbury pilgrims satisfies the senses. Shak-
speare, Spenser, and Milton, in their loftiest ascents,
have this national grip and exactitude of mind. This
mental materialism makes the value of English transcen-
dental genius; in these writers, and in Herbert, Henry
More, Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxou
materialism and narrowness, exalted into the sphere of
intellect, makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Mil-
ton. When it reaches the pure element, it treads the
clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its eleva-
tions, materialistic, its poetry is common-sense inspired ;
or iron raised to white heat.

The marriage of the two qualities is in their speech.
It is a tacit rule of the language to make the frame or
skeleton of Saxon words, and, when elevation or orna-
ment is sought, to interweave Uoman ; but sparingly ;
nor is a sentence made of lloman words alone, Avithout
loss of strength. The children and laborers use the Saxon
nnmixed. The Latin unmixed is abandoned to the col-
leges and Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the Eng-
lish island; and, in their dialect, the male principle is
the Saxon; the female, the Latin; and they are com-
bined in every discourse. A good writer, if he has in-
dulged in a lloman roundness, makes haste to chasten and
nerve his period by English monosyllables.

LITERATURE. 179

When tlie Golliic nations came into Europe, they
fonnd it liglited with the sun and moon of Hebrew and
of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain, long ke|)t
in the dark, were finely sensible to the double glory. To
tiie images from this twin source (of Christianity and art),
tlie mind became fruitful as by the incubation of the Holy
Ghost. The English mind flowered in every faculty.
The common-sense was surprised and inspired. For two
centuries, England was piiilosophic, religious, poetic,
Tlie mental furniture seemed of larger scale ; the memory
capacious like the storehouse of the rains. The ardor and
endurance of study; the boldness and facility of their
mental construction; their fency, and imagination, and
easy spanning of vast distances of thought; the enter-
prise or accosting of new subjects ; and, generally, the
easy exertion of power, astonish, like the legendary feats
of Guy of Warwick. The union of Saxon precision and
Oriental soaring, of which Shakspeare is the perfect
example, is shared in less degree by the writers of two
centuries. I find not only the great masters out of all
rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the time
charged with a nuisculine force and freedom.

There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor, and close-
ness to the matter in hand, even in the second and third
class of writers ; and, I think, in the common style of
the people, as one finds it in the citation of wills, letters,
and public documents, in proverbs, and forms of speech.
Tiie more hearty and sturdy expression may indicate
that the savageness of the Norseman was not all gone.
Their dynamic brains hurled oif their words, as the revolv-
ing stone hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the

180 ENGLISH THATTS.

seveiiteentli century sentences and phrases of edge not to
be matched in tlie nineteenth. Their poets by simple
force of mind equahzed themselves with the accumulated
science of ours. The country gentlemen had a posset or
drink they called October ; and the poets, as if by this
hint, knew how to distil the whole season into their
autumnal verses: and, as nature, to pique the more,
sometimes works up deformities into beauty, in some rare
Aspasia, or Cleopatra ; and, as the Greek art wrought
many a vase or column, in which too long, or too lithe,
or nodes, or pits and flaws, are made a beauty of; so
these were so quick and vital, that they could charm and
enrich by mean and vulgar objects,

A man must think that age well taught and thought-
ful, by which masques and poems, like those of Ben
Jonson, full of heroic sentiment in a manly style, were
received with favor. The unique fact in literary history,
the unsurprised reception of Shakspeare, — the recep-
tion proved by his making his fortune ; and the apathy
proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric, —
seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the
people. Judge of the splendor of a nation, by the insig-
nificance of great individuals in it. The manner in which
they learned Greek and Latin, before our modern facili-
ties were yet ready, without dictionaries, grammars, or
indexes, by lectures of a professor, followed by their own
searchings, — required a more robust memory, and co-
operation of all the faculties ; and their scholars, Cam-
den, Usher, Selden, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor,
Burton, Bentley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity
and method of engineers.

LITERATURE. 181

The influence of Plato tinges the British genius.
Their minds loved anah3gy; were cognizant of resem-
blances, and climbers on the staircase of unity. 'T is a
very old strife between those who elect to see identity,
and those who elect to see discrepancies ; and it renews
itself in Britain, The poets, of course, are of one part ;
the men of the world, of the other. But Britain had
many disciples of Plato, — More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney,
Lord Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chap-
man, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berkeley, Jere-
my Taylor.

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries
of observations, on useful science, and his experiments,
I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of Pranklin,
or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a
talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of
exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and
marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that
goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules of its
genesis or its diffusion are not known. That knowledge,
if we had it, would supersede all we call science of the
mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-chemis-
try ; — the vital point being, — how far the sense of
unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances predominated.
For, wherever the mind takes a step, it is, to put itself at
one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class
with which it has been conversant. Hence, all poetry,
and all affirmative action comes.

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the anal-
ogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming
from tlic best example) Platonists. Whoever discredits

182 ENGLISH TUAITS.

analogy, and requires heaps of facts, before any theories
can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing
original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke
is as surely the influx of decouiposition and of prose, as
Bacon and the Platouists, of growth. The Platonic is
the poetic tendency ; the so-called scientific is the nega-
tive and poisonous. 'T is quite certain, that Spenser,
Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists ; and
that the dull men will be Lockists. Then pohtics and
commerce will absorb from the educated class men of
talents without genius, precisely because such have no
resistance.

Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends, required
in his map of the mind, first of all, universality, or prima
'philosophia, the receptacle for all such profitable observa-
tions and axioms as fall not within the compass of any
of the special parts of philosophy, but are more common,
and of a higher stage. He held this element essential :
it is never out of mind : he never spares rebukes for
such as neglect it ; believing that no perfect discovery
can be made in a flat or level, but you must ascend to a
higher science. "If any man thinketh philosophy and
universality to be idle studies, he does not consider that
all professions are from thence served and supplied ; and
this I take to be a great cause that has hindered the pro-
gression of learning, because these fundamental knowl-
edges liave been studied but in passage." He explained
himself by giving various quaint examples of the sum-
mary or common laws, of which each science has its own
illustration. He complains, that " he finds this part of
learning very deficient, the profoundcr sort of wits draw-

LITERATUUE. 183

ing a bucket now and tlien for their own use, bnt the
sprhig-liead unvisited. This was the dr)/ light which did
scorch and offend most men's watery natures." Plato had
signified tlie same sense, when he said : " All the great
arts require a subtle and speculative research into the
law of nature, since loftiness of thought and perfect
mastery over every subject seem to be derived from
some such source as this. This Pericles had, in addi-
tion to a great natural genius. For, meeting with Anax-
agoras, who was a person of this kind, he attached him-
self to him, and nourished himself with sublime specula-
tions on the absolute intelligence ; and imported thence
into the oratorical art whatever could be useful to it."

A few generalizations always circulate in the world,
whose authors we do not rightly know, which astonish,
and appear to be avenues to vast kingdoms of thought,
and these are in the world constants, like the Copernican
and Newtonian theories in pliysics. In England, these
may be traced usually to Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, or
Hooker, even to Van Helniont and Belimen, and do all
have a kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks.
Of this kind is Lord Bacon's sentence, that "Nature is
commanded by obeying her " ; his doctrine of poetry,
which "accommodates the shows of things to the desires
of the mind " ; or the Zoroastrian definition of poetry,
mystical, yet exact, " apparent pictures of unapparent
natures " ; Spenser's creed, that " soul is form, and doth
the body make " ; the theory of Berkeley, that we have
no certain assurance of the existence of matter ; Doctor
Samuel Clarke's argument for theism from the nature of
space and time; Harrington's political rule, that power

184 ENGLISH TRAITS.

nmst rest on land, — a rule whicli reqnircs to be liberally
interpreted ; tlie theory of Swedenborg, so cosniically
applied by him, that the man makes his heaven and hell ;
Hegel's study of civil history, as the conflict of ideas and
the victory of the deeper tiiought ; the identity-philosophy
of Schelliug, couched in the statement that "all differ-
ence is quantitative." So the very announcement of the
theory of gravitation, of Kepler's threo' harmonic laws,
and even of Dalton's doctrine of definite proportions,
finds a sudden response in tlie mind, whicli remains a
superior evidence to empirical demonstrations. I cite
these generalizations, some of which are more recent,
merely to indicate a class. Not these particulars, but
the mental plane or the atmosphere from which they
emanate, was the home and element of the writers and
readers in what we loosely call the Elizabsthan age (say
in literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet
a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jonson's
remark on Lord Bacon : " About his time, and within
his view, were born all the wits that could honor a
nation, or help study."

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once
before. These heights could not be maintained. As we
find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, and have
received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so
history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed
races became effete. So it fared with English genius.
These heights were followed by a meanness, and a de-
scent of the mind into lower levels ; the loss of wings ;
no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of
ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and

LITERATURE. 185

his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, of the
English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty
sides of Parnassus, on which they had once Avalked with
echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved ;
the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later Eng.
lish want the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of groupuig
men in natural classes by an insight of general laws, so
deep, that the rule is deduced with equal precision from
f3w subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives.
Shakspcare is supreme in that, as in all the great mental
energies. The Gormans g3iieralize : the English cannot
interpret the German mind. German science compre-
hends the English. The absence of the faculty in
England is shown by the timidity which accumulates
mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of
men and miles of redoubts, to compensate the inspira-
tions of courage and conduct.

The English shrink from a generalization. " They do
not look abroad into universality, or they draw only a
bucketful at the fountain of the Eirst Philosophy for
their occasion, and do not go to the spring-head."
Bacon, who said this, is almost unique among his coun-
trymen in that faculty, at least among the prose-writers.
Milton, who was the stair or high table-land to let down
the English genius from the summits of Shaksp^are, used
this privilege sometimes in poetry, more rarely in prose.
For a long interval afterwards, it is not found. Burke
was addicted to generalizing, but his was a shorter line ;
as his thoughts have less depth, they have less compass.
Hume's abstractions are not deep or wise. He owes his
fame to one keen observation, that no copula had been

18G ENGLISH TRAITS.

detected between any cause and effect, either in physics
or in thought ; tliat the term cause and effect was loosely
or gratuitously applied to what we know only as consecu-
tive, not at all as causal. Dr. Johnson's written abstrac-
tions have little value : the tone of feeling in them makes
their chief worth.

