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THE Gl FX OF
^3 iH^y/rf9'
r"
^tanHarti SiBrarp €tiitton
THE WORKS OF
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
WITH A GENERAL INDEX AND A MEMOIR
BY JAMES ELLIOT CABOT
WITH STEEL PORTRAITS AND ETCHINGS
IN FOURTEEN VOLUMES
VOLUME V
J//. Eiuct so^i^'i Stiniy
ENGLISH TRAITS
BY
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
GhM2S4<gjo
•^5 TfjfJ^., nff^
Harvard Univ6i^ityi
Child Memorial Library.
Copyright, 1856 and 1876.
Bt RALPH WALDO EMBRSON.
Copyright, 1883 and 1884,
By EDWARD W. EMERSON.
AH rights reserved.
13u Riwrtide PresSy Cambridge, Man., XT. S. A.
Bleotiotiyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company.
CONTENTS.
OHAPTSK 'AQ»
I. First Visit to England 7
IL Voyage to England 28
in. Land 37
IV. Race 47
V. Ability 75
VI. Manners 101
VII. Truth 114
VEIL Character 124
IX. Cockayne 140
X. Wealth 149
XI. Aristocracy 166
XII. Universities 191
XIII. Religion 205
XIV. Literature 221
XV. The " Times," 247
XVI. Stonehenge 259
XVn. Personal 276
XVin. Result 283
XIX. Speech at Manchbstbx 292
ENGLISH TRAITS.
CHAPTER I.
FIEST VISIT TO ENGLAND.
I HAVE been twice in England. In 1833, on
my 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 Sim-
day morning ; there were few people in the streets,
and I remember the pleasure of that first walk on
English ground, with my companion, an American
artist, from the Tower up through Cheapside and
the Strand to a house in Russell Square, whither
we had been recommended to good chambers. For
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 lan-
guage ; our coimtry 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
indebted to the men of Edinburgh and of the Edin-
8 ENGLISH TRAITS.
burgh Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam,
and to Scott, Playfair and De Quincey; and my
narrow and desultory reading had inspired the wish
to see the faces of three or four writers, — Cole-
ridge, Wordsworth, Landor, De Quincey, and the
latest and strongest contributor to the critical jour-
nals, Carlyle; and I suppose if I 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 stiU living I
might have wandered into Germany also. Besides
those I 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 afterwards saw at Westminster Abbey at
the funeral of Wilberf orce. The young scholar fan-
cies 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 condi-
tions of literary success are almost destructive of
the best social power, as they do not leave that
frolic liberty which only can encoimter a compan-
ion 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, however, found writers superioi
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 9
to their books, and I cling to my first belief that a
strong head will dispose fast enough oi these im-
pediments and give one the satisfaction of reality,
the sense of having been met, and a larger hori-
zon.
On looking over the diary of my journey in
1833, I find nothing to publish in my memoranda
of visits to places. But I have 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 needful to affect any prudery of
suppression about a few hints of those bright per-
sonalities.
At Florence, chief among artists I found Hora-
tio Grreenough, 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
AchiUes in clay, were idealizations of his own.
Greenough was a superior man, ardent and elo-
quent, and all his opinions had elevation and
magnanimity. He believed that the Greeks had
wrought in schools or fraternities, — the genius 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
10 ENGLISH TRAITS.
so refractory a material as stone ; and he thought
art would never prosper until we left our shy jeal-
ous ways and worked in society as they. All his
thoughts breathed the same generosity. He was
an accurate and a deep man. He was a votary of
the Greeks, and impatient of Gothic art. His pa-
per on Architecture, published in 1843, annoimced
in advance the leading thoughts of Mr. Ruskin on
the morality in architecture, notwithstanding the
antagonism in their views of the history of art. I
have a private letter from him, — later, but re-
specting the same period, — in which he roughly
sketches his own theory. " Here is my theory of
structure : A scientific arrangement of spaces and
forms to functions and to site ; an emphasis of fea-
tures proportioned to their gradated importance in
function ; color and ornament to be decided and ar-
ranged and varied by strictly organic laws, having
a distinct reason for each decision ; the entire and
immediate banishment of all make-shift and make-
believe."
Greenough brought me, through a common friend,
an invitation from Mr. Landor, who lived at San
Domenica di Fiesole. On the 16th May I dined
with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courte-
ous, living in a cloud of pictures at his Villa Ghe.
rardesca, a fine house commanding a beautiful land-
scape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. U
from some anecdotes, an impression of Aclullean
wrath, — an untamable petulance. I do not know
whether the imputation were just or not, but cer-
tainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that
haughty mind and he was the most patient and gen-
tle of hosts. He praised the beautiful cyclamen
which grows all about Florence ; he admired Wash-
ington ; 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 inmiutable past. No great man ever had a
great son, if Philip and Alexander be not an excep-
tion ; and Philip he calls the greater man. In art,
he loves the Greeks, and in sculpture, them only.
He prefers the Venus to everything else, and, after
that, the head of Alexander, in the gallery here.
He prefers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo ; in
painting, Raffaelle, and shares the growing taste
for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek
iiistories he thought the only good ; and after them,
Voltaire's. I could not make him praise Mackin-
tosh, nor my more recent friends ; Montaigne very
cordially, — and Charron also, which seemed un-
discriminating. He thought Degerando indebted
to "Lucas on Happiness" and "Lucas on Holi-
ness " I He pestered me with Southey ; but who is
Southey?
12 ENGLISH TRAITS,
He invited me to breakfast on Friday. On Fri-
day I did not fail to go, and this time with Green-
ough. He entertained us at once with reciting half
a dozen hexameter lines of Julius Caesar's ! — from
Donatus, he said. He glorified Lord Chesterfield
more than was necessary, and undervalued Burke,
and undervalued Socrates ; designated as three of
the greatest of men, Washington, Phocion and Ti-
moleon, — 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
km 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 micro-
scopes, magnifying (it was said) two thousand di-
ameters; 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 Domenichino." I was more curious to see
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND, 18
his library, but Mr. H , one of the guests, told
me that Mr. Landor 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 sig-
nalize their commanding freedom. He has a won-
derful brain, despotic, 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 ac-
tion and heroes. The thing done avails, and not
what is said about it. An original sentence, a step
forward, is worth more than all the censures. Lan-
dor is strangely undervalued in England ; usually
ignored 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 multi-
tude of elegant sentences ; for wisdom, wit, and in-
dignation that are unforgetable.
From London, on the 5th August, I went to
Highgate, and wrote a note to Mr. Coleridge, re-
questing leave to pay my respects to him. It was
near noon. Mr. Coleridge sent a verbal message
that he was in bed, but if I would call after one
o'clock he would see ma I returned at one, and
he appeared, a short, thick old man, with bright
14 ^ ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 Eome ; what a master
of the Titianesque he was, &c., &c. He spoke of
Dr. Channing. It was an unspeakable misfortune
that he should have turned out a Unitarian af-
ter all. On this, he burst into a declamation 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
vehemence 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 bom 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 doctrine of the Jews
before Christ, — this handful of Priestleians should
take on themselves to deny it, &c., &c. He was
very sorry that Dr. Channing, a man to whom he
looked up, — no, to say that he looked up to him
would be to speak falsely, but a man whom h«
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 15
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 Christi-
anity for what was lovely and excellent, — 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 (Cole-
ridge) knew all about Unitarianism perfectly well,
because he had once been a Unitarian and knew
what quackery it was. He had been called " the
rising star of Unitarianism." He went on defining,
or rather refining : " The Trinitarian doctrine was
realism ; the idea of God was not essential, but su-
per-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 ken-
nel, 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 proceeded to inquire if the " extract " from
16 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the Independent's pamphlet, in die third yolnme
of the Friend, were a veritable quotation. He re-
plied 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 cold
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 quo-
tation than in the original, 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 anni-
versary," and he recited with strong emphasis,
standing, ten or twelve lines beginning, —
« Bom unto God in Christ "
He inquired where I had been travelling; and
on learning 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 re-
xiumed from that country, that Sicily was an excel-
lent 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 legis.
lation to anything good and wise. There were only
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 17
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 AUston's, and told me that
Montague, a picture-dealer, once came to see him,
and glancing towards this, said " Well, you have
got a picture I " thinking it the work of an old
master; afterwards, Montague, still talking with
his back to the canvas, put up 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 foreseen, the visit was rather a spec-
tacle than a conversation, of no use beyond the sat-
isfaction of my curiosity. He was old and preoc-
cupied, and could not bend to a new companion
and think with him.
From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands. On
my return I came from Glasgow to Dumfries, and
18 ENGLISH TRAITS.
being intent on delivering a letter which I had
brought from Some, inquired for Craigenputtock.
It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dun-
score, sixteen miles distant. 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 au-
thor 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 hinnor which floated every thing he
looked upon. His talk playfully exalting the fa-
miliar 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 magazine ; " Friaser's nearer approach to
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 19
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
his pig. He had 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 stiU thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked
Nero's death, " Qualis artifex pereo 1 " better than
most history. He worships a man that will man-
ifest any truth to him. At one time he had in-
quired and read a good deal about America. Lan-
dor'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 reading had been multifarioua
20 ENGUSH TRAITS.
Tristram Shandy was one of his first books after
Robinson Crusoe, and Robertson's America an
early favorite. Rousseau's Confessions had discov-
ered 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 litera-
ture at this moment; recounted the incredible
sums paid in one year by the great booksellers for
puffing. Hence it comes that no newspaper is
trusted now, no books are bought, and the book-
sellers are on the eve of bankruptcy.
He still returned to English pauperism, the
crowded country, the selfish abdication by public
men of all that public persons should perform.
Government should direct poor men what to do.
Poor Irish folk come wandering 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.
They 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
Wordsworth's country. There we sat down and
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 21
fcalked of the immortality of the souL It was not
Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for
he had the natural disinclination 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 Lon-
don 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 huge
machine. Each keeps its own roimd. The baker's
boy brings muffins to the window at a fixed hour
every day, and that is all the Londoner knows or
wishes to know on the subject. But it turned out
good men. He named certain individuals, espe-
cially 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
22 ENGLISH TRAITS.
great simplicity. He had just returned 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 so-
ciety is being enlightened 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 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 grav-
est mischiefs from this source ? He has even said,
what seemed a paradox, 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 manner, but that's
not important. That comes of the pioneer state of
things. But I fear they are too much given to the
making of money ; and secondly, to politics ; that
they make political distinction the end and not the
means. And I fear they lack a class of men of
leisure, — in short, of gentlemen, — to give a tono
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 23
of honor to the community. I am told that things
are boasted of in the second class of society there,
which, in England, — God knows, are done in Eng-
land 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 steal-
ing spoons ! " He was against taking off the tax
on newspapers in England, — which the reformers
represent as a tax upon knowledge, — for this rea-
son, that they would be inundated with base prints.
He said he talked on political aspects, for he
wished to impress on me and all good Americans
to cultivate the moral, the conservative, &c., &c.,
and never to call into action the physical strength
of the people, as had just now been done in Eng-
land in the Kef orm Bill, — a thing prophesied by
Delolme. He alluded once or twice to his conver-
sation with Dr. Channing, 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 esteems a far higher poet than Virgil ; not in
his system, which is nothing, but in his power of
illustration. Faith is necessary to explain any-
thing and to reconcile the foreknowledge of God
24 ENGLISH TRAITS.
with human evil. Of Cousin (whose lectures wo
had all been reading in Boston), he knew only the
name.
I inquired if he had read Carlyle's critical arti^
cles and translations. He said he thought him
sometimes insane. He proceeded to abuse Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister heartily. It was full of all man-
ner of fornication. It was like the crossing of flies
in the air. He had never gone farther 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 sympa-
thies of every body. Even Mr. Coleridge wrote
more clearly, though he had always wished Cole-
ridge would write more to be imderstood. He led
me out into his garden, and showed me the gravel
walk in which thousands of his lines were com-
posed. 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 Fingal's
Cave, and was composing a fourth when he was
called in to see me. He said '' If you are interi
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 25
ested in my verses perhaps yoa will like to hear
these lines." I gladly assented, and he recollected
himself for a few moments and then stood forth
and repeated, one after the other, the three entire
sonnets with great animation. I fancied the sec-
ond 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. The second al-
ludes to the name of the cave, which is " Cave of
Music ; " the first to the circumstance of its being
visited by the promiscuous company of the steam-
boat.
This recitation was so unlocked for and surpris-
ing, — he, 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 myself, 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 corrected a good deal, and every alter-
ation is ungraciously received after printing ; but
what he had written would be printed, whether he
lived or died. I said ^^ Tintem Abbey " appeared
26 ENGLISH TRAITS.
to be the £ayorite poem with the public, bat more
contemplative readers preferred the first books of
the " Excursion," and the Sonnets. He said " Yes,
they are better." He preferred such of his poems
as touched the affections, to any others ; for what-
ever is didactic, — what theories of society, and so
on, — might perish quickly ; but whatever com-
bined a truth with an affection was Krrjfui 'cs 'aci,
good to-day and good forever. He cited the son-
net " On the feelings of a high-minded Spaniard,"
which he preferred to any other (I so imderstood
him), and the " Two Voices ; " and quoted, with
evident pleasure, the verses addressed " To the
Skylark." In this connection he said of the New-
tonian 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 me what a common person in England could
do, and he 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 capabili-
ties 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 his simple ad-
FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND. 27
herence to truth, and was very willing not to shine ;
but he surprised by the hard limits of his thought.
To judge from a single conversation, he made the
impression of a narrow and very English mii^d ; 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 expi-
ate their departure from the common in one direc-
tion, by their conformity in every other.
CHAPTER n.
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 way as our New Eng-
land Lyceums, but in 1847 had been linked into a
" Union," which embraced twenty or thirty towns
and cities and presently extended into the middle
counties and northward into Scotland. I was in-
vited, on liberal terms, to read a series of lectures
in them all. The request was urged with every
kind suggestion and every assurance of aid and
comfort, by friendliest parties in Manchester, who,
in the sequel, amply redeemed their word. The
remimeration was equivalent to the fees at that
time paid in this coimtry for the like services. At
all events it was sufficient to cover any travelling
expenses, and the proposal offered an excellent op-
portunity 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
VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 29
traveller, nor have I found that long journeys yield
a fair share of reasonable hours. But the invita-
tion was repeated and pressed at a moment of more
leisure and when I was a little spent by some im-
usual studies. I wanted a change and a tonic, and
England was proposed to me. Besides, there were
at least the dread attraction and salutary influ-
ences of the sea. So 1 took my berth in the packet-
ship Washington Irving and sailed from Boston on
Tuesday, 6th October, 1847.
On Friday at noon we had only made one hun-
dred 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 night, after doing one day's
work in four, the storm came, the winds blew, and
we flew before a north-wester which strained every
rope and sail. The good ship darts through the
water all day, all night, like 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 hover
around; no fishermen; she has passed the Banks,
80 ENGLISH TRAITS.
left five sail behind her far on the edge of the west
at sundown, which were far east of us at mom, —
though they say at sea a stem chase is a long race,
— and still we fly for our Uves. 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 steer-
ing, 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, what-
ever dangers we are running into, we are certainly
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 in-
stead of twenty-four.
Our ship was registered 750 tons, and weighed
perhaps, with all her freight, 1,500 tons. The
mainmast, from the deck to the top-button, meas-
ured 115 feet ; the length of the deck from stem to
VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 81
stem, 155. It is impossible not to personify a
ship ; every body does, in every thing they say : —
she behaves well ; she minds her rudder ; she swims
like a duck ; she runs her nose into the water; she
looks into a port. Then 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 phosphoric insects, when
taken up in a pail, as shaped like a Carolina po-
tato.
I find the sea-life an acquired taste, like that for
tomatoes and olives. The confinement, cold, mo-
tion, 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 morn-
ing with the belief that some one was tipping up
my berth. Nobody likes to be treated ignomin-
iously, upset, shoved against the side of the house,
82 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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 are drifting all over it, each one,
like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alter-
nating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or
smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal ceme-
tery ? 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 geolo-
gist 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, monuments, bones, and knowledge of man-
kind, steadily and insensibly. If it is capable of
these great and secular mischiefs, it is quite as
ready at private and local damage ; and of this no
landsman seems so fearful as the seaman. Such
discomfort and such danger as the narratives of
the captain and mate disclose are bad enough as
VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 83
die oostlj fee we pay for entrance to Europe ; but
the wonder 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-sleeyes,
who had hid himself whilst the ship was in port, in
the bread-doset, having no money and wishing to
go to England. The siulors 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 runaway boys ; and adds that
all of them are sick of the sea, but stay in it out of
pride. Jack has a life of risks, incessant abuse
and the worst pay. It is a little better with the
mate and not very much better with the captain.
A himdred 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 preoccupied. The water-laws, arctic frost, the
moimtain, 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
vou. V. 8
84 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 coun-
try inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig. I
remember that some of the happiest and most val-
uable hours I have owed to books, passed, many
years ago, on shipboard. The worst impediment
I 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 con-
venience at sea, and sometimes a memorable fact
turns up, which you have long had a vacant niche
for, and seize with the joy of a collector. But,
imder the best conditions, a voyage is one of the
severest 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 coimt-
ed, sixteen according to me. Beckoned from the
VOYAGE TO ENGLAND. 35
time when we left soundings, our speed was 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
consult his dignity by giving audience to foreign
ambassadors 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 seafaring people,
who for hundreds of years claimed the strict sov^
ereignty of the sea, and exacted toll and the strike
ing sail from the ships of all other 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 senti-
ments, English loves and fears, English history
and social modes. Yesterday every passenger had
measured the speed of the ship by watching the
bubbles over the ship's bulwarks. To-day, instead
86 ESGUSH TRAITS,
€3i biibbl«ft, we measure hj Kinsde, Ccnk, Wsfcer-
iwd and Aidmore. There lay the green shore of
Ireland, like some ooart of plenty. We coold see
towna, towers, ehnrches, hanrests ; bat die cmse of
ei^ hnndred yean we eoold not diaooiu
CHAPTER m.
LAND.
Alfiebi thought Italy and England the only
countries wortti Kving in; the former because there
Nature vindicates her rights and triumphs over the
evils inflicted by the governments; the latter be-
cause art conquers nature and transforms a rude,
imgenial land into a paradise of comfort and plenty.
England is a garden. Under 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, val-
leys, 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
foimd aU the capabilities, the arable soil, the quar-
riable rock, the highways, the byways, the fords,
the navigable waters ; and the new arts of inter-
course meet you every where ; so that England is
a huge phalanstery, where all that man wants is
provided within the precinct. Cushioned and com-
38 ENGLISH TRAITS.
forted in every manner, the traveller rides as on a
cannon-ball, high and low, over rivers and towns,
through mountains in tunnels 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
have machinized the rest of the world for his occa-
sion.
The problem of the traveller landing at Liver-
pool is. Why England is England? What are the
elements of that power which the English hold
over other nations? If there be one test of na-
tional genius universally accepted, it is success;
and if there be one successful country in the imi-
verse for the last millennium, that coimtry is Eng-
land.
A wise traveller will naturally choose to visit the
best of actual nations ; and an American has more
reasons than another to draw him to Britain. In
aU that is done or begun by the Americans to-
wards 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 consid-
erable for a thousand years since Egbert, it has,
in the last centuries, obtained the ascendant, and
stamped the knowledge, activity and power of man*
kind with its impress. Those who resist it do not
LAND. 89
feel it or obey it less. The Bussian 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 modem society, the
utilitarian direction which labor, laws, opinion, re-
ligion take, is the natural genius of the British
mind. The influence of France is a constituent
of modem civility, but not enough opposed to the
English for the most wholesome effect. The Amer-
ican is only the continuation 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 what-
ever form, is still English history and manners.
So that a sensible Englishman 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, that the
sheriff finds in drawing a jury to try some cause
which has agitated the whole community and on
which every body finds himself an interested party.
Officers, jurors, judges have all taken sides. Eng-
land has inoculated all nations with her civiliza-
tion, intelligence and tastes ; and to resist the tyr-
anny 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
40 ENGLISH TRAITS.
old Grreek, the Oriental, and, much more, the ideal
standard ; if only by means of the very impatience
which English forms are sure to awaken in inde-
pendent minds.
Besides, if we will 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 within a few
years ; and hence the impression that the British
power has culminated, is in solstice, or already de-
clining.
As soon as you enter England, which, with
Wales, is no larger than the State of Georgia,^
this little land stretches by an illusion to the dv
mensions 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 rich and
of remarkable people, the servants and equipages,
— aU these catching the eye and never allowing it
to pause, hide aU 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 England well needs a hundred years ; for
^ Add South Carolina, and you have more than an equiva*
lent for the area of Scotland.
LAND. 41
what they told me was the merit of Sir John
Soane's Musemn, in London, — that it was well
packed and well saved, — is the merit of England ;
— it is stuffed full,in all comers 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 intermediate 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 en-
titled to by latitude. 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 demand 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 coimtry." Then England has
all the materials of a working coimtry except wood.
The constant rain, — a rain with every tide, in
some parts of the island, — keeps its multitude of
rivers full and brings agricultural production up to
the highest point. It has plenty of water, of stone,
of potter's clay, of coal, of salt and of iron. The
land naturally abounds with game ; immense heaths
and downs are paved with quails, grouse and wood-
42 ENGLISH TRAITS.
cock, and the shores are animated by water-birds.
The rivers and the surrounding sea spawn with
fish ; there are sahnon for the rich and sprats and
herrings for the poor. In the northern lochs, the
herring are in innumerable shoals ; at one season,
the coimtry people say, the lakes contain one part
water and two parts fish.
The only drawback on this industrial conven-
iency 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 fine soot or blacks
darken the day, give white sheep the color of black
sheep, discolor tiie human saliva, contaminate the
air, poison many plants and corrode the monuments
and buildings.
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 pretended that the
enormous consumption of coal in the island is also
felt in modifying the general climate.
Factitious climate, factitious position. England
resembles a ship in its shape, and if it were one,
its best admiral could not have worked it or an>
LAND. 48
chored it in a more judicious or eflfective position.
Sir John Herschel said " London is the centre of
the terrene globe." The shopkeeping nation, to
use a shop word, has a good stand. The old Ve-
netians pleased themselves with the flattery that
Venice was in 45°, midway between the 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
earth to be an animal. The Jews believed Jerusa-
lem 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,
imder his showing, by the inhabitants of Chestnut
Street. But when carried to Charleston, to New
Orleans and to Boston, it somehow failed to con-
vince the ingenious scholars of all those capitals.