Mr. Hallam, a learned and elegant scholar, has written
the history of European literature for three centuries, —
a performance of great ambition, inasmuch as a judgment
was to be attempted on every book. But his eye does
not reach to the ideal standards; the verdicts are all
dated from London : all new thought must be cast into
the old moulds. The exj)ausive element which creates
literature is steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his
school. Hallam is uniforndy polite, but M^ith deficient
sympathy ; writes with resolute generosity, but is uncon-
scious of the deep worth which lies in the mystics, and
which often outvalues as a seed of power and a source of
revolution all the correct writers and shining reputations
of their day. He passes in silence, or dismisses with a
kind of contempt, the profounder masters : a lover of
ideas is not only uncongenial, but unintelligible. Hallam
inspires respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his
manifest love of 'good books, and he lifts himself to own
better than almost any the greatness of Shakspeare, and
better than Johnson he appreciates Milton. But in Hal-
lam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve of Mackintosh, one
still finds the same type of English genius. It is wise
and rich, but it lives on its capital. It is retrospective.
How can it discern and hail the new forms that are loom-
ing up on the horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts

LITERATURE. 187

wliicli cannot dress themselves out of any old wardrobe
of the past ?

The essays, the fiction, and tlie poetry of the day liave
the like municipal limits. Dickens, with preternatural
apprehension of the language of manners, and the varie-
ties of street life, with pathos and laughter, with patriotic
and still enlarging generosity, writes London tracts. He
is a painter of English details, like Hogarth ; local and
temporary in his tints and style, and local in his aims.
Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional ability, is
distinguished for Ills reverence of intellect as a temporal-
ity, and appeals to the worldly ambition of the student.
His romances tend to fan these low flames. Their novel-
ists despair of the heart. Thackeray finds that God has
made no allowance for the poor thing in his universe ; —
more 's the pity, he thinks ; — but 't is not for us to be
wiser : we must renounce ideals, and accept London,

Tlie brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the
English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches,
that good means good to eat, good to wear, material
commodity ; that the glory of modern philosophy is its
direction on " fruit " ; to yield economical inventions ;
and that its merit is to avoid ideas, and avoid morals.
He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philos-
ophy, in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentan-
gling the intellect from theories of the all-Eair and all-
Good, and pinning it down to the making a better
sick-chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid ; — this
not ironically, but in good faith ; — that, " solid advan-
tage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is
the only good. The eminent benefit of astronomy is the

188 ENGLISH TRAITS.

better navigation it creates to enable tlie fruit-sliips to
bring home tLeir lemons and wine to the London grocer.
It was a curious result, in which the civility and religion
of England for a thousand years ends in denying morals,
and reducing the intellect to a saucepan. The critic
hides his scepticism under the English cant of practical.
To convince the reason, to touch the conscience, is ro-
mantic pretension. The fine arts fall to the ground.
Beauty, except as luxurious commodity, does not exist.
It is very certain, I may say in passing, that if Lord
Bacon had been only the sensuahst his critic pretends,
he would never have acquired the fame which now en-
titles him to this patronage. It is because he had im-
agination, the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an
element of contemplation out of all modern English
atmospheric gauges, that he is impressive to the imagi-
nations of men, and has become a potentate not to be
ignored. Sir David Brewster sees the high place of
Bacon, without finding Newton indebted to him, and
thinks it a mistake. Bacon occupies it by specific grav-
ity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any tutoring
more or less of Newton, etc., but an effect of the same
cause which showed itself more pronounced afterwards
in Hooke, Boyle, and Halley.

Coleridge, a cathoHc mind, with a hunger for ideas,
with eyes looking before and after to the highest bards
and sages, and who wrote and spoke the only high criti-
cism in his time, is one of those who save England
from the reproach of no longer possessing the capacity
to appreciate what rarest wit the island has yielded.
Yet the misfortune of his life, his vast attempts but most

LITERATURE. 189

inadequate performiugs, failing to accomplisli any one
masterpiece, seems to mark the closing of an era. Even
in liim, the traditional Englishman was too strong for
the philosopher, and he fell into accommodations : and,
as Burke had striven to idealize the English State, so
Coleridge ' narrowed his mind ' in the attempt to recon-
cile the Gothic rule and dogma of the Anglican Church,
with eternal ideas. But for Coleridge, and a lurking
taciturn minority, uttering itself in occasional criticism,
oftener in private discourse, one would say, that in
Germany and in America is the best mind in England
rightly respected. It is the surest sign of national decay,
when the Bramins can no longer read or understand the
Braminical philosophy.

In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed all
this materialism, Carlyle was driven by his disgust at the
])ettiness and the cant, into the preaching of Fate. In
comparison with all this rottenness, any check, any
cleansing, though by fire, seemed desirable and beautiful.
He saw little difference in the gladiators, or the "causes"
for which they combated ; the one comfort was, that they
were all going speedily into the abyss together. And
liis imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation,
avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of the
laws of decay. The necessities of mental structure force
all minds into a few categories, and where impatience of
the tricks of men makes Nemesis amiable, and builds
altars to the negative Deity, the inevitable recoil is to
heroism or the gallantry of the private heart, which
decks its immolation with glory, in the unequal combat
of will against fate.

190 ENGLISH TRAITS.

Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of
Tourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought
to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a
catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest at-
tempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible
knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long
Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and
only lacking what ought to accompany such powers, a
manifest centrality. If his mind does not rest in immov-
able biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is
not yet : but a master should inspire a confidence that
he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present
studies always the same high place.

It would be easy to add exceptions to the limitary tone
of English thought, and much more easy to adduce ex-
amples of excellence in particular veins ; and if, going
out of the region of dogma, we pass into that of general
culture, there is no end to the graces and amenities, wit,
sensibility, and erudition, of the learned class. But the
artificial succor which marks all English performance,
appears in letters also : much of their aesthetic produc-
tion is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary repu-
tations have been achieved by forcible men, whose
relation to literature was purely accidental, but who
were driven by tastes and modes they found in vogue
into their several careers. So, at this moment, every
ambitious young man studies geology; so members of
Parliament are made, and churchmen.

The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has reacted
on the national mind. They are incapable of an inutility,
and respect the five mechanic powers even in their song.

LITERATURE. 191

Tlie voice of tlieir modem muse has a sliglit hint of the
steam-whistle, and tlie poem is created as an ornament
and finish of their monarcliy, and by no means as the
bird of a new morning wiiich forgets the past world in
the full enjoyment of that wliich is forming. They are
with difficulty ideal ; they are the most conditioned men,
as if, having the best conditions, they could not bring
tliemselves to forfeit them. Every one of them is a
thousand years old, and lives by his memory ; and when
yon say this, they accept it as praise.

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels,
statistics, tabulation, and engineering, and even what is
called philoso|)hy and letters is mechanical in its struc-
ture, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no
religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed
any more. The tone of colleges and of scholars and of
literary society has this mortal air. I seem to walk on
a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert
every variety of talent on a lower ground, and may be
said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost all
commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science.
A good Englishman shuts himself out of three fourths
of his mind, and confines himself to one fourth. He has
learning, good sense, power of labor, and logic : but a
faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes ; a
belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must
follow and not lead the laws of the mind ; a devotion to
the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and Milton,
and Harrington, the modern English mind repudiates.

I fear the same fault lies in their science, since they
have known how to make it repulsive, and bereave nature

192 ENGLISH TRAITS.

of its charm ; — tliough perhaps the complahit flies wider,
and the vice attaches to many more than to Britisli pliysi-
cists. The eye of the naturalist must have a scope Hke
nature itself, a susceptibility to all impressions, alive to
the heart as well as to the logic of creation. But Eng-
lish science puis humanity to the door. It wants the
connection which is the test of genius. The science is
false by not being poetic. It isolates the reptile or mol-
lusk it assumes to explain ; whilst reptile or mollusk only
exists in system, in relation. The poet only sees it as an
inevitable step in the path of the Creator. But, in Eng-
land, one hermit finds this fact, and another finds that,
and lives and dies ignorant of its value. There are great
exceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas ; perhaps of
Robert Brown, the botanist ; and of Richard Owen, who
has imported into Britain the German homologies, and
enriched science with contributions of his own, adding
sometimes the divination of the old masters to the un-
broken power of labor in the English mind. But for the
most part, the natural science in England is out of its
loyal alliance with morals, and is as void of imagination
and free play of thouglit, as conveyancing. It stands in
strong contrast with the genius of the Germans, those
semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of their
lieight of view, preserve their enthusiasm, and think for
Europe.

No hope, no sublime augury, cheers the student, no
secure striding from experiment onward to a foreseen law,
but only a casual dipping here and there, like diggers in
California " prospecting for a placer " tliat will pay. A
horizon of brass of the diameter of his umbrella shuts

LITERATURE. 193

down around liis senses. Squalid contentment vr'ith con-
ventions, satire at the names of philosopliy and religion,
parochial and shop-till politics, and idolatry of usage,
betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample on
nationalities to reproduce London and Londoners in
Europe and Asia, so they fear the hostility of ideas, of
poetry, of religion, — ghosts which they cannot lay ; and,
having attempted to domesticate and dress the Blessed
Soul itself in English broadcloth and gaiters, they are
tormented with fear that herein lurks a force that will
sweep their system away. The artists say, " Nature puts
us out " ; the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry
earnest speech with banter and levity; they laugh you
down, or they change the subject. " The fact is," say
they over their wine, " all that about liberty, and so forth,
is gone by ; it won't do any longer." The practical and
comfortable oppress them with inexorable claims, and the
smallest fraction of power remains for heroism and poetry.
No poet dares murmur of beauty out of the precinct of
his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a Providence which
does not respect English utility. Tlie island is a roaring-
volcano of fate, of material values, of tariffs, and laws of
repression, glutted markets and low prices.

Li the absence of the highest aims, of the pure love of
knowledge, and the surrender to nature, there is the
suppression of the imagination, the priapism of the
senses and the understanding ; we have the factitious
instead of the natural ; tasteless expense, arts of comfort,
and the rewarding as an illustrious inventor whosoever
will contrive one impediment more to interpose between
the man and his objects.

9 M

194 ENGLISH THAITS.

Thus poetry is degraded, and made ornamental. Pope
and liis school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted
cake. What did Walter Scott write without stint ? a
rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland. And the libraries
of verses they print have this Birmingham character.
How many volumes of well-bred metre we must jingle
through, before we can be filled, taught, renewed ! We
want the miraculous ; the beauty which we can manufac-
ture at no mill, — can give no account of ; the beauty of
which Chaucer and Chapman had the secret. The poetry
of course is low and prosaic ; only now and then, as in
Wordsworth, conscientious ; or in Byron, passional ; or
in Tennyson, factitious. But if I should count the poets
who have contributed to the Bible of existing England
sentences of guidance and consolation which are still
glowiug and etfective, — iiow few ! Sliall I find my
heavenly bread in tlie reigning poets ? Where is great
design in modern English poetry? The English have
lost sight of the fact that poetry exists to speak the
spiritual law, and that no wealth of description or of
fancy is yet essentially new, and out of the limits of
prose, until this condition is reached. Therefore the
grave old poets, like the Greek artists, heeded their
designs, and less considered the finish. It was their
office to lead to the divine sources, out of which all this,
and much more, readily springs ; and, if this religion is
in the poetry, it raises us to some purpose, and we can
well afford some staidness, or hardness, or want of pop-
ular tune m the verses.

The exceptional fact of the period is the genius of
Wordsworth. He had no master but nature and soli-

LITERATURE. 195

tude. " He wrote a poem," says Landor, " without the
aid of war." His verse is the voice of sanity in a
worldly and ambitious age. One regrets that his tem-
perament was not more liquid and musical. He has
written longer than he was inspired. But for the rest,
he has no competitor.

Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where Words-
worth wanted. There is no finer ear than Tennyson's,
nor more command of the keys of language. Color, like
the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pencil, in
waves so rich that we do not miss the central form.
.Through all his refinements, too, he has reached the
public, — a certificate of good sense and general power,
since he who aspires to be the English poet must be as
large as London, not in the same kind as London, but in
his own kind. - But he wants a subject, and climbs no
mount of vision to bring its secrets to the people. He
contents himself with describing the Englishman as he is,
and proposes no better. There are all degrees in poetry,
and we must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But
it is only a first success, when the ear is gained. Tlie
best office of the best poets has been to show how low
and uninspired was tlieir general style, and that only
once or twice they have struck the high chord.

That expansiveness whicii is the essence of the poetic
element, they have not. It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz,
who said: "Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink
wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into
new forms." A stanza of the song of nature the Ox-
onian has no ear for, and he does not value the salient
and curative influence of intellectual action, studious of
truth, without a by-end.

196 ENGLISH TRAITS.

By the law of contraries, I look for an irresistilDle taste
for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-conceited modish
life, made up of trifles, clinging to a corporeal civiliza-
tion, hating ideas, there is no remedy like tlie Oriental
largeness. That astonishes and disconcerts Enghsh
decorum. Tor once there is thunder it never heard,
light it never saw, and power which trifles with time
and space. I am not surprised, then, to find an English-
man like Warren Hastings, who had been struck with
the grand style of thinking in the Indian writings, dep-
recating the prejudices of liis countrymen, while offer-
ing them a translation of the Bhagvat. " Might I," he
says, "an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds
to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in estimat-
ing the merit of such a production, all rules drawn from
the ancient or modern literature of Europe, all references
to such sentiments or manners as are become the stand-
ards of pr.ipriety for opinion and action in our own
modes, and, equall}^ all appeals to our revealed tenets,
of religion and moral duty." * He goes on to bespeak
indulgence to "ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste,
and passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into wliich
our habits of judgment will find it difficidt to pursue
them."

Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies in tlie
English race, which seems to make any recoil possible ;
in other words, there is at all times a minority of pro-
found minds existing in the nation, capable of appreciat-
ing every soaring of intellect and every hint of tendency.
While the constructive talent seems dwarfed and superfi-

* Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta.

THE "TIMES." 197

cial, the criticism is often in the noblest tone, and sug-
gests the presence of the invisible gods. I can well
believe what I have often heard, that there are two na-
tions in England ; but it is not the Poor and the Rich ;
nor is it the Normans and Saxons ; nor the Celt and the
Goth. These are each always becoming the other ; for
E-obert Owen does not exaggerate the power of circum-
stance. But the two complexions, or two styles of mind,
— the perceptive class, and the practical finality class, —
are ever in counterpoise, interacting mutually ; one, in
hopeless minorities ; the other, in huge masses ; one studi-
ous, contemplative, experimenting ; the other, the un-
grateful pupil, scornful of the source, whilst availing itself
of the knowledge for gain ; these two nations, of genius
and of animal force, though the first consist of only a
dozen souls, and the second of twenty millions, forever
by their discord and their accord yield the power of the
Eudish State.

CHAPTER XV.

THE "TIMES."

The power of the newspaper is familiar in America,
and in accordance with our political system. In Eng-
land, it stands in antagonism with the feudal institutions,
and it is all the more beneficent succor against the secre-
tive tendencies of a monarchy. The celebrated Lord
Somers " knew of no good law proposed and passed in
his time, to which the public papers had not directed his
attention." There is no corner and no night. A relent-

198 ENGLISH TRAITS.

less inquisition drags every secret to the da^^ turns the
glare of this solar microscope on every malfaisanee, so
as to make the ])ublic a more terrible spy than any for-
eigner ; and no weakness can be taken advantage of by
an enemy, since the whole people are already forewarned.
Thus England rids herself of those incrustations which
have been the ruin of old states. Of course, this inspec-
tion is feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable
monopoly, but sees surely that its days are counted ; the
j)eople are familiarized with the reason of reform, and,
one by one, take away every argument of the obstruc-
tives. " So your Grace likes the comfort of reading the
newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to the Duke of North-
umberland ; " mark my M^ords ; you and 1 shall not Hve to
see it, but this young gentleman (Lord Eldon) may, or
it may be a little later; but a little sooner or later, these
newspapers will most assuredly write the dukes of Nor-
thumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the
country out of its king." The tendency in England
towards social and political institutions like those of
America, is inevitable, and the ability of its journals is
the driving force.

England is full of manly, clever, well-bred men who
possess the talent of writing oif-hand pungent para-
graphs, expressing with clearness and courage their opin-
ion on any person or performance. Valuable or not, it
is a skill that is rarely found, out of the English journals.
The English do this, as they write poetry, as they ride
and box, by being educated to it. Hundreds of clever
Praeds, and Freres, and Frondes, and Hoods, and Hooks,
and Maginns, and Mills, and Macaulays, make poems, or

THE "TIMES." 199

short essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Par-
liament and on the hustings, or, as tliey shoot and ride.
It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direction of their
general ability. Rude health and spirits, an Oxford edu-
cation, and tlie habits of society are implied, but not a
ray of genius. It comes of the crowded state of the
professions, the violent interest which all men take in
politics, the facility of experimenting in the journals, and
high pay.

The most conspicuous result of this talent is the
*' Times " newspaper. No power in England is more
felt, more feared, or more obeyed. What you read in
the morning in that journal, you shall hear in the even-
ing in all society. It has ears everywhere, and its infor-
mation is earliest, completest, and surest. It has risen,
year by year, and victory by victory, to its present au-
thority. I asked one of its old contributors, whether it
liad once been abler than it is now. " Never," he said ;
*' these are its palmiest days." It has shown those quali-
ties which are dear to Englishmen, unflinching adher-
ence to its objects, prodigal intellectual ability, and a
towering assurance, backed by the perfect organization
in its printing-house, and its world-wide network of
correspondence and reports. It has its own history
and famous trophies. In 1820, it adopted the cause of
Queen Caroline, and carried it against the king. It
adopted a poor-law system, and almost alone lifted it
through. When Lord Brougham was in power, it de-
cided against him, and pulled him down. It declared
war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted the
League against the Corn Laws, and, when Cobdcu had

200 ENGLISH TRAITS.

begun to despair, it announced his triumpli. It de-
nounced and discredited tlie French Republic of 1848,
and checked every sympathy with it in Eiighmd, until
it had enrolled 200,000 special constables to watch the
Ciiartists, and make them ridiculous on the 10th April.
It first denounced and then adopted tlie new French
Empire, and urged the French Alliance and its results.
It has entered into each municipal, literary, and social
question, almost with a controlling voice. It has done
bold and seasonable service in exposing frauds which
threatened the commercial community. Meantime, it
attacks its rivals by perfecting its printing machinery,
and will drive them out of circulation ; for the only limit
to the circulation of the "Times " is the impossibility of
printing copies fast enough ; since a daily paper can only
be new and seasonable for a few hours. It will kill all
but that paper which is diametrically in opposition ; since
many papers, first and last, have lived by their attacks on
the leading journal.

The late Mr. Walter was printer of the " Times," and
had gradually arranged the whole materiel of it in per-
fect system. It is told, that when he demanded a small
share in the proprietary, and was refused, he said, " As
you please, gentlemen ; and you may take away the
' Times ' from this office when you will ; I shall publish
the 'New Times' next Monday morning." The propri-
etors, who had already complained that his charges for
printing were excessive, found that they were in his
power, and gave him whatever he wished.