But England is anchored at the side of Europe,
and right in the heart of the modem world. The
sea, which, according to Virgil's famous line, di-
vided 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 only
in the geologic strata, — that fortunate day when a
wave of the German Ocean burst the old isthmus
44 ENGLISH TRAITS.
which joined Kent and Cornwall to France, and
gave to this fragment of Europe its impregnable
sea-wall, cutting off an island of eight hundred
miles in length, with an irregular breadth reaching
to three hundred miles; a territory large enough
for independence, enriched with every seed of na-
tional power, so near that it can see the harvests
of the continent, and so far that who would cross
the strait must be an expert mariner, ready for
tempests. As America, Europe and Asia lie, these
Britons have precisely the best commercial position
in the whole planet, and are sure of a market for
aU the goods they can manufacture. And to make
these advantages avail, the river Thames must dig
its spacious outiet to the sea from the heart of the
kingdom, giving road and landing to innumerable
ships, and aU the conveniency to trade that a peo-
ple so skilful and sufficient in economizing water-
front by docks, warehouses and lighters required.
When James the First declared his purpose of
pimishing 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 Matiock and
Derbyshire; delicious landscape in Dovedale, de<
LAND. 45
licious sea-idew 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. FonteneUe thought that nar
ture had sometimes a little affectation ; and there
is such an artificial completenesss in this nation of
artificers as if there were a design from the begin-
ning to elaborate a bigger Birmingham. Nature
held counsel with herself and said, ' My Bomans
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.
Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the
strongest! For I have work that requires the
best will and sinew. Sharp and temperate north-
em breezes shall blow, to keep that will alive and
alert. The sea shall disjoin the people from others,
and knit them to a fierce nationality. It shall give
them markets on every side. Long time I will
keep them on their feet, by poverty, border-wars,
seafaring, 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 an-
other, but proportioned to the size of Europe and
the continents.'
With its fruits, and wares, and money, must its
46 ENGLISH TRAITS.
civil influence radiate. It is a singular coinci-
dence 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 aU 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."
CHAPTER IV.
RACE.
An ingenious anatomist has written a book ^ to
prove that races are imperishable, but nations are
pliant political constructions, easily changed or de-
stroyed. But this writer did not found his assumed
races on any necessary law, disclosing their ideal
or metaphysical necessity; nor did he on the other
hand count with precision the existing 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
imlike 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. Blu-
menbach reckons five races ; Humboldt three ; and
Mr. Pickering, who lately in our Exploring Expe-
dition thinks he saw all the kinds of men that can
be on the planet, makes eleven.
The British Empire is reckoned to contain (in
1848) 222,000,000 souls,— perhaps a fifth of the
^ The RaceSy a Fragment, By Robert Eaiox. London: 1850i
48 ENGLISH TRAITS.
population of the globe ; and to comprise a territory
of 5,000,000 square miles. So far liave British
people predominated. Perhaps forty of these mill-
ions are of British stock. Add the United States
of America, which reckon (in the same year), ex-
clusive of slaves, 20,000,000 of people, on a terri-
tory of 3,000,000 square miles, and in which the
foreign element, however considerable, is rapidly
assimilated, 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 home countries. What
makes this census important is the quality of the
imits 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 individuals
among them of personal ability. It has been de-
nied that the English have genius. Be it as it
may, men of vast intellect have been bom on their
soil, and they have made or applied the principal
inventions. They have sound bodies and supreme
<dndurance in war and in labor. The spawning
force of the race has sufficed to the colonization
of great parts of the world ; yet it remains to be
seen whether they can make good the exodus of
JRACE, 49
millions from Great Britain, amoimting in 1852
to more than a thousand a day. They have assim-
ilating force, since they are imitated by their for-
eign subjects; and they are still aggressive and
propagandist, enlarging the dominion of their arts
and liberty. Their laws are hospitable, and slav-
ery does not exist under them. What oppression
exists is incidental and temporary ; their success 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 advan-
tages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea, or to
local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws
and traditions, nor to fortune ; but to superior 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 foimd 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 litheness, or stature
that give advantage, but a symmetry that reaches
as far as to the wit. Then the miracle and renown
begin. Then first we care to examine the pedi<
voj* V. 4
50 ENGLISH TRAITS.
gree, and copy heedf ully the training, — what food
they ate, what nursing, school, and exercises they
had, which resulted in this mother-wit, delicacy of
bought and robust wisdom. How came such men
as King Alfred, and Eoger Bacon, William of
Wykeham, Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Isaac
Newton, William Shakspeare, 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 parent-
age ? For it is certain that these men are samples
of their contemporaries. The hearing ear is al-
ways found close to the speaking tongue, and no
genius can long or often utter any thing which is
not invited and gladly entertained by men around
him.
It is race, is it not ? that puts the hundred mill-
ions of India under the dominion of a remote is-
land in the north of Europe. Race avails much,
if that be true which is alleged, that all Celts are
Catholics and all Saxons are Protestants; that
Celts love unity of power, and Saxons the repre-
sentative principle. Race is a controlling influence
in the Jew, who, for two millenniums, under every
climate, has preserved the same character and em-
ployments. Race in the negro is of appalling im-
portance. The French in Canada, cut off from all
intercourse with the parent people, have held their
RACE, 61
national traits. I chanced to read Tacitus " On the
Manners of the Germans," not long since, in Mis-
souri and the heart of Illinois, and I found abun-
dant points of resemblance between the Germans
of the Hercynian forest, and our Hoosiers^ Suckers
and Badgers of the American woods.
But whilst race works immortally to keep its
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 man-
ners. Trades and professions carve their own lines
on face and form. Certain circumstances of Eng-
lish life are not less effective ; as personal liberty ;
plenty of food ; good ale and mutton ; open mar-
ket, or good wages for every kind of labor ; high
bribes to talent and skiU ; the island life, or the
million opportunities and outlets for expanding and
misplaced talent; readiness of combination among
themselves for politics or for business ; strikes ; and
sense of superioriiy foimded on habit of victory in
labor and in war: and the appetite for superiority
grows by feeding.
It is easy to add to the coimteracting forces to
52 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 national-
ity as out of other conditions, and make the na-
tional life a culpable compromise.
These limitations of the formidable doctrine of
race suggest others which threaten to undermine it,
as not sufficiently based. The fixity or inconverti-
bleness of races as we see them is a weak argument
for the etemiiy of these frail boundaries, since all
our historical period is a point to the duration in
which nature has wrought. Any the least and sol-
itariest fact in our natural history, such as the mel-
ioration of fruits and of animal stocks, has the
worth of a power in the opportimity of geologic pe-
riods. 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 every-
where. It need not puzzle us that Malay and Pap-
uan, Celt and Eoman, Saxon and Tartar should
mix, when we see the rudiments of tiger and ba-
boon in our human form, and know that the bar-
riers 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
RA.CE. 63
mounts, the organizations become complex. We
are piqued with pure descent, but nature loves in-
oculation. A child blends in his face the faces of
both parents and some feature from every ancestor
whose face hangs on the waU. The best nations
are those most widely related ; and navigation, as
e£Fecting a world-wide mixture, is the most potent
advancer of nations.
The English composite character betrays a mixed
origin. Every thing English is a fusion of distant
and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed;
the names of men are of different nations, — three
languages, three or four nations; — the currents
of thought are coimter : contemplation and practi-
cal skill ; active intellect and dead conservatism ;
world-wide enterprise and devoted use and wont ;
aggressive freedom and hospitable law 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 hea-
then coUiers ; — nothing can be praised in it with-
out damning exceptions, 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
54 ENGLISH TRAITS,
what races are in Britam ? Who can trace them
historically? Who can discriminate them anatom-
ically, or metaphysically ?
In the impossibility of arriving at satisfaction
on the historical question of race, and — come of
whatever disputable 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 Eng-
lishman was the mud of aU races." I incline to
the belief that, as water, lime, and sand make mor-
tar, so certain temperaments marry well, and, by
well -managed 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 tempera-
ments 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 aU the unadapted tempera-
ments die out.
The English derive their pedigree from such a
range of nationalities that there needs sea-room
and land-room to unfold the varieties of talent and
character. Perhaps the ocean serves as a galvanic
RACE. 55
battery, to distribute ax^ids at one pole and alkalies
at the other. So England tends to accumulate her
liberals in America, and her conservatives at Lon-
don. The Scandinavians in her race stiU hear in
every age the murmurs of their mother, the ocean ;
the Briton in the blood hugs the homestead stiU.
Again, as if to intensate the influences that are
not of race, what we think of when we talk of Eng-
lish traits really narrows itself to a small distiict.
It excludes Ireland and Scotland and Wales, and
reduces itscK 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, the prints in the shop-win-
dows, are distinctive English, and not American,
no, nor Scotch, nor Irish : but 'tis a very restricted
nationaUiy. As you go north into the manufac-
turing and agricultural districts, and to the popu-
lation 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 pro-
vincial eagerness and acuteness appear; the pov-
erty of the country makes itself remarked, and a
coarseness of manners ; and, among the intellectual,
is the insanity of dialectics. In Ireland are the
same climate and soil as in England, but less food^
66 ENGLISH TRAITS,
no right relation to the land, political dependence,
small tenantry and an inferior or misplaced race.
These queries concerning ancestry and blood may
be 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 he will win.
Yet it is fine for us to speculate in face of un-
broken traditions, though vague and losing them-
selves in fable. The traditions have got footing,
and refuse to be disturbed. The kitchen-clock is
more convenient than sidereal time. We must use
the popular category, as we do the Linnsean classi-
fication, for convenience, and not as exact and
final. Otherwise we are presently confounded when
the best-settled traits of one race are claimed by
some new ethnologist as precisely characteristic 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, with the complacency that
belongs to that constitution. Others who might be
Americans, for any thing that appeared in their
RACE, 67
complexion or form; and their speech was much
less marked and their thought much less bound.
We will call them Saxons. Then the Eoman has
implanted his dark complexion in the trinity or
quatemity of bloods.
1. The sources fromi which tradition derives their
stock are mainly three. And first they are of the
oldest blood of the world, — the Celtic. Some peo-
ples are deciduous or transitory. Where are the
Greeks? Where the Etrurians? Where the Ro-
mans ? But the Celts or Sidonides are an old fam-
ily, 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 productive-
ness. They planted Britain, and gave to the seas
and mountains names which are poems and imitate
the pure voices of nature. They are favorably re-
membered 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 Bomans found hard to conquer in two
58 ENGLISH TRAITS,
hundred and ten years, — say impossible to con-
quer, when one remembers the long sequel ; — a
people about whom in the old empire the rumor
ran there was never any that meddled with them
that repented it not.
3. Charlemagne, halting one day in a town of
Narbonnese Graul, 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 galleys. As they put out to sea
again, the emperor gazed long after them, his eyes
bathed in tears. "I am tormented with sorrow,"
he said, " when I foresee the evils they will bring
on my posteriiy." There was reason for these
Xerxes' tears. The men who 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 they 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 shore with a vic-
torious advantage in the retreat. As soon as the
RACE. 69
shores are sufficiently peopled to make piracy a los-
ing business, the same skill and courage are ready
for the service of trade.
The " Heimskringla," ^ 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 monarchical republic like Sparta. The
government disappears before the importance of cit-
izens. In Norway, no Persian masses fight and per-
ish to aggrandize a king, but the actors are bonders
or landholders, every one of whom is named and
personally and patronymically described, as the
king's friend and companion. A sparse population
gives this high worth to every man. Individuals
are often noticed as very handsome persons, which
trait only brings the story nearer to the English
race. Then the solid material interest predomi-
nates, so dear to English understanding, wherein
the 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. They are substantial 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,
1 Heimskringla, Translated by Samuel Laing, Esq. Lon-
don: 1844. _ -
60 ENGLISH TRAITS.
but for their acres. They are people considerably
advanced in rural arts, living amphibiously on a
rough coast, and drawing half their food from the
sea and half from the land. They have herds of
cows, and malt, wheat, bacon, butter, and cheese.
They fish in the fiord and hunt the deer. A king/
among these farmers has a varying power, some-
times not exceeding the authority of a sheriff. A
king was maintained, much as in some of our coun-
try 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. This
the king calls going into guest-quarters; and it was
the only way in which, in a poor coimtry, a poor
king with many retainers could be kept alive when
he leaves his own farm to coUect his dues through
the kingdom.
These Norsemen are excellent persons in the
main, with good sense, steadiness, wise 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, crowbars,
peatknives and hayforks are tools valued by them
all the more for their charming aptitude for assas-
sinations. A pair of kings, after dinner, will di-
vert themselves by thrusting each his sword through
the other's body, as did Yngve and Alf . Another
pair ride out on a morning for a frolic, and finding
RACE. 61
no weapon near, will take the bits out of their
horses' mouths and crush each other's heads with
them, as did Alric and Eric. The sight of a tent-
cord or a cloak-string puts them on hanging some-
body, 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 bum up half a dozen kings in a hall,
after getting them drunk. Never was poor gentle-
man 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 agricultural King Onund. Odin died in his
bed, in Sweden ; but it was a proverb of ill con-
dition to die the death of old age. King Hake of
Sweden cuts and slashes in battle, 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. History rarely
yields us better passages than the conversation be-
62 ENGLISH TRAITS.
tween King Sigurd the Crusader and King Eystein
his brother, on their respective merits, — one the
soldier, and the other a lover of the arts of peace.
But the reader of the Norman history must steel
himself by holding fast the remote compensations
which result from animal vigor. As the old fossil
world shows 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 lan-
guage and learned the Komance 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 " mem-
ory 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. They were all alike, they
took everything they could carry, they burned, har-
ried, violated, tortured and killed, imtil every thing
English was brought to the verge of ruin. Such
however is the illusion of antiquity and wealth, that
decent and dignified men now existing boast theii
descent from these filthy thieves, who showed a f ai
juster conviction of their own merits, by assum-
RACE. 63
ing 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 re-
ceptacle into which all the mettle of that strenuous
population was poured. The continued draught of
the best men in Norway, Sweden and Denmark to
these piratical expeditions exhausted those countries,
like a tree which bears much fruit when young,
and these have been second-rate powers ever since.
The power of the race migrated and left Norway
void. King Olaf said " When King Harold, my
father, went westward to England, the chosen men
in Norway followed him ; but Norway was so
emptied then, that such men have not since been to
find in the country, nor especially such a leader as
King Harold was for wisdom and bravery."
It was a tardy recoil of these invasions, when,
in 1801, the British government sent Nelson to
bombard the Danish forts in the Soimd, and, in
1807, Lord Cathcart, at Copenhagen, took the en-
tire Danish fleet, as it lay in the basins, and aU the
equipments from the Arsenal, and carried them to
England. KongheUe, 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
64 ENGLISH TRAITS.
perfume the first boat-load of Norse pirates into
royal highnesses 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 children of the blind see ;
the children of felons have a healthy conscience.
Many a mean, dastardly boy is, at the age of pu«
berty, transformed into a serious and generous
youth.
The mildness of the following ages has not quite
effaced these traits of Odin ; as the rudiment of a
structure matured in the tiger is said to be still
found unabsorbed in the Caucasian man. The na-
tion has a tough, acrid, animal nature, which cen-
turies of churching and civilizing have 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. The 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-bait-
ing, 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
RACE, 65
London streets hold cowardice in loathing : — "we
must work our fists well ; we are aU 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 went 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 flog-
ging, 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 seU the wife has been retained down
to our times. The Jews have been the favorite
victims of royal and popular persecution. Henry
III. mortgaged aU the Jews in the kingdom to his
brother the Earl of Cornwall, as security for money
which he borrowed. The torture of criminals, and
the rack for extorting evidence, were slowly dis-
used. Of the criminal statutes. Sir Samuel Bom-
illy said " I have examined the codes of all na-
tions, and ours is the worst, and worthy of the
Anthropophagi." In the last session (1848), the
VOL. V. 5
66 ENGUSH TRAITS.
House of Commons was listening to the 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 be-
coming the sailors and factors of the globe. From
childhood, they dabbled in water, they swam 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 maritime ; "
and Fuller adds, 'Hhe genius even of landlocked
counties driving the natives with a maritime dex-
terity." As early as the conquest it is remarked,
in explanation of the wealth of England, that its
merchants trade to all countries.
The English 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 sup-
pose a himdred 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 re-
marked the stoutness on my first landing at Liver-
pool; porter, drayman, coachman, guard, — what
substantial, respectable, grandfatherly figures, with
RACE. 67
costume and maimers 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 cos-
tumes 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 aU ages they are a handsome race. The bronze
moniunents of crusaders lying cross-legged in the
Temple Church at London, and those in Worces-
ter 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 goodnature, valor and refinement, and
mainly by that uncorrupt youth in the face of man-
hood, which is daily seen in the streets of London.
Both branches of the Scandinavian race are dis-
tinguished for beauty. The anecdote of the hand-
some captives which Saint Gregory found at Rome,
A. D. 600, is matched by the testimony of the
Norman chroniclers, five centuries later, who won-
dered at the beauty and long flowing hair of the
young English captives. Meantime the "Heims-
68 ENGLISH TRAITS.
kringla " has frequent occasion to speak of the per-
sonal beauty of its heroes. When it is considered
what humanity, what resources of mental and moral
power the traits of the blonde race betoken, its
accession to empire marks a new and finer epoch,
wherein the old mineral force shall be subjugated
at last by humanity and shall 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 con-
struction. 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, law-
ful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of chil-
dren, 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 "Beauty 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
BACE. 69
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 ex-
tremes of courage and tenderness. Nelson, dying
at Trafalgar, sends his love to Lord Collingwood,
and like an innocent schoolboy 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 Rodney's fig-
ure approached to delicacy and effeminacy, and he
declared himself very sensible to fear, which he
surmoimted only by considerations of honor and
public duty. Clarendon says the Duke of Buck-
ingham was so modest and gentle, that some cour-
tiers attempted to put affronts on him, until they
found that this 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 his back
on a danger, yet of that tenderness that he would
not brush away a mosquito." Even for their high-
waymen the same virtue is claimed, and Bobin
Hood comes described to us as mitiasimus prcedo'
num; the gentlest 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
70 ENGUSH TRAITS,
the bottom of society, the animal ferocity of the
quays and cockpits, the bullies of the costermon-
gers 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. They use a plentiful and nutri-
tious diet. The operative cannot subsist on water-
cresses. Beef, mutton, wheat-bread and malt-liq-
uors 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 Frenchman as a poor, starved body.
It is curious that Tacitus f oimd the English beer
already in use among the Germans : " They make
from barley or wheat a drink corrupted into some
resemblance to wine." Lord Chief Justice For-
tescue, in Henry VI.'s time, says " The inhabitants
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 reach cold water in England. Wood
the antiquary, in describing the poverty and mac-
eration 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
RACE. 71
fare was coarse ; his drink, of a penny a gawn, or
gaUon."
They have more constitutional energy than any
other people. They think, with Henri Qnatre,
that manly exercises are the foundation of that ele-
vation 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 head bent forward, as if urged
on some pressing affair. The French say that
Englishmen in the street always walk straight be^
fore 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 con-
dition. They are the most voracious people of prey
that ever existed. Every season turns out the aris-
tocracy into the country to shoot and fish. The
more vigorous run out of the island to America, to
Asia, to Africa and Australia, to hunt with fury
by gun, by trap, by harpoon, by lasso, with dog,
with horse, with elephant or with dromedary, all
the game that is in nature. These men have writ-
ten the game-books of all countries, as Hawker,
Scrope, Murray, Herbert, Maxwell, Gumming and
72 ENGLISH TRAITS.
a host of trayellers. The people at home are ad-
dicted to boxing, running, leaping and rowing
matches.
I suppose the dogs and horses must be thanked
for the fact that the men have muscles ahnost as
tough and supple as their own. If in eyery effi-
cient man there is first a fine animal, in the Eng-
lish race it is of the best breed, a wealthy, juicy,
broad-chested creature, steeped in ale and good
Bheer 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
derks 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 Buffon noted. If
you go into th^ streets, every driver in 'bus or dray
is a buUy, and if I wanted a good troop 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
lUCE, 78
other branch of their race had been Tartar nomads.
The horse was all their wealth. The children were
fed on mares' mUk. The pastures of Tartary were
still remembered by the tenacious practice of the
Norsemen to eat horseflesh at religious feasts. In
the Danish invasions the marauders seized upon
horses where they landed, and were at once con-
verted into a body of expert cavalry.
At one time this skill seems to have declined.
Two centuries ago the English horse never per-
formed any eminent service beyond the seas ; and
the reason assigned was that the genius of the Eng-
lish 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 understand horses bet-
ter 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 tail deer as if he were their
father." And rich Englishmen have followed his
example, according to their ability, ever since, in
encroaching on the tillage and commons with their
74 ENGLISH TRAITS.
game-preserves. It is a proyerb in England that
it is safer to shoot a man than a hare. The sever-
ity of the game-laws certainly indicates an extrav-
agant sympathy of the nation with horses and himt-
ers. 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 moimted gentlemen may frequently be seen
running like centaurs down a hill nearly as steep
as the roof of a house. Every inn-room is lined
with pictures of races; telegraphs commimicate,
every hour, tidings of the heats from Newmarket
and Ascot ; and the House of Commons adjourns
over the " Derby Day."
CHAPTER v.,
ABILITY.
The Saxon and the Northman are both Scandi-
navians. History does not allow us to fix the
limits of the application 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 manners, the
Norman has come popularly to represent in Eng-
land 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 en-
joyer.
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 Eoman came, but in the very day
when his fortune culminated. He looked in the
eyes of a new people that was to supplant his own.
He disembarked his legions, erected his camps
and towers, — presently he heard bad news from
76 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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, tilled, fished and traded, with
German truth and adhesiveness. 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 the 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 intellectual 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 viva-
cious as to extort charters from the kings, stood
on the strong personality of these people. Sense
and economy must rule in a world which 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 com:'
ABILITY. 77
monalty of shrewd scientific persons. What signi-
fies 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 which has 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 dis-
honor, fret and barrier must be removed, and then
his energies begin to play.
The Scandinavian fancied himself surrounded by
TroUs, — a kind of goblin men with vast power
of work and skilful production, — divine steve-
dores, carpenters, reapers, 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 troU-
moimts of Britain and turn the sweat of their
face to power and renown.
78 ENGLISH TRAITS.
If the race is good, so is the place. Nobody
landed on this spellbound island with impunity.
The enchantments of barren shingle and rough
weather transformed every adventurer into a la-
borer. 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 tem-
perament 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 ir-
resistible offshoots of the expanding mind of the
race. A man of that brain thinks and acts thus ;
and his neighbor, being afflicted with the same
kind of brain, though he 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 baro-
nial or ducal wiU.
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 like his dog. The people have that
nervous bilious temperament which is known by
medical men to resist every means employed t<»
ABILITY. 79
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 Wimbome and said he " would do one of two
things, or there live, or there lie." They hate
craft and subtlety. They neither poison, nor way-
lay, 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,
r— not so much as secret ballot, is suffered in the
island. In parliament, the tactics of the opposition
is to resist every step of the government by a piti-
less attack: and in a bargain, no prospect of ad-
vantage is so dear to the merchant as the thought
of being tricked is mortifying.
Sir Kenelm Digby, a courtier of Charles and
James, who won the sea-fight of Scanderoon, was
a model Englishman in his day. " His person was
handsome and gigantic, he had so graceful elocu-
tion 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
80 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 aU the variety of man's life. They
are the steps by which we walk in all our busi«
nesses. 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 na-
ture of man : and, if he do aught beyond this, by
breaking out into divers sorts of exterior actions,
he findeth, nevertheless, in this linked sequel of
simple discourses, the art, the cause, the rule, the
bounds and the model of it." ^
There spoke the genius of the 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 understandings. 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 impatient
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 wonted rule. Neither do they
reckon better a syllogism that ends in syUogism.
^ Antony Wood ^ MarCs Soule, p. 29.
ABILITY, 81
For they have a supreme eye to facts, and theirs is
a logic that brings salt to soup, hammer 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 daz-
zled by its own means, but locked and bolted to
results. They love men who, like Samuel John-
son, 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 pi:ac-
tical vision is spacious, and they can hold many
threads without entangling them. All the steps
they orderly take ; but with the high logic of never
confounding the minor and major proposition ;
keeping their eye on their aim, in aU 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 that capital inven-
tion of freedom, a constitutional opposition. 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 repro-
duction of the grievance, with calculations and es-
timates. But, meantime, he is drawing numbers
9iid money to his opinion, resolved that if all rem*
VOL. v. *
82 ENGLISH TRAITS.
edy fails, right of revolution is at the bottom of his
charter-box. They are boimd to see their measure
carried, and stick to it through ages of defeat.
Into this English logic, however, an infusion of
justice enters, not so apparent in other races ; — a
belief in the existence of two sides, and the resolu-
tion 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 kiss the dust be-
fore 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 answered ; Who is
to pay the taxes ? What will you do for trade ?
What for com ? What for the spinner ?
This singular fairness and its results strike the
French 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 England." Life is safe,
and personal rights ; and what is freedom without
security? whilst, in France, ^^ fraternity," ^^ equal-
ABILITY. 88
ity," and " indivisible uniiy " are names for assassi-
nation. Montesquieu said, ^^ England is the freest
country in the world. If a man in England had as
many 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 modem
world. Montesquieu said, "No people have true
common-sense but those who are bom in England."
This common-sense is a perception of all the con-
ditions of our earthly existence ; of laws that can
be stated, and of laws that cannot be stated, or
that are learned only by practice, in which allow-
ance for friction is made. They are impious in
their skepticism of theory, and in high departments
they are cramped and sterile. But the uncondi-
tional surrender 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, the
Flanders draught-horse, the waterfall, wind-miUs,
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
84 ENGLISH TRAITS.
and whose axis is parallel to the axis of the worlcL
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 wet sub-soil ; to
fishery, to manufacture of indispensable staples,
— salt, plumbago, leather, wool, glass, pottery and
brick, — to bees and silkworms ; — 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 pine-apples, all the growth
of his estate. They are neat husbands for order-
ing aU their 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 the
order of their dwellings and in their dress. The
Frenchman invented the ruffle; the Englishman
added the shirt. The Englishman wears a sensible
coat buttoned 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
ABILITY, 85
man whose dress is so fit for his use that you can-
not 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. They put the expense in the right
place, as, in their sea-steamers, 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 im-
pressed their directness and practical habit on mod-
em civilization.
In trade, the Englishman believes that nobody
breaks who ought not to break; and that if he
do not make trade every thing, it will make him
nothing; and acts on this belief. The spirit of
system, attention to details, and the subordination
of details, or the not driving things too finely,
(which is charged on the Germans,) constitute
that despatch of business which makes the mercan-
tile power of England.
In war, the Englishman looks to his means.
He is 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 Providence always fa-
86 ENGLISH TRAITS.
vored the heaviest battalion.'* Their mDitary sci-
ence propounds that if the weight of the advancing
column is greater than that of the resisting, the
latter is destroyed. Therefore Wellington, when
he came to the army in Spain, had every man
weighed, first with accoutrements, and then with-
out ; believing that the force of an army depended
on the weight and power of the individual sol-
diers, in spite of cannon. Lord Palmerston told
the House of Commons that more care is taken
of the 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 rank, on
the day of action, on the field of battle, than any
other army. Before the bombardment of the Da-
nish forts in the Baltic, Nelson spent day after
day, himself, in the boats, on the exhausting ser-
vice of sounding the channel. Clerk of Eldin's
celebrated manoeuvre 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 Collingwood was accus-
tomed 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
eame to do it in three minutes and a half.
ABILITY. 87
But conscious that no race of better men exists,
they rely most on the simplest means, and do not
like ponderous 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 improve-
ment in rig, in motor, in weapons, but they fimda-
mentally believe that the best stratagem in naval
war is to lay your ship close alongside of the ene-
my'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
sentiment, and never any whim, that they will shed
their blood for; but usually property, and right
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 minding his business and
earning his day's wages. But if you offer to lay
hand on his day's wages, on his cow, or his right in
common, or his shop, he wiU fight to the Judg-
ment. Magna - charta, jury -trial, habeas - corpus^
star-chamber, ship-money. Popery, Plymouth col-
ony, American Revolution, are all questions involv-
ing a yeoman's right to his dinner, and except as
touching that, would not have lashed the British
nation to rage and revolt.
88 ENGLISH TRAITS.
Whilst they are thus instinct with a spirit of or-
der and of calculation, it must be owned they are
capable of larger views ; but the indulgence is ex-
pensive to them, costs great crises, or accumulations
of mental power. In common, the horse works best
with blinders. Nothing is more in the line of Eng-
lish thought than our unvarnished Connecticut ques-
tion " Pray, sir, how do you get your living when
you are at home ? " The questions of freedom, of
taxation, of privilege, are money questions. Heavy
fellows, steeped in beer and fleshpots, they are hard
of hearing and dim of sight. Their drowsy minds
need to be flagellated by war and trade and politics
and persecution. They cannot well read a princi-
ple, 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."
This highly-destined race, if it had not somewhere
added the chamber of patience to its brain, would
not have built London. I know not from which of
the tribes and temperaments that went to the com-
position 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 I
ABILITY. 89
was shown the process of making a razor and a pen-
knife, I was told there is no luck in making good
steel ; that they make no mistakes, every blade in
the hundred and in the thousand is good. And
that is characteristic of aU 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 per-
fection in that; not content unless he has some-
thing in which he thinks he surpasses all other men.
He would rather not do any thing at all than not
do it well. I suppose no people have such thor-
oughness ; — 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 Eng-
lishman, " but to set your shoulder at the wheel, —
to advance the business." Sir Samuel Eomilly
refused to speak in popular assemblies, confining
himself to the House of Commons, where a meas-
ure can be carried by a speech. The business of
the House of Commons is conducted by a few per-
sons, but these are hard-worked. Sir Robert Peel
^knew the Blue Books by heart" His colleagues
90 ENGLISH TRAITS,
and rivals carry Hansard in their heads. The high
civil and legal offices are not beds of ease, but posts
which exact frightful amounts of mental labor.
Many of the great leaders, like Pitt, Canning, Cas-
tlereagh, Komilly, are soon worked to death. They
are exceUent 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 Russell,
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 him-
self for years at the Cape of Good Hope, finished
his inventory of the southern heaven, came home,
and redacted it in eight years more; — a work
whose value does not begin until thirty years have
elapsed, and thenceforward a record to all ages of
the highest import. The Admiralty sent out the
Arctic expeditions year after year, in search of
Sir John Franklin, imtil at last they have threaded
ABILITY. 91
their way through polar pack and Behring's Straits
and solved the geographical problem. Lord Elgin,
at Athens, saw the imminent ruin of the Greek
remains, set up his scaffoldings, in spite of epi-
grams, and, after five years' labor to collect them,
got his marbles on ship-board. 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 aU the world, were
to be his applauders. In the same spirit, were the
excavation and research by Sir Charles FeUowes
for the Xanthian 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 Dieman's Land or Cape-
town. Faithful performance of what is undertaken
to be performed, they honor in themselves, and ex-
act in others, as certificate of equality with them-
selves. The modem world is theirs. They have
made and make it day by day. The commercial
relations of the world are so intimately drawn to
London, that every dollar on earth contributes to
the strength of the English government. And if
all the wealth in the planet should perish by war
or deluge, they know themselves competent to re-
place it.
92 ENGLISH TRAITS.
They have approved their Saxon blood, by their
seargoing qualities; their descent from Odin's
smiths, by their hereditary 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, spim and woven. They have made
the island a thoroughfare, and London a shop, a
law-court, a record-office and scientific bureau, in-
viting 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 Ste-
phenson, 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 have not produced a first-rate book. It is
England whose opinion is waited for on the merit
of a new invention, an improved science. And in
the complications of the trade and politics of their
vast empire, they have been equal to every exi
gency, with counsel and with conduct. Is it their
luck, or is it in the chambers of their brain, — it
ABILITY. 98
is their commercial advantage that whatever light
appears 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 vigilance of party criticism insures the se-
lection of a competent person.
A proof of the energy of the British people is
the highly artificial construction of the whole fab-
ric. The climate and geography, I said, were fac-
titious, as if the hands of man had 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. The foimda-
tions of its greatness are the rolling waves; and
from first to last it is a museum of anomalies.
This foggy and rainy coimtry furnishes the world
with astronomical 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 coimtries. 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
94 ENGLISH TRAITS.
but a baked apple ; " but oranges and pine-apples
are as cheap in London as in the Mediterranean.
The Mark-Lane Express, or the Custom House Re-
turns, 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 borne,
And realms commanded which those trees adorn."
The native cattle are extinct, but the island is full
of artificial breeds. The agriculturist BaJkewell
created sheep and cows and horses to order, and
breeds in which every thing was omitted but what
is economical. The cow is sacrificed to her bag,
the ox to his sirloin. Stall-feeding makes sperm-
mills of the cattle, and converts the stable to a
chemical factory. The rivers, lakes and ponds, too
much fished, or obstructed by factories, are artifi-
cially filled with the eggs of salmon, turbot and
herring.
Chat Moss and the fens of Lincolnshire and
Cambridgeshire are unhealthy and too barren to
pay rent. By cylindrical tiles and guttapercha
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, which was al-
ready 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
FACTITIOUS. 95
disappear. In due course, all England will be
drained and rise a second time out of the 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 agri-
culture into a great thriving and spending indus-
try. 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 parliamentary-train
carries him for a penny a mile. Gas-burners are
cheaper than daylight in numberless floors in the
cities. AU the houses in London buy their water.
The English trade does not exist for the exporta-
tion of native products, but on its manufactures, or
the making well every thing which is ill-made else-
where. They make ponchos for the Mexican, ban-
dannas for the Hindoo, ginseng for the Chinese,
beads for the Indian, laces for the Flemings, tele-
scopes 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 manufacturing population. They caused to
be translated from foreign languages and illustrated
96 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 prod-
ucts of their looms, their potteries and their foim-
dries.^
The nearer we look, the more artificial is their
social system. Their law is a network of fictions.
Their property, a scrip or certificate of right to in-
terest on money that no man ever saw. Their so-
cial classes are made by statute. Their ratios of
power and representation are historical and legal.
The last Reform -biU took away political power
from a mound, a ruin and a stone-wall, whilst Bir-
mingham and Manchestei;, whose mills paid for the
wars of Europe, had no representative. Purity in
the elective Parliament is secured by the purchase
of seats.2 Foreign power is kept by armed colo-
nies ; power at home, by a standing army of police.
The pauper lives better than the free laborer, the
thief better than the pauper, and the transported
felon better than the one under imprisonment. The
crimes are factitious ; as smuggling, poaching, non-
conformity, heresy and treason. The sovereignty
of the seas is maintained by the impressment of
1 See Memorial of H. Greenough, p. 66, New York, 1863.
^ Sir S. Romilly, purest of English patriots, decided that
the only independent mode of entering Parliament was to
buy a seat, and he bought Horsham.
FACTITIOUS. 97
seamen. ^^ The 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 Romilly's expedient for clearing the
arrears of business in Chancery was, the Chancel-
lor's staying away entirely from his court. Their
system of education is factitious. The Universi-
ties 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
Birminghamized, and we have a nation whose ex-
istence 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 po-
litical 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 Birmingham 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 pop-
ulation to America. The nation is accustomed to
the instantaneous creation of wealth. It is the
VOL. ▼. T
98 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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.
One secret of their power is their mutual good
understanding. Not only good minds are bom
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 intel-
lectual organization of the English admits a com-
municableness of knowledge and ideas among them
all. An electric touch by any of their national
ideas, melts them into one family and brings the
hoards of power which their individuality is al-
ways hiving, into use and play for all. Is it the
smallness of the country, or is it the pride and af-
fection of race, — they have solidarity, or responsi-
bleness, 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 soldier 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
SOLIDARITY. 99
does not divide the national heart. The Danish
poet Oehlenschlager complains that who writes in
Danish writes to two hundred readers. In Ger-
many there is one speech for the learned, and an-
other for the masses, to that extent that, it is said,
no sentiment 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 idio-
matic ; the people in the street best understand
the best words. And their language seems drawn
from the Bible, the Common Law and the works of
Shakspeare, 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 their own time. Men
quickly embodied what Newton foimd out, in
Greenwich observatories and practical navigation.
The boys know 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 war, or in art, or in literature and an-
tiquities. 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
100 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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
his brain, knows what is confided to him and does
therein the best he can. The chancellor carries
England 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 ! " The very felons have their
pride in each other's English stanchness. In poli-
tics and in war they hold together as by hooks of
steel. The charm in Nelson's history is the unself-
ish greatness, the assurance of being supported to
the uttermost by those whom he supports to the ut-
termost. Whilst they are some ages ahead of the
rest of the world in the art of living ; whilst in
some directions they do not represent the modem
spirit but constitute it ; — this vanguard of civility
and power they coldly hold, marching in phalanx,
lockstep, 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 them-
selves what they value in their horses, — mettle
and bottom. On the day of my arrival at Liver-
pool, a gentleman, in describing to me the 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 heard last, and
the one thing the English value is pluck. The
word is not beautiful, but on the quality they sig-
nify 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 Sydney Smith had made it
a proverb that little Lord John Eussell, the minis-
ter, 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 affairs answer directly yes or no. They
102 ENGLISH TRAITS.
dare to displease, nay, they will let you break all
the commandments, if you do it natively and with
spirit. You must be somebody ; then you may do
this or that, as you will.
Machinery has been applied to all work, and
carried to such 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
they never tire, they prove too much for their ten-
ders. 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 possessed
itself of the ground, the air, the men and women,
and hardly even thought is free.
The mechanical might and organization requires
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
plain, this is no country for fainthearted people:
don't creep about diffidently ; make up your mind ;
take your own course, and you shall find respect
and furtherance.
It requires, men say, a good constitution to travel
in Spain. I say as much of England, for other
cause, simply on account of the vigor and brawn of
MANNERS. 108
the people. Nothing but the most serious business
could give one any counterweight to these Bare-
sarks, though they were only to order eggs and muf-
fins for their breakfast. The Englishman speaks
with all his body. His elocution is stomachic, —
as the American's is labial. The Englishman is
very petulant and precise about his accommodation
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 any neglect. His vivacity betrays itself at all
points, in his manners, in his respiration, and the
inarticulate noises he makes in clearing the throat ;
— all significant of burly strength. He has stam-
ina ; he can take the initiative in emergencies. He
has that aplomi which results from a good adjust-
ment of the moral and physical nature and the
obedience of all the powers to the will ; as if the
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
the bystanders, in his own fashion, only careful not
to interfere with them or annoy them ; not that he
is trained to neglect the eyes of his neighbors, —
he is really occupied with his own affair and does
104 ENGLISH TRAITS,
not think of them. Every man in this polished
country consults only his convenience, as much as a
solitary pioneer in Wisconsin. I know not where
any personal eccentricity is so freely allowed, and
no man gives himself any concern with it. An
Englishman walks in a jwuring rain, swinging his
closed umbrella like a walking-stick ; wears a wig,
or a shawl, or a saddle, or stands on his 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 is-
land himself, safe, tranquil, incommunicable. In a
company of strangers you would think him deaf ;
his eyes never wander from his table and news-
paper. He is never betrayed into any curiosity or
unbecoming emotion. They have 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 the face without being in-
troduced. In mixed or in select companies they
do not introduce persons ; so that a presentation is
a circumstance as valid as a contract. Introduc-
tions are sacraments. He withholds his name. At
the hotel, he is hardly willing to whisper it to the
derk at the book-of&ce. If he give you his pri-
vate address on a card, it is like an avowal of
friendship ; and his bearing, on being introducedi
MANNERS. 105
is cold, even though he is seeking your acquaints
ance 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 threw
out for its impertinence many a disparaging phrase
which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor,
thin, unable mortals ; — so much had the fine phy-
sique 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 con-
tinue 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 pos-
session which surround them are their own crea-
tion, and they exert the same commanding industry
at this moment.
They are positive, methodical, cleanly and for-
mal, loving routine and conventional ways ; loving
truth and religion, to be sure, but inexorable on
points of form. All the world praises the comfort
and private appointments of an EngUsh inn, and
of English households. You are sure of neatness
and of personal decorum. A Frenchman may pos-
tsdbly be clean; an EngUshman is conscientiously
106 ENGLISH TRAITS.
clean. A certain order and complete propriety is
found in his dress and in his belongings.
Bom 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,
himg with pictures and filled with good furniture.
'Tis 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
and 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. Incred-
ible 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
attaching the two Siamese. England produces
under favorable conditions of ease and culture the
MANNERS. 107
finest women in tho world. 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
1596 says, "The wife of every Englishman is
counted blest." The sentiment of Imogen in Cym-
beline is copied from English nature ; and not lesa
the Portia of Brutus, the Kate Percy and the Des-
demona. The romance does not exceed the height
of noble passion in Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, 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 Eomilly 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 inde-
pendence 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. Wellington 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
108 ENGLISH TRAITS.
and parish merits has of course its doting and fool-
ish side. Mr. Cobbett attributes the huge popular-
ity of Perceval, prime minister in 1810, to the fact
that he was wont to go to church every Sunday,
with a large quarto gilt prayer-book under one arm,
his wife hanging on the other, and followed by a
long brood of children.
They keep their old customs, costumes, and pomps,
their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. The Mid-
dle 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
himdred and a thousand years. Terms of service
and partnership are life-long, 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 West-
moreland, ^^ Many of these humble sons of the hiUs
had a consciousness that the land which they tilled
had for more than five hundred 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 hun-
dred years, grandfather, father, and son.
MANNERS. 109
The Englisli power resides also in their dislike
of change. They have difficulty in bringing their
reason to act, and on all occasions use their mem-
ory 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.
Eveiy Englishman is an embryonic chancellor :
his instinct is to search for a precedent. The fa-
vorite phrase of their law is, "a custom whereof
the memory of man runneth not back to the con-
trary." The barons say, " Nolumus mutari ; " and
the cockneys stifle the curiosity of the foreigner on
the reason of any practice with "Lord, sir, it was
always so." They hate innovation. Bacon told
them. Time was the right reformer ; Chatham, that
" confidence was a plant of slow growth ; " Canning,
to "advance with the times; " and Wellington, that
"habit was ten times nature." All their states-
men learn the irresistibility of the tide of custom,
and have invented many fine phrases to cover this
slowness of perception and prehensility of tail.
A searshell 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 the spire and the spines are formed, or with
the formation, a juice exudes and a hard enamel
110 ENGLISH TRAITS.
varnishes every part. The keeping of the propri-
eties is as indispensable as clean linen. No merit
quite countervails the want of this, whilst this some-
times stands in lieu of all. " 'T is in bad taste,"
is the most formidable word an Englishman can
pronoimce. But this japan costs them dear. There
is a prose in certain Englishmen which exceeds in
wooden deadness all rivalry with other countrymen.
There is a knell in the conceit and externality of
their voice, which seems to say. Leave all hope he-
hind. In this Gibraltar of propriety, mediocrity
gets intrenched and consolidated and founded in
adamant. An Englishman of fashion is like one
of those souvenirs, bound in gold vellum, enriched
with delicate engravings on thick hot-pressed pa-
per, 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 cot-
tage. When Thalberg the pianist was one evening
performing before the Queen at Windsor, in a pri-
vate party, the Queen accompanied him with her
voice. The circumstance took air, and all England
shuddered from sea to sea. The indecorum was
never repeated. Cold, repressive manners prevail.
Ko enthusiasm is permitted except at the opera.
They avoid every thing marked. They require a
tone of voice that excites no attention in the room.
Sir Philip Sidney is one of the patron saints of
MANNERS. Ill
England, of whom Wotton said, " His wit was the
measure of congruity."
Pretension and vaporing are once for all dis-
tasteful. 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 hate
nonsense, sentimentalism and highflown expres-
sion ; they use a studied plainness. Even Brum-
mel, their fop, was marked by the severest sim-
plicity in dress. They value themselves on the
absence of every thing 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 pro-
vide an entertainment for a person, than a groat
to assist him in any distress." ^ It is reserved to
the end of the day, the family-hour being generally
six, in London, and if any company is expected,
one or two hours later. Every one dresses for din-
^ Relation of England. Printed by tho Camden Society.
112 ENGLISH TRAITS.
ner, 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 which
our own are constructed in the Atlantic cities. The
company sit one or two hours before the ladies
leave the table. The gentlemen remain over their
wine an hour longer, and rejoin the ladies in the
drawing-room and take coffee. The dress-dinner
generates a talent of table-talk which 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
invention, of miscellaneous humor; political, liter-
ary and personal news ; railroads, horses, diamonds,
agriculture, horticulture, pisciculture and wine.
English stories, hon - mots and the recorded ta-
ble-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 pictur-
esque in society, as broken country makes pictur-
esque landscape; whilst our prevailing equality
makes a prairie tameness: and secondly, because
the usage of a dress-dinner every day at dark has a
MANNERS. 118
tendency to hive and produce to advantage every
thing good. Much attrition has worn every sen-
tence into a bullet. Also one meets now and then
with polished men who know every thing, have
tried every thing, and can do every thing, and are
quite superior to letters and science. What could
they not, if only they would ?
CHAPTER Vn.
TRUTH.
Th£ 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 meaning. The arts bear tes-
timony to it. The faces of clergy and laity in old
sculptures and illuminated missals are charged with
earnest belief. Add to this hereditary rectitude
the punctuality and precise dealing which com-
merce creates, and you have the English truth and
credit. The government strictly performs its en-
gagements. The subjects do not understand tri-
fling on its part. When any breach of promise
occurred, in the old days of prerogative, it was
resented by the people as an intolerable grievance.