I went one day with a good friend to the ''Times "
office, which was entered through a pretty garden-^^ard,

THE "TIMES." 201

ill Priiiting-House Square. We walked witli some cir-
cumspection, as if we were entering a powder-mill ; but
the door was opened by a mild old woman, and, by dint
of some transmission of cards, we "were at last conducted
into the parlor of Mr. Morris, a very gentle person,
with no hostile appearances. The statistics are now
quite out of date, but I remember he told us that the
daily printing was then 35,000 copies ; that on the 1st
March, 184S, the greatest number ever printed, — 54,000
were issued ; that, since February, the daily circulation
had increased by 8,000 copies. The old press they
were then using printed five or six thousand sheets per
hour; the new machine, for which they were then build-
ing an engine, would print twelve thousand per hour.
Our entertainer confided us to a courteous assistant to
show us the establisliment, in which, I think, they em-
ployed a hundred and twenty men. I remember, I saw
the reporters' room, in which they redact their hasty
stenographs, but the editor's room, and who is in it, I
did not see, though I shared the curiosity of mankind
respecting it.

Tlie staff of the " Times " has always been made up
of able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon, Barnes, Al-
siger, Horace Twiss, Jones Loyd, John Oxeuford, Mr.
Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contributed to its renown in
their special departments. But it has never wanted the
first pens for occasional assistance. Its private informa-
tion is inexplicable, and recalls the stories of Fouche's
police, whose omniscience made it believed that the Em-
press Josephine must be in his pay. It has mercantile
and political correspondents in every foreign city; and its
9*

20:i ENGLISH traits.

expresses outrun the despatches of the government. One
hears anecdotes of the rise of its servants, as of the func-
tionaries of tlie India House. I was told of the dexterity
of one of its reporters, who, fuiding himself, on one occa-
sion, where the magistrates had strictly forbidden report-
ers, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with pencil
in one hand, and tablet in the other, did his work.

Tlie iniiuence of tliis journal is a recognized power in
Europe, and, of course, none is more conscious of it
than its conductors. The tone of its articles has often
been the occasion of comment from the official organs of
the continental courts, and sometimes tlie ground of
diplomatic complaint. What would the " Times " say ?
is a terror in Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen,
and in Nepaul. Its consummate discretion and success
exhibit tlie English skill of combination. The daily
paper is tiie work of many hands, chiefly, it is said, of
young men recently from the University, and perhaps
reading law in chambers in London. Hence the aca-
demic elegance, and classic allusion, which adorn its col-
umns. Hence, too, the heat and gallantry of its onset.
But the steadiness of tlie aim suggests the belief that
this fire is directed and fed by older engineers ; as if per-
sons of exact information, and with settled views of
polic\% supplied the writers with the basis of fact, and
the object to be attained, and availed themselves of
their younger energy and eloquence to plead the cause.
Both the council and the executive departments gain by
this division. Of two men of equal ability, the one who
does not write, but keeps his eye on the course of public
affairs, will have the higher judicial wisdom. But the

THE "TIMES." 203

parts are kept in concert ; all the articles appear to pro-
ceed from a single will. The " Times" never disapproves
of what itself has said, or cripples itself by apology for
the absence of the editor, or the indiscretion of him who
held the pen. It speaks out bluff and bold, and sticks
to what it says. It draws from any number of learned
and skilful contributors ; but a more learned and skilful
person supervises, corrects, and co-ordinates. Of this
closet, the secret does not transpire. No writer is suf-
fered to claim the authorship of any paper ; everything
good, from whatever quarter, comes out editorially ; and
tlius, by making the paper everything, and those who write
it nothing, the character and the awe of the journal gain.
The English like it for its complete information. A state-
ment of fact in the " Times " is as reliable as a citation
from Hansard. Then, they like its independence ; they
do not know, when they take it up, what tlieir paper is
going to say; but, above all, for the nationality and con-
fidence of its tone. It thinks for them all ; it is their
understanding and day's ideal daguerreotyped. When I
see them reading its columns, they seem to me becoming
every moment more British. It has the national courage,
not rash and petulant, but considerate and determined.
No dignity or wealth is a shield from its assault. It
attacks a duke as readily as a policeman, and with the
most provoking airs of condescension. It makes rude
work with the Board of Admiralty. The Bench of
Bishops is still less safe. One bishop fares badly for his
rapacity, and another for his bigotry, and a third for his
courtliness. It addresses occasionally a hint to majesty
itself, and sometimes a hint which is taken. There is an

204 ENGLISH TRAITS.

air of freedom even in llieir advertising columns, wlilcli
speaks well for England to a foreigner. On the days
when I arrived in London in 1847, I read among the
daily announcements, one offering a reward of fifty
pounds to any person who would put a nobleman, de-
scribed by name and title, late a member of Parliament,
into any county jail in England, he having been con-
victed of obtaining money under false pretences.

Was never such arrogancy as the tone of this paper.
Every slip of an Oxonian or Cantabrigian who writes his
first leader assumes that we subdued the earth before Ave
sat down to write this particular " Times." One would
think the world was on its knees to the "Times " Office,
for its daily breakfast. But this arrogance is calculated.
Who would care for it, if it " surmised," or " dared to
confess," or " ventured to predict," etc. ? No ; zV is so,
and so it shall be.

Tlie morality and patriotism of the "Times" claims
only to be representative, and by no means ideal. It
gives the argument, not of the majority, but of the com-
manding class. Its editors know better than to defend
Russia, or Austria, or English vested rights, on abstract
grounds. But they give a voice to the class who, at the
moment, take the lead; and they have an instinct for
finding where the power now lies, which is eternally
shifting its banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking for
the class that rules the hour, yet, being apprised of every
ground-swell, every Chartist resolution, every Church
squabble, every strike in the mills, they detect the first
tremblings of change. They watch tlie hard and bitter
struggles of the authors of each liberal movement, year

THE "TIMES." 205

by year, — watching them only to taunt and obstruct
tliem, — until, at last, when they see that these have
established their fact, that power is on the point of pass-
ing to them, they strike in, with the voice of a monarch,
astonish those whom they succor, as much as those whom
they desert, and make victory sure. Of course, the
aspirants see that the " Times " is one of the goods of
fortune, not to be won but by winning their cause.

"Punch" is equally an expression of English good
sense, as the " London Times." It is the comic version
of the same sense. Many of its caricatures are equal to
the best pamphlets, and will convey to the eye in an in-
stant the popular view which was taken of each turn of
public affairs. Its sketches are usually made by mas-
terly hands, and sometimes with genius ; the delight of
every class, because uniformly guided by that taste
which is tyrannical in England. It is a new trait of the
nineteenth century, that the wit and humor of England,
as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold, Dickens,
Thackeray, Hood, have taken the direction of humanity
and freedom.

The " Times," like every important institution, shows
the way to a better. It is a living index of the colossal
British power. Its existence honors the people who
dare to print all they know, dare to know all the facts,
and do not wish to be iiattered by hiding the extent of
the public disaster. There is always safety in valor. I
wish I could add, that this journal aspired to deserve the
power it wields, by guidance of the public sentiment to
the right. It is usually pretended, in Parliament and
elsewhere, that the Englisli press has a high tone, —

206 ENGLISH TRAITS.

wliicli it lias not. It has an imperial tone, as of a pow-
erful and independent nation. But as with other em-
pires, its tone is prone to be official, and even officinal.
The " Times" shares all the limitations of the governing
classes, and wishes never to be in a minority. If only it
dared to cleave to the right, to show the right to be the
ojily expedient, and feed its batteries from the central
heart of humanity, it might not have so many men of
rank among its contributors, but genius would be its cor-
dial and invincible ally ; it might now and then bear the
brunt of formidable combinations, but no journal is ruined
by wise courage. It would be the natural leader of Brit-
ish reform ; its proud function, that of being the voice of
Europe, the defender of the exile and patriot against
despots, would be more effectually discharged ; it would
have the authority which is claimed for that dream of
good men not yet come to pass, an International Con-
gress ; and the least of its victories would be to give to
England a new millennium of beneficent power.

CHAPTEE XVI.

STONEHENGE.

It had been agreed between my friend Mr. C. and
me, that before I left England we should make an excur-
sion together to Stonehenge, which neither of ns had
seen ; and the project pleased my fancy with the double
attraction of the monument and the companion. It
seemed a bringing together of extreme points, to visit

STONEHENGE. 207

tlie oldest religious monument in Britain in company
with lier latest thinker, and one whose influence may be
traced in every contemporary book. I was glad to sum
up a little my experiences, and to exchange a few reason-
able words on the aspects of England, with a man on
whose genius I set a very high value, and who had as
much penetration, and as severe a theory of duty as any
person in it. On Friday, 7th July, we took the South-
western Railway through Hampshire to Salisbury, where
we found a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The
fine weather and my friend's local knowledge of Hamp-
shire, in which he is wont to spend a part of every
summer, made the way short. There was much to say,
too, of the travelling Americans, and their usual objects
in London. 1 thouglit it natural that they sliould give
some time to works of art collected here, which they
cannot find at home, and a little to scientific clubs and
museums, which, at this moment, make London very
attractive. But my philosopher was not contented.
Art and ' high art ' is a favorite target for his wit.
" Yes, Kund is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller
wasted a great deal of good time on it " : — and he thinks
lie discovers that old Goethe found this out, and, in his
later writings, changed his tone. As soon as men begin
to talk of art, architecture, and antiquities, nothing good
comes of it. He wishes to go through the British Mu-
seum in silence, and tliinks a sincere man will see some-
thing, and say nothing. In these days, he thought, it
would become an arcliitect to consult only the grim ne-
cessity, and say, ' I can build you a coffin for such dead
persons as you are, and for sucli dead purposes as you

208 ENGLISH TRAITS.

have, but you shall have no ornament.' Tor the science,
he had, if possible, even less tolerance, and compared
the savans of Somerset House to the boy wlio asked
Confucius " how many stars in the sky ? " Confucius
replied, "he minded things near him"; then said the
boy, " how many hairs are there in your eyebrows ? "
Confucius said, "he didn't know and didn't care."