And in modern times, any slipperiness in the gov-
ernment of political faith, or any repudiation or
crookedness 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.
TRUTH. 115
Their practical power rests on their national sin-
cerity. 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 f oundar
tion 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 instantly and unresist-
ingly torn in pieces. English veracity seems to
result on a sounder animal structure, 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 Nor-
man Conquest, the truth-speaher ; Alueredus verid-
i<yu8. 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 work to fulfil royal words." The mot*
toes of their families are monitory proverbs, as,
116 ENGLISH TRAITS.
Farefac^ — Say, do, — of the Fairfaxes ; Say and
secU^ of the house of Mennes; Vero nil verius^ of
the De Veres. To be king of their word is their
pride. When they unmask cant, they say, " The
English of this is," &c. ; 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
shuffling and equivocation, and the cause is dam-
aged in the public opinion, on which any palter-
ing can be fixed. Even Lord Chesterfield, with
his French breeding, when he came to define a
gentleman, declared that truth made his distinc-
tion ; 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 parole 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 su-
perlative, checks himself in compliments, alleging
that in the French language one cannot speak with-
out lying.
They love reality in wealth, power, hospitality,
and do not easily learn to mak^ a show, and take
the world as it goes. They are not fond of om»
TRUTH. 117
ments, and if they wear them, they must be gems.
They read gladly in old FuUer that a lady, in the
reign of Elizabeth, "would have as patiently di-
gested a lie, as the wearing of false stones or pen-
dants 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' houses
and public offices with the American, it is com-
monly said that they spend a pound where we
spend a dollar. Plain rich clothes, plain rich
equipage, plain rich finish throughout their house
and belongings mark the English truth.
They confide in each other, — English believes
in English. The French feel the superiority of
this probity. The Englishman is not springing a
trap for his admiration, but is honestly minding his
business. The Frenchman 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 Bonaparte'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 agricul*
118 ENGLISH TRAITS.
ture 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 lie drudged for
years on his military works at Lisbon, and from
this base at last extended his gigantic lines to
Waterloo, believing in his countrymen and their
syllogisms above all the rhodomontade of Eu-
rope.
At a St. George's festival, in Montreal, where I
happened to be a guest since my return home, I
observed that the chairman complimented his com-
patriots, by saying, " they confided that wherever
they met an Englishman, 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 birthday, when each bishop was expected to
offer the king a purse of gold, Latimer gave Henry
Vni. a copy of the 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. They are tenacious
of their belief and cannot easily change their opini
TRUTH. 119
ions to suit the hour. They are like ships with too
much head on to come quickly about, nor will pros-
perity or even adversity be allowed to shake their
habitual view of conduct. Whilst I was in Lon-
don, M. Gruizot arrived there on his escape from
Paris, in February, 1848. Many private friends
called on him. His name was immediately pro-
posed as an honorary member of 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 de-
spise M. Guizot; and the altered position of the
man as an illustrious exile and a guest in the coun-
try, makes no difference to him, as it would in-
stantly to an American.
They require the same adherence, thorough. con-
viction 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 hun-
dred and twenty-seven aU voting like sheep, never
proposing any thing, and all but four voting the
income tax," — which was an ill-judged conces-
sion of the government, relieving Irish property
from the burdens charged on English.
They have a horror of adventurers in or out of
Parliament. The ruling passion of Englishmen in
these days is a terror of humbug. In the same
120 ENGLISH TRAITS.
proportion they value honesty, stoutness, and ad-
herence to your own. They like a man conunitted
to his objects. They hate the French, as frivolous ;
they hate the Irish, as aimless ; they hate the Ger-
mans, as professors. In February 1848, they 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.
The barrister refuses the sUk 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 re-
ceive one for victory on 1st June, 1794 ; and the
long withholden medal was accorded. When Cas-
tiereagh dissuaded Lord Wellington from going to
the king's levee until the unpopular Cintra busi-
ness had been explained, he replied, '^ You furnish
me a reason for going. I will go to this, or I wiU
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 Trim-^
TRUTH. 121
mers to the timeservers, whom English character
does not love.^
They are very liable in their politics to extraor-
dinary delusions ; thus to believe what stands re-
corded in the gravest books, that the movement of
10 April, 1848, was urged or assisted by foreigners :
which, to be sure, is paralleled by the democratic
whimsy in this country which I have noticed to be
shared by men sane on other points, that the Eng-
lish are at the bottom of the agitation of slav-
ery, in American politics : and then again by the
French popular legends on the subject of perfidi-
ous Albion, But suspicion will make fools of na-
tions as of citizens.
A slow temperament makes them less rapid and
ready than other countrymen, and has given occa-
sion to the observation that English wit comes
afterwards, — which the French denote as esprit
(Tescalier. This dulness makes their attachment
^ It is an unlucky moment to remember these sparkles of
solitary virtue in the face of the honors lately paid in Eng-
land to the Emperor Louis Napoleon. I am sure that no
Englishman whom I had the happiness to know, consented,
when the aristocracy and the commons of London cringed like
a Neapolitan rabble, before a successful thief. But, — how
to resist one step, though odious, in a linked series of state
necessities ? Groyemments must always learn too late, that
the use of dishonest agents is aa roinous for natiooB as for
single men.
122 ENGLISH TRAITS,
to home and their adherence m all foreign conn*
tries 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 in-
formation, that, when the war is actually raging
most furiously, they will seek for good eating and
all their other comforts, without thinking what
harm might befaU 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 Rochester rappings began to be heard
of in England, a man deposited £100 in a sealed
box in the 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
TRUTH. 123
that lie exclaimed, " So help me God ! I will never
listen to evidence again." Any number of delight-
ful examples of this English stolidity are the anec-
dotes of Europe. I knew a very worthy 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 un-
safe ! This English stolidity contrasts with French
wit and tact. The French, it is commonly said,
have greatly more influence in Europe than the
English. What influence the English have is by
brute force of wealth and power ; that of the French
by affinity and talent. The Italian is subtle, the
Spaniard treacherous : tortures, it is said, could
never wrest from an Egyptian the confession of a
secret. None of these traits belong to the English-
man. His choler and conceit force every thing
out. Defoe, who knew his countrymen well, says
of them, —
" In close intrigue, their faculty 's but weak,
For generally whate'er they know, they speak.
And often their own counsels undermine
By 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 Vm.
CHABACTEB.
The English race are reputed morose. I do not
know that they have sadder brows than their neigh-
bors of northern climates. They are sad by com-
parison 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 travel-
lers, who, from Froissart, Voltaire, Le Sage, Mirar
beau, down to the lively journalists of the feuUle-
tons^ have spent their wit on the solenmity 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. Eeligion,
the theatre and the reading the books of his coun-
try all feed and increase his natural melancholy.
The police does not interfere with public diversiona
CHARACTER. 125
tt thinks itself bound in duty to respect the pleas-
ures and rare gayety of this inconsolable nation ;
and their well-known courage is entirely attribu-
table to their disgust of life.
I suppose their gravity of demeanor and their
few words have obtained this reputation. As com-
pared with the Americans, I think them cheerful
and contented. Young people in this 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 ; ih s'amusaient tristement^ sdon la
coutume de leur pays^ said Froissart ; and I sup-
pose 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 beginning
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 they were willing to show that
they did not live by their tongues, or thought they
126 ENGLISH TRAITS.
spoke well enough if they had the tone of gentle-
men. 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,
and no word exchanged. The club-houses were
established 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, sple-
netic and stubborn, — and as mild, sweet and sen-
sible. 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 resident 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 Commercial-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 character-
ize England to the foreigner, who meets them on
the road and at every public house, whilst the gen<
CHARACTER, 127
try 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 education have dealt with them. They
are good lovers, good haters, slow but obstinate
admirers, and in aU things 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, attached
to it for what it yields them, and not from any
sentiment. They are full of coarse strength, rude
exercise, butcher's meat and sound sleep ; and sus-
pect any poetic insinuation or any hint for the con-
duct of life which reflects on this animal existence,
as if somebody were fumbling at the umbilical
cord 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 common people a surly indifference, some-
times gruffness and ill temper; and in minds of
more power, magazines of inexhaustible war, chal-
lenging
" The ruggedest hour that time and spite dare bring
To frown upon the enraged Northumberland."
They are headstrong believers and defenders of
128 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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. Wellington 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 storming
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 passive obedience, like jimiping off a
castle-roof at the word of a czar. Being both vas-
cular and highly organized, so as to be very sensi-
ble of pain; and intellectual, so as to see reason
and glory in a matter.
Of that constitutional force which yields the sup-
plies of the day, they have the more than enough ;
the excess which creates courage on fortitude, genius
in poetry, invention in mechanics, enterprise in
trade, magnificence in wealth, splendor in ceremo-
CHARACTER. 129
nies, petulance and projects in youth. The young
men have a rude he,alth 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 comer of the
earth their turbulent sense ; leaving no lie imcon-
tradicted ; no pretension unexamined. They chew
hasheesh; cut themselves with poisoned creases;
swing their hammock in the boughs of the Bohon
Upas; taste every poison; buy every secret; at
Naples they put St. Januarius's blood in an alem-
bic ; they saw a hole into the head of the " winking
Virgin," to know why she winks ; measure with an
English footrule 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 trav-
ellers are of every class, the best and the worst; and
it may easily happen that those of rudest behavior
are taken notice of and remembered. The Saxon
melancholy in the vulgar rich and poor appears as
gushes of ill-humor, which every check exasperates
into sarcasm and vituperation. There are multi-
tudes of rude young English who have the self-
sufficiency and bluntness of their nation, and who,
VOL. V. 9
180 ENGLISH TRAITS.
with their disdain of the rest of mankind and with
this indigestion and eholer, have made the English
traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive
manners. It was no bad description of the Briton
generically, what was said two hundred years ago
of one particular Oxford scholar : " He was a very
bold man, uttered any thing that came into his
mind, not only among his companions, but in pub-
lic coffee-houses, and would often speak his mind
of particidar 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 with the loud statement of his crotch-
ets or personalities.
But it is in the deep traits of race that the for-
tunes of nations are written, and however derived,
— whether a happier tribe or mixture of tribes, the
air, or what circumstance that mixed for them the
golden mean of temperament, — here exists the best
stack in the world, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed,
best for depth, range and equability ; men of aplomb
and reserves, great range and many moods, strong
CHAJEUCTER. 131
instincts, yet apt for culture ; war-class as well as
clerks; earls and tradesmen; wise minority, as well
as foolish majority ; abysmal temperament, hiding
wells of wrath, and glooms on which no sunshine
settles, alternated with a common sense and human-
ity 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 inexpressive, now mute and contumacious,
now fierce and sharp-tongued dragon, which once
made the island light with his fiery breath, had
bequeathed his ferocity to his conqueror. 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
com 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, and 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 industry ; sulking in a
lonely house ; who never gave a dinner to any man
and disdained all courtesies; yet as true a wor-
132 ENGLISH TRAITS.
shipper of beauty in form and color as ever existed,
and profusely pouring over the cold mind of his
countrymen creations of grace and truth, removing
the reproach of sterility from English art, catching
from their savage climate every fine hint, and im-
porting into their galleries every tint and trait of
sunnier cities and skies ; making an era in paint-
ing ; and when he saw that the splendor of one of
his pictures in the Exhibition dimmed his rival's
that hung next it, secretly took a brush and black-
ened his own.
They do not wear their heart in their sleeve for
daws to peck at. They have that phlegm or staid-
ness which it is a compliment to disturb. " Great
men," said Aristotle, " are always of a nature
originally melancholy." 'Tis the habit 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 than the sayers of Yes. Each of them
has an opinion which he 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,
the German, the Italian, or the Greek. When he
is brought to the strife with fate, he sacrifices a
richer material possession, and on more purely
CHARACTER. 183
metaphysical grounds. He is there with his own
consent, face to face with fortune, which he defies.
On deliberate choice and from grounds of charac-
ter, 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 ten-
dency 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 sub-
sidize other nations, and are not subsidized. They
proselyte, and are not proselyted. They assimilate
other races to themselves, and are not assimilated.
The English did not calculate the conquest of the
Indies. It fell to their character. So they ad-
minister, in different parts of the world, the codes
of every empire and race ; in Canada, old French
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
134 ENGLISH TRAITS.
position in history. England is the lawgiver, the
patron, the instructor, the ally. Compare the tone
of the French and of the English press : the first
querulous, captious, sensitive about English opin-
ion ; the English press never timorous about French
opinion, but arrogant and contemptuous.
They are testy and headstrong through an ex-
cess of will and bias ; churlish as men sometimes
please to be who do not forget a debt, who ask no
favors and who will do what they like with their
own. With education and intercourse, these asper-
ities wear o£F and leave the good-will pure. K
anatomy is reformed according to national tenden-
cies, 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 wiD
be found to be cortical and caducous; that they
are superficially morose, but at last tender-hearted,
herein differing from Bome and the Latin nations.
Nothing savage, nothing mean resides in the Eng-
lish heart. They are subject to panics of credu-
lity and of rage, but the temper of the nation,
however disturbed, settles itself soon and easily, as,
in this temperate zone, the sky after whatever
storms clears again, and serenity is its normal con-
dition.
A saving stupidity masks and protects their pei>
CHARACTER, 135
ception, as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our
swifter Americans, when they first deal with Eng-
lish, 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 in their finest wits, in the patient Newton,
or in the versatile transcendent poets, or in the
Dugdales, Gibbons, Hallams, Eldons and Peels,
one shotdd 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 con-
form, 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 ; " Gen-
tlemen," as Charles I. said of Strafford, " whose
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 si-
lence have suspected that he had lost the day ; and,
had he beheld him in a retreat, he would have coL
136 ENGLISH TRAITS,
lected him a conqueror by the cheerfulness of his
spirit."!
The following passage from the "Heimskringla"
might almost stand as a portrait of the modem
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 circum-
stances, whether they betokened danger or pleas-
ure ; for, whatever turned up, he was never in
higher nor in lower spirits, never slept less nor
more on account of them, nor ate nor drank but
according to his 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." ^
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 bor-
ders in flame. The wrath of London is npt French
wrath, but has a long memory, and, in its hottest
heat, a register and rule.
1 Fuller, Worthies of England,
3 Heimskringla, Laing's translation, vol. iii. p. 37.
CHARACTER, 137
Half their strengUi they put not forth. They
are capable of a sublime resolution, and if here-
after the war of races, often predicted, and making
itself a war of opinions also (a question of des-
potism and liberty coming from Eastern Europe),
should menace the English civilization, these sea-
kings may take once again to their floating castles
and find a new home and a second millennium of
power in their colonies.
The stability of England is the security of the
modem world. K the English race were as mu-
table as the French, what reliance ? But the Eng-
lish stand for liberty. The conservative, money-
loving, lord-loving English are yet liberty-loving ;
and so freedom is safe : for they have more per-
sonal force than any other people. The nation al-
ways resist the immoral action of their government.
They think humanely on the affairs of France, of
Turkey, of Poland, of Hungary, of Schleswig Hol-
stein, though overborne by the statecraft of the
rulers at last.
Does the early history of each tribe show the
permanent bias, which, though not less potent, is
masked as the tribe spreads its activity into col-
onies, 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
138 ENGLISH TRAITS.
genius of the English society, namely that private
life is the place of honor. Glory, a career, and
ambition, words familiar 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."
For actual service, for the dignity of a profes-
sion, or to appease diseased or inflamed talent, the
army and navy may be entered (the worst boys do-
ing well in the navy) ; and the civil service in de-
partments where serious official work is done ; and
they hold in esteem the barrister engaged in the
severer studies of the law. But the calm, sound
and most British Briton shrinks from public life
as charlatanism, and respects an economy founded
on agriculture, coal-mines, manufactures or trade,
which secures an independence through the creation
of real values.
They wish neither to command nor obey, but to
be kings in their own houses. They are intellect-
ual 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 art, they value its refine-
ment. They are ready for leisure, can direct and
fill their own day, nor need so much as others the
constraint of a necessity. But the history of the
nation discloses, at every turn, this original predi^
CHARACTER 139
lection 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, ierters, manners and occupa-
tions. They choose that welfare which is compat-
ible with the commonwealth, knowing that such
alone is stable; as wise merchants prefer invest-
ments in the three per cents.
CHAPTER IX.
COCKAYNE.
The English are a nation of humorists. Indi-
vidual right is pushed to the uttermost bound com-
patible with public order. Property is so perfect
that it seems the craft of that race, and not to exist
elsewhere. The king cannot step on an acre which
the peasant refuses to sell. A testator endows a
dog or a rookery, and Europe cannot interfere with
his absurdity. Every individual has his particular
way of living, which he pushes to folly, and the
decided sympathy of his compatriots is engaged to
back up Mr. Crump's whim by statutes and chan-
cellors and horse -guards. There is no freak so
ridiculous but some Englishman has attempted to
inmiortalize by money and law. British citizen-
ship is as onmipotent as Roman was. Mr. Cock-
ayne 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 perform-
COCKAYNE. 141
ance of his nation makes him provokingly incu-
rious about other nations. He dislikes foreigners.
Swedenborg, who lived much in England, notes
"the similitude of minds among the English, in
consequence of which they contract familiarity with
friends who are of that nation, and seldom with
others; and they regard foreigners as one look-
ing 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 " Belation of England," ^ in 1500,
says : — " The English are great lovers of them-
selves and of every thing belonging to them. They
think that there are no other men than themselves
and no other world but England ; and whenever
they see a handsome foreigner, they say that he
looks like an Englishman and it is a great pity
he should not be an Englishman; and whenever
they partake of any delicacy with a foreigner, they
ask \\\rx\ whether such a thing is made in his coun-
try." 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 an Englishman. France is, by its nat-
ural contrast, a kind of blackboard on which Eng-
lish character draws its own traits in chalk. This
arrogance habitually exhibits itself in allusions to
1 Printed by the Camden Society.
142 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the French. I suppose that all men of English
blood in America, Europe, or Asia, have a secret
feeling of joy that 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 de-
fended him from being able to utter a single sen-
tence 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 talk-
ing 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 conmiiseration of the whole
company, who plainly account all the world out of
England a heap of rubbish.
The same insular limitation pinches his foreign
politics. 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 Congress of Vienna and
trample down all nationalities with his 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 Amer-
COCKAYNE. 148
ica, but buy their nails in England ; — for that
also is British law ; and the fact that British com-
merce 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 our 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 aU companies, each of
them has too good an opinion of himself to imitate
any body. He hides no defect of his form, fea-
tures, dress, connection, or birthplace, for he thinks
every circumstance belonging to him comes recom-
mended 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 ::quoaking 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 in vain, and this little
144 ENGLISH TRAITS. .
superfluity 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 takes away a dodging, skulking,
secondary air, and encourages a frank and manly
bearing, so that each man makes the most of him-
self and loses no opportunity for want of pushing.
A man's personal defects will commonly 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 politician, in one of our western cities, told
me that " he had known several successful states-
men made by their foible." And another, an ex-
governor of Illinois, said to me, " If the man knew
anything, he would sit in a comer and be modest ;
but he is such an ignorant peacock that he 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
English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this
self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air. Then
the natural disposition is fostered by the respect
COCKAYNE, 145
which they find entertained in the world for Eng-
lish 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 warrants
a certain confident bearing, which a Frenchman or
Belgian could not carry. At all events, they feel
themselves at liberty to assume the most extraordi-
nary tone on the subject of English merits.
An English lady on the Rhine hearing a Ger-
man speaking of her party as foreigners, exclaimed,
" No, we are not foreigners ; we are English ; it is
you that are foreigners." They tell you daily in
London the stoiy of the Frenchman and English-
man who quarrelled. Both were unwilling to fight,
but 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 any
body, fired up the chimney, — and brought down
the Frenchman. They have no curiosity about for-
eigners, and answer any information you may vol-
unteer 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
you y. 10
146 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the "Times'* newspaper through politicians and
poets, through Wordsworth, Carlyle, Mill and Syd-
ney Smith, down to the boys of Eton. In the
gravest treatise on political economy, in a philo-
sophical essay, in books of science, one is surprised
by the most innocent exhibition of unflinching na-
tionality. In a tract on Com, 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." ^
The English dislike the American structure of
society, whilst yet trade, mills, public education
and Chartism are doing what they can to create in
England the same social condition. America is
the paradise of the economists ; 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 remembers his
disparaging anecdotes.
But this childish patriotism costs something, like
all narrowness. The English sway of their colo-
nies has no root of kindness. They govern by
their arts and ability; they are more just than
1 William Spence.
COCKAYNE. 147
kind ; and whenever an abatement 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 meta-
physics discriminating Greek, or English, or Span-
ish science, ^sop and Montaigne, Cervantes 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 his-
tory on this very point of national pride.
George of Cappadocia, bom at Epiphania in
Cilicia, was a low parasite who got a lucrative con-
tract to supply the army with bacon. A rogue and
informer, he got rich and was forced to run from
justice. He saved his money, embraced Arianism,
collected a library, and got promoted by a faction
to the episcopal throne of Alexandria. When Jul-
ian came, a. d. 361, George was dragged to pris-
on ; 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
148 ENGLISH TRAITS.
of England, patron of chivalry, emblem of victory
and civility and the pride of the best blood of the
modem 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 pickledealer at Seville, who
went out, in 1499, a subaltern with Hojeda, and
whose highest naval rank was boatswain's mate in
an expedition that never sailed, managed in this
lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize hal{
the earth with his own dishonest name. Thus no-
body can throw stones. We are equally badly ofE
in our founders ; and the false pickledealer is an
offset to the false bacon-seller.
CHAPTER X.
WEALTH,
These is no country in which so absolute a hom-
age 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 you have
merit, can you not show it by your good clothes
and coach and horses ? How can a man be a gen-
tleman without a pipe of wine? Haydon says,
" There is a fierce resolution to make every man
live according to the means he possesses." There
is a mixture of religion in it. They are under the
Jewish law, and read with 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 represented except by opu-
lent men. An Englishman who has lost his for-
tune is said to have died of a broken heart. The
last term of insult is, ^^ a beggar." Nelson said.
160 ENGLISH TRAITS.
*^ The want of f orhme is a crime which I can never
get over." Sydney Smith said, " Poverty is infa-
mous in England." And one of their recent writ-
ers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic
life, of *'the grave moral deterioration which fol-
lows 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 AtTience Ox-
onienses^ and looking naturally for another stand-
ard 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, dis-
loyalty to Church and State, and second, to be
bom poor, or to come to poverty, A natural fruit
of England is the brutal political economy. Mal-
thus finds no cover laid at nature's table for the
laborer's son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament
expressed itself by the 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 offi-
cers to bind children apprentices at a greater dis-
tance than forty miles from their home. Peel op-
posed, and Mr. Wortley said, " though, in the
WEALTH. 161
higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a
good thing, it was not so among the lower orders.