Still speaking of the Americans, C. complained that
they dislike the coldness and exclusiveness of the Eng-
lish, and run away to France, and go with their country-
men, and are amused, instead of manfully staying in
London, and confronting Englishmen, and acquiring
tlieir culture, who really have much to teach them.

I told C. that I was easily dazzled, and was accus-
tomed to concede readily all that an Englishman would
ask ; I saw everywhere in the country proofs of sense
and spirit, and success of every sort : I like the people :
they are as good as they are handsome ; they have every-
thing, and can do everything : but meantime, I surely
know, that, as soon as I return to Massachusetts, 1 shall
lapse at once into the feeling, which tlie geography of
America inevitably inspires, that we play the game with
immense advantage; that there and not here is the seat
and centre of the Britisli race ; and that no skill or activ-
ity can long compete with the prodigious natural advan-
tages of that country, in the hands of the same race ; and
that England, an old and exhausted island, must one day
be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her
children. But this was a proposition wliich no English-
man of whatever condition can easily entertain.

We left the train at Salisbury, and took a carriage

STONEHENGE. 209

to Amesbiiry, passing by Old Surum, a bare, treeless hill,
once containing the town which sent two members to
Parliament, — now, not a hut, — and, arriving at Ames-
bury, stopped at the George Inn. After dinner, we
waked to Salisbury Plain. On the broad downs, under
the gray sky, not a house was visible, nothing but
Stonehenge, which looked like a group of brown dwarfs
in the wide expanse, — Stonehenge and the barrows,
which rose like green bosses about the plain, and a few
hay-ricks. On the top of a mountain, the old temple
would not be more impressive. Far and wide a few
shepherds with their flocks sprinkled the plain, and a
bagman drove along the road. It looked as if tlie wide
margin given in this crowded isle to this primeval temple
were accorded by the veneration of the British race to
the old egg out of which all their ecclesiastical structures
and history had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular
colonnade with a diameter of a hundred feet, and enclos-
ing a second and a third colonnade within. We walked
round the stones, and clambered over them, to wont our-
selves with their strange aspect and groupings, and
found a nook sheltered from the wind among them,
where C. lighted his cigar. It was pleasant to see, that
just this simplest of all simple structures — two upright
stones and a lintel laid across — had long outstood all later
churches, and all history, and were like what is most
permanent on the face of the planet : these, and the bar-
rows, — mere mounds (of which there are a hundred and
sixty within a circle of three miles about Stonehenge),
like the same mound on the plain of Troy, which still
makes good to the passing mariner on Hellespont, the

N

210 ENGLISH TRAITS.

vaunt of Homer and tlie fame of Achilles. Within the
enclosure grow buttercups, nettles, and, all around, M'ild
thyme, daisy, meadow-sweet, golden-rod, thistle, and the
carpeting grass. Over us, larks were soaring and sing-
ing, — as my friend said : " the larks which were hatched
last year, and the wind which was hatched many thou-
sand years ago." We counted and measured by paces
the biggest stones, and soon knew as much as any man
can suddenly know of the inscrutable temple. There are
ninety-four stones, and there were once probably one
hundred and sixty. The temple is circular, and uncov-
ered, and the situation fixed astronomically ; — the grand
entrances here, and at Abury, being placed exactly north-
east, " as all the gates of the old cavern temples are."
How came the stones here ? for these sarsens or Druid-
ical sandstones are not found in this neighborhood. The
sacrificial stone, as it is called, is the only one in all these
blocks, that can resist the action of fire, and as I read in
the books, must have been brought one hundred and fifty
miles.

On almost every stone we found the marks of the
mineralogist's hammer and chisel. The nineteen smaller
stones of the inner circle are of granite. I, who had
just come from Professor Sedgwick's Cambridge Museum
of megatheria and mastodons, was ready to maintain
that some cleverer elephants or mylodonta had borne off
and laid these rocks one on another. Only the good
beasts must have known liow to cut a well-wrought tenon
and mortise, and to smooth the surface of some of the
stones. The chief mystery is, that any mystery should
Lave been allowed to settle on so remarkable a monu-

STONEHENGE. 211

ment, in a country on whicli all tlie muses have kept
their eyes now for eighteen hundred years. We are not
yet too late to learn much more than is kuown of this
structure. Some diligent Fellowes or Layard will arrive,
stone by stone, at the whole history, by that exhaustive
British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice
of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir
Gaur to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids, and uncov-
ers Nineveh. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of
its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and
recent; and, a thousand years hence, men wall thank
this age for the accurate history it will yet eliminate.
We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh
look at the uncanny stones. The old sphinx put our
petty differences of nationality out of sight. To these
conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike known and
near. We could equally well revere their old British
meaning. My philosopher was subdued and gentle. In
this quiet house of destiny, he happened to say, " I
plant cypresses wherever I go, and if I am in search of
pain, I cannot go wrong." The spot, the gray blocks,
and their rude order, which refuses to be disposed of,
suggested to him the flight of ages, and the succession
of religions. The old times of England impress C.
much ; he reads little, he says, in these last years, but
^' Acta Sanctorum'' the fifty -three volumes of which are
in the " London Library." He finds all English history
therein. He can see, as he reads, the old saint of lona
sitting there, and writing, a man to men. The Acta
Sanctorum show plainly that the men of those times
believed in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as

212 ENGLISH TUAITS.

their abbeys and cathedrals testify : now, even the puri-
tanism is all gone. London is pagan. He fancied that
greater men had lived in England than any of her
writers ; and, in fact, about the time when those writers
appeared, the last of tliese were already gone.

We left the mound in the twilight, with the design to
return the next morning, and coming back two miles to
our inn, we were met by little showers, and late as it
was, men and women were out attempting to protect
their spread windrows. The grass grows rank and dark
in the showery England. At the inn, there was only
milk for one cup of tea. When we called for more, the
girl brought us three drops. My friend was annoyed
who stood for the credit of an English inn, and still
more, the next morning, by the dog-cart, sole procurable
vehicle, in which we were to be sent to Wilton. I en-
gaged the local antiquary, Mr. Brown, to go wilh us to
Stonehenge, on our way, and show us what he knew of
the "astronomical" and " sacrificial " stones. I stood
on the last, and he pointed to the upright, or rather,
inclined stone, called the "astronomical," and bade me
notice that its top ranged with the sky-line. " Yes."
Very well. Now, at the summer solstice, the sun rises
exactly over the top of that stone, and, at the Druidical
temple at Abury, there is also an astronomical stone, in
the same relative positions.

In the silence of tradition, this one relation to science
becomes an important clew; but we were content to
leave the problem, with the rocks. Was this the
" Giants' Dance " which Merlin brought from Killaraus,
in Ireland, to be Uther Pendragon's monument to the

STONEHENGE. 213

British nobles whom Hengist slaughtered here, as Geof-
frey of Monmouth relates ? or was it a Roman work, as
luigo Jones explained to King James; or identical in
design and style with the East Indian temples of the
sun ; as Davies in the Celtic Researches maintains ? Of
all the writers, Stukeley is the best. The heroic anti-
quary, charmed with the geometric perfections of his
ruin, connects it with the oldest monuments and religion
of the world, and, with the courage of his tribe, does not
stick to say, "the Deity who made the world by the
scheme of Stonehenge." He finds that the cursus * on
Salisbury Plain stretches across the downs, like a line of
latitude upon the globe, and the meridian line of Stone-
henge passes exactly through the middle of this cursus.
But here is the high point of the theory : the Druids had
the magnet; laid their courses by it ; their cardinal points
in Stonehenge, Ambresbury, and elsewhere, which vary
a little from true east and west, followed the variations
of the compass. The Druids were Phoenicians. The
name of the magnet is lapis Heracleus, and Hercules was
the god of the Phoenicians. Hercules, in the legend,
drew his bow at the sun, and the sun-god gave him a
golden cup, with which he sailed over the ocean. What
was this, but a compass-box ? This cup or little boat,

* Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cur-
sus. The avenue is a narrow road of raised earth, extending
594 yards in a straight hne from the grand entrance, then
dividing into two branches, which lead, severally, to a row of
barrows : and to the cursus, — an artificially formed flat tract
of ground. This is half a mile northeast from Stonehenge,
bounded by banks and ditches, 3,036 yards long, by 110 broad.

214 ENGLISH TRAITS.

ill which the magnet was made to float on water, and so
show the north, was probably its first form, before it was
suspended on a pin. But science was an arcanum, and,
as Britain was a Phoenician secret, so they kept their
compass a secret, and it was lost with the Tyrian com-
merce. The golden fleece, again, of Jason, was the
compass, — a bit of loadstone, easily supposed to be the
only one in the world, and therefore naturally awakening
the cupidity and ambition of the young heroes of a mari-
time nation to join in an expedition to obtain possession
of this wise stone. Hence the fable that the ship Argo
was loquacious and oracular. There is also some curious
coincidence in the names, Apollodorus makes Magnes
the son of jEoliis, who married Nais. On hints like
these, Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade into
liistoric harmony, and computing backward by the known
variations of the compass, bravely assigns the year 406
before Christ for tlie date of the temple.

For the diificulty of handling and carrying stones of
this size, the like is done in all cities, every day, with no
other aid than horse-power. I chanced to see a year ago
men at work on the substructure of a house in Bowdoin
Square, in Boston, swinging a block of granite of the
size of the largest of the Stonehenge columns with an
ordinary derrick. The men were common masons, with
paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing any-
thing remarkable. I suppose there were as good men a
thousand years ago. And we wonder how Stonehenge
was built and forgotten. After spending half an hour
on the spot, we set forth in our dog-cart over tbe downs
for Wilton, C. not suppressing some threats and evil

STONEHENGE. 215

omens on the proprietors, for keeping tliese broad plains
a wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of Eng-
lishmen were hungry and wanted labor. But I heard
afterwards that it is not an economy to cultivate this
land, which only yields one crop on being broken up,
and is then spoiled.