Better take them away from those who might de-
prave 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, every
thing prospers because it is solvent. The British
armies 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 left. Solvency is in the
ideas and mechanism of an Englishman. The
162 ENGLISH TRAITS.
Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it
pays; no matter bow much convenience, beauty,
or ^clatj it must be self-supporting. They are con-
tented with slower steamers, as long as they know
that swifter boats lose money. They proceed log-
ically 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 presump-
tion of better fortunes next year, as our people
have ; and they say without shame, 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 am-
bition, 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 ab-
sorb the other third."
The ambition to create value evokes every kind
of ability; government becomes a manufacturing
corporation, and every house a mill. The headlong
bias to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin, — •
if possible will teach spiders to weave silk stock
WEALTH. 158
ings. 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 another European ; or, his life as a work-
man is three lives. He works fast. Every thing
in England is at a quick pace. They have rein-
forced their own productivity by the creation of
that marvellous machiuery which differences this
age from any other age.
It is a curious chapter in modem history, the
growth of the machine-shop. Six hundred years
ago, Roger Bacon explained the precession of the
equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform
of the calendar ; measured the length of the year;
invented gunpowder; and announced (as if look-
ing from his lofty cell, over five centuries, into
ours), that " machines can be constructed to drive
ships more rapidly than a whole gaUey of rowers
could do; nor would they need anything but a
pilot to steer them. Carriages also might be con-
structed to move with an incredible speed, without
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 fulfilled his words.
Two centuries ago the sawing of timber was done
by hand; the carriage wheels ran on wooden axles;
154 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 power-
looms by steam. The great strides were all taken
within the last hundred years. The 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 for-
tunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning-jenny,
and died in a workhouse. Arkwright 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 sometimes 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 spin-
ners to Belgium and the United States. Iron and
steel are very obedient. Whether it were not pos-
sible to make a spinner that would not rebel, nor
mutter, nor scowl, nor strike for wages, nor emi-
grate ? At the solicitation of the masters, after a
mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Eoberts of
Manchester undertook to create this peaceful fel-
low, instead of the quarrelsome fellow God had
made. After a few trials, he succeeded, and in
WEALTH. 166
1830 procured a patent for his self-acting mule ; a
creation, the delight of mill-owners, and " destined,"
they said, " to restore order among the industrious
classes ; " a machine requiring only a child's hand
to piece the broken yams. As Arkwright had
destroyed domestic spinning, so Roberts destroyed
the 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 had made it
rich, and it was recorded, " England is the richest
of all the northern nations." The Norman histo-
rians recite that " in 1067, William carried with
him into Normandy, 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 steampipe has added to her
population and wealth the equivalent of four or
five Englands. Forty thousand ships are entered
166 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 of
pounds sterling are said to compose the floating
money of commerce. In 1848, Lord John Sussell
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 figures 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 machine
more potent in England than steam is the Bank.
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
WEALTH. 157
and of money, war and commerce are changed.
Nations have lost their old omnipotence; the pa-
triotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting obso-
lete, we go and live where we will. Steam has
enabled men to choose what law they will live
under. Money makes place for them. The tele-
graph is a limp band that will hold the Fenris-
wolf of war. For now that a telegraph line runs
through France and Europe 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 engineer 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 children.
Of course it draws the nobility into the competi-
tion, as stock-holders 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 Thor, who once forged his
158 ENGLISH TRAITS,
bolts in icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely
fiords, in England has advanced with the times,
has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, sits down
at a desk in the India House and lends MioUnir
to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.
The creation of wealth in England in the last
ninety years is a main fact in modem history.
The wealth of London determines prices all over
the globe. All things precious, or useful, or amus-
ing, or intoxicating, are sucked into this commerce
and floated to London. Some English private for-
tunes reach, and some exceed a million of dollars
a year. A hundred thousand palaces adorn the
island. All that can feed the senses and passions,
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 science, gratify taste, or soothe comfort,
is in open market. Whatever is excellent and
beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture,
in fountain, garden, or grounds, — the English noble
crosses sea and laud to see and to copy at home.
The taste and science of thirty peaceful genera-
tions ; the gardens which Evelyn planted ; the tem-
ples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and
Christopher Wren built; the wood that Gibbons
carved; the taste of foreign and domestic artists,
Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, — are
WEALTH. 159
in the vast auction, and the hereditary 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, til-
lage, pasture and park, sumptuous castle and mod-
em villa, — all consist with perfect order. They
have no revolutions; no horse-guards dictating to
the 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 per-
fection. 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 cunningest
heads in a profession which never admits a fool.
The rights 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
sweetness possession can give, is tasted in Eng-
land to the dregs. Vested rights are awful things,
and absolute possession gives the smallest free-
holder identity of interest with the duke. High
stone fences and padlocked garden-gates announce
160 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 forward into his grounds, so as to get
a coachway and save her a mile to the avenue.
Instantly he transforms his paling into stone-ma-
sonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe
cannot prevail on him to sell or compound 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 preci-
pice of incomparable prospect, built a house like a
long bam, which had not a window on the prospect
side. Strawberry Hill of Horace Walpole, Font-
hill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and
Newstead Abbey became one in the hands of Lord
Byron.
But the proudest result of this creation has been
the great and refined forces it has put at the dis-
posal 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
WEALTH. 161
trumpets announcing him. This, mth liis quiet
style of manners, gives him the power of a sover-
eign without the inconveniences which belong to
that rank. I much prefer the condition of an Eng-
lish gentleman of the better class to that of any
potentate in Europe, — whether for travel, or for'
opportimity 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. The
wonder of Britain is this plenteous nature. Her
worthies are ever surrounded 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 English are so rich
and seem to have established a tap-root in the
bowels of the planet, because they are constitution-
ally fertile and creative.
But a man must keep an eye on his 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.
▼OLi V. U
162 ENGLISH TRAITS.
But it is found that the machine unmans the user.
What 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 silk-worm, 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 nee-
dles. The incessant 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 shoe-strings super-
sedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen,
or railways of turnpikes, or when commons are
inclosed by landlords. Then society is admonished
of the mischief 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 application 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 wiQ not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread
satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick.
WEALTH. 168
In true England all is false and forged. This
too is the reaction of machinery, but of the lar-
ger machinery of commerce. 'T is not, I suppose,
want of probity, so much as the tyranny of trade,
which necessitates a perpetual competition of under-
selling, and that again a perpetual deterioration of
the fabric.
The machinery has proved, like the balloon,
unmanageable, and flies away with the aeronaut.
Steam from the first hissed and screamed to warn
him ; it was dreadful with its explosion, and crushed
the engineer. The machinist 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 faU, or who
knows the mischief of paper-money. In the cul-
mination of national prosperity, in the annexation
of countries ; building of ships, depots, towns ; in
the influx of tons of gold and silver; amid the
164 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 touching 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,
bounteous and augmenting. But the question re-
curs, does she take the step beyond, namely to the
wise use, in view of the supreme wealth of na-
tions ? We estimate the wisdom of nations by see-
ing 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, libra-
ries, bishops, astronomers, chemists and artists
with; and a part to repair the wrongs of this
intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks,
Mechanics' Institutes, public grounds and other
charities and amenities. But the antidotes are
frightfully inadequate, and the evil requires a
deeper cure, which time and a simpler social or-
ganization must supply. At present she does not
role her wealth. She is simply a good England,
WEALTH. 166
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 ot
greatness to be held as the chief offender. Eng-
land must be held responsible for the despotism of
expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so
much manhood and talent and perseverance has
thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument of
materialism. Her success strengthens the hands of
base wealth. Who can propose to youth poverty
and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the
conquest of letters and arts ; when English success
has grown out of the very renunciation of princi-
ples, and the dedication to outsides ? A civility of
trifles, of money and expense, an erudition of sen-
sation takes place, and the putting as many imped-
iments as we can between the man and his ob-
jects. 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 Bug-
land emerging 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 dosed.
CHAPTER XI.
ARI8TOCEACT.
The feudal character of the English state, now
that it is getting obsolete, glares a little, in con-
trast with the democratic tendencies. The inequal-
ity of power and property shocks republican nerves.
Palaces, halls, villas, walled parks, all over Eng-
land, rival the splendor of royal seats. Many of
the halls, like Haddon or Kedleston, 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. It was well to
come ere these were gone. Primogeniture is a
cardinal rule of English property and institutions.
Laws, customs, manners, the very persons and
faces, affirm it.
The frame of society is aristocratic, the taste of
the people is loyal. The estates, names and man-
ners 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
ARISTOCRACY. 167
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 traditions of the world, was too
pleasing a vision to be shattered by a few offensive
realities and the politics of shoe-makers and coster-
mongers. The hopes of the commoners 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 mu-
sic, the popular romances, conspire to uphold the
heraldry which the current politics of the day are
sapping. The taste of the people is conservative.
They are proud of the castles, and of the language
and symbol of chivahy. 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.
168 ENGLISH TRAITS.
The Norwegian pirate got what he could and
held it for his eldest son. The Norman noble, who
was the Norwegian pirate baptized, did likewise.
There was this advantage of Western over Oriental
nobility, that this was recruited from below. Eng-
lish 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 nobility in its beginnings was some-
body's natural superiority. The things these Eng-
lish have done were not done without peril of life,
nor without wisdom and conduct ; and the first
hands, it may be presumed, were often challenged
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 carried all his men over the river on his back.
" He shall have the book," said the mother of Al-
fred, " who can read it ; " and Alfred won it by that
ARISTOCRACY, 169
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 ad-
dicted to contemplation. The Middle Age adorned
itself with proofs of manhood and devotion. Of
Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, the Emperor
told Henry V. that no Christian king had such an-
other knight for wisdom, nurture and manhood,
and caused him to be named, " Father of curtesie."
" Our success in France," says the historian, " lived
and died with him." ^
The war-lord earned his honors, and no donation
of land was large, as long as it brought the duty
of protecting it, hour by hour, against a terrible
enemy. In France and in England, the nobles
were, down to a late day, bom 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
1 FuUep's Worthies, EL p. 472.
170 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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,
merchants, senators and scholars. Comity, social
talent and fine manners, no doubt, have had their
part also. I have met somewhere with a histori-
ette, which, whether more or less true in its particu-
lars, carries a general truth. ^' How came the Duke
of Bedford by his great landed estates? His an-
cestor having travelled on the continent, a lively,
pleasant man, became the companion of a foreign
prince wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast, where Mr.
Sussell 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 hundred years. But the fact is otherwise.
Where is Bohun ? where is De Vere ? The law-
yer, the farmer, the silkmercer lies perdu under
the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say
ARISTOCRACY. 171
nothing ; 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 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 prov-
erb is, that fifty miles from London, a family will
last a hundred years ; at a hundred miles, two hun-
dred years ; and so on ; but I doubt that steam, the
enemy of time as well as of space, will disturb
these ancient rules. Sir Henry Wotton says of
the first Duke of Buckingham, "He was bom at
Brookeby in Leicestershire, where his ancestors
had chiefly continued about the space of four hun-
dred years, rather without obscurity, than with any
great lustre." ^ Wraxall says that in 1781, Lord
^ Rdiquice WoUomanoBf p. 208.
172 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 teUs us, in writing of an Earl Oxford,
in 1666, that the honor had now remained in that
name and blood six hundred years.
This long descent of families and this cleaving
through ages to the same spot of ground, capti-
vates the imagination. It has too a connection with
the names of the towns and districts of the country.
The names are excellent, — an atmosphere of
legendary melody spread over the land. Older
than all epics and histories which clothe a nation,
this undershirt sits close to the body. What his-
tory 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) ; Eochdale, of the Roch ; Exeter or
Excester, the castra of the Ex; Exmouth, Dart*
mouth, Sidmouth, Teignmouth, the mouths of the
Ex, Dart, Sid and Teign rivers. Waltham is
strong town ; Radcliffe is red cliff ; and so on : —
a sincerity and use in naming very striking to aii
American, whose country is whitewashed all over
ARISTOCRACY. 173
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 " barbarians " of Jamblichus, who " are
stable in their manners, and firmly continue to em-
ploy the same words, which also are dear to the
gods."
'Tis 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 they
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 Stafford are neither forgetting
nor forgotten, but know the man who was bom
by them and who, like the long line of his fathers,
has carried that crag, that shore, dale, fen, or wood-
land, in his blood and manners. It has, too, the
advantage of suggesting responsibleness. A sus-
ceptible man could not wear a name which repre-
sented in a strict sense a city or a county of Eng-
land, without hearing in it a challenge to duty and
honor.
The predilection of the patricians for residence
in the country, combined with the degree of lib-
174 ENGUSH TRAITS.
erty possessed by the peasant, makes the safety of
the English hall. Mirabeau wrote prophetically
from England, in 1784, " If revolution break out
in France, I tremble for the aristocracy: their
chateaux will be reduced to ashes and their blood
spilt in torrents. The English tenant would de-
fend his lord to the last extremity." The 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 num-
bers, 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 Piccar
dilly, Burlington House, Devonshire House, Lans-
downe House in Berkshire Square, and lower down
in the city, a few noble houses which still withstand
in all their amplitude the encroachment of streets.
The Duke of Bedford includes or included a mile
square in the heart of London, where the Brit-
ish Museum, once Montague House, now stands,
and the land occupied by Wobum Square, Bedford
Square, Russell Square. The Marquis of West-
minster built within a few years the series of
ARISTOCRACY. 175
squares called Belgravia. Stafford House Is the
noblest palace in London. 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 mod-
em uses to which trade or charity has converted
them. A multitude of town palaces contain ines-
timable galleries of art.
In the country, the size of private estates is
more impressive. From Barnard Castle I rode on
the highway twenty-three miles from High Force,
a fall of the Tees, towards Darlington, past Raby
Castle, through the estate of the Duke of Cleve-
land. 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 Suther-
land 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 Rich-
mond 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 Parlia-
ment. This is the Heptarchy again; and before
176 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the Reform of 1832, one hundred and fifty-four
persons sent three hundred and seven members to
Parliament. The borough-mongers governed Eng-
land.
These large domains are growing larger. The
great estates are absorbing the small freeholds. In
1786 the soil of England was owned by 250,000
corporations and proprietors ; and in 1822, by 32,-
000. These broad estates find room in this narrow
island. AU over England, scattered at short inter-
vals among ship-yards, mills, mines and forges, are
the paradises of the nobles, where the livelong
repose and refinement are heightened by the con-
trast with the roar of industry and necessity, out
of which you have stepped aside.
I was surprised to observe the very small attend-
ance usually in the House of Lords. Out of 573
peers, on ordinary days only twenty or thirty.
Where are they ? I asked. " At home on their es-
tates, 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, with such interests at
stake, how can these men afford to neglect them ?
*' 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
ARISTOCRACY. 177
his tone to a lord. It was remarked, on the 10th
April, 1848 (the day of the Chartist demonstra-
tion), that the upper classes were for the first time
actively interesting themselves in their own de-
fence, and men of rank were sworn special consta-
bles with the rest. "Besides, 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 en-
titles 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 com-
missions, and give to these a tone of expense and
splendor and also of exclusiveness. They have
borne their f uU 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 in the sacrifices of the Eussian war. For
the rest, the nobility have the lead in matters of
VOL. V. 12
178 ENGLISH TRAITS.
state and of expense ; in questions of taste, in so-
cial usages, in convivial and domestic hospitalities.
In general, all that is required of them is to sit
securely, to preside at public meetings, to coun-
tenance 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
service 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 unconscious history. Their institution is
one step in the progress 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, bom to wealth and power, who
have run through every country and kept in every
coimtry the best company, 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 spirit 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
Men faire^ gives a majesty which cannot be con-
cealed or resisted.
ARISTOCRACY, 179
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 every thing,
in every kind, and they see things so grouped and
amassed as to infer easily the sum and genius, in-
stead of tedious particularities. Their good behav-
ior deserves all its fame, and they have that sim-
plicity 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 man-
ners, and it is wonderful how much talent runs into
manners : — nowhere and never so much as in Eng-
land. They have the sense of superiority, the ab-
sence 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 accom-
plished 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 1855 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 sentiments mutually
honoring the lover and the loved. Politeness is
180 ENGUSH TRAITS.
the Titaal of aociety, as ptajera are of die dmzdi,
a flcbool of manners, and % gentle blesnng to die
age in irinch it grew. T is a romance adorning
English li£e widi a laiger horizon; % midway
heaTen, fulfilling to thdr sense their fiuoy tales and
poetry. This, Just as far as the breeding of the
nobleman really made him bra^e, handsome, ao-
eomplished and great-hearted.
On general groimds, whatever tends to form
manners or to finish men^ has a great value. Every
cme who has tasted the delight of friendship will re-
spect every social goard which oar manners can es-
tablish, tending to secore from the intmsion of frivo-
lous and distasteful people. The jealousy of every
class to guard itself is a testimony to the reality
tiiey have found in life. When a man once knows
Ihat he has done justice to himgAlf^ let him digmiaa
all terrors of aristocracy as superstitions, so far as
he is concerned. He who keeps thedoor of a mine,
whether of cobalt, or mercury, or nickel^ or plum-
bago, securely knows that the world cannot do
without him. Every body who is real is open and
ready for that which is also reaL
Besides, these are they who make England that
strongbox and museum it is ; who gather and pro-
tect works of art, dragged from amidst burning
cities and revolutionary countries, and brought
hither out of all the world. I look with respect at
ARISTOCRACY. 181
houses six, seven, eight hundred, or, like Warwick
Castle, nine hundred years old. I pardoned high
park-fences, when I saw that besides does and
pheasants, these have preserved Arundel marbles,
Townley galleries, Howard and Spenserian libra-
ries, Warwick and Portland vases, Saxon manu-
scripts, monastic 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 Eoman 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 interpreter,
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, Quintinye, Evelyn, had
taught them to make gardens. Arthur Young,
Bakewell and Mechi have made them agricultural.
Scotland was a camp until the day of Culloden.
The Dukes of Athol, Sutherland, Buccleugh and
the Marquis of Breadalbane have introduced the
rape^ulture, the sheep-farm, wheat, drainage, 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
182 ENGUSH TRAITS.
rooted out and planted anew, and now six milliona
of people live, and live 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. The grand old halls scattered up and
down in England, are dumb vouchers to the state
and broad hospitality of their ancient lords. Shak-
speare's portraits of good Duke Humphrey, of War-
wick, 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
Cherbury's autobiography; the letters and essays
of Sir Philip Sidney ; the anecdotes preserved by
the antiquaries Fuller and Collins ; some glimpses
at the interiors of noble houses, which we owe to
Pepys and Evelyn ; tie details which Ben Jonson's
masques (performed at Kenilworth, Althorpe, Bel-
voir 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 pic-
tures of a romantic style of manners. Penshurst
still shines for us, and its Christmas revels, " where
logs not bum, but men." At Wilton House the
"Arcadia" was written, amidst conversations with
Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, a man of no vulgar
1 Dibdin's Literary RenUnisoences, yol. 1, ziL
ARISTOCRACY. 183
mind, as his own poems declare him. I must hold
Ludlow Castle an honest house, for which Mil-
ton's " Comus " was written, and the company nobly
bred which performed it with knowledge and sym-
pathy. In the roll of nobles are found poets, phi-
losophers, chemists, astronomers, also men of solid
virtues and of lofty sentiments ; often they have
been the friends and patrons of genius and learn-
ing, and especially of the fine arts ; and at this mo-
ment, 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 worthy. 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 aristo-
cratic history. In later times, when the baron, edu-
cated only for war, with his brains paralyzed by
his stomach, foimd himself idle at home, he grew
fat and wanton and a sorry brute. Granmaont,
Pepys and Evelyn show the kennels to which the
king and court went in quest of pleasure. Prosti-
tutes taken from the theatres were made duchesses,
their bastards dukes and eaiis. ^^ 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 his head might do what these pot-com-
184 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 wardrobe, '' and but
three bands to his neck," and the linen-draper and
the stationer were out of pocket and refusing to
trust him, and the baker will not bring bread any
longer. Meantime the English 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.
The Selwyn correspondence, in the reign of
George III., discloses a rottenness in the aristoc-
racy 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 boxmds 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 inclined plane into his coach to take
the air, was a scandal to Europe which the ill fame
ARISTOCRACY. 185
of his queen and of his family did nothing to re-
trieve.
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 mistresses bring them down, and the
democrat can still gather scandals, if he will. Dis-
mal anecdotes abound, verifying the gossip of the
last generation, of dukes served by bailiffs, 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 cham-
bers are exhibited to the visitor for money ; of ru-
ined dukes and earls living in exile for debt. The
historic names of the Buckinghams, Beauforts,
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 C^lSbres " in
France. Even peers who are men of worth 'and
public spirit are overtaken and embarrassed by
their vast expense. The respectable Duke of Dev-
onshire, willing to be the Mecaenas and Lucullus of
his island, is reported to have said that he cannot
Uve at Chatsworth but 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.
186 ENGLISH TRAITS.
and the grounds mown and dressed, at a cost of
four or five thousand pounds a year. The spend*
ing 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 idle-
ness, dressing and attendance on their parties."
I suppose too that a feeling of seK-respect is driv-
ing cultivated men out of this society, as if the
noble were slow to receive the lessons of the times
and had nofc 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 houses without being made
to feel that they were great lords, and he a low
plebeian. With the tribe of artistes^ including the
musical tribe, the patrician morgue keeps no terms,
but excludes them. When Julia Gxisi and Mario
sang at the houses of the Duke of Wellington and
other grandees, a cord was stretched between the
singer and the company.
When every noble was a soldier, they were care-
fully bred to great personal prowess. The educa?
ARISTOCRACY. 187
tion of a soldier is a simpler affair than that of an
earl in the nineteenth century. And this was very
seriously pursued ; they were expert in every spe-
cies of equitation, to the most dangerous practices,
and this down to the accession of William of Or-
ange. 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 and squire were preparing for the
career of the country-gentleman and his peaceable
expense. They went from city to city, learning
receipts to make perfiunes, sweet powders, poman-
ders, antidotes, gathering seeds, gems, coins and
divers curiosities, preparing for a private life there-
after, in which they should take pleasure in these
recreations.
All advantages given to absolve the young patri-
cian from intellectual labor are of course mistaken.
"In the university, noblemen are exempted from
the public exercises for the degree, &c., by which
they attain a degree called honorary. At the samel
time, the fees they have to pay for matriculation,
and on all other occasions, are much higher."^
FuUer records " the observation of foreigners, that
Englishmen, by making their children gentlemen
^ Huber, History of English Universities.
188 ENGLISH TRAITS.
before they are men, cause they are so seldom wise
men." This cockering justifies Dr. Johnson's bit-
ter apology for primogeniture, that '^ it makes but
one fool in a family."
The revolution in society has reached this class.
The great powers of industrial art have no exclu^
sion 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 advantages once con-
fined to men of family are now open to the whole
middle 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 his-
tory, wisely read, is the vindication of the brain of
that people. Here at last were climate and condi-
tion friendly to the working faculty. Who now
will work and dare, shall rule. This is the charter,
or the chartism, which fogs and seas and rains
proclaimed, — that intellect and personal force
should make the law ; that industry and adminis-
trative talent should administer ; that work should
wear the crown. I know that not this, but something
else is pretended. The fiction with which the
noble and the bystander equally please themselves
is that the former is of unbroken descent from the
Norman, and so has never worked for eight hun-
ARISTOCRACY. 189
dred years. All the families are Dew, but the
name is old, and they have made a covenant with
their memories not to disturb it. But the analysis
of the peerage and gentry shows the rapid decay
and extinction of old families, the continual re-
cruiting 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, when clearing for battle, " a
peerage, or Westminster Abbey ! " "I have no
illusion left," said Sydney Smith, " but the Arch-
bishop of Canterbury." " The lawyers," said Burke,
" are only birds of passage in this House of Com-
mons," and then 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. Whilst the privileges
of nobility are passing to the middle class, the
badge is discredited and the titles of lordship are
getting musty and cumbersome. 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 advantageously
consigned, with paint and tattoo, to the dignitaries
of Australia and Polynesia.
A multitude of English, educated at the univer-
190 ENGLISH TRAITS.
sities, 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 the fact
that an untitled nobility possess all the power with-
out the inconveniences that belong to rank, and the
rich Englishman goes over the world at the present
day, drawing more than all the advantages which
the strongest of his kings could command.
CHAPTER XIL
UNIVEBSITIES.
Of British universities, Cambridge has the most
illustrious 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 gar-
dens 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. Dau-
beny. Professor of Botany, and to the Regius Pro-
fessor of Divinity, as well as to a valued friend, a
Fellow of Oriel, and went thither 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 counsel to offer. Their
192 ENGLISH TRAITS.
affectionate and gregarious ways reminded me at
once of the habits of cmr Cambridge men, though I
imputed to these English an advantage in their
secure and polished manners. The halls are rich
with oaken wainscoting aud 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, Benedictus benedicat ; bene-
didtur^ benedicatur.
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 oc-
curred.
Oxford is old, even in England, and conserva-
tive. 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 thous-
and students ; and nineteen most noble foundations
were then established. Chaucer found it as firm
as if it had always stood ; and it is, in British story.
UNIVERSITIES. 193
ricli 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. Al-
bericus Gentilis, in 1580, was relieved and main-
tained by the university. Albert Alaskie, a noble
Polonian, Prince of Sirad, who visited England to
admire the wisdom of Queen Elizabeth, was enter-
tained with stage-plays in the Refectory of Christ-
church in 1583. Isaac Casaubon, coming from
Henri Quatre of France by invitation of James I.,
was admitted to Christ-Church, in July, 1613. I
saw the Ashmolean Museum, whither Elias Ash-
mole in 1682 sent twelve cart-loads of rarities.
Here indeed was the Olympia of all Antony Wood's
and Aubrey's games and heroes, and every inch of
ground has its lustre. For Wood's Athence Ox-
onienseSy 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 mon-
ument as Purchas's Pilgrims or Hansard's Regis-
ter. On every side, Oxford is redolent of age and
authority. Its gates shut of themselves against
modem innovation. It is still governed by the
statutes of Archbishop Laud. The books in Mer-
ton Library are still chained to the wall. Here,
on August 27, 1660, John Milton's Pro Populo
Anglicano Defensio and Iconoclastes were commit-
ted to the flames. I saw the school-court or quad-
VOL. V. 13
194 ENGLISH TRAITS.
rangle where, in 1683, the Convocation cansed the
Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes to be publicly burnt.
I do not know whether this learned body have yet
heard of the Declaration of American Indepen-
dence, or whether the Ptolemaic 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 cartoons of Raphael
and Michael Angelo. This inestimable prize was
offered to Oxford University for seven thousand
pounds. The offer was accepted, and the commit-
tee charged with the affair had collected three
thousand 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 told 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 cheque for three
UNIVERSITIES, 195
thousand, and wrote four thousand pounds. I saw
the whole collection in April, 1848.
In the Bodleian Library, Dr. Bandinel showed
me the 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 deficient in about twenty
leaves at the end. But one day, being in Venice,
he 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 much awe for the
Providence that appears in bibliography also, to
suffer the reunited parts to be re-bound. The old-
est building here is two hundred years younger
than the frail manuscript brought by Dr. Clarke
from Egypt* No candle or fire is ever lighted in
the Bodleian. Its catalogue is the standard cata-
logue on the desk of every library in Oxford. In
each several college they underscore 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
196 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 Wil-
ton mills weave 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 condition, 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
ordinary college tuition at Oxford, is about sixteen
guineas a year." But this plausible statement may
deceive a reader imacquainted with the fact that
the principal teaching relied 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 a half. At Cambridge,
$750 a year is economical, and $1,500 not extrava-
gant.2
1 Huber, ii. p. 304.
^ Bristed, Five Years at an English University.
UNIVERSITIES. 197
The number of students and of residents, the
dignity of the authorities, the value of the founda-
tions, the history 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 col-
lege is half suspected by the Freshman to be insig-
nificant in the scale beside trade and politics. Ox-
ford is a little aristocracy in itself, numerous 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
640, averaging £200 a year, with lodging and diet
at the college. If a young American, loving learn-
ing and hindered by poverty, 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 happily
placed, and paid to read, are impatient of their few
checks, and many of them preparing to resign their
fellowships. They shuddered at the prospect of
dying a Fellow, and they pointed out to me a para-
lytic old man, who was assisted into the hall. As
198 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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
great. The income of the nineteen colleges is con-
jectured 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-Ghiide into hexameters, 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 Brasenose
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 Norseman. Access to the
Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. He has
enough to think of, and, unless of an impulsive na-
ture, 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 Eng-
lish writer cannot ignore. They prune his orations
UNIVERSITIES. 199
and point his pen. Hence the style and tone of
English journalism. The men have learned accu-
racy and comprehension, logic, and pace, or speed
of working. They have bottom, endurance, wind.
When bom with good constitutions, they make
those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the
dura ilia^ whose powers of performance compare
with ours as the steam-hammer with the music-
box; — Cokes, Mansfields, Seldens and Bentleys,
and when it happens that a superior brain puts a
rider on this admirable horse, we obtain those mas-
ters 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 sentiment within^ each of those schools is
high-toned and manly ; that, in their playgrounds,
courage is universally admired, meanness despised,
manly feelings and generous conduct are encour-
aged : 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 non-
sense 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 country-
200 ENGLISH TRAITS,
men the attributes of an English gentleman, frank-
ly 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 fam-
ily. He should also have bodily activity and
strength, unattainable by our sedentary life in pub-
lic offices. The race of English gentlemen pre-
sents an appearance of manly vigor and form not
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 eminent are the members that a glance at the
calendars will show that in all the world one can-
not be in better company 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. The definition of a public school is
'^ a school which excludes all that could fit a man
for standing behind a counter." ^
No doubt, the foundations have been perverted.
1 Huber, History of the English Universities, Newman's
Translation.
* See Bristed, Five Years in an English University. New
York, 1862.
UNIVERSITIES, 201
Oxford, which equals in wealth several of the
smaller European states, shuts up the lectureships
which were made "public for all men thereunto
to have concourse;" mis-spends the revenues be-
stowed 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 it 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 im-
part. Whether in course or by indirection, whether
by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes
and foundation scholarships, education, according
to the English notion of it, is arrived at. I looked
over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for
the various scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby,
the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland and the University
(copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek
professor), containing the tasks which many com-
petitors had victoriously performed, and I believed
they would prove too severe tests for the candi-
dates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard.
And in general, here was proof of a more search-
ing study in the appointed directions, and the
202 ENGLISH TRAITS.
knowledge pretended to be conveyed was con-
veyed. Oxford sends out yearly twenty or thirty
very able men and three or four hundred well-edu-
cated 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 col-
leges. No doubt much of the power and brilliancy
of the reading-men is merely constitutional or hy-
gienic. With a hardier habit and resolute gym-
nastics, 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 con-
cede 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 uni-
versity 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 read meanly
UNIVERSITIES. 203
and fragmentarily. Charles I. said that he under-
stood English law as well as a gentleman ought to
understand it.
Then they have access to books ; the rich libra-
ries collected at every one of many thousands of
houses, give an advantage not to be attained by a
youth in this country, 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 routine : as churches and monasteries persecute
youthful saints. Yet we all send our sons to col-
lege, and though he be a genius, the youth must
take his chance. The university must be retrospec-
tive. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on
all its towers blows out of antiquity. Oxford is
a library, and the professors must be librarians.
And I should as soon think of quarrelling with
the janitor for not magnifying his office by hostile
sallies into the street, like the Governor of Kertch
204 ENGLISH TRAITS.
or Kinbum, as of quarrellmg 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 will wait for it, will have its own turn. Genius
exists there also, but will not answer a call of a
committee of the House of Commons. It is rare,
precarious, eccentric and darkling. England is
the land of mixture and surprise, and when you
have settled it that Ae universities 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 besid^ this restor-
ative genius, the best poetry of England of this
age, in the old forms, comes from two graduates
of Cambridge.
CHAPTER Xm.
BEUGION.
No people at the present day can be explained
by their national religion. They do not feel re-
sponsible 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 mar-
riage. 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 marriage 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 closed for me.'. In
the barbarous days of a nation, some cultus is
formed or imported; altars are built, tithes are
paid, priests ordained. The education and expen-
diture of the country take that direction, and when
wealth, refinement, great men, and ties to the world
supervene, its prudent men say. Why fight against
206 ENGLISH TRAITS.
Fate, or lift these absurdities which are now moun-
tainoiis ? Better find some niche or crevice in this
mountain of stone which religious ages have quar-
ried and carved, wherein to bestow yourself, than
attempt any thing 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 himdred 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 volcanic basalts
show the work of fire which has been extinguished
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
culture. The power of the religious sentiment put
an end to human sacrifices, checked appetite, in-
spired the crusades, inspired resistance to tyrants,
inspired self-respect, set bounds to serfdom and
slavery, founded liberty, created the religious ar-
chitecture, — York, Newstead, Westminster, Foun-
tains Abbey, Kipon, Beverley and Dundee, — works
to which the key is lost, with the sentiment which
created them ; inspired the English Bible, the lit-
urgy, the monkish histories, the chronicle of Eich-
ard of Devizes. The priest translated the VulgatCj
RELIGION. 207
and translated the sanctities of old hagiology into
English virtues on English ground. It was a cer-
tain affirmative or aggressive state of the Cauca-
sian races. Man awoke refreshed by the sleep of
ages. The violence of the northern savages exas-
perated Christianity into power. It lived by the
love of the people. Bishop Wilfrid manumitted
two hundred and fifty serfs, whom he found at-
tached to the soil. The clergy obtained respite
from labor for the boor on the Sabbath and on
church festivals. "The lord who compelled his
boor to labor between sunset on Saturday and sun-
set on Sunday, forfeited him altogether." The
priest came out of the people and sympathized
with his class. The church was the mediator,
check and democratic principle, in Europe. Lati-
mer, Wicliffe, Arundel, Cobham, Antony Parsons,
Sir Harry Vane, George Fox, Penn, Bunyan are
the democrats, as well as the saints of their times.
The Catholic church, thrown on this toiling, serious
people, has made in fourteen centuries a massive
system, close fitted to the manners 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 head-
land and monument, and has coupled itself with
208 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the almanac, that no oourt can be held, no field
ploughed, no horse shod, without some leave from
the church. All maxims of prudence or shop or
farm are fixed and dated by the church. Hence
its strength in the agricultural districts. The dis-
tribution of land into parishes enforces a church
sanction to every civil privilege ; and the gradation
of the clergy, — prelates for the rich and curates
for the poor, — with the fact that a classical educa-
tion has been secured to the clergyman, makes them
^^the link which unites the sequestered peasantry
with the intellectual advancement of the age." *
The English church has many certificates to show
of humble effective service in humanizing the peo-
ple, in cheering and refining men, feeding, healing
and educating. It has the seal of martyrs and
confessors ; the noblest books ; a sublime architec-
ture ; a ritual marked by the same secular merits,
nothing cheap or purchasable.
From this slow-grown church important reactions
proceed ; much for culture, much for giving a di-
rection to the nation's affection and will to-day.
The carved and pictured chapel, — its entire sur-
face animated with image and emblem, — made the
parish-church a sort of book and Bible to the peo-
ple's eye.
Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a
1 Wordsworth.
RELIGION, 209
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 arch-
bishop, I heard the service of evening prayer read
and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear
the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and
Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with cir-
cumstantiality in York minster, on the 13th Janu-
ary, 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 binding old and new to some purpose.
The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of
civilization, for thus has the history of the world
been preserved and is preserved. Here in England
every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the
Times.
Another part of the same service on this occa-
sion 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 po-
litical engine. From his infancy, every English-
man is accustomed to hear daily prayers for the
queen, for the royal family and the Parliament, by
name ; and this lifelong consecration cannot be with-
out influence on his opinions.
VOL. V. 14
210 ENGLISH TRAITS.
The universities also are parcel of the ecclesi-
astical 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 un-
broken order and tradition of its church ; the lit-
urgy, ceremony, architecture ; the sober grace, the
good company, the connection with the throne and
with history, which adorn it. And whilst it en-
dears itself thus to men of more taste than activity,
the stability of the English nation is passionately
enlisted to its support, from its inextricable connec-
tion 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 some-
where in the society. These minsters were neither
built nor filled by atheists. No church has had
more learned, industrious or devoted men ; plenty
of "clerks and bishops, who, out of their gowns,
would turn their backs on no man." ^ Their ar-
chitecture 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,
1 FuUer.
RELIGION, 211
twelftli, thirteenth, and again in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, when the nation was full of
genius and piety.
But the age of the WicliflPes, Cobhams, Arun-
dels, Beckets ; of the Latimers, Mores, Cranmers ;
of the Taylors, Leightons, Herberts ; of the Sher-
locks and Butlers, is gone. Silent revolutions in
opinion have made it impossible that men like these
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
Englishman come into his ambassador's chapel
and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-
brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much
national pride prays with him, and the religion of a
gentleman. So far is he from attaching any mean-
ing to the words, that he believes himself to have
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 well used by them, and that it would be-
come their magnanimity, after so great successes,
t^ take order that a proper acknowledgment be
212 ENGLISH TRAITS.
made. It is tte 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 vigor-
ous English understanding shows how much wit
and folly can agree in one brain. Their religion is
a quotation ; their church is a doll ; and any exam-
ination 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 Christen-
dom 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 officers."
They value a philosopher as they value an apothe-
cary who brings bark or a drench 5 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-in-
formed men possess the power of thinking just so
RELIGION, 218
far as the bishop in religious 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 brought free
trade or geology to their present standing, look
grave and lofty and shut down their 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 there
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 together 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,
214 ENGLISH TRAITS,
and in buying Pugin and architectural literature.
It has a general good name for amenity and mild-
ness. It is not in ordinary a persecuting church ;
it is not inquisitorial, not even inquisitive ; is per-
fectly weU-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 arts. The church has not been
the founder of the London University, of the Me-
chanics' Institutes, of the Free School, of 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
ft does 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 Socratic 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 history,
from the prayers of King Richard, in Richard of
Devizes' Chronicle, to those in the diaries of Sir
Samuel Romilly and of Haydon the painter.
"Abroad with my wife," writes Pepys piously,
" the first time that ever I rode in my own coach ;
RELIGION. 215
which do make my heart rejoice and praise God,
and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it."
The bill for the naturalization of the Jews (in
1763) was resisted by petitions from all parts of
the kingdom, and by petition from the city of Lon-
don, reprobating this bill, as " tending extremely
to the dishonor of the Christian religion, and ex-
tremely injurious to the interests 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 sojourn not," and arts, wars, discoveries and
opinion go onward at their own pace. The new
age has new desires, new enemies, new trades, new
charities, and reads the Scriptures with new eyes.
The chatter of French politics, the 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 ab-
surd in its imfitness, 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 nonconformist confutes the conformists, by
216 ENGLISH TRAITS.
quoting the texts they must allow. It is the eon<
dition of a religion to require religion for its ex-
positor. Prophet and apostle can only be rightly
understood by prophet and apostle. The states-
man knows that the religious element will not fail,
any more than the supply of fibrine and chyle;
but it is in its nature constructive, and will organ-
ize 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 weU. Like
the Quakers, he may resist the separation of a
class of priests, and create opportunity and expec-
tation in the society to run to meet natural endow-
ment 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 imspiritualize and imchurch the
people to whom it was bequeathed. The class
certain to be excluded from all preferment are the
religious, — and driven to other churches ; which
is nature's vis medicatrix.
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
RELIGION. 217
who 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 al-
most a premium on felony. Brougham, in a speech
in the House of Commons on the Irish elective
franchise, said, "How wiU the reverend bishops
of the other house be able to express their due ab-
horrence of the crime of perjury, who solemnly
declare in the presence 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 admin-
istration thereof, and for no other reason what-
ever ? " The modes of initiation are more dam-
aging than custom-house oaths. The Bishop is
elected by the Dean and Prebends of the cathedral.
The queen sends these gentlemen a congS d^Slire^
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,
218 ENGLISH TRAITS.
know that there is alive somewhere a man whose
honesty reaches to this point also that he shall not
kneel to false gods, and on the day when you meet
him, you sink into the class of counterfeits. Be-
sides, 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 under-
standing of the receivers.
The English church, imdermined 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
persons are driven out of the Established Church
iiito sects, which instantly rise to credit and hold
the Establishment in check. Nature has sharper
remedies, also. The English, abhorring change in
all things, abhorring it most in matters of religion,
eling to the last rag of form, and are dreadfully
given to cant. The English (and I wish it were
confined to them, but 'tis a taint in the Anglo-
Saxon blood in both hemispheres), — the English
and the Americans cant beyond all other nationa
RELIGION. 219
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 thimders are supplied by the property-
man. The fanaticism and hypocrisy create satire.
Punch finds an inexhaustible material. Dickens
writes novels on Exeter-Hall humanity. Thack-
eray exposes the heartless high life. Nature re-
venges herself more summarily by the heathenism
of the lower classes. Lord Shaftesbury caUs the
poor thieves together and reads sermons to them,
and they call it ' gas.' George Borrow summons
the Gypsies to hear his discourse on the Hebrews
in Egypt, and reads to them the Apostles' Creed
in Eomany. "When I had concluded," he says,
"I looked around me. The features of the as-
sembly were twisted, and the eyes of aU turned
upon me with a frightful squint : not an individual
present but squinted ; the genteel 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 in-
terrogations in his eyes, he has no resource but to
take wine with him. False position introduces
220 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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
theology, there is nothing left but to quit a church
which is no longer one.
But the religion of England, — is it the Estab-
lished Church ? no ; is it the sects ? no ; they are
only perpetuations of some private man's dissent,
and are to the Established Church as cabs are to a
coach, cheaper and more convenient, but really the
same thing. Where dwells the religion ? TeU me
first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought,
or gesture. They do not dwell or stay at aU.
Electricity cannot be made fast, 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, forever-
more ; it is passing, glancing, gesticular ; it is a
traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret, which per-
plexes them and puts them out. Yet, if religion be
the doing of all good, and for its sake the suffering
of aU evil, aouffrir de tout le monde^ et ne /aire
souffrir personne^ that divine secret has existed in
England from the days of Alfred to those of Rom-
illy, of Clarkson and of Florence Nightingale, and
in thousands who have no fame.
CHAPTER 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 con-
vertible 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 homeliness, 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, though
by pails and pans. They ask their constitutional
utility 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 farmyard, the lane and market.
222 ENGLISH TRAITS.
She says, with De Stael, "I tramp in the mire
with wooden shoes, whenever 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 ma
terialist, economical, mercantile. He must be
treated with sincerity and reality; with muffins,
and not the promise of muffins; and prefers his
hot chop, with perfect security and convenience in
the eating of it, to the chances of the amplest and
Frenchiest bill of fare, engraved on embossed pa-
per. When he is intellectual, and a poet or a phi-
losopher, 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 sym-
bol palpable and resisting. What he relishes in
Dante is the vise-like tenacity with which he holds
a mental image before the eyes, as if it were a
scutcheon painted on a shield. Byron " liked
something craggy to break his mind upon." A
taste for plain strong speech, what is called a bib-
lical 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,
LITERATURE. 223
Bunyan, Milton, Taylor, Evelyn, Pepys, Hooker,
Cotton and the translators wrote it. How realistic
or materialistic 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 mentality, — 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. Shakspeare, Spenser and MUton, in their
loftiest ascents, have this national grip and exacti-
tude of mind. This mental materialism makes the
value of English transcendental genius ; in these
writers and in Herbert, Henry More, Donne and
Sir Thomas Browne. The Saxon materialism and
narrowness, exalted into the sphere of intellect,
makes the very genius of Shakspeare and Milton.
When it reaches the pure element, it treads the
clouds as securely as the adamant. Even in its ele-
vations materialistic, its poetry is common sense in-
spired ; 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 ornament is sought, to interweave
Boman, but sparingly ; nor is a sentence made of
Boman words alone, without loss of strength. The
children and laborers use the Saxon unmixed. The
224 ENGLISH TRAITS,
Latin unmixed is abandoned to the colleges and
Parliament. Mixture is a secret of the English
island ; and, in their dialect, the male principle is
the Saxon, the female, the Latin; and they are
combined in every discourse. A good writer, if he
bas indulged in a Roman roundness, makes haste
to chasten and nerve his period by English mono-
syllables.
When the Gothic nations came into Europe they
found it lighted with the sun and moon of Hebrew
and of Greek genius. The tablets of their brain,
long kept in the dark, were finely sensible to the
double glory. To the images from this twin source
(of Christianity and art), the mind became fruitful
as by the incubation of the Holy Ghost. The Eng-
lish mind flowered in every faculty, The common-
sense was surprised and inspired. For two centu-
ries England was philosophic, religious, poetic.
The 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 fancy and
imagination and easy spanning of vast distances of
thought, the enterprise or accosting of new subjects,
and, generally, the easy exertion of power, — aston-
ish, like the legendary feats of Guy of Warwick.