We came to Wilton and to Wilton Hall, — the re-
nowned seat of the Earls of Pembroke, a house known
to Shakspeare and Massinger, the frequent home of Sir
Philip Sidney, where he wrote the Arcadia; where he
conversed with Lord Brooke, a man of deep thought,
and a poet, who caused to be engraved on his tombstone,
"Here lies Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, the friend of
Sir Philip Sidney." It is now the property of the Earl
of Pembroke, and the residence of his brother, Sidney
Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble specimen of the
English manor-hall. My friend had a letter from Mr.
Herbert to his housekeeper, and the house was shown.
The state drawing-room is a double cube, thirty feet
high, by thirty wide, by sixty feet long : the adjoining
room is a single cube, of thirty feet every way. Although
these apartments and the long library were full of good
family portraits, Vandykes and other ; and though there
were some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full
of antique and modern statuary, — to which C, catalogue
in hand, did all too much justice, — yet the eye was still
drawn to the windows, to a magnificent lawn, on which
grew the finest cedars in England. I had not seen more
charming grounds. We went out, and walked over tlie
estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones over a
stream, of which the gardener did not know the name,

216 ENGLISH TRAITS.

{Qu. Alpli?) watched the deer; climbed to the lonely
sculptured summer-house, on a hill backed by a wood ;
came down into the Italian garden, and into a French
pavilion, garnished with French busts ; and so, again to
the house, where we found a table laid for us with bread,
meats, peaches, grapes, and wine.

On leaving Wilton House, we took the coach for
Salisbury. The Cathedral which was finished six hun-
dred years ago has even a spruce and modern air, and its
spire is the highest in England. I know not why, but I
had been more struck with one of no fame at Coventry,
which rises three hundred feet from the ground, with the
lightness of a mullein-plant, and not at all implicated
with the church. Salisbury is now esteemed the cul-
mination of the Gothic art in England, as the buttresses
are fully unmasked, and honestly detailed from the sides
of the pile. The interior of the Cathedral is obstructed
by the organ in the middle, acting like a screen. I know
not why in real architecture the hunger of the eye for
length of line is so rarely gratified. The rule of art is
that a colonnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and
that ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom
so long that it need be divided by a screen.

We loitered in the church, outside the choir, whilst
service was said. Whilst w^e listened to the organ, my
friend remarked, the music is good and yet not quite
religious, but somewhat as if a monk were panting to
some fine Queen of Heaven. C. was unwilling, and we
did not ask to have the choir shown us, but returned to
our inn, after seeing another old church of the place.
We passed in the train Clarendon Park, but could see

STONEHENGE. 217

little but the edge of a wood, though C. had wished to
pay closer attention to the birthplace of the Decrees of
Clarendon. At Bishopstoke we stopped, and found Mr.
H., who received us in his carriage, and took us to his
house at Bishops Waltham.

On Sunday, we had much discourse on a very rainy
day. My friends ask, whether there were any Ameri-
cans ? — any with an American idea, — any theory of the
right future of that country? Tims challenged, I be-
thought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither
of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as
would make of America another Europe. I thought only
of the simplest and purest minds ; I said, ' Certainly yes ;
but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I
should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to
wliich it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the
only true.' So I opened the dogma of no government
and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
the fun, and procured a kind of liearing for it. I said, it
is true that I have never seen in any country a man of
sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain
to me that no less valor than this can command my
respect. I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar
musket-worship, — though great men be musket-wor-
shippers ; and 't is certain, as God liveth, the gun that
does not need another gun, the law of love and justice
alone, can effect a clean revolution. I fancied that one
or two of my anecdotes made some impression on C,
and I insisted that the manifest absurdity of the view to
English feasibility could make no ditference to a gentle-
man ; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop
10

218 ENGLISH TRAITS.

and spiuage in London or in Boston, the soul miglifc
quote Talleyrand, "Monsieur, je tCen vols pas la neces-
site" * As I had thus taken in the conversation the
saint's part, when dinner was announced, C. refused to
go out before me, — " he was altogether too wicked."
I planted my back against the wall, and our host wittily
rescued us from the dilemma, by saying, he was the
wickedest, and would walk out first, then C. followed,
and I went last.

On the way to Winchester, whither our host accom-
panied us in the afternoon, my friends asked many ques-
tions respecting American landscape, forests, houses, —
my house, for example. It is not easy to answer these
queries well. There I thouglit, in America, lies nature
sleeping, overgrowing, almost conscious, too much by
half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain
tristesse, like the rank vegetation of swamps and forests
seen at night, steeped in dews and rains, which it loves;
and on it man seems not able to make much impression.
There, in that great sloven continent, in high Alleghany
pastures, in the sea- wide, sky -skirted prairie, still sleeps
and murmurs and hides the great mother, long since
driven aM^ay from the trim hedge-rows and over-culti-
vated garden of England. And, in England, I am quite
too sensible of this. Every one is on his good beliavior,
and must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put off my
friends with very inadequate details, as best I could.

Just before entering Wincliester, we stopped at tlie
Church of Saint Cross, and, after looking through the
quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a

* " Mais, Monseigneur, il faut que j'existe."

STONEHENGE. 219

drauglit of beer, wliicli the founder, Henry de Blois, in
1136, commanded should be given to every one who
should ask it at the gate. We had both, from the old
couple who take care of the church. Some twenty peo-
ple, every day, they said, make tlie same demand, Tiiis
hospitality of seven hundred years' standing did not hin-
der C. from pronouncing a malediction on the priest who
receives £ 2,000 a year, that were meant for the poor,
and spends a pittance on this small-beer and crumbs.

In the Cathedral, I was gratified, at least by the
ample dimensions. The length of line exceeds that of
any other English church ; being 556 feet by 250 in
breadth of transept, I think I prefer this church to all
I have seen, except Westminster and York. Here was
Canute buried, and here Alfred the Great was crowned
and buried, and here the Saxon kings : and, later, in
his own church, William of Wykeham, It is very old :
part of the crypt into which we went down and saw the
Saxon and Norman arches of tiie old church on which
the present stands, was built fourteen or fifteen hundred
years ago. Sharon Turner says : " Alfred was buried at
Winchester, in the Abbey he had founded there, but his
remains were removed by Henry I. to the new Abbey in
the meadows at Hyde, on the northern quarter of the
city, and laid under the high altar. The building was
destroyed at the Reformation, and what is left of Alfred's
body now lies covered by modern buildings, or buried in
the ruins of the old." * William of Wykeham's shrine
tomb was unlocked for us, and C. took hold of the re-
cumbent statue's marble hands, and patted them affec-

* History of the Anglo-Saxons, I. 599.

220 ENGLISH TRAITS.

iiouatelj, for lie rightly values the brave man who built
Windsor, and this Cathedral, and the School here, and
New College at Oxford. But it was growing late in the
afternoon. Slowly Ave left tlie old house, and parting
with our host, we took the train for London.

CHAPTER XYII.

PERSONAL.

In these comments on an old journey now revised
after seven busy years have much changed men and
things in England, I have abstained from reference to
persons, except in the last chapter, and in one or two cases
where the fame of the parties seemed to have given the
public a property in all that concerned them. I must
further allow myself a few notices, if only as an acknowl-
edgment of debts that cannot be paid. My journeys
were cheered by so much kindness from new friends,
that my impression of the island is bright with agreeable
memories both of public societies and of households;
and, what is nowliere better found than in England, a
cultivated person fitly surrounded by a happy home,
"with honor, love, obedience, troops of friends," is of
all institutions the best. At the landing in Liverpool, I
found my Manchester correspondent awaiting me, a gen-
tleman whose kind reception was followed by a train of
friendly and effective attentions which never rested whilst
I remained in the country. A man of sense and of letters,
the editor of a powerful local journal, he added to solid

PERSONAL. 221

virtues an infinite sweetness and honhommie. There
seemed a pool of honey about his heart which lubricated
all his speech and action with fine jets of mead. An
equal good-fortune attended many later accidents of my
journey, until the sincerity of English kindness ceased to
surprise. My visit fell in the fortunate days when Mr.
Bancroft was the American Minister in London, and at
his house, or through his good offices, I had easy access
to excellent persons and to privileged places. At the
house of Mr. Carlyle, I met persons eminent in society
and in letters. The privileges of the Athenaeum and of
the Hefonn Clubs were hospitably opened to me, and I
found much advantage in the circles of the " Geologic,"
the "Antiquarian," and the " Royal Societies." Every
day in London gave me new opportunities of meeting
men and women who give splendor to society. I saw
Rogers, Hallam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman, Barry Corn-
wall, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Leigh Hunt,
D'Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey, Kenyon, and Eors-
ter : the younger poets, Clough, Arnold, and Patmore ;
and, among the men of science, Robert Brown, Owen,
Sedgwick, Paraday, Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche,
Hooker, Carpenter, Babbage, and Edward Forbes. It
was my privilege also to converse with Miss Baillie, with
Lady Morgan, with Mrs. Jameson, and Mrs. Somerville.
A finer hospitality made many private houses not less
known and dear. It is not in distinguished circles that
wisdom and elevated characters are usually found, or, if
found, not confined thereto ; and my recollections of the
best hours go back to private conversations in different
parts of the kingdom, with persons little known. Nor

222 ENGLISH TRAITS.

am I insensible to the courtesy which frankly opened to
me some uoble mansions, if I do not adorn my page with,
their names. Among the privileges of London, I recall
with pleasure two or three signal days, one at Kew,
where Sir William Hooker showed me all the riches of
the vast botanic garden ; one at the Museum, where Sir
Charles Fellowes explained in detail the history of his
Ionic trophy -monument ; and still another, on which Mr.
Owen accompanied my countryman Mt. H. and myself
through the Hunterian Museum.

The like frank bospitality, bent on real service, I found
among the great and the humble, wherever I went ; in
Birmingham, in Oxford, in Leicester, in Nottingham, in
Sheffield, in Manchester, in Liverpool. At Edinburgh,
through the kindness of Dr. Samuel Brown, I made the
acquaintance of De Quincey, of Lord Jeffrey, of Wilson,
of Mrs. Crowe, of the Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of
high character and genius, the short-lived painter David
Scott.

At Ambleside, in March, 1848, I was for a couple of
days the guest of Miss Martineau, then newly returned
from her Egyptian tour. On Sunday afternoon, I accom-
panied her to Rydal Mount. And as I have recorded a
visit to Wordsworth, many years before, I must not for-
get this second interview. We found Mr. Wordsworth
asleep on the sofa. He was at first silent and indisposed,
as an old man, suddenly waked, before he had ended his
nap ; but soon became full of talk on the French news.
He was nationally bitter on the French-: bitter on Scotch-
men, too. No Scotchman, he said, can write English.
He detailed the two models, on one or the other of which

PERSONAL.

223

all the sentences of the historian Robertson are framed.
Nor could Jeffrey, nor the Eduiburgh Reviewers write
English, nor can ... . who is a pest to the English
tongue. Incidentally he added, Gibbon cannot write
English. The M'mhiirrjh Reciew wrote what would tell
and what would sell. It had however changed the tone
of its literary criticism from the time when a certain letter
was written to the editor by Coleridge. Mrs. W. had the
Editor's answer in her possession. Tennyson he thinks
a right poetic genius, though with some affectation. He
had thought an elder brother of Tennyson at first the
better poet, but must now reckon Alfred the true one.
.... In speaking of I know not what style, he said,
" To be sure it was the manner, but then you know the
matter always comes out of the manner." •. . . . He
thought Rio Janeiro the best place in the world for a

great capital city We talked of English national

character. I told him it was not creditable that no one
in all the country knew anything of Thomas Taylor, the
Platouist, whilst in every American library his translations
are found. I said, if Plato's Republic were published in
England as a new book to-day, do you think it would find
any readers? — he confessed, it would not: "And yet,"
he added after a pause, with that complacency which
never deserts a true-born Englishman, — " and yet we
have embodied it all."

His opinions of Erench, English, Irish, and Scotch
seemed rashly formulized from little anecdotes of what
had befallen himself and members of his family, in a dili-
gence or stage-coach. His face sometimes lighted up,
but his conversation was not marked by special force or

224 ENGLISH THAITS.

elevation. Yet perhaps it is a high compliment to the
cultivation of tlie English generally, when we find such
a man not distinguished. He had a healthy look, with a
weather-beaten face, his face corrugated, especially the
large nose.

Miss Martineau, wlio lived near him, praised him to
me, not for his poetry, hut for thrift and economy ; for
having aiTorded to his country neighbors an example of a
modest household, where comfort and culture were se-
cured without any display. Sfie said, that, in his early
housekeeping at the cottage where he first lived, he was
accustomed to offer his friends b'read and plainest fare :
if they wanted anything more, they must pay him for
their board. It was the rule of the house. I replied,
that it evinced English pluck more than any anecdote I
knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood told the story
of Walter Scott's once staying a AA^eek with Wordsworth,
and slipping out every day under pretence of a walk, to
the Swan Inn, for a cold cut and porter ; and one day
passing with Wordsworth the inn, he was betrayed by
the landlord's asking liim if he had come for his porter.
Of course, this trait would have another look in London,
and there you will hear from different literary men, that
Wordsworth had no personal friend, that he was not
amiable, that he was parsimonious, etc. Laudor, always
generous, says that he never praised anybody. A gentle-
man in London showed me a watch tliat once belonged
to Milton, whose initials are engraved on its face. He
said, he once showed this to Wordsworth, who took it in
one hand, then drew out his own watch, and held it up
with the other, before the company, but no one making

RESULT. 225

the expected remark, lie put back liis own in silence. I
do not attach much importance to the disparagement of
Wordsworth among London scholars. Who reads him
well will know, that in following the strong bent of his
genius, he was careless of the many, careless also of the
few, self-assured that he should " create the taste by
which he is to be enjoyed." He lived long enough to
witness the revolution he liad wrought, and "to see what
he foresaw," There are torpid places in his mind, there
is something hard and sterile in his poetry, want of grace
and variety, want of due catholicity and cosmopolitan
scope : he had conformities to English politics and tradi-
tions; he had egotistic puerilities in the choice and treat-
ment of his subjects ; but let us say of him, that, alone
in his time, he treated the human mind well, and with an
absolute trust. His adherence to his poetic creed rested
on real inspirations. The Ode on Immortality is the
high-water mark whicli the intellect has reached in this
age. New meaus were employed, and new realms added
to the empire of the muse, by his courage.

CHAPTER XVIII.

RESULT.

England is the best of actual nations. It is no ideal
framework, it is an old pile built in different ages, with
repairs, additions, and makeshifts ; but you see the poor
best you have got. London is the epitome of our times,
and the Rome of to-day. Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed
10* o

226 ENGLISH TKAITS.

Teutons, tliey stand in solid plialaux foursquare to the
points of compass ; they constitute the modern world,
they have earned their vantage-ground, and held it
through ages of adverse possession. They are well
marked and differing from other leading races. England
is tender-hearted. Rome was not. England is not so
public in its bias; private life is its place of honor.
Truth in private life, untruth in public, marks these
home-loving men. Their political conduct is not decided
by general views, but by internal intrigues and personal
and family interest. They cannot readily see beyond
England. The history of Rome and Greece, when writ-
ten by their scholars, degenerates into English party
pamphlets. They cannot see beyond England, nor in
England can they transcend the interests of the govern-
ing classes. " English principles " mean a primary re-
gard to the interests of property. England, Scotland,
and Ireland combine to check the colonies. England
and Scotland combine to check Irish manufactures and
trade. England rallies at home to check Scotland. In
England, the strong classes check the weaker. In the
home population of near thirty millions, there are but
one million voters. The Church punishes dissent, pun-
ishes education. Down to a late day, marriages performed
by dissenters were illegal. A bitter class-legislation gives
power to those who are rich enough to buy a law. The
game-laws are a proverb of oppression. Pauperism in-
crusts and clogs the state, and in hard times becomes
hideous. In bad seasons, the porridge was diluted.
Multitudes lived miserably by shell-fish and sea-ware.
In cities, the children are trained to beg, until they shall

RESULT. 227

be old enough to rob. Men and women were convicted
of poisoning scores of children for burial fees. In Irish
districts, men deteriorated in size and shape. The nose
sunk, tlie gums were exposed, with diminished brain and
brutal form. During the xiustralian emigration, multi-
tudes were rejected by the commissioners as being too
emaciated for useful colonists. During the Russian war,
few of those that offered as recruits were found up to the
medical standard, though it had been reduced.

The foreign policy of England, though ambitious and
lavish of money, has not often been generous or just. It
has a principal regard to the interest of trade, checked
however by the aristocratic bias of the ambassador, which
usually puts him in sympathy with the continental Courts.
It sanctioned the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa,
Sicily, Parga, Greece, Turkey, Rome, and Hungary.

Some public regards they have. They have abolished
slavery in the West Indies, and put an end to human
sacrifices in the East. At home they have a certain
statute hospitality. England keeps open doors, as a
trading country must, to all nations. It is one of their
fixed ideas, and wrathfully supported by their laws in
unbroken sequence for a thousand years. In Magna
Charta it was ordained, that all " merchants shall have
safe and secure conduct to go out and come into Eng-
land, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as
by water, to buy and sell by the ancient allowed customs,
without any evil toll, except in time of war, or when
they shall be of any nation at war with us." It is a
statute and obliged hospitality, and peremptorily main-
tained. But this shop-rule had one magnificent effect.

228 ENGLISH TRAITS.

It extends its cold unalterable courtesy to political exiles
of every opinion, and is a fact which might give addi-
tional light to that portion of the planet seen from the
farthest star. But this perfunctory hospitality puts no
sweetness into their unaccommodating manners, no check
on that puissant nationality which makes their existence
incompatible with all that is not English.

What we must say about a nation is a superficial deal-
ing with symptoms. We cannot go deep enough into
the biography of the spirit who never throws himself en-
tire into one hero, but delegates his energy in parts or
spasms to vicious and defective individuals. But the
wealth of the source is seen in the plenitude of English
nature. What variety of power and talent ; what facil-
ity and plenteousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship,
royalty, loyalty; what a proud chivalry is indicated in
" Collins's Peerage," through eight hundred years !
Wiiat dignity resting on what reality and stoutness !
What courage in war, what sinew in labor, what cunning
workmen, wliat inventors and engineers, what seamen
and pilots, what clerks and scholars ! No one man and
no few men can represent them. It is a people of myriad
personalities. Tlieir many-headedness is owing to the
advantageous position of the middle class, who are always
the source of letters and science. Hence the vast plenty
of their sesthetic production. As they are many-headed,
so they are many-nationed ; their colonization annexes
archipelagoes and continents, and their speech seems
destined to be the universal language of men. I have
noted the reserve of power in the English temperament.
In the island, they never let out all the length of all the

RESULT. 229

reins, tliere is no Berserkir rage, no abandonment or
ecstasy of will or intellect, like that of the Arabs in the
time of Mahomet, or like that which intoxicated France in
1789. Bat who would see the uncoiling of that tremen-
dous spring, the explosion of their well-husbanded forces,
must follow the swarms which, pouring now for two hun-
dred years from the British islands, have sailed, and
rode, and traded, and planted, through all climates,
mainly following the belt of empire, the temperate zojies,
carrying the Saxon seed, with its instinct for liberty and
law, for arts and for thought, — acquiring under some
skies a more electric energy than the native air allows, —
to the conquest of the globe. Their colonial policy,
obeying the necessities of a vast empire, has become lib-
eral. Canada and Australia have been contented with
substantial independence. They are expiating the wrongs
of India, by benefits : first, in works for the irrigation of
the peninsula, and roads and telegraphs ; and secondly,
in the instruction of the people, to qualify them for self-
government, when the British power shall be finally
called home.