The union of Saxon precision and Oriental soarings
of which Shakspeare is the perfect example, is
LITERATURE, 225
shared in less degree by the writers of two centu-
ries. I find not only the great masters out of all
rivalry and reach, but the whole writing of the
time charged with a masculine force and freedom.
There is a hygienic simpleness, rough vigor and
closeness to the matter in hand even in the second
and third class of writers ; and, I think, in the com-
mon style of the people, as one finds it in the cita-
tion of wills, letters and public documents ; in prov-
erbs and forms of speech. The more hearty and
sturdy expression may indicate that the savageness
of the Norseman was not all gone. Their dynamic
brains hurled off their words as the revolving stone
hurls off scraps of grit. I could cite from the sev-
enteenth century sentences and phrases of edge not
to be matched in the nineteenth. Their poets by
simple force of mind equalized themselves with the
accumulated science of ours. The coimtry gentle-
men 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.
VOL. v. 16
226 ENGLISH TRAITS.
A man must think that age well taught and
thoughtful, 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 reception proved by his mak-
ing his fortune ; and the apathy proved by the ab-
sence of all contemporary panegyric, — seems to
demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people.
Judge of the splendor of a nation by the insignifi-
cance of great individuals in it. The manner in
which they learned Greek and Latin, before our
modern facilities were yet ready ; without diction-
aries, grammars, or indexes, by lectiu-es of a pro-
fessor, followed by their own searchings, — required
a more robust memory, and cooperation of all the
faculties ; and their scholars, Camden, Usher, Sel-
den, Mede, Gataker, Hooker, Taylor, Burton, Bent-
ley, Brian Walton, acquired the solidity and method
of engineers.
The influence of Plato tinges the British genius.
Their minds loved analogy ; were cognisant of re-
semblances, 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 discrep-
ances ; 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
LITERATURE. 227
Plato ; — More, Hooker, Bacon, Sidney, Lord
Brooke, Herbert, Browne, Donne, Spenser, Chap-
man, Milton, Crashaw, Norris, Cudworth, Berke-
ley, Jeremy Taylor.
Lord Bacon has the English duality. His cen-
turies of observations on useful science, and his ex-
periments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One
hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or
any one who had a talent for experiment, was
worth aU 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 gene-
sis or its diffusion are not known. That knowl-
edge, if we had it, would supersede all that we call
science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or
of meta-chemistry ; — the vital point being, how
far the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking re-
semblances, 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 aU
affirmative action comes.
Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held of the
analogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say,
naming from the best example) Platonists. Who-
ever discredits analogy and requires heaps of facts
before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic
228 ENGLISH TRAITS.
power, and nothing original or beautiful will be
produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx
of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the
Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic
tendency; the so-called scientific is the negative
and poisonous. 'T is quite certain that Spenser,
Bums, Byron and Wordsworth will be Platonists,
and that the dull men will be Lockists. Then poli-
tics and commerce will absorb from the educated
class men of talents without genius, precisely be-
cause such have no resistance.
Bacon, capable of ideas, yet devoted to ends,
required in his map of the mind, first of all, uni-
versality, or prima philosophia ; the receptacle for
all such profitable observations 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 dis-
covery can be made in a flat or level, but you must
ascend to a higher science. '^ If any man thinketh
philosophy and imiversality to be idle studies, he
doth not consider that all professions are from
thence served and supplied ; and this I take to be
a great cause that has hindered the progression of
learning, because these fimdamental knowledges
have been studied but in passage." He explained
LITERATURE. 229
liimself by giving various quaint examples of the
summary or common laws of which each science
has its own illustration. He complains that " he
finds this part of learning very deficient, the pro-
founder sort of wits drawing a bucket now and
then for their own use, but the spring-head unvis-
ited. This was the dry light which did scorch and
offend most men's watery natures." Plato had
signified the ' 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 Per-
icles had, in addition to a great natural genius.
For, meeting with Anaxagoras, who was a person
of this kind, he attached himself to him, and nour-
ished himself with sublime speculations on the ab-
solute 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 king-
doms of thought, and these are in the world con-
stants^ like the Copemican and Newtonian theories
in physics. In England these may be traced usu-
ally to Shakspeare, Bacon, MUton, or Hooker, even
to Van Helmont and Behmen, and do all have a
kind of filial retrospect to Plato and the Greeks.
2S0 ESGLISn TRAITS.
Of dus kind is Lord Baeon^s sentenoe, tbat ^ Xa-
tare » commanded b;^ obeying her ; ^ his doctrine
of poetry, which ^ accommodates the diows of
things to the desires of the mind,*' or die Zoroas-
tnza definition of poetry, mystical, yet exact, ^ ap-
parent pictures of nnapparent natures ; ^ Spenser's
creed that ^ soul is form, and doth the body make ; "
the theory of Berkeley, that we have no certain as-
surance 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 must rest on land, — a rule which requires
to be liberally interpreted; the theory of Sweden-
borg, so cosmieally 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 thought; the identity - philosophy of
Schelling, couched in the statement that *'*' all dif-
ference is quantitative." So the very announce-
ment of the theory of gravitation, of Kepler's three
harmonic laws, and even of Dalton's doctrine of
definite proportions, finds a sudden response in the
mind, which remains a superior evidence to empiri-
cal 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 iq
LITERATURE. 231
what we loosely call the Elizabethan age (say, in
literary history, the period from 1575 to 1625), yet
a period almost short enough to justify Ben Jon-
son'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 reck-
ons 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
descent 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 his " understanding " the measure,
in all nations, of the English intellect. His coun-
trymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on
which they had once walked with echoing steps, and
disused the studies once so beloved ; the powers of
thought fell into neglect. The later English want
the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping
men in natural classes by an insight of general
laws, so deep that the rule is deduced with equal
precision from few subjects, or from one, as from
multitudes of lives<> Shakspeare is supreme in
282 ENGLISH TRAITS.
diat, as in all the great mental energies. The Ger-
mans generalize : the English cannot interpret the
German mind. German science comprehends the
English. The absence of the faculty in England
is shown by the timidity which aecimiulates moun-
tains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of
men and miles of redoubts to compensate the in-
spirations of courage and conduct.
The English shrink from a generalization. " They
do not look abroad into universality, or they draw
only a bucketfid at the fountain of the First Phi-
losophy for their occasion, and do not go to the
spring - head." Bacon, who said this, is almost
unique among his countrymen in that faculty ; at
least among- the prose -writers. Milton, who was
the stair or high table-land to let down the Engliidi
genius from the summits of Shakspeare, 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 ob-
servation, that no copula had been detected be-
tween any cause and effect, either in physics or
in thought; that the term cause and effect was
loosely or gratuitously applied to what we know
only as consecutive, not at all as causal. Doctor
LITERATURE. 238
Johnson's written abstractions have little^ value ;
the tone of feeKng 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, in-
asmuch 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 expansive element which creates literature is
steadily denied. Plato is resisted, and his school.
Hallam is uniformly polite, but with deficient sym-
pathy ; writes with resolute generosity, but is un-
conscious of the deep worth which lies in the mys-
tics, 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 prof ounder masters : a lover of ideas is not only
imcongenial, but uniutelligible. HaUam inspires
respect by his knowledge and fidelity, by his mani-
fest 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 Hallam, or in the firmer intellectual nerve
of Mackintosh, one stiU finds the same type of Eng-
lish genius. It is wise and rich, but it lives on its
capital. It is retrospective. How can it discern
284 ENGLISH TRAITS.
and hail the new forms that are looming up on the
horizon, — new and gigantic thoughts which cannot
dress themselves out of any old wardrobe of the
past ?
The essays, the fiction and the poetry of the day
have the like municipal limits. Dickens, with pre-
ternatural apprehension of the language of man-
ners and the varieties 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 tempo-
rary in his tints and style, and local in his aims.
Bulwer, an industrious writer, with occasional abil-
ity, is distinguished for his reverence of intellect
as a temporality, and appeals to the worldly am-
bition of the student. His romances tend to fan
these low flames. Their novelists despair of the
heart. Thackeray finds that God has made no al-
lowance 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.
The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone
of the English governing classes of the day, ex-
plicitly teaches that good means good to eat, good
to wear, material commodity; that the glory of
modem philosophy is its direction on " fruit ; " to
yield economical inventions ; and that its merit is
LITERATURE, 235
to avoid ideas and avoid morals. He thinks it the
distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy in its
triimiph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the
intellect from theories of the all-Fair 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 ad-
vantage," as he calls it, meaning always sensual
benefit, is the only good. The eminent benefit of
astronomy is the better navigation it creates to en-
able the fruit-ships to bring home their lemons and
wine to the London grocer. It was a curious re-
sult, in which the civility and religion of England
for a thousand years ends in denying morals and
reducing the intellect to a sauce-pan. The critic
hides his skepticism under the English cant of prac-
tical. To convince the reason, to touch the con-
science, is romantic pretension. The fine arts fall
to the ground. Beauty, except as luxurious com-
modity, does not exist. It is very certain, I may
say in passing, that if Lord Bacon had been only
the sensualist his critic pretends, he would never
have acquired the fame which now entitles him to
this patronage. It is because he had imagination,
the leisures of the spirit, and basked in an element
of contemplation out of all modern English atmos-
pheric gauges, that he is impressive to the imagina-
tions of men and has become a potentate not to be
236 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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
gravity or levity, not by any feat he did, or by any
tutoring more or less of Newton &c., but as an ef-
fect of the same cause which showed itself more pro-
nounced afterwards in Hooke, Boyle and Halley.
Coleridge, a catholic 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 criticism 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 inadequate per-
formings, failing to accomplish any one master-
piece, — seems to mark the closing of an era. Even
in him, the traditional Englishman was too strong
for the philosopher, and he fell into accommoda'
tions ; and as Burke had striven to idealize the
English State, so Coleridge ' narrowed his mind '
in the attempt to reconcile 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,
LITERATURE, 287
when the Bramins can no longer read or under-
stand the Braminical philosophy.
In the decomposition and asphyxia that followed
all this materialism, Carlyle was driven by his dis-
gust at the pettiness and the cant, into the preach-
ing of Fate. In comparison with all this rotten-
ness, any check, any cleansing, though by fire,
seemed desirable and beautiful. He saw little dif-
ference 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 his 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 catego-
ries; 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.
Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the anno-
tator of Fourier and the champion of Hahnemann,
has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a na-
tive vigor, with a catholic perception of relations,
equal to the highest attempts, 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
238 ENGLISH TRAITS.
known except in deepest waters, and only lacking
what ought to accompany such powers, a manifest
centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovable
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 limit-
ary tone of English thought, and much more easy
to adduce examples 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 eru-
dition of the learned class. But the artificial suc-
cor which marks all English performance appears
in letters also : much of their aesthetic production
is antiquarian and manufactured, and literary rep-
utations 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 mo-
ment, every ambitious young man studies geology :
so members of Parliament are made, and church-
men.
The bias of Englishmen to practical skill has re-
acted on the national mind. They are incapable of
an inutility, and respect the five mechanic powers
even in their song. The voice of their modem
LITERATURE. 239
muse has a slight hint of the steam-whistle, and
the poem is created as an ornament and finish of
their monarchy, and by no means as the bird of
a new morning which forgets the past world in the
full enjoyment of that which is forming. They are
with difficulty ideal; they are the most conditioned
men, as if, having the best conditions, they could
not bring themselves to forfeit them. Every one
of them is a thousand years old and lives by his
memory : and when you 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 philosophy and letters is me-
chanical in its structure, 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 soci-
ety 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
240 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 modem English mind repudi-
ates.
I fear the same fault lies in their science, since
they have known how to make it repulsive and be-
reave nature of its charm ; — though perhaps the
complaint flies wider, and the vice attaches to many
more than to British physicists. The eye of the
naturalist must have a scope like nature itself, a
susceptibility to all impressions, alive to the heart
as well as to the logic of creation. But English
science puts humanity to the door. It wants the
connection which is the test of genius. The sci-
ence is false by not being poetic. It isolates the
reptile or mollusk it assumes to explain ; whilst rep-
tile 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 England, one hermit
finds this fact, and another finds that, and lives
and dies ignorant of its value. There are great ex-
ceptions, of John Hunter, a man of ideas ; perhaps
of Robert Brown, the botanist ; and of Eichard
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 unbroken power of labor in the
m
LITERATURE, 241
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 thought as conveyancing. It stands in strong
contrast with the genius of the Germans, those
semi-Greeks, who love analogy, and, by means of
their height 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 " that will pay. A horizon of brass of the
diameter of his umbrella shuts down around his
senses. Squalid contentment with conventions, sa-
tire at the names of philosophy and religion, paro-
chial and shop-tiQ politics, and idolatry of usage,
betray the ebb of life and spirit. As they trample
on nationalities to reproduce London and London-
ers 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 broad-
cloth and gaiters, they are tormented with fear that
herein lurks a force that will sweep their system
away. The artists say, " Nature puts them out " ;
the scholars have become un-ideal. They parry
earnest speech with banter and levity ; they laugh
VOL. V. 16
242 ENGLISH TRAITS,
you down, or they change the subject. ^^ The fact
is," say they over their wine, " all that about lib-
erty, 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 pre-
cinct of his rhymes. No priest dares hint at a
Providence which does not respect English utility.
The island is a roaring volcano of fate, of material
values, of tariffs and laws of repression, glutted
markets and low prices.
In 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 pri-
apism 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 im-
pediment more to interpose between the man and
bis objects.
Thus poetry is degraded and made ornamental.
Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round
frosted cake. What did Walter Scott write with-
out stint ? a rhymed traveller's guide to Scotland.
And the libraries of verses they print have this
Birmingham character. How many volumes of
weU-bred metre we must jingle through, before we
LITERATURE. 243
ean T)e filled, taught, renewed ! We want the
miraculous ; the beauty which we can manufacture
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 glowing and effect-
ive, — how few ! Shall I find my heavenly bread
in the reigning poets ? Where is great design in
modem 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, imtil 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 popular tune in the verses.
The exceptional fact of the period is the genius
of Wordsworth. He had no master but nature
and solitude. " He wrote a poem," says Landor,
^ without the aid of war." His verse is the voice
244 ENGLISH TRAITS,
of sanity in a worldly and ambitious age. One re-
grets that his temperament 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
Wordsworth wanted. There is no finer ear, nor
more oommand of the keys of language. Color,
like the dawn, flows over the horizon from his pen-
cil, 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 con-
tents 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 beau-
tiful talent. But it is only a first success, when
the ear is gained. The best office of the best poets
has been to show how low and iminspired was their
general style, and that only once or twice they have
struck the high chord.
That expansiveness which 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 newiorms." A stanza of the
LITERATURE. 245
song of nature the Oxonian has no ear for, and he
does not value the salient and curative influence of
intellectual action, studious of truth without a by-
end.
By the law of contraries, I look for an irresisti-
ble taste for Orientalism in Britain. For a self-
conceited modish life, made up of trifles, clinging
to a corporeal civilization, hating ideas, there is no
remedy like the Oriental largeness. That aston-
ishes and disconcerts English decorum. For 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 Englishman like
Warren Hastings, who had been struck with the
grand style of thinking in the Indian writings,
deprecating the prejudices of his countrymen while
offering them a translation of the Bhagvat. " Might
I, an unlettered man, venture to prescribe bounds
to the latitude of criticism, I should exclude, in
estimating the merit of such a production, all rules
drawn from the ancient or modern literature of
Europe, all references to such sentiments or man-
ners as are become the standards of propriety for
opinion and action in our own modes, and, equally,
all appeals to our revealed tenets of religion and
moral duty." ^ He goes to bespeak indulgence to
"ornaments of fancy unsuited to our taste, and
passages elevated to a tract of sublimity into which
^ Preface to Wilkins's Translation of the Bhagvat Geeta*
246 ENGLISH TRAITS.
our habits of judgment will find it difficult to pur-
sue them."
Meantime, I know that a retrieving power lies
in the English race which seems to make any re-
coil possible ; in other words, there is at all times
a minority of profound minds existing in the na-
tion, capable of appreciating every soaring of intel-
lect and every hint of tendency. While the con-
structive talent seems dwarfed and superficial, the
criticism is often in the noblest tone and suggests
the presence of the invisible gods. I can well be-
lieve what I have often heard, that there are two
nations 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 becom-
ing the other ; for Robert Owen does not exagger-
ate the power of circumstance. But the two com-
plexions, 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 stu-
dious, contemplative, experimenting ; the other, the
ungrateful pupil, scornful of the source whilst avail-
ing itself of the knowledge for gain ; these two na-
tions, 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 English State.
CHAPTER XV.
THE "times."
The power of the newspaper is familiar in Amer-
ica and in accordance with our political system.
In England, it stands in antagonism with the feu-
dal institutions, and it is all the more beneficent
succor against the secretive tendencies of a mon-
archy. The celebrated Lord Somers " knew of
no good law proposed and passed in his time, to
which the public papers had not directed his at-
tention." There is no comer and no night. A
relentless inquisition drags every secret to the day,
turns the glare of this solar microscope on every
malfaisance, so as to make the public a more terri-
ble spy than any foreigner; 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 inspection is
feared. No antique privilege, no comfortable mo-
nopoly, but sees surely that its days are coimted; the
people are familiarized with the reason of reform,
and, one by one, take away every argument of the
248 ENGLISH TRAITS.
obstructives. " So your grace likes the comfort of
reading the newspapers," said Lord Mansfield to
the Duke of Northumberland ; " mark my words ;
you and I shall not live 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 Northum-
berland out of their titles and possessions, and the
country out of its king." The tendency in Eng-
land 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 off-hand pimgent
paragraphs, expressing with clearness and courage
their opinion on any person or performance. Val-
uable 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 edu-
cated to it. Himdreds of clever Praeds and Freres
and Froudes and Hoods and Hooks and Maginns
and Mills and Macaulays, make poems, or short
essays for a journal, as they make speeches in Par-
liament and on the hustings, or as they shoot and
ride. It is a quite accidental and arbitrary direc-
tion of their general ability. Rude health and
spirits, an Oxford education and the habits of soci*
ety are implied, but not a ray of genius. It cornea
TEE "TIMES.** 249
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 evening in all society. It has ears,
everywhere, and its information is earliest, com-
pletest and surest. It has risen, year by year, and
victory by victory, to its present authority. I
asked one of its old contributors whether it had
once been abler than it is now? "Never," he
said ; " these are its palmiest days." It has shown
those qualities which are dear to Englishmen,
unflinching adherence to its objects, prodigal intel-
lectual 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 decided
against him, and pulled him down. It declared
war against Ireland, and conquered it. It adopted
the League against the Com Laws, and, when
Cobden had begun to despair, it announced his
250 ENGLISH TRAITS.
triumph. It denounced and discredited the French
Republic of 1848, and checked every sympathy
with it in England, until it had enrolled 200,000
special constables to watch the Chartists and make
them ridiculous on the 10th April. It first de-
noimced and then adopted the 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 commu-
nity. 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 perfect system. It is told that when he de-
manded 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 proprietors, who had
THE ''TIMES:* 261
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-
yard in Printing-House Square. We walked with
some circumspection, as if we were entering a pow-
der-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 appear-
ances. 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,
1848, the greatest number ever printed, — 64,000
— were issued; that, since February, the daily
circulation had increased by 8000 copies. The
old press they were then using printed five or six
thousand sheets per hour ; the new machine, for
which they were then building an engine, would
print twelve thousand per hour. Our entertainer
confided us to a courteous assistant to show us the
establishment, in which, I think, they employed 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.
252 ENGLISH TRAITS.
The staff of the ^^ Times " has always been made
up of able men. Old Walter, Sterling, Bacon,
Barnes, Alsiger, Horace Twiss, Jones Lloyd, John
Oxenford, Mr. Mosely, Mr. Bailey, have contrib-
uted to its renown in their special departments.
But it has never wanted the first pens for occa-
sional assistance. Its private information is inex-
plicable, and recalls the stories of Fouch^'s police,
whose omniscience made it believed that the Em-
press Josephine must be in his pay. It has mei^
cantile and political correspondents in every foreign
city, and its expresses outnm the despatches of the
government. One hears anecdotes of the rise of
its servants, as of the functionaries of the India
House. I was told of the dexterity of one of its
reporters, who, finding himself, on one occasion,
where the magistrates had strictly forbidden repor-
ters, put his hands into his coat-pocket, and with
pencil in one hand and tablet in the other, did his
work.
The influence of this journal is a recognized
power in Europe, and, of course, none is more con-
scious 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 the ground of diplomatic complaint
*What would the "Times" say?' is a terror in
Paris, in Berlin, in Vienna, in Copenhagen and m
THE "TIMES." 263
Nepaul. Its consummate discretion and success
exhibit the English skill of combination. The
daily paper is the 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 academic elegance and classic allusion
which adorn its columns. Hence, too, the heat
and gallantry of its onset. But the steadiness of
the aim suggests the belief that this fire is directed
and fed by older engineers ; as if persons of exact
information, and with settled views of policy, sup-
plied the writers with the basis of fact and the ob-
ject 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 parts are kept in con-
cert, all the articles appear to proceed 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, cor-
rects, and co-ordinates. Of this closet, the secret
254 ENGLISH TRAITS.
does not transpire. No writer is sufPered to claim
the authorship of any paper; every thing good^
from whatever quarter, comes out editorially ; and
thus, by making the paper every thing and those
who write it nothing, the character and the awe of
the journal gain.
The English like it for its complete information.
A statement 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 their paper is going to say : but, above
all, for the nationality and confidence 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 po-
liceman, and with the most provoking airs of con-
descension. 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 court-
liness. It addresses occasionally a hint to Maj-
esty itself, and sometimes a hint which is taken.
There is an air of freedom even in their advertis-
ing columns, which speaks well for England to a
THE "TIMES," 266
foreigner. On the days when I arrived in London
in 1847, 1 read, among the daily announcements,
one offering a reward of fifty pounds to any per-
son who would put a nobleman, described by name
and title, late a member of Pariiament, into any
county jail in England, he having been convicted,
of obtaining money imder 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 sub-
dued the earth before we 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," &c ?
No ; it is so, and so it shall be.
The morality and patriotism of the "Times"
claim only to be representative, and by no means
ideal. It gives the argument, not of the majority,
but of the commanding class. Its editors know
better than to defend Russia, or Austria, or Eng-
lish 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 shift-
ing its banks. Sympathizing with, and speaking
for the class that rules the hour, yet being apprised
256 ENGLISH TRAITS.
of every ground-swell, every Chartist resolution,
every Church squabble, every strike in the mills,
they detect the first tremblings of change. They
watch the hard and bitter struggles of the authors
of each liberal movement, year by year ; watching
them only to taunt and obstruct them, — until, at
last, when they see that these have established
their fact, that power is on the point of passing 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 cari-
catures are equal to the best pamphlets, and will
convey to the eye in an instant the popular view
which was taken of each turn of public affairs. Its
sketches are usually made by masterly 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 Eng-
land, — as in Punch, so in the humorists, Jerrold,
Dickens, Thackeray, Hood, — have taken the di
rection of humanity and freedom.