Their mind is in a state of arrested development, —
a divine cripple like Vulcan ; a blind savant like Ruber
and Sanderson. They do not occupy themselves on
matters of general and lasting import, but on a corporeal
civilization, on goods that perish in the using. But they
read with good intent, and what they learn they incar-
nate. The English mind turns every abstraction it can
receive into a portable utensil, or a working institution.
Such is their tenacity, and such their practical turn, that
they hold all they gain. Hence we say, that only the

230 ENGLISH TRAITS.

English race can be trusted with freedom, — freedom
which is double-edged and dangerous to any but the
wise and robust. The English designate the kingdoms
emulous of free institutions as the sentimental nations.
Their own culture is not an outside varnish, but is thor-
ough and secular in families and the race. They are
oppressive with their temperament, and all the more that
they are refined. I have sometimes seen them walk with
my countrymen, when I M-as forced to allow them every
advantage, and their companions seemed bags of bones.
There is cramp limitation in their habit of thought,
sleepy routine, and a tortoise's instinct to hold hard to
the ground with his claws, lest he should be thrown on
his back. There is a drag of inertia which resists reform
in every shape ; law-reform, army-reform, extension of
^suffrage, Jewish franchise. Catholic emancipation, — the
abolition of slavery, of impressment, penal code, and
entails. They praise this drag, under the formula, that
it is the excellence of the British constitution, that no
law can anticipate the public opinion. These poor tor-
toises must hold hard, for they feel no wings sprouting
at their shoulders. Yet somewhat divine warms at their
heart, and waits a happier hour. It hides in their sturdy
will. "Will," said the old philosophy, "is the measure
of power," and personality is the token of this race.
Quid vult valde vult. What they do they do with a will.
You cannot account for their success by their Chris-
tianity, commerce, charter, common law. Parliament, or
letters, but by the contumacious sharp-tongued energy
of English nattirel, with a poise impossible to disturb,
which makes all these its instruments. They are slow and

RESULT. 231

reticent, and are like a dull good horse which lets every
nag pass him, but with whip and spur will run down
every racer in the field. They are right in their feeUng,
though wrong in their speculation.

The feudal system survives in the steep inequahty of
property and privilege, in the limited franchise, in the
social barriers which confine patronage and promotion to
a caste, and still more in the submissive ideas pervading
these people. The fagging of the schools is repeated in
the social classes. An Englishman shows no mercy to
those below him in the social scale, as he looks for none
from those above him ; any forbearance from his superiors
surprises him, and they suffer in his good opinion. But
the feudal system can be seen with less pain on large
liistorical grounds. It was pleaded in mitigation of the
rotten borough, that it worked well, that substantial jus-
tice was done. Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce,
Sheridan, Rom illy, or whatever national men, were by
tills means sent to Parliament, when their return by large
constituencies would have been doubtful. So now we say,
that the right measures of England are the men it bred ;
that it has yielded more able men in five hundred years
than any other nation ; and, though we must not play
Providence, and balance the chances of producing ten
great men against the comfort of ten thousand mean men,
yet retrospectively we may strike the balance, and prefer
one Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney, one
Baleigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish democrats.

The American system is more democratic, more hu-
mane ; yet the American people do not yield better or
more able men, or more inventions or books or benefits.

23^ ENGLISH TRAITS.

tlian the English. Congress is not wiser or better than
Parliament. France has abolislied its suffocating old
regime, but is not recently marked by any more wisdom
or virtue.

The power of performance has not been exceeded, — the
creation of value. The English have given importance
to individuals, a principal end and fruit of every society.
Every man is allowed and encouraged to be what he is,
and is guarded in the indulgence of his whim. " Magna
Ciiarta," said Rushworth, " is such a fellow that he will
have no sovereign." By this general activity, and by
this sacredness of individuals, they have in seven hun-
dred years evolved the principles of freedom. It is the
land of patriots, martyrs, sages, and bards, and if the
ocean out of which it emerged should wash it away, it
will be remembered as an island famous for immortal
laws, for the announcements of original right wliich
make the stone tables of liberty.

CHAPTER XIX.

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER.

A FEW days after my arrival at Manchester, in No-
vember, 1847, the Manchester Athenaeum gave its annual
Banquet in the Free-Trade Hall. With other guests, I
was invited to be present, and to address the company.
In looking over recently a newspaper report of my
remarks, I incline to reprint it, as fitly expressing the
feeling with which I entered England, and which agrees

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 233

well enough with the more deliberate results of better
acquaintance recorded in the foregoing pages. Sir Arch-
ibald AHson, the historian, presided, and opened the
meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr.
Cobden, Lord Bracklej, and others, among whom was
Mr. Cruikshank, one of the contributors to " Punch."
Mr. Dickens's letter of apology for his absence was
read. Mr. Jerrold, who had been announced, did not
appear. On being introduced to the meeting I said : —

Mr. Ciiairman and Gentlemen : It is pleasant to me
to meet this great and brilliant company, and doubly
pleasant to see the faces of so many distinguished persons
on this platform. But I have known all these persons
already. When I was at home, they were as near to me
as they are to you. The arguments of the League and
its leader are known to all the friends of free trade.
The gayeties and genius, the political, the social, the
parietal wit of " Punch " go duly every fortnight to
every boy and girl in Boston and New York. Sir, when
I came to sea, I found the " History of Europe " * on
the ship's cabin table, the property of the captain ; — a
sort of programme or play-bill to tell the seafaring New-
Englander what he shall liud on his lauding here. And
as for Dombey, sir, there is no land where paper exists to
print on, where it is not found ; no man who can read,
tbat does not read it, and, if he cannot, he fmds some
charitable pair of eyes that can, and hears it.

But these things are not for me to say; these compli-
ments, though true, would better come from one who

* Bv Sir A. Alison.

234 ENGLISH TRAITS.

felt and understood these merits more. I am not here
to exchange civilities with you, but rather to speak of
that which I am sure interests these gentlemen more
than their own praises ; of that which is good in holidays
and working-days, the same in one century and in another
century. That which lures a solitary American in the
woods with tlie wish to see England, is the moral pecul-
iarity of the Saxon race, — its connnanding sense of
right and wrong, — the love and devotion to that, — this
is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre
of the globe. It is this which lies at the foundation of
that aristocratic character, which certainly wanders into
strange vagaries, so that its origin is often lost sight of,
but which, if it should lose this, would find itself para-
lyzed ; and in trade, and in the mechanic's shop, gives
that honesty in performance, that thoroughness and solid-
ity of work, which is a national characteristic. This
conscience is one element, and the other is that loyal
adhesion, that habit of friendship, that homage of man
to man, running through all classes, — the electing of
worthy persons to a certain fraternity, to acts of kind-
ness and warm and stanch support, from year to year,
from youth to age, — which is alike lovely and honorable
to those who render and those who receive it ; — which
stands in strong contrast with the superficial attachments
of other races, their excessive courtesy, and short-lived
connection.

You will think me very pedantic, gentlemen, but holi-
day though it be, I have not the smallest interest in any
holiday, except as it celebrates real and not pretended
joys ; and I think it just, in this time of gloom and com-

SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 235

merclal disaster, of affliction and beggary in these dis-
tricts, tliat on these very accounts I speak of, you should
not fail to keep your literary anniversary. I seem to
hear you say, that, for all that is come and gone yet, we
will not reduce by one chaplet or one oak-leaf the bra-
veries of our annual feast. Eor I must tell you, I was
given to understand in my childhood, that the British
island from which my forefathers came, was no lotus-
garden, no paradise of serene sky and roses and music
and merriment all the year round, no, but a cold, foggy,
mournful country, where nothing grew well in the open
air, but robust men and virtuous women, and these of a
wonderful fibre and endurance; that their best parts were
slowly revealed; their virtues did not come out until
they quarrelled : they did not strike twelve the first time;
good lovers, good haters, and you could know little about
tliem till you had seen them long, and little good of them
till you had seen them in action ; that in prosperity they
were moody and dumpish, but in adversity they were
grand. Is it not true, sir, that the wise ancients did not
praise the ship parting with flying colors from the port,
but only that brave sailer which came back with torn
sheets and battered sides, stript of her banners, but
having ridden out the storm ? And so, gentlemen, I feel
in regard to this aged England, with the possessions,
honors, and trophies, and also with the infirmities of a
thousand years gathering around her, irretrievably com-
mitted as she now is to many old customs which cannot
be suddenly changed ; pressed upon by the transitions of
trade, and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics, arts,
machines, and competing populations, — I see her not

236 ENGLISH TRAITS.

dispirited, not weak, but well remembering that she has
seen dark days before ; indeed, w^ith a kind of instinct
that she sees a little better in a cloudy day, and that
in storm of battle and calamity, she has a secret vigor
and a pulse like a cannon. I see her in her old age,
not decrepit, but young, and still daring to believe in
her power of endurance and expansion. Seeing this, I
say. All hail ! mother of nations, mother of heroes, with
strength still equal to the time ; still wise to entertain
and swift to execute the policy which the mind and heart
of mankind require in the present hour, and thus only
hospitable to the foreigner, and truly a home to the
thoughtful and generous who are born m the soil. So
be it! so let it be ! If it be not so, if the courage of
England goes with the chances of a commercial crisis,
I will go back to the capes of Massachusetts, and my
own Indian stream, and say to my countrymen, tlie old
race are all gone, and the elasticity and hope of man-
kind must henceforth remain on the Alleghany ranges,
or nowhere.

THE END

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