THE "TIMES." 257
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 flattered
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 else-
where, that the English press has a high tone, —
which it has not. It has an imperial tone, as of a
powerful and independent nation. But, as with
other empires, its tone is prone to be official, and
even officinal. The " Times " shares all the limita-
tions 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 only expedient,
and feed its batteries from the central heart of hu^
manity, 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 British reform; its proud func-
tion, that of being the voice of Europe, the de-
fender of the exile and patriot against despots,
would be more effectually discharged; it would
VOL. V. IT
268 ENGLISH TRAITS.
have the authority which is claimed for that dream
of good men not yet come to pass, an International
Congress ; and the least of its victories would be to
give to England a new millennium of beneficent
power.
'':^'*r-
CHAPTER XVT.
STONEHENGE.
It had been agreed between my friend Mr. Car-
lyle and me, that before I left England we should
make an excursion together to Stonehenge, which
neither of us had seen; and the project pleased
my fancy with the double attraction of the monu-
ment and the companion. It seemed a bringing
together of extreme points, to visit the oldest re-
ligious monument in Britain in company with her
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 reasonable 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 Eail-
way through Hampshire to Salisbury, where we
f oimd a carriage to convey us to Amesbury. The
fine weathier and my friend's local knowledge of
Hampshire, in which he is wont to spend a part of
every summer, made the way short. There was
260 ENGLISH TRAITS.
much to say, too, of the travelling Americans and
their nsual objects in London. I thought it natu-
ral that they should 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, Kunst
is a great delusion, and Goethe and Schiller wasted
a great deal of good time on it : " — and he thinks
he 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 antiq-
uities, nothing good comes of it. He wishes to go
through the British Museum in silence, and thinks
a sincere man will see something and say nothing.
In these days, he thought, it would become an ar-
chitect to consult only the grim necessity, and say,
* I can build you a coffin for such dead persons as
you are, and for such dead purposes as you have,
but you shall have no ornament.' For the science,
he had if possible even less tolerance, and compared
the savans of Somerset House to the boy who asked
Confucius " how many stars in the sky ? " Confu-
cius replied, " he minded things near him : " then
said the boy, " how many hairs are there in your
eyebrows ? " Confucius said, " he did n't know and
didn't care."
STONEHENGE, 261
Still speaking of the Americans, Carlyle com-
plained that they dislike the coldness and exclu-
siveness of the English, and run away to France
and go with their countrymen and are amused, in-
stead of manfully staying in London, and confront-
ing Englishmen and acquiring their culture, who
really have much to teach them.
I told Carlyle that I was easily dazzled, and was
accustomed to concede readily all that an English-
man 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 everything and can do
everything ; but meantime, I surely know that as
soon as I return to Massachusetts I shall lapse at
once into the feeling, which the 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 British race ; and that
no skill or activity can long compete with the pro-
digious natural advantages 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 chil-
dren. But this was a proposition which no English-
man of whatever condition can easily entertain.
We left the train at Salisbury and took a car-
riage to Amesbury, passing by Old Sarum, a bare,
262 ENGLISH TRAITS.
treeless hill, once containing the town which sent
two members to Parliament, — now, not a hut ;
and, arriving at Amesbury, stopped at the George
Inn. After dinner we walked 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
hayricks. On the top of a mountain, the old tem-
ple 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 the 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 structiu*es and history
had proceeded. Stonehenge is a circular colonnade
with a diameter of a himdred feet, and enclosing a
second and a third colonnade within. We walked
round the stones and clambered over them, to wont
ourselves with their strange aspect and groupings,
and found a nook sheltered from the wind among
them, where Carlyle 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 aU later churches and
all history, and were like what is most permanent
STONEHENGE. 263
on the face of the planet: these, and the barrowB,
— 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 mari-
ner on HeUespont, the vaimt of Homer and the
fame of Achilles. Within the enclosure grow but-
tercups, nettles, and all around, wild thyme, daisy,
meadowsweet, goldenrod, thistle and the carpeting
grass. Over us, larks were soaring and singing ; —
as my friend said, "the larks which were hat()hed
last year, and the wind which was hatched many
thousand 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 uncovered, and the situation
fixed astronomically, — the grand entrances, here
and at Abury, being placed exactly northeast, " 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 iihe
264 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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 Cam^
bridge Museum of megatheria and mastodons, was
ready to maintain that some cleverer elephants or
mylodonta had borne oflE and laid these rocks one on
another. Only the good beasts must have known
how 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 have
been allowed to settle on so remarkable a monu-
ment, in a country on which all the muses have
kept their eyes now for eighteen hundred years.
We are not yet too late to learn much more than is
known of this structure. Some diligent Fellowes
or Layard will arrive, stone by stone, at the whole
history, by that exhaustive British sense and per-
severance, so whimsical in its choice of objects,
which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to
the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids and uncovers
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 will
thank this age for the accurate history. 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
tliese conscious stones we two pilgrims were alike
STONEHENGE. 265
known and near. We could equally well revere
their old British meaning. My philosopher was
subdued and gentle. In this quiet house of des-
tiny he happened to say, " I plant cypresses wher-
ever 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, sug-
gested to him the flight of ages and the succession
of religions. The old times of England impress
Carlyle 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 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 fa^t, about the time when
those writers appeared, the last of these 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*
266 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 engaged the local antiquary, Mr.
Brown, to go with 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 Dru-
idical temple at Abury, there is also an astronomi-
cal stone, in the same relative position.
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 British nobles whom Hengist
slaughtered here, as Geoffrey of Monmouth relates?
or was it a Roman work, as Inigo Jones explained
to King James; or identical in design and style
with the East Indian temples of the sim, as Daviea
STONEHENGE. 267
{n the Celtic Eesearches maintainff? 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 worid 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, Ambres-
bury, and elsewhere, which vary a little from true
east and west, followed the variations of the com-
pass. 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 sim, and the sun-god
gave him a golden cup, with which he sailed over
* Connected with Stonehenge are an avenue and a cursus.
The avenue is a narrow road of raised earth, extending 594
yards in a straight line from the grand entrance, then divid-
ing 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, 3036 yards long, by 110
broad.
268 ENGLISH TRAITS,
the ocean. What was this, but a compass-box?
This cup or little boat, in 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 conunerce.
The golden fleece again, of Jason, was the com-
pass, — 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 maritime nation to join in an expedi-
tion 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 ^olus^ who married Nais. On hints like these,
Stukeley builds again the grand colonnade into
historic harmony, and computing backward by the
known variations of the compass, bravely assigns
the year 406 before Christ for the date of the
temple.
For the difficulty 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 Bos-
ton, swinging a block of granite of the size of the
STONEHENGE. 269
largest of the Stonehenge columns, with an ordi-
nary derrick. The men were common masons, with
paddies to help, nor did they think they were doing
anything 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 the downs for Wilton, Carlyle
not suppressing some threats and evil omens on
the proprietors, for keeping these broad plains a
wretched sheep-walk when so many thousands of
English men 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
renowned 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, Sid-
ney Herbert, Esq., and is esteemed a noble speci-
men of the English manor-haU. My friend had
a letter from Mr. Herbert to his housekeeper, and
270 ENGLISH TRAITS.
the house was shown. The state drawing-room is
a double cube, 30 feet high, by 30 feet wide, by
60 feet long : the adjoining room is a single cube,
of 30 feet every way. Although these apartments
and the long library were full of good family por-
traits, Vandykes and other ; and though there were
some good pictures, and a quadrangle cloister full
of antique and modem statuary, — to which Car-
lyle, 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 the
estate. We crossed a bridge built by Inigo Jones,
over a stream of which the gardener did not know
the name (^Qu. Alph?) ; watched the deer ; climbed
to the lonely sculptured sunmier-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 fished six
hundred years ago, has even a spruce and modem
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
STONEHENGE. 271
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 culmi-
nation of the Gothic art in England, as the but-
tresses 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 archi-
tecture the hunger of the eye for length of line is
so rarely gratified. The rule of art is that a col-
onnade is more beautiful the longer it is, and that
ad infinitum. And the nave of a church is seldom
80 long that it need be divided by a screen.
We loitered in the church, outside the choir,
whilst service was said. Whilst we 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. Car-
lyle 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
little but the edge of a wood, though Carlyle 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 Wal*
tham*
272 ENGLISH TRAITS.
On Snnday we had miich dkoomsey on a veiy
rainy day. My friends asked, whether there were
any Americans ? — any with an American idea, —
any theory of the right future of that country?
Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of cau-
cuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cab-
inet-ministers, nor of such as would make of Amer-
ica another Europe. I thought only of the sim-
plest 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 which 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 proctured a kind of
hearing 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 mus-
ket-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 Carlyle, and I insisted that the
manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibil-
ity could make no difference to a gentleman ; that
STONEHENGE, 273
as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and
spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might
quote Talleyrand, *'*' Monsieur ^je rCen vols pas la
nScessitSy As I had thus taken in the conversa-
tion the saint's part, when dinner was announced,
Carlyle refused to go out before me, — " he was al-
together 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 Carlyle followed, and I
went last.
On the way to Winchester, whither our host
accompanied us in the afternoon, my friends asked
many questions respecting American landscape, for-
ests, houses, — my house, for example. It is not
easy to answer these queries well. There, I thought,
in America, lies nature sleeping, overgrowing, al-
most 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 im-
pression. 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 away from the
trim hedge-rows and over-cultivated garden of Eng-
land. And, in England, I am quite too sensible
VOL. v. 18
274 ENGLISH TRAITS,
of this. Every one is on his good behavior and
must be dressed for dinner at six. So I put o£E
my friends with very inadequate details, as best I
could.
Just before entering Winchester we stopped at
the Church of Saint Cross, and after ' looking
through the quaint antiquity, we demanded a piece
of bread and a draught of beer, which 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 tweniy people every day,
they said, make the same demand. This hospital^
ity of seven hundred years' standing did not hin-
der Carlyle from pronoimcing a malediction on the
priest who receives j£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, Wil-
liam of Wykeham. It is very old: part of the
'»;rypt into which we went down and saw the Saxon
STONEHENGE. 275
and Norman arches of the 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 modem buildings, or bur-
ied in the ruins of the old." * William of Wyke-
ham's shrine tomb was unlocked for us, and Carlyle
took hold of the recumbent statue's marble hands
and patted them affectionately, for he rightly val-
ues the brave man who built Windsor and this Ca-
thedral and the School here and New College at
Oxford. But it was growing late in the afternoon.
Slowly we left the old house, and parting with our I
host, we took the train for London. |
^ '"i
1 History of the Anglo-Saxons^ L 699. ' -'^
CHAPTER XVIL
PERSONAL.
In these comments on an old journey, now re-
vised 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 acknowledg-
ment 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 nowhere 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
PERSONAL. 277
man of sense and of letters, the editor of a power-
ful local journal, he added to solid virtues an infi-
nite 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 acci-
dents of my journey, until the sincerity of English
kindness ceased to surprise. My visit fell in the
fortunate days when Mr. Bancroft was the Ameri-
can Minister in London, and at his house, or
through his good ofiices, I had easy access to ex-
cellent 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 Reform Clubs were hospi-
tably opened to me, and I found much advantage
in the circles of the "Geologic," the "Antiqua-
rian " and the " Eoyal " Societies. Every day in
London gave me new opportunities of meeting
men and women who give splendor to society. I
saw Eogers, HaUam, Macaulay, Milnes, Milman,
Barry Cornwall, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson,
Leigh Hunt, D'Israeli, Helps, Wilkinson, Bailey,
Kenyon and Forster : the yoimger poets, Clough,
Arnold and Patmore; and among the men of
science, Eobert Brown, Owen, Sedgwick, Faraday,
Buckland, Lyell, De la Beche, Hooker, Carpenter,
Babbage and Edward Forbesr It was my privi-
278 ENGLISH TRAITS.
lege also to converse with Miss BailUe, 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, they are 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 am
I insensible to the courtesy which frankly opened
to me some noble 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 gar-
den ; one at the Museum, where Sir Charles Fel-
lowes explained in detail the history of his Ionic
trophy-monument ; and still another, on which Mr.
Owen accompanied my countryman Mr. H. and
myself through the Hunterian Museum.
The like frank hospitality, 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 Mra
Crowe, of thi^ Messrs. Chambers, and of a man of
PERSONAL, 279
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 Sun-
day afternoon I accompanied her to Eydal Mount.
And as I have recorded a visit to Wordsworth,
many years before, I must not forget 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 Scotchmen, too. No Scotchman, he said,
can write English. He detailed the two models, on
one or the other of which all the sentences of the
historian Bobertson are framed. Nor could Jef-
frey, nor the Edinburgh Reviewers write English,
nor can * * *, who is a pest to the English tongue.
Incidentally he added. Gibbon cannot write Eng-
lish. The Edinburgh Eeview 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 Cole-
ridge. Mrs. W. had the Editor's answer in her
possession. Tennyson he thinks a right poetic gen-
ius, though with some affectation. He had thought
an elder brother of Tennyson at first the better
280 ENGLISH TRAITS,
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 Bio Janeiro the best place in the world for
a great capital city. . . . We talked of English
national character. I told him it was not credit-
able that no one in all the country knew anything
of Thomas Taylor, the Platonist, whilst in every
American library his translations are found. I
said, if Plato's Eepublic 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 compla-
cency which never deserts a true-bom Englishman,
" and yet we have embodied it all."
His opinions of French, English, Irish and
Scotch, seemed rashly f ormulized from little anec-
dotes of what had befallen himself and members
of his family, in a diligence or stage-coach. His
face sometimes lighted up, but his conversation
was not marked by special force or elevation. Yet
perhaps it is a high compliment to the cultivation
of the 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, who lived near him, praised
PERSONAL, 281
him to me not for his poetry, but for thrift and
economy ; for having afforded to his eomitry-neigh-
bors an example of a modest household where com-
fort and culture were secured without any display.
She said that in his early housekeeping at the cot-
tage where he first lived, he was accustomed to
offer his friends bread 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 anec-
dote I knew. A gentleman in the neighborhood
told the story of Walter Scott's staying once for
a week 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 him if he had come for his por-
ter. 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 par-
simonious, &c. Landor, always generous, says that
he never praised any body. A gentleman in Lon-
don showed me a watch that once belonged to Mil-
ton, 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
282 ENGLISH TRAITS.
no one making the expected remark, he put back
his own in silence. I do not attach much impor-
tance 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 had 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 cath-
olicity and cosmopolitan scope: he had conformi-
ties to English politics and traditions ; he had ego-
tistic puerilities in the choice and treatment 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 Immortal-
ity is the high-water-mark which the intellect has
reached in this age. New means were employed,
and new realms added to the empire of the muse,
by his courage.
CHAPTER XVm.
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 Eome of to-day.
Broad-fronted, broad-bottomed Teutons, they stand
in solid phalanx foursquare to the points of com-
pass ; they constitute the modem world, they have
earned their vantage gi'ound 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 Eome and Greece, when written by their
scholars, degenerates into English party pamphlets.
They cannot see beyond England, nor in England
284 ENGLISH TRAITS.
can they transcend the interests of the governing
classes. " English principles " mean a primary re-
gard to the interests of property. England, Scot-
land 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, punishes education.
Down to a late day, marriages performed by dis-
senters 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. Pau-
perism incrusts and clogs the state, and in hard
times becomes hideous. In bad seasons, the por-
ridge was diluted. Multitudes lived miserably by
shell-fish and sea-ware. In cities, the children are
trained to beg, until they shall 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,
the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and
brutal form. Diu'ing the Australian emigration,
multitudes were rejected by the commissioners as
being too emaciated for useful colonists. During
the Russian war, few of those that offered aa
recruits were found up to the medical standard,
though it had been reduced.
RESULT, 285
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 sym-
pathy with the continental Courts. It sanctioned
the partition of Poland, it betrayed Genoa, Sicily,
Parga, Greece, Turkey, Borne 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 wrath-
f uUy 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 England,
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 fchey shall be of any nation at war
with us. " It is a statute and obliged hospitality
and peremptorily maintained. But this shop-rule
had one magnificent effect. It extends its cold
unalterable courtesy to political exiles of every
opinion, and is a fact which might give additional
light to that portion of the planet seen from the
286 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 superfi-
cial dealing with symptoms. We cannot go deep
enough into the biography of the spirit who never
throws himself entire into one hero, but delegates
his energy in parts or spasms to vicious and defec-
tive individuals. But the wealth of the source is
seen in the plenitude of English nature. What va-
riety of power and talent ; what facility and plen-
teousness of knighthood, lordship, ladyship, royalty,
loyalty ; what a proud chivalry is indicated in
" Collins's Peerage," through eight hundred years !
What dignity resting on what reality and stout-
ness ! What courage in war, what sinew in labor,
what cunning workmen, what inventors and en-
gineers, what seamen and pilots, what clerks and
scholars ! No one man and no few men can repre-
sent them. It is a people of myriad personalities.
Their many-headedness is owing to the advanta-
geous position of the middle class, who are always
the source of letters and science. Hence the vast
plenty of their aesthetic production. As they are
many-headed, so they are many-nationed : their col-
onization annexes archipelagoes and continents, and
RESULT. 287
their speech seems destined to be the universal lan-
guage 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 reins, there is no
Berserker 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. But who would see the uncoiling of that
tremendous spring, the explosion of their well-hus-
banded forces, must follow the swarms which pour-
ing now for two hundred years from the British is-
lands, have sailed and rode and traded and planted
through all climates, mainly following the belt of
empire, the temperate zones, 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 pol-
icy, obeying the necessities of a vast empire, has
become liberal. 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^
288 ENGLISH TRAITS.
— a divine cripple like Vulcan; a blind saieant
like Hnber and Sanderson. They do not occupy
themselves on matters of general and lasting im-
port, but on a corporeal civilization^ on goods that
perish in the using. But they read with good in-
tent, and what they learn they incarnate. 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 English race can be trusted with freedom,
— freedom which is double-edged and dangerous
to any but the wise and robust. The English des-
ignate the kingdoms emulous of free institutions,
as the sentimental nations. Their culture is not
an outside varnish, but is thorough 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 was 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 suflErage, Jewish
RESULT. 289
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
tortoises 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 per-
sonality is the token of this race. Quid vult valde
vult What they do they do with a wiU. You
cannot account for their success by their Christian-
ity, commerce, charter, common law. Parliament,
or letters, but by the contumacious sharptongued
energy of English naturel^ with a poise impossible
to disturb, which makes all these its instruments.
They are slow and 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 feeling, though wrong in
their speculation.
The feudal system survives in the steep in-
equality of property and privilege, in the limited
franchise, in the social barriers which confine pa-
tronage 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
y VOL. V. 19
290 ENGLISH TRAITS.
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 historical grounds. It was
pleaded in mitigation of the rotten borough, that
it worked well, that substantial justice was done.
Fox, Burke, Pitt, Erskine, Wilberforce, Sheridan,
Romilly, or whatever national man, were by this
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 retrospec-
tively, we may strike the balance and prefer one
Alfred, one Shakspeare, one Milton, one Sidney,
one Ealeigh, one Wellington, to a million foolish
democrats.
The American system is more democratic, more
humane; yet the American people do not yield
better or more able men, or more inventions or
books or benefits than the English. Congress is
not wiser or better than Parliament. France has
abolished its suffocating old rSgime, but is not re-
cently marked by any more wisdom or virtue.
RESULT. 291
The power of performance has not been ex-
ceeded, — 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
Charta," 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 hundred years evolved the principles of free-
dom. 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 announce-
ments of original right which make the stone tables
of liberty.
CHAPTER XIX.
SPEECH AT MANCHE8TEE.
A FEW days after my arrival at Manchester, in
November, 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 re-
print it, as fitly expressing the feeling with which
I entered England, and which agrees weU enough
with the more deliberate results of better acquaint-
ance recorded in the foregoing pages. Sir Archi-
bald Alison, the historian, presided, and opened the
meeting with a speech. He was followed by Mr.
Cobden, Lord Brackley 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. Chairman and Gentlemen: It is pleasant
to me to meet this great and brilliant company,
and doubly pleasant to see the faces of so many
SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 293
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 aU the friends of free tradeo
The gayeties and genius, the political, the social,
the parietal wit of " Punch " go duly every fort-
night to every boy and girl in Boston and New
York. Sir, when I came to sea, I found the " His-
tory of Europe"^ on the ship's cabin table, the
property of the captain ; — a sort of programme or
play-bill to teU the seafaring New Englander what
he shall find on his landing 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, that does not read it, and, if he cannot, he
finds some charitable pair of eyes that can, and
hears it.
But these things are not for me to say; these
compliments, though true, would better come from
one who 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
* By Sir A. Alison.
294 ENGLISH TRAITS.
with the wish to see England, is the moral pecu-
liarity of the Saxon race, — its commanding 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 paralyzed ; and in trade
and in the mechanic's shop, gives that honesty
in performance, that thoroughness and solidity
of work which is a national characteristic. This
conscience is one element, and the other is that
loyal adhesion, that habit of friendship, that hom-
age of man to man, running through aU classes,
— the electing of worthy persons to a certain fra-
ternity, to acts of kindness and warm and staimch
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
holiday though it be, I have not the smallest inter-
est in any holiday except as it celebrates real and
not pretended joys ; and I think it just, in this
time of gloom and commercial disaster, of affliction
SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. , 295
and beggary in these districts, that, 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 braveries
of our annual feast. For I must tell you, I was
given to understand in my childhood that the Brit-
ish 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 vir-
tuous women, and these of a wonderful fibre and
endurance ; that their best parts were slowly re-
vealed ; 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 them 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 ban-
ners, but having ridden out the storm ? And so,
gentlemen, I feel in regard to this aged England,
with the possessions, honors and trophies, and
296 ENGLISH TRAITS.
also with the infirmities of a thousand years gath-
ering around her, irretrievably committed as she
now is to many old customs which cannot be sud-
denly changed ; pressed upon by the transitions of
trade and new and all incalculable modes, fabrics,
arts, machines and competing populations. I see
her not dispirited, not weak, but weU remembering
that she has seen dark days before ; — indeed with
a kind of instinct that she sees a little better in a
cloudy day, and that in storm of battle and calam-
ity 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 endur-
ance and expansion. Seeing this, I say, AU 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 requires in the present hour, and
thus only hospitable to the foreigner and truly a
home to the thoughtful and generous who are born
in 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, the old race are all gone, and
the elasticity and hope of mankind must hence-
forth remain on the Alleghany ranges, or no-
where.
i^